GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Superintendents aren’t needed to rate principals, the chancellor told parents. (Queens Chronicle)
• A drop in test scores has raised doubts about a “miracle” school in South Carolina. (Times)
• Special supports for new teachers don’t make them do better, a new study concludes. (Education Week)
• School administrators in Chicago are planning to close more schools. (Chicago Sun-Times)
• D.C. council members slam Michelle Rhee’s opaque school budgets. (Washington Post)
• Angry about a host of new reforms, French teachers are planning a one-day strike. (Guardian UK)
• Italian students and teachers took to the streets yesterday over new education policies. (AP)

Charter school night at the Brooklyn Museum of Art tonight became a scene of debate between two mayoral candidates, Congressman Anthony Weiner and Mayor Bloomberg — even though Bloomberg was not there.

Hundreds of parents attended the event — others were turned away at the door — which included a dinner followed by pro-charter school speakers, including Weiner and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. Weiner implored parents to stand with him — literally, in a protest outside City Hall — in opposition to Mayor Bloomberg’s push to extend term limits.

“I have something I need you to do Monday at 9:30,” Weiner said, asking parents to join the protest that will coincide with Bloomberg’s signing of a new law allowing lawmakers, and himself, to serve three terms.

Weiner suggested that Bloomberg, by bypassing voters and ramming through a term extension, will give ammunition to opponents of mayoral control of the public schools. The law granting control to the mayor was created in 2002 but will expire in 2009 if state lawmakers do not vote to keep it on the books. Already many lawmakers are saying they intend to slash power from the mayor, who they say has acted imperiously, ignoring parental and community input as he runs the schools.

“Too often parents have been cut out of the process,” Weiner said. “Too often the community hasn’t been listened to.” Weiner supports mayoral control, and he said a term limit extension will make control harder to preserve.

Mayor Bloomberg did not attend the event, but his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, brought fighting words.

Speaking in a scratchy voice because of what he said is a case of laryngitis, Klein said that charter schools would not have been expanded over the last six years had Bloomberg not supported them, against the wishes of “entrenched interests.” (Teachers unions have lobbied lawmakers to oppose the expansion of charter schools in New York.)

Klein asked the audience to join him in continuing to battle those interests, whose identities he did not specify. “They could undo this in a second,” Klein said. “If we don’t fight, make no mistake about it, people will roll it back.”

“Get ready to fight in the school wars,” he added later. “I need you to say that you will be warriors for our kids.”

Parents are outraged about those fat cat educrats at Tweed Courthouse, at least five of whom earned between $1.7 and $6 million in salaries and investments last year, the Daily News was supposed to report in today’s newspaper — but didn’t, after a late-night move killed the story.

Here’s what I saw on my Google Reader when I woke up this morning:

And here’s what popped up when I clicked the story:

My understanding is that the story was slated to run today both in the newspaper and online, but then got scrapped late last night. This appears to have happened because of an outside intervention, since the story had already been uploaded to the paper’s Web site, meaning it had gone all the way through the editing process. Word of the decision to kill the story — not postpone or delay or just put on the Web, but kill — came to both print and Web designers, who dutifully destroyed it, except for one thing: the Web headline, which was still visible this morning.

Did reporter Meredith Kolodner find something that was so juicy it had to be killed? I know when I was at the New York Sun Chancellor Joel Klein would sometimes learn about a scheduled story, dislike it, and make a phone call to the newspaper’s leadership to complain about it. To the paper’s credit, no story was ever killed.

David Cantor, a Department of Education spokesman, declined to comment on both how the story was killed and what it contained.

School leaders should explain their policies to journalists if they want positive stories to appear in the news, argues Richard Colvin, head of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, and education consultant Gina Burkhardt in a long column in Education Week.

That’s something Chancellor Joel Klein wishes he’d done better, the authors report:

Ambitious changes that disrupt the status quo—such as, in the case of New York, issuing letter grades for schools and negotiating a contract that reduces the role of seniority in teaching assignments—require the district leadership to step out and tell the story so that the community understands the rationale behind the decisions and the outcomes that can be expected.

“We let other people characterize the changes in ways that were both inaccurate and harmful,” the New York City chancellor said ruefully. “These things are controversial, and you’re running up against people who have very sophisticated media machines … who can be counted upon to mount an effective defense.”

Colvin and Burkhardt pulled Klein’s quote from a series of video clips the chancellor recorded in March for BigThink.com, a Web site where leaders answer questions about their ideas. Klein answered 18 questions on topics ranging from the role of private philanthropy in public schools to his childhood “on the streets of New York.”

While I’m on the Jon Schnur-Obama education wars subject, let me raise a problem that I have when writing about said wars: How should I describe each side?

In an earlier post, I referred to the Schnur/Eduwonk/Joel Klein nexus (axis?) as the “reform-minded” camp. In doing so I used a label the group calls itself, but also violated a principle I was taught at the New York Sun about the importance of precise language. I was rightly chastised by Leonie Haimson, who pointed out in the comments section that almost everyone involved in the education debate would like to see “reform”; the question is what kind.

A similar problem was raised by Richard Whitmire of USA Today in August, who was following up on Jay Mathews of the Washington Post. Their concern was what to call a group of “elite” inner-city schools whose students score better on tests than students nearby neighborhood schools. Ultimately the contest ended unsatisfactorily, and Whitmire posted my e-mail to him explaining why the contest was so hard:

“I think the difficulty of the contest is a symptom of a bigger problem. Aren’t these schools a part of a movement without a name? My editor banned me from ever letting the word “reform” follow the word “education” and I am glad for the lesson in precision, but I have never found a good substitute. The Wendy Kopp movement. The Teach For America alumni club. The people-likely-to-say-”relentless”-twice-in-one-sentence movement. HBS Grads for Change. Education warriors. Joel Klein, Paul Vallas et al.

The best description I’ve read was David Brooks’, “the thoroughly modern do-gooders”.

Anyway, my submission is the cop-out that maybe we first must solve that naming dilemma, and then get to the schools.

So, let’s solve this dilemma! Send ideas to me at egreen@gothamschools.org, and I’ll update on our progress as time goes by.

Schnur is the gray-haired man on the right (via Flickr)

Jason Horowitz has a story in the Observer this week wondering which New Yorkers could be going to Washington if Barack Obama wins the presidency, as it looks like he might.

Here’s a name I didn’t see on Horowitz’s list: Jon Schnur, the cofounder and CEO of the Manhattan-based nonprofit New Leaders for New Schools. Schnur has been taking time off lately to campaign for Obama, work that has included guest-blogging, debating, and meeting with like-minded, education-inclined fundraisers in fancy Manhattan apartments. (I don’t have a link for that last one but can testify it did happen at least once; I was there.)

Schnur is one of the main players in the quiet battle among Obama’s education advisers which I am told is still raging even this close to the election. Schnur is the leader of the mostly younger “entrepreneurial” set who sympathize with the efforts of Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein — and who likely were not too pleased when the leader of the other group, Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, criticized Teach For America at a recent Teachers College debate where she was speaking on behalf of Obama. (more…)

Some of these tips could work in New York City: involve grandparents, hold an online auction, try this Yahoo-powered search engine that pays the school a penny for every search.

And here’s an auction item that could really counteract coming budget cuts, if pulled off in the city:

8. Reserved parking spot for a family for the school year

Does your school have limited parking space? Take the stress out of daily drop-offs and pick-ups with reserved parking for a year! The winner of this items will be designated a prime parking spot reserved solely for the use of their family. You’ll be the envy Caravans everywhere!

The envy of caravans — and teachers.

One teacher-blogger’s school has an Elmo document projector, which no one else seems to know how to use. But that’s okay with her (sort of):

When I arrived for the first day of orientation at my school, the principals were trying to figure out how to use this thing called the Elmo… … Since they made it look so hard, people might not ask to borrow it. This would leave it open for me. Today. I Pounced on it. Ms. B has fallen in love, and the Elmo is locked in our closet for another day. We are hoping to get to the point that we keep it until someone else comes and gets it from us. Otherwise, it just sits in the principal’s closet not being used. My school loves their technology. Mostly, they love their technology as a display. The idea of technology in the classroom doesn’t quite make any sense.

From New York City:

• After admissions changes, gifted programs’ enrollment and diversity are down. (Times, Daily News)
• A best-case budget scenario for next year would include no increases in state aid for schools. (AP)
• The UFT is fighting for Teaching Fellows whose jobs are on the line. (Post)
• A fired teacher who called his students “animals” lost a bid to be reinstated. (Daily News, Post)
• Bronx principals report data errors in the DOE’s recent arts report. (Riverdale Press)
• A new building housing four schools was dedicated yesterday. (Staten Island Advance)
• A Harlem teacher in Antarctica spoke to her students by videoconference. (AP)
• Graffiti gets a gallery at New Design High School on the Lower East Side. (The Villager)
• Kids at PS 19 grilled a state senate candidate who was principal for a day. (Downtown Express)

And beyond:

• Massachusetts districts want to be able to stop paying students’ charter school tuition. (Boston Globe)
• The Wall Street Journal takes a look at presidential candidates’ education platforms.
• A California judge delayed the state’s plan to require algebra in 8th grade. (San Francisco Chronicle)
• Students learning English and in special education fear required high school exams. (Baltimore Sun)
• New NCLB rules take aim at the nation’s dropout crisis. (Time)
• Chicago schools chief says a top federal education job isn’t on his mind. (Chicago Sun-Times)
• Australia’s government wants proposed school reforms to happen faster. (The Australian)

New York Times, Oct. 29, 1905

From today’s report about overcrowding and capital planning:

A capital plan designed to alleviate current overcrowding and reduce class sizes to the City’s own target levels, based on the current need, should aim to provide at least 167,842 new school seats. While this is clearly a large figure, approximately 100,000 school seats were added from 1902-5 …

What was happening during those years? The city embarked on a construction spree so that it could fulfill the mayor’s 1903 pledge to provide a school seat for every child in the city for the first time. In just two years, 90,000 seats were constructed and bids were awarded for the construction of 93,000 more.

Judging from a table included in a 1905 New York Times article about the building boom, the city was aiming for an average class size of 50 in those new schools: