GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Frank McCourt (Photo via torre.elena on Flickr)

The noted author Frank McCourt got his start teaching at two New York City high schools, and come next year, his name could grace another one.

According to his brother, McCourt is very ill with cancer and in hospice care. His death would make it possible for a school to be named after him, something that a group of Upper West Side advocates have been pushing for in recent months.

The advocates want to see a new communications-themed school open inside Brandeis High School, which occupies prime real estate on 84th Street and is now being phased out due to poor performance. With McCourt’s endorsement, they have been lobbying for the next school to open in the building to be called the Frank McCourt High School for Journalism, Writing, and Literature. 

But one hitch has been that the city’s chancellor’s regulations prohibit schools from being named after living people. (more…)

• The Senate adjourned for summer break early without dealing with mayoral control (Times, Daily News)
• Kevin Parker’s “Better Schools Act” was debated and voted on last night but lost 40-15. (Daily News)
• Yesterday’s control talks failed because Democrats and the mayor can’t agree on amendments. (Post)
• The Daily News says if the Senate can get anything done at all, it should also take care of school control.
• Many waitlisted kindergartners still don’t have seats in their local schools. (Downtown Express)
• The West Side Spirit profiles Insideschools’ storied history and financially troubled present.
• A dozen city students recently traveled to South Africa to meet with Nelson Mandela. (Daily News)
• This weekend is the memorial for the controversial and beloved principal Frank Mickens. (Daily News)
• Some states see charter schools as stimulus cash cows and are opening new ones. (Wall Street Journal)
• Better data management could be driving D.C.’s test score gains. (Washington Post)
• In a speech on the 100th anniversary of the NAACP, Obama pushed education. (Post)

• The Wonkster is reporting that Mayor Bloomberg won’t sign any governance bill that has amendments.
• Former public school teacher and noted author Frank McCourt is reportedly near death.
• Data show that the achievement gap is lower at schools that serve military families.
• Joanne Jacobs’s mechanic tells her that customers need help figuring out how 3/8 relates to 1/4.
• Individual donors have so far given Insideschools.org two thirds of the money the site needs.
• Arizona got caught trying to use school stimulus money for other budget gaps. No go, said USDOE.
• A teacher who thought she had found the perfect pen found an even better one: It doesn’t bleed!
• Rather than negotiate a new contract in a bad budget year, Baltimore teachers extended the current one.
• Seniors in Kentucky are lobbying for more support for preschool programs.
• Alexander Russo can’t get Arne Duncan’s daily schedule, and he’s not happy about it.
• Work was stopped on the Achievement First school going up in Brooklyn because of an unsafe crane.
• A call for preserving, and funding, successful faith-based private schools.

Here’s a video showing a semester-long pollution studies project that students at Brooklyn’s MS 51 completed with the help of Livable Streets Education. Like GothamSchools, LSE is an initiative of The Open Planning Project.

Do you have pictures or videos of other public school classes at work? E-mail us.

If you call the UFT’s main offices on a Friday this summer, don’t expect anyone to pick up. From now until the end of August, most employees will be taking the day off to save the union money.

Like any large organization or business, the UFT is feeling the effects of the recession and the predicted effects of a citywide teacher hiring freeze that’s currently in place. And fewer teachers hired this summer means fewer dues payments for the UFT. So, for the rest of the summer, the majority of the main office will take Fridays off and much of the building will shut down. The summer Fridays are not furloughs — employees will still be paid.

A spokesman for the UFT, Peter Kadushin, said the days off, which amount to a total of eight, are one of several cost cutting plans, and would likely shave 40 percent off the UFT’s energy bill.

“Unions are no different than any other organization or corporation,” Kadushin said, “so when you have economic uncertainty, unions aren’t immune to any of those downturns.”

UPDATE: A call to the UFT’s press office was answered on the first ring on Friday. A spokesman, Ron Davis, said both the communications and grievance departments will be open on all Fridays during the summer. (more…)

Dolores Fernandez, the Bronx's appointee to the re-formed Board of Education, appearing on BronxTalk.

Graduates of the city’s public high schools are falling so behind in reading and math that a community college remediation program doubled in size between 1998 and 2008, the college’s former president said this week.

Dolores Fernandez, who resigned from Hostos Community College last year is now serving as the Bronx borough president’s appointee to the re-formed Board of Education, made the remarks in an interview on a Bronx television news program, BronxTalk.

“I would have loved for the New York City public schools to put my remediation programs out of business, because that would mean that every kid graduating out of the schools could read, write, and do math,” Fernandez said.

Fernandez said that a hiking up of standards at CUNY’s four-year colleges played some part in the growth of Hostos’s remediation program. “But then you still have the regular group of kids who just are coming to us in need of a GED diploma, because they haven’t graduated from the public schools, and when we get them, we’re basically teaching them reading, writing, and math — I mean, basic levels,” she said.

The gloomy picture challenges Bloomberg’s own claims about the public schools, which state figures show now graduate far more students since 2002. But Fernandez said she does not trust these figures as a fair picture of what is really happening, especially for the poor Latino community she served at Hostos Community College.

You can watch the interview in the full two parts below.

UPDATE: Department of Education spokesman Andrew Jacob points out in the comments section that a growing remediation program does not mean that more city students are struggling. His argument:

the size of the program doesn’t tell you anything about the percentage of graduates who required remediation, because the number of public school graduates enrolling at CUNY community colleges has risen dramatically in recent years–70% between 2002 and 2008. Among Hispanic public school graduates, enrollment doubled over that same time period.

With this many more students enrolling, of course the remediation program would expand, even if the percentage of graduates needing remediation fell. And, in fact, that percentage has fallen across all CUNY community colleges, from 82 percent in 2002 to 74 percent in 2008. Among all CUNY colleges, the remediation rate for public school graduates has fallen from 58% to 51%.

(more…)

• Continued conflict in the Senate is keeping mayoral control on hold. (Times, NY1, AP)  
• At Sonia Sotomayor’s Bronx Catholic school, students continue to have high aspirations. (Times)
• Two of the 20+ charter school applications the city received are for Obama-inspired schools. (Post)
• NYC charter schools’ space-sharing insulates them from the recession. (Kansas City infoZine)
• Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said he wants a war on bad schools. (Post)
• Enrollment is rising but budgets are falling at after-school programs nationwide. (USA Today)
• D.C.’s had too little money to make a scheduled payment to its charter schools. (Washington Post)

• The Times editorial board misunderstand basic facts about the city schools, Patrick Sullivan says.
• Gail Robinson finds one reason to think a mayoral control decision is coming soon.
• The Ladders of Discipline: What you don’t know about teaching in New York City.
• The Staten Island P.S. 22 chorus will appear on MTV News tomorrow.
• Philly teachers who hadn’t been signing individual contracts for years will have to sign them.
• A call not to yell at teacher unions for not supporting any old reform that gets thrown at them.
• Claudio Sanchez raises the question: Should everyone really go to college?
• Looks like Adrian Fenty forgot to write a check to D.C. charter schools, which now suffer.
• Alexander Russo wonders what Arne Duncan’s schedule looks like. (Probably FOIA’ble.)
• The low shelf-life of achievement gap closings, plus other insights on NAEP.
• Arne Duncan says good teachers “walk on water,” but is good teaching really a “miracle”?
• Or maybe good teaching requires technology. Or maybe it doesn’t.

Over the course of the last year, an elected parent council passed four resolutions, but the Department of Education never got them.

The Community Education Council in District 1 sent each of the resolutions to staff members at the Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy and then waited for a response. For council members, the resolutions, which are non-binding, are their main avenue for talking to the chancellor. Now the Office says that it never received the resolutions because the CEC didn’t follow the correct protocol for submitting them.

“No resolutions were received from CEC 1 last year,” wrote Martine Guerrier, who heads the Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy, in an email to council member Lisa Donlan yesterday.

The communication breakdown between the two bodies is not an isolated incident. Several councils said they’ve never received a single response to the resolutions they’ve passed, confirming for many members the sense that the city is ignoring them. At the same time, the Office says that parent councils have disregarded the system set up specifically to handle their resolutions.

Jim Devor, a member of the CEC in district 15, said he first learned that his council’s resolution had been declined when he read it on GothamSchools on July 9. Four days later, the DOE still had not contacted the council with its decision, he said.

“Common civility would have dictated a formal reply actually directed to the Council and/or its members,” Devor wrote in a strongly worded email to Klein. He added that the lack of response reflected “a thinly veiled contempt” for the council. (more…)

A group of Park Slope parents is in an uproar over the city’s plan to build a new school building that they say will house two “separate but equal” elementary schools. But schools officials say the plan is exactly how community leaders wanted it.

The plan would replace PS 133′s century-old school building in North Park Slope with a brand new building on the same site. The catch is that the shiny new space will house not just PS 133 but also a new school whose students are likely to be whiter, more affluent, and better prepared for school.

That’s because in an unusual arrangement, the two schools will belong to different districts. PS 133 is located in District 13, which stretches from Brooklyn Heights to Crown Heights. The second school, slated to be twice the size of PS 133, will be part of District 15, which begins just blocks away, and is intended to reduce crowding at PS 321, which is 62 percent white and has only a small fraction of students eligible for free lunch. On average, students in District 15 perform better on state tests than students in District 13.

Parents and community activists say the presence of two separate schools with different demographic compositions would amount to a regression to the days of racial segregation. Via e-mail and Twitter, they are bombarding schools officials and City Council members from the area with requests for a different use of the new building.

“This is an issue that demands creative leadership from you and Councilman [Bill] DeBlasio,” a District 13 mother, Paget Walker, wrote to City Councilman David Yassky. (more…)