GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Two New York City-based charter school networks, Uncommon Schools and Eva Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network, are splitting $2.5 million in grants meant to help them expand in size speedily. The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation doled out the money and made its announcement today.

The full press release is below. The most interesting part that I see is the disclosure that the Uncommon Schools network plans to expand to operate 33 schools by 2014, 20 of them in New York City. The network now has nine charter schools in the city, by my count.

The Success network’s plan, which has been reported before, is to expand its current crop of four schools to 40 in the next 10 years.

Only Uncommon Schools is said to be planning to use the money to invest in facilities.

The full press release: (more…)

I have a story in this week’s Village Voice about the fight over how to improve struggling public schools. Should the schools be rescued from the inside or replaced?

I focus on P.S. 194 in Harlem, which school officials favor replacing with the fledgling Harlem Success Academy 2. Both the principal at HSA 2, Jim Manly, and the principal at P.S. 194, Charyn Koppelson Cleary, are trying to give Harlem’s children a radically different experience of school. Yet they have very different tools to work with.

Cleary’s world:

Before the school year began, staffers recall, she gathered her whole faculty, from the teachers to the security officer to the secretary, in what she called a “circle of change.” Each person talked about what needed changing at the school. “The good news,” Cleary told them, according to people who were there, “is that 94 or 95 percent of the stuff you guys are talking about, we can change.”

In some ways, Cleary was constrained in her efforts. She could not hire a staff of her own, since the bulk of the teachers were inherited from the school’s previous years. She could not ask the custodian to repaint the entire building, since his contract only permitted a certain percentage. But she did the best she could, asking for the neediest rooms to get fresh paint and finagling a handful of other educators she trusted onto the payroll.

She also only had last three months to prepare for her turnaround: She began the job last July.

Now, here’s Manly’s world: (more…)

Elizabeth Green’s story, “Teachers union sent scripted questions to City Council members”, may serve as a wake-up call. A friend called me and shouted “You’ve got to be kidding me!” about eight times. He got the wake-up call.

Others active in public education are surprised that people are surprised. That should be a wake-up call too. Perhaps this soft corruption exists in part because of a lack of public awareness. Perhaps if we better educate people about “how things work” (as Elizabeth subtitles her story), we will get better political outcomes.

All special interest groups use money and pressure to influence the political process. We hope that their methods don’t cross the line, but different people draw that line in very different places. Instead of changing human nature, here are four mechanisms to change government that might decrease the effects of inappropriate interest group influence:

1. Increase government transparency. We can’t oversee what we can’t see.

2. Simplify the role of government. We can’t oversee what we can’t understand.

3. Reduce the role of government. The greater the role of government, the greater incentive for inappropriate interest group influence.

4. Allow for private competition to serve as a check on government corruption. When the government is a monopoly provider, there is no competitive check on the inefficiency caused by interest group influence.

Union president Randi Weingarten said that she is going to “make some changes in the union” to correct the cue-card lobbying that happened at Monday’s City Council hearing, which she called inappropriate. Weingarten made the comments on Fox 5′s Good Day New York. (Here’s where you can view our slideshow of exactly what the cards the union sent to council members said.)

Yet despite her mea culpa, Weingarten defended the union’s right to help elected officials prepare for hearings:

You do your job as advocates — and we are fierce advocates — when you do everything you can to make sure that people are prepared. That’s your job. But you don’t do something that creates the appearance of impropriety.

I wrote to some union officials asking what exactly will change in the union’s lobbying practice, which they have argued is not the way they usually do business. I haven’t heard back.

The Daily News’ Liz Benjamin reported on the video earlier today. She also, generously, and, unfortunately, against convention, acknowledged that we reported this story first. Thanks, Liz!

“Talking pointgate,” Day 3:

• Look who else picked up GothamSchools’ UFT-to-City Council question-card story! (NY1, AP)
• The City Council members who got question cards have also received union donations. (Daily News)
• The UFT says it won’t use the tactic again. (Post)
• A Post columnist says the incident shows that the City Council is a “wholly owned subsidiary” of the UFT.

And the news:

• General Electric gave the DOE $13 million for middle school improvement. (NY1)
• The Bloomberg campaign is advertising in parent newsletters for paid high school interns. (Daily News)
• The DOE sent parents a spring-break letter reminding them to serve their kids skim milk. (Post)
• The mayor is threatening to cut agency budgets more if unions don’t make concessions. (Daily News)
• More than 400 families applied for 37 spots at a Fort Greene charter school. (Brooklyn Paper, The Local)
• The Times calls on Arne Duncan to “hold the line” on his reforms when doling out stimulus money.
• The Columbia Spectator takes a look at how mental health issues are taught in the city schools.
• A program that uses retirees as tutors has paid off for kids, a study shows. (Christian Science Monitor)
• The D.C. public schools are promoting themselves with radio, TV, and online ads. (Washington Post)
• Three states are planning to standardize what’s taught in their state college classes. (Times)

• The UFT official who once showed charter schools were under-funded thinks equity is now near.
• Union activist Norm Scott likes the questions that were on the cue cards.
• Rotherham says that “regulatory capture in education is hardly news.”
• In a book review, Tom Toch says the challenge of school improvement is in scaling up.
• A push for “career and technical education,” the next-generation vocational model.
• Flagging the importance of training, not just recruiting, excellent teachers.
• “Please don’t throw any shoes at me,” Arne Duncan told the national school board association.
• Could it be that Randi Weingarten and Michelle Rhee agree on how to evaluate teachers?

Speaking of the School Support Organization run by the City University of New York, which netted the top rating in the Department of Education’s comparison of SSO performance, I have an article in this week’s Village Voice about the evolving nature of high school-college partnerships in the city.

The thrust of the story is that ballooning enrollment at CUNY colleges — the system is set to top a quarter of a million students this fall for the first time — is making it harder for the colleges to provide space and other resources to DOE schools. But the CUNY-run SSO is guaranteeing a deep relationship for at least the 13 schools that chose to partner with it. And rather than stewing about budget cuts and other constraints, the CUNY official in charge of the SSO, Cass Conrad, is thinking proactively about how more DOE schools might collaborate with CUNY colleges in the future. From my article:

For schools that do want to maintain a physical relationship in the face of CUNY’s system-wide space crunch, there might be other approaches to integrating campuses beyond simply busing students, says Conrad, who also heads the professional development network. “We’re hoping that some of the schools will develop the technology that will help them connect,” she says.

One thing that went under the radar during the nonstop news cycle of the last few weeks is a sizable data dump from the Department of Education, which for the first time released statistical reports about the 11 organizations that support the city’s schools.

The reports went online last week to inaugurate the period when schools can choose which organization they want to affiliate with. The organizations, called School Support Organizations, or SSOs, have provided support services to individual schools for the last two years in place of the traditional school-district bureaucracy. This is the first time that the DOE has allowed schools to change the affiliation they originally selected back in 2007.

The new reports include a chart (above) comparing the SSOs according to their schools’ progress report scores, quality review evaluations, and principal satisfaction survey results. The result is the public evaluation that Eric Nadelstern, the DOE’s chief schools officer who formerly ran the Empowerment organization, said back in January was being cooked up the department’s accountability office. The comparison, which takes into account school data from the 2007-2008 school year, shows that the SSO run by the City University of New York did the best, followed closely by the Empowerment organization.

The reports are available on the DOE’s Web site only in PDF format, and there is a different one for each organization. A DOE spokeswoman told me that the department had not made available a database compiling the data, so I went ahead and made one, available here or after the jump. I also went one step further and added some calculations of my own, based on the DOE’s data: The percent change in progress report and quality review scores from 2007 to 2008.

Among my first impressions: Schools either improved their internal operations significantly between 2007 and 2008, or else they figured out how to look like they had improved, because the percentage of schools receiving top ratings on their Quality Reviews jumped in every organization.

If you have more statistics knowhow than I do and some extra time on your hands (like during this school vacation), take a look and note what you see. Leave your observations in the comments. (more…)

Today's New York Post includes two stories about the story GothamSchools first broke on the UFT's lobbying of City Council members.

The story I broke yesterday morning about the United Federation of Teachers sending City Council members pre-scripted questions on charter schools is now filling the pages of the New York Post and the Daily News.

As Philissa pointed out in the morning roundup today, each paper (A) covered the story and (B) editorialized about the shameless things it says about the teachers union. They both also (C) did not give credit to GothamSchools for breaking the story, despite happily quoting the card text that only I obtained.

C’est la vie.

The important thing, of course, is to keep our eyes on the ball. One take-away here is pretty obvious. The teachers union peddles its influence in pretty clever ways!

Equally important, I think, is another point that shouldn’t get lost in this tangle. That’s the fact that, on the question of charter schools, the union is walking an astoundingly precarious tightrope. (more…)

• The Post and Daily News pick up on GothamSchools’ scoop about the UFT’s City Council cue cards.
• Both papers say the cards show that the union cares only about politics, not kids. (Post, Daily News)
• A Queens principal is under investigation for registering out-of-zone kids illegally. (Post)
• The New York Times awarded scholarships to seniors who triumphed in tough circumstances. (Times)
• Last night was “Super Tuesday” for charter school lotteries. (Daily News)
• State are hoping stimulus money will jump start their stalled prekindergarten expansions. (Times)
• Arne Duncan thinks kids should be in school 11 months a year. (AP)
• Obama’s education rhetoric isn’t far from President Bush’s. (Education Week)
• The biggest back of double dutch in the city is thrilled that it’s now an official school sport. (Daily News)
• Catholic school teachers say their schools are trying to break up their union. (Staten Island Advance)
• In Chicago, a new charter school where students learn from their computer at home. (Tribune)
• Some teachers are getting explicit instruction in how to handle disruptive behavior. (Wall Street Journal)