GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The state-city gap is wider in untested Social Studies and science, Aaron Pallas finds.
• Using popular films to teach history can be a double-edged sword, a study finds.
• Sawchuck offers a cheat sheet review of the NEA’s leaked alternative-pay memo.
• Kevin Carey finds the NEA’s position on value-added a matter of “willful misunderstanding.”
• If the “public option” is health care’s big issue, in education it’s the “private option.”
• Arne Duncan is not part of a federal investigation into the Chicago Board of Ed.
• Skepticism that Race to the Top’s $350m for making better tests will innovate assessment.
• Randi Weingarten tells Time Magazine her problem with bake sales paying for teachers.
• A principal offers 10 suggestions for new teachers starting at new schools this fall.
• What if college lasted for just three years?
• After trying Bush, an early college high school pleads for help from President Obama.

To the great relief of City Hall and Tweed Courthouse, the New York state Senate intends to pass the Assembly’s version of mayoral control tomorrow. As part of the deal enabling this basic but, for the Senate, extraordinarily difficult accomplishment, senators will also take up four amendments that appeared on paper for the first time today.

The amendments include no surprises, and outline only slightly more detail about the agreement than had previously been disclosed.

Sponsored by Senator Shirley Huntley and several other senators, including Eric Adams, Martin Dilan, and Jose Serrano, the amendments would create a $1.6 million parent training center, an arts council, yearly school safety meetings, and an additional supervision requirement for superintendents. Democratic senators agreed to vote for the Assembly’s bill in return for the passage of these four amendments.

The newest details are in a bill to create a parent training center, which has already garnered some criticism from Assembly members. According to language in the bill, the center will have many arms, each of which are thinly outlined. While offering basic guidance to parents on how to enroll their children in special education or gifted programs, the center will also recruit parents for community education councils and school leadership teams. It also aims to support college counseling initiatives.

Housed at CUNY (though at which college the bill doesn’t say), the center will be nonpartisan. The state will fund the center and the city will match that funding up to, but not above $800,000. (more…)

On his first day of work, Mulgrew visited teacher Carla Greene at P.S. 329 in Brooklyn. (Courtesy of Miller Photography/UFT)

New York City’s teachers union is gearing up for its contract negotiations in the fall, sending out thousands of questionnaires to poll its members about what they want.

The negotiations will be the first serious test of newly elected UFT president Michael Mulgrew who, in the survey’s cover letter, warns that the talks will be “tough” at a time when the city is slashing budgets and laying off employees.

The survey, which at a bulging 35 pages long barely fits in its return envelope, lists a series of desirable changes to the contract under headings like “Class Size,” and “Respect and Professionalism,” and asks respondents to rate the importance of each on a scale of one to five. It must be returned by August 13, and may surprise more than a few union members who could return from summer vacations to find the deadline has passed.

Absent from the survey is any mention of tenure or the Absent Teacher Reserve — the pool of over 2,000 teachers who have lost their jobs and have yet to find work within the city’s school system.

“The questionnaire was designed by our negotiating committee, and it’s a key part of the process because it allows members to weigh in on the issues important to them,” UFT spokesman Brian Gibbons wrote in an email. “The information we’ll get from this survey will help us shape our goals, priorities and demands as we move forward with collective bargaining.” (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg’s chief spokesman for his reelection campaign, Howard Wolfson, brushed aside claims that the city’s test scores and graduation rates are inflated in an appearance on NY1′s “Road to City Hall” last night.

“If we can’t talk about the data, then why are we even having a conversation?” he said.

Wolfson came to talk about the mayor’s new transit initiative, but he ended up spending much of the interview discussing the mayor’s education record, which is shaping up to be a centerpiece of his campaign. Wolfson only become animated when host Dominic Carter noted that some critics believe that the city and state have found ways to artificially inflate the numbers.

“I mean, yes, they can say crime rate really isn’t low, you’re cooking the books. Test scores are not dramatically higher, you’re cooking the books. Yes, you can say that about anything. I can say that about the stratospheric ratings that you enjoy every night, oh, you’re cooking the books. The fact is, the numbers are what they are,” Wolfson said.

Carter prodded Wolfson with an example of numbers that do lie, citing times when medical examiners have been encouraged to withhold death reports until the following year, lowering the city’s murder rate in key election cycles. (more…)

Yesterday’s New York Times story on standardized testing in New York City in the Bloomberg/Klein era isn’t the story I would have told.  Regular readers are aware that I’m more skeptical about the evidence regarding gains in student learning both in New York City and New York State.  And I was especially disappointed that the Times provided a tool for ranking schools, even though the tool provided a modicum of context.  As I’ve written recently, these school comparison tools aren’t very informative.

The article did, however, lead me to reflect on something I hadn’t considered before—New York City’s relative performance on different school subject tests.  Elementary and middle school students in New York are tested annually in math, English Language Arts (ELA), science and social studies.  Students in grades three through eight take the English Language Arts and math assessments.  Science is tested in grades four and eight, whereas social studies is tested in grades five and eight.

We have paid a lot more attention to student performance in ELA and math than we have to student performance in science and social studies.  The School Progress Reports accountability system devised by former accountability czar Jim Liebman and implemented in 2006-07 rests heavily on ELA and math test scores, and science and social studies scores have not been taken into account.  Elementary and middle schools, their principals and their teachers undoubtedly have gotten the message:  how students perform on the ELA and math tests matters;  based on the criteria for the Progress Reports, not much else does. (more…)

• More students in a privately funded incentives program passed AP tests. (Times, Daily News, Post)
• A Queens middle school teacher pled guilty to raping a student and will be barred from teaching. (Post)
• D.C. is planning to offer free STD screening in every high school this year. (Washington Post)
• A free boarding school in Nevada caters to highly gifted students. (USA Today)
• Arne Duncan wants to “turn around” failing schools, but research doesn’t have advice for him. (EdWeek)
• California legislators are considering changing state laws to get Race to the Top funds. (L.A. Times)
• The Chicago Public Schools chose as its back-to-school performer the singer of “Birthday Sex.” (Tribune)
• The head of Chicago’s school board has been subpoenaed in the admissions investigation. (Sun-Times)

• Edwize profiles Michael Mulgrew, six weeks after we did. A new factoid: Two of his siblings are teachers.
• GothamSchools blogger Ruben Brosbe says his teaching years have been the best of his life.
• A Bronx mom describes how parents at her school raise extra funds, which don’t pay for extra teachers.
• Besides that whole school governance thing, the State Senate doesn’t have much planned for Thursday.
• A Staten Island teacher describes a public hearing about new charter schools in that borough.
• Center for Immigrant Families members say parent “training” ignores how much parents already know.
• Clara Hemphill on planning the Frank McCourt school: It’s a chance to build her almost-dream school.
• John Merrow interviewed Diane Ravitch, who asks why Chicago’s schools aren’t better post-Duncan.
• The auditor who okayed the city’s graduation numbers has missed problems before, Wayne Barrett finds.
• Students who don’t report their SAT scores to colleges tend to have lower scores, a study concludes.
• Most of the (20) people who have taken EdWeek’s poll say New York law will change for Race to the Top.
• A HS for Law & Public Service teacher, Jason Raymond, will work at the Dept of Ed for the next year.
• So if teachers aren’t motivated by merit pay, should their salaries be slashed? Some suggest so.
• Leonie Haimson critiques the New York Times’ article about rising math and reading test scores.
• Sebastian from “NYC Prep” on why it’s so much fun to grow up in the city.

State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch is calling for state exams to be more “defensible,” but a study investigating test score credibility requested a year ago by the state’s testing oversight board has still not received a go-ahead.

The committee first formally asked the state education department to join an academic study on the state tests in the fall of 2008, said chair Howard Everson. The education department declined but did not rule out future participation. Since then, Everson has received no requests to revisit the idea, he said in an interview yesterday.

“It’s hard to trust the data right now,” said Everson, a psychometrician who is also a senior fellow at the City University of New York. Everson’s committee, the state Technical Advisory Group, is charged with monitoring the state testing process. (more…)

This column was originally published in Spanish in El Diario.

The Center for Immigrant Families (CIF) joins others across the city and nation who are working for justice and equity in our public schools-one of our last remaining universal public goods in the United States. Public education is a human right, not a luxury, and our schools should nurture the development and learning of every child.  As parents, caregivers, and concerned community members, we want schools that reflect, respect, serve our communities — and that draw upon the rich resources within our communities as sources of learning and support.

Mayoral control and the system we have now does not support this vision. 

Instead, under Mayor Bloomberg, a top-down, business model has been imposed on an educational system that promotes high-stakes and punitive testing. (more…)

One mayoral hopeful — the city’s current mayor — will be conspicuously absent from a candidates’ debate tonight due to a scheduling conflict.

That leaves him conveniently free to avoid questions about “aggressive policing in city schools,” which is one of the topics slated to be discussed at tonight’s debate, according to a press release put out by the New York Civil Liberties Union, the event’s co-host.

Instead, Bloomberg will be attending the National Night Out Against Crime, according to campaign spokeswoman Silvia Alvarez. Rather than trading talking points with his opponents, the mayor will spent all evening traveling to different precincts throughout the five boroughs to speak about crime and drug use prevention. Bloomberg has been an outspoken advocate for tighter gun control laws and is a member of the national coalition Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

“It’s a conflict of schedules for the mayor,” Alvarez said.

An NYCLU press release states: “Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s campaign has not responded to repeated invitations from the civil rights community via mail, email and phone.”

Candidates Comptroller Bill Thompson, City Councilman Tony Avella, the Rev. Billy Talen, and Roland Rogers will be there.

Update: The NYCLU has decided to postpone the event. “We are postponing tonight’s Mayoral Candidates Civil Rights Forum due to the unavailability of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Comptroller Bill Thompson.  We are working to reschedule for a time that the candidates for mayor will be able to attend the forum.”