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The head of the Assembly’s education committee, Catherine Nolan of Queens, is expected to release a revised proposal for the mayoral control law this evening, in the Assembly Democrats’ second closed-door conference  on the law. Opponents of mayoral control, anticipating that the proposal will not include as many checks to the mayor’s power as they had hoped, are scrambling to encourage supporters to call their elected officials and demand more changes.

The goal is to persuade Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver not to finalize a plan the opponents think is too weak, said April Humphrey, an organizer with the Campaign for Better Schools, which is pushing for checks to the mayor’s power over the schools. A main concern is that the proposal will not create fixed terms for members of the citywide school board, known as the Panel for Educational Policy.

Humphrey suggested that her group has abandoned efforts to revise the board to give the mayor a minority of appointments. “I don’t know if there’s a lot that we can do on that,” she said.

Humphrey said opponents of mayoral control feel a particular sense of urgency because they don’t expect the Senate, which has flipped to Republican control, to produce a palatable proposal. “Who knows what’s going to happen with the Senate, but if the Senate ends up in Republican hands, they’re not going to do any better for us than the Assembly will,” Humphrey said.

“Emergency!! Call you [sic] assembly member NOW,” was the subject line of an e-mail blast the Campaign sent out this afternoon. (more…)

A photo posted to GothamSchools' Flickr pool on Nov. 5, 2008

We do a good job reporting about the schools. But we’d love to be able to show more of what happens inside them.

So we’re asking our readers to submit photographs to GothamSchools’ photo pool on the picture-sharing Web site Flickr. There are already 49 pictures in the pool, including the one in this post.

We want to see any school-related pictures you take: of graduations, end-of-year parties, teachers working together, the conditions of your school building, or anything else you want to share with other GothamSchools readers. We’ll highlight the best pictures here on the blog.

To send pictures to the pool, create a Flickr account (or log in to your existing one). Then join the GothamSchools group. After that, you can add any school-related photos you upload to Flickr to GothamSchools’ photo pool. You can even post short videos to the group.

If you don’t want to join Flickr, you can also send us your pictures via e-mail. Be sure to tell us what we’re seeing!

By failing to set standards or even track the use of credit recovery in New York City schools, Chancellor Joel Klein has provided a convenient back door for students to pass courses and graduate without subject mastery. The State Education Department has now capitulated to this agenda by promulgating a draft policy based on unpublicized negotiations with the city Department of Education. If implemented, the policy would do nothing to stem this tide of empty credits but, rather, encourage credit recovery by officially recognizing and regularizing it but with inadequate controls and monitoring.

What is credit recovery? The term is sometimes used technically to denote a formal program, such as summer school, with specified content, attendance, and assessment requirements. But the term is widely applied to any effort to help students pass courses that they would otherwise fail because of incomplete or below-standard work. These students substitute the extra work for regular assessments by writing a paper, taking a test, or providing some other evidence of proficiency in a narrow course topic.

Under the new state policy, schools would need only create a committee (which would not include the student’s teacher) to approve a student’s customized credit recovery plan for a course. The same committee would then review evidence of student proficiency once the plan was completed. The State does not require minimum class attendance or proof that the plan addresses all subject matter deficiencies. If a teacher says a book report suffices to show proficiency, the committee would not need to inquire beyond the teacher’s word. No record of how many courses a student passed using CR would be maintained. There would be no monitoring of assignments’ rigor or the frequency of CR’s use by teachers, schools, or the system as a whole.

What is the problem, though, with giving students a second chance at passing or completing a course by filling in the gaps? (more…)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Teachers union president Randi Weingarten and Chancellor Joel Klein agreed yesterday that this week’s surprise state Senate flip leaves the fate of mayoral control up in the air. Weingarten and Klein made the remarks at a roundtable discussion here in Washington, D.C., that I attended.

Klein said the problem with the Republican coup is the possible gridlock it creates. If Senate Democrats challenge the GOP takeover in court, an ensuing legal battle could prevent any legislation from passing, Klein said. And if the legal battle dragged on through June 30, the date at which the current school law sunsets, that would send the city schools back to their pre-2002 structure — a situation many of the fiercest critics of the law have said they do not want.

Klein’s uneasiness with this week’s takeover challenges the argument that a Republican Senate is a boon to the effort to renew mayoral control. “Uncertainty is a bad thing,” Klein said.

For her part, Weingarten said that two days ago she would have predicted a reasonable compromise on a mayoral control law by the end of the month. But she said that the news from the Senate upended her confidence.

The roundtable discussion was organized by the journal Democracy, and it also included D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and Peter Edelman, of the Georgetown Law Center and a signatory of the Broader, Bolder statement on how to improve American schools.

• The State Senate coup could be good for mayoral control, if it doesn’t fall apart. (Post)
• The Times comes out in support of The New Teacher Project’s recent teacher evaluation report.
• A Brooklyn high school grad hasn’t missed a day of school since he started pre-K. (Post)
• The head of the New York State School Boards Association says how to fix mayoral control. (EdWeek)
• PS 85 in the Bronx is an example of a school that has turned around without restructuring. (WNYC)
• All of the city schools that were closed because of swine flu fears are back in business now. (NY1)
• The mayor of Boston suddenly wants to turn failing city schools into charter schools. (Boston Globe)
• Some colleges, like Reed in Oregon, have reduced the number of needy students they take. (Times)
• California is investigating whether it can renege on repaying some teachers’ student loans. (Times)
• Teachers contract negotiations have stalled in D.C., and the Washington Post wants to know why.
• At schools that have a longer day and year, there are signs that students do better. (USA Today)

• Norm Scott reveals his role in sugar-coating Harries and convincing New Haven officials to hire him away.
• Sen. Parker says mayoral control, in some form, will be extended, but it’s unclear for how long.
• Teachers: American Teacher is looking for your thoughts on the best way to begin a new school year.
• Ask the Twitter universe of teachers what they wish for, and this pie chart is the result.
• Ravitch says the NYSDOE has resorted to “institutionalized lying” about its students test scores.
• Edweek assembles a nifty hs graduation trends map as part of its Diplomas Count 2009 report.
• Charter school teachers are beginning to unionize and the stakes are higher than ever.
• Newsweek publishes its list of the top 1,500 U.S. high schools.
• And Jay Matthews puts out his own “Catching Up” school report.
• Duncan makes an appearance on “Talk of the Nation.”
• ED.gov posts states’ applications for stimulus money before they’re tweaked and approved.
• A parent chronicles his experience battling treacherous school security forces (Satire Warning).
• And Pissed Off Teacher says her kids have spring fever and she’s near the breaking point.

The rift between the Rev. Al Sharpton and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, the two founders of the Education Equality Project, widened this weekend when Sharpton used his weekly radio address to criticize New York City’s brand of parent involvement, as we reported he would.

Sharpton told the audience at his rally in Harlem on Saturday that problems with education in the city could not be solved “without parental involvement and respect.” Dividing the mayoral control debate into two sides, he defined one faction as “our so-called liberal friends,” who he said prioritize safeguarding teachers’ jobs over the needs of children, and the other as people who say, “Let us run everything and we’ll make all the decisions,” a reference to Klein’s vision of mayoral control. (more…)

I’m sitting at my desk right now, but I’m also watching a student-produced news broadcast about racial segregation in schools. Students from IS 339 in the Bronx are tracing the roots of the low graduation rates in their neighborhood schools to the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson, which established the doctrine of separate but equal.

The presentation is being broadcast online as part of a “global learning reception” called Dot to Dot hosted today by teachers and students at IS 339 in the Bronx, a school that is trying to pioneer new ways to integrate technology in student learning. The school is showing off examples of student work today that include videos, online chats, and collaborative Google documents. The event is part of what Principal Jason Levy, an occasional blogger for GothamSchools, is calling an effort to devise “a model for the new public school.”

The presentations run until 5 p.m. today and are being streamed online. Some of the upcoming highlights: 

• A class of special education students read the Holocaust story “Number the Stars” and learned about genocide in Darfur. They’ll be chatting here with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof at 2.30 p.m. (more…)

• The city’s cash-for-grades initiative might not continue next year after the pilot funding runs out. (Post)
• State Senate upheaval could put mayoral control in limbo, or solidify it. (GothamSchools, Daily News)
• The city says a contract the comptroller criticized will actually save the city money. (Daily News)
• Garth Harries is leaving the DOE, after five months on the special education beat. (GothamSchools, Post)
• Most people would prefer to see Mayor Bloomberg replaced this fall, a new poll found. (Times)
• Chancellor Klein honored high school students who overcame tough situations to graduate. (Daily News)
• New York Times readers weigh in about a Harlem charter school’s plan to pay teachers a lot.
• Arne Duncan wants to see teachers evaluated based on their students’ test scores. (AP)
• He also wants to see states (including NY) lift their charter school caps to get stimulus money. (Post)
• Jonathan Alter says Obama and Duncan must resist pressure to spread stimulus funds out. (Newsweek)
• Teachers are rebelling against a Scholastic program that sells books and toys in schools. (USA Today)
• A study suggests that students who take the SAT when they are tired and stressed out do better. (Time)

• MS 54 in Harlem plans an emergency (and early!) rally against budget cuts for tomorrow.
• Smith appears to be out, the GOP appears to be in, and what this means for mayoral control is unclear.
• Eduwonk reports that there will be a public forum on national standards in D.C. on June 17th.
• Edwize takes another look at this year’s math scores.
• Duncan comes out in favor of using test scores to evaluate teachers.
• Duncan also warns charter-wary states that they will suffer the consequences in stimulus dollars.
• A Connecticut town is tossing out its textbooks and writing its own math curriculum.
• A study finds that girls do better than boys in school and yet fear failure more.
• And one teacher wonders if we’re setting the bar too low by throwing elaborate 8th grade proms.