GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Shelly Silver said he supports the mayor appointing a majority of school board members. (Daily News)
• Malcolm Smith favors school board members serving at the mayor’s pleasure; Silver’s on fence. (Post)
• Merryl Tisch wants SUNY stripped of some charter school authorizing power. (Daily News)
• P.S. 150 in Brownsville is hoping test scores will save it from closure. (Brooklyn Daily Eagle)
• Four letter-writers reply to David Brooks’ Harlem Children’s Zone column. (Times)
• Duncan sets sights on turning around 5,000 most struggling schools in 5 years. (USA Today)
• Weiner is accusing Bloomberg’s campaign of smearing him, and urging him to run. (Times)
• A teacher in New Rochelle gets students passionate about forensic science. (Times)
• A D.C. agency accidentally e-mailed out students’ personal information. (Washington Post)
• Rhee accused Weingarten of lying about Rhee’s goals for the teaching force. (Washington Post)

• Writing in a local Bronx paper, a teacher warns that “mayoral control is out of control.”
• The UFT’s new TV ad: “We have teachers in our name but children and their families in mind.”
• Challenging the Times’ contention that “many” ATR teachers have been rated unsatisfactory.
• Journalism school students report differing parents’ perspectives on mayoral control.
• Arne Duncan wants the country’s worst schools closed and reopened within five ears.
• Duncan also stopped by Ohio recently to declare his hope the state will lead in reform.
• A new resource to help you find different states’ documents on English language learners.
• In California, teachers are protesting their own union because it wants to cut pension costs.
• Pondiscio highlights a study finding that good-looking people get better grades.

Spurred by a series of meetings held by Queens’ borough president, charter school administrators, parents and students are gathering at The Renaissance Charter School in Queens to dispel “misinformation” about their schools in a discussion on Wednesday night. Queens is far from the center of the city’s charter school debate, which has been raging in Manhattan and Brooklyn, but with the opening of two new charters in as many years, and increased attention to the issue city-wide, some parents and elected officials have voiced their opposition to the schools.

Nicholas Tishuk, the Director of Programs and Accountability at Renaissance and the organizer of the event, said that the discussion is the beginning of an “information campaign” targeted at charter school critics. Principals of two other Queens’ charter schools, VOICE and OWN, will participate in the panel.

Tishuk has been attending Queens Borough President Helen Marshall’s monthly Advisory Board meetings, where he said charter schools dominate the conversation. (Marshall said in February she has ” fought against charter schools.”) He invited some of the most outspoken critics at Marshall’s meetings to Wednesday’s discussion, hoping to show them that charter schools  aren’t “this big bad thing.”

“We’re all mom and pop schools here,” Tishuk said. “We’re all single-standing schools that are not ‘invading’ communities.” Tishuk wants to address complaints that charter schools take away funding from regular schools, aren’t connected to communities, and counsel out “problem kids”—none of which apply to Queens’ schools, he says.

Queens will have six charter schools next fall, including the city’s biggest, Our World Neighborhood Charter School. VOICE charter school started in 2008, and Growing Up Green, in Long Island City, opens this fall. VOICE is using a Department of Education school location for now, while the borough’s other charter schools occupy their own space. In Brooklyn and Manhattan, charter schools taking over public school space is a hot-button issue, one that has mostly been avoided in Queens. (more…)

Members of the Absent Teacher Reserve pool who did extensive job searches spoke at a press conference with teachers union president Randi Weingarten at the start of the school year. (GothamSchools)

A teachers union source surprised me recently by pointing out what the source described as the “dirty little secret” of the Absent Teacher Reserve pool.

The reserve is the group of teachers who will become the main hiring source for principals now that Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has announced a freeze on hiring outside teachers.

It includes teachers who lost their positions at schools that either down-sized or closed, but failed to find new positions, and so remain on the Department of Education’s payroll without holding an official job.

The teachers who remain in the ATR pool are a minority; many teachers who found themselves “excessed” out of schools found new positions quickly, according to a report about the pool. The teachers who did not find new positions seem to be left out for a variety of reasons. Some simply could not get a principal to hire them, despite making major efforts to find jobs. Others remained because they were doing precisely the same job they had been doing before they entered the pool, but, affordably for principals, off of the school’s payroll. (The central Department of Education’s budget covers the salaries of ATR members.)

Another group of teachers, however, the source told me, sat tight in the ATR pool out of a kind of defiance. They simply did not apply for new positions. (more…)

In the city:

• Randi Weingarten asked Bloomberg and Klein to be her “partners” in reform. (Post, Daily News)
• The City Council will begin reviewing the mayor’s proposed $60 billion budget. (WNYC)
• In endorsing Bloomberg for mayor, Rev. Floyd Flake cited his success in education. (NY1)
• Shelly Silver said mayoral control must be tweaked; Bloomberg disagreed. (Daily News)
• All this followed the state legislature’s first formal discussion of school control. (Daily News)
• A private preschool tells parents mayoral control is to blame for overcrowding. (Post)
• Charter schools, which serve fewer ELL’s, got higher test scores than DOE schools. (Post)
• The Post editorial board says mayoral control’s fate hinges on the UFT’s power.
• Adam Lisberg on Mayor Bloomberg’s complicated relationship with criticism.
• The Daily News editorial board says ELA scores show we need more charter schools.
• Marcus Winters of the Manhattan Institute says the hiring freeze will be bad for kids.
• Aspiring teachers and teachers-in-training are scrambling to craft a different plan. (Times)

Elsewhere:

• In New Jersey, legislation helps laid-off bankers become teachers. (Times)
• Steve Barr of Green Dot is organizing a citywide parent revolution. (LA Times)
• Jay Mathews grades a circulating proposal for how to spend the school stimulus.
• A teacher, drafted to Vietnam at 19, fights military recruitment at high schools. (Times)
• A video about “stuff” brings students up to speed on the latest enviro-science. (Times)

Billy Easton of the Alliance for Quality Education in Albany just sent around this TV-watching guide to reporters:

Campaign for Better’s Schools’ Zakiyah Ansari will be on ABC this Sunday morning at 11 AM with Diane Sawyer.  The segment was filmed today, and features a moderated discussion about mayoral control with Zakiyah, Peter Hatch from Learn NY and Tamara Rowe from the Parent Commission.  Tune in and check it out!

UPDATE: It’s not Diane Sawyer hosting the debate, but Diana Williams, of Up Close with Diana Williams on Eyewitness News 7.

• Here’s where you can watch video of the Eva vs. Randi NY1 debate.
• Rupert Murdoch is investing big in the Harlem Village Academy charter schools.
• Maybe Arne Duncan should start a commission on which programs to close.
• Tim Daly of The New Teacher Project says a hiring freeze is more sensible than layoffs.
• Dianne Piche, who is closely tied to DFER and EEP, will work for Obama.
• Charting the place of basketball in deciding our nation’s education elite.
• The CSM reporter following a charter school student travels to his homeland, Tanzania.
• Who would play Steve Bar in a Green Dot movie? (I vote for Steve as himself!)
• Sawchuck can’t figure out if federally funded merit pay would be collectively bargained.
• A California teacher of the year without seniority tops a layoff list. (Via Joanne Jacobs.)
• Aaron Pallas takes a look at the Roland Fryer study of Harlem Children’s Zone.
• A Teaching Fellows member had an interview canceled at a very high-turnover school.
• Liz Willen says the DOE’s response to students without high school matches is inadequate.

Data from the Department of Education show which school support organizations are gaining schools and which are losing them.

Given the choice to switch to a new support organization, most schools are deciding to stay put, Department of Education data that I obtained today show. Eric Nadelstern, the city’s chief schools officer, confirmed the data in a short telephone interview.

Nadelstern said the information is “gratifying” because it indicates schools are happy with the level of service they are receiving. But he said that he hopes that in the future schools will make their decisions based not just on their own experiences, but also on data showing how well students inside each support organization’s umbrella are performing academically. (Data were released for the first time earlier this year.)

A large group schools next year will also join a trial organizational model known as the Children First Network, which tries to personalize the way schools receive non-academic, logistical supports. Twenty networks of schools will join the Children First Network next year, Nadelstern told me. Each network includes about 20 schools, suggesting that the total number of schools moving into the Children First Network is increasing to about 490, roughly a third of all city schools. (more…)

Now that I have your attention … Today’s New York Times column by David Brooks touts a new study by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) Promise Academy charter schools, two celebrated schools in Harlem.  Fryer and Dobbie’s finding that the typical eighth-grader was in the 74^th percentile among New York City students in mathematics leads Brooks to state that HCZ Promise Academy eliminated the black-white achievement gap.  He’s so dumbstruck by this that he says it twice.  Brooks takes this evidence as support for the “no excuses” model of charter schools, and, claiming that “the approach works,” challenges all cities to adopt this “remedy for the achievement gap.”

Coming on the heels of yesterday’s release of the 2009 New York State English Language Arts (ELA) results, in which the HCZ schools outperformed the citywide white average in grade 3, but were well behind the white average in grades 4, 5 and 8, skoolboy decided to drink a bit more deeply from the datastream.  The figure below shows the gap between the average performance in HCZ Promise Academy and white students in New York City in ELA and math, expressed as a fraction of the standard deviation of overall performance in a given grade and year.  The left side of the figure shows math performance, and the right side shows ELA performance. (more…)

A father of one of the frozen-out teachers-to-be who works in higher education sent us a letter today that he requested we forward to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. The letter chastises Klein for essentially revoking hiring decisions so late in the school year, long after many teachers-to-be have already found apartments and stopped looking for other jobs.

The father writes that in higher education, “we take care not to waver from the commitments that we have made to our people and new hires,” despite serious budget pressures. He asks why the New York City public schools would not do the same.

The father gave me permission to publish the letter in partially edited form to keep his and his child’s identity anonymous.

UPDATE: Klein just wrote to me in an e-mail that he hopes to find fall jobs for teachers in the program this man’s child is in, Math For America. “We will work with them to find them jobs,” Klein wrote. “We said at the outset there would be exceptions — e.g. new schools — and this is a group that we want to place given their training and support and our challenges in finding math teachers.”

Math For America places recent college graduates and career-changers who are talented at math in inner-city schools. Fellows in the program have to make a five-year commitment to teaching in public schools, in exchange for close mentoring and support from master teachers in the program.

Here’s the father’s letter to Klein: (more…)