Issue date: 1/22/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Associated Press Photo Lee Solomon takes her daughter to school at P.S. 146, the Brooklyn New School, in New York, Monday Jan. 14. Solomon is one of many parents critical of the city's first-ever report cards for schools. The grades for schools are part of a push toward accountability by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and mirror efforts around the country to devise ways to measure school performance.

NEW YORK (AP) - Thanks to heavy parent involvement and high test scores, Public School 321 in Park Slope, a yuppie neighborhood in Brooklyn, is considered a gem of New York City's public school system.

In the eyes of New York's Department of Education, however, P.S. 321 deserved just a B in the city's first-ever school report cards, which are based largely on how students score on standardized tests.

Such accountability efforts‚ widespread since the advent of the federal No Child Left Behind Act‚ have raised the hackles of parents and educators across the country, who fault the methodology and question the wisdom of tying test results to the job safety of teachers and principals.

Now parents in the nation's largest school system are voicing similar concerns about the grades, released in November as part of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's push to turn around underperforming schools.

"It really saddens me that this is how the Department of Education thinks that parents are best served, by boiling everything that happens in an entire school to a letter grade," said Lee Solomon, the mother of a first-grader at the Brooklyn New School, a sought-after school that accepts students only by lottery but got a C.

Educators have debated the push toward testing since No Child Left Behind was enacted in 2002 at President Bush's urging. While some studies show that student achievement in reading and math has increased, teachers complain that they are forced to teach to the tests and to give up "frills" like music, art and recess.

A 2006 survey by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy found that since the passage of the federal law, 71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math.

Jim Devor, the father of a fifth-grader at P.S. 58 in Brooklyn‚ which got a D on its report card‚ said students there were "strongly invited" to attend Saturday test-prep sessions but have no time to discuss current events like the presidential campaign.

"I'm appalled at how little my child knows about social studies," he said. "They're all obsessed with test prep."

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