GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

As the Sundance Film Festival kicks into high gear this afternoon, mingling among the movie stars and directors will be a New York education celebrity — the Harlem Children’s Zone’s Geoffrey Canada.

Canada is attending the Park City, Utah festival for today’s world premiere of “Waiting for Superman,” a new documentary directed by Davis Guggenheim, who won an Oscar in 2007 for helming the Al Gore climate change film “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Guggenheim’s film is one of two new documentaries that feature Harlem charter schools prominently and cast them in a glowing light. The other is “The Lottery,” which will be released in May and which follows a group of families seeking entrance into Eva Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academies.

“Waiting for Superman” follows five children from around the country as they navigate the public schools system. None of them are Harlem Children’s Zone students, said an HCZ spokesman, Marty Lipp, but Canada offers commentary throughout the film. In an interview, Guggenheim calls Canada “perhaps the strongest voice” in the film. (more…)

Earlier this week on my blog, I wrote about the positive achievements of the No Child Left Behind Act. I argued that for all its faults, the NCLB has had an overall positive impact on American education.

Now for the bad news. And I hope President Obama, Secretary Duncan, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein will pay attention for this part, because it’s important. NCLB hasn’t fixed education. In fact, it has created some problems of it’s own. And if policymakers aren’t extremely careful over the next few years, the so-called cure will become much worse than the disease.

The three main problems with NCLB are testing, testing and testing. More specifically the assessments themselves, the school and classroom environments created by testing, and the coalescing of corporate interests with education policy are all major problems created directly or indirectly by the changes enacted by NCLB.

Let’s start with testing. (more…)

• The state placed 34 city schools on its list of failing schools. (GothamSchools, NY1, Times)
• A student who dropped out of Paul Robeson HS says the school shouldn’t be shut down. (NY1)
• Chief schools officer Eric Nadlestern defends the DOE’s school closure policies. (Brooklyn Graphic)
• Many see the firing of one of Sen. Craig Johnson’s allies as payback for Johnson’s charter stance. (Post)
• With one week to decide, Tribeca is split between two school zoning options. (Downtown Express)
• Mayor Bloomberg warned that Governor Paterson’s budget would force the city to lay off workers. (Post)

• Gov. Paterson isn’t exactly calling the state’s RttT plan bad, but he won’t call it good either.
• Welcome to Bellwether Education, a new org to help education reformers via Rotherham.
• A UFT blogger says Silver’s charter school bill didn’t have the “poison pills” critics said it had.
• Sen. Craig Johnson’s payback for backing Gov. Paterson’s charter school bill was swift.
• It’s the one-year anniversary of Arne Duncan’s swearing-in: a look at how the year has gone.
• Some of the schools on the state’s replacement list recently earned A’s and B’s on city report cards.
• Richard Kessler reports back from a meeting between the USDOE and arts education leaders.
• A high school student says she’s turning his brain off in order to pass the Regents.
• Clara Hemphill answers more NYTimes readers’ questions about high school admissions.
• Some UFT members are pleased with Mulgrew’s bullishness, but it’s all style writes Norm.
• Deborah Meier says the AFT should lead a campaign to clear up the myths about test scores.
• Philly gets a new teachers contract with pay raises and performance bonuses.
• A Sidwell Friends teacher has been charged with sexual abusing a minor — not his students.
• Chicago’s school CEO tweaked Duncan’s turnaround policy and may get better results.
• And a judge in Texas ordered truant students to carry GPS devices.

Parents, students and teachers protest against school closures and the expansion of charter schools across the street from Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Upper East Side townhouse (center house).

The pavement outside of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Upper East Side townhouse became a battleground in two fights this afternoon — one against school closures and another for the right to protest against them on a public sidewalk.

A group of parents, students and teachers sued in federal court last week for the right to demonstrate on both sides of the street outside of Bloomberg’s home. They said their protests at Tweed Courthouse — home to the Department of Education — had fallen on deaf ears.

On Friday, the protesters won their case. But the city appealed, and this morning a panel of circuit court judges overturned the first decision, ruling that the demonstrators had to stay on the south side of East 79th Street, across the street from the mayor’s door.

And so protesters, who had vowed to demonstrate regardless of the lawsuit’s outcome of their lawsuit, took their chants of “Phase out Bloomberg” to just the south side. (more…)

The New York State Department of Education has singled out 34 New York City public schools, most of them large high schools, that it believes should be replaced.

Many of the schools are already on the city’s to-be-closed list and others have had poor reputations and low grades on the city’s annual report cards for years. Now that SED has designated which schools are the bottom five percent across the state, school districts will have to submit plans to Commissioner David Steiner detailing which of four federally mandated plans they intend to implement.

The plans are a menu of sorts: four options the U.S. Department of Education believe can transform “persistently low achieving” schools into success stories. Before the list came out today, state officials said they planned to replace many of the schools with charter schools, a proposal that could be severely delayed by the state legislature’s recent decision not to lift the state’s charter cap.

Long before the list came out, Chancellor of the Board of Regents Merryl Tisch said the state’s choices would not be controversial. (more…)

Second graders at Brooklyn's Community Partnership Charter School read along with a volunteer from Barclays Capital. The students were each given copies of a book on financial literacy for kids, as well as book about Bo Obama, the White House dog, which is what the students here are reading.

As banking executives prepared to offer a sorta-kinda-mea culpa to Congress last week, some bankers in New York gave back to society in a different way — by teaching schoolchildren about financial literacy.

Investment bankers from Barclays, the British bank that bought Lehman Brothers’ investment banking arm after Lehman collapsed in the fall of 2008, visited Brooklyn’s Community Partnership Charter School with a gift of 2,000 books for the school library. They also spent the morning reading aloud to students in Toti Little and Anna Plunkett’s second grade classroom and left each of the students with a book to take home. (more…)

• Charter advocates will try again for changes before RttT’s second deadline in June. (Daily News)
• And they are warning legislators not to wait until the last minute to try for round-two RttT funds. (Post)
• There are plenty of charter schools planned that had been banking on a charter cap lift. (Post)
• The Wall Street Journal says New York State “needs a tea party, if not a French Revolution” over the cap.
• Letter-writers criticize Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver for failing to raise the charter cap. (Post)
• The DOE is planning a reorganization, for the third (or fourth) time since 2003. (GothamSchools)
• More than a third of Manhattan schools are violating code, according to Scott Stringer’s office. (Times)
• Students are suing over the city’s school safety practices. (GothamSchools, AP, Daily News, NY1, WNYC)
• The city’s plan to merge two departments is intended to send fewer teenagers to jail. (Times)
• The DOE’s relaxed bake sale rules benefit Haiti, but not local schools. (Brooklyn Courier-Life)
• Riverdale residents say the way that local students hang out after school is dangerous. (Riverdale Press) 
• Though Paul Robeson HS is struggling, it has great school spirit and a college advising program. (NY1)
• Schools across the country are teaching Chinese, with financial backing from China. (Times)