GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• A Queens teacher explains why he doesn’t think the UFT should grant concessions in exchange for raises.
• A former head of NYC’s Teach for America office has been tapped to head D.C.’s parks department.
• Teachable Moment argues that Chicago’s new socio-economic admissions preferences make sense.
• The USDOE will give states RttT credit for narrowing the achievement gap on state tests, not just NAEP.
• A new open-enrollment policy in Colorado caused a school district’s computer system to crash.
• Norm Scott takes on a UFT party for not fighting the UFT’s cooperation with charter schools.
• Jay Mathews says we should keep an eye on a teacher and principal bonus program in the D.C. suburbs.
• A new study shows noteworthy benefits to a 30-year-old phonics-based reading curriculum.
• A British headmaster ponders the benefits of co-ed schools that teach boys and girls separately.
• John Thompson predicts RttT will result in a few successes and disasters, but mostly middling results.
• Peter Murphy argues RttT judges might not trust state officials’ promise that the data firewall will expire.
• A Brooklyn principal starts a new InsideSchools blog series inspired by Ted Sizer.
• And a reminder: the GothamSchools party is a week from today! We hope you’ll join us.

The city’s Department of Education announced plans today to close four public schools that the department believes are “failing” to educate students.

Citing the schools’ low graduation rates and poor scores on state standardized tests, the DOE said it would phase out two high schools and two middle schools next year. The schools are William Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School in Brooklyn’s East New York, the Academy of Environmental Science Secondary High School in East Harlem, the middle school grades at Frederick Douglass Academy III in the South Bronx, and KAPPA II middle school in East Harlem.

Officially, the four closures must be approved by the citywide school board, known as the Panel for Educational Policy, and be discussed in public hearings, in accordance with the city’s new school governance law. In the past, the department has told schools they would be closed without advanced warning, and teachers union president Michael Mulgrew said little had changed this year. (more…)

Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch supports raising the cap on the number of charter schools allowed in New York State, she told me in an interview yesterday.

“My opinion is that the charter cap is now at a place where it will prevent us from opening great charter schools,” Tisch said. “I would like to see us have a conversation about lifting the cap in a really thoughtful way.”

Tisch has often voiced support for eventually raising the charter cap, but always in the future tense — a conservative position compared to those like Mayor Bloomberg, who push for the cap to be eliminated altogether. Her comments yesterday indicate that she will still support a cap but is ready for it to be lifted. (more…)

I am wired for worrying. For this reason, and this reason alone, I dread taking my students on field trips. But I usually do it anyway. Last year, as much as my students’ behavior was difficult to manage, I was secretly relieved that whenever the topic of trips came up, I could point to the conduct issues as a valid reason for not leaving the building.

This year, I have no such excuse. We’ve already had one trip, which was arranged by an outside organization which arranged for a school bus to pick us up and drop us off. This small convenience erased most of my usual worry, because the one field-trip related detail that causes me the most stress is transportation. I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve taken a school bus on a field trip during the years I’ve taught in New York City; we almost always have to take the subway. And though I love to share that fact with non-city teachers, because the expressions of surprise, admiration and “you’re out of your mind” greatly amuse me, I dislike the actual experience of taking my students on the subway. (more…)

The Brookings Institution has a report out today decrying the low volume and poor quality of journalism about education. Education stories are too rare, making up 1.4% of all national news, the report finds. When they do happen, the stories are too often not really about schools at all; instead, they dissect strip-searches of students and H1N1.

Yet the sad state of the news business makes improvement difficult. From the report:

… education represents a fundamental mechanism for social and economic advancement and long-term civic engagement.
But the ability of the general public to understand what is happening in elementary and secondary schools, as well as higher education, is limited by the current collapse of traditional media organizations.

Well, duh. This is why we exist, and why we are asking for your support.

Interestingly, the report also draws attention to a lack of coverage of education issues that fall outside the K-12 box: community colleges and early childhood. I would love to pour more of our time into writing about how the average 3-year-old is educated in this city — and into investigating the education received by the average community college-attending high school graduate. I’m especially curious about the daycare workers the UFT organized last year, and about claims of turnarounds, like at Hostos Community College in the Bronx (see the TV interview cited here).

Are you, readers, curious about those subjects too? Please send tips to the tips line or write them publicly.

Here’s the full report: (more…)

It’s odd to see the New York Post up in arms over the possibility of teachers receiving the same pattern of raises established by Mayor Bloomberg for other city unions. Usually, there’s a highly undesirable pattern, and the papers insist we’re lucky to get it. That’s what happened in our 1995 double zero contract, which resulted in city workers getting no raises for two years as the dot com boom swept the nation. I don’t recall a whole lot of tabloid outrage over that.

The first union to be offered the double zero was the UFT. We rejected it, though then-UFT President Sandra Feldman had sent a stern letter warning anyone who thought we’d do better must be “smoking something.” The contract next went to DC37, which voted it up, followed by every city union, including a second-round UFT. There was a modification though-UFT teachers reached maximum salary in 22 rather than 25 years. As someone who’s now been on maximum for two and a half years, I’d like to personally thank every single teacher who was “smoking something.”

But there was more to the double zero contract, and I’m not certain the Post ever picked up on it. (more…)

• Three “21st-century schools” got big budget boosts outside the normal budgeting process. (Daily News)
• A angry mother was arrested after hitting the principal of Brooklyn’s Art and Design High School. (Post)
• The city is building five new schools in Queens for next fall, but some wonder if it’s enough. (Daily News)
• An investigation found that a former ACORN employee used her DOE position to scam Verizon. (Times)
• Teachers present and retired respond to Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to link tenure to test scores. (Times)
• Joel Klein faced a tough crowd of about 200 parents on Staten Island earlier this week. (S.I. Advance)
• Massachusetts legislature accidentally amended its charter school bill to exclude Boston. (Boston Globe)
• Proponents of healthier school lunches are finding that feeding kids well is expensive. (USA Today)
• Steve Barr is giving $50,000 back to Green Dot after an audit questioned his expenses. (L.A. Times)

• Frederick Hess argues that current teacher pension plans make it more difficult to boost teacher quality.
• Richard Whitmire defends college admissions processes that favor boys, athletes and children of donors.
• At a district rezoning meeting, a DOE official insisted that there are enough seats in District 2 schools.
• Gordon Macinnes wonders what data the city will use to evaluate teachers of subjects with no tests.
• Pittsburgh is trying to raise revenue by taxing student tuition.
• If Dr. Seuss were still alive, he might write books called “Oh! The Tests You’ll Take,” says Richard Kessler.
• Arne Duncan said that to make a difference, we need to reduce class sizes for low-income students to 15.
• How old is too old to believe in Santa? And is it the teacher’s job to burst the bubble? Ruben wonders.
• Diane Ravitch says that NYC and Chicago show that schools should not be run like businesses.

A schedule conflict could mean that students’ scores on this year’s state standardized tests may not play a role in whether their teachers get tenure. Nevertheless, if the city does use the scores, it could land in court with the union on the other side.

Citing a loophole in state law, Mayor Bloomberg ordered the city’s Department of Education last week to begin using students’ test scores in tenure decisions this year. But the results of this year’s state math and English tests will not be available until after the deadline for submitting tenure decisions has passed.

The state changed its timeline for administering math and English exams this year, pushing both exams to the spring. Previously, they were given in January and March. Though principals have to make decisions about whether to grant teachers tenure by May 1, this year’s tests will not even finish going through the scoring process until weeks after that deadline.

This schedule conflict could leave principals to make tenure decisions using two years of test scores rather than three, and those could be two easier years. Chancellor of the Board of Regents Merryl Tisch has said that this year’s tests will be “less predictable” than in previous years. (more…)