New CLOSED PCSB meeting Wednesday March 12

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Oh it is not bad and they are trying to close schools before the lottery deadline so those kids can reorder their lists and have more options or put in late lists.

Agree that it's not emergency level bad -- it's just part of the internal, deliberative discussions they need to have in closed session as they approach charter reviews. But it's not them trying to close schools before the lottery. They may be trying to close schools but the lottery window is DONE. High schools closed some weeks ago and elementary middle closed last week. if there are schools closed this year, those parents will have to take whatever seats are left. That's assuming that they weren't in the lottery already.

Also, if you look at past years, meetings where reviews were scheduled were usually preceded by special/closed meetings in the prior month or weeks. This happened in October 2019 before they went into three charter renewals in November 2019. The difference this year is the sheer volume of charter reviews require more closed meetings to deliberate before the public review. Reviews used to start as early as November and go through early spring. Now they are compressing reviews with a timeline that starts mid-March.

Okay, but why the super short notice? The list of schools up for review has been known for years. It seems like something unexpected happened.

The PCSB changed to a new accountability system. While outcomes aren't available publicly, they are calculating the information for every school. They have been clear that this new system is much more complicated and will take much longer to produce results. Going forward, they will likely have school report cards out in February or March when they used to come out by November. So everything is just later. The timeline has shifted but not the process. Still looks to me like the schools that likely have the most difficult reviews coming are scheduled earliest in this new timeline.

That's pretty inconvenient for using the data to make lottery choices.

Exactly! The timing puts parents and students at a significant disadvantage. Or maybe they are going to have the reviews but push off the consequences until the end of the next school year? That would allow families to get into the lottery when it opens in December.

[Anonymous]

And I love how they don't release the meeting materials until really close to the meeting. Because they know the upcoming Monday meeting will make them look bad.

Sooooo much transparency.