GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The Senate stalemate finally concluded when Pedro Espada returned to Democrats. (Times)
• A tentative Senate deal would pass mayoral control, then add tweaks in a few months. (Crain’s)
• Daniel Squadron said he’s been assured Senate will pass Assembly’s mayoral control bill. (Post)
• The tough-love Brooklyn principal accused of pushing students out died in his sleep. (Daily News)
• The Daily News praises Jim Liebman, “the least known person who has had the greatest impact.”
• The opening of a new school in the Bronx is causing an extra-large amount of trash. (Your Nabe)
• The Detroit school system is teetering on bankruptcy, upsetting union, school board. (Detroit News)
• A cheating scandal in Georgia will leave schools’ test scores to be thrown out. (AP)

• A Teachers College fellowship program for outstanding principals is seeking nominations.
• Teacher JD2718 lays out his priorities for the UFT’s upcoming contract negotiations.
• It’s awesome how easy it is to capture and share video. Here’s another view of the PS 123 rally.
• Debbie Meier, the progressive educator who opened schools in Harlem, on her favorite education books.
• Linda Darling-Hammond at the National Review: There’s no link between mayoral control and outcomes.
• A UFT rep takes a closer look at what students said about respect at their schools on the DOE’s surveys.
• Another frontier for USDOE-NYC tension: Ed Sec Arne Duncan thinks cell phones are good for schools.
• You know what preschoolers need? More math instruction. So says a new report.
• Norm Scott looks at people (whose names begin with A or B) the UFT paid $100,000 or more last year.
• Putting policymakers’ discussions on the record takes all the fun out of them, Andy Rotherham writes.
• Are Massachusetts’s ”readiness schools” the frozen yogurt to charter schools’ ice cream?
• Russo calls for more one-note education blogs, perhaps about Arne Duncan’s face.

The stalemate in the State Senate appears to be ending in dramatic fashion today, with the distribution of power returning to how it was 31 days ago, at least numerically. That means senators can now get to work on everything they’ve ignored for the last month, including mayoral control, which officially expired last week.

Crain’s New York is reporting that a deal in Albany will have the Senate approve the Assembly’s bill now, but add amendments later:

Key Senate Democrats, notably Democratic conference leader John Sampson, want a few more checks on the mayor’s power than are provided for in the Assembly bill. But the Assembly has already adjourned for the summer, and senators don’t want to wait to renew mayoral control, which expired June 30. …

Amendments passed subsequently by the Senate would require Assembly approval, but an Albany insider says assurances have been received that the lower chamber would accept some modifications.

The bill probably won’t be discussed tonight. But when it is, the Senate is likely to push for increased parent involvement, Crain’s reports. “A vocal constituency” is still pushing for fixed terms for school board members, the report says.

James Eterno, a member of ICE, is running for president of the UFT. (Photo via GothamSchools' Flickr)

For months now, outgoing UFT president Randi Weingarten has made it clear whom she would like to see succeed her — chief operating officer Michael Mulgrew. But the seeming inevitability of Mulgrew’s election has not stopped two small opposition groups within the union from promoting their own candidate, James Eterno.

Eterno’s name didn’t make the list today, when the UFT’s executive board met to nominate candidates for interim president. Weingarten nominated Mulgrew and no one on the board offered any other names. Non-board members weren’t permitted to make nominations. Eterno’s party, the Independent Community of Educators, commonly known as ICE, as well as the Teachers for a Just Contract, do not have any members on the board, which is dominated by the UFT’s ruling party, the Unity caucus. At the end of the month the board will reconvene to vote in Mulgrew (according to the constitution, there have to be two separate meetings even if there’s only one candidate). But not being chosen won’t preclude Eterno from running for president in 2010, when all union members will vote.

Eterno is keenly aware of his role as the underdog. “It’s a long shot,” he said of his 2010 candidacy, which he and fellow ICE members are funding. “If you were making betting odds, you wouldn’t favor us.”

Eterno, 48, has been a social studies teacher at Jamaica High School for 23 years, and he served on the union’s executive board from 1997 to 2007. He left his party, the New Action caucus, when it made a deal with Unity to back Weingarten’s reelection, something Eterno vehemently opposed. (more…)

The mayor's signature from one of the waivers he signed.

The newly reconstituted Board of Education is stacked with three deputy mayors — but before the officials could serve on the board, they had to get waivers from Mayor Bloomberg.

That’s because of a statute in the city charter that prevents people from holding two city jobs without receiving a waiver from the mayor. Bloomberg wrote letters (read them here) authorizing Patricia Harris, his first deputy mayor; Dennis Walcott, his deputy mayor for education; and Ed Skyler, his deputy for operations to serve on the Board of Education on the same day that it met for the first time in seven years.

A deputy mayor sat on the school board as recently as the Giuliani administration, when Giuliani appointed a board member, Ninfa Segarra, as his deputy mayor. But it’s not clear to me whether three deputy mayors have ever served on the board simultaneously. (Knowledgeable readers?)

In each letter, Bloomberg explains he is waiving the prohibition because the deputy mayors won’t be compensated for their service on the board. (State law outlines $15,000 salaries for board members and $20,000 salaries for the board president, but all board members right now are waiving the salaries.) Bloomberg appointed two of the deputies to the board, Harris and Skyler. The Queens borough president, Helen Marshall, appointed Walcott, who is now president of the board.

In other new-world-order developments, Chancellor Joel Klein is declining to transform a second parent council into a community school board. (more…)

The state’s online survey about proposed credit recovery rules will only accept comments of 400 words or less, according to a Bronx math teacher who had a lot more to say. So he sent me his response. Here’s part of his answer:

A dangerous discrepancy exists between the statement “the committee much consider each student’s needs and course completion deficiencies” and “the student must also demonstrate mastery of the initial deficiency areas. What is the state definition of mastery? A principal could, by these regulations, decide that a student that is not going to college does not need to know how to solve a one variable equation, and therefore assign a project that superficially demonstrates “mastery” without the student actually addressing his/her deficiencies. There MUST be some provision to make it very clear to school administrators what this means, otherwise there will be inconsistency across the state in the area of credit accumulation. 

Send your comments about the proposed regulations to tips@gothamschools.org. The teacher’s complete response is below: (more…)

Joanne Weiss

The Obama administration official in charge of an educational innovation fund yesterday issued a warning to a New York audience: Unless the state legislature revises a law now on the books about teacher tenure, the state could lose out on the $4.35 billion fund she controls.

Joanne Weiss said the Obama administration aims to reward states that use student achievement as a “predominant” part of teacher evaluations with the extra stimulus funds — and pass over those that don’t. New York state law currently bans using student data as a factor in tenure decisions.

Test scores aren’t everything, Weiss said. “But it seems illogical and indefensible to assume that those aren’t part of the solution at all,” she said, echoing nearly word-for-word Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s remarks last week to the National Education Association.

The pessimism about New York’s policies is a departure from Duncan’s tone during a visit to New York City in February, when he was cheery about the state’s chances in the competition. Duncan also briefly mentioned New York as one of several states whose firewalls around student and teacher data need to come down in a recent speech, and he indicated that New York’s cap on charter schools may also hurt the state’s chances at a slice of the stimulus pie.

Weiss, who worked at the New Schools Venture Fund before heading to Washington, said the “disadvantage” of the tenure law to New York could be counterbalanced by efforts here that the Obama administration admires. She praised a New York City program that is evaluating individual teachers based on their students’ test scores.  One strength of the program, Weiss said, is that city teachers generally accept the evaluations as an accurate and fair assessment of their performance. (more…)

• The city’s top accountability officer has resigned. (Times, GothamSchools 1, 2)
• Hunter College tried to pull scholarships from city students who had been awarded them. (Daily News)
• City Council candidates explain where their kids go to school and why. (Brooklyn Paper)
• Parent councils fear rezoning will be stalled while the councils legally don’t exist. (Riverdale Press)
• Manhattan’s Murry Bergtraum HS isn’t letting other schools use its ballfields. (Downtown Express)
• Upper West Side families want a high school that gives them admissions priority. (West Side Spirit)
• The City Council has cleared the way for a Park Slope school to be torn down. (Brooklyn Paper)
• In Chicago, criticism of state tests but praise for students’ higher scores on them. (Chicago Tribune)
• An special ed study found that too many Boston students were kept in separate classes. (Boston Globe)

• Richard Ravitch is lieut gov. Paterson will push mayoral control, but legal troubles are ahead.
• Board of Ed questions are being directed to DOE’s press office, Wayne Barrett reports.
• Also via Barrett: Assemblyman Brennan called Board of Ed ruling an “abuse of power.”
• Video captures Bloomberg and Thompson answering education questions at the WFP debate.
• The city teachers union is endorsing a Queens City Councilmember — and her teacher opponent.
• That amazing Staten Island P.S. 22 student chorus says an emotional goodbye, via the Cure.
• Mayor Bloomberg may order agencies to block routine contracts in order to save money.
• Sherman Dorn: recent attacks on teacher unions are ineffective and based on wrong assumptions.
• In cheering modest test score gains, Chicago’s Mayor Daley also said tests may be too easy.
• That’s in response to the new report challenging Chicago’s supposed improvements.
• Ideas for how education grad schools can spur innovation.
• The think-tank arm of the national school boards association grows a blog, authors a report.
• One of the first to push for a parent-training center was a Brooklyn pastor.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the city's new accountability chief.

Accountability czar James Liebman is officially leaving the Department of Education, but he isn’t going far. From his office at Columbia University, he will help the city win federal stimulus money to boost the very programs he pioneered during his three-year tenure.

In an interview today, Liebman said he’ll go back to teaching criminal law this fall. But he’ll also help the department put together “the most powerful proposal” for federal innovation funds, he said. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that New York City’s accountability and teacher pay initiatives are top candidates for a $650 million grant program meant to spur innovation.

Liebman is leaving behind an accountability system that has divided educators and parents. ”I think [he] has forever changed the way this public school system thinks about accountability and the way public school systems around the country will think bout accountability in the future,” said Eric Nadelstern, the department’s chief schools officer.

But some principals reacting to the news of Liebman’s departure this afternoon showed relief. One laughed joyfully when she saw the city’s press release at an event today. Another jokingly wrote to a fellow principal, ‘No more progress reports?’

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the former principal who is replacing Liebman, said the basic tools created by the accountability office would not change. (more…)