GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Christopher Cerf, Joel Klein’s top deputy, is leaving Tweed for Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign. (Times)
• Classes citywide exceed size limits, with parents at one school saying a class has 40 kids. (Daily News)
• Juan Gonzalez: The city is renewing contracts and simultaneously laying off school aides. (Daily News)
• In a letter, Randi Weingarten objects to the fights over seniority that accompany budget cuts. (Times)
• Biking to school appears to be on the rise; 34 schools have requested more bike racks this year. (Times)
• Colleges are recruiting city high school football players more now than in the recent past. (Daily News)
• Half the entering 9th graders in Boston’s charter schools leave before graduation. (Boston Globe)
• D.C. officials are asking to be freed from court-ordered special education mandates. (Washington Post)
• Charter schools are booming in suburbs around the Twin Cities. (Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune)
• California’s statewide school data system is getting off the ground, but not without issues. (L.A. Times)

• More schools are encouraging students to hitch a ride on their parents’ (or their own) bicycles.
• Merryl Tisch has a job for the soon-to-be Commissioner Steiner: fix the arduous charter renewal process.
• The DOE’s No. 2 administrator joins Bloomberg’s reelection campaign, cementing its education fixation.
• The Carnegie Corp. has suggestions for lawmakers in the adolescent literacy report it put out today.
• Chicago students’ ACT scores are stagnating, putting new curricula in question.
• Ohio schools are struggling to come up with ways to pay for the governor’s expensive reforms.
• Pissed Off Teacher says the back-to-school honeymoon is over.
• Debra Calinvo is New York State’s Teacher of the Year and now moves up to the national competition.
• The House will vote on a higher ed bill with some K-12 programs tucked into it.
• And a friendly reminder: the polls are open until 9 p.m. tonight.

UCLA management professor William Ouchi spoke to a group of principals and administrators at LaGuardia High School yesterday.

A talk to principals yesterday by one of the earliest supporters of the Bloomberg administration’s school reforms raised a question: Would Bloomberg’s changes to the public schools survive under a new mayor?

The change that most concerns the supporter, William Ouchi, a management professor of UCLA, is the administration’s effort to push power away from a central school system and into the hands of principals.

In a talk to principals gathered at LaGuardia High School in Manhattan, Ouchi warned that other school districts have seen gains eroded when a new administration re-centralizes authority. He said he hopes that would not happen in New York. “The DNA of this idea will continue to circulate,” he said.

But speaking privately before the address, he confessed concern. “The problem is sustaining the governance,” he told GothamSchools. “I’m really scared that at the end of 12 years, the next person could wash it all away.”

Ouchi, who served as an adviser to Chancellor Joel Klein in 2002, hinges his argument for principal empowerment on a slightly different argument than Klein has provided. He focuses on a factor known as “total student load” or TSL, the number of students that each teacher is responsible for educating. His research, including a new book published this month, concludes that decentralization in New York City has led to a significant decline in TSL. (more…)

Members of the revived Panel for Educational Policy approved more than a dozen Department of Education contracts last night over the protests of colleagues who demanded that they be allowed to read the full documents.

Reconvened for the first time since mayoral control’s renewal, the panel now has the authority to approve contracts worth over one million dollars. It also reviews any contracts that were handed out without competitive bidding.

But the biggest change on panel last night was not a result of those contracts, $250 million of which sailed to approval with a nearly unanimous vote, including contracts with Octagon and the Future Technology Associates, which have come under criticism.

The main difference was that the person who has been the panel’s single active dissident, Patrick Sullivan, the representative from Manhattan, yesterday was joined in his protests by Anna Santos of the Bronx. Both objected to voting on the contracts because, they said, none of the panel members had read them in full. (more…)

• Not much appears to have changed for the reconstituted Panel for Educational Policy. (Times)
• The panel approved $250 million in contracts at its first meeting last night. (Daily News)
• Lots of extras, and some programs principals deem essential, have been lost to budget cuts. (Times)
• The number of teachers in the ATR pool is now below 1,600, down by 100 since last week. (ABC 7)
• The City Council has scheduled a hearing about the long-delayed Student Safety Act. (City Limits)
• The NYCLU is planning lessons to teach kids about their rights in interacting with school police. (Post)
• Muslim groups are still pushing the city to cancel school on two holy days. (Wall Street Journal)
• A PBS documentary airing tonight profiles two principals in inner-city schools. (NPR, Chicago Tribune)
• Many school districts hire teachers from abroad, a practice the AFT criticized. (Times, Washington Post)
• Bucking trends, Harvard University will offer a doctorate in education leadership. (Boston Globe)

• Jay Mathews recaps an AFT report on exploitative practices by international teacher recruiters.
• Bill Thompson’s first radio ads criticize Bloomberg’s record on schools.
• Jenna Bush’s first Today show interview will be with Dallas sixth-grader Dalton Sherman.
• Draft NAEP standards for tech literacy are seriously flawed, says one group of state officials.
• Ed is Watching spotlights a new Denver school run by two “lead teachers” but no principal.
• The Buffalo schools superintendent asked for a moratorium on new charter schools.
• Early Ed Watch has some tips for recruiting more men to careers as preschool teachers.
• Two teachers wonder why the DOE approved a plan for P.S. 123 to grow, but won’t give it the space.
• And “Eduwonk” Andy Rotherham will leave Education Sector, but not blogging, this spring.

Comptroller Bill Thompson released his overcrowding report outside of P.S. 290, a school that is over capacity.

One day before the Democratic primary, mayoral hopeful Bill Thompson is making Mayor Bloomberg’s oversight of the city’s public schools his campaign’s defining issue.

Thompson, the city’s comptroller, issued a report yesterday rehashing arguments made by the mayor’s critics throughout his time in office. It criticized the mayor for not spending enough money on school construction, despite evidence that the city’s school-age population had swelled in certain districts.

The report, called “Unprepared for Overcrowding,” looks at the 2010-2014 capital plan the City Council approved this summer and singles out roughly two dozen school districts, the majority of them in the Bronx and Queens, where it predicts schools will remain overcrowded after 2014.

State Senator Liz Krueger, who was part of a gaggle of local elected officials who stood next to Thompson during the announcement, thanked the comptroller “for stating the obvious.” (more…)