GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The students who enroll at new small schools are not always just like those who enrolled at the large high schools they replaced, a new study has found.

The study, by Aaron Pallas, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College and Jennifer Jennings, an assistant professor at New York University, confirms Jennings’ earlier analysis of student enrollment patterns on the Evander Childs High School campus. But it also suggests that when it comes to who enrolls, not all new small schools are alike.

“New small schools don’t look that different overall. But the ones that replaced large schools do,” Pallas said last night at a presentation sponsored by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. (more…)

• Liz Willen applauds Harvard’s admissions dean for focusing on equity, not how-to-get-in.
• A look at how Michelle Rhee and George Parker’s fighting words have changed over time.
• For just eight little criteria, Gates will help your state with its RttT application
• Weingarten finds a link between the charter school study’s results and keeping New York’s charter cap.
• Chaz says the UFT’s changes to corporal punishment investigations are a good start.
• Bloomberg delivers a preemptive attack on Thompson’s education policy speech.
• Norm notes that not only did Mulgrew come to the delegate meeting on time, he didn’t interrupt.
• Diane Ravitch worries that we’re in a twilight zone where numbers are meaningless.
• It’s only week three, but an experienced teacher doesn’t think she can take much more.
• How do you hold a teacher accountable for teaching algebra to a student who can’t add?

In the first policy speech of his campaign for mayor, Comptroller Bill Thompson announced a ten-point plan to improve the city’s public schools.

Simultaneously attacking Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s schools record and outlining his own priorities, Thompson outlined a plan focused broadly on changing curriculum and school environments, improving programs for under-served groups such as English-language learners  and special education students, increasing community participation in schools and improving transparency in the Department of Education.

Item number one on the mayoral hopeful’s list was appointing a career educator as chancellor, a position currently filled by Klein who is a trained lawyer and does not have a background in education.

“We need a Schools Chancellor with a solid and extensive education background,” he said, “who not only cares about children, but who understands fundamentally what goes on in the classroom and respects the tough work that teachers and principals perform on the front lines of our system every day.” (more…)

Teachers’ union president Michael Mulgrew will urge the Department of Education to return superintendents to their districts when he testifies before the City Council tomorrow.

In the wake of new school governance legislation passed this summer, the City Council Education Committee is holding a hearing tomorrow on whether the city is complying with changes in the law. Among those changes is a revised role for superintendents and new powers for the citywide school board, which is now legally empowered to vote on certain contracts.

In draft comments released to reporters this afternoon, the United Federation of Teachers expresses “grave concern” that the DOE is ignoring what few changes were made to the law.

The UFT will argue that the city is not complying with a provision of the law that calls for superintendents to work within the districts where they are assigned, rather than in districts throughout the city. According to the union, the superintendents in districts 26 and 25, both in Queens, are still being made to answer for the performance of over a dozen schools outside of their districts. In an extreme example, the union says that all of the schools supervised by the superintendent for district 30 are outside of her district. The union’s draft statement reads:

“I wish I could say they can’t be serious, but my experience tells me otherwise.  How can a superintendent supervise his own schools when given responsibility for over 15 schools in another district? … I’m here to tell you — it currently doesn’t measure up to the standards set forth in the new governance law.  It doesn’t even come close.” (more…)

There is a growing consensus over New York State’s standardized test scores. They are so inflated that even the Daily News and New York Post aren’t buying in anymore. These are the mayor’s most unquestioning allies, usually loathe to present data that might undermine the case that Mr. Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein are the only ones capable of saving our schools. Yet even they are now skittish over the data upon which the mayor’s case is built.

It’s about time that it is drummed into the public consciousness that serious questions have been raised about both the Regents subject mastery exams taken by high school students, and the grade 3 through 8 tests required under the federal No Child Left Behind law. These impact all of the programs advanced by the mayor and other “reformers,” skewing results and compromises the billions we are investing in the schools.

This issue recently got some front burner attention when the city released their controversial report cards for the schools, a key element in the data based strategy of Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein. (more…)

• A new study shows good results for city charter schools. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News, Post, WSJ)
• Remember our profile of Michael Mulgrew when he became UFT president? The Times has one now.
• At several large high schools in Queens, some classes have more than 40 students. (Daily News)
• NY1‘s Lindsey Christ visited a hiring fair in Brooklyn for teachers in the ATR pool.
• The city won’t provide buses for Bronx students whose school moved over the summer. (Post)
• Tony Bennett and Nancy Sinatra were at the ribbon-cutting for a new Queens arts school building. (NY1)
• In a letter, the head of the city’s Planned Parenthood worries that sex ed will fall to budget cuts. (Times)
• City colleges underreport crime on their campuses, an audit has found. (Post)
• Milwaukee’s mayor says his vision for his city’s schools involves someone like Joel Klein. (BizTimes.com)
• President Obama said improving schools would be key to boosting the economy. (Albany Times-Union)
• A draft list of standards for what students nationwide should learn has been released. (Washington Post)
• Philly schools are hunkering down for big budget cuts later this week. (Philadelphia Inquirer)
• In Massachusetts, a charter school was approved for political reasons, evidence shows. (Boston Globe)

Hoxby's study examined 43 charter schools throughout the city. The schools she researched are noted on this map with red stars.

New York City charter school students are performing so well on state tests that they may soon catch up to students in Scarsdale, the upscale suburb north of the city, according to an extensive update of a multi-year charter study released today.

The optimistic projection stems from researchers’ finding that the boost charter schools give does not taper off, but is steady throughout elementary school and middle school and even into high school.

“It seems to be really stable as an effect,” said Stanford University economist Caroline Hoxby, who directed the study.

Hoxby and her team studied 43 charter schools in New York City serving elementary, middle and high school students. They compared students who applied and were accepted into charter schools in 2000 by random lottery to those who applied but did not receive a seat.

By the time charter school students reached the eighth grade, in 2008, they scored on average 30 points higher on state math tests than students who remained in traditional public schools, the researchers found.

That’s almost the equivalent of closing the average achievement gap between students in traditional public schools in Harlem and students in Scarsdale, the affluent New York suburb north of the city where students take the same standardized tests. The average Harlem-Scarsdale math score gap is between 35 and 40 points, so the charter school students close that gap by about 86 percent. (more…)

• “I’m not the kind of person you want to ignore,” Michael Mulgrew tells the NYT.
• Accountable Talk wants to know where the UFT’s member survey results are.
• Ed in the Apple says teachers union contract negotiations can be like “watching ice melt.”
• Danny Dromm made the case for due process before the UFT last week.
• Richard Kessler is nostalgic for the days when you could get a solid arts education at almost any school.
• Miss Brave offers up some things that are going right in her class.
• Patrick Sullivan says two people with poor attendance should not be at the helm of the PEP.
• Jay Matthews foresees instant backlash to the NYC charter school report coming out tomorrow.
• A former teacher turned DOE fellow moves to the White House, putting his agenda at the center of things.
• Marketplace floats the idea that an “education bubble” has burst.
• Flypaper likes the new draft of the Common Core State Standards, especially the math.
• LA’s teacher outrage could have ramifications beyond the city’s borders.
• And teachers are already planning to protest layoffs in D.C.

Chancellor Klein announced the creation of four experimental vocational schools.

Chancellor Joel Klein announced the creation of four demonstration schools today that are designed to rethink how the city teaches vocational skills.

At a time when traditional industries are shuttering the production plants that schools like Automotive High School and Aviation High School cater to, the city is reevaluating how to make its high school graduates marketable.

Selected from a pool of 10 proposals, the four schools are experimenting with new time structures, course offerings, and partnerships with other organizations. Each one is sharing space with a larger public school and serving between 75 and 125 students.

At a press conference at George Westinghouse Career and Technical Education High School, Klein said he hoped more people would think up proposals for new school models.

“I hope we can expand this model,” he said. “It’s one that I urge people to watch.” (more…)