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The ads parodying the Fund for Public Schools' Keep It Going NYC campaign. Via Gothamist.

• Someone with a sense of humor is creating fake Keep It Going NYC subway ads.
• Flypaper gives Obama’s speech a 7 out of 10 on its Reform-o-meter.
• Mark ed committee members “usually present” on Gotham Gazette’s City Council attendance ranking.
• NYC Educator has an answer for everything his union rep says.
• After buying the Brooklyn Paper today, Rupert Murdoch owns all the newspapers in Brooklyn now.
• Conventional wisdom says farming required the long summer break. But rich urbanites are to blame, too.
• Alexander Russo has story ideas for education reporters more enterprising than he is.
• Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum isn’t letting up in her push for comprehensive sex education.
• The Guardian UK profiles a British Quaker school that has an exchange program with D.C.’s Sidwell Friends School.

Harlem is gearing up for round two this evening in a showdown between charter school backers and those who oppose a Department of Education plan to close a traditional public school.

The hearing last week drew supporters of PS 194, a low-performing school that the DOE has said it would like to close to make way for a charter school to expand, and members of Harlem Parents United, a group of parents organized by Eva Moskowitz, the ambitious leader of the Harlem Success network of charter schools. But the DOE scheduled another hearing for tonight after getting complaints that it had not announced last week’s hearing, or the plan, far enough in advance.

As skirmishes like this one take place across the city, few have been criticized more loudly or more often than John White, the DOE official who is in charge of finding space for schools — and delivering the bad news to schools that are being closed or relocated. Others acknowledge that White has been given a tall order, to find homes for a constantly increasing number of schools when the amount of space the DOE controls is not growing at nearly the same rate. At a recent hearing in Greenwich Village, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said White has “the worst job — ever.” Here’s video of Stringer defending White:

In a speech that called for more charter schools, performance pay, and tougher state standards, President Obama this morning laid to rest some doubts that he had not yet made up his mind on several education policy questions currently dividing the Democratic Party.

At the same time, Obama called for a truce in education politics, which has lately been divided by those, including Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who are pushing for aggressive changes in how schools are run and those who say that schools cannot be fully improved unless lawmakers address poverty and other roots of educational failure. He said his administration will invest heavily in initiatives that are proven to boost student achievement, such as early childhood education and home health care for young families, regardless of who supports them. And in proposing major changes to how teachers are hired, compensated, and fired, Obama never once mentioned teachers unions, regarded by some as obstacles to reform.

Thanks to the stimulus bill passed last month, the federal government is authorized to spend an unprecedented amount of money on education in the coming years. Obama said his administration would offer special funds to states that want to boost their preschool quality, develop more rigorous standards and assessments, and cut their high school dropout rates. During a visit to a Brooklyn charter school last month, Obama’s new education secretary, Arne Duncan, said he would support districts that want to build new data systems to track student achievement and pay teachers based on their students’ test scores, as New York City has done. Without mentioning New York, the president today said he supported the same initiatives.

On how some of the more controversial elements of his education plan would be put in place, Obama gave few specifics in the speech delivered in Washington, D.C., to the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. (more…)

Elizabeth just posted a story about an upcoming change at the Department of Education that would allow more than 350 schools to bypass the DOE’s borough-based Integrated Service Center when managing operational tasks such as budgeting and arranging student transportation. The change is an expansion of a pilot currently underway with 90 schools:

The new format would further personalize services by expanding a model that’s been quietly piloted for the last two years under the name of the Children First Network. Rather than leaning on the imposing ISC for help writing their budgets and managing paperwork-heavy responsibilities like special education, the 90 schools in the Children First Network bypass the ISC altogether. Instead, each group of about 20 schools — the configuration known in all of the citywide support organizations as a “network” — works with a team of 13 staff members who do the same tasks performed by the ISC, but on a smaller scale.

Because these staff members focus only on the 20 schools they are assigned to, principals in the program say they are less like bureaucrats and more like partners. “I know these people really, really well. They’re not some faceless bureaucrat sitting halfway across the city that I only know through e-mail and phone calls,” said a principal in the pilot phase of the network, Michael Soet of Brooklyn’s International High School. “These are people that I really know well.”

The change has the teachers and principals unions worried about the costs associated with reassigning dozens of bureaucrats, Elizabeth reports.

Eric Nadelstern heads the Children's First Network, which is set to expand. (Via Cody Castro)

In a quiet project that has union activists gritting their teeth with concern, the Department of Education is once again moving to reshape its own bureaucracy — this time by offering about 300 schools the option to transform the way they manage basic back-office tasks, from busing to budget planning to monitoring medical vaccinations. The change, which principals are learning about this month and which is set to begin in September, would be the third time these schools have transformed the way they work with the system bureaucracy since Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools in 2002.

The way operational services are handled has already changed several times since 2002. When Bloomberg first took office, 32 individual district offices — plus separate offices for high schools, alternative schools, and special education schools — managed school operations. Those were replaced by six offices serving 10 regions after Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s first reorganization of the school system, and then by a single Integrated Service Center, with five borough branches, after Klein revised the structure again in 2006. During the 2006 reorganization, instructional services were also relocated, to a group of nine support organizations from which principals now choose one.

The new format would further personalize services by expanding a model that’s been quietly piloted for the last two years under the name of the Children First Network. Rather than leaning on the imposing ISC for help writing their budgets and managing paperwork-heavy responsibilities like special education, the 90 schools in the Children First Network bypass the ISC altogether. Instead, each group of about 20 schools — the configuration known in all of the citywide support organizations as a “network” — works with a team of 13 staff members who do the same tasks performed by the ISC, but on a smaller scale.

Because these staff members focus only on the 20 schools they are assigned to, principals in the program say they are less like bureaucrats and more like partners. “I know these people really, really well. They’re not some faceless bureaucrat sitting halfway across the city that I only know through e-mail and phone calls,” said a principal in the pilot phase of the network, Michael Soet of Brooklyn’s International High School. “These are people that I really know well.”

The close attention means principals can free themselves of much of the business of running a school day to day and focus instead on the business of educating their students. Before she joined CFN, Marisol Bradbury, principal at Bedford Stuyvesant Preparatory High School, said she spent hours managing tasks unrelated to instruction. “You would have to call one person, then call someone else, and then send that person to a different office, and then that person would have to communicate with someone else,” she said. “With CFN, it’s been such a better way of living.”

Chief Schools Officer Eric Nadelstern, who launched CFN when he headed the system’s empowerment schools program and is continuing to manage it, said the satisfaction has translated into better schools. Ratings of all the school system’s roughly 70 networks of schools indicate that the first network to join CFN has risen from about the middle of the pack to the No. 1 network in the city, Nadelstern said. He said the ratings, which are based on student test scores, graduation rates, and other measures included on the school progress reports, will become public in the next few months.

The ratings are one reason Nadelstern and Klein decided to expand the pilot, which in the first two years included just four networks and was funded by a private grant from the NewSchools Venture Fund. Starting next fall, the department will open CFN up to as many as 20 networks, an expansion that could bring more than 350 schools into the program.

While Nadelstern focuses on the instructional advantages he hopes will come out of the expansion, the news of the change has created something of a frenzy among some who worry it will cause confusion of the sort that accompanied previous reorganizations of the school system’s bureaucracy — and at the worst possible time, during a budget crisis. A teachers union source who is familiar with the plan pointed out that the expansion would mean moving as many as 128 administrative staff from the ISC to networks. He said that kind of change looks unmistakably like a third reorganization of the school system. “I don’t know how else you can look at it, because you’re going to be shifting support people across the city of New York,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because negotiations are still underway with school officials.

Though the DOE has insisted the project won’t carry any new costs, and that it could even save money over time, the principals union is not yet convinced. “There is a certain amount of automatic suspicion because the DOE has spent a lot of money over time,” said Chiara Coletti, the union’s communications director. “We want them to demonstrate to us why it is cost neutral.”

Nadelstern and department officials insist that the change is not a reorganization, but rather an expansion of options. Principals already choose which instructional support system they’d like from a menu of options; now, Nadelstern says, they can also choose how they’d like to have their back-office needs supported. “Choice and competition have proven effective on the instructional side of the equation,” Nadelstern said. “We think it’s going to prove equally effective on the operational side.”

• President Obama will call for merit pay, more charter schools in a speech today. (Wall Street Journal)
• A Bronx principal was arrested for drunk driving and leaving the scene of an accident. (Post)
• The principal of a closing school is under investigation for changing students’ grades. (Daily News)
• Nationwide, charter schools say their biggest challenge is finding space. (Christian Science Monitor)
• Looming teacher layoffs have generated debate about seniority rules in Los Angeles. (L.A. Times)
• The official who brought Joel Klein to Australia is talking education reform again. (The Australian)

• Randi Weingarten says teachers should be getting involved in the project of studying teacher quality.
• A charter school advocate says the outgoing Regents chancellor was a big supporter of charters.
• A Brooklyn principal has been reassigned for allegedly fudging students’ transcripts.
• A call for a report that would scrutinize the quality of teacher education across America.
• Surprise! The Milton Friedman Foundation finds many research studies show vouchers work.
• Antonucci wonders if the future of labor will involve teachers unions. He’s skeptical on a NEA-AFT merger.
  
• The federal Department of Education will upgrade its web site after years of criticism.
• Dana Goldstein flags a City Paper investigation shining light on Michelle Rhee’s foundation friends.
• Will NCLB’s tutoring component go on the chopping block? Charlie Barone marshals reasons to keep it.

The Department of Education's new organizational chart.

After reshuffling its internal bureaucracy, the Department of Education will publish a run-down of the changes on its web site in the next few weeks, in the form of the following flow chart — or, to be precise, a small variation of this flow chart. (A DOE spokeswoman, Ann Forte, says small parts of the chart still need to be fleshed out, such as the labor strategy team.)

The chart lays out the new internal structure of the people who work at DOE’s Tweed Courthouse headquarters, with only six people reporting directly to Chancellor Joel Klein, down from a number that had been around 20.

Publishing such detailed information in chart form, and on the DOE’s web site, comes after critics charged the department with being obtuse about its internal makeup. Right now, the web site offers only a list of the names and titles of people who report to Klein, without clarifying how the department is organized. The last time the department published an actual chart mapping out this structure was in 2004, after a reporter filed a request asking for one.

The most notable change is the new spot for Garth Harries, whose office of new schools is now folded under Kathleen Grimm, the deputy chancellor for infrastructure and planning, under the title “system planning.” John White, a top aide in the old new school office, now oversees that team, while Harries is on a special assignment to rethink special education.

Here’s the full chart, below the jump: (more…)

Students from IS 171 in Brooklyn

Teachers and students at last week’s massive rally against budget cuts said they were braving the cold out of fear that they could lose their jobs, have their after-school program closed, or miss out on the chance to help decide how the city’s stimulus funds are spent.

Here’s a sampling of what students and teachers from across the city told me last week when I asked them why they had come to the rally:

• Meredith Jacks, a middle school teacher at PS/MS 126 in Chinatown: ”We just want to have a say in how this [stimulus] money gets used. It could do nothing or it could do a lot.”
• Sharon Stolberg, a retired teacher from Queens who in the 1970s was bumped from school to school because of budget cuts: “I had kids sitting on radiators, 38 kids in a first-grade class. We cannot afford that again.”
• Josh, a second-year teacher at a Bronx school: ”Teachers in their first three years could be laid off. But that’s less likely than cuts to programs that benefit our neediest kids.”
• Gabriel Saez, a sixth grader at IS 171 in Brooklyn who came with dozens of his classmates: ”We are here so that they won’t shut down our after school. We heard that might happen.” (more…)

Critics of mayoral control have already proposed one major check on the mayor: taking away his effective control over the school board. Now a Brooklyn lawmaker is making another suggestion. Assemblyman James Brennan wants the legislature to take away the mayor’s authority to appoint the schools chancellor instead.

Diane Ravitch, the NYU education historian and critic of the Bloomberg administration’s school policies, has also said that the independent school board should select the schools chancellor, as happened before 2002. But the endorsement of one of the lawmakers who will write the new mayoral control law this summer (Brennan sits on the education committee) gives the idea extra heft.

Here’s how Brennan explained the idea to me earlier this month:

My view is that the board should hire the chancellor… I just think that the chancellor being obligated to report directly to the mayor with no balance, because the mayor also appoints a huge majority of the board, kind of makes the chancellor subordinate to whatever the public relations manipulation of the moment is for the mayor and the mayor’s re-election schemes. So I think just philosophically I support a more democratic structure, in which policy decisions get a legitimate review by an independent board.

Brennan is also the author of a report criticizing the Bloomberg administration’s claims about its work with the public schools. More on that later today.