GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and UFT President Michael Mulgrew at the DOE's new teacher orientation today.

An as-yet-unhired Teaching Fellow ambushed Schools Chancellor Joel Klein today, charging that it is unfair for the city to recruit new teachers and then deny them jobs.

Arah Lewis, a 28-year-old new teacher, stopped Klein as the chancellor left LaGuardia High School this morning after speaking at the city’s annual new teacher orientation. Lewis was hired this spring to join the city’s Teaching Fellows program, but then the city closed its teaching ranks to most new hires in May.

“To be here and to hear you speak is wonderful,” she told Klein. “But it’s also kind of a slap in the face.”

Lewis explained that she had found a middle school in the Bronx, MS 337, whose principal wanted to hire her as a math teacher. But the principal, Andrea Cyprys, can’t offer the position until the hiring freeze is lifted, something Klein warned recently isn’t likely to happen any time soon.

On the verge of tears and surrounded by other new teachers, Lewis protested to Klein that her situation is unfair.

“I don’t know an organization that would go out and recruit people and expect them to change their lives and then say you can’t work here,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense.” (more…)

• The current solution in the Gates Foundation’s search for a silver bullet is teacher effectiveness. (AP)
• Two new city charter schools are in new buildings, and advocates are pushing for funds for more. (Times)
• The city’s former top labor negotiator says he thinks New York is not eligible for Race to the Top. (WNYC)
• Tests scores were flat at Green Dot’s L.A. high school. (More students took the tests.) (L.A. Times)
• The family of a boy whose bus company failed to take him home is suing. (Daily News)
• A study of the ACT finds only a quarter of test-takers are likely to do well in college. (Wall Street Journal)
• In Florida, top school officials spend time in the classroom as substitutes. (Miami Herald)
• Atlanta is quietly striving to become a model urban school district. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
• Principals whose schools don’t improve should be fired, Joel Klein-protégé Julia Gillard said. (The Age)
• For the first time, activists and the feds agree that students should get healthy school lunches. (Times)
• The parent rebellion against ice cream is spreading. (Times)

• Miss Brave is losing her “wackness” as the start of school approaches, and she isn’t happy about it.
• D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee has gotten the Oprah Winfrey endorsement.
• Speaking of Rhee, John Merrow is featuring her for the 10th time tonight, and the topic is testing.
• A school is a boring place to work if the teachers don’t talk a little dirty, Pissed Off Teacher says.
• The Department of Education is looking for someone to supervise testing in Manhattan.
• The middle of high school isn’t a good time to move to NYC, according to Judy Baum.
• Mildly Melancholy, a teacher who was fired last year, had her first day at a new charter school.
• Ice cream sounds really good right now. Here are Robert Sietsema’s frozen food picks.
• Given all the criticism about the state tests, Crissy Strining wonders if promotion policies are irrelevant.
• Bad news for the new journalism: The Washington Post killed its hyper-local news site today.
• British students get their test scores today — and their college admissions hinge on the results.
• Emily Glickman worries that prep for private school admissions tests has gotten too much attention.
• Is Diane Ravitch’s opposition to Obama’s education policies all about states’ rights?
• The Core Knowledge Blog is back, comparing teaching to tapping out tunes without the melodies.

With less than a month to go before the Democratic primary, the teachers union is establishing itself as a major campaign donor in the upcoming city races.

As of August 10, candidates in the November election have received some $79,000 from the United Federation of Teachers’ committee on public education, according to the latest reports to the New York City Campaign Finance Board.

The UFT doled out slightly less than some of the city’s other powerful unions, such as the Service Employees International Union, which has given more than $90,000 and the International Union of Operating Engineers, which has contributed over $80,000. But it’s substantially more than unions like D.C. 37 and the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, both of which have members working in the city’s schools.

A union official said more money is yet to come. But the union’s biggest power will likely be its endorsements — the most important of which have yet to go out.

The official said it’s still possible that the UFT will endorse a candidate for mayor.

“There’s a distinct possibility that we will [make more endorsements]. We’ve got no time frame right now. We’re still assessing everything,” the official said.

A UFT endorsement means not only money but manpower in helping get out the vote, a major boon in an election year where the biggest ticket contest is a lackluster mayor’s race. (more…)

I got my first phone call from Dick Riley very soon after I started covering education at U.S. News & World Report. “Elizabeth, Dick Riley. I’m going to win you a Pulitzer Prize some day,” he said in his gravelly between-you-and-me voice, before adding that he worked for Kaplan, the test prep company.

Maybe he’ll finally come through in his new role: press secretary to new teachers union president Michael Mulgrew. Mulgrew made the announcement today, marking his first public decision since taking over for Randi Weingarten. (Though he did outline his priorities this summer — save the schools budget! get a contract!) The appointment undoes a decision Weingarten made several months ago, to appoint longtime deputy press secretary Ron Davis to the top press spot.

But Mulgrew is not straying too far from his predecessor; Riley also served as Weingarten’s press secretary when she first became UFT president 10 years ago. Appointing him is a smart choice if Mulgrew wants to build his own version of Weingarten’s tight relationships with reporters — and get his name in the papers as much as she did. Riley returns phone calls in seconds and loves to have friendly chat with reporters. Other jobs he’s held include working for Mayor Ed Koch’s press shop, running press at the old Board of Education, and (until today) serving as press secretary to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.

Davis, a former newspaperman who joined the union’s press shop many years ago and remained deputy press secretary for many years as person after person was appointed press secretary over his head, will stay inside the union, Mulgrew told me on the phone today. “Ron is a valued employee. He’s still here. I need to talk to him before I say exactly what it is, but it’s something very good,” Mulgrew said. “We’re fine.”

Next question: What other staffing changes has Mulgrew made without fanfare? In several conversations today, sources pointed out the delicate position he’s in: He has to prove himself as a boss, so he’s got to build a staff that’s his. But he’s also a union boss, and so kicking out people who aren’t his is tricky. We’ll be watching.

The number of correct answers needed to pass state exams is falling — but the head of the state’s testing oversight board says that’s because the tests are actually getting more difficult.

Critics charge that the tests have become so easy that students can guess their way through them. But there might be a good reason for the shift, said Howard Everson, chair of the state body that oversees the testing process: As the individual exam questions have gotten harder, students need to answer fewer of them correctly to earn the same score.

“The idea you have to remove from your head is that a test has a certain number of questions and all of those questions have the same weight every year,” Everson said.

Instead, he said, the state has asked CTB/McGraw-Hill, the company that publishes the exams, to make test questions slightly harder every year. The publisher then adjusts the scale that calculates a student’s final score from the number of correct answers according to the difficulty level of that year’s questions.

The modifications ensure that the test is scored fairly from year to year, Everson said, so that a student correctly answering seven relatively easy multiple choice questions one year would not receive the same final score on an exam as a student correctly answering seven harder questions a different year.

But a side effect is that students have to answer fewer questions correctly each year to pass the tests. (more…)

• Yesterday was the first day of school at a Bronx charter school, the earliest to open this year. (Post)
• The city does not plan to close schools for swine flu or offer a daily count of those infected. (Daily News)
• Susan Dominus profiles a new, $450-an-hour private school consultant who supports test prep. (Times)
• A new book by four Brooklyn professors tackles how students feel about their schools. (City Limits)
• The Detroit News says Detroit’s schools should become more like NYC’s, with a new teachers contract.
• The 11 states that so far have said no to charter schools could miss out on federal education funds. (AP)

• School districts need socioeconomic integration if they’re to succeed, according to Rick Kahlenberg.
• Experts weigh the benefits and drawbacks of traditional teacher preparation programs.
• Peter Goodman answers FAQs about the UFT’s upcoming contract negotiations.
• Aaron Pallas is skeptical about RateMyProfessors.com‘s validity but notes that the site says he’s “hot.”
• The teachers union’s minority caucus launched its 2010 campaign, featuring James Eterno for president.
• Summer school might be over, but the city is still offering free summer meals for children.
• Most applicants to a TFA-like program got rejected; applications spiked with Obama’s inauguration.
• Liam Julian was for national standards before he was against them. 
• Muffy Worthington of Billionaires for Education Reform is worried about names for new charter schools.
• Norm Scott reports on the school governance battle of 2015.
• In a sequel to her first column about Arne Duncan, Leonie Haimson says Duncan could alienate voters.
• Why do kids who love reading refuse to tackle their summer assignments? Smartmom wants to know.

A profile of Mayor Bloomberg in the New Yorker this week is nearly silent about schools, though they’re one of the mayor’s main campaign talking points. But there is this missive about an anonymous hedge fund manager.

We’ll treat you to dinner if you can guess who this person is:

He tells stories that give a sense of unfiltered access to the back channels of power: say, about how it finally dawned on Bill Harrison, the former chairman of J. P. Morgan Chase, that he was retired (“He went downstairs, got in the back seat of his car, and it didn’t move”); or about the self-important hedge-fund guy who once approached Bloomberg and Joel Klein with “great news” about a plan that he and his friends had conceived (“They were going to raise a billion dollars to fix public education. When I told him our annual budget’s twenty billion . . .”).

The bulk of the piece is devoted to Bloomberg’s search for a third term and the various ethical and political hurdles he’s overcome to have the chance to run, but writer Ben McGrath does dip into the mayor’s frustration with the state Senate’s handling of the city’s schools.

Reading into the actions of the “renegade faction of Democratic senators”, McGrath sees a collection of “Albany bozos” motivated by a personal dislike of the mayor, not an ideological divide over education. Referring to the series of press conferences and staged protests that followed the June coup in the Senate, he writes:

For a few weeks, the senators had their fun, but they eventually relented. No one really wanted to return to the days of decentralization and runaway local school boards—they just wanted to see the Mayor sweat. The Albany bozos, as unlikely a Greek chorus as you could imagine, may have unwittingly been channelling the larger ambivalence of the general public. According to polls, a majority of the city’s voters would prefer a new mayor but also believe the current one is the best available man for the job.

One interpretation of rising pass rates on state math and reading tests is that the tests have grown easier. But are they so easy that students can earn a passing score without showing that they know anything at all?

The answer is yes, at least sometimes, writes teacher Diana Senechal in the GothamSchools community section. Senechal conducted an experiment to test whether guessing alone could yield a 2, the lowest passing score. She writes:

I first tried my experiment with the sixth grade ELA test. I “guessed” all the answers on the multiple-choice portion and left the written portions blank. Or, rather, I didn’t “guess,” but filled in the answers as follows: A, B, C, D, A, B, C, D, and so on, all the way through the 26 questions. I didn’t read one of them. …

… I got a 2 without looking at a single test question or writing a single word.

Read Senechal’s entire column for a more detailed explanation of her experiment and its results.