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At a LYFE center at Urban Academy. Picture by Los Dragonnes via Flickr.

A report out today by the New York Civil Liberties Union says the Department of Education should bolster its daycare program for students with young children of their own. But because of budget cuts, the DOE could actually move in the opposite direction, cutting off young parents’ access to free DOE-run daycare centers currently housed in 40 public schools across the city.

The programs, called LYFE centers, have existed since 1982. Last year, after the city eliminated special schools just for pregnant and parenting teens, saying that the schools were academically weak, the LYFE centers became the centerpiece of the DOE’s services for young parents.

Now the centers could also be on the chopping block, a possibility that has one editor of the report worried.

Without the LYFE centers, “the DOE would lack any real meaningful services for this very high-risk population,” Galen Sherwin, director of NYCLU’s Reproductive Rights Program, told me. “The outcome would be devastating.”

The LYFE centers have already taken a hit from the faltering economy. (more…)

One highlight of the mayoral control panel put together by the parent commission Friday night was testimony by Robert Tobias, the former city testing czar and now New York University professor. Tobias has often been quoted expressing concerns that the Bloomberg administration inflates its record of educational improvement.

But the analysis Tobias presented Friday, explaining exactly what progress he thinks happened (“real” improvements in math) and what he thinks did not (any narrowing of a longstanding gap between the state and city students’ scores on reading tests), was the most succinct summary I’ve ever heard him deliver — not to mention a striking counterpoint to the sanguine evaluations of Chancellor Joel Klein, Mayor Bloomberg, and even Caroline Kennedy.

Here’s what Tobias said:

Tobias also tempered the fact of the improvements in math scores with a warning about score inflation, the phenomenon by which test-prepping, in his words, can “undermine” the meaningfulness of the test as an indicator of what students know, versus how well they have been prepped. (Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Daniel Koretz has written the most on score inflation that I know of. For more on the topic, see this story I wrote for the Sun and these posts by Eduwonkette.)

Tobias’s remarks on score inflation are below the jump. Thanks to David Bellel for sending me the video. (more…)

110 Livingston Street, home of the old Board of Education, now houses condominiums. But the Board of Education lives, however quietly.

Earlier this month, I wrote about all the investigations into the Department of Education that happen every year but are never publicly reported. (In 2007, the Special Commissioner of Investigations into the DOE filed almost 300 reports that never became public knowledge.) A key to the reports’ remaining outside the spotlight: The only person besides the investigator who gets copies of them is the chancellor.

But it turns out that there’s another city group that might have the right to look at the reports: The Panel for Educational Policy, the 13-member group charged with voting on policy changes proposed by the chancellor.

The logic behind that possibility is buried inside the law that created the investigator in the first place, an executive order issued by Mayor David Dinkins in 1990. Here’s an excerpt from the order (PDF):

(e) The Deputy Commissioner shall, at the conclusion of any investigation that results in a written report or statement of findings, provide a copy of the report or statement to the Commissioner of Investigation, Chancellor, and the Board of Education.

What’s the Board of Education in an age of mayoral control? (more…)

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Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is emerging as a high-profile defender of Caroline Kennedy in her fight to replace Hillary Clinton as New York’s junior senator. He made the case for her on “Face the Nation” Sunday, and his case hinged on Kennedy’s work at the Fund for Public Schools. Scroll to minute 13 to watch Klein’s case.

“She helped us raise money, she helped us forge partnerships, and she spent time with our kids in the schools,” he said. “I think that says a lot about her. She could have done a lot of things with the time she had.”

Klein also answered host Bob Schieffer’s concern that Kennedy doesn’t have the gumption to face reporters in the halls of Congress by saying that Kennedy did public press events with him in New York. True. Although, as Philissa pointed out last week, she didn’t answer every question. Here’s what the Times reported when she left the Fund for Public Schools in 2004 after two years of service:

In an interview about eight months into her tenure, she would not say how often she worked at the department headquarters or how many hours she spent on the job, saying only, ”I put in as much time as I can.”

When the city last year centralized admissions standards for gifted and talented programs, setting a single standard for all city programs, one goal was to open the programs up to a more diverse set of students. But, as Eduwonkette first pointed out and Elissa Gootman then reported in the Times, the result was the opposite: Although more students were tested for giftedness, poor children fared much worse on the admissions test. The low admit rates put gifted programs in poor neighborhoods at risk of shutting down; the city discontinues programs if there aren’t enough students eligible to join them.

Now, I’m hearing that at least one of the programs that’s in jeopardy is fighting back. Its strategy: stealthily test-prepping 4- and 5-year-olds for the admissions test, which students take in January. The program’s idea, described to me by an educator who asked to remain anonymous, is to zero in on pre-kindergarteners and kindergartners at the school that houses the program. If those students can learn to score well on the gifted test, called the OLSAT, the program might survive.

There’s nothing unique about prepping children for the test. Tutoring companies offer just that service to families that can afford it. But at this program, the educator I spoke to said she’s doing the homework herself, studying the OLSAT and buying prep materials that matched the kinds of skills it demands.

Over at It’s Not All Flowers and Sausages, teacher Mimi now has a bigger problem than a thermostat she can’t control. Halfway through the school year, she has a new student:

But not just any new student, a VISITING new student. Why is he just visiting you ask? Well, let me tell you. He’s just visiting because he’s been suspended from his regular public school and is being sent to our school for five days. (Mind you, the five days before the holiday break in which my job can be likened to keeping the lid on a boiling pot of small child enthusiasm…so yea, awesome timing.)

And that’s not even the best part! This new little visiting boy has been suspended from his school for “attacking his teacher” (those are his words not mine.) Evidently the poor woman took a pencil or something away from him when he was being disruptive and that’s when the kicking and slapping began. Yea, he’s adorable. We won’t even get into a discussion here about the ridiculousness of this entire situation. But I would like to say to the person who thought it was a good idea to create a policy in which the children who ATTACK the adults who work tirelessly with them are thoughtlessly placed in OTHER adults’ classrooms…sir, you are a total d-bag.

• An advocacy group says the DOE isn’t helping pregnant and parenting teens enough. (Daily News)
• Schools that share buildings deal with special challenges. (Times)
• A Brooklyn school librarian scrimps and saves to fill her shelves. (Times)
• Students at a Brooklyn school say a teacher used a racist slur in class. (Daily News)
• A Queens middle school spent $40,000 getting free professional development. (Post)
• DUMBO might not be getting a new middle school after all. (Brooklyn Paper)
• Linda Darling-Hammond says U.S. educators should look to Singapore and Finland. (Newsweek)
• New Jersey is considering holding school board elections at the same time as regular ones. (Times)
• A California judge has blocked the state’s plan to require all 8th-graders to take algebra. (AP)
• Ramon Cortines discusses his new job as Los Angeles schools superintendent. (L.A. Times)

• Watch Joel Klein on “Face the Nation” Sunday morning.
• MommyPoppins has a run-down of holiday events for kids in the city.
• Internal union prediction is “doom and gloom” for the next contract negotiations.
• Chicago’s “turnaround” schools come under scrutiny similar to that levied against NYC small schools.
• Sherman Dorn recommends reading “Public Schools in Hard Times.”
• Michelle Rhee could make it hard for Arne Duncan to be a “straddler,” Whitmire says.
• TNR argues Arne Duncan says the most about Obama of any cabinet pick.

Simon Doolittle of After Ed TV was busy this week. In addition to posting an interview with Diane Ravitch, he also made an appearance on the New York Times’ City Room blog with a seven-minute piece about ZeAndre Orr, a Brooklyn fifth-grader who recently competed in a citywide Double Dutch competition.

This fall, Double Dutch became the city’s newest official school sport.

Caroline Kennedy is the vice chairman of the Fund for Public Schools.

The state assembly’s decision to study whether the Fund for Public Schools should be exempt from a state law that asks nonprofits for detailed financial disclosure reports is something to watch. That’s because the charity group’s exemption stems from a claim that has enabled the city Department of Education to opt out of a list of other laws and protocols: the notion that the Department of Education is not legally a city agency, and therefore doesn’t have to follow city law.

The claim doesn’t come from nowhere; the city school system has been a state-authorized entity since it was created in the 1840s, and only briefly became a fully city-run entity, thanks to a power play by Boss Tweed circa 1873. But the claim is important because it’s the reason the DOE has given for exempting itself from a laundry list of other city laws and protocols over the years. So if the assembly forces the Fund to disclose its finances, that could produce a ripple effect.

Here’s a partial list of laws and protocols the DOE has avoided via this claim, compiled largely from a list Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters put together in testimony (Word doc) to a mayoral control panel recently: (more…)