GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The 500 school aides at risk of being laid off will finally be fired at the end of this week. (Daily News)
• The budget cuts Mayor Bloomberg will propose could be the steepest he’s imposed since 2002. (Post)
• Final Race to the Top rules come out this week, and states are chomping at the bit to be eligible. (Times)
• At the Harlem Children’s Zone, Arne Duncan reiterated his call for innovative school policies. (Post)
• Supreme Court Justice Kennedy demanded to review a city private school’s student newspaper. (Times)
• Dozens of Chicago middle schoolers were arrested for having a food fight in the cafeteria. (Times)
• Volunteers work to tell parents they can opt their child out from military recruitment. (The Uptowner)
• An UWS mom is worried after the school bus dropped her 6-year-old son off far from home. (Daily News)
• The City Council heard testimony about problems with school safety. (GothamSchools, Daily News, NY1)
• The Times advocates for discipline programs that don’t criminalize student behavior. 
• Parents in the Bronx protested against cuts to after-school programs. (Mount Hope Monitor)
• The Daily News calls the state’s lowest-in-the-nation GED pass rate “shameful.”
• A new report examines school districts nationwide for the best human capital practices. (Education Week)
• Massachusetts could have a new law by Weds raising the state’s charter cap. (Boston Globe)

• Jay Mathews nominates Randi Weingarten to replace Michelle Rhee in D.C., if Rhee must go.
• It’s now legal to evaluate Wisconsin teachers based on their students’ test scores.
• The four-word explanation: Race to the Top, which has states everywhere changing their laws.
• Richard Kessler explains why it’s a no-brainer to partner with the UFT.
• The final edition of the Bracey Report finds that mayoral control hurt democracy in New York.
• A school turnaround story in the White House’s backyard (and my hometown!).
• States are about to apply for Phase 2 of the stimulus’s stop-school-cuts fund.
• Rotherham is betting that “special interest groups” (ahem, teacher unions) will squash an NCLB rewrite.
• Rick Hess thinks Arne Duncan should not have lobbied for health care reform.
• Duncan visited Harlem Children’s Zone today, but the investment in replication is small.
• Weeding out bad teachers won’t be enough to improve teacher quality across the board, a report argues.
• A view from Sunset Park Prep is featured at The Quick and the Ed today.
• A push to raise the bar on what constitutes “evidence” when judging I3 innovation grant submissions.
• Ask Judy suggests an alternative to taking your daughter out to lunch during the school day.
• And teachers and parents say PS 204 in Morris Heights is falling apart.

Principal wannabes hoping to open up new city high schools got marching orders from city officials last night: Try to focus on students still learning English or vocational programs.

The advice came at a meeting held by the Office of Portfolio Planning, where more than a dozen people stood before an audience of community board members and parents and tried to sell their vision for a new high school. Most said they wanted to open schools that focus on English Language Learners or students who are older and are not on track to graduate.

Though the final proposals are not due until December, the principal-hopefuls were there to see what kind of reception their envisioned new schools would get from parents and community board members.

Johanny Garcia, an assistant principal at the Urban Assembly School for Careers in Sports, proposed a high school for ELL students, which he once was. (more…)

Jeffrey Paulino, 17, said he had been assaulted by a school safety agent at his Bronx high school.

Rallying before a City Council hearing today on a more than year-old school safety proposal, advocates renewed their call for a law that would force the city to issue quarterly reports on school violence.

Introduced in 2008 by Robert Jackson, chairman of the City Council education committee, the School Safety Act has the support of 33 of the Council’s 50 members as well as advocacy groups like the New York Civil Liberties Union. Lost amid the debate over term limits last year, the act has seen little movement in the Council.

The act would require the Department of Education and Police Department to report arrests, suspensions, and expulsion data on a quarterly basis, along with a demographic breakdown of the students involved in school incidents. (more…)

• A controversial school yoga program escaped notice because only large contracts get scrutinized. (Post)
• School funding advocates say they’d consider another lawsuit if state school aid is cut. (Times)
• Students at Francis Lewis HS in Queens demonstrated in favor of shrinking the school. (Daily News)
• New York State has the nation’s lowest pass rate on the GED exam. (Daily News)
• Some public school graduates choose to give back to their alma maters many years later. (Daily News)
• A handful of Queens students say their H1N1 vaccine made them feel sick. (NY1)
• A new report finds that the city leaves children in foster care for too long. (Times)
• New school stimulus aid, about $12 billion, will be dependent on states’ education policies. (AP)
• A Massachusetts school might be the first in the country to do away with library books. (NPR)
• Supporting the 1954 Brown vs. Board Supreme Court decision is hard for Justice Scalia. (Times)
• A bipartisan report lays out education innovations from state to state. (Christian Science Monitor)
• New admissions rules for Chicago’s magnet schools privileges economic diversity. (Chicago Sun-Times)

• Center for American Progress gives New York State a “B” for hiring teachers, an “A” for firing them.
• Young teachers are big on incentive pay, but give standardized tests poor grades.
• Deborah Meier argues for teacher assessments developed on a school-by-school basis.
• Senate Dems are not getting behind Gov. Paterson’s call for major education and health cuts.
• The U.S. DOE released guidelines for the 2nd round of stabilization fund money.
• It’s looking like RttT will focus heavily on science, technology, engineering and math.
• Corey Bunje Bower wonders if young teachers’ hopefulness actually hurts them in the end.
• An out-of-work inexperienced art teacher asks what he/she can do to become more employable.
• If being paid on commission doesn’t work for Macy’s employees, will it work for teachers?
• Norm Scott says Mulgrew’s silence on NYS’s data firewall means little, as the law was a PR stunt.
• One blogger says the Bronx English teacher’s story highlights the need for due process in the UFT contract.
• Michigan’s math and science teachers can get scholarships to work in high-needs schools.
• Bonuses should go to entire schools, not to individual teachers, writes Jay Mathews.

Burned by Albany funding cuts, charter school advocates are turning to a political base that they’ve long left untapped: parents.

In mid-October, a dozen charter school administrators gathered in a conference room at the Times Square Marriott for a seminar on the role of parents in charter school advocacy. Kenneth Peterson, a director of strategic partnerships at the New York State Charter School Association told the group that the charter school movement has a secret problem: it has almost no grassroots parent advocacy.

New York State’s political climate had changed, Peterson explained. Last year, legislators froze the amount of money that charter schools receive for each student they teach, effectively cutting their budgets. A fragile majority of charter school supporters in the State Senate made it imperative for charter school advocates to win over individual senators, rather than relying on friendships with a few party leaders.

“Crisis has a way of galvanizing folks around the need to act,” said Jeff Maclin, vice president for school advocacy at the New York City Charter School Center. “I think the ‘freeze’ in education funds to public charter schools this year was a wake up call to schools to make sure something like this does not happen again.” (more…)