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Elected officials, teachers, and parents offered up a litany of concerns about the DOE’s proposed Contracts for Excellence — regarding both their content and the process by which they were developed — last night at the final public hearing in Manhattan.

The hearing, chaired by Terence Tolbert, executive director of the DOE’s Department of Intergovernmental Affairs (and soon to direct Obama’s Nevada campaign), was well-attended by representatives from numerous organizations, including ACORN, Class Size Matters, the Coalition for Educational Justice, the Alliance for Quality Education, the City Council, school level PTAs, the UFT, and others.

Legally, Contracts for Excellence funding must “supplement, not supplant” existing spending; several speakers expressed concerns that the money will be spent to close holes in the budget rather than create or expand programs. Others worried that the new funding would be used to make up losses due to budget cuts in low-performing schools, rather than expanding services for high-needs children in those schools. Complicating these issues, several speakers noted, the plan includes little oversight of whether principals spend the Contracts for Excellence money as intended.

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Photo by Annie Mole

When it comes to alleviating school overcrowding, the squeaky wheel gets the grease in New York City.

Earlier this spring, the DOE responded to a rising tide of dissatisfaction and protest in Manhattan’s District 2 by announcing plans for a new elementary school in Greenwich Village and releasing a long-anticipated blueprint for further reducing overcrowding. And this week, Chancellor Klein announced that the DOE will build an annex for the popular PS 8 in Brooklyn Heights. Already, the Brooklyn Paper is reporting that parents and community leaders see the annex, tentatively slated to open in 2011, as a way for PS 8 to expand through the middle school grades, something PS 8 parents have long been seeking. Last month, Chancellor Klein told Brownstoner that no new middle schools are needed in District 13 since the district’s schools are overall under capacity — but he also didn’t seem too torn up about the impending arrival of portable classrooms at PS 8, and now there’s a plan for their removal.

Last night at the Contracts for Excellence hearing in Manhattan, I heard that parents in District 3 are planning to adopt the strategies used this past year in District 2 to push for a new school on the Upper West Side, where new residential construction will soon flood already overcrowded schools with extra students. Upper West Siders — and parents at other overcrowded schools — start squeaking!

Coming soon… notes from Wednesday’s public hearing in Manhattan.

New York City’s Proposed Citywide Contracts for Excellence plan provides:

• 63% or $242 million in discretionary allocations to schools, which may be used for new or expanded programs in any of six areas: class size reduction, time on task, teacher & principal quality initiatives, middle and high school restructuring, full-day pre-kindergarten programs, and model programs for English Language Learners (ELLs).  The DOE has posted more details about options within each program area.
• 20% or $76 million for targeted allocations to schools based on student need and the school’s capacity to carry out programs.  These funds will be spent on new collaborative team teaching (CTT) classrooms, full-day pre-K expansion, new and expanded autism spectrum disorder, and ELL summer school expansion.  An additional $7 million will be allocated this week to a small group of high-needs schools.
• 10% or $37 million to district-wide initiatives, with $10 million going to new and expanded principal training initiatives, $20 million going to school-wide performance bonuses, and $7 million to new and expanded multiple pathways to graduation initiatives.
• 8% or $30 million to maintenance of effort, specifically maintaining summer programs that target the lowest-performing students.

School-based allocations of the discretionary funding were combined with targeted allocations and other funding to produce this overview of Contracts for Excellence spending by program area:

According to the citywide plan, within the class size reduction program area, $100 million will go to reducing teacher-student ratios through team teaching, while $46 million will go to creation of additional classrooms.  The majority of time on task dollars will go to dedicated instructional time ($42 million) and summer school programs ($31 million), and the majority of teacher and principal quality dollars will go to instructional coaches for teachers ($45 million).

Much more information, including summaries and tables of district and school-level distribution of funds to specific program areas and strategies, and a breakdown of spending by student need category, along with model ELL strategies outlined by the state, can be found on the DOE’s website.

• The DOE plans to invest more in vocational schools. (Sun, Post)
• More on Double Dutch, the schools’ newest competitive sport. (Times)
• A popular Brooklyn Heights elementary school is set to expand in 2011. (Brooklyn Paper)
• Parents criticize the DOE’s reliance on test scores to determine eligibility for gifted and talented programs. (Village Voice)
• A judge in Texas ruled that the state shortchanges its students who are learning English, particularly in high school. (Houston Chronicle)
• Despite statewide gains, one Maryland county, used to being the best, isn’t happy with its test scores. (Washington Post)
• Focus on high school dropouts: Students drop out of school for a variety of reasons, such as needing to work, pregnancy, and feeling unsafe in school. (San Jose Mercury News) Jefferson County, K.Y., convened a summit to discuss strategies for cutting the dropout rate in half in the next ten years. (Louisville Courier-Journal) Meanwhile, a Haverhill, Mass., school district has created a task force to look at reducing dropouts there. (Boston Globe)
• Environmental education is on the rise in schools across the country. Watch one teacher work on building solar cars with students in this video. (USA Today)
• At the Scarsdale Teachers Institute, teachers offer classes for each other on a wide range of topics. (NY Times)

After some back and forth between bloggers and the DOE press office, NYC has released scale scores and standard deviations broken down by race for the past seven years of English Language Arts and Math tests. In Eduwonkette’s analysis, they show that the racial achievement gap in the city has increased during the Bloomberg administration, and in 8th grade ELA, the one area where the gap has decreased, it’s because white and Asian scores have declined.

This note on the spreadsheet, coupled with concerns that the tests may have gotten easier, makes you realize just how tricky it is to get a clear picture of how the kids are doing:

As of 2006 the New York State Education Department expanded the ELA and mathematics testing programs to Grades 3-8. Previously, state tests were administered in Grades 4 and 8 and citywide tests were administered in Grades 3,5, 6, and 7. State tests at Grades 3-8 include both multiple-choice and extended response questions. Citywide tests were composed of multiple-choice questions only. As a result of the changes in the testing program, scale score results from 1999 to 2005 cannot be compared with scale scores from 2006 to 2008 because the state changed the scale scores and its corresponding ranges with the introduction of state tests in ELA and math in grades 3-8.

Personally, I’m hoping for some visuals to help bring the numbers to life… (hint, hint).

America’s schools systematically fail to educate black males as well as they educate other students, according to a new report by the Schott Foundation for Public Education, Given Half a Chance: The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males.

If Black students did poorly in all schools, we would plausibly seek solutions to the problem of their achievement among those students themselves. The same would be the case if, in schools with majority Black enrollments, Black students did poorly and the other students did well. But in reality, Black students in good schools do well. At the same time, White, non-Hispanic students who attend schools where most of the students are Black and their graduation rates are low, also do poorly. The crisis of the education of Black males sits squarely in the middle of the crisis America faces as we work to create a world-class public education system that will support and maintain the values of a fair and equitable democratic society.

According to the report, in New York State, 39 percent of black male students graduated from high school in 2005-06, compared to 75 percent of white male students, and far more black male students performed at the Below Basic level on all sections of the NAEP tests compared to white male students. Also, as the report points out, on the eighth grade NAEP reading assessment, “virtually none reach the Advanced level.” Furthermore, black males in New York State are about 5 times less likely to be placed in Gifted and Talented programs, and nearly 3 times more likely to be classified as mentally retarded.

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The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is notoriously right-wing, so it was no surprise when, earlier this week, it endorsed John McCain’s education plan. But I was surprised to see that its editorial suggested that McCain cite Edison schools’ performance in Philadelphia as an example of a successful privately-run alternative to public schools — because no one, not even Edison’s leaders, disputes the company’s failure.

I was under the impression that Edison’s free-market glow had dimmed as its schools barely inched up academically, lost enrollment, were plagued by safety issues and high teacher turnover, and ultimately even were taken back over by the district that once saw the company as path out of persistent failure. The Journal mentions the six-school seizure in Philadelphia but attributes it to Democratic myopia, not market forces. Last month, the company announced that it was becoming EdisonLearning, an education technology and data management provider. Looks like the only folks who didn’t get the memo about the end of the Edison era were those penning the Wall Street Journal’s education editorial.

• One parent’s DOE satire, available online at the NYC Public School Parents blog, has been mistaken for reality. (Times)
• When one Brooklyn principal came out to his students, few batted an eye. (Village Voice)
• Unique among the city’s charter schools, Wildcat Academy serves high school students who have been unsuccessful in traditional schools. (WABC)
• An audit has found that the DOE overspends on travel and other expenses. (WCBS)
• Citing his own experience, Nat Hentoff echoes Randi Weingarten’s call for “community schools.” (Village Voice)

I was very interested to learn from last week’s New Yorker that some of the first public libraries for children were right here in New York City; the first in 1896 at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, followed in the early 1900s by a Central Children’s Room at the New York Public Library and children’s programs at the NYPL branch libraries. Anne Carroll Moore, who founded the Children’s Library at Pratt and went on to run the Department of Works for Children at NYPL, also reviewed children’s books, playing a decisive role in creating and shaping the field of children’s literature. E.B. White and his wife, Katharine White, who wrote reviews for the New Yorker, tussled with Moore over what was appropriate for and appealling to children.

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