GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

We’ve said in the past that our long-term plan is to expand our Community section to include more voices. Today we’re taking a step in that direction with a contribution from Pedro Noguera, the New York University professor and co-chair of the Broader, Bolder project (the one that clashes with Rev. Al Sharpton and Chancellor Joel Klein’s Education Equality Project).

Noguera argues that David Brooks’ recent New York Times column on the Harlem Children’s Zone drew the wrong conclusion:

In most cases, these schools succeed not because they impart middle class values, (there is very little evidence that the middle class is the only group that values hard work and courteous behavior) but because of high academic expectations and a clear, coherent approach to educating children. Most importantly, these schools succeed because they also address social, health and psychological needs of the children and families they serve.

Read Noguera’s full commentary here. And please feel free to send your own commentaries. We’re building the Community section up slowly, but we are building it up.

The Promise Academy, praised by David Brooks, is a wonderful school, but it is not unique and hardly a “miracle.”  There are several schools in Harlem and other parts of New York where poor children are achieving at high levels.  Many of these are charter schools, but some are public and private schools.  In most cases, these schools succeed not because they impart middle class values, (there is very little evidence that the middle class is the only group that values hard work and courteous behavior) but because of high academic expectations and a clear, coherent approach to educating children.   Most importantly, these schools succeed because they also address social, health and psychological needs of the children and families they serve.

This is the point that David Brooks doesn’t seem to understand.  He claims that Promise Academy’s high scores “are powerful evidence” in a debate between those (like New York City’s Schools Chancellor Joel Klein) who say better schools alone can close the achievement gap, and those (like supporters of the “Broader Bolder Approach” campaign) who say that for significant gains in achievement, school improvement must be supplemented by improvements in children’s social and economic conditions. Brooks believes the evidence favors the Klein claims. (more…)

• Juan Gonzalez looks at declining racial diversity at the elite Beacon School in Manhattan. (Daily News)
• Dennis Walcott reassures parents that most kids will get off kindergarten wait lists. (Downtown Express)
• NYU is offering to take four pre-K classes from overcrowded Village schools. (The Villager)
• A second D.C. charter school serving high-need kids only is being made to close. (Washington Post)
• School board members in Los Angeles agree that teacher firing should happen faster. (L.A. Times)
• The House of Representatives is trying again to push funding for green schools. (Wall Street Journal)
• A test for eighth-graders from the makers of the SAT is being shelved for now. (Times)
• A new report says merit pay programs aren’t actually that prevalent in the private sector. (EdWeek)
• Nationwide, more schools are introducing chess programs. (USA Today)
• What about putting AP and honors students in the same classes, Jay Mathews asks. (Washington Post)
• Remember how Obama’s election appeared to boost scores for black students? Not true. (Newsweek)

• A nonprofit with Rudy Crew on its board is accused of firing its leader for backing Bloomberg.
• At LaGuardia High School, budget cuts are threatening upper-level math classes.
• LinkEd kicks off a series of posts about assessment with Teacher Data Report analysis.
• Two state lawmakers urge Mayor Bloomberg to listen to critics during mayoral control talks.
• Do teachers unions really care about policies supported by education research?
• Teachers imagine life without the extra $150 stipend via “Teacher’s Choice.”
• Aaron Pallas wonders if the College Board’s latest test is really worth anything.
• A California man who’s deep in debt says he regrets going to college. (Via Joanne Jacobs.)
• A researcher explains the complex factors that make early childhood programs successful.
• A third of all teachers in Sweetwater, California, are asking for the superintendent’s head.
• The New Republic meets ATR’s and finds aged 60s activists, “sense of entitlement.”
• Rotherham thinks that transparency alone isn’t enough; accountability is necessary, too.
• Elementary school teachers in Massachusetts will now have to pass a math test.

A week after the city stopped giving daily updates on the swine flu epidemic that last month forced closures at multiple schools in Queens, including one public school, three more schools are being closed because of the disease.

The city Department of Health urged the Department of Education to close the schools, all in Queens, because they all have higher-than-normal numbers of students reporting flulike symptoms. At one of the schools, IS 238 in Hollis, an assistant principal is seriously ill with a confirmed case of the H1N1 flu strain, also known as swine flu. Mayor Bloomberg said today during a press conference about the outbreak that health officials think the administrator might have been in poor health before contracting H1N1 flu.

According to the New York Times, 241 students were absent at IS 5 in Elmhurst today. Typically, 96 percent of the school’s 1,500 students are present every day, according to DOE data; today, that figure was 84 percent. At PS 16 in Corona, the Times reported, dozens of students went home sick just today. And at IS 238, four students plus the administrator have been documented as having swine flu.

The DOE has been monitoring the situation at the schools for several days, according to Kathleen Grimm, deputy chancellor for finance and administration at the DOE. (more…)

The College Board announced on Thursday that it was postponing a new eighth-grade assessment announced last fall. ReadiStep was conceived as a low-stakes assessment designed to provide teachers, students and parents feedback on a student’s readiness for challenging high school coursework that would prepare a student for college.  The College Board claimed that the test was intended to help create a “college-going culture.”

It’s hard not to view this as an attempt to make a quick buck.  Do we really need a new test to help demonstrate the importance of challenging coursework, or to figure out which students are ready for it?  One of the legacies of No Child Left Behind, for better or worse, is a system of assessments from grades 3 through 8 that reflect state-specific curricular frameworks and standards.  The incremental value of a national assessment such as ReadiStep beyond these state-specific assessments seems pretty modest.  Any district or school that is paying attention should know what pattern of performance on local or state assessments predicts readiness for challenging high school and college curricular standards.

ReadiStep seemingly was in trouble from the moment it was announced last October.  Sara Rimer’s article in the New York Times dryly reported that College Board officials were only able to cough up two educators from districts interested in ReadiStep, one of whom was a College Board trustee, and the other of whom helped to develop the assessment.  She quoted Gaston Caperton, President of the College Board, and other Board officials as saying that their market research had found that well over 50% of the more than 1,000 schools and districts they had approached “had expressed strong interest in the new test.”

I think these schools and districts were just being polite to the powerful organization that administers the SAT, the widely-used college entrance examination.  The College Board does a lot of good, but trying to manufacture demand for an unnecessary assessment wasn’t its finest moment.

Mayor Bloomberg’s school leadership has been characterized by secrecy, defiance of the law, and a heavy hand in school discipline, the New York Civil Liberties Union declared today in a report titled “The Price of Power.”

The report details NYCLU’s experiences with the Bloomberg-controlled Department of Education stalling on responding to Freedom of Information Law requests, refusing to comply with student safety-related laws passed by the City Council, and refusing to provide basic data about military recruitment that the organization said the U.S. Armed Forces provided freely.

The report deliberately avoids some of the major questions of the debate about mayoral control of the city’s schools, including whether the mayor should appoint the chancellor and whether the mayor should control the number of seats on the citywide school board. But it does offer recommendations on the law, which is set to sunset June 30 if it’s not renewed or revised.

The recommendations include making the public school system a city, rather than state, agency, which would bring it under a slate of good governance regulations about public notification of policy changes; opening the school system to audits by the city comptroller and public advocate; and requiring that schools contracts get publicly vetted.

Transforming the Department of Education into a city agency would also allow the City Council to make laws about the public schools that the DOE would be accountable for implementing. Like others recommending changes to mayoral control, NYCLU is saying that the city’s Independent Budget Office should get the right to receive and review DOE data, but the group adds the idea that the department needs an “inspector general” who would investigate systemic wrongdoing. (more…)

A top city school official is reassuring union president Randi Weingarten that teachers in alternative-certification programs like Teach For America will not get a preference over graduates of education schools. But whether new schools will be able to work around the hiring freeze, as school officials initially declared, appears to be under debate.

The note to Weingarten, from Deputy Chancellor Christopher Cerf, followed a letter she sent yesterday urging the Department of Education to treat all teachers outside the system the same. Cerf’s note says the department will do that. But it also includes a new twist in the story: an acknowledgment that the hiring-freeze exception for new schools, who Chancellor Joel Klein said could hire anyone they wanted, is now “under discussion.”

Cerf did not offer me clarification on what exactly that means, though he did say that Weingarten and the teachers union have no role in the discussions.

One clue is that, in addition to Weingarten, Merryl Tisch, the head of the state Board of Regents, is also voicing concern about the idea of holding new schools exempt from the hiring freeze. In a short telephone interview today, Tisch said that the policy could hurt her goal of sending the most qualified teachers to the hardest-to-staff schools. New schools are actually easier to staff than existing struggling schools, she said, so why should they be the only ones to get free reign on hiring? (more…)

Last week one state politician said he would revamp mayoral control by changing who makes decisions about school policy. Two others said they are proposing legislation that would take a different approach to reforming school governance, by clarifying the constraints under which current decision-makers must operate.

Two state politicians, Assemblyman Rory Lancman and Sen. Daniel Squadron of Brooklyn, announced last week that they have introduced legislation that would require the city Department of Education to be treated just like any other city agency when it comes to budgeting, oversight by the comptroller and public advocate, and public notification about policy changes. Currently, the department occupies a no-man’s-land between city and state authority, a position that has allowed the DOE to escape some of the scrutiny regularly applied to other city agencies and to avoid following laws passed by the City Council.

Lancman and Squadron say their bill is not meant as a comprehensive way to address the school governance question, which lawmakers must tackle by the end of next month. Instead, they say, it’s meant to close a big loophole in the law that has been open since 2002, when the state gave control of the city schools to Mayor Bloomberg. The loophole allowed the nonprofit organization that raises money for the DOE, the Fund for Public Schools, to avoid disclosing its donors, saying that disclosure rules apply only to groups working with city agencies. The DOE has also used the loophole to justify its decision not to follow state law that says elected parent councils must be consulted before the department can close schools.

Lancman told me he doesn’t expect the bill to become law, in part because it addresses only one component of the school governance question. The final school governance bill will deal with other issues including the makeup of the school board, currently known as the Panel for Educational Policy, and how much input parents should have in DOE decisions. Lancman told me he sponsored a partial bill to raise awareness about the particular issue of whether the DOE should be a city agency. “This legislation is a vehicle for driving this issue into the final bill,” he said.

Lancman and Squadron’s bill would firmly establish the DOE as a city agency. (more…)

The president of the city teachers union is asking the city to offer a retirement incentive for veteran teachers, a move that could make room for new teachers who have otherwise been (mostly) frozen out of the system for this fall.

In a letter sent yesterday to Christopher Cerf, the Department of Education’s top human-resources official, Randi Weingarten says she is concerned about how the hiring freeze is being implemented. New schools have been told they are exempt from the freeze, and graduates of education schools are getting cut loose, while members of Teach For America and the Teaching Fellows program are being promised some spots.

Weingarten argues that new teachers, especially those who have graduated from schools of education, could improve the city’s teaching quality:

Remember the teachers who we recruit through the education colleges and the career ladder program have far better retention rates; that both increases teacher quality and saves the money invested in them.

Her solution is retirement incentives for veteran teachers, which she argues would make more room for new teachers. An added benefit, she says, is that those new teachers would cost the city less on average.

Weingarten’s full letter is after the jump. We’ll publish the city’s response as soon as we have it. (more…)