GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The Times profiles a handful of celebrities who have taught in New York City classrooms.
• McCourt wrote that Klein, Bloomberg and Moskowitz don’t know “what the hell they’re talking about.”
• He also advocated for smaller class sizes.
• Carl Kruger demands an apology, saying “We’re not Hitler. We’re legislators.”
• The Senate did manage to pass a few schools bills before it ended the session.
• EduWonk says the two largest teachers unions are sending out mixed messages.
• A meeting about the Brooklyn Dreams Charter School was heavy on union turnout.
• Scott has video of parents, principals, and charter employees at the meeting.
• Ed in the Apple posts a (fake) letter from the mayor to the Senate’s Democratic leadership.
• Ronald Ferguson writes that changing life at home is as important as improving schools.
• The author of an anonymous teacher blog is coming out with a book.
• New Leaders for New Schools tried and failed to recruit Michelle Obama.
• Critics are starting to wonder if Obama’s community college goals are feasible.
• The Naked Cowboy joins the mayoral race with no discernible school governance position.
• And Ed.gov wants your input on its redesign.

Senators and Bloomberg administration officials met last night and this morning to resuscitate the mayoral control negotiations that collapsed last week.

Democratic conference leader John Sampson and senators Shirley Huntley and Martin Dilan met with advocacy groups and City Hall officials last night to restart negotiations, according to Senator Eric Adams (D-Brooklyn). And early this morning, members of Sampson’s staff met with deputy schools chancellor Christopher Cerf, according to a source close to the discussions. Cerf did not return requests for comment late this afternoon.

“There was a meeting held today with the mayor’s office that we believe went extremely well,” the source said.

“There was no agreement, but they’re moving forward. We’re hopeful that we’ll have something in the upcoming days.”

Sources said that Bloomberg did not attend either of the meetings. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office declined to comment on the negotiations.

Adams said he had “no idea,” whether the school governance fight would be resolved before the Fall. “We’re not scheduled to go back up to Albany until it’s time to deal with the deficit,” he said. “So I don’t know if we’re going to make a special trip.” (more…)

City principals rated more teachers unsatisfactory this year than they have since at least 2005, suggesting that the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to escort more struggling teachers out of the system may be bearing some fruit.

Principals gave the scarlet-letter rating to 1,554 teachers this year, up from 981 in the 2005-2006 school year, data provided by the city Department of Education show. Both the number and percentage of teachers rated unsatisfactory rose during that period, and the rise occurred for both tenured and non-tenured teachers, city figures show.

Even with the rise, the percentage of teachers rated unsatisfactory remains low. About 2% of teachers, both tenured and without tenure, received what teachers call “U” ratings this year.

Ann Forte, a schools spokeswoman, sent us the figures this afternoon.

The rise follows a concerted effort by school officials to make it easier for principals to terminate poorly performing teachers, including a new group of lawyers assigned to targeting struggling teachers, called the Teacher Performance Unit. Rating a teacher unsatisfactory is often the first step toward removing him from the school system. (more…)

Frank McCourt, who died on Sunday, spent three decades teaching in the New York City schools before becoming an internationally renowned author.

McCourt began his career in 1958 in a vocational school, and moved on to Stuyvesant High School in 1972. Administrators at Samuel Gompers Vocational High School in the Bronx and William E. Grady Vocational High School in Brooklyn turned him away because his Irish accent was too thick.

During his first few months at Ralph R. McKee Vocational High School in Staten Island, McCourt felt caught between two models of teaching. There were the old-timers, he wrote, who were veterans of World War II and considered students “the enemy.” Then were the new teachers, who had read John Dewey and wanted to meet the students’ “felt needs.” Uncomfortable with both strategies, McCourt taught in his own idiosyncratic style, to mixed reviews.

From his second book, ‘Tis:

They don’t want to read and they don’t want to write. They say, Aw, Mr. McCourt, all these English teachers want us to write about dumb things like our summer vacation or the story of our life. Boring. Every year since our first grade we write the story of our life and teachers just give us a check mark and they say, Very Nice. (more…)

Department of Education employees reined in their text-message habits this month after a change meant to curb unprofessional use of city-owned phones.

Since July 15, thousands of principals, assistant principals, and members of the central administration have had to prove that they send text messages for professional reasons. Then they can pay $20 a month to have the service reactivated, spokeswoman Ann Forte said. (Principals can subtract the charge from their school budgets, according to Forte.)

All parent coordinators have cell phones and will retain their text messaging capability, Forte said.

The department pledged in May to cut $20 million from its central administration budget. Eliminating text messaging could save some money, but the change was not meant as a cost-cutting measure, Forte said. Instead, she said, it was an attempt to curb excessive personal use of city-owned phones.

The department will reactivate the service for employees who prove that they text for professional reasons, Forte said. (more…)

FROM NEW YORK CITY:

• Some principals say charter schools pawn their most difficult students off on them. (Daily News)
• Senate Dems rallied at City Hall to urge school control negotiations. (Times, Post, NY1, Daily News)
• The city is cracking down on supplemental school aides paid for by parents. (Times)
• City Hall pushed for and got a one-year extension of a high interest rate on teacher pensions. (Newsday)
• The Bloomberg campaign believes the Senate schools fight is good for the mayor’s reelection bid. (Post)
• The presence of critics is one reason the city doesn’t want parent training to happen at NYU. (Post)
• Noted author and former NYC schoolteacher Frank McCourt has died at 78. (Times)
• AP scores were tossed for 300 students at Bayside HS because of testing improprieties. (Post)
• The city’s hottest pre-K programs accepted less than 5 percent of applicants. (Post)

AND BEYOND:

• The Wall Street Journal says the test score gains that Chicago claims are “phony.”
• Parents often want say about who teaches their kids, but schools balk at giving it. (AP)
• An effort is underway to preserve one of the schools in the Brown. v. Board of Education fight. (Times)
• The Boston Globe says Massachusetts should welcome Arne Duncan’s policy pushes.
• A new book about Maryland schools gives short shrift to teachers, Jay Mathews says. (Washington Post)

• Beth Fertig explains how the mayoral control deal was made, then didn’t happen.
• Arne Duncan calls being a principal the “toughest job in America.”
• State Sen. Bill Perkins is planning demonstrations in Harlem next week against charter schools.
• Clara Hemphill says charter schools can help students and also hurt neighborhood schools.
• Charlie Barone tracks how states are responding to Race to the Top carrot and/or stick.
• Joel Klein’s unlikely ally, the Rev. Al, will endorse a Klein critic, Bill Thompson, for mayor.
• Chicago’s high school transformation initiative is running out of money and steam.
• Laying out how research shows that teacher control helps schools get better.
• A Manhattan Institute scholar calls for a Compstat-style tracking system for teachers.
• Speaking at NAACP, President Obama urged people to get involved at their local public school.
• Arne Duncan and Kathleen Sebelius are both getting behind an early education bill.
• Skepticism about UFT’s savings thanks to some (just some!) employees taking summer Fridays.
• NEA prez says he and Duncan both want schools to get better; strategies are the problem.
• And the Innovative Educator is looking for an intern.

Bloomberg administration officials are ending a sleepless week in Albany today with no idea whatsoever of how to get mayoral control renewed, along with the unsettling realization that the stalemate could go on for the rest of the summer.

In the end, it wasn’t that the mayor’s office couldn’t strike a deal with the largest group criticizing mayoral control, the Campaign for Better Schools, or with the city teachers’ union, which had pushed for checks early on. All three parties signed onto a deal together earlier this week, writing down a Memorandum of Understanding that would have put in place parent-training centers that senators said they wanted to add.

But Senate Democrats ultimately did not go along with the deal.

“It’s not like we couldn’t agree on terms. It’s like they couldn’t agree on terms amongst themselves,” an exhausted and depressed city official, speaking on background, said in an interview today.

“They clearly were saying one thing to us yesterday and doing something different,” said teachers union president Randi Weingarten. “That was very frustrating.” (more…)

Will Obama officials succeed in their mission to use the Race to the Top fund to re-write state education laws? The state of Indiana, where a recent down-to-the-wire budget session featured a teacher-evaluation mini drama, offers some clues.

The drama began with pressure from the Obama administration to repeal a law banning the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations. Alarmed, state education officials lobbied the state legislature, and lawmakers acted, inserting a repeal of the law into the state’s budget.

But mere hours before the new budget passed, lawmakers at the state House removed the repeal at the request of the teachers’ union. The final budget includes a roundabout compromise allowing districts to use student data to assess teachers — but only in cases where federal grant money requires it.

“We had a clear message from the secretary [Arne Duncan] that we were putting our ability to compete for the Race to the Top Funds at risk,” a spokesman for the Indiana Department of Education, Cam Savage, said. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett has communicated frequently with the federal education department about Indiana’s strengths in the competition for grant funds, Savage said.

Bans on using student test scores to assess teachers seem to be the next group of laws on the Department of Education’s watch list. States and districts already took note after Obama administration officials used the threat of denying Race to the Top funds to push against state laws limiting the spread of charter schools. Lawmakers in at least eight states have passed or introduced legislation since the end of May to lift their charter caps. (more…)

Listen to the segment in its entirety right here: 

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Michael Barbaro reports on the choice words Mayor Bloomberg had for the state Senate, which has adjourned for the summer without restoring mayoral control, on his weekly radio show today:

A fuming Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that state troopers should “drag” senators back to Albany — by force, if necessary – if they leave for the summer without voting on a bill to preserve his control of New York City’s schools.

During his weekly radio show, an incredulous Mr. Bloomberg – who seemed to question the intelligence of individual senators by name – said that those holding up the legislation “want to ruin the schools.”

“You wonder what goes through their heads,” he said, adding that the time for negotiations over mayoral control had passed. “It’s over. It’s stopped. You just can’t do that.”

Liz Benjamin has more:

“This is what he should do,” Bloomberg said of Paterson, noting that he has been “defending” the governor throughout the Senate stalemate. “Giving them the summer off is as we say in Gallic, ‘Meshugenah’”.