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Philissa and I spent the morning watching the inauguration in Harlem with thousands of public school students. They came from 34 public schools, including about 18 charter schools, and when Obama took the oath of office they exploded in cheers, waving American flags and jumping up and down. Here’s a slideshow of some of what we saw, and we’ve also just posted a feature describing the day.

I spent much of the morning sitting next to Douglas Noble, an eighth-grader at KAPPA II in East Harlem. Here’s what he told me about Obama’s influence on him:

He said Obama’s rise changed his life goals. He had wanted to be a basketball player, but now he’s set his sights on engineering. “Everybody wants to be a basketball player, but I want to be something that’s harder,” he said. “A basketball player, all you have to know how to do is dribble and shoot. An engineer, you have to know a lot more.”

Students from 34 city public schools and and an influx of tearful well-wishers — including some members of the New York Guard, a family that traveled to Harlem from New Jersey, and city charter school lobbyists — filled the enormous Harlem Armory this morning to watch Barack Obama’s inauguration on three giant television screens.

Just before noon, some children squirmed while students and teachers spoke at a dais. Others sank into their seats and nodded quietly to the iPod music plugged into their ears. But when the CNN announcer declared that, although he had not yet been sworn in, Obama was now officially president, even the too-cool-for-school students stood up to scream. When he took the oath of office, children jumped up and down, grinning, and waved American flags. Adults sitting on the sidelines wiped tears from their eyes.

Douglas Noble, an eighth-grader at KAPPA II, said Obama caused him to reevaluate his dreams.

One former sloucher, Douglas Noble, a 14-year-old eighth-grader at KAPPA II, a middle school in East Harlem, had drawn a picture of Obama on a posterboard and written the words “YES, WE, CAN” at the top. “He showed every black person that, even though you’re at the bottom, you can still make it to the top,” Noble said.

He said Obama’s rise changed his life goals. He had wanted to be a basketball player, but now he’s set his sights on engineering. “Everybody wants to be a basketball player, but I want to be something that’s harder,” he said. “A basketball player, all you have to know how to do is dribble and shoot. An engineer, you have to know a lot more.”

Noble, who wore a hooded sweatshirt and a Yankees t-shirt, sat down for most of the day’s events, even as other students danced around excitedly, but he pushed his chair back and stood when Obama took the oath of office. “I’m showing my respect to Obama for making it,” he said.

The Democracy Prep charter school, a three-year-old middle school in Harlem which will extend into high school next year, organized the event, coming up with the idea of a party in their own neighborhood after the school’s plans to travel to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration didn’t transpire. A group of about 25 students sat on an inauguration committee that planned the alternative event. (A lone student supported John McCain.)

Their Harlem Armory party proved so popular that the entire floor of the Armory today was packed with round tables filled with children. Seats in upstairs bleachers were also filled. Students found blank poster boards and markers at their tables, and they filled the posters with pictures congratulating Obama.

Democracy Prep founder Seth Andrew made the event political, too. Next to the markers and posterboard were postcards pre-addressed to President Barack Obama at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The postcards said:

Dear President Obama:

I want to congratulate you on this historic day and ask you to keep your promise to support more school choice and parent voice in education.

The postcards also included room for students to write their ideas for how to improve America’s schools, and a request: “Please write back if you can.”

The executive director of the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence, James Merriman, sat in the crowd of students alongside Michael Thomas Duffy, who runs the Department of Education’s charter school office. Merriman addressed the crowd, and a press group that works with his organization, Knickerbocker SKD, handled the gaggles of press who converged in Harlem for the event.

“Out of all the choices, I wanted to come to Harlem,” said Cathy Salley, a mother from New Jersey who brought her children to the Armory for the day. “It’s the environment, it’s the camaraderie. This is an experience they’ll never forget.”

There were some moments when the entire room came alive, like when Obama took his oath and students stood up with him and put their hands over their hearts, and when Aretha Franklin sang. One girl, a student at East New York Prep Charter School in Brooklyn, registered a note of disappointment when she realized Obama himself would not be in Harlem. “I was excited because I thought I was going to see Obama,” she said.

The final time the room exploded came via a song the event organizers put on the loudspeaker, after fading out the sound of CNN. It was Natasha Bedingfield singing “Unwritten.”

When I reported last week about the total review of special education that is set to start soon at the Department of Education, I noted that a complaint was pending with the U.S. Office for Civil Rights against the DOE’s policies about admission to its new small high schools.

In fact, the civil rights office actually issued a decision on the complaint that same day. Based on an interview with the parent leader who filed the complaint and data provided by the DOE, OCR determined that it is not possible to conclude that the DOE excludes students who require special education services or English language instruction from its new small high schools.

The decision comes two and a half years after David Bloomfield, a past president of the Citywide Council on High Schools, filed a complaint alleging that the DOE’s policy allowing small schools to exclude at their start some students with special needs violated those students’ civil rights.

Kim Sweet of Advocates for Children of New York told me last week that OCR generally rules on complaints quickly. But the ruling itself suggests a reason for the delay: In its decision, OCR cited DOE data that showed that after three years, small schools enroll a higher proportion of students with special needs than other high schools.

In a statement, Bloomfield said the longitudinal data reflect a victory for advocates for students with special needs:

While disappointed in this result, I believe we were successful in prodding the NYCDOE to provide greater  educational access to special needs students and English language learners. The almost 3 year process of OCR deliberations clearly allowed the NYCDOE to improve its record of high school admissions, so I feel we have made our point.

The organizations that schools can choose to affiliate with for bureaucratic support, like New Visions for Public Schools, the Knowledge Network, and the Empowerment network, are being graded this month for their effectiveness. The Department of Education’s accountability office is writing the grades of the “school support organizations,” and Chief Schools Officer Eric Nadelstern said the outcome will eventually be made public.

“It will definitely be public before schools have to make the selection as to which SSO they want to affiliate with next year, so that parents and teachers and principals can make that decision on the basis of all sorts of factors,” Nadelstern said yesterday.

The school support organizations were created last year as part of an overhaul of the school system’s bureaucracy. Rather than being forced to report to the superintendent in their neighborhood, schools can shop around among a set of support organizations to decide which bureaucracy they prefer.

This is the first year that the support organizations will be graded, since they’ve now amassed a year’s worth of a track record in student test scores. Nadelstern said that the accountability office, headed up by Columbia law professor Jim Liebman, is basing its grades on both schools’ progress report cards and on their quality reviews, written reports about schools based on in-person interviews and observations.

The report cards have come under heavy criticism for being statistically problematic, if not meaningless. (more…)

This month’s Atlantic Monthly reports on the Obama administration’s efforts to open up government through the Internet. Here’s the coolest part, via the Atlantic, something called “API documentation”:

It’s not just the API that’s a big deal, Greg Elin, Sunlight’s chief data architect, told me. “It’s the discipline an API imposes,” he said. To build one, an agency has to record and store data in a way that anticipates public use. “Data sharing is no longer an afterthought,” Elin explained. “You begin with the notion that you’re going to share information. And you’re going to make it easy for people.”

Compare to the New York City Department of Education, which has not produced financial expenditure reports (lists of exactly how taxpayer dollars were spent) since 2004! and which often releases school test score data in unwieldy PDF’s impenetrable to outside analysis. As Eduwonkette put it in July:

Unfortunately, denying data access appears to be a growing Department of Education strategy – in this case, the DOE failed to release data, and in other cases, they have released data only in PDF formats that no one can analyze. There is something deeply troubling about an administration that bows down at the altar of “data-driven decision making” but refuses the public access to data that rightfully should be available in a spreadsheet on their website.

ABOUT THE INAUGURATION:

• More than three-quarters of city schools will be watching the inauguration live. (Post)
• Schools in Los Angeles are including parents in today’s celebration. (L.A. Times)
• The Education Equality Project partied in Washington, D.C, yesterday. (Education Week)
• The Daily News has a roundup of how Bronx schools are spending the historic day.
• Jay Mathews uses the inauguration to push his new book about KIPP schools. (Washington Post)

EVERYTHING ELSE:

• A city councilman wants community service to be a graduation requirement. (Daily News)
• The new stimulus package will also push education quality. (USA Today)
• You heard it here first: The DOE is providing free e-mail to all parents. (Daily News)
• The Post rehashes the Riverdale Press‘s story about a demoted class of honors students.
• A Queens vocational school is already preparing kids to take on green jobs. (Daily News)
• People can start working in schools before their background checks are complete. (Post)
• A civil rights complaint prompted the DOE to move girls soccer to the fall. (Times)
• Brooklyn will get new schools in Bay Ridge (Brooklyn Paper) and Park Slope. (Brooklyn Daily Eagle)
• More closures prompt the question: Will Catholic schools soon be gone for good? (Times)
• Diane Ravitch says no to the forthcoming Hebrew-language-focused charter school. (Daily News)

• A considerate student alerts her teacher to a condom she inadvertently touched.
• A fun rundown at Eduwonkette of past mayors’ rhetoric on school improvement.
• A look at venture philanthropy in Chicago as hands-on charity.
• The SUNY Charter Institute is closing an Albany charter school touted as a key to ed reform in the capitol.
• Alyson Klein says the stimulus shows that the new administration really prioritizes education.
• John McWhorter says we know how to teach reading: Direct Instruction. (Via Joanne Jacobs.)
• Daily Howler says that education journalism should take advice from schools and raise its standards.

The same person who will lead the Department of Education’s review of special education masterminded the internal reorganization that’s currently underway at the department.

DOE spokesman David Cantor told me Garth Harries, who came to the DOE from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, devised the new organization as a way to make the department more efficient. At a time when cuts to schools and “potentially hundreds of layoffs” are on the horizon, “we had a strong feeling we need to be as efficiently organized as possible,” Cantor said.

With only a few exceptions, the new organization simply adds a level of reporting between managers and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who until now has had more than 20 DOE officials reporting directly to him, Cantor said. “When the dust settles, there’s not really anything that’s notably different about it,” he said.

One place where changes are more substantive is in the Office of Portfolio Development, currently run by Harries, where responsibilities are being dispersed among several different managers. (more…)

After a rocky journey marked by allegations of dystopianism and favoritism and almost too many principals to count, the charter school founded by the millionaire Courtney Ross is moving out of Tweed Courthouse and into a home of its own. That’s happening despite the fact that there is still no resolution to the cheating scandal that hit Ross Global Academy charter school last year, when its principal was pushed out after being investigated for tampering with tests.

Next year, Ross Global Academy charter school will move to a new East Village space, which it will share with the progressive East Side Community High School. Another small high school, the Urban Assembly School of Business for Young Women, is leaving the building for its own new space, at an office building in Lower Manhattan.

A person at Urban Assembly today told me the school is excited to get a new space. “It’s very crowded here,” the person said. “We were supposed to be here for one school year, and it’s already four.”

Ross expects to have more students next year, 384 up from 316 this year, Department of Education spokesman Will Havemann said.

In Ross’s place, two new elementary schools are starting off with kindergarten classes in the basement of Tweed next year. They are eventually scheduled to move into larger spaces now under construction. Downtown Express has a profile of the new schools.

Kim Sweet

Special education advocates are planning to criticize the Department of Education’s choice of official to spearhead a comprehensive review of special education in the city schools.

Kim Sweet, the executive director of Advocates for Children of New York (where I used to work when I wrote for Insideschools), told me this morning that she’s worried about what the review could mean for special education services, especially in light of the current economic conditions.

One major concern is that Garth Harries, who has been appointed to conduct the review, doesn’t have experience in special education. “The special education system is a complex system that to address a diverse and complicated set of student needs,” Sweet told me. “Garth Harries unfortunately does not have the experience to make decisions about it in an intelligent and sensitive way.”

She said the ARISE Coalition, which advocates for children with special needs, will speak out against Harries’ appointment.

Another issue, Sweet said, is that given the current budget shortfall, the department might be taking a hard look at special education simply to save money. (more…)