GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The high school fair is upon us, but the city hasn’t yet released a full list of the high schools open next year.
• The head of a CEC, the parent groups that replaced community school boards, explains what they are.
• Deborah Meier compares Mayor Bloomberg’s school reforms to a Ponzi scheme.
• Lisa Nielsen says you’re not too old for Facebook. Indeed. Please become a fan of GothamSchools.
  
• Robert Pondiscio has suggestions for those suffering from Eduwonkette withdrawal.
• A study argues that firing least-senior teachers first hurts students and programs. (Via Joanne Jacobs.)
• A Kentucky-based government-transparency zealot cheers a mainstream newspaper for catching on.
• And here’s what Michelle Obama said to U.S. Department of Ed staff, via Russo:

A fourth grader explains how his classmates mapped their families' origins during their unit on immigration.

I spent this morning at PS 27, the Red Hook school that the Department of Education announced in December would close at the end of the school year because of its persistently poor performance. I wanted to see what kinds of learning are happening at a school deemed so bad that it must close.

Today, the school’s gym and auditorium had been converted into a mini-museum to show off last semester’s projects, and I saw some creative ones. Some of the highlights: a video about how to solve algebraic equations by three seventh-grade girls; the fourth grade’s giant timeline of Red Hook’s history; and a model of nearby Coffey Park produced by second graders who had explored the neighborhood in depth. You can view a slideshow of these projects and others.

But overall, the caliber of the work on display wasn’t strong. (more…)

A petition advocates will send out at tomorrow's Manhattan hearing on school governance.

A coalition of progressive groups has become so fed up with the current discussion on school governance that it is asking for a new discussion altogether. The group wants a commission that would take a slow and steady year or year-and-a-half to think deeply about how the public schools are run — and then write a detailed strategic plan outlining what should be changed.

The idea is to expand the current debate to include more people and a broader focus. “Right now, the governance question is a question only a political hack can love,” said Cecilia Blewer, a member of the group who is a former community school board member. “It’s really, like, who has the money, who has the power over the money. Real responsible good governance is asking much deeper questions than that.”

The commission Blewer’s group is asking for would begin immediately and would, if necessary, proceed beyond the June date when the current mayoral control law sunsets. “We’re saying, ‘Okay, tinker with the system, do a little quick fix, that’s what’s coming down anyway. Fine, do it. But then do this for the long term,’” Blewer said.

The goals are outlined in a flier the group will hand out at tomorrow’s Manhattan governance hearing. Online petitions to sign onto the idea are available here. Members of the group include the Center for Immigrant Families, Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, the Coalition to Save Harlem, Time Out From Testing, and a slew of other progressive groups.

Their petition stresses that the commission members would be parents, teachers, students, and community leaders selected to reflect the city’s diversity.

Offers of admission by borough. Data from the Department of Education

More than 6,000 eighth- and ninth-graders got good news today: offers of admission to one of the city’s nine specialized high schools.

For the 23,000 other students who took the Specialized High School Admission Test last October, the wait to find out about what school they’ll attend this fall will continue until the end of next month. They’ll find out where they’ve been accepted at the same time as the tens of thousands of eighth graders who did not try to get into one of the city’s most elite schools.

At eight city schools, including Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, admission is based on students’ scores on the ultracompetitive Specialized High Schools Admission Test, which 29,000 eighth- and ninth-graders took last October. Admission to the ninth school, LaGuardia, depends on music or art auditions and grades.

More than 100 more students were offered spots at LaGuardia this year, 1,041 compared to 936 last year. The school is graduating a larger-than-normal class this June and so extended more offers of admission than it has in the past, according to Andrew Jacob, a Department of Education spokesman. (more…)

Both the mayor and the chancellor have now issued statements boasting about gains on Advanced Placement exams, the rigorous tests that are considered a good indicator of whether students are prepared for college. But the picture is more complex than they suggest, and if anything the evidence adds to concerns raised yesterday about college preparedness, particularly among black and Hispanic students.

More students are definitely taking the exams than were in 2002, whether you look at the sheer numbers — a total of 23,600 students took the tests in 2008, up from less than 17,000 in 2002 — or at proportions — in 2008, about 23% of eleventh- and twelfth-graders took AP exams, up from 21% in 2002.*

But, as I suggested yesterday, the increased participation has led to a lower pass rate:

(more…)

A teacher named Mandy Kwan submitted this entry to Brian Lehrer’s Uncommon Economic Indicators project:

In the elementary school where I am teaching, I’m noticing an unusual surge of students enrolling in our school at this time of the year. Many of them are coming from private schools — with tuition costs that parents can no longer afford.

A union member quoted James Madison as he spoke in favor of the plan to slash power from the mayor over the schools. (Flickr)

Union members voted overwhelmingly to slash the mayor’s power over the public schools last night. The union plan, publicly released earlier in the week, would eliminate one of the major powers the state legislature gave to the mayor in 2002, as part of a vaunted mayoral control law. That power: effective control over the school board, which is now known as the Panel for Educational Policy and seen as a rubber stamp for the mayor’s will.

The plan — read it here — would give the mayor appointment power over just 5 votes of 13. It would also limit the mayor’s ability to pull disagreeable people off the school board at a moment’s notice. Mayor Bloomberg fired three of his appointees from the board in 2004 after they threatened to vote against a social promotion ban he supported. Critics of the mayor call the event the Monday Night Massacre. City Hall officials and allies say the power allows the mayor to take unpopular positions that are in the interest of children, without having to consider political pressure.

Some union members thought the plan did not slash the mayor’s power enough, and they put out a rival recommendation suggesting that the mayor also lose the power to appoint the schools chancellor. At the union meeting last night, some delegates tried to table the official plan, which president Randi Weingarten endorsed. But Weingarten’s favored plan passed overwhelmingly, according to people who were there.

Peter Goodman, a long-time union member who sat on the commission that drafted the plan, spoke on behalf of it, quoting the Federalist Papers, No. 51:

Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

• Black and Hispanic kids in New York City are taking more AP tests than before. (GothamSchools, Post)
• ESPN says reports that it is sponsoring a new city high school are overblown. (CNBC)
• New high school graduation requirements could affect the graduation rate. (GothamSchools, Daily News)
• The Riverdale Press explains what happens when a principal takes maternity leave.
• Teachers say the UFT’s mayoral control proposal reflects a compromise. (WNYC)
• East Village parents planned to protest unless they got their pick for principal. (The Villager)
• Nationwide, racial gaps persist in AP test-taking and results. (Times)
• Schools are giving out more free breakfasts. (AP)

UPDATE: The original version of this post incorrectly summarized Ken Hirsh’s post. Charter schools do not grade their own tests; they administer their own tests. Apologies.

• Montgomery County, Maryland, led the state to No. 1 AP exam status. Am I proud? Hell yes.
• New York State did well on Advanced Placement tests, too. New York City: let’s say medium-rare.
• Ken Hirsh says charter school leaders are upset about a lack of controls on test administration.
• An Insideschools staffer makes an emotional pitch for more help for her autistic son.
• A pro-No Child Left Behind civil rights activist is joining the Obama administration.
• Will Richardson is upset at how few educators (25%) feel comfortable teaching Internet safety.
• Governor Paterson is looking more and more like Governor Spitzer by the minute.
• NYC Educator offers his counter-myths for Jay Mathews’ myths about KIPP.
• Sarah Palin’s calls for more school funds to Alaska do not impress conservatives at Jay Greene’s blog.

The newest hire on Mayor Bloomberg’s reelection team used to sit on the old Board of Education — as its student member.

Today, Andrea Batista Schlesinger announced that she was taking a leave as the executive director of the progressive Drum Major Institute to join the Bloomberg campaign as a policy adviser.

Fifteen years ago, Batista Schlesinger was a senior at Brooklyn’s Murrow High School, with aspirations to grow up and be schools chancellor. At the time, she was a vociferous advocate of student input who had just been elected the non-voting student member of the city’s Board of Education. From a November 1993 profile in the New York Times:

“The Board of Education treats students as children,” she said during an appearance this fall on “New York Closeup,” New York One’s public affairs program, “and I’m talking about 17-year-old students who are going on to college. If you really want the system to work well, you’re going to have to allow more student input.”

At a board meeting after the interview, Ms. Schlesinger heard Michael J. Petrides, the Staten Island representative, praise her performance. “Some of the rest of us on the board could learn a lot from Andrea,” Mr. Petrides said. “She was independent, she knew her constituency, she was marvelous to see. I was in awe.”

But all board members are not always happy with Ms. Schlesinger’s ideas. Ms. Schlesinger created a stir recently by challenging the rule that has excluded student members from participating in the board’s closed-door “executive session” meetings.

Batista Schlesinger’s Board of Education term was also the subject of a documentary, “Hear Us Now,” which is available for the modest sum of $195.