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. The Web site GerritsenBeach.net covered the event, where angry community members delivered a petition with more than 6,000 signatures to the DOE officials on hand, in detail, with lots of video, including the one posted above.

The Marine Park charter school skirmish cropped up later than most other charter school siting fights because the Hebrew Language Academy, which is the brainchild of philanthropist Michael Steinhardt, had at first said it would secure space on its own. But late last month, the school revealed that it had been unable to find a private location that could accommodate its 150 incoming students in the fall.

Opponents of the charter school plan argued that they had long lobbied the DOE to expand IS 278, which is currently at only about 70 percent capacity, to include high school grades with a performing arts focus. Even without the Hebrew Language Academy in the building, an expansion is not possible because the extra space in the building could not fit four grades that are similar in size to current middle school grades at IS 278, a zoned school, Meyer said.

But she said that the department would work to open a new school in the building for the fall of 2010. That school would likely be a small high school that accepts students through the citywide high school admissions program, she said. “We do hear that the community wants high school grades and we are committed to working with them,” Meyer said.

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.

Empire State Pride Agenda spokesman Josh Meltzer said his organization had approached Palmer about being “a third party validator.” “We wanted to make it very clear that some of the false misinformation campaigns that had gained traction in other states, would not gain traction here,” he said.

The National Organization for Marriage’s education ad:

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.

Zakiyah Ansari, a parent organizer with the Campaign for Better Schools, said that she had been invited by Sharpton’s National Action Network to appear on the Saturday morning rally. Ansari said Sharpton was responding to parents’ calls for more input on how their children are educated. “My sense is that he supports the parents’ need to have a meaningful voice,” she said.

A spokesman for the Campaign for Better Schools, Shom Shamapande, said there was a possibility Sharpton would make an announcement regarding education on air.

Update: this post has been updated to reflect the program’s postponement.

“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.

After the event, the mothers, who also included a District 13 activist and two members of the Parent Commission on School Governance, discussed what they could actually do, given their limited resources and short time frame, Lovett-Rivera told me. We can pray, she said they decided.

“We all felt very spiritually this is such a big fight for those of us who don’t have the armor of financial power and political clout,” Lovett-Rivera said.

She said she opposes mayoral control after witnessing the effects of the current administration on her family and community. Her son was shunted into a new small high school where he did not get the preparation or support he needed for college, she told me.

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.

Figure 1 below shows the distribution of experience for the 2,800 fifth-grade teachers who taught students in math in 2007-08.  Overall, about 7% of these teachers were in their first year of teaching in NYC.  But 27% of them were teaching fifth-grade math for the first time.  About 15% of these teachers were in their first or second years of teaching in NYC, but 47% of them were in their first or second years of teaching fifth-grade math.  On average, New York City has a highly-experienced fifth-grade teaching force, with well over 60% of the teachers having taught in NYC for at least five years.  But only 22% of these fifth-grade teachers have taught fifth-grade math for five or more years.

The story is similar for the distribution of fifth-grade teachers teaching English Language Arts in 2007-08.  Figure 2 below shows that about 29% of the fifth-grade teachers in 2007-08 were teaching ELA at the fifth-grade level for the first time in that year, and that 50% were in their first or second years of teaching fifth-grade ELA.  As was true in Figure 1, however, only about 15% of these teachers were in their first or second years of teaching in New York City.  Only 17% of the fifth-grade teachers teaching ELA in 2007-08 had five or more years of experience teaching fifth-grade reading.

Bottom line:  Overall teaching experience and experience teaching a particular subject at a particular grade level are not the same thing.  We need to better understand the forces that result in teachers shifting the subjects and grade levels they teach.

• 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)

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.

Duncan himself said on a visit to a Brooklyn charter school the day after he announced the Race to the Top program that he hopes to receive applications from New York. “I fully expect New York City and New York State to put together a great proposal,” Duncan said that day. “In many ways, you are already setting the standard.”

The new promise to deny funds to states with charter caps could mean those proposals aren’t as happily met by the federal government. Under lobbying pressure from the teachers union, the state legislature has capped the number of charter schools in New York at 200.

The promise also could be a political tactic to offer support to charter schools. Duncan’s words will surely boost the arguments of charter school supporters like Mayor Bloomberg who have called for lifting New York’s cap entirely.

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.

Kerci Marcello Stroud, a Teach For America New York City spokesperson, said that the organization was “specifically not guaranteeing that every single person would get a job.” “We’ve been talking really closely with the DOE,” she said. ” And from those talks, we think that we’ll be able to support that number of teachers.”

The e-mail also assures the New York City corps that TFA will provide them with financial assistance for 40 days, should the first of school come and go without them being hired.

Here’s the email:

May 8, 2009

Dear 2009 Corps Members,

I hope this message finds you well, in whatever part of the country (or world) you may be. My team and I are all so excited to meet you in June.

I am writing to share with you some news that may impact the placement timeline for many incoming corps members, and I know that those of you who just matriculated at the fourth deadline for this year may have heard some of this already on your placement calls this past week.

Update from New York City
On Wednesday, May 6, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced that, given the national financial crisis, there will be substantial cuts to next year’s school budgets. The Chancellor also announced that in an effort to absorb budget cuts to schools and avoid teacher lay-offs, the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) will implement hiring restrictions that limit the hiring of new teachers by district schools. At this time, principals can only fill vacancies with teachers who are currently employed by the NYCDOE.

There are limited exceptions for new teachers with licenses in “bilingual special education” (a dual license) and speech; neither excepted license area applies or will apply to current or new Teach For America corps members. As well, there are exceptions for new schools in their first, second, or third year, which may hire new teachers for up to half of their vacancies, and we will work to prioritize placing 2009 corps members in such positions. As budgets are finalized over the summer, the hiring restrictions will be lifted for subject areas and geographic districts where the need to fill vacancies is not being met by existing DOE employees. The primary implication of this policy is that new teachers, including new corps members, cannot be formally hired into any district school-level vacancy that does not fall under an exception unless and until the restrictions are lifted.

We have continued to work very closely with the NYCDOE and our charter partners to ensure we are making the appropriate decisions regarding the size of the incoming 2009 corps and license areas in which they are to be placed. Please note that public charter schools in New York City and State are considered independent employees and thus these hiring restrictions do not impact any charter schools.

Corps Size and Placement Timeline Implications
As a result of this new information, we are planning to reduce the incoming New York City corps size from our original plan of 350 to 330, down from 550 incoming corps members in the previous few years. Each of you have already been assigned toward this new number of 330 and thus have secured a spot in the New York City corps. 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.

As the implications of the new hiring guidelines become apparent in the coming weeks, we anticipate that the hiring timeline may be longer than expected, and that–as we saw last year for the first time–some 2009 New York City corps members may not be placed as of the first day of school. At the start of the current school year, about 30 New York City 2008 corps members were still unplaced. We worked aggressively and were able to place half of them within a week and all by mid-October.

Also, for the small number of you who have already secured placements in district schools, your placement associate will be in touch with you shortly to discuss whether or not your placement may change as a result of the new citywide hiring guidelines.

Please note that while the financial crisis is a national one, the implications for placement in New York City district schools are unique to the Teach For America · New York City region. As well, you should know that the New York City regional team is in close and constant communication and coordination with the New York City summer institute team and each of our university partners for the 2009-10 school year.

Financial and Housing Plans
Although we know that all of you reviewed and signed our Corps Member Requirements, Policies, and Procedures and are acquainted with our Assignment and Placement Policies section, we recognize that some of you may have additional questions about how a longer placement timeline might affect your financial planning as well as opportunities and timeline for finding housing.

In the event that any corps members are not placed by the first day of school, we are developing specific plans to provide Teach For America financial assistance to impacted corps members. In the coming weeks, we will be better poised to provide more specific information about this financial assistance. However, we can say now that Teach For America corps members who are not placed as of the first day of school will receive a grant equivalent to 90 percent of our average regional first-year teacher salary, including additional funds to procure an interim basic health insurance policy. Corps members qualifying for grant-based transitional financial assistance from Teach For America may receive a grant equivalent to up to 100 percent of the average regional first-year teacher salary. This financial assistance will extend up to 40 business days, or approximately two months, after the first day of school, though we do not expect any corps members to remain unplaced for that length of time.

Although we are doing everything we can to place you before the first day of school, we are sharing this information with you to reassure you that we continue to approach the placement season conservatively–in the best interests of our students and corps members–given the overall economic climate this year.

As far as housing is concerned, we continue to suggest waiting to secure housing until you have secured a placement. In the event that you need to secure housing before you have secured a placement, we recommend strongly that you choose a location near a subway or bus hub that will enable you to have reasonable access to most if not all of our placement schools. Our placement team is committed to supporting you in figuring out the best such locations.

Working Together to Rise to the Challenge
Lastly, as a follow up to this letter, we will host an optional conference call for any interested corps member on Thursday, May 14, 2009 at 6:30 p.m. EST. In order to join, dial (605) 475-4850, wait for the prompt, and then input 899006#. The purpose of this call is so that we can offer support in answering any additional questions you may have.

As we continue to work closely with the NYCDOE and other key decision makers, we will keep you informed of relevant updates.

Through this experience of joining the corps and signing on for a two-year commitment to teach in a low-income community during such challenging times, you are now part of a collective force of individuals committed to persevering against all obstacles in order to ensure that all children have an opportunity to attain an excellent education, regardless of the color of their skin or their parents’ incomes. Challenges like the budget situation the city is now facing hit our students and families the hardest and it is our responsibility to rise to these unforeseen circumstances in preparing to enter the classroom this fall.

That means staying incredibly focused on the things you can control: your efforts while preparing for institute, engaging fully with our placement team to secure and be prepared for interviews, staying connected to Teach For America and your fellow corps members through the bi-weekly Incoming Corps Member Digest, TFANYConnect, and ensuring that you meet all critical testing and fingerprinting, security clearance, and other deadlines and prerequisites.

On our end, know that we are here to support you through these challenges. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please reach out to your corps member placement associate, Jamie Meltzer (’04 New York City) at [redacted] or Jennifer Barnette (’01 Houston) at [redacted].

Warm Regards,

Jemina R. Bernard
Executive Director

Teach for America, the program that places new teachers in hard-to-staff public schools, is planning to send nearly a third of its new New York City teachers to charter schools this fall, up from just 3% in 2005, internal TFA projections show.

The shift to charter schools insulates the latest batch of Teach For America teachers from a new-teacher hiring freeze the city announced earlier this month. Charter schools are publicly funded but privately operated, so they aren’t subject to the freeze and can hire any certified teacher, whether she is already in the Department of Education system or not.

The move follows a downsizing in Teach For America’s pool to about 300 from 500 teachers last year. The city’s dismal budget picture led to the retraction.

Kerci Marcello Stroud, a TFA spokeswoman, called the shift toward placing more teachers in charter schools “a natural progression.” As the number of charter schools has grown, so has the number of TFA teachers encouraged to work in them, she said.

The shift also means that far fewer Teach For America teachers are being placed at schools run by the Department of Education. TFA plans to place 230 teachers in DOE schools this fall, less than half as many as in 2008.

TFA placed teachers in charter schools for the first time in 2005, when 17 out of 505 teachers went to schools not operated by the city Department of Education.

The other program that places new and mostly untrained teachers into the public school system, Teaching Fellows, is still pumping a larger number of people into the schools, but its projected number — about 700 — is also down since last year, by half. Teaching Fellows does not allow its teachers to find jobs in charter schools.

“Teaching Fellows is designed to send teachers to DOE schools, and that’s a pattern that will continue even in this new environment,” said Ann Forte, a DOE spokeswoman.

The teacher-blogger NYC Educator first reported the questions on his blog yesterday, relaying questions that were posed to an unnamed teacher in a phone call.

One of the most prescient questions on that list asks teachers when they’d like contract negotiations to end — before or after the 2009 mayoral election? The contract is set to expire in October, and the election is in November. Negotiating a contract before the election would mean working with Mayor Bloomberg for sure, rather than whoever wins the 2009 mayoral race. It could also offer a boost to the mayor’s re-election campaign, as happened in 2005.

Nailing down a contract before the 2009 election could also have an impact on the debate on mayoral control. Some have suggested that the union could, for instance, make a concession on its demanded checks and balances to the mayor’s power over schools now in exchange for help in the contract later.

Another question of interest: “How do you feel about Michael Mulgrew?” Mulgrew is the union’s vice president and chief operation officer and the heir apparent to president Randi Weingarten, who recently became president of the national teachers union in addition to the city chapter. It’s not known when Weingarten will decide to hand over the reins to Mulgrew, and the union’s polls always ask teachers how they feel about union officers.

• Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver says mayoral control talks in Albany are “evolving.” (NY1)
• Mayor Bloomberg praised Shelly Silver’s school plan and the effort in Albany. (Post)
• The Daily News says Silver is on the right track; the Post wants more details about what his position. 
• State lawmakers say Bloomberg’s leadership is making them think twice about mayoral control. (NY1)
• Jacob Gershman analyzes the politics around Silver’s moderate mayoral control position. (Post)
• The Queens school board appointee says the PEP should have more power. (Queens Tribune)

OTHER NEWS:

• Some principals say their budgets are dropping by even more than the amount the DOE warned. (Post)
• A teacher’s 5-year fight over an abuse charge shows problems in the teacher justice system.  (Times)
• ARIS for parents is now online. (GothamSchools, Post)
• Since the arrival of swine flu, school nurses have been busier than ever. (NY1)
• Some city kids are changing their college plans after getting too little financial aid. (Riverdale Press)
• About a dozen Los Angeles teachers have launched a hunger strike against layoffs. (L.A. Times)
• States are working on plans to keep high school graduates out of remedial college classes. (Times)
• Kids these days really like hugging each other; parents and teachers are baffled. (Times)
• The Green Dot-takeover school in Los Angeles, Locke High, is still lagging academically. (L.A. Times)

During a hearing this morning about the Department of Education’s proposed budget, finance committee chair David Weprin asked Klein what might happen to class sizes next year, when school budgets are cut by more than 5 percent, especially given that schools used $84 million to reduce class sizes this year yet the average class size went up for the first time in several years.

“I think they will increase, not dramatically,” Klein said, explaining that the expected decline in the size of the teaching force through attrition would likely cause class sizes to inch up. 

Education committee chair Robert Jackson asked Klein how watchdogs can make sure that state class size reduction money is being spent on its intended purpose if class sizes continue to increase.

Klein said the department will monitor how principals use the special funds, which flow to the city through a state program called Contracts for Excellence, and people who ask principals for an accounting should be able to get an appropriate answer. But he reminded Weprin and Jackson that even if all of the money is used appropriately, that might not offset other funding cuts in a particular school.

A school might hire two new teachers with Contracts for Excellence money, which would reduce class size in some grades, Klein said by way of example. But at the same time, the school’s tax levy funding might drop by so much that the principal would have to eliminate three teaching positions. The school would have spent all of the mandated money on class size reduction, but the total teaching staff would still have decreased, Klein said. Still, he added, classes would be smaller than if the school hadn’t gotten the class size reduction funds in the first place and began the next school year with five fewer teachers instead of one.

Klein’s explanation of why it’s so difficult for schools to reduce their average class size resembled the one given to Elizabeth by a DOE employee earlier this month.

Image from the DOE's Parent Link Web site

First it was principals, then it was teachers, and now parents are next in line to gain access to ARIS, the Department of Education’s data warehouse.

Each school will give parents passwords to log into the Parent Link section of ARIS sometime “between now and the end of the school year,” according to DOE spokesman Andy Jacob. Once logged in, parents will be able to monitor their child’s test scores.

The department is planning to hold a press conference tomorrow to debut Parent Link, ARIS’s previously missing puzzle piece, Jacob said. But the site is already up and running, and it appears that at least one school has given parents their usernames and temporary passwords: A commenter on Insideschools reports having received a password to access Parent Link — and finding that some of the information there was incorrect.

Principals and teachers have had access to ARIS for some time, but previous rollouts have not been without incident.

In a videotaped message promoting Parent Link, Mayor Bloomberg welcomes parents to the site as the camera pans over this relic of a question: “How is Nancy doing?” and footage of parents walking children to school.

Update (5/28): Jacob adds that the error reported by the Insideschools commenter was caught and fixed within 12 hours. “The ELA scores were correct. The issue was that the system also started displaying 2009 math scores, which don’t exist yet. Since the 2009 math scores don’t exist, it simply copied the 2008 math scores and called them 2009 scores.”

A spokesman for de Blasio said school officials alerted his office to the new bill of rights yesterday, the same day the document appeared on the department’s Web site. In a statement, de Blasio said he is encouraged by the expansion, but not satisfied.

The new version outlines a litany of specific rights for parents, including the right to receive their children’s full instructional schedule, the right to have meetings about their children’s educational record, and the right to communicate with teachers. The original bill of rights, which is also still published online, in English and a slate of other languages, was more vague, affording parents the right to things like “a free public school education” for their children and to “be actively involved in the education of their children.”

The new version does not include one of de Blasio’s recommendations, though: the right to attend a zoned school in their neighborhood. De Blasio called that omission “troubling.” His full statement is below the jump.

UPDATE: A spokeswoman for the department, Nicole Duignan, said school officials have actually been working on the expanded document for two years. She said the family engagement and advocacy office built it “based on input and experience from parents who wish to play an active role in their children’s education.”

“We always welcome ideas and suggestions from elected officials to promote and improve parent involvement in our schools,” Duignan said.

De Blasio’s statement:

“I commend the Department of Education (DOE) for working speedily and utilizing my proposal to improve their existing Parents’ Bill of Rights. While this is an important first step, the DOE continues to disregard some of the most critical aspects of the Parents’ Bill of Rights. The DOE’s decision not to include language that guarantees parents access to zoned schools or provides parents with much needed budget transparency is very troubling, and leads me to question DOE’s commitment in these and other fundamental areas. In order for public school parents to be true partners in education, the DOE must demonstrate its commitment to fully engaging parents by honoring the complete Parents’ Bill of Rights.”

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has for years been a proponent of paying some teachers more based on their performance, and he has made some headway in introducing merit pay in the city schools. But the policy has plenty of critics, from teachers who say merit pay divides them to statisticians who point simply to flaws in the measures on which pay calculations are based.

In the video above, University of Virginia psychology professor Dan Willingham gives six reasons in three minutes why paying teachers based on their students’ test scores isn’t statistically sound. But Willingham doesn’t totally rule out the prospect of paying better teachers more: “Merit pay can’t work until there’s a way to measure teacher performance that’s fair,” he concludes.