GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Welcome Jenna Bush Hager to the ed beat. She’s the newest education contributor to the Today Show.
• The Core Knowledge Blog rounds up opinion about whether kids should read books of their own choice.
• The Washington Post has redesigned its education page, launching a new blog just for parents.
• This week, the National Journal’s panel of experts is tackling the subject of school turnarounds.
• Mildly Melancholy, who has been to a lot of professional development, spells out what makes good PD.
• Principal Henry from Staten Island’s McKee HS on why the quality review matters.
• The feds tore down their symbolic little red schoolhouse, but is there a better symbol for education?
• Ed in the Apple wants the school management structure to look less like a Jackson Pollock painting.
• The gender gap in math test scores could be due to loads of untapped female talent.
• The debate over the value of paying kids for good grades rages on the radio.
• And Michele McNeil gives a handy summary of comments on the draft Race to the Top regulations.

The fight over mayoral control isn’t over, according to a stalwart group of activists who convened a meeting Saturday to plan how to increase local control of city schools.

Comptroller candidate John Liu and mayoral candidate Tony Avella joined an energized and sometimes raucous crowd of around 70 public school parents, teachers and advocates at the launch event for the Coalition for Public Education, held at the lower Manhattan headquarters of the municipal union District Council 37.

The coalition could be one legacy of this spring’s protracted debate over school governance. That debate was finally settled, at least for the next six years, when Gov. Paterson signed into law a new bill that continues a modified version of mayoral control. Vowing to keep the fight against mayoral control going into the new school year, coalition organizers announced rallies in four boroughs for the first day of school next week.

“The struggle continues on this battle,” said Esmeralda Simmons, director of the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College. “Do not be fooled into thinking that because something has happened in Albany, there’s nothing else that can be done.” (more…)

Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz named his appointee to the resurrected citywide school board today, choosing a college administrator with a child in the city’s public school system.

Gbubemi Okotieuro, the associate dean for governmental and external relations at Medgar Evers College and the father of a high school senior, said in an interview today that he would be a dedicated member of the Panel for Educational Policy. Describing himself as a parent who has been heavily involved “behind the scenes” in his son’s education, Okotieuro said he would not shy away from voicing his opinions.

“I’m not looking for a fight, God knows I’m not. But if you don’t want a man who can think for himself, I’m not your man,” he said. “Marty and I had a talk, and I was very clear, if you want me for this appointment, I’m going to do what I believe is right for my own son and the other kids out there.”

The panel, which became legally nonexistent when the state Senate refused to renew mayoral control legislation this summer, is slowly being reconstituted now that the law is back in effect. With Markowitz’s appointment, there is one seat that remains to be filled by Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. A spokesman for Diaz said he was still interviewing candidates for the position. (more…)

As teachers start gearing up for the first day of classes next week, many are logging in to ARIS, the city’s online school data warehouse. But some are finding that despite all that ARIS offers, it still isn’t in sync with what teachers really need.

Miss Brave, a second-grade teacher, writes on her blog:

Now, I am all about the lists and charts and organizational tools, but I’m already frustrated by ARIS. Maybe it’s because I’ve got second graders, so there’s not exactly that much data to go on, but almost every single data field on my students was blank, and the ones that were there are cryptic. My new student from another school has an IEP, but I can’t tell what’s on it. Several of my students have “health alerts,” but I don’t know what they are. And a handful have “closed 407s,” which (because I am a huge dork) I had to research to find out what exactly that meant. (As far as I can tell, it means they were absent a lot, and the DOE investigated.) This is my third year in the system, and I don’t see how I’ll ever keep pace with all the acronyms and numbered abbreviations.

But all the tools we use at my school to measure student progress –running records and Everyday Math assessments and checklists and such — don’t factor into ARIS. (more…)

News from New York City:

• City principals are hiring ad agencies to boost their schools’ profiles. (Post)
• Even with their options limited, some principals are choosing not to fill positions. (GothamSchools, Times)
• A teacher who just left the city says the city schools would benefit from tracking by ability. (Daily News)
• Fewer city schools are considering failing under NCLB, thanks to higher state test scores. (Daily News)
• Just 10 city schools were named “persistently dangerous” by the state, the lowest number ever. (Post)
• Brooklyn’s PS 35 was removed from the state’s lists of dangerous schools and failing ones. (Post)
• A school safety agent appears to be using his work shirt to skirt city parking rules. (Post)
• Concern persists about the new home for Bronx Early College Academy. (Riverdale Press)

And beyond:

• Jay Mathews reminds us that going back to school is just a human construct. (Washington Post)
• Two scholars say claims that top students benefit from NCLB aren’t supported by the data. (Times)
• New Orleans’ charter schools, with 60 percent of students, are seeing higher test scores. (USA Today)
• More disputes over who should pay for special ed services are ending up in court. (Washington Post)
• The new trend in reading classes (including in NYC) is letting students select their own books. (Times)
• The Times says the Obama administration must “hold the line” against teachers unions on RttP.
• Eli Broad says his philanthropy helped unseat unions as education authorities. (Wall Street Journal)

• D.C.’s mayor, Adrian Fenty, kept his promise and moved his kids from private to public school for this fall.
• Aaron Pallas on why the Leadership Academy study was “bungled by design.”
• Students found out before the teachers at Pissed Off Teacher’s school who was teaching what.
• Jay Mathews speculates on whether AP exams will take over the SAT’s role in college admissions.
• A teacher who’s assigned to the rubber room says she’s dreading going back to school this year.
• NYC Public School Parents is collecting Race to the Top comments, which are due to the feds tomorrow.
• We’ve added more completed candidate questionnaires to our Election 2009 homepage.
• Remembering Ted Kennedy, a champion of education and the reason we get state-level NAEP scores.
• Miss Eyre’s final installment on what you should know when you start teaching: How to keep your head.
• Registration centers for students who are new to the city open on Monday.
• Teachers reveal what they learned from the New York Times-hosted debate over teacher training.
• NY Teacher is looking forward to going back to school; Peace in the Classroom is seeking balance.
• What does the New Yorker’s Rubber Room augur for upcoming teachers contract negotiations?
• Robert Pondiscio muses on teacher observations, inspired by Michelle Rhee’s 200-page checklist.

See you back here next week, when we’ll be back on a regular posting schedule. Have a good weekend!

Teach for America isn’t alone in planning to keep its new members busy even if they don’t land positions before the start of school. The city’s Teaching Fellows program is also offering short-term activities for new teachers shut out by the hiring freeze.

Teaching Fellows who haven’t been hired by a school by Sept. 18 can sign on for six more weeks of “extended pre-service training,” paid for by the city, as part of an arrangement developed even before the hiring freeze was announced in May. Accepted Fellows learned about the extension option this spring, before they agreed to join the program.

Fellows who participate will earn $250 a week in exchange for four days of practice teaching. They’ll also get to attend the program’s required graduate program for free during that time. But they won’t be offered health insurance or other benefits, according to Ann Forte, a Department of Education spokeswoman. Unlike TFA, the Teaching Fellows program won’t involve home-cooked meals, Forte said.

The short-term, low-pay program for unplaced Fellows follows a fight last year over how long Fellows without jobs should be entitled to a salary. (more…)

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is offering to open up. Photo via Wikimedia commons.

Responding to the national push for more transparent government, the Bloomberg administration is opening up some of its datasets for easier public consumption. The only question is what data the city will throw up on the new Web site.

The city is taking suggestions starting Monday, and the nonprofit that houses GothamSchools, The Open Planning Project, is part of the push to send those in. We will be helping TOPP fill out what are called RFEI’s, or requests for expressions of interest, this coming Monday.

With the deadline breathing down our necks, on our staycation no less!, we need your help. Our wish list includes information on outside contracts the Department of Education holds, school-by-school budget documents, and school accountability information organized in easy-to-search Excel spreadsheets rather than individual PDF’s.

What should we add? Please name names of specific documents, and please don’t be shy with ideas. Info on how to submit your own RFEI is here.

Teach for America is calling on its sizable alumni base to help entertain new teachers while they wait for the hiring freeze to be lifted.

Despite halving the size of this year’s cohort and directing many teachers to charter schools, TFA still hasn’t found jobs for 118 of its 300-odd new teachers, according to an e-mail sent to graduates of the program yesterday. While TFA officials “continue to be optimistic” that the Department of Education’s freeze on outside hires will be lifted, they anticipate that “a substantial number” of new corps members will remain jobless when the school year begins, the e-mail said.

The organization is putting together additional training for the unplaced teachers, according to the e-mail from Jemina Bernard, director of the program’s New York region. It is also asking the more than 2,000 graduates of the program who live in the city to provide “social and cultural opportunities,” such as home-cooked meals and walking tours, between now and the end of October for the new teachers. ”I want to be very clear how critical this period of time is for our 2009 corps and how extremely important it is that we come together as a family to fully support them,” Bernard wrote.

Teach for America told its new members this spring that they would be guaranteed a salary for 40 business days after the start of classes, even if they hadn’t found a position. (more…)

There’s a well-known education research textbook by three distinguished scholars at Harvard entitled By Design.  Judy Singer, one of the authors, once told me that the working title for the book, rejected by Harvard University Press, was Bungled by Design.  That title conveyed the key message of the book, which is that, when it comes to education research, you can’t fix by analysis what you bungled by design.  The design of a research study dictates what a researcher can plausibly ask, and the credibility of the claims about what is being studied.

The recently-released NYU study of the New York City Principal Leadership Academy comparing graduates of the Aspiring Principals Program to other new NYC principals is, in my view, bungled by design.  This is not a knock on the authors, each of whom I know and respect a great deal.  Rather, it reflects the fact that the NYU researchers were brought in to study the Aspiring Principals Program of the Leadership Academy long after critical design decisions about how to evaluate the impact of the program were made—either by omission or commission.

The three key limitations I raise here pertain to selection mechanisms that ideally would have been observed by the researchers.  The inability to understand and model these selection processes undermines the objective of isolating the effect of the Aspiring Principals Program on student outcomes.  (See the comments of Sean Corcoran, lead author of the report, on selection issues here.) (more…)