GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Chaz wonders whether principals can find a way around using ATRs to plug openings.
• Norm Scott, union troublemaker, says Randi Weingarten is on a “national sellout tour.”
• Here’s a write-up of the Queens charter school myth-busting session we previewed.
• An internal NEA e-mail, reported by Andrew Rotherham, marshals union officials against TFA.
• Sawchuck: Why fight a group your own members are part of? Antonucci has an answer.
• Three K-12 stimulus projects touted by VP Joe Biden reflect job protection, not reform, says Smarick.
• Geoffrey Canada is taking his Harlem Children’s Zone message around the country.
• A report suggests that preschool enrollment is lagging in poor Chicago neighborhoods.
• At the National Press Club, Arne Duncan answered concerns about stimulus funds.
• Ed Week reports that educators are drowning in data — so much that they can’t use it.
• At Insideschools, Judy Baum summarizes the mayoral control debate, plus some good context.

Just days after a massive protest against a proposed charter school siting at a Brooklyn middle school, the charter school under contention withdrew its request for public space today.

The Hebrew Language Academy Charter School, which the Department of Education had proposed siting inside a middle school in Marine Park, Brooklyn, told school officials today that it no longer wants to be housed in a public school building, DOE spokeswoman Melody Meyer told me. That means that the location under contention, IS 278, is off the table, and the charter school will not be considered for space in any other DOE building, Meyer said.

The news is certain to be well received at IS 278, where a meeting on Tuesday about the proposed charter school drew hundreds of protesters, including Comptroller William Thompson, City Council member Lew Fidler, and Congressman Anthony Weiner. (more…)

An issue that dominated California’s Prop 8 battles is reappearing in New York: whether legalizing gay marriage will have an effect on what children are taught in schools.

In an ad campaign by the Empire State Pride Agenda, a pro-gay marriage group, State Deputy Secretary for Education Duffy Palmer assures people that should marriage equality legislation pass, New York teachers would not be forced to teach children about gay marriage.

A group that opposes gay marriage legislation around the country, the National Organization for Marriage, taunted California voters last November with the idea that children could be taught to embrace gay marriage. In one televised ad, a girl arrives home from school and greets her mother with the news that, according to her teacher, boys can marry boys and girls can marry girls.

The Empire State Pride Agenda predicted that similar ads would appear in New York, and they were right — the National Organization for Marriage released their ads yesterday. The Palmer ad, which was designed to preemptively combat the National Organization for Marriage’s ad campaign, was released in early May and is online-only. In it, Palmer, a former Empire State Pride Agenda board co-chair, tells parents that marriage of any sort has never been, and will never be, a part of New York State’s curriculum. (more…)

Rev. Al Sharpton invited one of the strongest opponents of mayoral control onto his live radio broadcast tomorrow morning.

This is not the first time the reverend has publicly distanced himself from Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s support for mayoral control. In April, at a conference for their shared group, the Education Equality Project, Sharpton ceded the floor to Assemblyman Charles Barron, who called for ending mayoral control of the schools. (Barron also called for Mayor Bloomberg to fire Klein.) Sharpton said he invited Barron because he wants the Education Equality Project to “hear all views.”

The appearance was postponed late this afternoon in light of the recent police shooting. Instead, Sharpton will devote his radio broadcast to a vigil for the slain officer and will address mayoral control at a later date. (more…)

A group of New York City mothers are appealing to divine intervention to stop the renewal of mayoral control, with a daylong fast that starts a minute before midnight tonight.

“I am hoping that the legislators in Albany, if they don’t have direct knowledge of how bad things are for our children, that they will be influenced by the hand of the Lord on their heads,” said Benita Lovett-Rivera, one of the event’s organizers.

From tonight until 8:19 p.m. tomorrow — the official sunset — opponents of mayoral control citywide will abstain from eating and drinking. At 7 p.m. they will gather in small groups for “fervent” prayer and to sing the protest song “We Shall Overcome,” Lovett-Rivera said. She told me she has heard from nearly a thousand people who said they would participate.

The fast was the brainchild of a small group of mothers who attended a recent town hall meeting about mayoral control in Brooklyn (that Elizabeth moderated), where Major Owens, the former longtime congressman from Brooklyn, said he wished opponents of mayoral control would mobilize to stop the school governance law from being renewed, rather than just hold forums about it. (more…)

A few years ago, after more than 20 years of full-time college teaching, I taught a course on survey research methods for the first time.  Was I a novice teacher?  Not at all, from the standpoint of having taught well over a thousand students and around 75 courses over that period.  Yes, certainly, in the sense that I was teaching this subject matter at this level for the very first time.  Some of what I had learned from my teaching experience, such as how to organize a class, or assess student learning—what we might call general pedagogical knowledge—would readily transfer to this new teaching setting.  And I felt that I knew the subject matter of the course quite well.  But I was still a novice in discerning which course topics students might struggle with, or what the best way to present a particular topic might be—what Lee Shulman and others have called “pedagogical content knowledge.”  The next time I taught the course, I felt that the experience gleaned from the first time around gave me much more insight into how to sequence the material, which topics needed additional time to master, and when an informal explanation was more useful than a technical one.

If my teaching experience at the time I first taught this class were being gauged by administrative records, or a paper-and-pencil survey, it’s very likely that I would have been recorded as having more than 20 years of experience.  And yet I was a novice at teaching this subject at this level of schooling.  We might get a different picture of the distribution of teaching experience in a population of teachers if we looked at how much experience a teacher has teaching a particular subject—e.g., math, or reading—at a particular grade level—e.g., second grade, or sixth grade. 

There’s some recent evidence on this in the technical report for the Teacher Data Initiative, the NYC Department of Education’s effort to generate a value-added measure for individual teachers’ contributions to their students’ performance on the state math and ELA exams.  The technical report shows the distribution of years of teaching overall for fifth-grade teachers in New York City, as well as the distribution of the number of years of experience teaching math at the fifth-grade level and reading at the fifth-grade level.  I wouldn’t place too much stock in the precise numbers for experience teaching a particular subject at the fifth-grade level, as they were produced specifically for the Teacher Data Initiative from teacher course-assignment data from 2000-01 to 2007-08, and these course-assignment data are a work in progress.  In contrast, the overall years of teaching experience are from the DOE’s human resources records.  There are experience data for 95% of the teachers. (more…)

From New York City:

• Democratic lawmakers are pushing Shelly Silver to impose fixed terms for school board members. (Post)
• Downtown Express, a paper from Silver’s Manhattan district, says it hopes he resists the pressure.
• A top Democratic state senator has a plan that would leave the PEP unchanged. (Daily News)
• A hearing held by a Queens state senator last week showed ire with mayoral control. (Queens Chronicle)
• Mayor Bloomberg’s education numbers could hurt his bid for a third term, says Errol Louis. (Daily News)
• A teacher at a middle school (whose principal left under fire) allegedly had sex with a student. (Post)
• Six more city schools are closing because of spikes in flu-like symptoms among students. (Post)
• ARIS Parent Link, whose launch GothamSchools first reported, cost the city $900,000. (Times, NY1)
• The city announced it would reopen a closed Upper East Side school to meet demand for seats. (Post)
• Budget cuts are taking a major toll on after school programs. (Daily News)
• The Post says the reason the UFT’s charter schools aren’t the best is that they are union-run. (Post)
• Parents in Brooklyn are angry that a transfer school could move into their school building. (Daily News)

And beyond:

• New Jersey’s highest court backed a school funding formula that doesn’t favor poor schools. (Times)
• In Los Angeles, budget cuts mean an end to virtually all summer school programs. (L.A. Times)
• Arne Duncan says states should lift their charter caps if they want stimulus money. (GothamSchools, AP)
• More middle-class white families are choosing to homeschool their kids. (USA Today)
• Jay Mathews problematizes the preschool-for-all debate. (Washington Post)

• The Campaign for Better Schools finally has a slick Web site, featuring its supporters in Albany.
• Hundreds of people, including Comptroller Thompson, protested against a Brooklyn charter school siting.
• Peter Goodman says Albany’s mayoral control debate is a lesson in transparency.
• A new Web site, BetterLesson.org, aims to be a social network for lesson plans. (Via Russo)
• Words of encouragement for parents who can’t get past the angst on UrbanBaby.com.
• The city says it has nailed down a deal to reestablish an elementary school on the Upper East Side.
• What happens when a teacher asks his students if they like the subject they’re about to have a test in.
• In D.C., education department staffers aren’t happy, but Arne Duncan is on the job.
• An international comparison shows that boys do better than girls in science worldwide.
• Why are education types so obsessed with change, a teacher asks?
• Patrick Sullivan posted Chancellor Klein’s testimony from Wednesday’s City Council hearing.
• A Tilden High School teacher has a biting take on the DOE’s school closing practices.
• How school reform stopped being grassroots and became the Education Equality Project, in the Nation.

There’s another round of federal stimulus dollars that local school districts can hope for, but it may be out of reach for New York schools. That’s because the state has a law Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says could jeopardize applications for the funds: a cap on the number of charter schools educators are allowed to create.

Duncan told Congress last week that, in awarding a new pot of stimulus funds meant to encourage innovation, he will give preference to states without charter school caps. He said he would also give preference to states with caps that agree to lift them.

The pot includes $5 billion to be given through a competitive grant process known as the “Race to The Top.” Chancellor Joel Klein has indicated that he wants to apply for Race to the Top funds to expand innovations such as the citywide data system and the bonus program for schools whose students show improvement on test scores. (more…)

Teach for America is reassuring its 2009 corps members assigned to New York City public schools that they’ll likely have spots come September — despite a hiring freeze that prohibits most Department of Education principals from hiring new teachers.

The assurances came in an e-mail message to people who were hired to join schools via Teach For America in September. “Despite some of the uncertainty that exists currently across the city, the NYCDOE and our charter partners continue to provide us with enough evidence to suggest that placing 230 corps members in district schools, and the remaining 100 in charter schools, will be possible,” Jemina Bernard, the executive director of Teach For America’s New York City branch, wrote in the e-mail.

The hiring freeze, announced earlier this month, prohibits principals at district schools that have operated for more than three years from filling vacancies with new teachers. A tight budget situation has already inspired Teach For America to scale down the number of people it recruited to work in New York City, and Teach For America is now sending more of its corps members to city charter schools, which are exempt from the hiring freeze.

Bernard’s e-mail message explains exceptions to the freeze, and it tells prospective teachers that the majority of them cannot be hired “unless and until the restrictions are lifted.”

The Teach For America corps member who sent the message to me said many corps members were calmed by the note. “There’s no evidence to suggest that we can’t hold them to their word,” the corps member said. “If they were going to screw this up, they would know by now.” But the email’s sender was skeptical and thought Teach For America was being overly optimistic. (more…)