GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• A lawsuit takes on the DOE’s plan to replace three schools with charter schools. (GothamSchools, Times)
• A Brooklyn eighth grader is publishing a comic book with his teacher as its superhero. (Daily News)
• Deputy Chancellor Marcia Lyles is a superintendent finalist for a district in Delaware. (AP)
• Chancellor Klein defends mayoral control and attacks its detractors in an interview with the Post.
• A Bronx charter school with lots of uncertified teachers gets probation from its authorizer. (Post)
• The Post says other schools should emulate the Bronx charter school that’s now on probation.
• Massachusetts is taking a step toward evaluating teachers by their students’ scores. (Boston Globe)
• Some school districts are replacing letter grades with numerical ratings. (Times)

One of the charming features of GothamSchools is that, as a blogger, I can bite the hand that feeds me.  Philissa Cramer and Elizabeth Green, the two journalists who make this site a must-read for me and thousands of others daily, have been very gracious in letting me post here.  So I hope they will take the occasional riff on their work in the spirit in which I intend it:  as a gentle, and educational, rebuke.

Yesterday, Philissa posted a story on a new poll out of Quinnipiac University on all things New York City, including mayoral control of the schools and Joel Klein’s performance as Chancellor of the NYC schools.  The post was entitled “Sinking approval for mayor’s school efforts, chancellor,” and was accompanied by a chart that showed the percentage of New Yorkers who approve of Joel Klein’s handling of the schools at six time points between October, 2008 and March, 2009.  Klein’s approval rating ranged from 42% to 44% between October and February, 2009, and the new poll reported that 37% approved of Klein’s efforts.

The figure, unfortunately, distorted the trend.  Rather than using a true zero point, the scale of the chart ranged from 36%, at the low end, to 45%, at the upper end.  The decline from 44% in February, 2009 to 37% in March, 2009 took up most of the chart, and made it seem much sharper than it would have if the scale for the chart were 0% to 100%. (more…)

• Education secretary Arne Duncan has picked his deputy, but he hasn’t named names yet.
• Insideschools doyenne Judy of “Ask Judy” fame explains the value of an Advanced Regents diploma.
• Diane Ravitch asks if public schools can survive the current era of foundation-funded education policy.
• A private school consultant says her business is brisk, despite the economic downturn.
• Jamaica High School in Queens got landmark status today.
• The DOE extended kindergarten registration until April 20, after initially closing it during spring break.
• Alexander Russo reveals that at the new Locke High School in L.A., good students get special shirts.
• The AFT, Randi Weingarten’s national union, is asking teachers if they support national standards.
• England this week named the first school to be classified as failing under a new measurement system.
• The notion that states project their prison populations based on test scores might be apocryphal.

Parents and a slew of community leaders filed a lawsuit today against the Department of Education, demanding that the department reverse its decision to shutter three struggling elementary schools and replace them with charter schools. The parents say the decisions violated state law, because they happened without any consultation of the elected parent councils that have replaced community school boards.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers union; Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s public advocate, and a slew of parents of children at the schools are among the plaintiffs to the suit, which personally singles out Chancellor Joel Klein as a defendant. (Read the full suit here, in PDF form.)

Suing Klein and his department is a dramatic escalation of the ongoing saga over the city’s decision this year to shut down three elementary schools — two in Harlem and one in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn — and fill their buildings with charter schools instead. Charter schools are publicly funded, but operate outside of the regular district bureaucracy, meaning they usually lack teachers unions and can only serve a limited number of students. (more…)

The receptionist at the office of the Special Commissioner of Investigations, Richard Condon. Condon's staff takes up more than an entire floor at its financial district building.

I just picked up the 600 pages of reports on wrongdoing and misconduct by city school employees that got sent to Chancellor Joel Klein in 2007 and 2008, but never surfaced publicly. The Post highlighted some of the contents: a Stuyvesant librarian’s unauthorized field trips to a Quiz Bowl, a substitute teacher who showed students a movie in which he appeared with a semi-naked woman.

But the biggest story is what is not in this file: Any investigations into top or even mid-level Department of Education officials, or any evidence of educators fudging student performance data to make their school look better.

The absence is matched by a similar drought among those investigations that have been publicized. The development suggests one of two conclusions. On one hand, the new reports could disprove critics’ concerns that growing pressure to produce higher test scores and graduate more students has led some educators to cheat. They could also squash the speculation that the Special Commissioner of Investigations, Richard Condon, somehow managed to cover up looks into higher-profile targets. On the other hand, the cynical conclusion is that high-level misbehavior and cheating are happening with little intervention from an office whose purpose is to investigate schools for misconduct. (more…)

Public support for Bloomberg’s school control is at its lowest point since 2003, and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s approval rating has also taken a hit, according to poll results released today.

After a month packed with contentious public hearings about Klein’s tenure as chancellor, his approval rating dropped 7 points, to 37 percent, according to a new poll out of Quinnipiac University. His approval rating is lowest among blacks, Hispanics, residents of the Bronx, and women. It’s also just four points higher than his all-time low, posted two years ago just after mid-year school bus route changes frustrated parents citywide.

Approval for how Mayor Bloomberg is handling the public schools has also dropped, to 47 percent from 50 percent a month ago, giving him the lowest approval rating on his education efforts since May 2003. Just 46 percent of New Yorkers said they thought the mayor’s takeover of the public schools has been a success. Public school parents rated the mayor the worst: Just 41 percent of them said they approved of the job he’s doing, and 54 percent said they disapproved.

The poll indicates that the public still supports the idea of mayoral control. A majority, 52 percent, said the school governance structure should continue after June 30, when the law creating it is set to expire. (more…)

• Some Manhattan elementary schools might not have room for all of their zoned children. (Times)
• A Bronx charter school is under fire for having too many uncertified teachers. (Post)
• Teachers in Queens say their principal is abusive; the DOE says it supports him. (Daily News, NY1) 
• City Council members are worried about a significant cut to the city’s children’s services budget. (Times)
• The economic recession could slow a trend toward preschool for all. (Wall Street Journal)
• U.S. schools are looking abroad, to Finland and Singapore, for new ideas. (Christian Science Monitor)
• The Supreme Court has taken on the case of a 13-year-old girl who was strip-searched at school. (Times)
• A Daily News columnist looks at Bernie Madoff’s tenure at Far Rockaway High School.
• A Brooklyn eighth grader will represent New York State at the national spelling bee. (Daily News)
• The dance program featured in the movie “Mad Hot Ballroom” is in financial trouble. (Post)

• A Queens charter school that was unionized 16 months ago has no contract.
• A suggestion that all New York teachers should be able to decertify the union.
• The city union’s internal critics see why the KIPP teachers wouldn’t want the UFT’s help.
• Sawchuck shows that today’s debates on teacher effectiveness are kind of old, really.
• In Connecticut, debating whether to allow cell phone cameras in class.
• A teacher defends his decision to remain nonviolent, even when students thrash.
• Randi Weingarten tells The American Prospect she’s a “disrupter,” just not a “demonizer.”
• A good summary of Bell Curve author Charles Murray’s latest, by Mike Petrilli.
• My alma mater is making headlines: how budget cuts hurt an elite public school program.
• Russo catches a Newsweek anecdote showing how under-staffed the U.S. DOE is now.
• Video of Arne Duncan’s appearance on Charlie Rose, in case you missed it.
• Wendy Kopp says school districts should “recruit aggressively from all sectors.”
• A Harvard dean says Obama needs to invest in education research.
• Tom Payzant says the president should work to attract the future educators of America.

Technology constraints prohibited me from live-blogging Friday’s Assembly hearing on mayoral control of the city schools, which (for those not following along) is the policy that in 2002 handed near-total education authority over to the mayor — and which is up for renewal this June.

The strong thrust of Friday’s hearing, the last of five that have taken Assembly members on a tour through the boroughs, was that lawmakers are not happy with the system they created. Some have become even less happy during the hearings in every borough over the last few months.

A few flubbed exchanges with lawmakers have not helped the Bloomberg administration’s case. One such embarrassing moment happened one Friday, when officials failed to produce the graduation rate for black males.

Here are some of the highlights from Friday:

• Thirteen Assembly members attended the hearing, one of the largest showings so far, and I didn’t hear any of them speak positively about mayoral control. Two members made their dissatisfaction most clear. “I can assure you that my opinion has changed a lot in these hearings,” Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell of Manhattan declared, after angrily chastising Department of Education officials during a question-and-answer session. “Talking to my legislative colleagues over the last three months, the question in my mind is no longer if we’re going to make any changes to the law. It’s going to be what changes are we going to make,” declared Mark Weprin of Queens. (more…)

Several of the proposals for revising mayoral control call for renaming the Panel for Education Policy, the current incarnation of the city’s school board, and changing the way that its members are selected. So if you want to see the PEP in action in its current form, tonight could be one of your last chances; the group meets only once a month.

Straight from the Department of Education, here’s the agenda for tonight’s meeting, which begins at 6 p.m. at Brooklyn Tech in Fort Greene:

I. Local 306 IATSE Collective Bargaining Agreement

II. Increased Rates of New York City CUNY-Bound Students

III. Office of Multiple Pathways to Graduation Update

IV. President Obama’s Education Speech

V. Public Comment

One item that’s not on the agenda: the DOE’s 2010-2014 capital plan. Originally, the PEP was scheduled to vote on the proposed plan tonight. But because the city, state, and federal funding pictures still aren’t clear, that vote has been put off until the PEP’s April meeting, deputy chancellor Kathleen Grimm told City Council members last week.

We’ve covered a couple of the agenda items, the higher number of public school students enrolling at CUNY colleges and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s response to Obama’s recent education speech, here on GothamSchools. Tonight, I’m interested to find out why the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees has a collective bargaining agreement with the DOE.