School Size and Class Size in NYC

Do smaller schools in NYC have smaller classes? I took at look at the numbers for 9th grade English general education classes. Here's what I found:

• Smaller schools, on average, have smaller classes. Students attending small schools in NYC (those with fewer than 500 students) attend schools with an average class size of 23.8. For schools with 500-2000 students, the average is 25.6; and for schools with more than 2000 students, the average is 28.0.
  
  
• These averages conceal the fact that a much higher proportion of small schools have very small classes. 24% of small schools have average classes of 20 or fewer, while 7% of medium sized schools and 2% of large schools do.
  
  
• Only 5% of small schools have average class sizes of 30 or more, while 10% of medium sized schools do and 27% of large schools do.

To anecdotally make points 2 and 3 above, International High School in the Bronx has an average class size of 12.2, while Francis Lewis High School in Queens has an average class size of 32.8. What a difference 20 kids makes.

What's also interesting is that there are small schools that have very large class sizes - for example, the two largest 9th grade class sizes are at relatively new small schools (East Bronx Academy for the Future, 34; Brooklyn Generation School, 38.5). Why? One hypothesis is that some small schools have been able to find ways to turn away (or to not be sent) over the counter students, while others have not. Perhaps some schools have been successful in raising additional funds to reduce class size. Other ideas are welcome here.

The last two days have only provided a cursory look at these data, and there's a lot more that could be done. If you have suggestions, please let me know.

Update: At Edwize, Leo Casey weighs in on the school size/class size relationship.

When a Lottery is Not a Lottery II: The NYC Small Schools

I received a number of emails last week in response to my post comparing Evander Childs High School and the new small schools in the same building, which found that the small schools enrolled a very different group of kids. The most common question was how these differences were possible if these students are assigned “by lottery.”

I spent a few days looking into this question, and here’s what I learned: it’s a common misconception that the NYC small schools are admitting students by lottery. The majority of the new small schools fall under the city’s “limited unscreened” selection mechanism. Here’s how it works: as a student, I can apply to up to 12 schools; students rank these choices from 1-12. Every 8th grader applies to high school, and these applications are entered into a central database. Each school then receives a list of the students who have applied to them, but the schools do not know if the students have ranked the school 1st or 12th.

Limited unscreened schools then dichotomously rank their students (yes or no); students are chosen if the school can verify that the student is making an “informed choice” to attend the school. Students that choose the school and that are also chosen by the school are admitted in order of the students' preferences (i.e. students who ranked the school first are admitted before those who ranked the school 10th).

Schools vary in the criteria they use for verifying informed choice. Some schools require students to attend information sessions; in the past, schools have required that students attend a session with a parent or guardian, but this has now been forbidden by the Department of Education. Other schools have used “applications” that students needed to fill out to verify informed choice. For example, a New Yorker passed along the application used in the 2004-2005 school years by the network of schools affiliated with Replications, which include schools like the Frederick Douglass Academy and Mott Hall replications, which are "limited unscreened" schools. Here are the essay questions:

1) What are three things your teachers would say about you?
2) What makes you want to attend a school that will demand your very best academically and will expect you to work harder than you probably ever have before?
3) What are five future goals you have for yourself?
4) Mention the title and authors of some books you would like to discuss during your interview.
5) What are some activities to which you belong either in school or outside of school?

In addition, until this year, all limited unscreened schools had access to individual students’ prior attendance, grades, their test scores, their date of birth, their address, their sending junior high schools, and their special education and English language learner status. Interestingly, the Department of Education did not provide this information to limited unscreened schools beginning with admission for the 9th grade class of 2007 - was this choice made because unscreened schools were using data they weren't supposed to?

What this means, however, is that the limited unscreened schools about which we’ve heard a lot of crowing had access to a great deal of students’ achievement data. Given the data I presented last week, which show large differences between large and small school incoming populations, I have a hard time believing that schools ignored these data entirely.

Certainly the formal rules of the system prohibit these schools from doing so – but how tightly was this regulated? The Department of Education could easily demonstrate that “informed choice” doesn’t limit lower-achieving students’ access to these schools by testing for differences in the mean test scores, attendance, etc of the applicants, the applicants chosen by the schools themselves, and the students who ultimately matriculate. This is a trivial (i.e. easy) analysis, and certainly something that the Department of Education needs to do if they want to maximize educational opportunity for New York City kids.

To sum up, it appears that some of these disparities are created by who applies to the small schools themselves, by who schools verify as making an “informed choice,” and potentially by these schools use of students’ achievement characteristics available through the database.

The Turnaround at Evander Childs: A NYC Small School Trick?

New York's Fund for Public Schools, which has raised substantial funds for NYC's reforms, has launched a new ad campaign called "Keep it Going New York City." One ad showcases the succesful creation of new small schools within large high schools. Watch this ad called "Evander Childs Turnaround" - the main idea here is that Evander Childs, a high school in the Bronx, was failing, dangerous, and a poor environment for learning. Enter Bloomberg/Klein, the Children First reforms, and five new small schools, and Evander is reborn - teachers say it's different, students say they like going to school there, and a principal beams that the graduation rate has increased from 30% to 80%. Evander certainly has received a lot of attention - Joel Klein visited the school to deliver his spring statement on small schools' superior graduation rates. A NY Times Editorial praised new small schools for increasing graduation rates. The final line of the ad: "The building may be the same, but the school is very different." Should we be cheering?

The answer is a resounding "no." The building is the same, but the students definitely aren't. As the tables below demonstrate, the new students were much higher performing before they even entered the building. In the first table, I use the NYC School Report cards to compare incoming 9th graders in 2004-2005 (the last year that Evander took 9th graders) with the 9th graders at the other small schoools. On every dimension, the Evander incoming 9th graders are lagging behind academically - they are more likely to be in special education or to be classified as ELL, they are much more likely to be overage for their grade (i.e. they had been retained before), their attendance rates in junior high school were much lower, and they were much less likely to be proficient in reading and math. Of particular note is the praise showered on Bronx Lab at the end of the 2004-2005 school year - see this NY Times article - but 46.6% of their kids were proficient in reading and 52.7% in math when they walked in the door, while Evander's entering students passed at rates of only 11.1% in reading and 12.8% in math. How did the reporter miss this? How did the NYT editorial board miss these numbers before writing a glowing endorsement? (See Leo Casey's analysis at EdWize that shows similar comparisons for other schools in NYC- the pattern is very similar.)

Comparing these schools is either incredibly foolish or incredibly dishonest - and I don't think the folks running NYC schools are foolish. Click below to enlarge these tables.

(Note: 2004-2005 was the last year Evander Childs took new ninth graders; the 2005-2006 numbers for Evander thus represent 9th and 10th grade transfer students, I imagine - someone with more knowledge of this particular case can comment here.)

* I am not sure what to make of these free lunch figures. Given the disadvantage profile suggested by the performance of kids at Evander (especially that so many of them are over-age for grade and ELL), it is difficult to believe that they don't qualify for free lunch in equal numbers as their peers at the small schools. Another interpretation is that their families are less involved, and thus less likely to turn in free lunch forms; alternatively, their feeder schools may be less organized to get these forms turned in. Other interpretations welcome.