Go Figure

Figures:

Efforts by the Bloomberg administration to add accountability to the public school system have included moving quickly to shut down schools deemed beyond repair, and rewarding those that make significant progress on standardized tests. Those initiatives seemed to collide last week, when teachers and principals at five of the failed schools earned cash bonuses for their successes.

The Department of Education explained the apparent contradiction in its judgments largely as a question of short-term versus long-term goals. Students at the five schools — four of which closed last spring, the fifth scheduled to close in 2010 — consistently lagged far behind their peers citywide on state math and reading tests, often with less than 20 percent meeting state standards. But during the 2007-8 school year, each of the schools met the improvement targets set by the Education Department on their report cards, making them eligible for performance bonuses of about $3,000 per teacher and $7,000 for principals.