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Students were evacuated from a South Bronx school that houses three middle schools after a teacher barricaded himself inside this morning, reportedly claiming to have a bomb. The New York Times reported that police said there does not appear to be a bomb in the building. The teacher told police that he is protesting the mistreatment of teachers, the New York Post is reporting on its web site.

The teacher is an employee at M.S. 328 in the Bronx, which shares a building with two other middle schools: J.H.S. 145 and M.S. 325. A source with knowledge of the situation tells me that the teacher is his school’s union chapter leader, an elected post for a person that teachers choose to represent them in hiring, firing, and work-environment disputes. A Department of Education spokeswoman, Melody Meyer, said the department has no comment and referred questions to the NYPD.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports that the teacher told police he was going on a hunger strike after being assigned to the rubber room, the holding center for teachers accused of infractions from corporal punishment to incompetence. Here’s the Times’ report:

With the teacher isolated inside the classroom, negotiators talked with him, said Mr. Browne. During these talks, he admitted that he had planted no bomb, but said he had undertaken a hunger strike over the way a disciplinary case against him had been handled and that he wanted to see the principal, “ousted,” said Mr. Browne.

“He slipped a note to negotiators and said he was on a hunger strike because of some disciplinary case,” said Mr. Browne.

An official with knowledge of the case said that the teacher was a union chapter chairman at the school and had received a letter Thursday informing him that that he was being reassigned to a so-called “rubber room” — a term for classrooms where teachers removed from teaching duties are assigned — as discipline for imposing corporal punishment on a student.

I think we’ll hold off running to the scene and rely on the sure-to-be-exhaustive work of the Times, Post, and Daily News. Let us know if you’re a teacher or parent at the school or have any background on why the teacher would want to protest mistreatment.

UPDATE 12:15 P.M.: According to several news sources, the teacher, who has been identified as Francisco Garabitos, has been taken into custody by police. Students and teachers are returning to the building.

• Merryl Tisch says she is talking with union leaders about using test scores in tenure decisions. (Post)
• The Post says Catherine Nolan must be lying about why she didn’t propose a teacher tenure study.
• Charter schools are getting $30 million restored from what was cut. (Daily News, Post, GothamSchools)
• Experts say a rule change means 2009 test scores can’t be compared to last year’s. (Daily News)
• Scores on social studies and science tests are up, but still low for eighth graders. (Post, AP)
• A Brooklyn principal is being investigated for trying to boost test scores and survey results. (Daily News)
• Queens teachers protesting against their principal say he told them to inflate grades. (Queens Chronicle)
• Parents are fuming about being put on the waitlist for their zoned schools. (Daily News)
• Most students in the special ed classes with a 5 percent grad rate are black and Latino boys. (Daily News)
• City officials are proposing an energy-saving plan that would upgrade most school buildings. (Times)
• A Greenwich Village elementary school is set to receive a “green roof.” (The Villager)
• A powder prank Wednesday at PS 345 in Brooklyn made lots of students itchy. (Daily News)
• Last year’s dangerous Stuyvesant team trip could lead to strengthened school trip policies. (NY1)
• Ed Sec Arne Duncan suggests that schools use stimulus money for summer school. (AP)
• About 5 percent of Dallas teachers have been given a year to improve or be fired. (Houston Chronicle) 
• Jay Mathews: I feel silly for thinking Ivy League grads could staff every needy school. (Washington Post)

I woke up yesterday morning to read Norm Scott’s post on Education Notes Online about a new study of the effects of charter schools on achievement in New York City.  The study, by economists Caroline Hoxby and Sonali Murarka, finds a charter school effect of .09 standard deviations per year of treatment in math and .04 standard deviations per year in reading.  I haven’t read the study closely yet, but I was struck by Norm’s headline:  “Study Shows NO Improvement in NYC Charters Over Public Schools.”  The effects that Hoxby and Murarka report are statistically significant, which means that we can reject the claim that they are zero.  But are they big?  That’s a surprisingly complicated question. I’m going to argue that the answer hinges on “compared to what?”

The standard deviation is a basic measure of how spread out a given attribute—such as a test score—is in a population.  When scores are widely spread out away from the average, the standard deviation is large;  when the scores are narrowly bunched around the average, the standard deviation is small.  Many distributions, whether in nature or by design, take on the shape of a bell curve.  The family of such distributions are called normal distributions, and they have some properties that are really useful for making sense of a given effect.

The figure below shows a standard normal distribution, with a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one.  A standard normal distribution is symmetric, with 50% of the cases above the mean and 50% below the mean.  About 34% of the cases are between the mean and one standard deviation above the mean, and a similar fraction is between the mean and one standard deviation below the mean.  An additional 13% on each end or so are between one and two standard deviations away from the mean, and about 2.5% on each are more than two standard deviations away from the mean. (more…)

Chancellor Joel Klein, Harlem Success CEO Eva Moskowitz, and State Sen. Malcolm Smith took center stage tonight at the admissions lottery for the four charter schools Moskowitz runs. GothamSchools

• An Economist reporter says a KIPP school in Newark was one of his most fun school visits, ever.
• A new report concludes that the city’s graduation rate for students with special needs is “abysmal.”
• The DOE’s chief lobbyist wishes the New York Post weren’t dredging up last year’s political fights.
• Pissed Off Teacher has photographic evidence of what a teacher’s office typically looks like. 
• Education reformers pick and choose the data they cite, Debbie Meier says on Bridging Differences.
• Dan Brown: Remember, the vast majority of teachers have nothing to do with Teach For America.
• Teacher tenure is under scrutiny in Los Angeles, too.
• Chicago students are mostly attending non-selective colleges, even after high school gains there.
• Gerald Bracey says President Obama is carrying on a long tradition of public school fear-mongering.

A Queens charter school encouraged parents and students to call Governor David Paterson and Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith after it learned charter schools could see their funding frozen. Paterson and Smith are now sending the schools $30 million. (Nicholas)

Governor David Paterson and Malcolm Smith, the state Senate majority leader, are back in good favor with their long-lost charter school friends. Smith has just announced a plan to counteract a budget freeze that took the schools by surprise earlier this year, by sending the schools a one-time $30 million grant.

The grant is less than the $51 million that charter schools were slated to lose after legislators axed planned funding increases in their recent budget deal. And it will expire at the end of next year, leaving supporters to wage a new fight  over funds then. But a source familiar with the plan who is a supporter of charter schools said that $30 million will be enough to help schools that had been imagining slashing after-school programs and turning down extra staff they’d already hired for next year.

Smith announced the planned injection just now at a charter school lottery in Harlem, which Philissa is covering. The lottery is the annual event for the former City Council member Eva Moskowitz, who runs the Success Charter Network in Harlem. Harlem Success is expecting more than 5,000 parents at the lottery, which will determine which children are selected to attend the schools. (more…)

More city public school graduates are enrolling at City University of New York Colleges, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and CUNY President Matt Goldstein boasted at a press conference last month. But whether the students are prepared for the college experience, both in and outside the classroom, is much less clear.

Only 7.5% of students take all of the high school courses that CUNY recommends, and more than 70% of the first-year students in CUNY’s junior colleges must take remedial courses to catch up on basic skills, according to John Garvey, who was until recently the dean in charge of CUNY’s College Now program, which allows high school students to take college-level courses. Garvey presented the information at an event Tuesday held by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, which is developing a set of recommendations for how to boost student achievement.

One major problem is that the most advanced high school courses, called Regents courses to match the exit exams students must pass, do not approximate the style or difficulty of college classes, Garvey said. CUNY freshmen are exempted from remedial courses if they score a 75 on the math and English Regents exams. But the tests focus on material that should be learned in middle school and the first years of high school, Garvey said. “They don’t align with the real needs of college courses,” he said. (more…)

A KIPP charter school in the Bronx. (By Leila Haddouche, via Flickr Creative Commons)

The next front in the tug of war between teachers unions and charter schools is about to commence, and this development will occur at the bargaining table. The game: UFT vs. KIPP.

There’s been no official word yet, but everyone involved in the saga between the politically powerful teachers union and the prominent charter school network is expecting that 16 KIPP teachers in Brooklyn will become official members of the city teachers union today.

UPDATE: It’s now official, confirmed by both the union and KIPP. Press releases from both parties are below. And here is the PERB decision.

David Levin, KIPP’s co-founder and the superintendent of New York City KIPP schools, told me this afternoon that he hopes negotiations will begin as soon as next week.

Teachers at the charter school, KIPP AMP, petitioned to form a union in January, but their pitch has to be accepted by the Public Employee Relations Board before the union becomes official. Reports had said a final decision would come yesterday, but both the union and KIPP officials were still waiting for word this morning. Now, all signs point to PERB sending the green light to the union today. (more…)

In order to learn more about charter school philanthropy and expenses, I needed to get copies of the annual financial audits that all charter schools are required to produce.  Charter schools send these audits to their authorizers.  For New York City schools, there are three authorizers: the NYC DOE, the State University of New York (SUNY), and the State Education Department (SED).

In this case, the NYC DOE has the good-government solution: all audits for DOE-authorized charter schools are available on the DOE website in PDF format.

SUNY and SED, on the other hand, do not have the audits available on their websites.  Luckily, the people I interacted with at the two organizations were professional and courteous.  They both gave the same advice: “You need to FOIL me.”  FOIL refers to New York State’s Freedom of Information Law.  As instructed, I sent an email requesting the documents, being careful to include the magic phrase “Freedom of Information Law”.  In both cases, after about a week and a half,  I received the documents.

SUNY gave me a link to a PDF file that I could temporarily access on their website.  SED, on the other hand, only has the audits in paper form, so they had to mail a copy to me.  Also, with SED, I had to pay 25 cents per page and they needed to receive a check before they could proceed.  I hope they use the funds towards the purchase of a scanner.

Two questions are raised by this experience:

1. Why don’t SUNY and SED simply put these files on their websites?

2. Why do SUNY and SED make people “FOIL them” for these documents?

For both institutions SED, it is policy to require FOIL requests for information that is not available on their website.  Apparently, it can be quite time-consuming to fulfill these requests, especially if the documents only exist in paper format.  The FOIL requirement can discourage some of these requests.  If people knew that a FOIL request is as simple as an email with the FOIL phrase included, they might not be discouraged.  One solution, of course, is for the organizations to put the files on their websites.  See question #1.

I will make all of these audits available online very soon.  My efforts, though, should not be necessary.

UPDATE:
I had a follow-up call with SUNY.  They pointed out three things:
1. I was the only person in at least the last three years to request copies of the financial audits.
2. SUNY is very proud of the extensive charter school reporting available on their website.
3. It is not SUNY policy to require FOIL requests for all information that is not available on their website.  Rather, in this case, they thought a FOIL request was the best approach.  (I corrected this in the original post.)

In my experience, SUNY’s online reporting is generally excellent.  (Check out their impressive website.) In the case of the financial audits, I think their reporting is lacking but the situation is easy to remedy.  I  hope they address this in the future.

• Governor Paterson says he doesn’t have a firm opinion about mayoral control in NYC. (Post)
• The Panel for Educational Policy was supposed to be a check on the mayor; it hasn’t been. (Times)
• Randi Weingarten is trying to bring back a bill calling for a tenure study commission, she says. (Post)
• A Manhattan Institute scholar says that reforming teacher pay is the key to better schools. (Post)
• The law that gives an edge to district kids in charter lotteries is causing logistical headaches. (Daily News)
• Parents in the Bronx say a new principal is out of control. (Riverdale Press)
• Study: Closing achievement gaps with other countries could net the U.S. $5 billion a day. (Times)
• Expanding charter schools could be politically tricky, despite high demand. (Wall Street Journal)
• In Chicago, a quarter of elementary schools are becoming year-round schools. (Chicago Sun-Times)

• Norm finds the latest installment in that giant study of NYC charter schools by Caroline Hoxby.
• Mayor Bloomberg said mayoral control will save schools, which could allow us to save democracy.
• Announcing the big report from McKinsey, Joel Klein said that tenure needs to be overhauled.
• Sharpton said that the new opponents of civil rights are “Professor James Crow, rather than Jim Crow.”
• Another take on the Supreme Court case about ELL’s: Is it money or is it better teaching that’s needed?
• Oklahoma “won’t have the fox guarding the hen house”: the accountability office is going independent.
• There’s a new documentary coming out about how hard it is to get into private nursery schools.