LeBrun: School receivership plan a boondoggle in the making

While New York public education struggles to resolve an idiotic dependence on standardized tests, waiting in the wings is another poorly-thought-out plan threatening more harm than benefit: school receivership.

[...] you haven't heard a great deal about it because the dramatic consequences are a year off, but you will.

[...] unlike the statewide disgust over Gov. Andrew Cuomo's testing obsession that affects every school district and has gotten a lot of press, the threat of receivership at the moment hangs over only 144 "struggling" schools — not districts — all of them among the state's poorest.

A required community engagement team composed of the principal, staff, teachers, parents and even students from Hackett will forward recommendations for improvements to the superintendent, who will use them to help create her intervention plan to turn the school around.

[...] the school receiver can do pretty much what she wants (with approval from State Ed): change the curriculum, replace teachers and administrators, increase salaries, reallocate the budget, expand the school day or year, turn Hackett into a community school, even convert to a charter school.

[...] to help start the process, Vanden Wyngaard can apply for a grant from a $75 million pot set up by the state, although she'll have plenty of competition from other "persistently struggling" school receivers in Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Yonkers, New York City and elsewhere.

What is expected and how reasonable it is will answer a great deal.

Because just a year to show any marked improvement on any front for a school like Hackett, no matter how thoughtfully considered, broadly accepted by the community, or earnestly pursued, is absurd.

Amusingly, the concept of "struggling" public schools is defined by the educational establishment as the bottom 5 percent of all state schools based on a host of criteria.