GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Lots of good information about the stimulus school money at Ed Week.
• The author of the fair student funding program here in New York will work in the White House.
• But who’s going to be Arne Duncan’s chief of staff? Tom Toch issues a correction.
• A new report suggests some ways states could improve programs like Teach For America.
• Ken Hirsch points out an easy way to improve test oversight: don’t let the writing tests sit out in public.
• A funny satirical post announcing that Mayor Bloomberg will host a charter school in his living room.
• Most people who took an InsideSchools survey want smaller classes.
• Hard-nosed Columbia Journalism School students seek your help in investigating no-bid contracts.
• Aaron Pallas critiques a study comparing traditional and alternative teacher training programs.
• John highlights a school in Tuscon, Arizona, that is teaching a lot of music – and seeing test scores rise.

Eva Moskowitz.

Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez, who has done some seriously good work in the past, this week took his pistol-like investigative skills to the skull of charter school operator and eternal politician Eva Moskowitz — first in a story on the erosion of parent voices in the city schools, and then in a story on Moskowitz’s salary. Gonzalez challenges the salary, which he reports as $371,000 last year (Moskowitz says the real figure is $250,000 plus a $60,000 bonus), suggesting that she should give some of her pay back to her charter schools.

This is hardly the first criticism that’s been thrown at Moskowitz, who previously served as the chair of the City Council’s education committee and ran for borough president of Manhattan, losing to Scott Stringer after the teachers union campaigned against her. As Gonzalez reports, her critics include “educators, parents, the teachers’ union and Harlem political leaders.”

Why’s there so much hate for a woman who has decided to spend her days starting schools for poor and mostly black children in Harlem? There are now many charter school operators in this city. Why focus on Moskowitz? I asked around today and collected three different theories: (more…)

With lots of help from former CBS reporter Kerri Lyon, who now works at the Department of Education press office. Here’s the video:

Does this sound familiar? From the Charlotte Observer:

Also Tuesday, Associate Superintendent Ann Clark told the board that 13 more Charlotte-Mecklenburg principals will earn new freedom to run their schools in 2009-10, based on their track record of success with students.

Gorman introduced the “freedom and flexibility” plan last spring, tapping 48 of his most successful veteran principals and two former principals who have moved into other administrative jobs.

Paging Eric Nadelstern…

The study, published in the latest Education Next, was partially funded by one of the companies it examined.

Maybe I fell victim to the blindly trust-Harvard-professors trap when writing about a recent report on for-profit school management in Philadelphia. The report found that for-profit companies like Edison are doing a better job of running the schools than non-profit managers and the regular district, and it led some readers to ask me why New York City doesn’t bring in companies to manage the schools here. (All we have our “support” organizations that are run either by school district employees or by nonprofits.)

But the report should not be seen as the final word on the Philadelphia experiment. Here’s a critique of the research, which was conducted by Paul Peterson (he of Harvard) that’s worth reading as a counter-point. Written by a parent activist who has argued against for-profit school management, the critique argues that Peterson also has a bias, demonstrated by his track record of studies favoring market-based school reforms. More important, the parent activist points to three independent studies that found opposite results — at least one of which inspired Peterson’s effort to look at the numbers again.

Maybe even more important than the other studies is the fact that, if you look into the report a little more closely, as I did this morning, you’ll find that part of its funding comes from one of the for-profit companies it praises: EdisonLearning. Other funds come from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences, under the Bush administration’s leadership, presumably, and from two right-leaning foundations, Olin and Bradley.

I spoke to an associate director at the Harvard research center, Antonio Wendland, this morning. He said that he doesn’t think the funds from Edison compromise the center’s research, which doesn’t just appear in the center’s journal, Education Next, but will also be presented at conferences around the country. “Someone has to pay for it,” Wendland said, explaining that the center is financed almost entirely by grants. “I guess you could characterize it as a criticism that we have accepted money from some people who have stake in it, but we’ve been open about it, and no one has said, ‘Oh let me show you the fault in the research.’”

Pissed Off Teacher has mixed feelings about her successful effort to use a credit-recovery-like program to help a group of struggling high school seniors graduate. She wonders whether her double-period of math, for students who previously had passed just a semester of math, was enough to prepare them for college:

All semester, I told these seniors that I was teaching them to get over. And, while I tried to teach the math and the concepts, I mostly concentrated on test preparation. I sometimes meet some of those students at the community college I work at and feel sad about their lack of preparation. I wonder if they would have been better off spending the extra year in high school, really learning something, and then going on to college. Maybe then their college years would be more successful.

Background on how credit-recovery programs can be abused to award diplomas to students who haven’t earned them is in this New York Times story.

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post incorrectly suggested that students can graduate without passing Regents exams. That’s not possible, even if you do credit recovery, a DOE spokesman, Andy Jacob, just told me. My bad.

Two hot-air balloonists get lost, and they’re floating aimlessly. They spot someone down below them, and call out, “Hello!” The person on the ground replies, “Hello!” “Where are we?” one calls down. Up comes the reply: “You’re in a balloon!” They continue to drift, and one of the balloonists says to the other, “Who was that?” And the other responds, “That was obviously an economist.” “An economist? How can you tell?” the first asked. “Because what he said was precise, but irrelevant,” the other replied.

“Precise, but irrelevant” is my three-word assessment of the recent study of traditional and alternative teacher certification conducted by Mathematica Policy Research for the Institute of Education Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education.  (And the study really isn’t very precise, but that’s a more technical story.)  The design of this study successfully precludes it from addressing the most salient policy questions about alternative teacher certification–but we get a pretty clean estimate of the relative effectiveness of pairs of traditional-route and alternate-route teachers that are not representative of any population of teacher education programs, teachers, or schools.

The biggest weakness of the study, in skoolboy’s opinion, is that it fails to take seriously the idea that the elements of teacher education programs differ from one another, and that there is variability in the quality of programs–within both the population of traditional teacher certification programs and the population of alternative route teacher certification programs.  The design of the Mathematica study doesn’t evaluate the operations and outcomes of particular traditional or alternative programs.  And yet most of the relevant policy questions pertain to investment in particular programs or the hiring of graduates of particular programs.  The study design cannot address these questions. (more…)

The news about the news profession is pretty depressing these days, and the news about local news is especially dismal. (Goodbye, Rocky Mountain News.) But I’m happy to report that education reporters are not letting the school news disappear without a fight.

Here’s a run-down of some relatively new efforts to keep local school journalism alive in the new media atmosphere:

• In Dayton, editorial writer Scott Elliott has won awards for his Get on the Bus ed blog.
• Kent Fischer of Dallas innovates with his Dallas ISD blog, whose readers helped him dig up big scoops.
• Emily Alpert of the new online-only, donation-funded Voice of San Diego writes great in-depth stories.
• The long-running site about the Philadelphia schools, The Notebook, has started a blog.
• Catalyst Chicago has a blog, and Russo’s Chicago schools blog is going strong. So is Catalyst Ohio.
  
• L.A. Times reporters give regular updates on the schools at a blog called L.A. Now.
• The Journal News, a lower-upstate New York paper, has a Hall Monitor education blog.
• The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a blog called Get Schooled.
• A live-blog of a superintendent search was the recent topic at The Houston Chronicle’s School Zone.
• A D.C. writer has started a chronicle of school news there.

The new reporting format certainly has its problems. But innovation will be the only way for good journalism about schools to survive, and the only way to keep the new efforts up to par is to keep track of “best practices.” Please keep up the critiques of our coverage, and please send more good local education news sites that I missed. Or lay it all out in the comments.