The reauthorization of NCLB should require states that accept Title I money (i.e. all of them) to require all public school teachers to get buzz cuts. Seriously*. This would benefit our schools and our students.

Think about it. With buzz cuts, teachers could get ready for work faster in the morning, and spend less time touching up their hair each day. That might give them an extra 10-30 minutes each day (fact**), time they could spend meeting with students, giving students better written feedback or creating better lesson plans. Not only that, but it would actually be like giving them a pay raise!!

Think about it. Our nation’s most efficient public service is the military (fact***). It requires all recruits to get a buzz cut (fact***). It is the strongest military in the world (fact). We want our schools to be the best and most efficient in the world, right? Why not follow the military’s model? This also returns us to traditional values for teachers, in this case discouraging their dating (fact). The time they are not spending on dating, preparing for dates and thinking about dates could then be poured into their teaching, as it should have been in the first place (fact***).

As for the pay raise, this is the genius part. The average amount of money public school teachers in this country spend on a hair cut – including tip — is $32.47 (fact**), and the median number of hair cuts per year is 11 (fact**). Plus, the average public school teacher in this country spends $157.32 on hair products each year (fact**). Requiring teachers to get buzz cuts would put an extra $500+ in their pocket each year. Moreover, this is all after tax dollars (fact), and when one takes the local, state and federal tax rates of the average teacher into account, this is the equivalent of more than a $1000 raise (fact**).

(* OK. Not seriously.)

(** = Not really a fact, but filling in the actual fact would not change the value of the argument.)

(*** = Not really a fact, but it suits my argument to say that it is.)

*****************

Last week, Corey Bunje Bower offered the world the most ironic piece that I know of to have come out of Vanderbilt’s School of Education. He argued against Kim Marshall’s recent commentary in Education Week on merit pay for teachers by claiming that “Ms. Marshall” presented a paucity of facts to support her case, and decried the lack of “discussion[s] of merit pay…[that are] based on facts rather than conjecture and [that] approach[] the topic in an unbiased way.”

The irony of this piece stems from its own amazing lack of facts. First, Kim Marshall is a man, not a woman. (This fact is very easy to ascertain. Google “Kim Marshall” and click on the first link. You’ll get a picture. Once I pointed this out to Mr. Bower, he fixed the pronouns.) Second, Marshall claims that all merit pay programs for teachers are collectively based, rather than individually based – though he leaves himself an out. As Mr. Marshall is arguing against individual merit pay programs, it is hard to understand why Mr. Bower thought it appropriate to argue with him. In fact, Mr. Bower writes that he knows of no such programs, but still argues against Mr. Marshall, decrying conjecture and Marshall’s lack of facts.

I do not write this to point out how wrong Mr. Bower is – though on individual merit pay I think he is very very wrong – but rather to note the flaws in his approach. He claims to be offering “Thoughts on Education Policy,” but is he not doing so very thoughtfully.

Yes, conjecture (i.e. “an opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information”) is often a problem in policy discussions and education discussions (e.g. Mr. Bower’s post, ironically enough). No question about that. But the opposite of conjecture is not “facts” or even “research.” In my ridiculous argument above, I offer any number of facts – or place holders for facts – and they do not actually make for a strong argument. It remains a ridiculous argument, regardless of how many facts it purports to present.

You see, the opposite of conjecture is informed analysis, something that Mr. Marshall offered and something I strive to offer myself. Mr. Brower closes by calling for “sober analysis of research,” which is a good thing, but it is not enough and might not even be required. Some issues do not need to researched (e.g. buzz cuts for teachers). Some ideas can be dealt with well without research, though research can be useful and at times can be necessary.

A well designed thought experiment can tell us everything we need to know. Let us look at the potential elimination of free Metrocards for students to get to and from school in New York City. The Bloomberg administration has been encouraging the move away from neighborhood schools in favor of greater use of school choice in NYC. Without the numbers in front of us, I think that we could agree that students probably travel a lot further to school today than they did 30 years ago. We do not need research to tell us that there are many families in the city for whom buying Metrocards for their multiple children would be an incredible burden. A single parent with two kids in school, making three times the minimum wage would have to pay 5% of his/her take-home pay to get a paid for Metrocard ten months out of the year. ($870/week before taxes, $666 after. $1780 total for the Metrocards, $35,000 total take home pay.)

We do not need to research the policy to know that it is a bad idea. We can tell that a lot of kids will not get Metrocards. Lower income families will not be as able to take advantage of school choice. And we can easily predict that many kids will be absent or grossly tardy due to a lack of money to pay for the bus or subway. We do not need to do research, or to soberly analyze the results, to thoughtfully examine this proposal.

I will address the basic problems with individual merit pay proposals another time – I do think that Mr. Marshall left out some critically important issues. For now, however, I just want to urge everyone to look hard at the quality of the thinking behind the arguments people make, without decrying them simply because they do not happen to cite “research” as an academic would.

First up is high school English as a second language teacher Arthur Goldstein who describes how his students responded when he accused another teacher of assaulting the principal. Then, Bronx middle school teacher Tracy Dunne-Derrell writes about the pleasant surprise she got this fall when she asked her sixth-graders to write 6,000-word novels — in a month. Finally, elementary school teacher Ruben Brosbe recalls the disturbing answers his students sometimes offer, so long as he asks them the right questions.

Are you a teacher (or principal, or parent, or …) with something to say? Let us know if you’d like to contribute to the community section in 2010.

“I’m having a hard time concentrating.”

“Why is that?”

“My mom and dad are arguing a lot.”

“Why are you so tired?” I asked a girl in my after school program after she admitted to being too tired to concentrate.

“I had to stay up late cleaning the floor because my dog pees a lot. She’s diabetic.”

“How late were you up?”

“12.”

“Why was it your job to clean the floor?”

“It’s part of my chores.”

“What are your chores?” The girl proceeded to list all sorts of household work, some typical and some not for an eight-year-old kid. “How long were you doing chores for?”

“From 8 – 12.”

It makes the frustrating task of teaching a kid to be “responsible” by doing their homework seem somewhat unrealistic and unfair. While the answers to these questions (Why isn’t your homework done? Why are you so tired? What time did you go to bed? Why weren’t you in school yesterday?) start to fill in themselves once you’ve spent enough time teaching in a high need school, the unique stories never cease to amaze or dishearten. I try not to think of all the questions left unasked and unanswered from my first year of teaching, and remind myself that it takes time to learn the right questions to ask.

A few years ago I stumbled across NaNoWriMo, also known as National Novel Writing Month, a contest which challenges participants to crank out a 50,000-word novel during the month of November. Whenever that month approaches, I think about making an attempt myself but can never bring myself to commit. This year, looking at the site, I noticed that there was a branch of the contest for students. Although the goal for adults is 50,000 words, the goals for kids are more flexible. Specifically, kids were expected to write approximately a thousand words per grade, making my sixth graders’ goal 6,000 words. I ordered the free materials on the spot.

But then I began growing skeptical that my students would want to get involved. Getting my kids to write anything is usually a challenge. Sometimes I joked to my colleagues that “dentist” was a more accurate title for what I do, because getting the kids to write more than a couple paragraphs is often like pulling teeth.

So I wasn’t expecting much enthusiasm. If my own sixth-grade English teacher had said, “Guess what? I want you to write a 6,000-word novel! And I want you to do it in a month!” I would have thought that she was out of her mind, even though I’ve always liked writing. Despite my misgivings, and the fact that I didn’t really have time to lay the proper groundwork, I decided that that I’d tell my students about NaNoWriMo, accepting up front that it would probably flop. Then I’d have a year to think about why it flopped and how I could better implement it the next time around. (I am not usually this pessimistic, but if the idea of me writing a novel makes me dizzy, imagine how an 11-year-old would feel.)

Happily, and surprisingly, I was wrong. I was wrong about the reception I got from the kids, wrong about the level of commitment I got from most of them, and, regrettably, very wrong about my own ability to meet the adult goal of 50,000 words. After all the years I’d passed it up, I decided to finally participate myself, to set an example for the kids. When I told the students that I, too, would be writing, one of the students burst out, “You can’t write 50,000 words! You have a kid!” He turned out to be right, but I did manage to write about 2,000 words. I sort of hope that they gloated about the fact that they were able to write more than their teacher, and I’m glad that my lack of success didn’t derail anyone.

Even though I’d intended to do the accompanying novel-writing lessons, I found that the kids were completely squirmy and uninterested in anything I had to say. They just wanted to write, and write they did, in the marble composition notebooks I gave them. Initially I’d planned on reserving laptops for them, but the logistics of that, coupled with the fact that this was not the time to also begin formal typing instruction, was a bit overwhelming, in part because I still had the regular curriculum to follow along with a few kids who didn’t want to participate.

So now it’s over, several weeks over, and instead of trying to work out why it flopped, I’m still trying to figure out why it didn’t and what that means for my teaching, how I can channel all that interest and enthusiasm. I learned that when left alone, kids will write. They will write a lot. They will ignore the pleas of their teachers to pay attention to the lesson and scribble furtively on notebooks half concealed under their desks. They will wait patiently in line at the front of the room to record their current word count so I can update the class chart.

Nearly all of the students met the 6,000-word goal. One student met the goal in about 10 days and continued to write until the end of the month. Another student started about 10 days in, met the goal, and started his second novel in December. I loved that none of them stopped when they reached the word count goal; they stopped when they were finished telling their stories, which ranged from fairy tales to action stories with a few crazy capers thrown in.

Knowing what I know about these kids as individuals pointed to a range of motivations and helped me learn a little more about them as people and as writers. Some kids wrote because they’re creative and they like it. Some kids wrote because it gave them a temporary escape from personal challenges. Some kids wrote to tell their true stories in safer, fictional contexts. And some kids wrote to be social. Several kids wanted to write but didn’t want to work alone, so they formed partnerships and worked together towards a 12,000-word goal.

It was a great experience for my students, and for me. Ideally, I wish they could have continued to work on their novels, but time waits for no one, and more important, testing waits for no one.

I was using a book called American Streamlines, which offers illustrations of an unfortunate high school principal being hit over the head with a blackjack or something. At first blush, the kids enjoyed it. But the story specifically stated that the police thought the attacker was a student, and that all students would be questioned, be they male or female.

The male/ female distinction is an important one, particularly when you’ve got a large group of Chinese speakers. In Chinese, they tell me, they do not distinguish between male and female in third person pronouns, so many of my kids call everyone “he.” I’m forever drawing stick figures and explaining how dangerous it can be to refer to women as “he.”

As far as dangerous women go, I have one right next door, in the adjacent trailer. That would be Ms. Rena Sum, Chinese teacher extraordinaire. I met her about five years ago, when she was assigned to co-teach my oversized beginning ESL class. Our partnership did not begin well. An assistant principal, beaming, announced, “Guess what?  Your new co-teacher speaks Chinese!”

I said, “Most of the kids speak Chinese already.  I’d rather have a co-teacher who speaks English.” The AP was thoroughly mystified by this remark.

Fortunately, Ms. Sum spoke both Chinese and English, and proved to be a great asset. Ms. Sum has the enviable and inscrutable gift of “the look.” That is, whatever a kid may be doing at any given time, she need only make direct eye contact — even if it’s a kid double her size and weight, he will instantly slink back into his chair and try to disappear into a ball of nothingness. No one understands exactly how this works, but it’s an incredibly useful skill for high school teachers.

I believe her look transcends language. I, for example, don’t speak a word of Chinese, yet I’m quite frightened of Ms. Sum. When the Chinese kids are safely out of range, they sometimes call her “lady tiger.” If that doesn’t make her dangerous, I’m not sure what does.

For my lesson, I asked kids what they were doing at 9:18 p.m., and listed their activities on the board. I’d then cross-examine them mercilessly. Who was with you? Can I call right now and find out if it was true? You were sleeping? Did you dream in English? Why not? You know you need to practice your English.

Some kids offered persuasive responses, and I crossed their names off the board. The second round of questioning became a little more contentious, with me shouting things like, “You did it!  Just admit it!”

After a few minutes of this, I said, “Well, I was in the teachers’ room at 9:18 p.m., but I didn’t hear anything.”

At that point, the kids turned on me instantly. 

“Who saw you?”

“What were you doing?”

“You want to be principal!”

It got pretty loud in my room, at that point. I tried to give them “the look,” but they weren’t having it. Finally I used a teacher trick — I started speaking in a very low voice and made them quiet down to listen. I pointed toward the interlocking door of the adjacent trailer and whispered, “It was Ms. Sum.  I think she hit the principal.”

Several Chinese girls were plainly horrified, and their eyes showed it. How could this teacher make such an awful accusation? But the kid who took the most umbrage was a Spanish speaker.

“I’m gonna tell her, Mister,” he threatened.

“You wouldn’t,” I challenged.

He walked to the back of the room to the door that separates our trailers. He peered nervously at the Chinese class. He saw thirty-four kids speaking a language he didn’t understand at all. He hesitated. Should he walk in there? He looked back and forth. Then he mastered his doubts, walked in, and told her the entire horrible story, ending with my accusation.

Ms. Sum burst in and began waving a finger at me. “MISTER Goldstein, how DARE you accuse me of such an awful thing? I would NEVER do such a thing. Everyone here knows YOU did it, and you will be hearing from my lawyer. Don’t you EVER tell the students such awful lies about me again! You will PAY for this!”

She walked back into her classroom, the bell rang, and my band of newcomers marched out of the trailer into the free world, delighted to see that reprehensible English teacher, the one who gives homework on Fridays, put in his place for once.

United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew and other union officials held a news conference in front of Merrick Academy-Queens Public Charter School today to protest the school’s contract with a for-profit educational management organization. According to the UFT, over the last four years Merrick Academy’s board has paid over $8 million to Victory Schools, a figure that Mulgrew said was “astronomical.”

At the center of the UFT’s rally today is its ongoing contract talks with the school. Union officials said the school’s board has been dragging its feet on negotiations.

In 2007, an overwhelming majority of teachers at Merrick Academy voted to make the UFT their exclusive bargaining agent, but since then the UFT and school’s board have yet to reach a contract agreement.

Merrick Academy board chair Gerald Karikari said the union is pushing for the school to pay teachers the same salary that regular public schools offer, something he says the school can’t afford to do given the freeze in state aid. Two years ago, the school did pay roughly what districts schools pay, but since then teachers have been without a contract and without raises.

“The union is well aware that charter schools aren’t getting the same per-pupil rate,” Karikari said. “So it’s difficult for me to understand why they would tell their members this is something they’re definitely entitled to and it’s completely unfair if you’re not making what UFT members are making.”

Mulgrew said the school could afford to increase teachers’ salaries if it wasn’t overpaying its management organization.

“They’re telling us they don’t have money so we started looking through their books and they don’t have money because the Victory charter management company is taking all of it,” he said.

Karikari said the issue of payments to Victory Schools was “somewhat of a red herring.”

“The company didn’t stop teachers from receiving raises,” he said. “We couldn’t increase teacher salaries because we’re in the middle of negotiations.”

Merrick signed a contract with Victory Schools before Karikari joined the board, but he said he would reconsider the school’s contract with the organization when it expires next year.

“I have promised them a very very serious review of the management agreement and will definitely address those costs and look at other options in terms of the management of the school,” he said.

The union is also accusing Merrick’s board of hiring an anti-union law firm to represent them in the contract talks.

Mulgrew said that if negotiations don’t move at a faster pace, the union would declare an impasse and move on to state arbitration.

The dissertation offers a window into Tisch’s oft-cited critique of teacher preparation — one that is far more robust and detailed than the stock line she uses in speeches.

Publicly, Tisch and education commissioner David Steiner have offered a barebones roadmap for changing how teachers are prepared. Last month, the Board of Regents approved an expansion of the number of alternative teacher certification programs in the state, opening the door for non-university programs to certify teachers.

Steiner has often spoken of increasing classroom-based training, and Tisch told me in an interview that the Board would seek programs “with a track record of success.” But the Board hasn’t been more specific about what they will look for in these programs, or how many they seek to approve, or what exactly a training program completed without the aid of a college or university will look like.

Tisch’s paper, published in 2005, provides a case study of one model of an alternative certification program: the partnership between the city, the New York City Teaching Fellows and Mercy College.

In an interview, Tisch downplayed the importance of her study, though she noted that it marked an early stage of her concern with how to bring more science and math teachers, trained in real-world fields, into classrooms.

But Tisch’s analysis of the the pros and cons — mostly the cons — of having outside organizations partner with universities to certify teachers may give clues to what elements of alternative certification Tisch could replicate, and which elements she may want to jettison altogether.

Currently, alternatively certified teachers enter the classroom immediately while simultaneously studying in a more traditional academic setting. The cohort Tisch followed would teach all day and then travel to Mercy College’s Bronx campus on Saturdays and at night.

In Tisch’s study, tensions grew between the fellows and the teachers college. Fellows told Tisch that when they arrived on Mercy College’s campus for the first time, they didn’t know where to go and went to the main office of the education graduate school for help. There, they were told that they were not students in the Graduate School of Education and were sent away.

The fellows also said they were not well integrated into the staffs of the schools where they taught. And teachers told Tisch that what they learned in class didn’t match with what they were doing in classroom.

Likewise, the program seemed to be a mixed blessing for Mercy College. The college welcomed the program as a way to boost the struggling quality and reputation of their teacher education program, Tisch reports, and it saw an influx of students.

But the Department of Education assigned students to Mercy without the college’s input, and Mercy was told little about each student beyond their names before they arrived on campus. Mercy administrators also decided to set up the Teaching Fellows program separately from the School of Education, and education faculty members told Tisch they resented being excluded from the process of developing curriculum. The college also resented that their contract with the DOE was not as lucrative as the department originally promised.

Despite the problems, Tisch argues the program was largely successful because of the staff’s ability to rebound from their stumbles. Ironically, Tisch says Mercy’s status as a small and struggling teachers college helped the Teaching Fellows program succeed there. Mercy had less leverage with the DOE and the school district than more well-established teachers colleges and so accommodated the department’s vision for what teacher training should look like.

“Mercy became the place where the Department of Ed could take charge of the Fellows program,” one former DOE official told Tisch. At Mercy, the official said, “the department could just about re-establish their right to certify teachers which they have not had since the Board of Examiners was disbanded.”

Partly for that reason, the DOE quadrupled the number of fellows enrolled in the Mercy College arm of the Teaching Fellows program after its first year.

In recent years, the number of fellows sent to Mercy has dwindled, as the Teaching Fellows program has sent more new teachers to programs at Pace University, Hunter College and the City University of New York, said DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte. This school year, Mercy College did not begin training any fellows, though Forte noted that the overall Teaching Fellows cohort is significantly smaller now than it was when Tisch published her dissertation in 2005.

Tisch completed her dissertation working with Arthur Levine, the former dean of Teachers College and a well-known critic of traditional teacher education. She concludes her study with a list of recommendations for policy-makers, including, presumably, herself (she was on the Board of Regents at the time of the study, although she had not yet been elected Vice Chancellor or Chancellor).

Some of her recommendations now sound familiar in the context of the Regents’ current proposals — for example, promoting competition among certification programs and increasing the number of certification programs that are targeted to bring in teachers from the science, math and engineering programs. Other proposals, like rethinking the practice of immediately placing alternatively trained teachers in the most challenging school districts, sound more radical.

Steiner said last month that a request for proposals outlining the specific qualities the state wants in training programs will be released before the end of the year.

I realized not long ago that the cuteness of the students sometimes presents another challenge, one I’m working hard to overcome. I recognized the problem the other day when I was reminiscing about one of my fourth graders. I heard her voice in my head, asking me a question in her innocent, singsong voice and improper English. That kid was adorable, I thought to myself. Then a realization hit me. In five or 10 years time she won’t sound adorable, she’ll just sound uneducated.

I don’t encounter Ebonics as much this year (and correcting Ebonics does invite a bit of controversy I won’t address here), but many of my students speak with thick accents and sometimes broken English. And sometimes, I can’t help it, it sounds pretty damn cute. I think it makes them sound younger than they are, and if I spent more time speaking to third graders who are reading and writing at grade level I might have different feelings toward the way my kids talk.

In any case, I’ve realized now that helping my kids with their oral language is just as important as their reading, writing and math skills. In fact you can argue it’s more important, because it’s their verbal skills that will make the first impression everywhere they go.

It’s not as if I haven’t corrected students when they talk about something that is “mines” or use a double negative, but at times I do think I’ve let their size and age distract me from what is actually an urgent issue. Since the revelation I had about my student from last year, I’ve made a more concerted effort to see through the veil of cuteness and enforce certain rules of diction whenever possible. It may make for fewer “cute” moments now, but it’s my hope it will create more articulate and intelligent moments in the future.

Though New York City’s charter schools admit relatively few English Language Learners in comparison to district schools, Inwood Academy for Leadership intended to be the exception. When Principal Christina Hykes applied for a charter, she envisioned a school where half the students were English Language Learners and half were general education students, making Inwood Academy the first charter school in the city to propose such a model.

Hykes planned to achieve this balance by giving admissions preference to ELL students living in Inwood, something Department of Education officials agreed she could do. State law encourages charters to focus on students “at risk of academic failure,” and students with little English seemed like prime candidates. They routinely have lower scores on the state tests than their English-speaking peers and are less likely to graduate high school.

But officials at the State Education Department disagreed with the city’s reading of the law, telling the DOE and Hykes that ELL students don’t fall in the “at risk” category. As a result, Inwood Academy’s application would have to lose all the language giving ELLs enrollment preference if it wanted to get a charter.

“Because a student is an ELL doesn’t necessarily mean they’re at risk. That’s their [SED's] interpretation,” said Michael Duffy, director of the city’s office of charter schools.

“What’s ironic is that it seems like at the Regents level there’s a real interest in seeing charter schools that can reach out to ELLs in the way Inwood was trying to do,” he said.

According to the state, ELL students are considered “high needs,” but not “at risk.” To bridge this distinction, the Board of Regents recommended last week that the state legislature raise the charter cap to encourage the growth of charter schools targeting “high needs” high school students,” said Tom Dunn, a spokesman for SED.

A change in law could offer hope to future charter operators looking to focus their attention on specific student groups like ELLs.

Charter schools won’t hold lotteries until April, leaving state officials time to change their interpretation of current law and the city time to lobby them, Duffy said.

In the meantime, Hykes has modified Inwood’s application enough to get it approved by the Board of Regents last week.

Inwood’s charter now says it will give admissions preference to students living in District 6 who get low scores — 1s and 2s — on the state math and English exams. Because of their low scores, the state does consider these students to be “at risk.”

“We’re being specific about how we recruit,” Hykes said. “We know where the need is. We’re going to have our meetings in the projects. What we’ll try to do is reach out to recent immigrants who came here in third or fourth grade. But there’s a chance we still won’t get 50 percent ELL.”

Without being able to give preference to ELL students, Hykes could land 110 fifth graders who have low test scores but are English-speakers.

“We would also like that language back in our application to show we’re devoted to these students,” Hykes said.

Traditional public schools don’t face the same admissions restrictions charter schools do. The high school Inwood Academy is using as a model, Gregorio Luperon High School in Washington Heights, only admits Spanish-speaking students who have lived in the U.S. for fewer than two years.

“There are criticisms out there about charters not enrolling enough ELL students, and I think those are valid criticisms,” Duffy said. “Here you have a school like Inwood that wants to go the extra distance and they’re being stymied and it doesn’t make sense.”

Kammie Sifonte, 14, stood outside MTA's Manhattan headquarters, protesting budget cuts that would eliminate free student Metrocards.

Hundreds of New York City high school students rallied outside of the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Manhattan headquarters this afternoon to protest budget cuts that would eliminate free student Metrocards.

The students came from all corners of the city, responding to a hastily organized call made over Facebook. They came from Manhattan’s School of the Future and Millenium High School, from Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills High School and Franklin K. Lane High School, from the High School of American Studies and Our Savior Lutheran High School in the Bronx, among many others. Many of them left their schools early, with or without the permission of their principals. Others were accompanied by their teachers and parents.

They gathered at the MTA’s Midtown headquarters to send the message that the elimination of free student transportation would drastically hurt their ability to attend quality schools. Students predicted increased financial hardship for their families, forcing them to return to their zone schools, a prospect many said they wanted to avoid. Others predicted they might drop out altogether.

The MTA board is currently in a public comment period on the cuts, which they passed last week and will vote on early in the new year. If the plan is approved, students would begin to pay for half-price passes beginning next school year and would pay full price beginning in September 2011. New York City students have received free or reduced fares since 1948.

Students gathered from schools around the city.

Jessie Byrd, 14, said she travels 30 to 40 minutes each day from her home in East Harlem to the School of the Future, where she is a freshman. Next year she intends to transfer to Bayside High School in Queens, drawn by their arts and music curriculum, but those plans will be thrown into doubt, she said, if her free Metrocards disappear.

“My mom has been struggling, barely getting by, getting money for lunch,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to waste my $4.50 for lunch just getting to school.”

Next to Byrd, 14-year-old Kammie Sifonte and her twin brother Danny, both freshman at School of the Future, said that lower classmen would be disproportionately harmed by the plan. “We’ll still be in school in 2011, and we’re too young to get jobs to help us pay for the cost,” said Danny.

The Sifontes energetically waved a handwritten sign at the oncoming traffic that read, “honk your horn for student Metrocards.” A passing MTA bus driver blared his, and students cheered.

Kammie Sifonte said that if the budget plan passes, she would most likely transfer to her zone school, as would many of her classmates at School of the Future. “We’re an accelerated high school, so we have kids from the Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island,” she said.

Other students were more pessimistic. “I probably wouldn’t go to school,” said Louis Shanoc, 16, a sophomore at Manhattan’s High School of Art and Design.

“I would still have to take the bus to get to my zone school,” added Amanda Hernandez, 15, also a sophomore at Art and Design.

Losing subsidized transportation to school was a further hardship in an environment where students are already losing services at their schools, they said. Hernandez and Shanoc, along with Arts and Design junior Jhaton Watson, 15, listed a litany of cuts to foreign language and arts programs their school has already sustained. “They’re cutting things at our school, but they’re making us pay to go there,” Hernandez said.

A parent outlined how her family

Adults sprinkled themselves throughout the crowd. City Councilman Charles Barron, who is running for Council Speaker, worked his way down the block, shaking students’ hands, flanked by his wife, State Assemblywoman Inez Barron. Teachers, parents and political organizers mingled with the teenagers.

Organizers blasted Jay-Z’s and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind” from loudspeakers and the crowd of students began to sing along, waving their signs as if at a concert, their voices rising over city traffic.

“For all the political guys that are here, this is really just a bunch of kids who used their technology to get together,” said Ed Goldman, a retired teacher at Brooklyn Tech who heard about the protest through students’ online organizing.

Jordan Orvam, a senior at Our Savior Lutheran High School in the Bronx, said he started a Facebook group to protest the cuts after reading about them in the Daily News on December 13.  When he logged on again hours later, he said, 7,000 people had joined the group. More than 73,000 people have joined the online group in the week since he started it. With the help of community organizers, he and other students in the group organized the rally in four days.

Kyle Maer, a sophomore at Bronx High School of Science who organized the Facebook group with Orvam, said students are trying to organize protests at every city high school on the day students return to school after their winter holiday, which begins this week.

City Councilman David Weprin (right) signs a petition urging the DOE not to close 20 city schools. Councilman Eric Ulrich (left) plans to deliver the petition to Chancellor Joel Klein's office this afternoon.

Members of the Queens City Council delegation called on Chancellor Joel Klein to abandon plans to close 20 city schools today.

Standing on the steps of Tweed Courthouse and joined by colleagues representing other boroughs, Queens Council members accused the Department of Education of threatening to close schools without first trying to improve them or seeking community input.

City Councilman Eric Ulrich, who represents Rockaway Beach, said the DOE did not notify his office before announcing its proposal to close Beach Channel High School.

Ulrich is circulating a petition signed by nearly all of the Queens Council members calling on the DOE to abandon its plans to close the borough’s schools.

Ulrich said he intended to deliver the petition to Chancellor Joel Klein’s office this afternoon. (He jokingly said he might nail it to the doors of Tweed.)

Many of the 11 Council members and members-elect who attended the news meeting called for discussions with parents, community leaders, and the teachers union about how to improve struggling schools before resorting to closure.

“The Chancellor is turning his back on these students and these schools,” Queens Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley said. “That is unacceptable.”

Three of the 20 schools the DOE has marked for closure this year are in Queens and two of the three — Jamaica and Beach Channel — are large high schools. Critics of the DOE’s plans to shutter the schools worry that the closures would displace students from eastern Queens, crowding them into already crowded schools such as Francis Lewis High School.

City Council members petitioned Chancellor Joel Klein to abandon plans to close 20 city schools.

]]> http://gothamschools.org/2009/12/21/queens-city-council-members-petition-klein-to-save-schools/feed/ 8 http://gothamschools.org/2009/12/21/spike-in-anti-school-closure-protests-begins-to-heat-up-the-winter/ http://gothamschools.org/2009/12/21/spike-in-anti-school-closure-protests-begins-to-heat-up-the-winter/#comments Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:53:53 +0000 Maura Walz http://gothamschools.org/?p=29333

Students and teachers protest the proposed closure of Jamaica High School on Wednesday. Photo courtesy William McDonald.

Tis the season to light candles, exchange gifts, visit family — and protest school closures?

Last week marked the beginning of what promises to be an unusually heated season of rallies organized by opponents of the city’s plan to close 20 schools.

Some activists point to a heightened sensitivity around this year’s school closings. But the spike in public demonstrations may also be due to changes in school governance law that has required DOE officials to explain and defend their closure proposals in public, where those decisions were once made behind closed doors.

“I think the amount of activity this year is definitely unusual,” said parent activist Leonie Haimson. “Among people who pay attention to these things, I think there’s an overwhelming sense of enough is enough and an attitude that we’re going to fight back.”

This afternoon, teachers union head Michael Mulgrew will join parents and City Council members to protest school closings on the steps of Tweed Courthouse.

Last week, hundreds of students, parents and teachers rallied against the closure of Jamaica High School in Queens. Smaller protest gatherings were also held at Norman Thomas High School in Manhattan, Metropolitan Corporate Academy and Maxwell High School in Brooklyn. Much of last week’s four-hour-long citywide school board meeting was spent in public comment session as students and teachers vented their frustration at the proposed school phase-outs.

And in the new year, the frequency of demonstrations against closings is expected to increase. According to a list of demonstrations circulated by the city teachers union, events are being planned at schools slated for closure for nearly every weekday during the first two weeks of the year. Members of an internal opposition group within the UFT have begun to organize a January protest at City Hall or at the residence of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

A UFT official said union representatives met with teachers at all of the schools facing closure, offering support to anyone who wanted to fight. Teachers at more than half the schools accepted the offer, he said. Some teachers, such as those at Jamaica, used UFT phone banks to encourage parents and teachers to attend Wednesday’s rally against closing the high school.

Schools were given more advance warning because of a newly-mandated 45-day comment period before a final decision can be made, Haimson said. Public hearings now required to be held at each school slated for closure give opponents a natural platform for organized protests. And the January 26 Panel for Educational Policy meeting, the first public vote on school closures since the DOE began shuttering schools in the 2004-05 school year, will likely draw teachers and families from all over the city to Brooklyn Tech’s thousand-seat auditorium.

Haimson said that while the changes in governance laws have made a difference, a more important factor has been an increased awareness of the consequences of school closures for students and teachers. “The first few rounds, there wasn’t enough of an understanding about the effects of the situation,” she said.

Norm Scott, an activist and member of an opposition party within the UFT, said that an increase in the number of schools slated for closure may correspond to an increase in protests. The DOE announced plans to shutter 20 schools this year, more than in previous rounds — last year, 12 schools began to phase out, and 15 the year before that.

Scott also said there may also be a greater level of surprise at which schools were selected in this round of closings. “Now what they’ve done is take schools where people are really shocked,” he said. Some of the schools slated for closure have received bonuses for the past two years for reaching their performance targets on state tests, and other schools with lower graduation rates dodged the ax.

Each round of school closings has been controversial. A DOE official said that opposition against closures this round has not reached the level it did last year, when a group of parents, community leaders and the UFT sued to prevent the DOE from closing three elementary schools and replacing them with charter schools. The DOE backed off that plan in April.

The Panel for Educational Policy, which will have the final say on each school’s closure, has never voted down a DOE proposal. But last week the DOE withdrew a proposal to eliminate the sixth grade from a Bronx school after parent and community members protested.

Klein told reporters earlier this month that there was a chance that public feedback could change the minds of DOE officials. “These are well thought-through decisions, but I don’t foreclose the possibility based on what we hear that we’ll come to a different final decision,” he said.

Central office employees have gone two years without raises and are getting less than the city set aside for them. Under the original plan, they would have received two four percent pay raises over two years, at a cost of $30 million total. DOE officials said today the $18 million savings would be used to soften budget cuts’ blow to schools.

In a memo this afternoon, Klein told employees they deserve raises, but following significant budget cuts to schools and the layoffs of hundreds of other central employees and school-based staff, he could not justify granting the full four percent raise.

“[A]t a time when the Department and our schools will have no choice but to make further large reductions, I cannot in good conscience fully fund raises, especially for people who are already earning substantial salaries,” Klein wrote. “We are in this together, and our schools in particular must be spared to the extent realistically possible.”

The $18 million saved by cutting the raises will cover only a fraction of the amount the DOE needs to cut from its budget. For the 2010 fiscal year, the department needs to reduce its budget by just over $113 million, and for 2011, the target cut is nearly $317 million.

Employees who earn over $70,000 are having their raises capped at roughly $2,800, while those earning less will receive a two percent raise to their salaries. The increases are being awarded to employees who do not have raises otherwise written into their contracts, and affect employees from among the lowest pay grades to the highest.

Doug Turetsky, chief of staff of the New York City Independent Budget Office, said that other managers working in city government received four percent raises earlier this year. “DOE managers didn’t, and now they’re making good on part of that,” he said.

When the four percent raises were originally announced by the mayor in July, the DOE was not included because it is not legally recognized as a city agency. The raises were later approved for the department, months after raises for other city managers went into effect.

DOE managers last received slightly more than a four percent raise in 2007; that followed a two percent raise the year before. The current raises include $4 million in retroactive payments and $4 million in salary increases for the next two years.

The raises come at a time when the city is negotiating a new contract with the city teachers union. At issue in those negotiations are pay raises for teachers, though UFT president Michael Mulgrew said that raises for non-unionized DOE managers are a separate issue.

“The Chancellor has the right to make his own judgments about what his managers deserve,” Mulgrew said in a statement.

David Bloomfield, professor of education at Brooklyn College, said that while the capped raises sound reasonable, it was hypocritical of the chancellor to give managers a raise paid irrespective of their performance, while demanding merit pay plans for teachers.

“Isn’t this another example of, ‘do as we say, not as we do?’” he said.