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Catherine Nolan

New Yorkers who weren’t able to attend any of the Assembly’s five public hearings on mayoral control can now find out just what they missed. (That is, if GothamSchools’ coverage wasn’t enough for them.) Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, who chairs the education committee, is making transcripts of the hearings available on her Web site.

Transcripts from the Staten Island, Manhattan, and Queens hearings are online now. But beware: The PDF files are enormous. The Queens hearing is 419 pages, and the transcript of the Manhattan hearing runs to 554 pages!

President Obama might have spoken too soon when he said the federal stimulus could prevent teacher layoffs in New York City. Depending on how state legislators choose to disburse the stimulus funds, the city could still be looking at a loss of 2,000 teachers, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein told members of the City Council’s education committee this morning.

The city Department of Education believes it is entitled to 41 percent of the state’s $2.4 billion in education stimulus funds because it receives 41 percent of state funds overall, Klein said today at the council’s hearing on the DOE’s preliminary budget for the fiscal year that begins on July 1. This formula would give the DOE more than $500 million in stabilization funds, allowing it to avoid teacher layoffs.

But he said some lawmakers “are taking a different view,” instead suggesting that the city should receive a third of the state’s stimulus money for schools because it serves a third of the state’s public school students. Under this scenario, the DOE would receive just $360 million in stabilization funds, and about 2,000 teachers would have to be laid off. Klein, who was in Albany yesterday to lobby for the city schools, declined to identify the lawmakers to reporters after his testimony, saying that the negotiations are internal and ongoing.

Either way, cuts to schools’ non-teaching staff would be severe, Klein said, with a minimum of about 2,500 positions being lost in the first scenario and as many as 25 percent of school-based non-teaching staff positions being eliminated in the second. These positions include school aides, family workers, and other school personnel. (more…)

The other day, I posted on Philissa Cramer’s report on the Quinnipiac poll, and the finding that Joel Klein’s approval rating had fallen from 44% in February to 37% in March. I said that Philissa’s graph was misleading, and that the decline in Klein’s approval among registered voters in New York City was not statistically significant.

I was wrong.

Thanks to Leonie Haimson for obliging me to go back to my calculations and find the mistake I made. (For the two people who might care, it involved substituting the margin of error, rather than the standard error, for the percentages into the formula estimating the standard error of the difference between the two percentages.)

So no, Leonie, you’re not a statistical idiot. I get to wear that hat today.

The more substantive interpretation is that support for how Joel Klein is handling his job as Chancellor really did seem to fall from February to March. We’ll have to wait until the next poll to see if this decline persists.

The logo of the Brooklyn KIPP school where teachers have asked to join the union. From the school's web site.

In their first-ever appearance together since they became locked in an organizing dispute in January, the KIPP charter school network and the city teachers union remained at odds earlier this week over a petition by Brooklyn KIPP teachers to join the union.

In a conference before the state labor board, the union implored a judge to make the teachers’ petition official. KIPP officials asked instead that the state conduct a secret-ballot election of teachers before deciding whether to grant them a union. A wide majority of teachers at KIPP AMP have already turned in cards confirming that they want to unionize. New York state law only requires that card-check majority in order for public employees to form a union.

“We think an election is a fair way to accurately decide, in a democratic process. We believe in an election,” David Levin, the superintendent of KIPP New York told me in an interview yesterday.

Leo Casey, a vice president of the union, called the move a stalling tactic. “The bottom line is that they’re trying to drag it out, and they still refuse to accept that their teachers want to have a union at this point,” Casey told me in an interview yesterday.  “But the law is the law.”

The Public Employee Relations Board is expected to make a decision in the next 30 days. The skirmish is part of a larger battle between charter school supporters who believe the schools’ selling point is the fact that their teachers are not represented by unions — and teachers unions, which across the country are fighting to recruit charter school teachers into their fold. (more…)

• Mayor Bloomberg told the Post he thinks he will make a deal with lawmakers over mayoral control.
• The Post says “kids come last” for the teachers union, so mayoral control should be preserved.
• A Bronx principal is under investigation for maintaining a “hate list” of teachers. (Post)
• Schools in the Riverdale section of the Bronx get free rent for their fundraising events. (Riverdale Press)
• A Bronx mom is suing over what she says are dangerous PCB levels at her kids’ school. (Daily News)
• A third grader brought a five-inch knife to his Brooklyn elementary school, officials say. (Daily News)
• The Times says states should forgo their annual ritual of playing chicken with education dollars.
• Arne Duncan is set to push school reforms with his $5 billion “innovation” fund. (Washington Post)
• The school voucher movement is in jeopardy under the Obama administration. (Wall Street Journal)

• Mayor Bloomberg and Randi Weingarten were in Albany today to advocate for the city’s school funds.
• Some states are already revamping their annual tests, per Arne Duncan’s instructions.
• The United Federation of Teachers explains its side of the KIPP union decertification story.
• Mike Petrilli says Duncan’s most recent hires are pretty good — for union leaders.
• Jennifer Freeman, one of the plaintiffs in the school siting lawsuit against the DOE, speaks out.
• Via Politics K-12, Rolling Stone says Duncan is the country’s 98th top change-maker.
• Insideschools has a first look at all of the new elementary and middle schools opening this fall.
• Sara Mosle on KIPP: Their diffuse geography makes the schools hard to consider as a broad solution.
• Some in the teachers union want action over the 1,700 teachers still without permanent positions.
• A look at the man behind Hunter College’s charter school teacher training program.

Eighth graders at many middle schools this afternoon enacted one of the more emotional rituals of New York City public school life: Comparing their high school placement letters.

Back in December, each eighth grader submitted an application ranking up to 12 high schools, joined by a handful of high school freshmen hoping to change schools for tenth grade. Then the Department of Education’s computer system matched applicants to schools based on their qualifications and preferences. (Check out Insideschools for a more detailed description of the matching process.) Today, students found out what result the computer spat out for them.

The DOE announced today that 86 percent of the 86,169 applicants matched with one of their top five high school picks, and that 91 percent matched with a school somewhere on their list. About 6,000 students found out their high school options last month by scoring high enough on the specialized high school exam to win admission to one of those schools, or by winning admission to LaGuardia, the city’s elite performing arts school.

The DOE delivers match letters to middle schools, and the schools pass them on to their students. (more…)

Next year, the state’s English tests could be missing one crucial component: writing.

That’s the conclusion that educators are drawing after the Board of Regents weighed a proposal earlier this month to eliminate the open-ended question section of the state’s standardized tests — the only part of the third through eighth grade testing regime that asks students to write out their answers in sentences.

The proposal is one of several ideas the Board of Regents, the state panel that sets New York’s education policy, is considering in order to speed up the test-grading process, following a new federal regulation ordering states to tell schools sooner whether or not they are meeting states standards. (State test scores play a large part in making that decision.) Changing the way the tests are graded could also cut costs.

The Regents have been studying how to meet the new federal requirement for almost a year. The prospect of scrapping writing first surfaced publicly when the Regents published the findings of a survey the board conducted to study the question. Of 22,000 parents and educators surveyed, 85% said the essay questions should remain. (more…)

A lineup of Department of Education officials challenged Assemblyman Mark Weprin's assertion that the public schools are overrun by excessive test prep. GothamSchools

Another snippet of Friday’s final Assembly hearing on mayoral control that’s worth highlighting is an exchange between school officials and Mark Weprin, the Assemblyman from Queens, over test prep.

Weprin has raised his concerns that the public school are doing too much test prep with Chancellor Joel Klein before. (He memorably hijacked a press conference that was supposed to be about Klein’s accomplishments.) This exchange gave school officials and Weprin a less awkward chance to duke it out. Weprin was incredulous when Eric Nadelstern, the chief schools officer, and a lineup of other officials told him that the Department of Education does not encourage test prep. “There’s an incredible amount of test prep going on. You know that, right?” he said.

When James Liebman, the chief accountability officer, told Weprin that only a tiny percentage of parents believe there is too much test prep going on in schools — about 1%, according to the department’s surveys — Weprin snapped back. “That’s unbelievably ridiculous,” he said. “You guys are either in denial, or you’re trying to pretend to be in denial. I thought it was just a given you knew how much test prep was going on.”

Officials clarified that they are in favor of testing; it just depends on which kind of testing. They said that giving diagnostic tests to assess what exactly students know and what they don’t is not test prep but a good way to help teachers educate children. “You will never find a serious educator who will say that merely teaching children how to take a test is a sufficient form of education or indeed a defensible form of education,” Cerf said. “To the extent people are being taught the content and then assessed on whether they have mastered that content by the milestone ages, that is not test prep.”

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn's proposed changes to mayoral control are less drastic than Comptroller Bill Thompson's (right). Photo via Azi's Flickr.

Christine Quinn, the speaker of the City Council, is joining the chorus of voices urging state lawmakers to add checks and balances to the mayor’s authority over the public schools, but she’s proposing a different, slightly softer kind of check.

Rather than strengthening the citywide school board, as the teachers union, the comptroller, and several parent groups have suggested, Quinn wants lawmakers to empower the City Council to do stronger oversight of the mayor’s school policies.

In written testimony Quinn submitted to the state Assembly this week, she describes the arrangement she’d like to see as “municipal” rather than mayoral control. Currently, the Council’s ability to check the mayor’s education policy extends only “up to the door of a school,” she says, citing last year’s cell phone brouhaha as evidence. (The city argued that the council’s legislation overturning Bloomberg’s cell phone ban, which Bloomberg vetoed, but council members over-rode, did not have any effect on the final policy.)

Only state lawmakers have the authority to override the mayor’s school policy, Quinn argues. But she says that doesn’t make sense. “I would never look to weigh in on local education policies in Elmira County, and I don’t think a State legislator from Elmira (no matter how qualified her or she may be) should or wants to be responsible for decisions made about New York City schools,” she writes. (more…)