GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• State pols told Chancellor Klein yesterday they want to restrict mayoral control. (Times, Daily News, Post)
• Parents are rallying at City Hall today against widespread kindergarten wait lists. (Times, Post, WNYC)
• A proposal would give the Board of Regents more power over charter school authorization. (Post)
• The head of a youth music group was found to have had an illicit relationship with a member. (NY1)
• Arne Duncan says he will seek public input as feds set out to revise No Child Left Behind. (USA Today)
• Partnerships between high schools and colleges let some students advance early. (Washington Post)

• The federal government told school districts not to panic and close their doors because of swine flu. 
• Insideschools has details on how the DOE expects kindergarten waiting lists to disappear.
• One way, Insideschools reports, is by eliminating prekindergarten classes at overcrowded schools. 
• Robert Pondiscio ponders a tongue-in-cheek proposal for schools to vote teachers out each year.
• Betsy Gotbaum sent a copy of her school governance commission’s book to Arne Duncan. 
• The DOE says students do better when their school is closing. Michelle Rhee doesn’t agree.
• A teacher who is currently in the rubber room describes the dismal mood in reassignment centers.
• Guestblogging at Eduwonk, Mike Goldstein describes with few words his visit to KIPP Infinity in Harlem.
• A teacher writes that she just can’t focus on what her students need right now.
• The NYC Student Union, a group of active HS students, is planning middle school workshops.
• In Baltimore, the city’s teacher of the year had only 12 competitors. Sara Neufeld asks why.
• A new Ask Judy column focuses on an often overlooked issue: How to make schools nice places to be.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver

In the part of the city represented in Albany by the man who helped give control of the city schools to Mayor Bloomberg, both community boards are asking lawmakers to take some of that power away.

Community Board 1, one of two boards in Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s downtown Manhattan district, passed a set of resolutions last Tuesday that advise lawmakers to alter mayoral control in the city dramatically. In addition to calling on lawmakers to empower district parent councils and place checks on the mayor’s authority, CB 1 endorsed the recommendations put forth in March by the Parent Commission on School Governance. The Parent Commission, which draws its members from across the city, is calling on state lawmakers to slash the number of mayoral appointees to the city school board and shift more power to parents.

CB1′s set of resolutions got a couple of press mentions last week, at the same time as another community board resolution against the current form of mayoral control slipped under the radar. Members of Community Board 3, which covers Chinatown and the Lower East Side, voted unanimously (with one abstention) to endorse the Parent Commission’s recommendations. 

Together, CB 1 and CB 3 make up the entirety of Silver’s 64th Assembly District. With just eight weeks until state lawmakers’ deadline to decide what to do about mayoral control, the resolutions place Silver in the difficult position of having brokered the deal that gave Bloomberg control over the schools but representing politically engaged constituents who wish he hadn’t. (more…)

Assemblyman James Brennan

A state lawmaker who has vocally opposed Mayor Bloomberg’s control of city schools announced today that he plans to introduce a bill laying out an alternative governing structure for school system. Assemblyman James Brennan wants New York City’s school governance structure to look more like that of Boston, where mayoral control faces built-in “checks and balances,” his office announced today.

Under Brennan’s proposal, which the Post first reported last week, the city’s Board of Education, currently known as the Panel for Educational Policy, would retain its balance of seven mayoral appointees and one appointee each from the five borough presidents. But the mayor’s appointees would have to come from a pool of 14 names nominated by a 13-person panel representing a wide range of constituencies, including parents, teachers, administrators, the business community, and others. The mayor would also be allowed to appoint members of the nominating committee.

The complicated nominating system resembles the one proposed in March by Comptroller William Thompson, who is running for mayor.

Brennan’s bill is likely to end up being largely symbolic, even as the deadline for state lawmakers to decide the fate of mayoral control is now just eight weeks away, according to Peter Goodman, a longtime United Federation of Teachers member who worked on the UFT’s proposal for revamping mayoral control. (more…)

A child at play. Photo by admiretime, via Flickr

An Upper West Side mom and education researcher is arguing that her son and his classmates need an active, outdoor recess — even when it’s very cold outside.

Anne Feighery said she noticed that her second-grade son was coming home grumpy every day from PS 166 this winter. Feighery, who is an education researcher and doctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Teachers College, told me she identified the reason for her son’s bad mood when she realized that he hadn’t been outside to play in days because PS 166 keeps students indoors for recess when the temperature drops below 40 degrees.

Feighery said the indoor recess PS 166 offered instead was inadequate to meet children’s needs. During a 6-week span when he didn’t go outside this winter, her 8-year-old son got hurt during indoor playtime as his fellow students’ pent-up energy turned indoor games violent, she said.

“We began talking about it with other friends who have children in other schools and a lot of people have this problem—it wasn’t unique to us,” Feighery said. (more…)

Nine months after an anonymous teacher-blogger began waging an online campaign against the leadership at his school, PS 154 in the Bronx, the principal that he skewered has decided to resign.

As of today, Linda Amill-Irizarry is no longer the principal at PS 154, DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte confirmed for me. Amill-Irizarry, who before becoming PS 154′s principal was briefly the superintendent of District 8 in the Bronx, is taking a position in the Leadership Learning Support Organization, one of the outside support networks that schools can partner with. PS 154 has been part of a different network, the Empowerment Schools Organization.

Marsha Elliott has been appointed as interim acting principal, Forte told me. Elliott was formerly an assistant principal at PS 50 in the Bronx, and she also led PS 158 while it was being phased out due to poor performance. According to The Chief-Leader, a newspaper produced by the city’s labor organizations, Elliott was fined last year by the city’s Conflict of Interests Board for encouraging staff members at PS 158 to visit the church in Queens where she and her husband were co-pastors.

Forte said there is an open investigation of Amill-Irizarry in the Office of Special Investigations, the DOE’s in-house unit that examines allegations of wrongdoing in the city schools. Forte she said she could not characterize the allegations against the former principal but said the investigation would continue.

For the last nine months, the teacher-blogger has documented what he (or she — the blogger’s gender isn’t noted on the blog) says is illicit behavior at PS 154, charging that Amill-Irizarry and an assistant principal, whom he nicknamed “Numb Nuts,” failed to report incidents according to required procedures. (more…)

• The number of kids qualifying for gifted programs is up. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News, Post)
• A mom who started out opposing a charter school learned more and became its biggest supporter. (Post)
• After the second HS admissions round, some kids were placed in schools they didn’t pick. (Daily News)
• Dueling lobby groups are heading to Albany to push their plans for mayoral control. (Post)
• A big issue for Albany to work out is the role of parents in the school governance system. (Daily News)
• A Queens school custodian quit after it was revealed that he stole cleaning supplies. (Daily News)
• There is growing dissent in D.C. over the city teachers union president’s leadership. (Washington Post)
• The two-year span for federal stimulus funding has school advocates worried. (USA Today)
• Lame-duck state ed head Richard Mills warns of a 2011 crunch in state school aid. (Legislative Gazette)
• A Wall Street Journal columnist complains about how many politicians send their kids to private school.
• The WSJ editorial board also condemns Arne Duncan’s decision to end the D.C. voucher program.
• A government plan would let English parents force change in the failing schools they might attend. (BBC)
• A Philadelphia Inquirer columnist ponders her reason for wanting more black teachers in the classroom.

• An teacher describes the antics of the dysfunctional hiring team at her school. The story involves bacon.
• Pissed Off Teacher wonders how an extended day could be good for already overstressed students. 
• Aaron Pallas takes a deeper look at what the country’s essentially flat NAEP scores might mean.
• Some students who were discharged from high school say they didn’t really enroll elsewhere.
• Andy Smarick says he just doesn’t get why Jon Schnur isn’t joining the US Department of Education.
• On Edwize, a teacher writes about the importance of making sure children have a good breakfast.
• A conference at Pace University today focused on whether charter schools are the answer.
• Chester Finn says Joel Klein is one reason the country needs an independent education audit agency.
• There aren’t too many high achievers in American schools, Kevin Carey says. There aren’t enough.
• A Queens teacher sheds some light on what happens once teachers are sent to the rubber room.
• At Eduwonk, another voice in the chorus calling for more study of how HS graduates do in college.

A chart produced by the Department of Education that shows the number of children qualifying for gifted programs in each district, compared to last year.

Nearly 50 percent more incoming kindergartners scored high enough on two nationally normed assessments to be eligible for a seat in a gifted and talented program, according to data released today by the Department of Education. The percentage of test-takers who qualified also increased, from 18 to 22 percent.

The jump in participation shows that the standardized procedures the DOE established last year for admission to gifted programs are gaining traction, DOE spokesman Andrew Jacob told me today. ”It reflects that families are more familiar with the way we’re running the admissions process,” he said.

The increased number of students eligible for gifted programs could be seen as a feather in the cap for the DOE, which has said it wants to expand access to gifted programs to children citywide, particularly in communities that have not had robust gifted programs in the past. Jacob told me the department this year ramped up its outreach to prekindergarten programs in districts where too few children took the tests and scored high enough last year to warrant opening programs.

“We wanted to find as many children as possible in the city who could meet the standard that we set,” he said.

In terms of sheer numbers, some of the biggest gains happened in districts that already enroll many children in gifted programs, including the districts comprising Staten Island and most of Manhattan below 96th Street. (more…)

Assemblywoman Inez Barron of Brooklyn. (Courtesy of Barron)

Among those who will decide whether to scrap, renew, or revise the law granting the mayor control over the city’s public schools is an impeccably dressed former principal with an aggressively anti-Bloomberg position.

Inez Barron, of Brooklyn, is the wife of Charles Barron, the City Council member who recently called for Joel Klein’s resignation and urged that mayoral control be abolished. She also happens to be a member of the state Assembly, the body that, along with the Senate and Governor Paterson, will decide what to do about mayoral control before June 30 (next month!).

Her election in November brought her into a group of state lawmakers who have also voiced a slew of concerns about mayoral control. But Barron, who worked for the city schools for many years, including as the principal of PS 81 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, appears to have one of the more radical criticisms.

At a panel I moderated last weekend, Barron said she favors letting the current law sunset altogether and writing an entirely new version, rather than simply “tweaking” the current system as some have advocated. (more…)