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There’s plenty more I’d like to write about today, but right now I am going to pop some popcorn and settle in for the big fight: NY1’s televised debate between Harlem charter school operator Eva Moskowitz and United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

The debate between the two controversial women is set to broadcast live on Dominic Carter’s “Road to City Hall” show, which starts at 7 p.m. It will air again tonight at 10 p.m. You can also listen online at the same times using NY1’s audio stream.

Are you tuning in? Post your reactions in the comments section.

Elizabeth reported yesterday about a conversation she had with NYU professor Pedro Noguera about PS 28, a Brooklyn school that he said is succeeding despite serving a challenging set of students. In that conversation, Noguera objected to what he said is the commonly held idea that “the KIPP way” is the only way to run an urban public school.

Today, after reading comments defending the KIPP charter schools, Noguera clarified his objection in an e-mail to GothamSchools:

I support KIPP, Achieve[ment] First and any school — charter, private or traditional public — that serves children, especially poor children well. However, I reject the notion that there’s one way to educate poor kids or the idea put forward by David Whitman that you must treat their culture as a problem. I also reject the idea that schools should focus narrowly on achievement and ignore the other needs — social, emotional, etc. PS 28 does it all with a high-need population and even though children do not walk the halls in silence they still receive a good education. 

In his 2008 book, “Sweating the Small Stuff,” David Whitman lauded what he termed “the new paternalism” in urban education: The trend of highly structured schools, such as the KIPP charter schools, teaching not only academic content but a way of behaving that Whitman says represents “traditional, middle-class values.”

The Department of Education and Diane Ravitch, a former supporter who has emerged as one of the department’s most vocal critics, have for years sparred over how to interpret DOE data. In their latest skirmish, the department and the historian have each issued memos refuting the other’s claims about how well the city schools are performing. The DOE’s memo went out by e-mail to all principals; Ravitch’s appears for the first time in this post.

The newest dustup stems from an op/ed Ravitch wrote for the New York Times earlier this month, in which she argued that data show the DOE is incorrect to say schools have improved significantly since Mayor Bloomberg took control of them.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein immediately fired back against Ravitch in a letter to the editor. But apparently some principals needed more convincing, because Klein wrote in a recent Principals Weekly newsletter that he had heard from “a number” of them with questions about whether Ravitch’s op/ed was accurate. To answer the principals’ questions, Klein said he asked Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, a senior DOE official who oversees testing, to fact-check Ravitch’s claims. Bell-Ellwanger produced an 8-page memo, dated April 28, rebutting Ravitch point by point. Klein linked to the memo in his most recent e-mail newsletter to principals; I’ve also posted it in full below the jump.

After I shared Bell-Ellwanger’s memo with her, Ravitch composed a long response of her own, noting that her Times op/ed was thoroughly vetted before publication. “The editor at the Times required documentation for every single fact in the article, and I supplied it,” she writes in her response, which I’ve posted just after Bell-Ellwanger’s memo below. (more…)

A chart in the report being issued today shows the rising "discharge" rate, plus a mysterious spike in the rate of special education students being discharged in 2005.

Six years after Schools Chancellor Joel Klein vowed to crack down on a bureaucratic loophole that allowed principals to hide students’ failure to graduate high school, a new report (PDF) suggests that the loophole remains open and may be growing wider. The report calls for closer study of the students classified as “discharges” — departures from the system, but not dropouts — through steps including a state audit.

The report says that 21 percent of students who entered high school in 2003 both never graduated and were never counted as dropouts, instead falling into a category known as “discharges.” The percentage was up from 17.5 percent among the Class of 2000. The rate is especially high among special education students, and includes a remarkable jump in 2005, when the special education discharge rate shot up to 36 percent from 23 percent in a single year.

Students classified as discharges can include those who left the school system for legitimate reasons, such as moving to another state, deciding to enroll in an outside G.E.D. program, or death. But some advocates have argued that principals can also misuse the discharge code, entering students who simply dropped out in order to inflate their graduation rate artificially.

A recent audit of 12 high schools in New York State by the state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, found that high schools classified students as G.E.D. discharges who did not actually enroll in a G.E.D. program. “As a result,” DiNapoli’s audit concluded, “the report cards understated the number and percentage of dropouts and overstated the percentage of graduates for some of the schools we reviewed.” The audit did not probe any New York City high schools.

Two persistent critics of the Bloomberg administration compiled the report: the executive director of Class Size Matters, Leonie Haimson, and a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, Jennifer Jennings. Jennings was the author of the now-defunct Eduwonkette blog, whose analysis of New York City education data became (as I reported) a thorn in the Bloomberg administration’s side. The report is being released at a press conference this morning held by a third critic, the city’s public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum.

City school officials were already disputing the report’s claims yesterday, before it had been released. (more…)

• A new report finds that many students are still leaving high schools before they graduate. (Times)
• State Sen. Malcolm Smith said he personally scrapped his task force’s mayoral control report. (Post)
• Randi Weingarten’s views on mayoral control are a personal affront to President Obama, the Post says.
• Because lawyers are expensive, teachers are spending more time in the “rubber room.” (Daily News) 
• A movement’s afoot to bring robotics instruction to more public schools. (USA Today)
• A private donor pledges to help KIPP add more schools in cash-strapped California. (LA Times)
• The D.C. Council wants to hire an auditor to evaluate Michelle Rhee’s reforms. (Washington Post)
• Across the country, field trips are falling victim to budget cuts. (USA Today)
• The Supreme Court is hearing another case about when parents should pay for special ed schools. (AP)
• As a senator, former Denver supe Michael Bennet says he will influence national ed policy. (Denver Post)

• Jennifer Freeman asks why foundations can fund art and chess programs, but parents should not.
• Aaron Pallas takes aim at Margaret Spellings’ justification for why high school NAEP scores are stuck.
• Experts debate the meaning of the NAEP test results in the New York Times’ Running Debate feature.
• Newspaper editors can’t decide whether the NAEP results are good or bad.
• Was the beleaguered Queens principal’s resignation really voluntary? Helen Zelon implies it was not.
• A former Brooklyn principal who was convicted of molesting a girl was caught after years on the lam.
• The Wall Street Journal gives a thumbs up to a new book that tries to explain why kids don’t like school.
• A new report argues that paying fewer teachers better would improve educational outcomes.
• In Baltimore, officials are proposing relaxing high school promotion requirements.
• A new film highlights the challenges faced by teenagers in foster care.
• Alexander Russo picks up a too-cute video from Jezebel.com, of kids at PS 22 singing “Eye of the Tiger.”
• A middle school teacher says the most adolescent behavior at her school comes from her colleagues.

Test results from Harlem's KIPP STAR College Prep Charter School, where students on average outperformed their district but not always the state. Graph from 2008 KIPP annual report.

Critics of KIPP charter schools have accused the national charter school chain of being opaque about how much money it spends and what kinds of students it serves. But KIPP says it’s committed to transparency, and so every year it releases a comprehensive report about its fundraising and planning efforts, and about how each of its schools is performing. The report about 2008 just went online today.

The report covers some familiar data points about how students at the city’s four KIPP schools are outperforming students at other schools in their districts on state tests. But it also includes the less often publicized fact that not all KIPP schools in New York always beat state test averages.

And while KIPP’s New York City schools have recently been at the center of a renewed battle over teachers unions in charter schools, the report card doesn’t get into politics, instead providing an overview of KIPP’s plans for growth and profiles of each of the organization’s 66 schools across the country. The profiles include pictures of each school leader, the demographic breakdown of students, per-pupil funding figures, and state reading and math test results. The section about the city’s KIPP schools begins on page 84.

Also of interest, particularly if you’ve been following along with Ken Hirsh’s hunt for financial information about charter schools, is the list of foundations and individuals that gave to KIPP during the 2007-2008 school year, broken down by gift size. You can find that at the very end of the report.

I spent nearly an hour earlier today trying to cobble together out of several askew, truncated, and fuzzy faxed versions a single shareable copy of State Sen. Martin Dilan’s explosive mayoral control report. I should have spent my time on something else, because Liz Benjamin at the Daily News just posted an impeccable version on her Daily Politics blog; I’m sharing it below the jump. 

Benjamin’s copy of the report, which recommends that lawmakers place substantial checks on mayoral control when the school governance structure expires June 30, is easier to read than the one I just trashed. But the version I was working with looked about as muddled as debate over the report has been since it was first revealed in the Post yesterday. At issue is whose opinions the report contains and whether the report was meant to be released this week at all.

Gail Robinson at the Gotham Gazette wrote yesterday that her copy of the leaked report didn’t indicate anywhere that it was a draft version. But City Hall, which condemned the recommendations, told the Post that it considered the report to be in draft form, and Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith’s office said the report doesn’t reflect his position on mayoral control. Later yesterday, Dilan, one of the two chairs of the school governance task force convened by Smith, issued a statement saying that the leaked report represented only his own opinions, not those of his fellow committee members. 

This afternoon, I called the office of State Sen. Shirley Huntley, the task force’s other chair, to find out how her position compared to Dilan’s. A spokeswoman who works in Smith’s office, Selvena Brooks, returned my call on Huntley’s behalf. “The task force is still convening hearings,” Brooks told me. “She feels it’s a bit premature to make recommendations.” (more…)

Principals and reporters who thought they were going to get a first look at Mayor Bloomberg’s school budget proposal this afternoon were just told that the Department of Education has cancelled its two planned budget briefings. The reason for the cancellation, according to a DOE spokeswoman, is that the department doesn’t yet know exactly what Chancellor Joel Klein would be able to tell them.

A City Council source told Liz yesterday that the executive budget proposal Mayor Bloomberg is scheduled to reveal on Friday is likely to contain substantial school budget cuts.

But a DOE spokeswoman said the budget situation remains “fluid,” making a briefing for principals today impractical. “We’re just waiting until we have a better sense of what the actual numbers look like,” said Ann Forte of the DOE. She said the event would be rescheduled, but no time has yet been set and it is unlikely that the DOE will be able to brief principals before Bloomberg is scheduled to present his budget on Friday.

Right now, the DOE is frantically reaching out to principals to let them know that they shouldn’t come to Manhattan’s Norman Thomas High School later this afternoon after all. Forte said the department is contacting principals by phone and e-mail, and network leaders from external school support organizations are also trying to spread the word about the cancellation.

Pedro Noguera and Joel Klein appeared at a panel together last month about the achievement gap, sponsored by Channel 13. (GothamSchools)

Pedro Noguera, the NYU professor and all-around authority on urban schools, had lunch with Chancellor Joel Klein the other day. The two aren’t natural candidates for a lunch date: Noguera is a co-founder of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, a national effort to rival Klein’s Education Equality Project. But they had recently spoken on a panel together and found that they agreed about a lot. So they decided to have lunch.

There, Noguera urged Klein to visit an elementary school in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, PS 28, which Noguera said epitomized his thoughts on what makes a strong urban school. Noguera said that its extended school day (some children stay until 5:45 p.m.), social services, professional development for teachers, and focus on emotional as well as academic growth have helped it become an impressive school, despite being challenged by serving a large number of homeless students.

Klein visited the school “the very next day,” Noguera told me in a telephone interview. It made an impression on him, too, and soon he wrote a memo to all principals in the city urging them to visit PS 28 (The memo was included in the April 7 Principals’ Weekly newsletter, and is reproduced below.)

But Noguera told me on the telephone that he was struck by what Klein’s memo emphasized about the school — and what it did not say. Namely, Klein talked about the importance of a strong principal and of analyzing students’ test scores, but not about addressing children’s non-academic needs, the focus of the other programs Noguera admired. (more…)