De Blasio’s solid C

When Mayor de Blasio rolled out his signature turnaround program for struggling schools, he said “we will demand fast and intense improvement — and we will see that it happens.” Three years and $582 million later, despite loads of new social services, teacher training and academic support, the 78 schools in the program are showing decidedly mixed results.

Aaron Pallas, a Columbia Teachers College professor, compared students in so-called Renewal Schools to peers in similar schools from 2014 to 2017 and found nothing to write home about.

Kids in Renewal elementary schools jumped 11 points on state reading tests over these three years — a decent jump, four percentage points higher than demographically peer schools. But at the middle school level, slight gains in reading and math for students in the Renewal schools were no larger than those in peer schools.

Meantime, Marcus Winters of the Manhattan Institute used another metric and found modest gains on both reading and math tests.

Assume he’s right. It’s still not the fast and intense improvement the mayor assured the city was in the offing.