GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The stimulus bill expected to pass today includes just $83 billion for education. (Times)
• A planned private high school for Greenwich Village has been scrapped. (Post)
• The DOE’s new vendor policies are pushing a black bookstore out of business. (Brooklyn Paper)
• A teacher was fined for hawking a book of her poems to parents. (Post)
• A study found that many of the items sold in Scholastic’s book club aren’t books. (Times)
• Michelle Rhee said she’s reducing the incentives being offered to some teachers. (Washington Post)
• A doctor takes on the question of when sick kids should go to school. (Times)

• $16 billion in school construction funds got wiped out of the “moderate” stimulus, says Politics K12.
• Arne Duncan will lobby for more school construction funds in the stimulus.
• Teachers union members are supporting the stimulus package by wearing blue to school tomorrow.
• Chad Aldeman digs up data on what universities trained New York teachers.
• Ken Hirsh thinks the Green Dot teachers contract is not flexible enough.
• Andy Rotherham says Teach For America matters because it injects new ideas into public education.
• Will Richardson explains why he allots his children only 45 minutes a day on the Internet.
• How much does being educated protect you from being unemployed? Some, but same as before.

Gotham Gazette — a fine web publication with which we share no connection — offers this cool game, in which readers get to play against Mayor Bloomberg in trying to balance the city’s budget. You don’t have to cut $1 billion of services or raise the sales tax. You can add other revenue-producing proposals or cut even more services.

Major hint: There is no way (that I can see) to scroll up education funding to the highest possible level.

Here are some key pieces of back-to-back interviews Randi Weingarten and Joel Klein gave to Diana Williams at Channel 7 yesterday.

Weingarten said that, rather than laying off teachers, the city should offer buyouts to teachers on the brink of retirement and should put a freeze on hiring young teachers from Teach For America and The New Teacher Project.

She said:

“Take all those signs down – the great beautiful signs…Just stop that stuff. If we’re serious that there’s a $1.5 billion deficit, there’s a hiring freeze.”

Klein’s response, when he came on later in the program:

“We have almost $100m of teachers who could not find a job, and those are teachers we ought to prioritize if there are in fact going to be layoffs. But, no, let’s not use great, talented, excited young new people to come into the system. Those are the people that our kids want, those are the people we need to go find.”

UPDATE: Edwize has video of the interviews here.

The mayor’s plan to save endangered Catholic schools by helping them become charter schools reminds me of a school I visited a year and a half ago, the Hellenic Classical Charter School in Brooklyn. Like the Catholic charters will, Hellenic emerged, indirectly, from a struggling parochial school, Soterios Ellenas. Soterios Ellenas had been tied directly to a Greek Orthodox church next door.

But as longtime members moved away to New Jersey, Staten Island, and other suburbs, the school struggled financially. Father Damaskinos Ganas, the priest at the church, estimated to the school’s annual deficit at $350,000 a year.

Hellenic officials, led by the lawyer Charles Capatanakis, who had served on Soterios Ellenas’ board and is now the board chair of Hellenic, took pains to separate the charter school they created from the parochial school that is being phased out. They strenuously maintained that had not converted Soterios Ellenas into a charter school. They refused admission to many families who attended the parochial school and erected walls between their space and religious areas. A majority of their students are not Greek.

But, as I reported then for the New York Sun, when I last visited, some overlaps remained:

The school’s relationship with a Greek parochial school has been even more polarizing, nearly jeopardizing Hellenic’s charter application in 2004. The school, Soterios Ellenas, shares the building with Hellenic, and several students and teachers who had been at the parochial school have transferred to the charter school. Soterios Ellenas’s priest, Father Damaskinos Ganas, has no formal relationship with Hellenic, but educators there refer to him as Hellenic’s “spiritual leader”; on a recent visit students waved enthusiastically when he passed them in the hall.

John Merrow has been collecting advice for President Obama on education. The latest additions are real audio from students, including this Texas high school senior, who says schools should focus on tests that prepare students for college, not standardized state tests:

“It would be a whole lot more useful to students if they would focus on tests like SAT’s and ACT’s, more college-oriented things, rather than an end of year test that’s not used by colleges or even hardly looked at by colleges.”

Malika Evans, an Urban Academy senior here in New York City, wants Obama to end military recruitment in high schools:

“It gets harassing, they keep calling…School is for education and education only, and students should be worried about going to college after going to school.”

At Vanguard High School in Manhattan, two students ask for better environments for gay and lesbian students:

“There is a lot of high schools that don’t approve of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and queers….In school, it should be a safe place, it should be like a second home. Nobody should be put down because of their sexuality.”

Hazel Dukes, president of the New York NAACP, urged Assembly members to make changes to mayoral control

By now you know a bunch of the highlights from the big mayoral control hearing Friday. Diane Ravitch argued for taking power away from the mayor, the administration argued for keeping it, and some students summed the whole thing up pretty nicely.

But there were other highlights, too, that I didn’t go over Friday. Here’s a rundown:

• New York NAACP President Hazel Dukes charged the Bloomberg administration with over-stating its civil rights accomplishments. “Despite repeated claims, the achievement gap has not diminished in any grades or subjects since this administration came to office,” she said.

Dukes also advised Assembly members to carve into the mayor’s control of the schools by adding checks and balances to the power of the mayor and chancellor. “You got to put the teeth in now, and when they don’t do it, just like that groundhog did the other day, you’re going to have to bite,” she said. “We need to make sure that no man, not any man in this city or woman can just have all the power about our children.”

• Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell, whose sister is the famous TV personality Rosie O’Donnell, criticized the Bloomberg administration for having too few educators control education policy. He described a meeting with a senior education policy aide to the mayor. When O’Donnell asked about her background, the adviser said she went to school, became a lawyer, and has siblings who are educators.

“My sister used to have a very famous talk show, but that doesn’t make me qualified to be an executive at NBC,” O’Donnell said. (more…)

FROM NEW YORK CITY:

• More on Friday’s mayoral control hearing. (WNYC, Crain’s New York, Times, Daily News)
• The mayor is helping four closing Catholic schools convert to charters. (Times, WNYC, Post, Daily News)
• Teachers at KIPP AMP say administrators aren’t acceding to their unionization plan. (Times)
• In Brooklyn, teachers and families protested against a school closure. (NY1)
• The controversial ex-principal of Lafayette High School is under investigation, again. (Daily News)
• The Radio Rookies program gives city kids a chance to produce spots for NPR. (Daily News)
• Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood is getting its first high school this fall. (Daily News)
• A school for kids with special needs is getting pushed out of its DUMBO home. (Times)
• A religious leader who works with charter schools says mayoral control should continue. (Daily News)
• Two former DOE employees admitted to taking bribes from bus companies. (Times)
• The DOE is moving all kindergarten classes into public school buildings next year. (Daily News)

AND BEYOND:

• Two academics argue against the Head Start money in the stimulus bill. (Times)
• A psychology professor says the stimulus bill should only fund programs that work. (Times)
• Test scores help schools improve, Jay Mathews says. (Washington Post)
• Charter schools struggle for space in Los Angeles. (L.A. Times)
• D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee tries to set the record straight with teachers. (Washington Post)

Democracy Prep Charter School Students Testify on Both Sides of Mayoral Control Debate before New York State Assembly from Elizabeth Green on Vimeo.

Maybe the clearest articulation of the debate on mayoral control was laid out Friday by two middle-school students from Harlem. The two boys, students at Democracy Prep Charter School, testified back-to-back before the state Assembly hearing in Manhattan.

One argued for preserving the law as-is, on the grounds that giving one person power allows the most efficient and effective leadership. The other pushed for adding checks and balances to the mayor’s power, on the grounds that total control is un-American and makes him feel a little queasy.

Daniel Clark Jr., a seventh-grader and the first of the boys to testify, asked the Assembly members to consider his family’s dishes. He said the dishes are more likely to get washed if only one family member has sole responsibility for them.

LeiShawn McClean, an eighth-grader, also used a family metaphor. “Student and parent input isn’t just about sitting around a table talking about how bad this dinner is,” McClean said. “We need to really have input on how the schools are run.” (more…)

• The race gap at the specialized high schools didn’t close with this year’s test results.
• Most parents are very concerned about the prospect of teacher layoffs, Insideschools finds.
• The Education Equality Project wants you to write your legislator in support of the stimulus bill.
• Mike Petrilli says Linda Darling-Hammond is set to join the U.S. Department of Education.
• There were surprises galore for specialized high school applicants at the Morton School.
• The DOE announced today that the video game school from this 2007 article is set to open.
• Down in Baltimore, former DOE deputy chancellor Andres Alonso is chatting live with parents.
• The state teachers union wants your advice about how state testing should change.

And be sure to check in tomorrow for a special weekend post — GothamSchools’ first ever!