GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Mayor Bloomberg and UFT President Randi Weingarten announced a tentative contract deal last night, just in time for Weingarten’s announcement Wednesday. The agreement would roll back pension benefits for newly hired employees, but preserve benefits for current teachers. It would also scrap the two work days before Labor Day that were added to the work year in the last contract negotiation.

Not mentioned in either Bloomberg’s press release or Weingarten’s e-mail to teachers (sent late last night and obtained thanks to a helpful reader): the small matter of the $81 million-a-year Absent Teacher Reserve. That’s the pool of teachers who are the losers in the system’s new hiring market — but haven’t been able to find positions at schools.

The union and the city struck a deal to try to drain the pool in November, but the number of reserve teachers stayed basically the same.

This appears to be Weingarten’s penultimate loose end before she leaves the city to work at the national teachers union full-time. The final deal she must announce: A contract agreement with the union-represented Green Dot charter school in the Bronx, which officials are unveiling this afternoon.

Here’s how Weingarten described the new citywide labor agreement in an e-mail to teachers, followed by Bloomberg’s press release: (more…)

ON GRADUATION RATES:

• The city’s high school graduation rate jumped 4 percent this year. (GothamSchools, City Room, NY1) 
• According to the city’s old formula, the graduation rate is up to 60.7 percent. (Post)
• John Bowne HS in Queens posted the largest grad rate gains in the city, at 16 points. (Post)
• Schools that serve ELLs, like Gregorio Luperon HS in the Bronx, help kids graduate more. (Post)
• Mayor Bloomberg said the higher rate is proof that mayoral control should continue. (Daily News)

• Bronx Science math teachers are taking their complaints to binding arbitration, JD2718 reports.
• Outcry about mayoral-control-critic-turned-Senate-school-governance-bill-sponsor Daniel Squadron.
• Peter Goodman has the history of New York State’s complicated public employee pension system.
• A report that principals are spurning ATRs, even at hiring fairs set up just for them.
• A teacher from the ATR pool is so frustrated by not working that she penned her theoretical suicide note. 
• A former NYC schools beat reporter has written a book about Latino gangs on Long Island.
• Elizabeth talked about mayoral control and the Albany situation on Brian Lehrer today.
• Also on Brian Lehrer today, discussion about whether small means better when it comes to school size.
• A teacher who graded AP exams wonders why schools force unprepared students to take the tests.
• Do not, under any circumstances, take eighth-graders on a field trip after graduation, a teacher warns.
• Turning schools around is as hard as playing basketball like Michael Jordan, writes Chad Aldeman.
• Arne Duncan outlined four ways to pull off a school turnaround at a conference today.
• A 10th-year teacher finishing her first year in NYC recounts some lessons learned. 
• American history textbooks cut out recent history, or at least one side of it, a study has found.
• A cautionary story? Test-tampering led to felony charges for a Georgia principal.
• The state makes teachers grade Regents exams before it decides what is considered passing. Why?
• Is it the best of times or the worst of times for charter schools? Alexander Russo ponders this question.

Mayor Bloomberg announced today that New York’s graduation rates are on the rise for the seventh consecutive year.

According to Department of Education data the city’s four-year graduation rate climbed from nearly 53 percent in 2007 to over 56 percent in 2008. The nearly 4-percentage point jump refers to students who started ninth grade in 2004 and graduated in 2008.

The percentage of students graduating from the city’s public schools fell short of the statewide average of roughly 71 percent. But New York City’s rates were higher compared to those in major cities like Buffalo and Syracuse.

Calling the rate increase “dramatic,” Mayor Bloomberg declared it a victory for the 2002 law that centralized the city’s school governance. The law is set to sunset on June 30.

“The bottom line is, all signs are pointing in the right direction,” Bloomberg said. “And I think everybody understands that mayoral control really has been the key to all of this.” (more…)

I was just wondering whatever happened to that Green Dot charter school contract that Steve Barr told me was imminent kind of a while ago. Then we got this advisory from the UFT:

Contract Signing Ceremony for Green Dot Charter High School Indicates New Era of Teacher Union/Charter School Partnership

WHO:            American Federation of Teachers President and United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten; Steve Barr, founder and CEO of Green Dot Public Schools, Inc. and Green Dot New York Charter School Chairman Jeffrey T. Leeds.

WHAT:         Contract signing ceremony for the groundbreaking three-year contract agreement for the Green Dot New York Charter School in the Bronx with Green Dot Public Schools, the prominent charter school operator and educational reform organization based in Los Angeles, CA, and the United Federation of Teachers, the labor union representing New York City’s 100,000 public school educators. (more…)

The state’s top education policymakers are considering scrapping a plan to raise high school graduation standards, a Board of Regents member told me today. The rethinking comes in response to data showing that one-third of black and Hispanic students who graduate from high school today would not graduate if the state raised its standards.

It also comes as the new Regents chancellor, Merryl Tisch, has been vowing to raise standards. Tisch recently traveled to a Chicago conference where 46 states vowed their support for common standards across the country. She did not return a request for comment this afternoon.

State school officials had said they would get rid of what are known as “local” diplomas, less rigorous versions of the more prestigious Regents diplomas, beginning with students who entered ninth-grade this year. While students must score 65 out of 100 on state subject exams to earn a Regents diploma, they can now score 55 and graduate with a local diploma.

But Regent Betty Rosa, of the Bronx, told me that the board is considering scrapping that plan, which she said was never a foregone conclusion. “I think some people thought it was, but there’s been some concern on both sides of the equations,” Rosa said.

Mayor Bloomberg said he favors getting rid of the local diploma at a press conference today where he announced the latest graduation rate: (more…)

Eight more schools will open this fall with the goal of using technology to change the way students and teachers work together, according to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s inaugural column on the Huffington Post’s new New York City site.

The schools will be in the model of the NYCiSchool, a small, selective high school that opened in Tribeca last fall as the first school in the city’s NYC21C initiative. (The name refers to the “21st-century skills” that technology-infused schools teach.) Klein touted the iSchool at the small schools panel discussion he introduced last week, saying that the school provides an example of how technology can be used to ”tailor the instructional journey of the child to the child’s needs.”

In his column today, Klein writes that the iSchool is pioneering a new “technology ‘culture,’” one that more schools should emulate:

In the past three years, the New York City Department of Education has created a number of technologies that allow teachers, principals, and parents to better understand students’ strengths and weaknesses and create academic programs that are tailored to the students’ needs. …

For New York City, the next big change is to change our technology “culture,” so we begin using modern tools to rethink the way our schools and classrooms are organized to most effectively engage students and bolster their achievement.

An iSchool student, Angelica Modabber, wrote about getting accustomed to using technology in her classes on this site in December. (more…)

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer is asking his office to craft a contingency plan for what he called an “Armageddon” scenario: the possibility that state lawmakers will not renew or revise the 2002 mayoral control law by June 30, its expiration date. In an interview with me this afternoon, Stringer urged Mayor Bloomberg to do the same thing.

“Normally, I would not take seriously this notion that the legislature would not finish mayoral control, do the sales tax, whatever,” Stringer told me today in a telephone interview. “But that’s before the thug and crook took control of the Senate.”

Stringer, himself a former Assemblyman, said that he is concerned that the Senate will not be in a position to take a vote on a renewed mayoral control law by June 30, the day the 2002 law expires. That would set the city’s legal clock back to the pre-2002 days when a citywide school board had the power to appoint — and get rid of — a schools chancellor.

Mayor Bloomberg has said that letting mayoral control expire would cause “riots in the streets.” Asked today whether he is preparing for that scenario, Bloomberg told reporters he’d rather not think about it. “It would be a nightmare, but I just cannot conceive of it happening. And we shouldn’t waste a lot of time preparing for it,” Bloomberg said. “This will get done. The public will not stand for this not getting done.” (more…)

Hundreds of city parents who spent the weekend hitting their e-mail refresh button now know which gifted and talented program has accepted their child.

Word came first in the form of e-mails sent at the hoppin’ hour of, in one reader’s case, 1:20 Saturday morning. (That was an hour and 20 minutes after the city’s self-appointed (and extended) deadline to start notifying families.) Others, according to this blogger, still hadn’t heard as of 10 p.m. yesterday. Snail-mail notice is expected to land in mailboxes today, a schools spokesman, Andrew Jacob, said.

The most interesting piece of news, though, will be where these parents decide to go. Many of the families applying to gifted programs also applied to private schools, and some are reporting choosing between the two kinds of kindergartens. Will the economy cause parents to spurn private schools? (more…)

The state Education Department has released graduation rate data on its website; find all the Power Points and spreadsheets here. The New York City rate jumped to 56% from 53% last year. We’ll have a more complete report later in the day, including coverage of Mayor Bloomberg’s take on the numbers.