GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• UPS donated two hard-to-obtain truck engines to Automotive High School. (Times)
• The Web site Greatschools.net gave awards to a host of city schools. (Daily News)
• Twenty-six city students are Intel Science Talent Search semifinalists. (Post)
• Parents complain after an entire class of honors students was demoted. (Riverdale Press)
• USA Today solicited even more education advice for Obama.
• A new report says school segregation is on the rise in the country. (Reuters)
• Melinda Gates dishes on trying to improve education. (ABC News)

• Tom Toch says Arne Duncan’s confirmation hearing showed he’s a pragmatist, not an ideologue.
• Mike Petrilli says unionizing KIPP will dilute what makes charters unique: autonomy.
• About $80 billion of the federal stimulus package will go to education, Campaign K12 reports.
• With Michael Bennett going to Senate and Duncan to D.C., do we have an urban supt shortage?
• Remember what KIPP leaders were doing just a week ago, relishing about the power to hire and fire?
• Mike Antonucci on the sense that KIPP unionizing could have a domino effect: “all this hoohah is silly.”

Desperate economic times call for creative measures, according to a state senator who is proposing raising revenue for schools by adding new games to the state’s computer gambling terminals.

Tomorrow morning, Sen. Jeff Klein, who represents part of the Bronx and Westchester County, is formally unveiling his plan, which he says would generate $145 million for education. According to his office, he’ll be joined at his press conference by representatives of Advocates for Children (my former employer) and Class Size Matters.

This is the second creative proposal about how to increase school funding I’ve heard this week. From someone who is typically a big backer of public transportation, I also heard a suggestion that New York City stop funding work to the Second Avenue Subway and instead direct that money into the schools. But before this week, I hadn’t heard many creative ideas about how to mitigate the coming budget cuts. Any suggestions?

The Department of Education is signing a $54.9 million contract with a firm called MAXIMUS to streamline the way it tracks services for students with disabilities. Right now, a paper system tracks the process of diagnosing and giving services to special education students, with results that both special education advocates and the department say are poor.

The new system will allow administrators and teachers to track these documents in a single place online. It will also be costly: The five-year contract is for $54.9, and the DOE expects extra attached costs like internal training programs so that principals can use the database will cost an additional $23.7 million over five years.

The DOE press release that went out on this earlier today includes unusually glowing remarks from the special education advocate Kim Sweet, who as the executive director of Advocates for Children has often criticized the DOE for failing to serve special education students adequately

Sweet’s statement:

“The Department of Education desperately needs a new system for tracking special education data. Under the current system they are unable to track their performance in providing essential services ot students with disabilities with any kind of accuracy. A new data system is essential to helping the Departmetn of Education improve its delivery of special education services and, we hope, will be a key step to holding the Department of Education accountable for the education of this vulnerable population.”

The contract was not a no-bid but was competitively bid. A law firm helped the department negotiate it pro bono.

Here’s the full press release, below the jump: (more…)

From the KIPP Infinity web site.

Yesterday, I wondered what sparked the move by the teachers union to push a second KIPP charter school, KIPP Infinity, into contract negotiations. I said I didn’t know whether the union had taken this initiative on its own or whether it was working in concert with teachers at Infinity, which is considered one of the best KIPP schools in the country.

This morning, Dave Levin, the superintendent of New York City KIPP schools, told me that, as far as he knows, teachers at Infinity did not approach the union to ask for a contract. That goes along with this comment from someone identifying him/herself as a teacher at Infinity on Ezra Klein’s blog. It also suggests that one of the United Federation of Teachers’ most dramatic claims yesterday — that 3 of 4 KIPP charter schools in New York City are now represented by the union — is a little misleading.

KIPP Academy, the original KIPP school in New York City, is unionized only because it was not originally founded as a charter school but as a traditional public school. When it changed to charter status in 2000, it had to keep its unionization, according to the charter school law. KIPP Infinity, as I reported earlier, has also been represented by the union since it opened in 2005, though it doesn’t (yet) have a labor contract. Only KIPP AMP will unionize because teachers organized together and pushed for it.

The man behind Bluejake, Jake Dobkin, took some pretty amazing photographs at an abandoned public school building in Harlem. He didn’t post the exact location, but I’m pretty sure it’s the old PS 186 building on 145th Street and Broadway. The school closed in the mid-1970s after parents protested unsafe conditions in the building and the city built a new school across the street. According to a 2007 New York Sun article, the city sold the building for $215,000 in 1986 (just over $400,000 today) to a Boys and Girls Club that promised to redevelop it but never did. Back in 2005, WNYC aired a story saying that Harlem teens were leading a campaign to draw attention to the school.

There are a lot of questions floating around about the KIPP schools’ unionization, which, according to two major players, was a surprise even to Dave Levin, KIPP’s cofounder and the superintendent of New York City KIPP schools. People are guessing at exactly how high is turnover at KIPP AMP. (Levin told me this morning that he doesn’t know the exact data but promised to get back to me.) They’re wondering whether more elite charter schools will unionize next. (Open question, though charter teachers across the city were contacted about joining up with the union last year.)

The most important thing to follow, I think, is what kind of labor contract the KIPP teachers end up negotiating. How will the contract handle job protection? Will it go the extreme route of a virtual job for life, or will it allow for discrimination between effective and ineffective teachers? If it does the latter, what will be the definition of an “effective” teacher?

I got some hints of what’s to come — or at least what the union wants — in a conversation with Randi Weingarten, the union president, yesterday. Weingarten said she is not in favor of offering “tenure” that means a “job for life.” Instead, she said that a contract should force administrators to prove that they have “just cause” before they let an employee go. “Just cause” can mean the extreme case of, say, having sex with a student. Weingarten said that it can also mean the trickier matter of incompetence.

Here’s how Weingarten explained “just cause” to me:

Tenure has been interpreted very, very differently. But it shouldn’t be. Tenure was never intended to be a job for life. Tenure is supposed to be a process, due process, so that you promote excellence and you guide against arbitrariness.

What this sounds a lot like is the contract that Green Dot charter school teachers have in Los Angeles, finding a sweet spot between the extreme of so much job protection that bad teachers stay in the profession and so little that teachers feel constantly threatened. (more…)

This week, kids in grades 3, 4, and 5 are taking state English language arts exams. On Monday, Ruben, a teacher in the Bronx, said the preparations were getting him down. He wrote:

I spent the afternoon readying my classroom for tomorrow’s ELA exam. That meant covering or taking down a dozen or so charts for strategies like making predictions, using non-fiction text features and understanding cause and effect. I couldn’t stop there however. I needed to eliminate any thing that could be used for help on the ELA exam. So, next came down the class rules, the writing process, my science, social studies and math word walls, directions for early finishers, and how to make an “I statement”.

The paper I was supplied to cover up my classroom had run out, and I still had to cover my alphabet. I found a roll of paper towels and began rolling it across the letters, pinning as I went. It was at this point that the absurdity of the whole exercise – more or less deconstructing four months evidence of learning – sunk in, and revealed itself as a ridiculous metaphor for the next three days of testing my students will undergo. All of my class’s learning across all content areas has been slowly subsumed by these standardized exams. Now even the physical representation of that learning has been overtaken by the tests as well.

• The DOE will spend $55 million or more to upgrade the way it manages special education data. (Times)
• KIPP teachers voted to unionize. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News)
• The City Council will debate whether schools can display nativity scenes. (Times)
• A second Stuyvesant student is being treated for possible meningitis. (Daily News)
• Arne Duncan faced few tough questions at his confirmation hearing yesterday. (Times, Washington Post)
• Performance, not spending, is to be the “bottom line” in Australia’s education policy. (The Australian)

• JD2718 says the KIPP unionization is a victory for teachers everywhere.
• Russo has a roundup of reactions to Arne Duncan’s uncontroversial confirmation hearing.
• Diane Ravitch says no thanks to de-schooling.
• Leonie Haimson points out that the Washington Post didn’t ask a parent for advice for Arne Duncan.
• Tweens in Park Slope report a rise in muggings.
• A teacher wonders whether it might be wise for his colleagues to sometimes play God.
• The state’s education grants are available for the public to peruse.
• Aaron Pallas points out some errors in the Bush Administration’s education claims.
• Clay Risen comments on the new education politics.