GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Common standards for science and social studies may be coming soon to a planning committee near you.
• A group is rallying support for New York City’s first “recovery high school” for newly-sober teens.
• The Times’ Room for Debate blog asks how we can boost students’ math scores.
• Another deadly school fight, this one between a student and a school resource officer in South Carolina.
• Pissed Off Teacher describes how talking to her students helped her find mistakes in the ARIS system.
• The CDC reported 11 more child swine flu deaths this week.
• High school students aren’t interested in the few fields experiencing job growth, says a new report.
• The Daily Howler wants education writers to tell a more complete story about test scores.
• President Obama explains the politics of negative attacks to a fourth grader in New Orleans.
• Ron Isaac at Edwize calls Bloomberg’s plan to open more charters “disturbing.”
• Brian D’Agostino takes a close look at the education claims in Bloomberg’s mailers.
• Early Ed Watch says that preschool educators should be better trained as well.
• Richard Kessler pays tribute to Bill Safire, arts education supporter.
• And Online Schools lists 50 excellent ed reform blogs. (Not to brag or anything, but it includes this one.)

Board of Regents chancellor Merryl Tisch addressed members of the New York State School Board Association this morning.

New York State education commissioner David Steiner and Board of Regents chancellor Merryl Tisch declared this morning that the state education department is entering a new era.

Speaking to a packed room at the annual meeting of the New York State School Board Members Association, they said that after years of acting as a regulatory body following an outdated curriculum, the department would now focus on innovation.

“We spend an enormous amount of effort regulating districts that frankly would do very well without us,” Tisch said. She said that her goal was to remove as much unnecessary regulations from school districts as possible.

“I would like people to say that we re-invigorated the concept of the state education department, that we re-invented what a state education should be across this state,” Tisch said. “The only way to do that is to restore our integrity. Every chit that takes away from our credibility needs to be addressed.” (more…)

Here’s a photo sent to us by the folks at Future Leaders Institute Charter School in Harlem, where Thomson Reuters recently delivered more than 700 new books collected in a company book drive. Peter Anderson, FLI’s head of school, is at the center of the picture. And the tall boy in the striped shirt: is he holding an illustrated Kafka? A bigger question: who’s as inspired as I am by the art in the background to see the “Where the Wild Things Are” movie this weekend?

Send us a picture from your school and we might feature it as an “A Thousand Words” post.

Mayor Bloomberg's senior education adviser Chris Cerf (left) and former Congressman Herman Badillo touted the mayor's promotion and retention policies on the steps of City Hall this afternoon.

Chris Cerf, the former Department of Education deputy chancellor turned senior education adviser to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s re-election campaign, said today that the RAND report released this week on the mayor’s promotion policies “completely vindicates” those policies.

Flanked by former Congressman Herman Badillo, Cerf said that the mayor’s rival, Comptroller Bill Thompson, showed a lack of leadership for failing to support stricter retention policies during his tenure as president of the city’s Board of Education.

Badillo, who has also served as the chairman of the City College of New York and who endorsed Bloomberg in July, said that he urged the Board of Education to end social promotion throughout Thompson’s term to no avail.

“I have been against social promotion for decades,” he said.”In Puerto Rico, where I come from, if you do your work, you pass, and if you don’t, you don’t pass.”

Thompson’s campaign has pointed out that he voted for a measure in 1999 that required low-performing third through eighth grade students to repeat a grade of attend summer school. Cerf called that opposition to social promotion “halfhearted,” and countered that Thompson opposed Bloomberg’s efforts to introduce new promotion and retention standards in 2004. (more…)

Twice in my teaching career, I’ve lived the cliché “familiarity breeds contempt.” In edu-speak terms, I’ve “looped” two times, spending three years teaching many of the same kids through sixth, seventh and eighth grade. Both times, I greatly enjoyed sixth and seventh grade, but a few months into eighth grade, well, to use another cliché, the bloom was off the rose. I can’t pinpoint exact reasons, but I think that they were tired of me, and I hate to admit that the feeling might have been mutual, just a little.

The last time I finished with eighth grade, I swore that I’d never loop again. The challenges with the students themselves were emotionally draining, but I also found that my teaching wasn’t improving as much as I wanted. (more…)

• A judge stopped the city from firing 500 school aides; the city is appealing the decision. (GothamSchools)
• The city offered to rehire the aides without benefits to help with swine flu, the filing reports. (Daily News)
• The DOE rolled out a new curriculum for the study of film yesterday. (Hollywood Reporter)
• Midyear budget cuts like the ones Paterson proposed are especially hard for schools to handle. (Times)
• It looks like the UFT will not be endorsing Democrat Bill Thompson for mayor. (Post)
• The study of the city’s promotion policy touts extra help for failing students. (GothamSchools, Times)
• The planning process for a new building in DUMBO that would house a school is under fire. (Daily News)
• The president of LaGuardia Community College writes that she had to close enrollment this year. (Times)
• More city students are attending after-school programs, a study has found. (NY1)
• The city’s first Middle School Film Festival was like an Oscars ceremony for city students. (Daily News)
• This year, 38 percent of D.C. students attend charter schools. (Washington Post)
• More than 50 House Republicans want an Obama schools official who promoted tolerance fired. (Times)
• The Christian Science Monitor says it’s significant that Obama visited a charter school in New Orleans.

• The Times-Union has a breakdown of what Paterson’s budget cuts will do to each school district.
• Arthur Goldstein wonders why the DOE considers Francis Lewis successful at class size reduction.
• A British study says that children’s formal schooling should not begin until the age of 6.
• NYSUT wants the state legislature to reject the school cuts.
• Mulgrew jokingly told new UFT chapter leaders they’ve got the “I can’t win job.”
• The UFT’s leadership shot down a call to endorse Thompson at the delegate assembly.
• David Bloomfield calls new state standards on graduation a “ticking time bomb” for the city.
• The president of the national teacher’s colleges association hopes Duncan’s next speech is more inspiring.
• Science students benefit when teachers spend summers working on academic research, a study says.
• Corey Bunje Bower wants to set Nick Kristof straight about the achievement gap.
• Diane Ravitch believes there is “something rotten in the state education department.”
• While Robert Pondiscio wonders if anger over NAEP scores will mean the end of test-driven accountability.
• And a senior at LaGuardia High School is the city’s first Youth Poet Laureate.

On Tuesday morning bright and early, I drove to Forest Hills, Queens, and took the E train all the way down to the American Arbitration Association.  I had to go there because Francis Lewis High School has 73 oversized classes.

I’m a new chapter leader, I’d never done this before, and I made some mistakes.  For one thing, I numbered the oversized classes when I was supposed to highlight them.  So James Vasquez, my UFT District Representative, handed me a highlighter and told me to get highlighting.

Oversized classes are arbitrated in reverse order, so the schools with 200 oversized classes had already been and gone.  James went into a room and represented a school with 75 oversized classes. While he negotiated each and every one of them, I kept highlighting.

There are things you see when you highlight that you’d never notice otherwise.  For example, many classes are actually multiple classes meeting with the same teacher in one classroom. I noticed we have a Hebrew class that includes two levels, one with 23 and another with 14. I’m grieving that as a class of 37, but if you do a straight average, there are only 18.5 kids in each class. (more…)

A day before the Department of Education had planned to dismiss over 500 school aides, a judge has issued a temporary restraining order preventing the layoffs from going through.

State Supreme Court Justice Carol Edmead ruled today that before the city laid off hundreds of “the most vulnerable employees,” the Court had to ensure that the layoffs did not violate the state’s constitution and the education law.

Officials from DC 37, the union that represents the school aides, argued in court yesterday that the city was laying off civil servants in order to replace them with less expensive temporary workers who are not given health benefits. (more…)

Mayoral candidates Thompson and Bloomberg have so far avoided the most important failing of New York City’s public schools: Under new state standards, a third of today’s high school graduates will soon be ineligible for diplomas. The so-called Local Diploma, requiring a 55 on Regents exams, is being phased out and only Regents-endorsed diplomas, requiring a score of 65 or better, will be issued to the Class of 2012.

The graduation time bomb brings two issues into stark relief. The first, difficult enough to absorb, is that every year over 10,000 more New York City residents will enter the job market (college largely off-limits to them) without even the entry-level requirement accorded by a high school diploma. The second is the diminished meaning of current Regents standards and the political pressure for further decline in order to accommodate this explosion of almost-grads. (more…)