GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Mayor Bloomberg will meet with President Obama this afternoon at the Oval Office to talk about the achievement gap. The meeting, which also includes the Rev. Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House majority leader, adds to signs suggesting that Obama is taking the Education Equality Project group’s stance on how to improve public schools seriously.

A spokesman for Chancellor Joel Klein, David Cantor, said that the group will discuss “education reform, in particular how best to address the racial achievement gap.”

The Washington Post reported that Sharpton, who along with Klein is a co-founder of EEP, requested the meeting.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post incorrectly said that Klein attended the meeting at the Oval Office. He did not, though he did appear with the group later outside the White House.

UPDATE: Ben Smith at Politico’s take is that the meeting is “a way for the administration to signal openness to a range of voices on the topic” of education. Seems to me it’s just the opposite, because — believe it or not — at this point Sharpton, Bloomberg, and Gingrich are actually on the same page about education. (more…)

State school officials will announce the results of this year’s state English tests this morning, at 11 a.m. To watch the news conference live, either begin driving to Albany immediately or visit one of these Web sites, depending on which video player you have:

Windows Media

Real Player

Chancellor Joel Klein will give his interpretation of the city’s results at a separate press conference at Tweed Courthouse this afternoon, at 1 p.m. Come back here for the latest intelligence.

And, while you’re waiting, consider obtaining a big fat grain of salt, bigger yet given that it’s an election year, and political opponents of Mayor Bloomberg’s are zeroing in on his claims of improved student performance. Last year, New York City scores shot up to historic highs, and Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Klein said the improvements were evidence that they are succeeding at turning around the public schools.

But testing experts said the increased scores on state tests didn’t necessarily mean that students were learning more than students in the past. The experts pointed to relatively smaller gains — and in some cases, no gains at all — on the national benchmark test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, plus a phenomenon called “score inflation,” in which practices like test prep make test scores rise faster than actual learning.

• The DOE has closed teacher hiring from outside the system. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News, Post)
• Parents rallied against wait lists at some kindergartens. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News, NY1)
• In a column, Chancellor Klein explains that equity and transparency led to the K wait lists. (The Villager)
• A Harlem politician said mayoral control is a failure. Harlem schools also appear to be improving. (Post)
• Steve Sanders, the architect of the mayoral control law, says the law should mostly stay. (Post)
• The Post says none of the organizations lobbying Albany to change mayoral control are not legit.
• A Queens high school has opened a student-run restaurant on campus. (Daily News)
• Obama says D.C. should grandfather out children who currently get school vouchers. (Washington Post)
• In Los Angeles, Ramon Cortines says he would love to fire every teacher in the reserve pool. (L.A. Times)

• The New Yorker reports on a possible national effort with Green Dot, Arne Duncan, and Randi Weingarten.
• Here’s how to apply for a grant from the American Federation of Teachers’ innovation fund.
• Peter Murphy says it’s hard for charter schools to cover both the educational and political worlds.
• Beth Fertig has more stories from parents whose children are on the kindergarten wait lists.
• There are rubber room clones in Los Angeles, and the LA Times is on the case.
• Here’s a NY Times reporter’s number, if you have a juicy credit recovery story. (Here’s our e-mail.)
• Helen highlights Jennifer Jennings’ analysis of G&T data, plucked from our comments section.
• A selection from last year’s AP Calculus test, in honor of this year’s. Some rigor lives.
• For Teacher Appreciation Day, a teacher gets an awkward drop-in and a sticker.
• Paul Tough highlights Geoff Canada’s advice to Obama on the “promise neighborhoods.”
• An effort to get teachers to specialize in elementary-school math.
• School Chief Learning Officer should be a new position, says Will Richardson.

Randi Weingarten is hoping that the hiring freeze will help teachers in the group known as the Absent Teacher Reserve. (GothamSchools)

Teachers union president Randi Weingarten is trumpeting the teacher hiring freeze announced today as a victory for teachers who have been sitting on the city payroll but without actual teaching jobs, the group known as the Absent Teacher Reserve pool.

The freeze also marks a victory for her in a long-standing dispute with the Bloomberg administration over what to do with teachers who find no placement in the city’s newly free-flowing teacher market, which for the first time requires that both principals and teachers have a say in which teachers are assigned to which schools. While the Bloomberg administration has pushed for letting go teachers who don’t find placements, the union has insisted on full job security, even for teachers who spend several years without finding a placement.

Today’s announcement ensures not only job security, but actual positions at schools. Now, when principals need to fill an opening, they can turn only to teachers in the pool, and not to teachers from one of the alternative certification programs, Teach for America and Teaching Fellows, that serve the city.

Weingarten said that she expects that “virtually all” members of the ATR pool will be helped by the freeze. “The principal still has the right to choose,” she said in a telephone interview today. “But they’re choosing from a pool of experienced people who have performed well in the New York City system.”

A schools official, Photeine Anagnostopoulos, told reporters today that the department’s new hiring rules do not represent a win for the union or a departure from the market principles that the 2005 teachers’ contract instilled. “It is very different,” Anagnastopoulous said. “We are not force-placing anyone.” Force-placing occurred in the past, when a teacher could be placed at a school against both her preference and the preference of the principal. (more…)

Parents and elected officials gathered at City Hall today to protest crowding in Manhattan that has led to long waiting lists for public school kindergartens. (GothamSchools Flickr)

A crowd of shell-shocked parents gathered outside City Hall this afternoon, angry that the Department of Education hasn’t found seats for the hundreds of rising kindergarten students who have been placed on waiting lists for next year at their local public schools.

The waiting lists, which include 273 names in just two Manhattan districts, mean that families in baby- and building-boom areas like the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, and Greenwich Village could find themselves unable to secure a spot at their neighborhood school’s kindergarten.

The lists attracted extra attention yesterday after news leaked that the city was considering closing or relocating prekindergarten classes at two Greenwich Village elementary schools, PS 3 and PS 41, in order to make room for kindergartners.

Parents at the rally said they felt confused and powerless. “As far as I can tell, I don’t have a Plan B — other than home school or moving to Jersey,” said Jay Douglas, whose 4-year-old son is number 42 on a waiting list for PS 187 in Washington Heights.

Elected officials joined the parents at City Hall today to criticize city officials for not planning ahead to meet the demand for spots in public schools. Scott Stringer, Manhattan’s borough president, said the DOE is “closing its eyes” to a widespread capacity problem, warning that taxpaying parents will pack up and move, taking their kids and tax dollars somewhere else if they can’t enroll in their local public school. (more…)

With the deadline for next year’s city budget looming, elected officials are eyeing early-childhood centers slated to be cut under Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget as a key reduction to reverse. More than a dozen officials, including two mayoral candidates and three out of five borough presidents, decried the possible cuts today at a City Hall rally alongside hundreds of parents and workers associated with the centers.

The proposal would cut the budgets of early-childhood programs and replace kindergarten programs currently operated outside of the school system with Department of Education kindergarten classes. The city says that moving the kindergartens is necessary in order to save the Administration for Children’s Services $15 million.

But parents today said that the current programs cover the burden of child-care in a way that schools, which end at 3 p.m. and are shuttered on holidays, cannot. The programs at risk of being shut are operated out of ACS, the city’s social services arm for children, as part of larger daycare operations. Head Start, the early childhood program, is also slated to see its budget slashed by 3 percent.

Desiree Jean-Mary said she is upset that her son, Joshua, who attends a Head Start program in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, might not be able to continue there next year when he enters kindergarten. Right now, Jean-Mary, who has two other children, picks Joshua up at 5 p.m. after her job as a home health aide is over for the day. “It would be really hard if I had to find somewhere else for him to go — I don’t want that,” she said. (more…)

Responding to shrinking budgets and rising costs, the Department of Education is putting in place what amounts to a systemwide teacher hiring freeze, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein informed principals today.

Individual schools will still be able to use their budgets to add new teachers if they are able, but the DOE is planning to cut school budgets so far that many schools will have to shed teachers, DOE officials revealed. And any new hires, to replace teachers who leave, will have to come from teachers who are already in the system, according to new rules the department is implementing.

Klein informed principals about the hiring restrictions, which the department says should allow it to avoid actually laying off teachers, this morning during a Webcast and just now in a memo, which is included at the end of this post. The department is planning to give principals more detailed information about their schools’ budgets during the week of May 18.

Speaking to reporters today, a top DOE official, Photeine Anagnostopoulos, said she could not predict how many schools would need to eliminate teachers but said that a “high percentage” might be able to cut their budgets sufficiently by reducing non-teaching staff and axing programs. She said “the goal” for the department is for all schools to make the same percentage cut to their budgets. That size of that cut has not yet been finalized, she said, adding that principals would ultimately have discretion about how to cut their own budgets.

The new restrictions require principals to fill vacancies created by attrition by picking up current teachers who are either in a classroom elsewhere in the city or in the existing pool of excessed teachers, which already includes about 1,100 teachers. (more…)

Last week, in a post that prompted a reader to complain that I haven’t mastered English, I sought to explain why we should be skeptical of claims about the effects of programs when those effects are expressed in terms of months or years of learning.  The point of reference was the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, a controversial federally-funded program providing vouchers worth up to $7,500 for children in the DC Public Schools to attend private schools.  Characteristic of the reporting was the Wall Street Journal‘s claim that “Children attending private schools with the aid of the scholarships are reading nearly a half-grade ahead of their peers who did not receive vouchers.”

I expressed concern that the quantity “a half-grade ahead” is a function of how sensitive a test is to changes over time in performance;  a given effect will look bigger if the amount of growth on the test from one year to the next is small than if the amount of annual growth is large. 

Today I want to demonstrate another oddity that follows from using this approach.  Before we begin, think about this question:  What percentage of fourth-graders in a state or district do you think are performing at the level of the average seventh-grader in that state or district?  Put differently, what percentage of fourth-graders do you think are performing three years above grade level? (more…)

The chart plots a dot for every school that received state money to create new classrooms. The dot represents the amount of money the school received, and the amount that the school's average class size changed. (Data via the Department of Education)

We’ve already reported that average class sizes citywide did not decline last year, despite an infusion of money meant to reduce them. New data suggest the same relationship happens at the school level: Even schools that reported spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on class-size reduction efforts, such as creating new classrooms, did not necessarily see a drop in average class sizes.

Rather, while some schools that reported investing in new classrooms did end up reducing class sizes on average, others actually saw their average class size go up. The data, provided by the Department of Education following a tug-of-war that you might recall, are summarized in the graph above and in a searchable file available here.

The major challenge, according to the schools official who compiled the data, Tania Shinkawa, is not that principals didn’t spend the money as they were supposed to, but that even that pot of money didn’t guarantee that they could lower class sizes across the board.

Take Bronx elementary school PS 57, which reported that it spent $190,000 to open new classes. Let’s be generous and say that the money could pay for three additional teachers. That could go a long way toward reducing class sizes in three grade levels. But would it necessarily lower the entire school’s average class size?

No. (more…)