GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The federal stimulus bill appears to have taken teacher layoffs off the table for next year. But Reality-Based Educator, who posts on the blog written by NYC Educator, predicts that while teacher salaries might have been saved, extra pay for working at after-school programs could disappear forever. He writes:

As for after school programs, the only ones funded these days are extended day classes. All the other clubs and programs, if they are still running, are doing so because teachers are volunteering their time to run them. Now even in good times you knew if you worked one of these programs or clubs that you would only be paid one hour for every three hours you worked, but now you’re not paid at all. Still, most of my colleagues continue to work these programs and clubs. One wonders if all that “volunteer time” will become expected even after the economy and the school budget improves? I’m betting it does…

“There you go again,” Ronald Reagan famously said to Jimmy Carter in a presidential debate during the 1980 election campaign.  Reagan later explained the memorable phrase, which arose in a discussion of Medicare, to reporter Jim Lehrer as, “it just seemed to be the thing to say in what he was saying up there, because it was to me it felt kind of repetitious, something we had heard before.”

Something else we’ve heard before is the Wall Street Journal championing the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, the federally-funded initiative that provides vouchers of up to $7,500 to enable poor children attending the DC public schools to attend religious and secular private schools participating in the program.  Having gained no traction with Congress, and just a modicum with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the Journal is now trying to shame President Obama into supporting the program, since, after all, he’s sending his own kids to an exclusive private school.

The WSJ writes that “…independent evaluations — another is scheduled for release later this month — show that children in the program perform better academically than their peers who do not receive vouchers.”  There you go again!  You know, saying something more often doesn’t make it true.  It’s still true, as skoolboy has written before, that these independent evaluations — of both the first and second year of the voucher program — find that the children who are awarded vouchers, as well as that subset that uses them, do not perform significantly better than the control group of students who applied for vouchers and did not receive them.  One might hope that the economic whizkids writing for the Journal would understand that the statistical evidence for the claim that voucher recipients are outperforming their peers is extremely weak. (more…)

• Mayor Bloomberg has pretty much stopped talking about massive teacher layoffs. (Post)
• The DOE isn’t letting a rapper bound for jail visit a Crown Heights middle school. (Daily News)
• D.C.’s Catholic-to-charter school conversions could have lessons for New York City. (Times)
• Schools could lose their drug counselors thanks to a state move to outsource them. (Daily News, NY1)
• Another member of Harlem Parents United argues in favor of school choice. (Daily News)

AND BEYOND:

• Much of the state’s stimulus money will arrive this month. (AP)
• The federal government will be paying attention to how schools use their stimulus money. (Times)
• In one high-pressure suburban school, students got a boost from falsified transcripts. (Times)
• New York’s senators say they’ll oppose a law to preserve the D.C. voucher program. (Post)
• The Wall Street Journal says Obama should expand D.C.’s voucher program, not end it.

• The WSJ’s editorial board says mayoral control saves “kids from the tyranny of union-dominated failure.”
• Pedro Noguera suggests Obama think broadly and move the teacher-quality debate forward.
• Andy says the Times Klein profile was too much about personality. Helen says it’s “open season” on Klein.
• Chaz offers a report from the rubber rooms, and criticizes the union for not supporting teachers there.
• A teacher says she knows what her students need, and data won’t help her figure that out.
• The nation’s report card could soon include a detailed report on the five largest states, including New York.
• The American south is remarkably less well-educated than the northern parts of the country.
• Around the country, states are getting into the business of setting cell phone rules.
• Educators, weigh in on a professor’s argument that “learning styles” (tactile, visual, etc.) don’t exist.
• Chad Aldeman catches an interesting point in a conversation about how to improve tests.
• Richard Simmons, newly minted ed activist: “Kids aren’t well-rounded, they’re just…rounded.”
• Eliot Spitzer uses his Slate column to push an innovative way to pay for college.

Chancellor Klein, right, with Pedro Noguera at a panel discussion today

If Joel Klein is nervous about his future as chancellor, he wasn’t showing it this morning.

After participating in a panel about the achievement gap at a conference sponsored by Channel 13 today, Klein was swarmed by audience members who wanted to thank him for the opportunities his leadership has given them.

Three of the well-wishers I encountered were people who have risen to leadership positions under Klein’s administration: Mercedes Qualls, who in 2003 took over a failing school in Queens that has since stabilized; Jackie Boswell, currently ushering Lafayette High School through its final years; and Robert Armond, who is training right now at the city’s Leadership Academy to join his wife as a principal in the city’s schools.

Klein was all smiles and hugs as he listened to one fan after another. After hearing a particularly effusive expression of gratitude, Klein joked about his reported unpopularity. Laughing, he said, “I’m staying here next year!”

Robert Bennett

Opening the door to new leadership just as the state is planning changes to its education system, Robert Bennett, the chancellor of the state’s Board of Regents, is announcing today that he will step down at the end of the month, one year before his term was set to end. Bennett’s decision comes as the Board of Regents is searching for a new state education commissioner to replace Richard Mills, who announced his plan to retire late last year. The Regents have also been steering a reorganization of the state Education Department.

Bennett, a Buffalo native who ran United Way’s chapter there and once served as mayor of that city, announced his decision to step down in a short letter dated today. He gave no reason for his departure, but said he intends to continue his service as board member. “As we all know, there are many issues that warrant our collective attention and resolution,” he wrote. “I am very grateful to all of you for your confidence and support. It has been a unique and tremendous honor to serve as Chancellor.”

The Board of Regents will elect its next chancellor on March 16 and 17, the date of the group’s next meeting. Merryl Tisch of Manhattan, who is an ally of the Bloomberg administration, is vice chancellor of the Board of Regents. The board also includes some critics of the administration. Tisch did not immediately return my phone call this evening after the press release was sent out (at about 5 o’clock).

Mills, the departing commissioner, said of Bennett: “I never found a better companion with whom to visit a pre-kindergarten or a school. He demands the best for every kid and is impatient with barriers he finds in their way.”

Bennett had been chancellor since 2002. Here is the full text of his letter: (more…)

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan weighed in yesterday on the debate over whether the KIPP charter school in Brooklyn, KIPP AMP, should unionize, as the teachers have moved to do — without taking either side of the argument. (KIPP officials appear to be resisting the unionization effort.) Instead, Duncan told NPR’s Tom Ashbrook that the decision might not matter.

Here’s Duncan’s full answer (emphasis mine):

Well, let me just say, in Chicago, and I’m sure this is true nationally, we had great union schools and we had poor union schools, and we had great non-union schools and we had poor non-union schools. And so, that’s a piece of the puzzle, but it’s much more complex than that.

Does a third-grader know whether they’re going to a union school or a non-union school? They don’t know that. And frankly, they don’t care. All they care about is, are they being challenged. What I want to do, Tom, I want to be very, very clear: I want to take to scale what is working and I want to eliminate what is not working. There are great examples of success in those two camps and there are examples of failure.

Duncan also demonstrated even-handedness in talking about the current contract debate between Michelle Rhee, the D.C. schools chancellor, and the teachers union there, which, like New York City’s union, is part of the national American Federation of Teachers. “I have a lot of confidence in the chancellor, Michelle Rhee, and Randi Weingarten, the president of the AFT, doing the right thing by children,” Duncan said.

The equal time for Rhee and Weingarten comes after Obama heaped praise on Rhee alone during the campaign. It also offers evidence for exactly how Duncan plans to approach debates inside the Democratic Party on education. The model here is to cite pragmatism above ideology: He doesn’t voice any faith in the labor movement as a cause, or, alternatively, voice disapproval of it. He simply says he wants to support “what works.”

You can listen to Duncan’s full interview, which included the fun fact that Duncan’s family did not have a television set when he was growing up, here.

The sign-off on the November 2002 letter in which Mayor Bloomberg hired Joel Klein as schools chancellor.

There’s an argument raised in Elissa Gootman’s long-anticipated profile of Chancellor Joel Klein that deserves more reporting. That’s the idea that Klein, though he was hired by Mayor Bloomberg and serves at the mayor’s pleasure, is actually different from the mayor in terms of personality and policies.

The most vociferous spokeswoman for this view is Randi Weingarten, who for several years now has been differentiating between Bloomberg, the good-guy pragmatist she can work with, and Klein, the ideologue who alienates teachers. She uses the distinction to illustrate a larger point she makes on the national stage, about the importance of finding a “third way” in which so-called reformers, who often criticize teachers unions, work collaboratively with unions to improve public schools.

Weingarten’s distinction became most prominent when the mayor announced he’d seek a third term. While many of the teachers, parents, and education advocates opposed to Bloomberg’s school reforms were enraged by this possibility, Weingarten was softer on the mayor. She reserved her raised-voice fury for Klein. “The discussion on mayoral control has changed significantly with the prospect of Joel Klein being the chancellor for the next four years,” she told me the next month, adding:

I’ve heard a lot of debate and conversations about this, and it has actually changed the debate on mayoral control, when people think about who will be the chancellor for the next four years. And when they think it’s going to be Joel Klein as chancellor, I’ve heard lots of people talk about the need to have far more stringent checks and balances.

But is there really much distance between Klein and Bloomberg? Maybe Bloomberg strikes a somewhat more conciliatory public persona, or at least is more polite during his meetings with Weingarten. But how does he act privately? Does he ever pull the reins on Klein’s more radical proposals? (more…)

Elizabeth reported last week that the Department of Education plans to extend the new initiative that grades teachers according to their students’ test scores. By law, the report cards may not be taken into account when principals make tenure decisions about their teachers. So what are the reports being used for?

For Bronx teacher Ruben, who blogs at Is Our Children Learning, his first report card, while disappointing, helped him set expectations for his second year of teaching. He writes:

At the end of the meeting I was handed a packet. It was my report card. This is part of a new initiative to hold teachers accountable through the use of reports of “value added” to their students. Groups of students are given predicted performance scores. These scores are compared to their actual results, and the teacher is rated on the basis of these scores.

Now I only have one year of teaching experience, and as anyone who’s been reading since the beginning knows, that first year was, ahem, rocky. So, I wasn’t really expecting a great report. What I didn’t expect was how low my percentile score would be, even after my rating was adjusted for years of experience. And while it was a blow to my self-esteem, it was also a way to focus my expectations for this year. I know I’ve come a long way since last year, so I expect a big improvement on the next report card I see.

• Mayoral control’s future could depend on Chancellor Joel Klein’s reputation. (Times)
• An Australian reporter visited a Bronx high school to see what all the fuss is about. (The Australian)
• The Manhattan Institute’s Marcus Winters worries that the stimulus won’t change education. (City Journal)
• A Manhattan community leader says mayoral control should continue with changes. (Daily News)
• Jay Mathews lists and rebuts 20 reasons to dislike the Advanced Placement program. (Washington Post)
• An upstate legislator says the state should block new charter schools for now. (Ithaca Journal)
• In England, parents want school inspectors to visit schools without warning them. (BBC)