GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Next school year’s budget cuts will be “devastating,” principals are reporting.

Principals had until Thursday to decide how to handle cuts of about 5 percent or more of their budgets for next year. Many say they chose to cut teaching positions, slash after-school programs, and trim other extras that have helped their schools improve.

For an example, see the comment left on GothamSchools’ interactive budget cuts map over the weekend by the principal of PS/MS 179 in the Bronx:

We lost 13 teachers, one AP through retirement who we cannot afford to replace, four paraprofessionals, three school aides and a family worker. [...] I will have NO special programs that we previously paid for such as poets for middle school, dance for elementary school. Morale is terrible and the results would appear to be devastating — all this after making significant progress over the past three years.

To let us know what’s being cut at your school, leave a comment on our budget cuts map or send us an e-mail.

Graduation data for students who entered high school in 2004 will be released today, the State Education Department has announced.

The city will announce that its graduation rate jumped four points, according to the New York Post. A gain of that magnitude would outstrip the increases of the last few years and would bring the city’s official graduation rate to 56 percent.

City officials were hinting at an increase last week: Schools Chancellor Joel Klein told an audience that he had looked at internal third- and fourth-year data for many of the city’s new small high schools and seen continued gains. “The results are consistently higher,” he said, adding that the rate was continuing to inch upward at large high schools as well.

Asked about graduation rate and dropout trends, the department’s data czar Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger told the City Council on Thursday, “We certainly expect rates to rise and everything else to go down.” (more…)

ON SCHOOL GOVERNANCE:

• Gov. Paterson is putting the Assembly’s mayoral control bill before the Senate. (Times, Gotham Gazette)
• Some are worrying that the Senate won’t regroup in time to deal with mayoral control. (GothamSchools)
• “The days of tweaks are over,” Mayor Bloomberg said about pending mayoral control legislation. (Post)
• Daniel Squadron is the first Senate Democrat to back the Assembly’s mayoral control bill. (Daily News)
• The new Senate Dem leader who wants changes to mayoral control had scores rise in his district. (Post)
• Bloomberg also said the State Senate has to work out its issues and approve mayoral control. (Post)

FROM NEW YORK CITY:

• The city is set to announce increased graduation rates for the Class of 2008 today. (Post)
• Nurses went unpaid when schools closed because of swine flu, and they are angry. (Daily News)
• The city’s biggest high schools attracted the most applicants. (Daily News)
• Budget cuts could kill Ashton Kutcher’s favorite chorus, from Staten Island’s PS 22. (Post)
• The cuts are costing enrichment classes and low class sizes at schools in Brooklyn. (Daily News)
• A passage on the English Regents exam this year praised Mayor Bloomberg. (Post)
• President Clinton is speaking at a Harlem graduation after students lobbied for him. (Daily News)
• A Jewish student is upset that her high school graduation is happening on a Saturday. (Post)
• The DOE was planning to destroy a brand-new science lab at a school that’s closing. (Daily News)
• Major crimes are down and robberies are up in the city schools, according to new data. (Daily News)
• Chancellor Klein showed up in an article about unsavory Blackberry use in business meetings. (Times)

AND BEYOND:

• At a speech today, Arne Duncan is going to urge that low-performing charter schools be closed. (Times)
• The Washington Post says it’s pleased Arne Duncan is using his “bully pulpit” to boost charter schools.
• In California, two students had vastly different high school experiences just 20 miles apart. (L.A. Times)
• The Australian official who loves Joel Klein’s reforms met with him again last week. (The Australian)
• In England, teachers are being told to skip grammar and stop teaching the “i before e …” rule. (BBC)

That man in the suit with the bald head one seat away from Rev. Al Sharpton looks a lot like Michael Mulgrew. Mulgrew is the man Randi Weingarten says is first in line to take her place as United Federation of Teachers president if/when she announces plans to leave Wednesday.

Sharpton convened the state’s top Democratic leaders at his Harlem office this morning to try to sort out the Senate mess. The Democrats concluded that they should rule the Senate along with one Republican, NY1 reports. (NY1 also provides the screenshot I’m stealing above.)

There are 10 days to go before mayoral control expires and one day left of the legislative session. Given the standstill at the state Senate, that equation is leaving both supporters and opponents of the mayoral control in a state of high alarm.

Invariably, their panic is fueled by the complete unpredictability of the situation. No one has the answers to questions about what would happen if the Senate allowed the 2002 law to sunset, as State Senator John Sampson has threatened to allow.

“If everybody goes home for the summer we’ve got 32 school boards on July 1. Mayoral control is over. The clock is ticking and it doesn’t seem like anybody’s doing anything,” said Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, which favors preserving mayoral control.

Should the Senate pull itself together and reconvene, either by choice or by force, before the law expires, it remains unclear what kind of bill it will support. A bill has already passed the Assembly, but Sampson and other Democrats have said they want to amend that to add stricter checks to the mayor’s power. (more…)

• Rahm Emanuel says Arne Duncan is leading a “quiet revolution” in education reform.
• After an interview with Randi Weingarten, Sawchuck calls her Henry James-like.
• Today’s emergency PEP meeting was a perfect example of rubber-stampedness.
• Parent leader Lisa Donlan says of governance: “Ultimately we get the government we deserve.”
• Columbia Journalism School students will cover charter schools in a major way this summer.
• NYC Educator, on Regents-grading: Try “to make them pass by any means necessary.”
• A report on the state of arts education included the game “Name that instrument.”
• A Chicago charter school’s teachers voted to join the teachers union.
• Michigan State is getting a grant to teach education researchers economics.
• LA Unified will hire no Teach For America members in the fall. (Via Amy Fagan.)
• And Bronx students made a documentary showing how they use low-cost laptops:

Teach for America is moving to the ‘burbs. The program will send 5 to 10 recruits to Westchester County this fall, where they’ll teach in a district that serves special education students from across the state.

In contrast to New York City, where Teach For America places hundreds of teachers every year, the Greenburgh-Graham Union Free School District has just two schools and about 350 students, all of whom come from low-income families and have severe special needs. All of the TFA teachers there will have special education certification, said a spokeswoman for the organization, Kerci Marcello Stroud.

One reason for the upstate expansion is that working in Greenburgh-Graham helps TFA fulfill its mission of helping at-risk students, Stroud said. There’s also the fact that the New York schools the organization usually works with, in New York City, are shutting new teachers out right now because of the city’s budget-induced hiring restrictions.

Teach For America’s New York City chapter admitted fewer applicants this year and is planning to have a far higher proportion of them teach at charter schools, which are not subject to the hiring restrictions. The handful of teachers going to Greenburgh-Graham were admitted to the New York Region and will go through the same hiring process as any other candidate, Marcello Stroud told me.

TFA is also placing teachers in Queens for the first time in more than a decade, according to an e-mail sent to corps members and alumni this morning. The national organization has placed teachers in New York City schools since its launch 20 years ago.

The man who made sure the city’s school budget vote was legal used his own vote to say no to the proposed budget.

A key reason Patrick Sullivan opposed is that school officials still had not responded to a long list of budget questions he submitted two weeks ago, Sullivan told me. The questions, which are posted in full after the jump, reflect the difficulty of getting information from the department.

Here’s one of Sullivan’s questions:

Last time we had this exchange we were told DOE does not know how many charter students are in DOE facilities. But then at the Bronx meeting Kathleen Grimm said we do know. Can someone tell us please?

Sullivan is often the only member of the school board, currently known as the Panel for Educational Policy, to speak out against the mayor’s policies. But he wasn’t the only panel member asking questions about the budget at this morning’s surprise school board meeting. Two other members appointed by borough presidents (Sullivan was appointed by Manhattan’s Scott Stringer) also asked question, but they ended up voting yes to the budget.

“The difference is that unless they provide this, I’m not going to support the budget,” Sullivan said.

Below the jump, the full list of questions Sullivan sent the DOE that remained unanswered today:

(more…)

The city budget for the next school year could have ended up invalidated as illegal, were it not for a few pointed questions from a Manhattan father.

Patrick Sullivan, who in addition to being a dad is the only member of the citywide school board who regularly votes against the Bloomberg administration’s proposals, approached a City Council member this Monday after reading newspaper accounts that the mayor and the council had reached a budget deal. Stories said a vote was planned for this week (in fact, it’s happening today).

“I was kind of surprised, because we hadn’t approved the budget yet,” Sullivan told me today.

Indeed, the 2002 state education law that is under the microscope in Albany right now requires that school board members approve the city schools budget before the City Council can vote on it. But as the Council readied to vote in a budget this week, the Panel for Educational Policy had not yet voted its own approval — and wasn’t scheduled to do so until next week. (The panel members had been offered three briefings on the budget by school officials.) (more…)

A “bubble science” lesson at an after-school program put on by The After School Corporation at Thurgood Marshall Academy Lower School in Harlem.