GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

When Joseph Dell’Aquila learned that he would have to leave his students at a Bronx middle school for more than two weeks to grade state reading exams, he was determined not to leave them entirely high and dry. Instead, he figured out a way to be in two places at once: While he scored tests during the day, his students would listen to video and voice recordings of him explaining Power Point slides with lessons he’d made the previous night.

“If there’s no consistency, they kind of lose track of how to act. I just wanted to remain consistent with them, let them know that I’m still there, that I’m still their teacher,” Dell’Aquila said. “It wasn’t like I was going to bounce on them and have a vacation. I wanted them to know that I was there for them.”

The result was that his students followed through a planned unit on hip hop and poetry, just by listening to their teacher’s voice. (A video of how this worked, provided by the school, CIS 339, is above.) (more…)

As we debate the merits of charter schools, many of us have not had the time to visit one.  Many others have visited exactly one.  Although I have visited several charter schools in recent years, I decided that it would be worthwhile to visit every charter school in Manhattan.  To be more precise, I hope to visit every charter school in Manhattan that took the New York State exams last year.

Eighteen schools are on my list.

I hope to learn things that you can’t learn by reading their websites or reviewing their test scores.  So far I have visited five schools.  I have written about two schools (here and here) that really impressed me.

I also hope to visit many traditional public schools as well as some magnet schools, special education schools, and private schools. Of course, in all cases, the school has to let me visit.  In my experience, charter schools are generally happy to have visitors.

All suggestions for what I should be looking for on my visits are encouraged!

The Baltimore Sun this week ran a three-part series about Andres Alonso, the schools superintendent who used to be Chancellor Joel Klein’s deputy in charge of teaching and learning. Some elements of Alonso’s leadership sound like he imported the New York City playbook wholesale to Baltimore: He has closed failing schools, to great controversy; experimented with incentives to make students work harder; and reached out for philanthrophic money to launch new programs.

But there are some ways that Alonso sounds quite different from his former boss. According to the series’ author, Sara Neufeld, Alonso has been willing to speak directly with her since his first day in Baltimore, rather than channeling her questions through a press office. Neufeld wrote recently on InsideEd, the Baltimore Sun’s education blog, that Alonso also makes himself available to parents and teachers with questions.

Neufeld said she first heard that he might become the new superintendent one day in June 2007:

Two hours later, he arrived at The Sun’s offices to introduce himself to the editorial board. I saw him again that afternoon at the press conference where the school board officially announced his appointment. He gave me his e-mail address and cell phone number, saying I should feel free to contact him at any time.

Was this guy serious? At that point, I’d been covering education for seven years, in two states and many school districts, and the protocol for contacting a superintendent always went something like this: Call the press office, submit questions, wait. In Baltimore, school officials often would wait until I was past deadline to get back to me, and then get angry that their views weren’t more fully represented in my articles.

Not only could I e-mail Alonso directly, he almost invariably responded within about five minutes. Soon, I realized, he wasn’t only responding to me. He was waking up before dawn every morning to reply to teachers, parents, community folks. The days of a shrouded bureaucracy were over.

Things started happening – fast.

Teachers at a KIPP charter school in Brooklyn are moving forward with their campaign to form a union, undeterred by what they describe as managers’ moves to intimidate them. Indeed, rather than back down, the teachers leading the union drive have actually added one more person to their ranks.

Sixteen teachers filed petitions today to the state Public Employee Relations Board saying they want to unionize, working with the powerful United Federation of Teachers. That number is up from 15 teachers who were part of the original campaign last month. The first effort could have ended smoothly, with the teachers forming an official union, had leaders at KIPP recognized the effort within 30 days. But KIPP leaders did not recognize the campaign, leaving the state to judge whether the union should be formed.

The UFT in the last 10 days has filed two complaints to PERB on behalf of the teachers, accusing KIPP leaders of waging an intimidation campaign to stop staff from unionizing. A complaint filed this week accused KIPP co-founder David Levin of telling teachers that unionizing could throw teachers’ retirement benefits and pension plans “in jeopardy.” The complaint quoted Levin as saying “all of that goes away” if the teachers form a union.

Levin disputed that characterization in an interview this morning. “It wasn’t about discouraging them from doing that,” he said. “It was about providing them with information about what their rights and options are in this process.” He said he intends to cooperate with the law as the teachers work to form a union, and declined to say whether he plans to file counter-objections that could thwart the effort.

In a statement issued today, UFT President Randi Weingarten said KIPP has not cooperated with the union. “We are really disappointed that neither the initial thoughts expressed by management about working together nor the KIPP motto of team and family extend to the hardworking and dedicated teachers of the school,” Weingarten said.

The new petition to unionize has an additional difference from the one teachers sent to administrators last month: It lists the total number of teachers at KIPP AMP as 19, down from 20. A UFT spokesman, Brian Gibbons, said that apparently one teacher quit the school in the last month.

DC schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee took to the pages of the Washington Post on Monday to sell her proposal for a new teacher contract to the public—and maybe to a few teachers too. Her primary message: Teachers are the solution, not the problem. They’re not to blame for the low achievement levels in DC schools. Heck, she was a teacher herself. So she knows the challenges and rewards of teaching.

Of course, there’s the pesky case of ineffective teaching, Chancellor Rhee’s version of the Ronald Reagan “welfare queen” rhetorical ploy. “I do not believe that most of our teachers are shortchanging their students,” she writes. “But in the worst cases, we have teachers who put their feet on their desks and read the paper while students run around. Or they use corporal punishment. Or they intentionally abuse their current contract, leaving for three months at a time and returning for the one day that will keep their job active.” Powerful words, but I’m left to wonder how many teachers we’re talking about, and why the current contractual provisions can’t address such problem cases. (Since we’re only talking about the “worst cases,” after all.) Does the Chancellor mean to suggest that the District has no mechanism to remove a teacher who is using corporal punishment in the classroom? (more…)

I remember the first time I pulled opened a form letter. Personally addressed to me, the greeting’s clean typeface read: “Dear Mr. Levy.” I felt the same initial rush of enjoyment from when summer camp care packages would arrive. Then I kept reading the letter, slowly realizing by the 8th mindless paragraph that there were thousands of other recipients. I hadn’t heard of a “mail merge” yet, but I certainly felt…well, merged with the masses.

Strange. A letter that had been personally stamped, addressed, and delivered by USPS must surely meant something to the sender. Yet it didn’t feel that way on my end; it seemed to be a trick to force unnecessary information on me.

So when I decided to email merge promotion-in-doubt letters to students this week, I did it with low expectations. I figured that students might pass over the letters, or feel once again feel reminded that they were not meeting expectations.

What I didn’t predict was that I would receive over twenty emails back from promotion-in-doubt students! Their responses were genuine, and their concern was heartfelt.

• “Okay Mr. Levy i am going to make u proud” (more…)

All school bus drivers would have to be re-trained immediately and citizens could call in concerns about individual drivers to a city hotline, if the city followed a list of demands Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum issued yesterday. The demands come on the heels of reports of school bus abuse, including a 7-year-old stranded on a bus in Queens this month, a four-year-old Brooklyn child stranded on a school bus last month, and a severely disabled 22-year-old left on a freezing school bus overnight January 1.

Asked whether the city will follow Gotbaum’s demands, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, Marge Feinberg, said, “We have an effective policy in place that suspends bus personnel for half a year for the first infraction and decertifies them if it happens again.” According to the policy, drivers who leave children alone on a bus have their licenses suspended for 180 days. The licenses are revoked if they commit an error a second time. School officials also pointed out that two of the three most recent cases of abuse happened on private buses, not school buses run by the DOE. (The 4-year-old in Brooklyn was riding a DOE school bus.)

In a press release, Gotbaum points out that while cosmetologists in the city have to register 1,000 hours of training, school bus drivers are required to put in just 10 hours of training and two three-hour refresher courses a year. She also cites a 2007 Daily News investigation that found that the Department of Education hid 225 cases of bus abuse, including one case where a bus driver beat a student with special needs. (Since then, the Department of Education has taken steps to prevent hidden abuse in the future, hiring a new chief manager of the investigative unit and a slew of experienced investigators, Feinberg said.)

Gotbaum’s full list of demands is below the jump. (more…)

Every year, students from PS 15 in Red Hook, grow vegetables at Added Value, a community farm in their Brooklyn neighborhood, then serve a giant salad to their entire school.

One of the farm’s employees, Kimberly Vargas, made this video about the school’s relationship with the farm as part of a contest sponsored by the National Farm to School Network. Vargas has been working at Added Value for five years, since she was a 15-year-old Crown Heights high school student, according to a 2008 New York Times story about the farm.

Vote for Vargas’s video here. (Via Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn)

A first-year ESL teacher (she teaches English for students still learning the language) praises her supervisor:

Today we were talking about how I go about using and teaching academic language to my students and she says, “I hate (the way the school does) the word wall. You have my permission to tear it down. Get rid of it and use words that they will use. That are meaningful.”

How rockin’ is that?! Not only is she giving me permission to do something different but it’s something that requires me to be creative and do what I think is best.

• KIPP leaders are intimidating, not recognizing, unionizing Brooklyn teachers. (GothamSchools, Times)
• The stimulus bill requires the state to restore funding to the city’s schools, and more. (Times, Daily News)
• Parents aired familiar complaints at another hearing in Queens about mayoral control. (Queens Chronicle)
• Staten Island parents on mayoral control: “Keep it but tweak it” (Staten Island Advance)
• Six Catholic schools in Brooklyn and Queens won’t close as planned. (Daily News)
• Jay Mathews: A study of Boston schools gives ammunition to anti-union reformers. (Washington Post)