GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• MONDAY: We looked at two plans for re-zoning schools on the Upper West Side.
• TUESDAY: We learned that finding a kindergarten for a child with special needs can be tough, that teachers aren’t getting enough sleep, and that some parents and community leaders think New York’s students are over-tested.
• WEDNESDAY: We saw Bloomberg call for major budget cuts and Randi Weingarten push for schools as community centers and try to solve the Absent Teacher Reserve problem .
• THURSDAY: We wrote about teachers seeking National Board Certification and wondered where our Assembly Ed Committee Members were during Tuesday’s ELL roundtable.
• FRIDAY: We introduced a new accountability model being proposed by the state, and looked into the fate of excessed teachers.

And if you missed the daily news round-ups, they archive under headlines.

On Monday, the Today Show spotlighted public school travel programs, including New York City’s Beacon School’s famous field trips to India, England, Venezuela, and many other parts of the world.

Dozens of educators, policymakers, and advocates gathered at United Federation of Teachers headquarters this morning for the first in a series of public forums to discuss proposed changes to New York State’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability system. The Board of Regents is seeking feedback on a new growth model, which is designed to provide “differentiated accountability” for schools, before they submit it for approval by the federal department of education in mid-October.

Ira Schwartz of the New York State Education Department presented the proposal, stressing that a growth model allows the state to more carefully assess the work of schools by looking both at the number of students meeting absolute proficiency standards and the rate of growth of students who have not yet reached proficiency.

Adapted from NYSED presentation. Statements in quotes are from Ira Schwartz about each type of school.

By combining these measures, he said, the state could differentiate between schools with low absolute scores where students made significant growth, and schools with both low scores and low growth. The same distinction could be made for schools with high absolute scores, separating schools that continued to push students to higher levels from those where individual students do not make much progress.

The state hopes to use a growth model both to “make more refined… decisions” about whether schools have made Annual Yearly Progress (AYP), and to go beyond AYP to measure the growth of students who have already reached proficiency. Schwartz noted that while the use of a growth model for determining AYP status must be approved by the U.S. Department of Education, the second part of the proposal, going beyond NCLB to look at the growth of proficient students, does not require federal approval.

Schwartz’s presentation mentioned New York City’s Progress Reports as an example of a locally-developed initiative that takes student growth into account, which sparked criticism by some educators in the room.  “I hope they’re not using New York City as a model of success for this,” one principal said during the question-and-answer period.

And Leo Casey, who spoke for the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), emphasized that any accountability model must be fair and complete, accurate, and transparent — no “statistical hieroglyphs,” in order to be meaningful to teachers and families. “If grades and accountability careen all over the place, from F to A and A to F, educators will experience them like the weather,” he said. Casey concluded that although there are still areas needing work, the state’s proposal is an improvement over the current system.

Upcoming posts will detail the state’s proposals for elementary and middle schools, high schools, and for measuring the growth of already proficient students.

Teachers College professor Celia Oyler has posted a quiz about the NYC school progress reports, featuring true-and-false, multiple choice, and even essay questions:

From a psychometric point-of-view, New York State achievement test scores offer a reasonably adequate tool to measure progress of one learner from one year to the next. TRUE FALSE

Explain why you agree or disagree with the following statement by Chancellor Klein: School grades “are giving parents and the public clearer information than they’ve ever had before about the strengths of their schools. They have also become a tool schools use to pinpoint the specific areas where they need to improve.”

If you took last year’s quiz, compare your scores and see if you’ve made any progress. (Via Eduwonkette)

On Wednesday, the Community Education Council for District 3 held a special meeting to hear comments from community members about the rezoning proposal the DOE unveiled last week. CEC 3 space committee chair Jennifer Freeman had this to say:

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the DOE presentation last week was the suggestion that the citywide Anderson Program could relocate to empty space in the building currently occupied by MS44 and the Computer School. [On Wednesday] I learned that Anderson’s leadership — both the principal and the PTA board — think that a relocation could work. This was probably the most productive part of the meeting. While there are still many concerns, not least parent worries about safety in the MS 44 building, the proposal does allow Anderson and PS 9 crucial room to grow. PS 9 parents also say they would welcome the Center School as a good fit, in terms of both size and philosophy. Most Center School parents remain adamantly opposed to any move.

Regarding the rezoning proposal itself, perhaps the best I can say is that it’s at too early a stage for comment.

According to Freeman, representatives from nearly every elementary school on the Upper West Side attended Wednesday’s meeting, although no one from PS 84, 145, or 191 spoke. In addition, she said, no one attended from MS 44, the West 70th Street middle school where the DOE has proposed moving the ultra-selective Anderson School.

The budget-crunched DOE could save millions of dollars by helping teachers who are currently in the Absent Teacher Reserve find permanent positions instead of hiring new teachers to fill open slots, UFT President Randi Weingarten argued yesterday afternoon at a press conference to launch the union’s “Let Us Teach” campaign.

Two teachers flank UFT President Randi Weingarten at yesterday's press conference

The campaign is a response to the growing number of teachers without assignments — there are more than 1,400 — and a sustained attack on those teachers by The New Teacher Project, an organization the DOE has hired to recruit, screen, and place new teachers in the city’s schools.

Joining Weingarten were eight ATRs — for the most part, teachers who were excessed when their positions were eliminated because their schools closed or were downsized — who say they have tried desperately to land a regular teaching position without success.

“All I want to do is teach,” said one teacher who lost her job last year when the school for pregnant and parenting teens where she taught was closed. Contradicting the chancellor’s claim that many teachers in the reserve choose not to look for work, the teachers at the press conference all said they had applied for dozens of jobs, both through the DOE’s centralized hiring system and outside of it, and had rarely even been offered an interview.

Instead of helping teachers whose positions were eliminated find new jobs, the DOE has created financial disincentives for principals to hire experienced teachers, who command higher salaries, and incentives to keep use ATRs as staff as long as possible, because the DOE picks up a portion of their salaries, Weingarten said. (more…)

• The budget crunch is bringing the DOE’s policy on excessed teachers to the fore, and the UFT weighs in. (Times, Sun)
• The City Council today is considering a bill that would close the schools for two Muslim holidays. (Sun)
• Half of the 7th graders who received payments for their school performance last year will continue in the program this year. (Post)
• Teachers in Riverdale filed grievances against the DOE because their classes are larger than their contract allows. (Riverdale Press)
• District 2′s new middle schools will be part of K-8 schools. (Downtown Express)
• The DOE could reject downtown Manhattan parents’ first choice for a new school site. (Downtown Express)
• New research suggests that the more students a middle or high school teacher has in total, the worse his or her students do, Jay Mathews writes. (Washington Post)

“We need to take responsibility for professionalizing ourselves,” Lorraine Scorsone told me, explaining her decision to become a candidate for National Board Certification in 1994, when few had heard of the certification.

Scorsone, who now mentors the latest crop of candidates through the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) Teacher Center, was a kindergarten teacher looking for a new challenge.

National Board Certification seemed like a good fit. “The hook was that I read that the standards were written primarily by teachers, for teachers. When I read those standards, I got goosebumps. …[F]or the first time, the complexities of teaching were described.”

This year, 53 New York City educators are starting the process of becoming board certified. Altogether, 137 National Board Certified teachers have come from New York City, 99% through the UFT National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) Project, Scorsone told me. Candidates working with the UFT NBPTS Project meet twice monthly to work on their applications and get help from mentors and from each other.

“The more experienced you are, the more underground, in a sense, your teaching goes,” Scorsone said, explaining that the application process helps teachers “deconstruct what [they] do and why [they] do it, then put it back together through synthesis.”

Teachers seeking National Board Certification must submit three portfolios of classroom practice, documenting their teaching through written reflection, videos of their interactions with students, and samples of student work, plus a fourth portfolio called “documented accomplishments,” which highlights the work they’ve done beyond the classroom — whether reaching out to parents or attending professional development programs — that has positively impacted their students. (more…)

In July, when the city announced cuts in the number of free parking permits for teachers, I asked for comments on the fairest ways to distribute permits and how it played out in schools. Here’s what teachers on the internet are saying.

Miss Malarkey, who wrote that the new parking policy seems like “another slap at the veteran teachers,” is thinking about what to take out of her over-sized handbag, which will ring true for those who’ve carried science supplies, rolls of chart paper, or stacks of student journals on a bus or train:

The neighborhood I work in is not great. There have been muggings and purse snatchings near the school, and I feel vulnerable walking, weighted down by all my stuff.

Jonathan, who teaches in the Bronx, is concerned that the old system of more permits than spaces was more fair than the favoritism going on at many schools now that the principal and union chapter leader distribute permits. And some schools aren’t easily accessed by transit, he points out:

I am a big fan of public transport. I use it, where it is practical. The tyranny of the upper east side rich poking at middle class schlubs who need to drive is infuriating.  Meeting in Manhattan? Of course I jump on the train. Meeting on the other side of the Bronx? What, are you kidding?

Mimi agrees that permits are not being distributed fairly: (more…)

“I’m trying to encourage more of our rank-and-file committee members to … show up at these hearings. We have 31 people on the committee and 3 members [are here],” State Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan said Tuesday at the Assembly’s Standing Committee on Education’s Roundtable on the Educational Needs of English Language Learners (ELLs).

Nolan chairs the education committee and moderated the roundtable; she was joined by Assembly Members Carmen Arroyo of the Bronx and Daniel O’Donnell of Manhattan.

Source: New York State Graduation Rates 06-07 Presentation

Although overall graduation rates have increased statewide, they have declined among English Language Learners; the city’s four year graduation rate for ELLs was 23.5% in 2007. And 76% of New York State’s ELLs live in the city. Yet among those education committee members who did not attend the roundtable were Barbara Clark of Queens; Ruben Diaz, Jr., Aurelia Greene, and Michael Benedetto of the Bronx; and James Brennan, Karim Camara, and Alan Maisel of Brooklyn. (more…)