GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Front row, from left: Mayor Bloomberg, Gov. Paterson, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.

If the still-splintered State Senate doesn’t get to work and renew mayoral control, the city is in for a summer of litigation, Mayor Bloomberg warned this morning.

He made his comments at a hastily organized press event held in Harlem today to urge state politicians to pass a new school governance bill before the current law, giving control of the schools to the mayor, expires on Tuesday night. The senate has not held a legal vote since early June, when a leadership coup ended its regular session.

Should the school governance law expire, technically the system would revert to its pre-2002 structure. But the law doesn’t include instructions for reconstituting the old school boards or dismantling the current system.

“The bottom line is that the schools chancellor would have to run the school system for the next day,” Bloomberg said. “And you know right away that that would be in court.”

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein did not speak at the press conference, but he echoed Bloomberg’s warnings to me afterwards. “I don’t want to spend my summer meeting with the lawyers,” he said. “That’s what would happen.” (more…)

LAST-DAY-OF-SCHOOL EDITION:

• “This has been one long damned year,” says Bronx teacher JD2718, whose summer plans involve work.
• NYC Educator reports that his summer is unexpectedly plan-free for the first time in 20 years of teaching.
• Ms. M says she’s glad the start of school was changed because she won’t return from Syria until Aug. 30.
• If you want to listen to Alice Kooper’s classic end-of-the-year rock anthem, head over to Edwize.
• It’s teacher appreciation day for Pissed Off Teacher.
• Kids say the very cutest things to Miss Brave, on the occasion of her becoming their teacher for next year.
• The city is holding a “family reunion” for students past and present, tomorrow in Riverbank State Park.
• The Department of Education produced a video about the last day of school at PS 57 in East Harlem.
• Insideschools wants you to grade your child’s school year.

ALSO:

• Bronx Lab principal Marc Sternberg was picked as a White House Fellow, so he’ll be in D.C. next year.
• Ruben Brosbe, GothamSchools’ resident excessed teacher, compares job interviews to first dates.
• Principals are leaving two high-profile Upper West Side schools.
• Budgets aren’t likely to to get any better in 2011, so Warren Buffet is urging Federal Stimulus 2.0.
• Preschool teachers are paid poorly and turn over quickly. Early Stories sees a connection.
• The Quick and the Ed looks at three school turnaround attempts but says it’s too early to tell which works.

A 1998 agreement that gives the city’s police department control over school safety is still in effect, despite city officials’ insistence that it had expired more than six years ago.

The revelation has advocates and elected officials lambasting the city for not disclosing the agreement’s extension.

The original agreement, between Mayor Rudy Giuliani and then-Board of Education President William Thompson, was set to expire in 2002 and was widely assumed to have done so. But in fact, Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein quietly renewed the agreement in January 2003.

The renewal came to light for the first time this month, after Assemblyman Karim Camara urged his colleagues to consider school safety issues when deciding how to vote on mayoral control, according to Udi Ofer, director of advocacy for the New York Civil Liberties Union. The NYCLU was working with legislators to raise the profile of school safety in the mayoral control fight.

When Camara met with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Silver showed him a copy of the memorandum’s renewal, Ofer said. The paragraph-long agreement was signed by Bloomberg and Klein on Jan. 22, 2003, and does not include an expiration date.

The renewal contradicts information the City Council received during a 2007 hearing on school safety, where council members repeatedly asked whether any formal document existed to define the relationship between the city schools and the police department. (more…)

Brian Gibbons/UFT

The backstory: the school booked a place for graduation but, come May, the venue fell through. School officials called the man Randi Weingarten says is first in line to replace her as president, United Federation of Teachers chief operating officer Michael Mulgrew, to ask for help. The UFT offered to put up the 123 graduates–the school’s largest graduating class in a while–in the union’s massive assembly room.

Have any graduation photos of your own?  Send them to tips@gothamschools.org.

The Bloomberg administration is arguing that chaos and anarchy would result if state lawmakers let mayoral control expire on June 30. But the reality of the school system prior to 2002 pokes major holes in the officials’ argument.

Over the last several days, Mayor Bloomberg has likened the resurrection of the pre-2002 decentralized school system to the return of the Soviet Union and has forecast widespread chaos. In a memo released today, Department of Education officials outlined how the system will become gridlocked if the law expires and the current power structure breaks down.

But the department’s memo rests on assumptions that people familiar with the pre-2002 governance structure picked apart in interviews today.

“I think a return to the Board of Education structure would be most unfortunate because of the tension, the politics, and the lack of coordination that the structure causes,” said former chancellor Harold Levy. “But it’s clear to me that the mechanics of having it function would be perfectly doable provided that the Board itself was reconstituted by the borough presidents.”

“They’re crying wolf. They’re catastrophizing,” said former general counsel to the Board of Education, David Bloomfield. (more…)

It’s often said that first dates are like interviews, and two years since finding my first teaching job, I can say the comparison goes both ways. The nervousness. The desire to be desired. Fighting the impulse to badmouth your ex.

My first date interview didn’t go so well last week. I’d done as much research as possible going into the experience, checking up on the school’s quality review, report card and review on Insideschools.org. I even began to wonder if there can be such thing as too much information going into a job interview, as I tried to keep an open mind.

After the interview I had mixed feelings. Was I too honest? Did I monopolize the conversation? Did I act interested enough? Did I seem desperate? Did I even want the job?

Days went by, and I waited for the phone to ring. One missed call later, I called back to find the job was given to another candidate. In spite of my ambivalence, rejection never feels good.

So, for now I stay “single,” but without even a decent meal to show for it. Oh well, there’s plenty of other fish in the sea. In fact I’ve got another interview next Monday. I’ll be sure to keep everyone posted.

Ruben Brosbe is finishing his second year teaching in the Bronx. He will be writing about his experiences looking for a new position. He also blogs at Is Our Children Learning?

• The Supreme Court said a school strip search of a 13-year-old girl was uncontsitutional. (Times, WSJ)
• Bronx Early College Academy improved the most on the city’s school surveys. (Daily News)
• More and more, the city says, it is asking residential developers to provide school seats. (NY1)
• Bloomberg forecasts chaos if mayoral control expires. (GothamSchools, Post, Daily News, WNYC)
• Why a top teacher at PS 150 is retiring early: The mounting paperwork, she says. (Downtown Express)
• In Queens, a debate over whether schools should hold classes in trailers. (Queens Chronicle)
• The school year will start a day later for students this year. (GothamSchools, City Room)
• The state’s top court ruled that the comptroller can’t be made to audit charter schools. (WCBS Albany)
• Famed crooner Tony Bennett toured the Queens high school named for his friend, Frank Sinatra. (Times)
• In D.C., excessed teachers are called “surplussed.” Jay Mathews is looking for them. (Washington Post)
• A Greenwich Village parent calls the DOE’s plan to move a local middle school frustrating. (The Villager)
• WNYC examines whether Harlem’s charter school fights inspired competition, or just unfriendly rivalries.

• The Senate came to no agreements today and won’t be paid. Three biz days till June 30.
• Children at the playground gave their advice for the senators to Beth Fertig.
• Rick Lazio, who’s running for governor, says disband the Senate. (Gubernatorial control?)
• Tests in May upset principals who say they can’t plan. What’s the effect on test prep?
• A teaching fellow at the end of his service can’t believe he now has to fight to teach.
• Nearly 200 teachers will get pink slips in Rochester.
• Debbie Meier says she needs to face the pitfalls of too much democracy and local control.
• The school year will start (and end) a day later next year.
• Michael Mulgrew will have to face the teachers. Here’s one dissenter.
• A state court of appeals ruled that the state comptroller can’t audit charter schools.
• Philly’s School of the Future, opened by Microsoft, has floundered. (Via Joanne Jacobs.)
• The national Parent Teacher Association falls in line for national standards.
• A former AFT official who’s still close to the union has a new paper on tenure. (Via Eduwonk.)
• The Broader, Bolder group offers an alternative accountability approach. (Via Flypaper.)
• A Chicago education academic praises local journalists for ensuring accountability.
• There’s some fuzziness in Congress about who will support Obama’s education plans.

Beginning next year, state math and reading tests will be given in May, rather than two months apart in January and March, the state decided earlier this week. But beyond the barest outline of the schedule, details about the change are still unclear.

Details up in the air include when exactly the tests will be given and how results will be tabulated in time for the start of the next school year. “Work is now underway to revise current examination calendars and scoring timelines,” State Education Department deputy commissioner Johanna Duncan-Poitier said in materials released this week.

The schedule change is throwing schools’ plans for next year into question just as teachers are leaving for the summer. Steven Evangelista, the principal of Harlem Link Charter School, said his teachers have already planned their lessons for all of next year, and finding out that the state tests are moving is forcing them to revise the plans.

“At this late date, when we have already mapped out our entire curriculum and assessment calendar for 2009-10, changing the date of high-stakes tests throws a monkey wrench in our plans,” Evangelista said, adding that he wondered whether getting results over the summer would give teachers enough time to use the data to inform their instruction. He said he hadn’t heard about the Regents’ debate before this week.

In the past, some schools have focused more heavily on reading before the state test in January, then shifted their focus to math in the months before the March math test. Some schools also plan different kinds of lessons for after the state tests, when the pressure to prepare students for the exams has lifted.

Even schools that shun explicit test prep, including Evangelista’s, say the schedule change could pose problems for them. (more…)

The city is reversing a back-room deal that would have had teachers and students returning to school on the same day in September, giving staff no official planning time.

Now, instead of starting school on the day after Labor Day, students will have their first day on Wednesday, Sept. 9. That will give principals and teachers one day together to plan for the opening of school.

Principals union president Ernest Logan had attacked the plan to eliminate the beginning-of-the-year planning days, which he said were the most important days of the year. “No one used common sense here,” he told me.

After today’s schedule adjustment, Logan declared, “Common sense prevails,” in a message to principals. He also said his union would continue to discuss the effects of the schedule change with the Department of Education.

One effect of the change will be a stray school day for students at the end of next year. Instead of finishing on the last Friday in June, as they are this year, students will be required to report to school the following Monday, as well.

Below are Logan’s full statement and the city’s press release, which emphasizes that other components of the teachers union’s deal with the city will save the city $100 million a year.  (more…)