Another parent, Natasha Campbell, described the notebook that her daughter, who is in second-grade, brought home from school. Several assignments called for her to write her name down in the notebook over and over again, and now the pages are filled with her name, Campbell said.
P.S. 64 was one of a dozen schools in District 9 to land on the newest state list of schools in need of aggressive intervention this fall. Of the 123 city schools tagged as failing by the state’s new accountability system, more schools came from the district than any other in the city.
District 9 parent organizers recognized many familiar names: Under the outgoing No Child Left Behind accountability system, 26 of the district’s schools were labeled “in need of improvement.”
The new “focus schools” designation makes the schools eligible for federally funded overhauls, but to parents with students in the schools, it is a reminder of how little has changed in the seven years since the district was first categorized as “in need of improvement” under NCLB.
Only about a quarter of students in the district scored proficient on this year’s state reading tests, making it the second-lowest-performing district in the the city for a fifth consecutive year (nearby District 7 ranked last).
Yet a decade of aggressive efforts by the Bloomberg administration to replace struggling schools with new schools, many of them charter schools, have largely passed over District 9. The city has closed about 150 schools and opened nearly the same number of charter schools. District 9’s share: Just five closures and six charter schools.
“In this neighborhood, we get the leftovers, because of where we are, ” said Yoshika Buchanan, who joined in Wednesday’s protest. “That’s not fair.”
For the last year, organizers have been working to get officials at both the city Department of Education and the State Education Department to commit to improving the district.
