Former CSB President Delores Schaefer recaps 15 years of policy history: Choice and pre-K

Dolores Schaefer 515 East 13 St. New York, NY 10007
home 212-533-1371 work 212-417-3731 dmschaefer@aol.com

April 4, 2007

Mr. Christopher Cerf
Deputy Chancellor
Department of Education
52 Chambers Street Re. District 1 Choice Plan &
New York, NY 10007 Pre-Kindergarten Policy

Dear Mr. Cerf:

Thank you for meeting with the delegation from District One last week regarding the issues surrounding the District’s Choice plan and long-standing policies and practices around full-day pre-kindergarten.

While the meeting was very productive in getting the issues on the table, it is difficult to condense 15 years of practice in implementing a choice plan into a brief presentation and to accurately portray the particular—and very unique—character of District One. I hope that before a final decision is reached, you will take a hard look at what the Choice program and the historic development of full-day pre-kindergarten has accomplished in District.

First, it’s important to recognize that District One is unlike most other districts in the city. It is geographically compact and tiny. Choice was practical because movement within the district is quick and easy. The “half-mile” provision—which seems to have caused some confusion—was no more than a safety valve to reassure a few parents who thought they might not be able to attend a school nearby. I know for a fact that no parent ever invoked this provision during my tenure on the School Board and few people were even aware of it. Most families have 3-5 elementary schools within a half mile of their apartments so the provision was largely irrelevant.

What is most relevant is the progress District One made during the 90s. In 1989 when I joined the School Board after having worked with parents to open the district’s first collaborative school-within-a-school, District One was ranked second from the bottom among the 32 school districts. When I left the Board, it was solidly above the middle. Once parents were able to choose their schools, and as new, smaller schools opened to create some real competition for elementary schools that had a long history of poor performance, things began to change. Over time, a number of failing elementary schools closed because parents were able to “vote with their feet.” All of the traditional junior high schools were eventually replaced with new schools as choice helped parents demand greater accountability. The flow of middle class parents out of the district was reversed, and the new schools attracted students from outside the District.

Between 1989 and 1994 four new elementary schools were set up and because they were popular they were generally oversubscribed. These four used the lottery system outlined in the Choice policy of the early 90s (the lottery was used in 1989-91 without being a formal school board policy) and resulted in student bodies in those four schools that were gender balanced and well integrated racially, ethnically, and economically. The ability of the district to integrate from within helped it secure two federal Magnet grants, and new funding enabled the district to improve staff development, increase the district’s use of technology, and completely overhaul early childhood education.

The four new elementary schools mentioned above all started at the Pre-K level, with full-day Pre-K that was funded by the District (prior to the introduction of Universal Pre-K). Over time, all of the traditional elementary schools introduced full-day Pre-K and it became the norm in the District. Before the Universal Pre-K program was introduced, the District paid for full-day Pre-K out of existing funding streams. The District adopted the tenets of the National Association for the Education of Young Children as its early childhood policy and moved forward aggressively to encourage families to take advantage of full-day Pre-K. If one were to examine the data on District One, looking at cohorts of students as they moved up the grades, there is no doubt that the opportunities and dynamic created by the Choice system, combined with the implementation of developmentally-appropriate practice in the early childhood grades, was largely responsible for the District’s academic improvement.

While individual parents have sometimes been upset when their child did not win a place in the school of their first choice (and here we are talking primarily about the four collaborative elementary schools and white parents), no group has ever felt or expressed a problem with the lottery system and the use of racial quotas.

In 2001, the School Board was asked to revise its policy not because the Central Administration was suddenly concerned about the use of racial quotas, with which they had previously found no legal issue, but because the NEST school (which was supposed to be a District One school following the policy) wanted to be a talented and gifted school and admit students solely on the basis of test scores. The School Board complied with Central’s request, and with the help of NYCLU crafted a policy that used multiple criteria for admission to oversubscribed schools. NYCLU attorney Art Eisenberg, who the School Board had formally retained on a pro bono basis, submitted a lengthy memorandum to the Legal Department showing that the new policy conformed to laws and precedent in the Second Circuit. The new policy had overwhelming support from parents and school leaders. In fact, school leaders had insisted that academic diversity be added to the criteria to ensure that no school was overwhelmed with low-performing students and all students could learn in a heterogeneous environment, a principle which correlated to the District’s early childhood policy and to its stated middle school policy.

Despite promises to review the new policy, the Legal Department stonewalled the district and refused to meet or even return phone calls from Mr. Eisenberg or myself. Correspondence at the time from Mr. Vignola indicated that our inclusion of academic criteria on the middle school level would undermine NEST. To everyone who was looking at this situation from whatever angle, it was clear that Mr. Vignola and Chancellor Levy were interested in making sure NEST could pick and choose its students and that was their only interest in asking the School Board to revamp the Choice policy.

The NEST issue is now moot as it was declared a citywide talented and gifted school. However, no action was taken on the District’s choice policy after that, except communications saying that the 2002 policy was not in effect and therefore the ‘91-93 policy was in effect. Of course, the ‘91-93 policy was the very policy that had the racial quotas that they claimed they wanted to eliminate.

Although I agree with Mr. Eisenberg that in the absence of a written policy by the central administration proscribing the use of certain criteria in admissions processes, District One’s policy does not conflict with central policy, I think the primary question to be answered with respect to the Choice Policy and the Pre-K policy is what is best for children and what is best for the district? Why fix something that’s not broken? The choice policy still promotes healthy competition in the district, and that competition means that schools continually have to try to meet parental demands for high quality education.

It is clear to me after 19 years of activism in District One that eliminating admission criteria that promote racial/ethnic/economic/academic diversity will result in increasing racial isolation in all schools, and will un-do the spectacular gains in integration (and student achievement and parental involvement) that have been made by the more popular schools. The children will be the big losers here, losing the benefit of learning in a diverse environment. Less competition among schools will mean less accountability; families that can exercise other options will do so to get the type of education they want for their children. The district will lose students and schools will be more racially isolated.

We demonstrated clearly in 2002 (and revised the plan to make it simpler in 2003) that we could have an admission process for oversubscribed schools that resulted in integrated schools without using race as the sole criterion. It is not that complicated and the schools that are likely to be oversubscribed have already had years of experience in conducting lotteries, so they will not find it difficult to do.

On the issue of Pre-Kindergarten, the District’s long-standing policy is that Pre-K is an entry grade. Since District One elementary schools do not have zones, and since there are more than sufficient seats available at the K level, keeping the Pre-K system the way it is will not reduce the options for students who enter in Kindergarten. The way to ensure that children entering school for the first time in Kindergarten is to simply make sure that enough Kindergarten seats are available in certain schools, not to have four-year-olds move from one school to another after they formed attachments at their Pre-K schools. District One’s policy has been that admission to Pre-K is admission to the school, and there is simply no sound educational reason to change it. It is especially problematic in the schools that use mixed-age groupings since the whole idea behind the practice is that the same group of students remains with a teacher for two years. If you examine the data, you will find that the schools that have used mixed-age groupings, including the Pre-K / K grouping, have been the higher performing schools in the District. Again, this is a practice that promotes high student achievement and changing it is likely to reverse that.

I would be happy to provide additional historical information about the educational and social benefits of District One’s choice and pre-kindergarten policies and practice and to demonstrate the feasibility of an admissions lottery using multiple criteria. Thank you very much for your willingness to look for a solution to these issues that benefits the children of District One.

Sincerely,

Dolores Schaefer
Former President, School Board One

cc: Joel Rose
Marty Barr, OSEPO
Michael Best, Legal Dept.
Lisa Donlan, CEC
Michelle Haring, Principal
Art Eisenberg, NYCLU
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