GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

In a recent speech to the NAACP, President Obama name-dropped a New York City public high school, saying that more schools should emulate Bard High School Early College and push students to earn college credits in addition to their high school diplomas. 

A recent BHSEC graduate who now attends Williams College, Kesi Augustine, explains in a Huffington Post column what makes the small, super-selective school on the Lower East Side so special. (A replica opened last year in Queens.) It’s not just that students can earn as much as two years of college credits before graduating, she writes:

The most rewarding part of my experience at BHSEC, however, WAS more than just the Associate’s degree. The school introduced me to critical thinking and writing about my place in the world. Our teachers did not give us the recipe for performing well on state-wide tests and SATs, although we performed well in that respect, too. Rather, our small classes thrived on student energy in open seminar discussions and debates about course material. …

If we are going to strive for the educational equality Obama calls for, every American student should have the education I did. I was more than prepared for success in “real” college, largely owed to what I learned at BHSEC. (more…)

Monday, the Census Bureau released a report on the finances of public elementary and secondary schools in 2007.  Such reports lead to a number of common questions:  Why is public schooling so expensive?  Why is there such a weak relationship between spending and student achievement?  If high-spending states and school districts don’t outperform lower-spending states and school districts, are we getting our money’s worth?  These questions are especially pressing in a state such as New York, which, as Yoav Gonen pointed out in yesterday’s New York Post, has the highest average per-pupil expenditures among the 50 states and the District of Columbia, but ranks 15^th and 23^rd among the states on the NAEP fourth-grade and eighth-grade reading tests, respectively.

Three quick points about state-level expenditures.  First, expenditures are higher in states with a higher cost of living.  The chart below shows that the correlation between state per-pupil expenditures in 2007 and the 2009 cost-of-living index calculated by the Council for Community and Economic Research is .63, a strong association.  If we remove Hawaii, which has an unusually high cost of living, the correlation rises to .70. (more…)

• Tony Avella, the third mayoral candidate, has made “take back the schools” part of his platform. (Times)
• Eva Moskowitz says the UFT was wrong to stop parents from hiring teaching assistants. (Daily News)
• Juan Gonzalez notes that consultants paid by a no-bid contract make more than Joel Klein. (Daily News)
• A fired federal auditor had said the Teaching Fellows program skirted AmeriCorps rules. (Village Voice)
• The city’s three all-boys high schools hope to boost black males’ graduation rate. (Village Voice)
• The Albany Times-Union says new state education commissioner David Steiner has a tall task ahead.
• California’s schools chief is trying to show that the state actually meets Race to the Top rules. (L.A. Times)
• D.C. is giving some schools new themes but not changing how they admit students. (Washington Post)
• Teach for America’s Wendy Kopp is in Australia, where a TFA-like program is starting. (The Australian)

• Thompson: Joel Klein should be fired because he tried to sell the schools instead of improve them.
• The Race to the Top fund as a vast, very expensive rendition of the classic skit “Who’s on First?”
• Norm Scott on new state education chief David Steiner: Is Steiner just more of the same?
• NYC Educator says “mutual consent” really just means that principals can veto incoming teachers.
• 70 percent of D.C. parents say they would send their kids to private or charter schools if they could.
• Jay Mathews is spearheading debate over whether an contrary student would make a good teacher.
• A city schools graduate echoes Obama and praises her school, Bard High School Early College.
• On the merits of school vegetable gardens, by a Brooklyn mom.
• A teacher attacks those who blame schools’ problems on masses of incompetent teachers.
• Mrs. Mimi was feeling wistful about teaching as she relaxed this morning. Then she thought again.
• There are many ways of thinking about teacher performance pay; all have fans and detractors.
• Judy Baum provides responses for the perennial summertime complaint, “I’m bored!” 
• A Red Hook school is still resisting a longer-than-planned stay by its resident charter school.
• Commenters cried foul after Alexander Russo posted a mom’s 24-year-old Chicago school tale.

Sonia Sotomayor with students from her high school, Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. Photo via WhiteHouse.gov

A South Bronx school is racing to be the first to honor Sonia Sotomayor, the federal judge whose Supreme Court appointment is all but assured after being endorsed by the Senate Judiciary Committee today. 

At the brand-new Girls Prep Bronx charter school, one of the six classrooms opening this fall will be named after Sotomayor, who attended Catholic school just seven minutes away from Girls Prep’s home inside MS 302. Girls Prep CEO Miriam Raccah told me she made the decision with the school’s principal, Josie Carbone, after discussing Sotomayor’s Bronx roots.

“We mutually decided that we absolutely had to name a classroom after her,” said Miriam Raccah, the CEO of Girls Prep. “It just was a no-brainer.”

The naming is in keeping with a tradition at Girls Prep, a Lower East Side charter school that opened in 2005. At the original school, classrooms are named for Congresswoman Bella Abzug, the architect Zaha Hadid, and Brenda Berkman, who sued the city to open the fire department to women. Teachers often tell their students about their classrooms’ namesakes, Raccah said. She said the teacher who worked in the Bella Abzug room gave her students extra lessons about government.

One outcome of Albany’s debate over mayoral control may have nothing to do with state law. The political wrangling may end up leaving the city with permanent parent advocacy groups.

Last Friday, Democratic state senators reached a deal with Mayor Bloomberg (that may or may not pass), essentially ending the drawn-out negotiations. Yet groups that were in the thick of the political fight just last week are intent on remaining active, even if the mayoral control debate has largely ended.

Learn NY, which was set up roughly a year ago by allies of the Bloomberg administration to campaign for mayoral control’s renewal, will continue to exist until the Senate passes a bill bringing mayoral control back. After that, the group’s future is uncertain.

Learn NY spokeswoman Julie Wood refused to comment in greater detail.

On the opposite side of the debate are groups like the Campaign for Better Schools, the 3Rs Coalition, and the Parent Commission on School Governance, all of which advocated for significant changes to the 2002 school governance law, but favored keeping mayoral control in place. Each them face their own existential questions. (more…)

• David Steiner, the Hunter College dean, is the new state education chief. (GothamSchools, Times, NY1)
• The Post says Sheldon Silver’s school governance caution is sensible but shouldn’t stop mayoral control.
• A Daily News columnist complains about Albany’s practice of including sunset dates in many laws.
• In his third Post column in a week, Thomas Carroll list four steps for NY to win Race to the Top money.
• New York has the highest per-student spending of any state in the country. (Post)
• In the pre-stimulus days, the federal government contributed only 8 percent of education funds. (AP)
• A Park Slope school’s gardening plans were foiled by the theft of a $25 planter this week. (Daily News)
• Class sizes are increasing nationally as more districts reduce the size of their teaching force. (AP)

• It felt like getting hit by a tornado when SED announced the new testing schedule.
• Richard Kessler explains how arts education won in the end in the mayoral control debate.
• Selective high schools and elementary schools in Chicago are seeing lower minority enrollment.
• Is the Gates Foundation giving some states extra help in writing Race to the Top applications?
• Michele McNeil will spend tomorrow with Arne Duncan and chronicle the day via Twitter.
• She may ask how he expects both unions and charter organizers to sign off on every RttT app.
• Diane Ravitch asks, What happens if Duncan is wrong about what constitutes “reform”?
• Clay Christensen suggests some good online learning test cases, in an interview with John Merrow.
• A study (by a former ed reporter) finds that our breed often favor think-tanks over academic research.
• To understand the achievement gap, Richard Rothstein recommends a longitudinal study.
• To close the gap, Pedro Noguera says focus on “the conditions of learning.” (Instruction quality is one.)
• And Peter Murphy, of the state charter lobby, likes David Steiner. Kessler, of arts lobby, too.

The fact that New York prohibits the use of student test scores in teacher tenure decisions would seem to axe the state from the race for Race to the Top dollars. But there are growing suggestions that the state could take home a share after all.

Race to the Top is a special $5 billion federal stimulus fund meant to spur innovation in public schools. It is available only to states and districts that meet certain requirements. One of those requirements is that they allow teacher evaluations to be tied to student performance.

New York State’s tenure law, passed last year under pressure from teachers unions, says student test score data can’t be the sole determinant of whether a teacher gets tenure. But three top officials — teachers union president Randi Weingarten, Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, and incoming State Education Commissioner David Steiner — are arguing that the law will not disqualify New York from the fund.

“It is our firm belief that the language of Race to the Top funding does not preclude New York,” Steiner said today. “New York has a law on the books that relates strictly to tenure.”

Weingarten noted that a second section of the same law explicitly requires teachers’ annual evaluations, which take place even after they receive tenure, to be based in part on how they use test score data to improve their instruction. (more…)

For years, one pesky paper has stalked David Steiner, the man elected New York’s education commissioner this morning. The paper, published in 2003, while he was a professor at Boston University, attacked education graduate schools as intellectually weak and ideologically slanted, marking Steiner as a brave “maverick” among those critical of traditional teacher education — and enemy no. 1 among those who defend it.

Steiner, who was raised in England but was born in America and spent one year at P.S. 41 on West 11th Street, has shrugged off the to-do in the years since. He kept a reasonably modest profile as dean of CUNY’s Hunter College School of Education for the last four years. In conversations, he calmly insists that there is a middle ground in the fierce debate about how to improve public schools.

But the paper that marked him also foreshadows some of the innovations he has tested out at Hunter and the thinking he might bring to the state Education Department, where he is set to become commissioner Oct. 1, replacing Richard Mills, who announced his intention to retire last year. Mills had served in the position since 1995.

The position means Steiner will run the state Education Department, the large bureaucratic organization that enacts education policy set by the state Board of Regents and oversees both universities and public primary schools. (more…)