Summarizing Learning Environment Surveys from Bronx High Schools

Learning Environment survey results came out earlier this month. Most people ignore them. Quite a few look at their own school, or schools of a few friends, or a school or two that’s been in the news. Scan 16 pages of tabulated results, and move on.

But I decided to look. Maybe the data was readily available. I don’t know. But I searched for schools in the Bronx with grade 9, and downloaded the pdfs, one at a time. I considered campus schools, non-campus schools, CTE schools, and specialized schools. I considered 6-12 schools. I also threw in charter schools. I did not use data from D75 schools. There are several schools that do not yet have data. There are several where too few teachers filled in the surveys to be considered meaningful (Bronx Leadership Academy II, Global Enterprise HS, ELLIS, and Bronx Studio School for Writers).  Two small schools that are not completely staffed had 100% or almost 100% of the staff – I included them even thought the raw number of teachers was small: Crotona Academy and the Cinema School. I looked at 115 schools.

I chose four questions to summarize:

The Principal is an effective manager who makes the school run smoothly
I trust the principal at his or her word
To what extent do you feel supported by your principal?
School leaders invite teachers to play a meaningful role in setting goals and making important decisions for the school

In other words: Competent? Trustworthy? Supportive? Collaborative?

Each question had four responses possible: Strongly agree, Agree, Disagree, or Strongly Disagree for all but the third question, there the responses were: “To a great extent,” “to some extent,” “to a small extent” or “to no extent.” I considered both the percent in the two positive categories, and the DoE’s ‘score’ (they used a 3-2-1-0 weighting, rating each question from 0 to 10).

Mostly principals who I have heard good things about rose towards the tops of the categories, and principal who I know no-so-good things about show up near the bottom of most lists. Some results were surprising. Some principals I thought ogres showed up in the middle of the list. But those were exceptions.

The type of school does not seem to correlate strongly with the position on the list. Transfer schools are a bit over-represented at the top of the list (like-minded people come together to work with older students who have had difficulty in previous schools). And 6-12 schools are under-represented at the top, and cluster further down; I suspect the demands inherent in running two complicated systems – a middle school and a high school – are too much for an ordinary administrator to handle, and we don’t know who among them are ordinary. But campus schools spread from top to bottom, and the two specialized schools are at the extremes. Three of the four CTE schools run low, reflecting how poorly they have been treated recently.

The three charter schools sit unremarkably in the middle. They show up in two other interesting ways: percentage of new teachers, and students and teachers responding that there are not enough courses to engage them.

I’ll be summarizing the results in the next few days. I’ll put more detailed articles here, and quick lists at the New Action website.

For now, the superlatives, those principals rated the best (and the worst) on the teachers’ section of the Learning Environment Survey:

	principal	school	type	percent	DoE score
most competent	Gary Eisinger	Bronx Academy	Transfer	100	10.0
least competent	Sharron Smalls	Jane Addams	CTE	20	2.6
least competent	Richard Bost, removed	Fordham Leadership Academy	Campus (Roosevelt)	33	2.5
most trustworthy	Gary Eisinger	Bronx Academy	Transfer	100	9.8
most trustworthy	Nancy Mann	Fannie Lou Hamer	D12 school	100	9.6
least trustworthy	John Tornifolio	School for Community Research and Learning (SCRL)	Campus (Stevenson)	24	3.5
least trustworthy	Lisa Luft	John F Kennedy	Phase out	27	2.6
most supportive	Rex Bobbish	The Cinema School	Campus (Monroe, 2 years old)	100	10.0
most supportive	Estelle Hans, retiring	Collegiate Institute of Math and Science	Campus (Columbus)	100	9.9
least supportive	John Tornifolio	School for Community Research and Learning (SCRL)	Campus (Stevenson)	18	2.7
most collaborative	Rex Bobbish	The Cinema School	Campus (Monroe, 2 years old)	100	9.7
most collaborative	Gary Eisinger	Bronx Academy	Transfer	100	9.6
most collaborative	Sue-Ann Rosch	Community School for Social Justice	D7 school in a shared building	96	9.7
least collaborative	Charles Ogundimu	Monroe Academy for Business/Law (MABL)	Campus (Monroe)	23	2.6
least collaborative	Lisa Luft	John F Kennedy	Phase out	24	2.4