GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

An Oscar-nominated take on teaching in NYC, and one of Sidney Poitier’s early films.

Chicago school buses by Today is a Good Day

With only the long weekend separating them from the first day of school, religious, political, and education leaders in Chicago are gearing up for a major protest in which more than 100 busloads of Chicago students will roll into a middle-class suburb and try to enroll in schools there to highlight unequal school funding between the two districts. Although organizers briefly offered to drop the boycott plan if the state’s top Democrats agreed to back a $120 million reform initiative to benefit Illinois’ lowest-performing schools, yesterday they announced that “the window has expired” and the boycott would go on.

The Committee for Concerned Clergy, led by state senator Rev. James Meeks, has been developing plans all summer to bus Chicago students to Winnetka, an upper-middle-class suburb 20 miles north of the city that’s home to New Trier Township High School, one of the nation’s top-rated high schools. Once there, the students will try to enroll in Winnetka schools, although the district’s residency requirements and state laws prohibit them from being admitted. For their part, Winnetka officials are cooperating with protest leaders and are planning to make it easy for the busloads of students to fill out registration forms. Back in Chicago, school officials are nervous about a funding formula that will cost schools $110 a day for each student who is absent during the first week of school. (more…)

Painting McDonough HS by Beurremanie

Three years ago today, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans. Since then, the city has struggled — valiantly at times, less so at others — to rebuild. As Paul Tough’s New York Times Magazine cover story from two weeks ago reminds us, nowhere has the rebuilding meant such a “radical experiment in reform” as in the city’s school system, where currently half of students attend charter schools, many of which are being run in the KIPP model, and many teachers come straight from college with far more energy than teaching experience. (more…)

Links to state standards, the city’s scope and sequence, professional development opportunities help with DOE email, and HR information all in one place, plus news and a calendar: the city’s new Teacher Page looks like a useful resource for teachers. You can use it to subscribe to newsletters from the DOE, although it looks like everyone in the system will be automatically subscribed to the Teachers’ Weekly through their department email.

The teaching resources section, divided by subject area, could use a little work; at the moment, it’s just long lists of links, without much indication of what you might find there or how it might fit in to the city’s programs. Special education includes no links to anything about Collaborative Team Teaching (CTT), Gifted and Talented doesn’t include anything about the Schoolwide Enrichment Model, and in Science, the FOSS, Harcourt, and Glencoe sites, which relate directly to the city’s curriculum, are mixed in with resources like Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Increased communication of this kind will help teachers solve HR problems and connect to resources for themselves and their students, but it’s just a small step. (more…)

• Performance bonuses for schools will go out soon, and schools have to decide how to divide the money among teachers. (Daily News, Post)
• The DOE is expanding its middle school plan, which helped about two-thirds of targeted schools achieve above-average test score gains last year. (Post)
• Michael Phelps personally delivered a check to support youth swimming programs to the 14th St. YMCA. (Post)
• Some teachers in Harrold, TX, will be carrying concealed guns at school this year. (Times)
• The Clayton County, GA school system has lost its accreditation after ethics violations by four school board members. (Times)
• An essay in the Wall Street Journal urges parents to take education seriously at home.
• In editorials, the Post and Sun question NYC’s test score increases in light of declining SAT scores.

Francesca Martinez, left, and Alexis Noa

While many teens spent their summer vacations relaxing, Francesca Martinez and Alexis Noa manned the phones and filed purchase orders at the employment office of the Henry Street Settlement, a comprehensive service provider on the Lower East Side.

Noa, a senior at Manhattan’s High School for Leadership and Public Service, and Martinez, a junior at Millennium High School in Tribeca, were among the 43,000 young people who this spring won an annual lottery: a job through the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development‘s Summer Youth Employment Program.

Nearly three decades old, SYEP is more popular than ever — this year receiving more than 100,000 applications for 43,000 positions — and a model for summer employment programs in cities around the country, even as DYCD officials refine the program’s structure here in New York. (more…)

• Some schools, such as PS 21 in Brooklyn, seem to have received disproportionate numbers of parking permits in the past; they’re now set to lose many of the permits. (Times, Post)
• More on the DOE’s plan to test the city’s youngest students. (Daily News, Post)
• Despite rising construction costs, school construction projects are costing less and coming in under budget more, the city says. (Sun)
• The Riverdale Press takes an in-depth look at the state of physical education in the city’s schools.
• A possible boycott of the first day of school looms in Chicago. (Time)
• A large suburban school district in Maryland is launching an ad campaign to combat truancy. (Washington Post)
• The dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education says education needs a bigger role in the presidential election. (CNN)

The Gothamschools Time Machine

The city announced today that it will open 18 “new” school buildings next week with the start of the school year. A few are brand new construction. Others are adapted from use as government offices or Catholic schools; the two high schools moving into a renovated building on Adams Street in Downtown Brooklyn, for example, occupy an old family court building. And still others are annexes to existing schools: the buildings may be new, but the schools themselves are not. Despite their different provenances, however, all of the new schools are likely to provide suitable physical conditions for teaching and learning.

But what about the days when schools were disgusting? Not trash-in-the-halls gross, but diphtheria-inducing, reeking-of-dead-animals gross? Back in the late 1800s, that’s how Charles Wehrum, a member of the Board of Education, characterized the city’s 140 schools after surveying their conditions: (more…)

Distribution of New Seats by Borough

Eighteen new school buildings will open next week, providing 11,471 new seats in New York City classrooms, the mayor and chancellor announced today. The current five-year capital plan, available for your perusal on the DOE’s website, will create 63,000 new seats by 2012.

The graphic to the left shows the distribution of the new seats among boroughs. About half of the new school buildings are elementary schools.

Earlier this summer, we saw parent advocacy result in DOE action on increasing capacity in the West Village and Brooklyn Heights/DUMBO.

Four-Year Outcomes for the Class of 2007

When the state released graduation figures earlier this month, I wondered what the city’s old formula for determining graduation rates would have said about the class of 2007. Yesterday, Edwize pointed us to a 276-page report available on the DOE’s website that includes the answer to that question and much, much more.

Although the state’s graduation figure of 52 percent is the official one thanks to an agreement between the city and state last year, the DOE still calculated the graduation rate for the class of 2007 using its old formula, which gave credit for students graduating in August and for students completing a GED or IEP diploma rather than a local or Regents diploma. According to this formula, 62 percent of students entering the city’s high schools in the fall of 2003 graduated on time, an improvement of 2.3 percentage points over the class of 2006. (more…)