GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Lowering class size by just a fraction of the degree sought by class-size reduction advocates would require a tremendous expansion of the Department of Education’s budget, Deputy Chancellor Christopher Cerf just testified at today’s Assembly hearing on mayoral control in the Bronx.

Recent DOE analysis concluded that a reduction in class of 10% — from an average of 25 to 22.5, for example — would cost $800 million a year in extra operating funds to pay for new teachers, Cerf said. Constructing the extra classrooms needed would be an additional tens of billions of dollars in capital funds, he said.

The city last year received $150 million from the state in funds earmarked to reduce average class sizes in a set of needy schools.

After a long wait, a commission of parents led by outspoken critics of the Department of Education is unveiling its own proposal for how to change mayoral control. In testimony delivered to the Bronx Assembly hearing on mayoral control this morning, parents painted an ideal picture in which parent voices would gain power while the mayor would lose it.

Their proposal is topped off by a radical answer to the question of how to change the Panel for Educational Policy — the effective citywide school board — that would both strengthen the powers of the board and reshape who sits on it. The board would include just three mayoral appointees compared to six parent representatives, plus a City Council appointee, an appointee of the public advocate,and four expert members selected jointly by the board.

The commission is also proposing a stronger role for the CEC elected parent councils in each district. A key complaint about Mayor Bloomberg’s leadership has been that parents are not included in decision-making about the schools. Some have criticized the DOE for not consulting those councils when choosing to open and close schools, as is required by law.

Lisa Donlan, a commission member from Manhattan and the president of a CEC, testified that the state should create an “ombudsperson” role who would have the legal authority to advocate for parents when they aren’t comfortable advocating for themselves. This role addresses the DOE’s Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy, which Freeman called “a way of distracting [parents], but not a way of helping them.” (more…)

Last week I visited another great New York City charter school: KIPP Infinity in West Harlem.  Infinity serves grades 5 through 8.

In the most recent NYC Department of Education progress report, KIPP Infinity received the highest overall score amongst all 1,043 elementary, middle, and K-8 schools that were graded.  On their 2007-08 “Learning Environment Survey Report”, in which parents, teachers, and students are surveyed, the scores were uniformly excellent and, often, outliers.  For example, on parent engagement, they scored a 125% on a scale from 0 to 100%.

As I talked with principal Joe Negron in his office (a table in the hallway), it was clear that his focus is on further improvement.  He noted, for example, that while most of Infinity’s students pass the state tests, few of them have advanced into the most selective high schools.  (more…)

A graph from Assemblyman James Brennan's report shows that test score increases began before 2002, when mayoral control was enacted and Mayor Bloomberg took office.

A Brooklyn lawmaker is throwing doubt on two key arguments in both Mayor Bloomberg’s re-election campaign and his effort to keep the mayor in charge of the public school system: The idea that Bloomberg’s leadership is responsible for city students’ rising scores on standardized tests — and the extent to which achievement actually improved under Bloomberg.

In a paper released earlier this year, Assemblyman James Brennan points out that city students’ test scores were rising steadily for four years before Bloomberg took office, and, in some cases, at a faster pace than they have under Bloomberg.

He also argues that a list of changes in the schools that are unrelated to the Blooomberg administration or mayoral control (a near quadrupling of early childhood programs, for instance, and a dramatic increase in state funding that dates back to 1998) are the real reason for the gains the system has made.

“I generally don’t view their success to be credible,” Brennan, who could play a significant role in the mayoral control discussions this spring, said in a recent interview. “I do not believe that some of the recent improvements in the school system are directly related to policies of Klein.”

Brennan’s stance directly challenges the mayor and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who declare in speeches, billboards, television advertisements, and interviews that their changes to the school system are responsible for a battery of improvements, including higher test scores. A Department of Education spokesman, Andrew Jacob, defended this point of view in a short memo disputing Brennan’s conclusions.

The memo argues that the city’s test scores are rising more steadily than scores across New York State, and accuses Brennan of ignoring several Bloomberg administration policies, including the opening of hundreds of new schools and transfers of funds to schools from the bureaucracy. It also points out an indisputable rise in the graduation rate, which soared by 10 percentage points under Bloomberg, compared to a change of just one-tenth of a percentage point in the entire decade before he took control of the schools.

Below the fold, I’ll walk through each part of the dispute. (more…)

Strange bedfellows Joel Klein and Al Sharpton, and their ghostwriters, have a piece in yesterday’s Huffington Post arguing that the key to closing the achievement gap is revamping how we evaluate and reward teachers.  Value-added assessment, merit pay, and presto chango! the achievement gap is gone.

How skoolboy wishes it were this easy.  But strewing together some quotes from President Obama, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Diane Ravitch doesn’t make it so.

Let’s start with our popular President.  Klein and Sharpton quote him as saying, “The single most important factor in determining [student] achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from … It’s not who their parents are or how much money they have–it’s who their teacher is.”  But that’s just not true.  The gaps in performance among children of differing racial and ethnic backgrounds, and between poor and more economically advantaged children, are substantial even at the start of kindergarten, and many studies show that these differences continue to grow across the early elementary grades.  Moreover, there is little evidence of a narrowing of the gap in the high school years.  And make no mistake:  poor and minority children attend different schools than more affluent and white children, in New York City and elsewhere, and these differences shape students’ subsequent achievement trajectories.     (more…)

• In letters, educators and advocates weigh in on the Times’ recent article about Joel Klein. (Times)
• The mayor and chancellor visited “the poster child” for Obama’s policies. (GothamSchools, Post)
• Chancellor Klein says he supports Obama’s call for national standards. (WNYC)
• The DOE made a deal with pre-K parents at a Chinatown school to let their kids stay on. (Post)
• The Times’ City Room blog says the parent council election process is a new frontier in democracy.
• JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald (infrequently) attended middle school in the Bronx. (Daily News)
• A middle school accidentally let condoms get handed out to its students. (Daily News)
• A Midwood High School student was arrested for toting bomb-making supplies to school. (Newsday)
• The School Library Journal profiles a Brooklyn librarian who says she’s glad she still has resources.
• Kids at PS 41 in Greenwich Village are helping design a new neighborhood playground. (The Villager)
• Despite the federal stimulus, some school districts might still have to lay off teachers. (Reuters)
• David Brooks says Obama’s education policies sound bold, but his voucher talk is not. (Times)

When it comes to schools, New Yorkers are kind of like Texans – we think that everything is bigger here, including our problems.  And most of the time, we’re right.

But occasionally something comes along that indicates that other systems are just as screwed up as ours is.  And that deserves some grim recognition.

Today is “Pink Friday” in California.  Due to the state’s financial troubles, public schools, colleges and universities are facing more than $11 billion in reductions in state funds in next year’s budget.  Today is the deadline for school districts to notify teachers and other personnel that they may be laid off as of June 30^th. (more…)

• “It’s the system, stupid,” write Sharpton and Klein, quoting (among others) Darling-Hammond and Ravitch.
• A Bronx empowerment zone principal makes a plea for retaining mayoral control.
• Sherman Dorn imagines Joel Klein as “Dungeonmaster.” Someone explain this, please.
• Dan Brown says “The Class,” that French movie, is startlingly hollow.
• Debbie Meier thinks that differences in curriculum can be “a blessing, not a curse.”
• Arne Duncan is appointing a former union official to do teacher outreach.
• Rhode Island’s getting a new zone of schools that will be free from regular district rules.
• Colorado prints out school accountability reports for parents, but that might end.
• The Obama administration is clarifying how it wants to change No Child Left Behind.
• A report finds that states don’t do enough oversight of child care centers.
• What’s the science test of the future? It goes into more depth, for one thing.

In his interview with Chancellor Joel Klein this morning, Brian Lehrer of WNYC repeatedly described the $115 billion federal stimulus package for education as being available to states only if they met a steep demand: evaluating teachers based on their students’ test scores.

Klein agreed, calling the evaluations “a general requirement for states to get the stimulus money.” Pressed for specifics on how that would affect the city schools, the chancellor hedged, saying he’s waiting for more details from the Obama administration.

In fact, a spokesman from the U.S. Department of Education told me that states will receive the stimulus funds regardless of their willingness to evaluate teachers using student test scores. “We’re encouraging states to do merit pay,” he said. “But to get all of the stimulus money you don’t have to do merit pay.”

The notion that there are strings in the main pot of the stimulus money is not entirely off base. The federal DOE is asking states to pledge to do a list of four things with the money before they get it (an occurrence that’s scheduled to happen next month, a spokesman told me). Two points on that list also seem to add up to merit pay, or at least provide the ingredients to make it possible — one asking states to improve “teacher effectiveness” and another asking them to create data systems to track students’ progress. And President Obama did, just this week, signal his interest in seeing federally funded merit-pay programs expand to 150 districts from a measly 34.

Finally, there’s another $5 billion pot of money in the stimulus, the “race to the top” fund, that states will have to apply for the use of — and which is dedicated to “innovative” programs that could include performance-based pay.

Here are the four criteria states will have to promise their stimulus funds will meet, cribbed from these federal DOE stimulus guidelines: (more…)

I missed one big story when I put together today’s morning news roundup, an article in the Wall Street Journal about how mayors across the country are looking to seize control of their cities’ schools. The most interesting nugget suggests that the New York Post was on to something when it said President Obama’s education speech this week amounted to an endorsement of mayoral control.

From the Wall Street Journal article: 

Advocates say the structure, in which mayors generally appoint school boards and have the power to pick superintendents, enables tough-minded reforms by promoting stable leadership and accountability. Giving the idea more currency, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, until recently the Chicago schools chief, is a fan and product of mayoral control. And, this week, President Barack Obama promoted some controversial initiatives that have been pushed heavily in districts with mayoral control: charter schools, merit pay for teachers, and accountability, based on rigorous testing standards.

“I would anticipate that over the next few years we will see a new wave” of switches to mayoral authority, says Kenneth Wong, director of Brown University’s urban education policy program, who studies mayoral control of schools.

Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein today visited a Harlem charter school to tout the similarity of their reforms to those Obama encouraged all districts to enact. The press release about the event does not mention mayoral control.