GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

From the mayor's new campaign web site.

Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign manager, Bradley Tusk, sent out a letter to likely supporters today listing the reasons they’ll probably want to vote Bloomberg into a third term. Number two on the list was education.

The key excerpt, bolded by me, not Tusk:

Mike Bloomberg’s record speaks for itself. New York City has never been safer – crime is down nearly 30% since he took office. Mike took control of the public school system and now test scores and graduation rates are on the rise, while the achievement gap is shrinking. Quality of life has improved across the five boroughs, our streets are cleaner than ever, and new parks are being created all across the city. And Mike has a nine-point economic plan that will create and retain 400,000 jobs in New York.

One other thing of note: As he shifts into campaign mode, the mayor is signaling a new preference for how to be addressed. It’s not Mr. Bloomberg or Hizzoner. It’s Mike, just Mike, please. I guess that’s one way to make a multi-billionaire feel a little more accessible (though not technologically accessible, says Sewell Chan).

Teachers I know have jetted off to spend their midwinter recess in the Dominican Republic, New Orleans, and even a Trappist monastery in Virginia. But I bet they have no idea why they have the week off.

I thought the vacation was a way for the city to save on fuel costs during the dead of winter. In fact, the recess is the result of a deal cut in the early 1990s between the mayor and the teachers union at a time when, like now, the city was facing teacher layoffs. (The city also had a midwinter recess briefly during the fuel crisis of the 1970s to save on heating costs.)

From a 1992 New York Times article about the first midwinter recess:

The new winter vacation was an offshoot of a fiscal crisis that shook New York City in 1990.

Mayor David N. Dinkins had just reached agreement with the United Federation of Teachers, which offered him critical support in his election campaign, that provided them a 5.8 percent increase in wages and benefits when the bad news hit.

The settlement was immediately denounced by fiscal monitors and editorial writers, and a campaign was begun to roll back the increase, or at least defer them so that they would not affect the city’s fiscal standing. Mr. Fernandez was faced with a $95 million budget, which would have meant laying off 3,000 teachers.

Mr. Fernandez averted the layoffs by persuading the teachers to defer $40 million of their wage increase in exchange for, among other sweeteners, a winter break long sought by teachers, especially teachers who lived in the suburbs and whose children were already off from school the same week.

Chancellor Joseph Fernandez called the vacation “Kids Week” and encouraged schools and cultural institutions to offer special programs for children during the days off. But parents complained that it was hard to find child care during the surprise vacation.

Nicholas Kristof has discovered education. Health care is no longer our greatest national shame—education is. skoolboy thinks that responsible op-ed reporting can’t be far behind. Breathlessly, Kristof reports in Sunday’s New York Times that teachers are “astonishingly important.” “It turns out that having a great teacher is far more important than being in a small class, or going to a good school with a mediocre teacher,” he writes. “A Los Angeles study suggested that four consecutive years of having a teacher from the top 25 percent of the pool would erase the black-white testing gap.”

Wow, erasing the black-white testing gap in four years sounds like a pretty good deal. And just from being taught by some really great teachers! There must be some evidence of this for it to show up in the New York Times, wouldn’t you think? Some study somewhere that actually showed that black students exposed to teachers in the top quarter of the teacher effectiveness distribution for four years in a row can routinely move from the 16th percentile in the test score distribution (roughly the black average) to the 50th percentile (roughly the white average)?

Maybe that Los Angeles study will show the way. Nah, that’s just a “suggestion” by Robert Gordon, Tom Kane, and Doug Staiger that the five percentage point increment in performance from having a teacher in the top quartile, and the five percentage point decrement from having a teacher in the bottom quartile, could cumulate over time—a 10 percentage point swing for four years in a row would more than close the 34 percentage point gap between the average black student and the average white student. (more…)

A major downside to opening up boutique schools with special programs and higher expectations is that some children will inevitably be left behind. What becomes of them?

Victor Harbison, a Chicago teacher, grapples with this question on a post on Nicholas Kristoff’s New York Times blog today. Selective schools offer opportunities for top students, Harbison writes, but they also cause less motivated or skilled students to be concentrated in non-selective schools, making it harder for those schools to succeed. He writes:

When educational leaders decided to create magnet schools, they didn’t just get it wrong, they got it backwards. They pulled out the best and brightest from our communities and sent them away. The students who are part of the “great middle” now find themselves in an environment where the peers who have the greatest influence in their school are the least positive role models.

Schools adapted, and quickly. We tightened security, installed metal detectors, and adopted ideas like zero-tolerance. And neighborhood schools, without restrictive admission policies based on test scores, quickly spiraled downward …

Imagine if pulling out the “bottom ten” had been the policy for the past 30 years. Neighborhood schools could have purred along like the go-go 90’s under Clinton and the students with the greatest needs, facing the greatest challenges, would have had millions of dollars in resources devoted to their education in brand new state-of-the-art buildings (with Ivy League-educated, amazing teachers, no doubt). …

I look forward to the arguments defending magnet schools. They are legion and many are spot on. That is, if you can live with the idea of condemning the vast majority of students in your community to sub-standard schools.

There’s an extensive discussion of this phenomenon, which critics call “creaming,” going on elsewhere on our site. Read more here, here, and here.

We’ve been getting a lot of tips and comments about Special Commissioner of Investigations Richard Condon, the man charged with investigating the Department of Education for corruption and misconduct, but whose office often fails to publicize its findings.

We definitely want to look deeper into Condon, and, while our FOIL requests churn through the slow grind, we could use your help. Do you know of a case that Condon investigated that wasn’t publicized, but should have been? What about a case recommended to Condon that never got investigated? Or a case that you think led to an unfair verdict?

We are also interested in cases where Condon investigated allegations of cheating on tests and fudging of graduation rate figures — behaviors that critics say the new accountability system encourages.

As always, find our e-mails here or leave a comment.

View the TV program here.

A new television look at Joel Klein’s reforms airing in Australia paints a mixed picture of the results for schools. While one Bronx high school explains how it has flourished under Klein’s leadership, the sociology graduate student Jennifer Jennings, who blogged under the alias Eduwonkette, urges Aussies to consider that school an exception, not the rule, in New York City.

The Australian education minister, Julia Gillard, has been eying Klein’s reforms as a model for her  work down under.

The new TV story, airing on Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service network, on a program called “Dateline,” focuses on Bronx Lab School, a small high school in the Evander Childs building the program calls the “poster child” for Klein’s reforms. Principal Marc Sternberg explains that the city’s move to give principals more freedom allowed his school to flourish.

“It is because the chancellor communicated very clearly to us what we had to accomplish, and then left the rest up to us,” Sternberg says. “If a school a decade ago was creative in some of the ways that we have been creative, they would have been breaking all the rules.”

But the documentary piece also visits Jennings, who argues that small schools like Evander Childs got advantages over other public schools in the kinds of students they admit. “I think that if you were under the impression that there was going to be a miraculous rebirth of your schools as a function of looking at a lot of the PR in new york city, you’d end up with quite a disappointed education minister,” she says.

Watch the full program here.

Staff at the four KIPP charter schools in New York City are experimenting with a new way to improve their practice: Every Wednesday, they toss their Blackberries and their Gmail and go e-mail free.  KIPP calls the new tradition, part of a trend at businesses around the country, “Use of Time Wednesdays.”

KIPP is part of a group of elite charter schools that demand extra-long work hours of teachers along with other unique requests, like urging teachers to visit families at their homes after school hours. Supporters say the formula is responsible for the schools’ impressive test scores, but some worry it might not be sustainable as the teachers age and want to start their own families. Teachers at one KIPP school in Brooklyn, KIPP AMP, aired concerns about sustainability as part of their drive to organize into a union.

But KIPP’s co-founder and New York City superintendent, Dave Levin, said the e-mail abstinence days don’t have to do with improving what teachers call the “work/life balance.” He said the point is to enhance face time with students and between staff. “One of the key things to any organization being outstanding is everybody thinking really closely about how to use their time for the best benefit of the kids,” Levin said. “And, as you know, e-mail can take up a lot of time during the work day.”

The rule applies to teachers, who keep their famous cell phones on to stay in touch with parents and students, and to administrators, who have created automatic e-mail messages for themselves to explain why they won’t reply immediately. “KIPP NYC believes it is important to continuously evaluate what we do and how we do it,” an e-mail from one administrator reads. “To that end, each Wednesday is designated as ‘Use of Time Wednesday’, a day in which we focus on doing work away from e-mail.”

• Class sizes are up in city schools for the first time in years. (GothamSchools, Times, Post)
• Fashion icon Giorgio Armani gave $1 million to city schools’ art programs. (Post, Women’s Wear Daily)
• A new law aimed at reducing pollution near schools is now in effect. (AP)
• The stimulus bill could transform schools. (AP)
• A study finds that Chicago’s charter high schools aren’t better than other city schools. (Chicago Sun-Times)
• Philadelphia is planning to overhaul its schools on the Chicago model. (Philadelphia Inquirer)
• What happens to students when a charter school runs out of money? (Washington Post)

• Using the mayor’s teacher layoff threats to teach math to fifth-graders.
• In our new Community section, Ken Hirsh asks, What does teaching to the test look like?
• And Aaron Pallas answers Seth Andrew’s creaming question by analyzing data at Andrew’s own school.
• A teacher says she can’t do her job well if she’s pulled from one class to another with no notice.
• Milwaukee considers mayoral control, and finds it’s not a “cure-all.” Via John at Teachable Moment.
• Union muckraker Mike Antonucci finds that the AFT has about 725,000 active members, most based here.
• Joe Williams flags an interesting Ed Week story on a compromise between divided Democrats.
• A college student begs President Obama not to make community college totally free.

Jonathan is already skeptical of the Department of Education’s explanation for why average class sizes are going up across almost all grades, despite an infusion of $150 million over the past year in funds earmarked to class-size reduction. The DOE’s argument, embedded in a Power Point released today: It’s the economy, stupid.

The idea also bothers Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, who pointed out to me earlier today that the state actually increased funding to schools this year, while the city’s budget cuts came with a promise that classrooms would be insulated. “What they’re trying to do is confuse people about the current economic situation to somehow excuse the fact that class sizes went up in the past,” Haimson said.

The economy explanation first arose in a Power Point released today, and the DOE is sticking to it. On the telephone this afternoon, a spokesman, Will Havemann, said the rising class sizes can be traced back to a cut to schools of about $100 million in October, on top of another $100 million cut to schools in the middle of last year. The idea is that, with less money to spend, principals have decided not to hire additional staff when people retire. Not replacing retiring teachers means class sizes get bigger. Havemann said the city this school year had 440 fewer teachers working directly with students than it had the year before. (more…)