EDucation in the US
Brooklyn School Scores
High Despite Poverty
Fourth graders at P.S. 172 in Brooklyn, which outperforms its wealthier neighbors on state tests.
By SHARON OTTERMAN
To ace the state standardized tests, which begin on Monday, Public School 172 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, finds money for coaches in writing, reading and math. Teachers keep detailed notes on each child, writing down weaknesses and encouraging them to repeat tasks. There is after-school help and Saturday school.
But at the start of this school year, seven or eight students were still falling behind. So the school hired a speech therapist who could analyze why they and other students stumbled in language. A psychologist produced detailed assessments and recommendations. A dental clinic staffed by Lutheran Medical Center opened an office just off the fourth-grade classrooms, diagnosing toothaches, a possible source of distraction, and providing free cleanings.
Perfection may seem a quixotic goal in New York City, where children enter school from every imaginable background and ability level. But on the tests, P.S. 172, also called the Beacon School of Excellence, is coming close — even though 80 percent of its students are poor enough to qualify for free lunch, nearly a quarter receive special education services, and many among its predominately Hispanic population do not speak English at home.
In 2009, the 580-student primary school, tucked between fast-food restaurants and gas stations in a semi-industrial strip of Fourth Avenue, topped the city with its fourth-grade math scores, with all students passing, all but one with a mark of “advanced,” or Level 4. In English, all but one of 75 fourth graders passed, placing it among the city’s top dozen schools.
On average, at schools with the same poverty rate, only 66 percent of the students pass the English test, and 29 percent score at an advanced level in math, according to a New York Times analysis of Department of Education statistics. And though it is less well known, P.S. 172 regularly outperforms its neighbors in Park Slope and Carroll Gardens, where parents raise hundreds of thousands a year for extra aides and enrichment.
The school’s approach, while impressive in its attention to detail, starts with a simple formula: “Teach, assess, teach, assess,” said Jack Spatola, its principal since 1984.
Mr. Spatola attributed the coaches and other extra help to careful budgeting and fighting for every dollar from the Department of Education; the school’s cost per pupil, in fact, is lower than the city’s average.
P.S. 172 has scored highly for years, and improving will not be easy. Because of criticism that the state tests had become too predictable — a factor in far better scores than on national assessments — this year they will not look exactly like what students have practiced. They will also cover a more comprehensive slice of the curriculum than in past years, when they were held in January and March.
Although the school’s third and fifth graders also will be tested, the fourth-grade exams are particularly crucial. Selective middle schools, including Middle School 51, the high-achieving Park Slope school where the upper echelon of P.S. 172 students end up, use the scores as the baseline for admissions.
At P.S. 172, the focus on test material began in February. By mid-April, nearly every moment in class seemed to touch on the effort to help the children pass. Up to five special coaches and teachers were providing help to small groups of students.
While most of Erica Orlando’s 26 fourth graders sat in a cluster on the floor, learning about historical fiction — a genre tested on the exam — Anna Maria Rizzo, a special education specialist, helped a group of eight other children across the room get extra help on biography.
“What’s the first thing we do when we get a piece of text on the test? What’s our little song?” Ms. Rizzo asked her students, handing out highlighters and a passage about Babe Ruth on large sheets of paper.
“We scan the questions first,” the children chorused in a bouncy rhythm. “We scan the questions first. Then we read our story.”
While about one-third of the students are still learning English, there are no bilingual classes. They were eliminated years ago at the request of parents, who noticed that children placed directly in English-only classes, with extra help from teachers of English as a Second Language, were scoring higher.
To practice converting decimals to fractions, a common point of weakness on the exam, children in another fourth grade class were playing a modified version of the card game “War,” the larger decimals and fractions trouncing the smaller. Not all principals embrace the exams in the same way. Brian DeVale, the principal of P.S. 257 in East Williamsburg, is more skeptical, saying he doesn’t believe they accurately measure achievement. He worries that if the tests are harder this year, scores will drop, and schools that earned A’s and B’s on their report cards this year— some 97 percent of elementary and middle schools — will come under scrutiny. “They’ve come up with a capricious, arbitrary system,” he said.
But Mr. Spatola defended his laser-beam approach, noting that his school still had art, music and dance instruction. “They are not asking us to teach skills that the children don’t need to know,” he said. “It’s not a test,” he added. “It’s learning.”
Parents, some of whom themselves attended P.S. 172 under Mr. Spatola’s leadership, praised the school, and 50 families travel from Staten Island to send their children there. The school gives priority to children in the neighborhood, but if there is extra space, Mr. Spatola said, he can admit students from outside the district. There is a waiting list for prekindergarten and kindergarten.
“Here, they practice the test so much, it doesn’t faze them anymore,” said Shirley Santiago, whose daughter Lilliann, 10, has a learning disability, but is now getting near-perfect scores on the math practice tests. “I think we get more nervous than them.”
Students at P.S. 172 who need more help stay in their classrooms until 4:45 p.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays, after a short snack break at the regular 3:05 quitting time.
Henry Marquez, 10, was among those who stayed late to practice for the English test on a bright April afternoon. Like Lilliann, he started the year below grade level, hindered by learning disabilities. When the class would gather on the floor for their lessons, he would rock back and forth and slump so deeply that his head would touch his knee.
His assignment was a final draft of an essay about “Ish,” a short book about a boy who draws imperfectly, but who finally learns to do so without fear of failure.
As it neared 4 p.m., Henry perched on a yellow exercise ball instead of a desk chair, an adjustment that teachers found increased his focus. He clipped his paper to a “slant board” that props up his work at an angle, helping him see and write. He began working, his left hand closed in a near death grip around the pencil, a smudge growing on the side of his fist where it rubbed the page. When he was halfway through, Dominique Freda, 25, one of his teachers, walked over and let out an excited yelp. He used to write in solid blocks of text without proper punctuation. “Did you see the space he left between the paragraphs?” she asked the other teacher in the room.
Finishing his third paragraph, Henry jumped off the ball and walked the essay over to Ms. Freda. “You worked hard, I’m happy for you,” she said. “But look through it. Every time you see a period, put a capital letter, O.K?”
“In the story,” Henry wrote for a topic sentence, “Ramon learns that it dosen’t matter if the drawing is bad or not it could be perfect or not and it dosen’t matter if it’s bad.”
Ms. Freda asked to keep the essay, slipping it into his folder. It was a clear improvement over the simple, repetitive sentences he managed at the start of the year — “I live playing with my cat. I live playing in the park.” — but would it be enough on testing day?
“He’s good at the short answers, and they give credit for the ideas, so maybe it will balance out,” Ms. Freda said.
Henry is aiming for perfection, he confided during a math problem set. “I want to get a hundred,” he said.
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