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The Department of Education is launching an effort to include more parents in the process of voting representatives to perpetually short-staffed district parent councils. But there are already concerns that the effort will have limited impact.

By state law, only a small subset of parent leaders can vote for the council members. But the department is on the verge of signing a contract to move voting online, opening the door for a “straw vote” that would allow all parents to register their preferences, Martine Guerrier, the DOE’s head parent liaison, said yesterday at the monthly meeting of the Panel for Education Policy.

The straw vote wouldn’t count, but it would at least allow more parents to give feedback about council candidates. In the past, parents who wanted to give feedback could do so only in person, at poorly attended meetings, or by submitting written comments. The department plans to hold the straw poll in April.

Opening the vote to more parents is an improvement, said PEP member Patrick Sullivan. But without a change in the law that governs who can vote officially, the straw vote will just be “more meaningless input for parents,” he said. (more…)

Neil deMause and I have a story in the latest Village Voice education supplement about the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit. The headline declares boldly that the lawsuit was a “failure.” Specifically:

“The Campaign for Fiscal Equity Lawsuit Was the Best Hope for City Schools. It Failed.”

Michael Rebell, the lead attorney on the lawsuit and a professor at Teachers College at Columbia, is objecting to this headline, on the grounds that CFE succeeded at its goal of pumping money into the system and at setting a legal precedent for how much money is constitutionally required. (For the record, Rebell says he does agree with the “basic thrust” of the piece, which takes the subtler tack of listing advocates’ many disappointments with the lawsuit’s aftermath.)

Now, as a blogger I have pretty much permanently lost access to the “I don’t write the headlines” excuse. But in this case, I did not, in fact, write the headline. I wouldn’t have, either. I like to be provocative. But I don’t think that the CFE lawsuit was necessarily the “best hope” for the city schools, and I don’t think that what has happened since should necessarily be labeled a total failure.

I bet other people might disagree with me and with Rebell, though. Anyone?

Footnote: Neil, who did write the headline, tells me it is a reference to the television show Babylon 5.

UPDATE: The print-version headline is a little less strong, calling the lawsuit the “last, best hope,” rather than just “best hope,” which is a little jokier.

UPDATE2: Leonie Haimson’s thoughts on the subject are here.

Speaking of the average length of the school day, I took this picture at 3 o’clock on the dot, on 19th Street in Brooklyn.

 

Three boys leaving school in Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn, at 3pm on the dot.

I reported yesterday that Learn NY is trying to change the conversation on mayoral control. Here’s how Julie Wood, the group’s spokeswoman, put it:

“If this is a referendum on Joel Klein, that doesn’t serve the interests of the school system,” she said. “We think that it’s about more than that.”

There are a few good opportunities coming up to ask substantive questions about school governance. There’s the first public hearing by Assembylwoman Cathy Nolan, in Queens. And next week, I am moderating a panel in Queens on mayoral control. What testimony do you plan to share with the Assembly? What questions should I ask the panelists?

The importance of raising teacher quality and a ramped-up declaration of support for charter schools are the education points getting attention from Bill Gates’ first annual letter about the state of his philanthropic giving. But here’s another really important point that Gates makes about his efforts to improve American education:

Unlike scientists developing a vaccine, it is hard to test with scientific certainty what works in schools. If one school’s students do better than another school’s, how do you determine the exact cause? But the difficulty of the problem does not make it any less important to solve. (Emphasis mine.)

A hint at how the foundation might improve educational research is in my feature on the Gates Foundation’s new direction from late last year:

One initiative will invest about $7 million in a partnership between three research groups, the Educational Testing Service, the Rand Corporation, and a University of Michigan research group, which will study ways to measure teacher effectiveness. The goal is to find “fairer, more powerful, and more reliable measures” than current standardized tests provide, the foundation’s director of education programs, Vicki Phillips, said.

Teachers College Professor Aaron Pallas

Eduwonkette, the soon-to-be NYU professor who specialized in explaining education research to the rest of us, and whose data analysis often contradicted Department of Education claims, signed off this morning. Her many fans are now declaring a collective “Nooo!”

Here’s Nancy Flanagan, in the comments:

Oh, no. No.

Who will make statistics sing? Who will take on the nattering nabobs of educational negativism, the Big Names who blog to hear their own wonky voices? Who will simplify arguments for those who believe that complicated and quantitative = correct? I am, quite literally, crushed.

Nancy, please meet Aaron Pallas, professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University; former statistician for the U.S. Department of Education, and the man behind Eduwonkette’s blogging sidekick, Skoolboy.

Professor Pallas will be keeping up his own sharp analysis of what the New York City data show in a new section of GothamSchools that we and our awesome web brains are furiously working to develop, tentatively titled the GothamSchools Commons. Please look out for his contributions very soon.

• Research by a Bronx Science student shows that lots of stores sell cigarettes to teens. (Post)
• Bill Gates says he supports charter schools. (Post)
• The new Chicago schools chief is an education novice and not Arne Duncan’s pick. (Chicago Sun-Times)
• The Christian Science Monitor profiles Washington, D.C., schools chief Michelle Rhee.
• Even in New York City, private schools are struggling financially. (Wall Street Journal)

• CUNY’s new ambitious plan to raise dismal graduation rates could involve Gates Foundation support.
• More details about that study that found Obama closed the achievement gap from U.S. News.
• Eduwonkette bemoans the fact that the average young American spends 87% of her time out of school.
• Ed Week, the education world’s newspaper of record, is laying off staff.
• What if Joe Torre were a public school teacher, and schools were movies?
• A U.S. DOE staffer says people there feel confident Arne Duncan will not be an ideologue. (Via Flypaper)
• EdWize thinks Bill Gates’ idea to gather good teacher lectures in one place has a fatal, one-word flaw.

Parent councils that are meant to serve as watchdogs over public school districts continue to be so understaffed that the Manhattan borough president is recruiting volunteers online.

A member of Scott Stringer’s staff contacted GothamSchools today to ask for help finding volunteers to fill two slots on Manhattan Community Education Councils. Those councils were created in 2002 by the same state law that gave control of the city’s schools to the mayor, to ensure a forum for parent input in the new governance structure. The law gives CECs oversight of districts’ academic and financial performance, zoning, and education and capital plans.

Finding volunteers could be difficult. In 2007, Stringer himself released a report, titled “Parents Dismissed” (pdf), that cataloged council members’ dissatisfaction with the level of training and support offered by the Department of Education. A survey conducted by his office found that 71 percent of council members had seen a colleague resign during the school year out of frustration.

That frustration has persisted through changes in the DOE’s parent outreach initiatives: Right now, 26 of the city’s 34 councils currently have vacancies, according to the DOE’s press office. Altogether, there are currently 66 openings for parents who want to get involved. Thirteen of those vacancies must be filled by borough presidents, and the Public Advocate has another slot to fill. (Borough presidents are actually permitted to appoint people who are not public school parents, the only way non-parents can join the councils.)

Interested in joining a CEC? Contact your district’s council for information. Below the jump, information from Stringer’s office on how to apply for the Manhattan spots. (more…)

Brooklyn mom blogger Louise Crawford posted Learn NY's statement on her web site, but other parents are refusing.

Learn NY is ramping up its dogged campaign to bring public school parents on board its effort to preserve mayoral control of the city schools. Its latest technique: asking parent-bloggers to post a canned introductory letter directly to their web sites.

The group, which includes a set of four high-profile board members, some anonymous rich donors, and one seasoned political hand, was formed last year as the premier campaign to lobby for mayoral control when it comes up for renewal this spring. (The law could be scrapped, bringing back the old school board, revised, or kept intact.) Part of Learn NY’s argument for keeping mayoral control is that, though some very vocal parents loudly criticize the system, a silent majority of non-loud parents support it — or would, if they properly understood what mayoral control is.

The blogosphere campaign is part of its effort to find those parents and educate them. An earlier effort involved shooting off an arsenal of e-mails to parent e-mail lists.

The campaign is hitting some snags. After e-mails went out to parent list-serves, Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters, denounced the group on the public school parents list serve she runs. Another blogger, David Quintana of Queens, who received an inquiry from Learn NY today, declined the offer and passed it on to press contacts. Quintana’s blog includes a clock excitedly counting down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds left in the Bloomberg administration. (more…)