Lack of middle schools irks Chelsea parents

TOP: Chelsea Now photo by Lawrence Lerner
Dusty Miller, principal of the New York City Museum School, in her office this week

Bottom: Chelsea Now photos by Jefferson Siegel
Clockwise from above: New York City Museum School and the Lab School (at the O’Henry Learning Center, 333 W. 17th St.); Clinton School for Writers and Artists (320 W. 21st St.); Simon Baruch Jumior High School (330 E. 21st St.)

By Chris Lombardi

When entertainment attorney Howard Leib and his family moved to Chelsea in 2003, they assumed that in such a thriving neighborhood, there would be at least one middle school for their son Josh. But to Leib’s astonishment, the local K-8 school, P.S. 33 (at 281 Ninth Ave.), had decided to shut down its middle school, and there were no others nearby. “I’ll be honest, I wasn’t that concerned about it being close,” said Leib, who lives at 27th Street and Sixth Avenue and is now a member of Community Board 5, speaking to Chelsea this week, “My son was 12 years old; he can travel around the city. But the big question still was: Where was he supposed to go, at all?” Leib and his son eventually secured a spot at the flagship Simon Baruch Middle School on 22nd Street and Lexington Avenue, but he was still astonished at the shortage he’d just learned about.

“Don’t worry about my kids,” said Leib, who is now pursuing the subject further with C.B. 5’s Youth and Human Services Committee. “What I worry about are the ones whose parents don’t have the time, or don’t know how, to game the system for their kids.” And New York’s famously challenging middle-school picture gets even harder, he added, if the schools aren’t there.

P.S. 33, now known as Chelsea Prep, is one of two local schools that has phased out its middle school in the last few years, leaving parents to look outside the neighborhood for a school to accommodate their seventh- and eighth-graders. In the era of “school choice,” inaugurated a decade ago and integrated into the Department of Education (DOE), parents are given a “menu” of middle schools to choose from. For kids below Times Square and west of Madison Avenue, that means they have to compete with students from all over Manhattan for schools with long waiting lists, or travel a few miles on a free MetroCard, which raises the hackles of many concerned parents.

While aware of Chelsea’s concerns, DOE is in its own middle-school transition. After the New York Coalition for Educational Justice declared a “middle school crisis” in January and New York’s spring gains in reading scores showed a significant dropoff in grades 5–8, the City Council has convened a citywide task force on the issue, which will send Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein recommendations at the end of the month. As they sort out the myriad issues of how best to meet middle-schoolers’ needs, parents and other concerned members of Community Boards 4 and 5 are trying to sort out what to do next, especially with the predicted arrival of more than 15,000 new residents in the next 10 years.

The January report from the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice (CEJ), famous for initiating the lawsuit that helped garner billions in state aid for New York City schools, was not coy in its title: “New York City’s Middle-Grade Schools: Platforms for Success or Pathways to Failure?”

The coalition pointed out that the majority of students in New York’s middle grades cannot read “up to New York State standards,” with a far lower percentage reading in high-poverty districts; that nearly half of the city’s middle-grade schools failed to meet No Child Left Behind requirements in 2004–2005; and that while recent educational reforms have poured much more money and effort into elementary and high schools, middle schools have received far fewer resources. Asking for a “Marshall Plan” for middle schools, the report urged advocates and parents to demand “highly qualified teachers and principals who understand early adolescent development.”

Difficulty in middle-school years is neither a new issue nor a peculiarly New York one, according to Dr. Pedro Noguera, chair of the City Council Task Force on Middle Schools, who talked to Chelsea Now this week.

“This is a national problem,” said Noguera, a professor in the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University, the executive director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, and author of “City Schools and the American Dream: Reclaiming the Promise of Public Education” (Teacher College Press, 2003). A Lexis Nexis search for “middle school crisis” turns up press coverage and studies from Seattle to North Carolina, as well as New York and Berkeley, Calif., where Noguera was also a professor before moving to his current position.

The Council task force, which convened in January, brought together educators, think tanks, and education advocates like CEJ to assess what’s actually happening in New York City middle schools, and what resources they need. Members have visited middle schools in all five boroughs, Noguera told Chelsea Now. “We asked both to look at exemplary schools and those that are far behind,” he said. “We wanted to see, Why are some schools struggling?”

The task force also held a series of forums across the city in which parents, teachers and middle-schoolers themselves talked about what they loved, hated and needed.

“What was affirmed,” said Noguera, “was how much concern was out there for the fate of the middle schools.” Top on the list of concerns: “quality, safety and discipline.” Quality of teaching was at the top, added Noguera, especially in districts that felt they had been forgotten.

Of particular concern, Noguera added, is the problem of “teachers not prepared specifically to work with that age group.” The New York Times reported earlier this year that only 82 of the 13,000 teachers in New York’s middle schools were certified as “middle school specialists,” a real concern given what the CEJ report calls the “emotional and cognitive changes” occasioned by early adolescence’s “intense emotional volatility and extreme personality fluctuation.”

The result of educational approaches not attuned to those unique personalities is often bad test scores and discipline problems, as at Chelsea Prep/P.S. 33, the school that shut out middle-schoolers before Josh Leib could get there. Before the arrival of its celebrated new principal, Linore Lindy, credited by Chancellor Klein last month with raising its test scores substantially, P.S. 33 appears to have been one of those “struggling” schools, with “a history of mediocre to below-average test scores, misbehavior in the middle school, and a revolving door of administrators,” according to Inside Schools, a nonprofit that charts New York City schools.

Sources at the Department of Education told Chelsea Now that the volatile middle schoolers, with their plunging test scores, may have seemed like too much of a weight for the 50-year-old school. (More on Chelsea Prep in an upcoming issue of Chelsea Now). In any event, P.S. 33 graduated its last middle schoolers in 2005; now, those parents of fifth-graders must apply to middle school like anyone else.

At New York City Museum School, in Chelsea, which closed its middle school in 2006 and now serves grades 9–12, the closure was a matter of hard, hard choices.

Principal Dusty Miller, interviewed by Chelsea Now this week, softened when asked to describe middle-school students. “They are 100 percent alive—all wiring lit to bright, full of energy, sadness or tears from one moment to the next.” She also loves their essential honesty, she said: “They don’t have the social thermometer yet…to get to [the concept of] seem.” What you see is, she said, for the most part what you get.

By the time Miller arrived at Museum in 2005, the Department of Education had already decided to phase out the school’s lower grades, citing low enrollment under “school choice.” Museum’s unique museum-based curriculum, she said, was unable to accommodate the full range of special education and immersion English as a Second Language programs, and resisted some other popular programs as violating the school’s commitment to academic diversity. As a result, the classes at the middle school level were smaller than the DOE found cost-effective.

Losing the middle school, said Miller, also meant losing many, if not most, kids with deep ties to the neighborhood. “Kids who could go home for lunch, whose parents lived down the street—I miss that,” she said.

She meant parents like P.T.A. President Miguel Acevedo, director of Fulton Youth for the Future, whose daughter Brenda and nephew Juan were in the school’s last middle school classes. With Museum now firmly a statewide, super-competitive high school (with 2,300 applications this year for 125 places), Acevedo feels the loss of the middle school acutely.

“Now where can our kids go?” he asked.

Unlike some other parts of New York City, District 2 (the huge school district that includes C.B. 4 and C.B. 5) contains no “zoned” middle schools, where parents are assured of a seat for their kids. Of those available to Chelseans without going above Central Park, most are extremely competitive, like Chelsea’s Lab School and Clinton School for Writers and Artists, the East Side’s School of the Future, and even those a little further away, like Baruch, are now victims of their own success, with class sizes above the citywide average.

Acevedo pointed out that few local kids get into the Lab School (officially known as NYC Lab School for Collaborative Learning), housed with Museum at the O. Henry Learning Center at 333 W. 17th St., called “one of the most sought-after in the city” by Inside Schools. And Clinton School for Writers and Artists, at 320 W. 21st St., a small school whose arts-based program is the sort of tailored middle-school approach praised by educators in the field, is “getting overcrowded,” said Acevedo, testing the limits of its small space and intimate structure.

Tamara Rowe, P.T.A. president at Clinton Writers, told Chelsea Now that the other two middle schools’ closures had increased pressure on hers. Class size at Clinton now maxes out at 35, twice the size recommended by DOE and substantially higher than the citywide average. “We have a terrific shared-space agreement with P.S. 11 [who occupies most of the building],” Rowe said, but “we can’t grow much more.” To do so, she said, would risk the success of the 300-student school.

Thus, local parents have few options, and most find themselves sending children across Manhattan on a discount MetroCard. Both Acevedo and education expert Clara Hemphill found the Department of Education’s assumption that such an arrangement is the best possible for younger adolescents a bit questionable.

Hemphill, the author of “New York City’s Best Public Schools” and founder of Inside Schools, said that when she first had to send her 10-year-old daughter 60 blocks away to school, she was stunned. “My daughter weighs 65 pounds, she’s four-foot-four,” she said. But while she therefore wants to fight for good yellow buses to keep middle-schoolers from having to ride public transportation, Hemphill added that with the very good schools available in District 2, it’s not the end of the world.

Not exactly, said Acevedo, who is less sanguine about letting younger teens alone public attention. “Parents in my community—if we leave an 11-, 12-year-old alone in our apartments, we can be charged [by the city] with neglect. We can have our kids taken away from us.” He said that parents at the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses hate not being able to be involved with their kids’ school, when they are trying to guard against the seduction of the streets.

“Kids that age—it’s the generation we’re losing,” said Acevedo. “But you expect us to be comfortable sending them all around town on a bus?” When they can, he said, parents miss work or change work schedules to be able to get younger kids to school.

Chelsea Now asked those involved in the Middle School Task Force whether parents at the public forums had asked for more local schools. “It was consistent in every borough,” said an aide to Speaker Quinn. “Parents wanted a local zoned middle school, somewhere they can be more involved. But they were more passionate about the teachers, and making sure the schools were good.”

Task force chairman Noguera was more blunt. “I heard that in Queens, but nowhere else,” he said, saying parents actually expressed a willingness to travel if the school deserved it. Even after years studying violence in urban schools, including Oakland, Calif., and Los Angeles, he was astonished at how many safety complaints the panel heard. “The number of concerns we heard raised about discipline and safety in Staten Island—that was surprising,” he said. Noguera was also heartened at the number of immigrant parents who have communicated with the task force, offering ways to reach English language learners who have been asking for help.

As the task force wraps up its work, with a final report due by July, parents in both local community boards are trying to sort out what they want to do about the lack of middle schools, and about schools overall. With 8,000 new residents predicted in C.B. 5’s report on development, and about twice that in C.B. 4 due to the West Chelsea, West Clinton and Hudson Yards rezonings, members of both boards have told Chelsea Now that they are planning their own studies and forums.

At a meeting last week of C.B. 5’s Youth and Human Services Committee, Howard Leib, committee chair Susan Baida and Robyn Hatcher were particularly passionate about taking action so that parents didn’t find themselves with few options for their kids.

Told that Noguera, of the task force, had said that parents valued quality of teaching over a local middle school, the trio said what so many others had said to Chelsea Now, this time almost in unison. “Why should we have to choose?”