GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

I reported in February that the degree to which the Department of Education’s bureaucracy is growing depends on which bureaucracy you’re talking about: the central brain at Tweed Courthouse has gained members, but the nervous system known as “the field,” whose suited desk-sitters are located throughout the five boroughs, is shrinking in size.

The degree of growth also depends on the kind of bureaucrat, and the way the kinds shake out — which have been kept and which have not — sheds some light on the Bloomberg administration’s priorities. (Recall that all departments inside the DOE were asked to write plans for budget cuts, but not all had to enact them.)

While those specializing in areas such as teaching and learning, food and nutrition, family engagement, and operations are losing ground, officials who work in accountability, budget, and transportation matters proliferate, according to new, more detailed numbers the department (finally) disclosed to me. (more…)

Is there school choice in New York City? It depends whom you ask.

Ask in Harlem, and members of Harlem Parents United, a group organized by charter school operator Eva Moskowitz, might tell you that there is: They have all chosen charter schools for their children and are aggressively pushing the neighborhood’s families to have even more options. They have allies in Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who count increasing school choice as a cornerstone of their reforms.

But ask a high school student who wants to change schools, and you might get another answer entirely. According to an article in the New York Post, ninth grader Kimselle Castanos said she asked the Department of Education for a transfer dozens of times but didn’t get one until she was assaulted by students from another school in the building. The DOE thinks the Post got some major facts wrong, such as how many times Kimselle e-mailed the chancellor, officials told me today. But even if it did, the real story remains that in a system that boasts about the choices open to students, Kimselle and her family felt stuck in a school that wasn’t right for her.

I heard from countless parents, students, and advocates desperately seeking school transfers when I worked at Insideschools, through the hotline run by parent organization Advocates for Children. Callers reported that their transfer requests, particularly at the high school level, had been denied even though they had compelling reasons for seeking them. Those calls continue to pour in, my former colleague Pamela Wheaton, Insideschools’ executive director, told me today.

“For whatever reason, it has become increasingly difficult, almost impossible, to get a transfer to another regular high school,” Wheaton said. (more…)

Hundreds of Bronx teachers turned out on Friday to protest the high school principal they say is responsible for a 70 percent teacher turnover rate. In record time over the weekend, the Bronx division of the United Federation of Teachers produced a video about the event, which it coordinated.

Teachers charge that in the four years since Iris Blige has been principal of Fordham High School for the arts, a small school that opened in 2002, the school has run through nine assistant principals, four business managers, and more than 100 teachers. (This data point is in clear view on a protester’s poster in the video.) Blige replaced the founding principal, Sal Mazzola, who was removed after two years in charge because of poor performance, according to the school’s Insideschools review.

Fordham High School for the Arts' teacher turnover figures from its 2006-2007 state report card

According to the school’s most recent state report card, more than a quarter of all teachers left the school after the 2005-2006 school year, and the previous year the school lost more than half of all relatively new teachers. The UFT says turnover has only accelerated since then, with more than 70 percent of teachers leaving during the 2007-2008 school year.

Merryl Tisch, sitting next to teachers union vice president Carmen Alvarez at the Manhattan Assembly hearing on mayoral control. (GothamSchools)

Merryl Tisch, a former first-grade teacher and member of one of the city’s most philanthropic families, will head the committee that oversees the state public schools, the Board of Regents, state officials just announced.

The other Regents elected Tisch to the title today at a critical moment for state education efforts. The Education Department in Albany is launching an internal restructuring, and the Regents are searching for a new commissioner to run the department.

Commissioner Richard Mills, who had served 14 years in the job, presiding over an ambitious raising of graduation standards, announced his plans to retire last year. The current Regents chancellor, Robert Bennett, of Buffalo, said he would step down from the position 10 days ago. Tisch has been vice chancellor of the board since 2007 and served on the board since 1996. Her term as chancellor begins April 1.

Though Tisch has been a strong supporter of Mayor Bloomberg, she has also occasionally criticized him and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein. She told the Times last year that she disagreed with Klein’s request for looser regulations on state funds. “Nobody appointed him czar,” she said. She also testified to a committee that mayoral control of the schools, which Bloomberg strongly supports, should be curtailed. I reported her testimony, which was originally secret, at the New York Sun

Yet Tisch’s plans for the state’s public schools, which she laid out in a long statement accepting the new position, sound many similar notes to the Bloomberg administration’s work in New York City. It also echoes the Obama administration’s plans for education. (more…)

FROM NEW YORK CITY:

• Friday’s mayoral control hearing focused on problems for English language learners. (Daily News)
• The Gotham Gazette takes an in-depth look at the idea of converting Catholic schools to charters.
• The DOE’s parent council election is groundbreaking because it’s all online. (Times)
• A girl says she asked 25 times for a high school transfer but didn’t get one until she was assaulted. (Post)
• The Robin Hood Foundation has given public schools beautiful new libraries. (Times)
• At Quest To Learn, a new middle school in Manhattan, kids will learn through video games. (Post)
• A Sheepshead Bay High School student talks about being on the Double Dutch team. (Times)

AND BEYOND:

• Michelle Rhee tells D.C. teachers she might have tried to do too much too soon. (Washington Post)
• Schools across the country are adapting to a new wave of immigrant students. (Times)
• As both public and private financing dries up, charter schools struggle. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
• Because of declining tax revenue, some school districts are looking at big budget cuts. (USA Today)
• As businesses go under, schools are getting more supplies donated. (Times)
• Schools near McDonald’s restaurants have higher obesity rates. (Post)
• In California, 40,000 school employees are being warned that they could be laid off. (Times)

Jumbo shrimp.  Military intelligence.  Open secret.  Classic oxymorons, but the Washington Post adds a new one:  “Strong anecdotal evidence.”  That’s the evidence that the Post cites in its Saturday editorial on the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program.  “Both sides need to put aside the overheated rhetoric that too often accompanies any mention of vouchers and focus instead on the facts,” the Post lectures us.  skoolboy has enumerated those facts–which show that participants in the program using vouchers to attend private schools in DC do not score significantly higher on standardized tests of academic achievement than their peers–here, here and here.

The Post‘s idea of balance is to enumerate reasons to support the program, and to ignore the evidence from evaluations of the first and second years of the program that it has minimal effects on a range of student outcomes:

Nonetheless, critics are right to want to know whether vouchers are effective in improving the achievement of their poor, minority recipients and, as such, are a good use of federal tax dollars. There is strong anecdotal evidence from parents of students receiving scholarships that their children feel safer and more secure, are better motivated and work harder in their new schools.   

“Strong anecdotal evidence.”  Was this written by a guest host?  A graduate student?  An editorial writer taking the down escalator?  skoolboy thinks the Post editorial is pretty ugly, and partially complete.  But now I’m going to add some non-dairy creamer to my coffee, and return to my working vacation.

And not even think about a head butt.

• The Green Dot charter school in the Bronx is searching for teachers with “demonstrated ability.”
• A Bronx 18-year-old asks Obama to make college affordable. Another is in favor of school uniforms.
• Joel Klein’s Education Equality Project has a new web site, blog, and executive director.
• In our Community section, Ken profiles KIPP Infinity, and Aaron critiques the latest Klein, Sharpton op-ed.
• Corey also offers a point-by-point critique of that op-ed.
• Emily Alpert highlights a metaphor for teacher layoffs: It’s like “trimming a tree.”
• Teachers in California are wearing pink to protest layoffs.
• An overview of how to teach creativity, plus an argument that it can be taught.
• Why the math wars are dying down a little, plus why they’ll stay around anyway.
• Folks agree that NCLB should include growth models, but not on how to do them.
• And finally, in a sign of the conventional wisdom on the teaching profession:

Rocky Mountain News cartoonist Ed Stein still publishes on his web site. Via the Schools for Tomorrow blog.

A sign at the entrance to the High School of American Studies at Lehman College. Via Flickr

Mayoral control ruled the day in the auditorium at Lehman College where the Assembly Education Committee hearing on school governance was taking place, but not everyone noticed. 

When I stepped out of the hearing briefly this afternoon, I ran into a class from the High School of American Studies, a specialized high school located on Lehman’s campus. The class spends the last period of school every Friday exploring the campus, so today, their teacher brought them by hearing for a simple assignment: To figure out, based on the documents available at the auditorium’s entrance, what the event was about.

It didn’t take long for a handful of bright, resourceful kids to figure out that the attendees were tackling the question of “who should control the school district,” as one student put it. It was harder for their teacher to elicit correct answers to his subsequent probing questions: “Which school district?” “What are the choices?” “Which document is official?” One student even drew a blank on Mike Bloomberg’s name when he was asked to identify the city’s current mayor.

Their teacher explained that some say the mayor should control the schools, but that the alternative isn’t as clear-cut. “No one really knows who the other choice is,” he said.

Before they moved on to their next destination, I asked the dozen or students if they’d ever heard mayoral control discussed before today, at home or in the newspaper or on the subway. Not a single one had.

The state Assembly is having its penultimate hearing on mayoral control today, this time in the Bronx. Philissa is at the hearing, and I’m going to post some live updates as she e-mails them to me.

4:27: Cathy Nolan, the education committee chair, and other Assembly members are trying to figure out what the requirements are to get into a middle school gifted and talented program, Philissa reports.

4:26: Parents and teachers are finally testifying, Philissa writes. On the same panel, a teacher and parent from two Bronx schools that are slated to close are testifying against mayoral control, while a parent and principal from a big middle school are saying mayoral control helped their school.

The pro-mayoral control parent, Teresa Jordan, went slightly off message to say that district parent councils should have more power. (Many have complained that the councils have been deprived of power under the mayor.)

If the opposing sides created any tension, it’s defused by the fact that only a handful of seats in the audience remain filled. Several Assembly members have also left. But there could be an after-work-hours revival: April Humphrey from the Campaign for Better Schools says over 100 parents plan to arrive at around 5:30, and the chair, Cathy Nolan, says Lehman College will be keeping the auditorium open long after its normal 6 pm closing time. (more…)

The flier advertising today's rally.

Teachers at the Fordham High School of the Arts plan to rally today in protest of their principal, who they say has conducted a “reign of terror” that is partly responsible for a 70% teacher turnover rate. Teachers from across the Bronx are invited to join the Fordham protest, which is being billed as a larger statement against what teachers call Chancellor Joel Klein’s “support of abusive principals.”

I don’t know any of the context here. It seems like a case where it’s impossible, without a lot more reporting, to know which side to believe — but very clear that the school environment is not a peaceful and happy one.

A Department of Education official, speaking on background today, said the protest is likely linked to an incident earlier this month where a teacher was removed from the school after an investigation tied her to a threatening letter written to the principal. A poster advertising the rally declares that teachers are protesting the “unfounded removal” of a teacher. The DOE source said the letter is being investigated by the police. (more…)