GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Has President Obama finally picked a side in the education wars? Three prominent New Yorkers are worrying that he is at least leaning — and that it’s not in the right direction.

Deborah Meier, the respected small schools pioneer, said President Obama’s appointment of Arne Duncan as education secretary “leaves me sad.” Today, Diane Ravitch, the NYU historian and Meier’s blogging partner, described Duncan as “Margaret Spellings in drag.” “This is not change I can believe in,” she wrote in Politico. And on Saturday, Ann Cook, another small-school movement doyenne, said she is also concerned about  Obama’s choice of Duncan.

All three women sympathize with the “Broader, Bolder” manifesto, which argues that schools alone cannot be expected to close the achievement gap and whose members are more suspicious of popular innovations such as charter schools and test-driven accountability systems. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein leads another camp, which strongly supports test-based accountability, the No Child Left Behind law, and charter schools. Klein’s Education Equality Project circulated a rival petition.

Obama made a point of not selecting a side in the debate. He chose two top education advisers, one from each camp. And he touted his chosen education secretary, Duncan, who had signed both petitions, as a pragmatist. But in the last few weeks, concerns about Duncan have begun to surface. (more…)

If we’re to believe a recent piece in New York Magazine, some city leaders are turning against Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. But among regular New York City voters, according a new poll, Klein is about as popular as he ever has been, even with the debate over mayoral control ratcheting up in recent months.

A new poll out of Quinnipiac University found that 44 percent of registered voters say they approve of the job Klein is doing. That’s roughly unchanged since last July and only two points lower than the highest approval rating Klein has ever recorded in a Quinnipiac poll, back in January 2003.

As I continue to visit charter schools in Manhattan, I am struck with the prevalence of arrangements in which there are two teachers in a classroom.  The classrooms themselves often have between 20 to 30 children, but the kids are frequently split into two groups or some other arrangement in which they seem to be getting more attention than the typical single-teacher approach.  A few thoughts on this:

1. Aaron Pallas wrote yesterday “One of the truisms about class size reduction is that, if the student population stays constant, the only way to reduce class size is to increase the number of classes, which requires more classroom space.”  This makes sense to me, but is the goal class size reduction, i.e. reducing students per foot of classroom space, or is it to reduce the student-teacher ratio in classroom settings?  Is class size important for reasons beyond the student-teacher ratio in classroom settings?  How important are these other reasons?

2. In part, charter schools are able to afford lowering the student-teacher ratio because they generally employ younger teachers and they don’t participate in the UFT benefit plan.  Since most charter schools roughly follow the UFT salary scale, they can’t afford to compete with salaries for the most senior teachers. (more…)

I stumbled on this display this morning, while walking to a middle school in Crown Heights that seems to be thriving despite the neighborhood’s challenges.

• The DOE’s accountability and budget offices grew in size last year. (Daily News)
• Schools are using yoga to help students with special needs. (City Limits)
• Queens kids are without private buses after fire destroyed the fleet that took them to Bronx schools. (Post)
• New research shows the importance of recess, at the same time as more schools slash it. (Times)
• In Chicago, principals at selective schools can handpick some students. (Chicago Sun-Times)

• At Insideschools, an explanation of why parents should get involved in their local councils.
• After its Times mention, Eduwonk’s contest to rename NCLB has more than 400 entries.
• NYC Educator praises a surprisingly diligent substitute teacher.
• A Brooklyn high school teacher shares his classroom management techniques.
• The steel framework for a new charter school building in Brooklyn is up, Brownstoner reports.
• Democrats for Education Reform has suggestions for Arne Duncan’s stimulus spending.
• Alexander Russo talks to one of KIPP AMP’s organizing teachers.
• NCLB’s not so bad after all, realizes A Midwestern mom.

Part of the flier the union sent out today.

In its campaign to unionize a KIPP charter school in Brooklyn, the national American Federation of Teachers union has a new target: other teachers in the wide KIPP network. The AFT today reached out to KIPP teachers from San Jose to D.C. to Boston, asking them to join an e-mail campaign to urge the charter network’s co-founders to recognize the union.

The saga began earlier this year, when 15 teachers at the Brooklyn school, called KIPP AMP, told school officials that they want to form a union with the help of the local United Federation of Teachers. They said a union would help them feel more secure in their jobs and have a stronger say in building their school.

KIPP leaders, who have traditionally touted their freedom from teachers unions as a strength, because it allows them to hire and fire as they please, could have recognized the union and worked with it. Instead, they have hedged — and even indicated they might fight back against the teachers or drop their affiliation with the Brooklyn school. A state labor board is now considering the teachers’ petitions. (And the group of teachers, meanwhile, has swelled to 16 from 15.)

The fliers sent today ask KIPP teachers to send e-mail messages to KIPP’s co-founders, Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg, asking them to recognize the union — and offer teachers tips on how they could form a union themselves. Titled “BE NICE,” a riff on the KIPP motto, “Work Hard. Be Nice,” the fliers narrate the story of how Levin and Feinberg founded KIPP 14 years ago. “They put good ideas together with hard work and a relentless drive,” the flier says. “They also worked for supportive administrators who gave Dave and Mike the power they wanted to start a new program.”

The flier goes on:

Today in Brooklyn, a dedicated group of KIPP teachers and parents want the same thing and they’re forming a union and PTA to have a stronger voice. They’re asking for the power to add their own knowledge to the program and to sustain the school’s success.

Full flier is below the jump. (more…)

City and union officials now say teacher layoffs are unlikely, thanks to an expected infusion of cash from the federal stimulus package’s state stabilization fund. But at least one New York City teacher says the threat of losing her job has already distracted her from doing it as well as she would like to.

The teacher, who blogs at They Call Me Teacher, in her first year in the city, writes:

[Teachers union president Randi] Weingarten is right. Teachers start hearing they’ll be losing their jobs, and we all start thinking about what to do, where to go, etc. etc… which means, we are Not putting all of our energy into teaching our students who desperately need all the teaching time they can get (at least mine do!). …

Teaching in this city is 100 times more stressful than I ever wish upon anyone.

Tania Shinkawa at her desk in the bull pen at the Department of Education's Office of Portfolio Development.

Last week I grumbled about a problem that was, at worst, a deliberate obfuscation and, at best, an annoying characteristic of Department of Education spreadsheets. The spreadsheets in question were supposed to convey two facts about every school in the city: 1) how much money the school had received from the state’s $150 million class-size reduction pot and 2) how much the school had actually reduced class sizes.

That would have been useful information, given that class sizes in the city got bigger, on average, despite the infusion. There was just one gigantic problem: I could not, for the life of me, extract the data from the spreadsheets — and even the press officer on the case, Will Havemann, couldn’t help me.

Today, I am delighted to report that the Department of Education has solved this problem for me, in the form of Tania Shinkawa, a staffer at the Office of Portfolio Development who manages class size reporting. Shinkawa just spent more than an hour with me, patiently re-jiggering the spreadsheets from this year and last year into a form that is much more understandable and analyze-able.

In the long term, this means please hold me accountable for drawing out some interesting facts about where the money went. In the short term, yay for transparency — and thank you, Tania!

Ours isn’t the only city that’s about to have a big debate over who should control the public schools. The Dallas Morning News reported this morning that that city’s mayor, Tom Leppert, is considering a campaign to take control from the school board.

Dallas is the twelfth-largest school district in the country. If it switched from school board rule to rule by the mayor, it would join the ranks of a small but high-profile group of cities that includes (in addition to New York) D.C., Boston, and Chicago. Leppert reportedly talked the idea over with at least one state lawmaker and a business leader, and his chief of staff told the News that he will consider anything that helps children.

Reaction in Dallas so far seems to range from encouragement to angst. A comment on the News’ schools blog displays the latter:

Posted by Horrified @ 11:27 AM Mon, Feb 23, 2009

I just had a horrible thought. Does Leppert think that since Geogre is back in town, that the ex-pres might like a job running a No Child Left Behind school district?