GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Scott Brown’s election in MA could mean the federal gov.’s role in education won’t keep expanding.
• In spite of its bad reputation, BronxTeach writes, No Child Left Behind is still something to celebrate.
• The RttT applications that have been published give hints at what common tests might look like.
• There’s much debate over a piece in the Atlantic criticizing the Edible Schoolyard movement.
• Here’s footage from last night’s hearing on the DOE’s proposal to expand PAVE charter school at P.S. 15.
• Leo Casey says the DOE’s plan is against the spirit of P.S. 15′s namesake, slain principal Patrick Daly.
• A charter advocate tells the DN’s Elizabeth Benjamin, “we don’t have the support we thought we did.”
• The author of a book on how to improve struggling schools in Chicago discusses if closures will help.
• Arkansas’ education department is singling out 58 schools for inflating grades.
• A city principal describes what she considers the criteria for a great teacher.
• Questions about NYC highs schools? Clara Hemphill is now answering them on City Room.
• And the federal gov. is investigating complaints of racial discrimination in New Orleans charter schools.

A technical education high school the Department of Education slated for closure is getting a reprieve — sort of.

Instead of shuttering the Bronx’s Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School entirely, the DOE is now proposing to keep the school’s automotive technology program open. The school’s other programs, which include home construction, carpentry, electrical and plumbing, will still be closed.

About 500 of the school’s 1,100 students are enrolled in the automotive program this year, said DOE spokesman Danny Kanner.

Kanner said the DOE’s proposal was revised after receiving strong community feedback against eliminating the Bronx’s only automotive technical education program. Kanner also cited “the strength of the school’s corporate partnerships,” which include IBM, BMW and a number of city dealerships for other car companies including Toyota, Lexus, Buick and Nissan, according to the school’s website. (more…)

Call it early spring cleaning: the city’s Department of Education is planning its third official reorganization of how schools receive support services in eight years.

Support organization leaders say the new plan involves decentralizing the city’s large service centers, which offer schools assistance with writing their budgets and handling the mountains of paperwork that pile up. Since 2007, a Brooklyn principal would call the Brooklyn Integrated Service Center for help with these tasks; now, she’ll turn to a small group that’s assigned to work with her school through her support organization.

The groups, called Children First Networks, are part of a model that has been quietly piloted for several years by Eric Nadelstern, the DOE’s chief schools officer. About 300 schools are already part of the CFNs, an expansion that took place last year and is now being extended to all of the city’s public schools. The networks are small — each has a staff of 13 staff members — and are meant to personalize the way schools receive non-academic, logistical support. (more…)

New Yorkers who want to see details of the state’s Race to the Top plan that officials hope will win them a $700 million grant will have to wait for three more months.

Half of the states that submitted applications yesterday have posted their applications online, but New York State isn’t among them. That’s because the state plans to keep the application’s contents under wraps until the federal government announces the competition’s first round of winners and losers in April.

“If New York does not win a Phase 1 award, we will in all likelihood apply in Phase 2. Therefore, the release of New York’s application at this time could compromise the State’s ability to compete in the next round,” said Tom Dunn, a spokesman for the State Education Department.

But a U.S. Department of Education spokesman, Justin Hamilton, said the department plans to post all of the first-round applications in April, whether or not they’re successful. That’s two months before the competition’s second-round deadline in June. (more…)

Stepping up its campaign against excessive policing in city schools, the New York Civil Liberties Union today sued the city on behalf of students who say they’ve been victims of overaggressive school safety officers.

The abuses alleged in the 56-page complaint filed in federal court today “shock the conscience,” said NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman at a press conference this morning. The NYCLU charges that school safety officers threatened, intimidated, handcuffed, and assaulted students whose only offenses included writing on a desk or being late for class.

The NYCLU has sued the city before about single cases of abuse by school safety agents, who are overseen by the police department rather than the Department of Education. In November, the city agreed to pay $55,000 to a student who said he was assaulted by a safety agent at Robert F. Kennedy High School in Queens. Today’s suit is different because it seeks to represent all city students and because it aims to establish that the city’s official school discipline policies violate students’ civil rights. (more…)

Like 20 other schools across the city, Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Corporate Academy recently received word that Chancellor Joel Klein has recommended that the school be closed. In some ways, MCA outshines other schools. For example, in June 2009 MCA outperformed 74% of city schools in weighted US History Regents performance and more than 62% of city schools in weighted Integrated Algebra Regents performance. Of course, like all of the schools on Chancellor Klein’s shutdown list, MCA has real deficiencies and areas where improvement is needed. But the chancellor’s recommendation does not reflect the learning community that has been created here, and his selective use of statistics to justify his decision is upsetting.

The progress reports do show how MCA compares to other schools that share some of its characteristics, but that comparison doesn’t reflect the nuances behind MCA students’ specific needs and accomplishments. And when DOE officials visited MCA on Jan. 14 to explain the decision to close the school, they compared MCA to schools citywide. Considering the emphasis on differentiation of instruction in the classroom to meet the needs of students, it seems reasonable to ask the same of our chancellor: Differentiate your evaluation of each school to reflect the needs of that particular school. The decision to use failures to reach citywide averages as the basis to close schools is unreasonable and unfair because it fails to account for the unique needs of each school’s population.

Klein should recognize that a school like MCA (where 80% of students who entered in 2006 scored 1 or 2 on their 8th grade statewide ELA exams) is going to have a harder time getting its students to pass the English Regents exam than a school that receives a more skilled 9th grade class. The performance of an incoming 9th grade class has great influence on the expected results, especially when the numbers are not outliers, but trends. It is unreasonable to expect that students who earned mostly 1s and 2s on their 8th grade exams will graduate at the same rate as students who earned mostly 3s and 4s. Similarly, while MCA’s attendance rate is too low, it’s not fair to assume the problem lies with MCA; forty percent of this year’s 9th graders, for example, also missed more than one in 10 school days in middle school.

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• After legislative inaction, NYS applied for RttT without charter changes. (GS, Times, Post, Daily News)
• The possibility of RttT funds got states to make politically unpopular policy changes. (Wall Street Journal)
• PS 216 in Brooklyn will be the first NYC outpost of Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard program. (Times)
• Juan Gonzalez notes that PS 15 is just one of several schools trying to avoid sharing space. (Daily News)
• The city has agreed to let the EPA test schools for environmental toxins. (Times, Daily News)
• In part two of its series on Paul Robeson high school, NY1 looks at the school’s attendance woes.
• Fredric Dicker says he hopes the charter cap bills’ failure causes people to turn against the UFT. (Post)
• The Daily News calls the legislature’s no-vote approach “cowardly and irresponsible.”
• The Wall Street Journal lauds new ed chiefs in New Jersey and Virginia who will “butt heads” with unions.

• Clara Hemphill, founder of Insideschools.org, is answering questions at the City Room blog this week.
• Linda Perlstein’s description of “the TFA of journalism” sounds a lot like something we know well.
• About 40 states submitted applications for Race to the Top funds by the deadline today.
• A student was stabbed at University Neighborhood High School on the Lower East Side today.
• The Education Writers Association is eliminating dues and has a job opening at the top.
• The EWA also launched a new Web site today, EdMoney.org, to track school stimulus spending.
• Alexander Hoffman weighs in on the semantics of the charter cap debate.
• Miss Eyre says she wishes her school’s upcoming quality review would review students, too.
• PS 15 in Red Hook is gearing up for another round of fighting against PAVE Academy charter school.
• A top education official will serve a stint in the parks department as part of a management exercise.
• If you didn’t want to go to Yale before, you will when you see the college’s musical pitch.
• At the National Journal, the experts are discussing the future of the AFT’s teacher evaluation initiative.
• A fourth-grader wonders how to deal with his teacher’s two-minute tests.
• On Martin Luther King Day, musician John Legend channeled Joel Klein on school reform.
• Peter Goodman says there are good teachers at schools slated for closure, too.