Teachers' data reports place them in one of five categories depending on how much they were able to boost their students' test scores over the course of several years.

Reports ranking teachers on how much they were able to increase students’ test scores from one year to the next arrived in principal’s inboxes this week, and this time Department of Education officials say the reports are simpler and fairer than in years past.

First released in 2008, teacher data reports have rankled teachers who object to being judged solely on test scores and confused principals, some of whom found the reports too complicated to use. The reports released this week cover 12,000 teachers and address some of those concerns. They contain less information, are easier to read, and use a new formula to calculate teachers’ value-added scores.

This year, Chancellor Joel Klein has made it clear what should be done with the data: one in ten teachers who are up for tenure will have their reports used as a criteria in their tenure evaluations.

On Tuesday morning, principals with students in grades 3-8 — the state gives yearly math and English tests to these students — were given school summary reports. Teachers won’t receive their individual data reports until next week. The vast majority work in traditional public schools, as less than a dozen charter schools chose to participate, according to the Department of Education’s chief talent officer, Amy McIntosh.

This year’s reports offer much of the same data as last year’s, with a few tweaks. Teachers’ value-added scores — how much they’ve helped students’ improve over the course of a year — are still compared to the scores of teachers who have similar kinds of students in their classrooms and a similar experience level. They’re also broken down to show how well someone teaches special education students versus students who arrive scoring in the top tier.

But this year, the reports don’t include comparisons to teachers citywide, nor do they give a breakdown of teachers’ scores for each year they’ve been teaching. Instead, the reports show data from the 2008-2009 school year as well teachers’ value-added scores averaged over as many as four years.

“We did find that that [showing each year's data] tended to focus people more on an annual trend and, given the properties of value-added, year to year changes are not necessarily the thing we would want people to take a lesson from,” McIntosh said.

The new reports also use a different formula to calculate a teacher’s value-added score. In previous years, the formula only noted whether a teacher taught special education students, but didn’t distinguish the highly functioning students from those who are more challenging. Now, the formula includes these distinctions, and also takes into account the margin of error on the state’s tests.

Professor at New York University’s Institute for Education and Social Policy, Sean Corcoran, said that while the new reports are much easier to understand, they still suffer from the problem that plagues any value-added system: too much certainty.

“What the performance categories ignore —and this is true for any value-added system — is that teachers’ value-added measures are estimates, and as such are subject to error,” Corcoran wrote in an email.

A teacher reading her report will see a single value-added score, but she’ll also see that, accounting for errors, her performance could fall anywhere across a wide range of scores.

“The five performance categories are already pretty crude, but when you consider that a teacher with a 65th – 95th percentile confidence interval could be an Average, Above Average, or Excellent teacher, it doesn’t tell us very much,” Corcoran wrote.

“We know statistically that the most likely result is the point we’ve highlighted,” McIntosh said. “But this is not a surgical scalpel and people should use caution and judgment and other metrics when they take into account this data.”

Another common concern for those studying and using value-added data is how stable the results are. From year to year, teachers sometimes move in rank from very bottom to the top, and though more data smooths out those inconsistencies, it doesn’t completely erase them.

In the New York City data reports, most teachers who ranked in a category for two years will still place there two years later. For example, 70 percent of math teachers who ranked in the bottom for two straight years were still placing there two years later, showing that their effects on students had been consistent.

But some teachers have been shown to make great changes. Six percent of math jumped from the very worst ranking to the very best over four years.

“This could be because the teachers improved, or it could simply be noise,” Corcoran said. “With these statistical models we can’t say.”

Consistency data for Math:

Consistency data for ELA:

Teacher Data Report sample

School Summary Report sample

The parents, John Battis and Lydia Bellahcene, allege that the city of violating state education law in its plan to allow PAVE Academy charter school remain in the same building as P.S. 15 until 2013. The citywide school board voted to approve that plan in its January meeting.

The appeal, which parents filed to the city today and expect to deliver to the state education department in Albany on Monday, claims that vote should be nullified because the city revised its timeframe for PAVE’s stay without having a second public hearing, as required if the city changes a plan for how a building will be used. It also argues that the city failed to give enough information about how the plan would affect students at both the schools.

Lawyers with the advocacy group Advocates for Children are working with Battis and Bellahcene on the appeal.

Here is a copy of the appeal:

The group’s website has been down at least since yesterday, though staff members’ email addresses were still working and phone calls to their main office line were being answered. Messages to the group’s spokeswoman, Julie Wood, were referred to Learn NY’s current executive director, Heather McNaught, who did not respond to requests for comment by this evening.

After mayoral control was reinstated, it was unclear what Learn NY’s role should be and the group never publicly revised its mission. The organization, founded in 2008 by close allies of the mayor to rally parents to the mayoral control cause, never picked up much steam in that effort.

One of the social studies teachers in my school, trained as a lawyer, could not believe I’d gotten the term right. But there it is, in GothamSchools, the most reliable source for education news and opinion in the known universe. So basically, they can fire you for stealing pencils, and you’d have to prove to them that you didn’t do it. After all, it’s “Children First” in New York City. So if you’re an adult, falsely accused, too bad. No salary or health benefits for you. And when the children who “came first” grow up, the hell with them too. They get the same 19th-century-style jobs we just took away from their parents.

The DOE, of course, is now two years into its quest to fire more teachers. So far, they’ve only been able to build successful cases against three. It’s remarkable that, led by a noted attorney, that’s as far as they got. I’m sure they could’ve done better if they weren’t expending so much energy on personal vendettas and utter nonsense. Still, you’d think someone who so reveres accountability and spurns excuses, like Chancellor Klein, would have a better explanation than the one he’s got — that the rules and regulations are neither arbitrary nor capricious enough. But those are the sort of results you can expect when you send people to the rubber room for bringing plants to school or reporting administrative malfeasance. I personally worked with someone who spent time there largely for the offense of not wearing a tie.

As a chapter leader, I’m particularly fascinated by the clause demanding that chapter leaders do all their work outside school hours. I’m wondering exactly how that would work. If the principal calls me into a meeting that takes place during class time, would I have to teach my class after school? Would I perhaps be expected to tutor the kids in my home one at a time? If I get called into an arbitration over class size violations, would I get to ask the arbitrator if he could hold it off until after dinner? Or would we simply ignore class size violations, so Tweed could get back to its policy of doing whatever it felt like doing, with no consequences whatsoever?

With 300 UFT members in my building, when would I consult with them? Who on earth could handle such a thing? I suppose the goal is to leave union members without union representation. That’s a worthy and admirable goal in this administration’s continuing effort to roll back the 20th century. If they get what they want here they’ll have come pretty close.

I’m struck by their proposal to create modified contracts in phasing out schools. It seems they think they ought to be able to do whatever they wish in those schools. The fact that they close them arbitrarily and capriciously based on false statistics is of no consequence. Doubtless they’d like to make up contracts on the fly in all schools. In fact, by offering compensation increases based on whether teachers are “apprentice, practicing, mentor, or master,” they’re pretty much saying they ought to pay whatever they feel like as well.

Frankly, if they really want to be arbitrary and capricious, I see no reason why the UFT shouldn’t negotiate in kind. To hell with the 4 percent increase. Let’s demand a four hundred percent increase.  We’ll also demand that Joel Klein come to each school personally, every week, and pay everyone in quarters.

Let’s make sure there are fresh baked goods in every workroom and every classroom. Why shouldn’t kids reap the benefits of our new and improved negotiation techniques? Every school needs a state-of-the-art gym and spa for UFT members and public school kids, with personal trainers, sports drinks, and complimentary Starbucks drinks of every stripe. An Iron Chef in every school cafeteria. And for goodness sake, let’s demand a golf course to work off those calories.

Let’s make assistant principals subordinate to teachers, as it’s well-known we do all the work anyway. Let’s demand a huge barrel of cash in every department office, so that we can take handfuls of it and distribute it to our best students. Or best buds. Or Best Buy.

Finally, let’s make sure the mayor and chancellor are truly accountable.  The next time a kid, any kid, is left behind, let’s phase out Tweed.

All good teachers do this, of course, making their frustration look like the first, the only frustration they have ever felt over the behavior of a child. After school or in private they will laugh about it and say that it is an act, or a trick, but I know better. Good teachers do feel their frustration as if it is the first, the only. If it is a trick, then it is a trick that they play on themselves. Good teachers are surprised when kids do not do what they need to do.

But Ms. Fire takes it a step further and makes that surprise, that real disappointment, personal. I cannot believe that YOU have made me mad, YOU whom I KNOW. She becomes a musician, playing their shame like a violin. What a risky move!

Here is a piece of teacher wisdom that I have heard a few times: Do not make a child feel ashamed. Why? Because 1. It is cruel and 2. It doesn’t work. My experience has certainly borne this out. But Ms. Fire’s method complicates things. Ms. Fire shows me, every time I watch her, that teachers meet children in a territory between confidence and shame. Every lesson is new to the child. He can work toward confidence by practicing the lesson, or he can give in to shame and all of shame’s myriad behaviors.

I would argue that when Ms. Fire makes her disappointment personal, she is showing her student the possibility of shame, and in this way encouraging the child to avoid the path of shame itself.

An example: Richard (a pseudonym, as are all names in these posts) once finished his math test early, and performed very well. He then doodled his name all over the test page. Ms. Fire picked up his test, looked at it, and told him to do it over. Risky move! She told him that he was scribbling all over his own hard work and so insulting himself, and moreover he is always doing things like this.

I watched this interchange with a grimace, but as soon as she was done Richard rewrote the test without a complaint, and he has never since doodled on a math test. So maybe she was showing him the danger of shameful practice. Maybe Ms. Fire’s constant invocation of shame functions in her world as a warning of a constant danger. Her students certainly do not seem ashamed.

Should I apply this strategy in my room? All I can say is that the thought makes me nervous.

Charter school parents packed into last night's Panel for Educational Policy meeting to call for more city building space for charter schools.

Last night’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting was the second in as many months to be packed to the gills with parents and teachers passionately pleading their case.

But this time it was charter school parents, not teachers and parents at closing district schools, who drove to the meeting in busloads.

“What we are pleading for this evening is space,” Trevor Alfred, a parent at Explore Empower Charter School, told the panel. “We deserve it.”

At first blush, the level of passion, and sometimes anger, directed towards the panel could seem odd. Although 16 school space proposals were up for a vote, the board had never voted down a city proposal, and none of the charter school proposals on the agenda yesterday was defeated.

But charter school advocates, stung by what they felt was a bruise at last month’s PEP meeting on school closures, which was dominated by charter school opponents, decided to take the opportunity to launch a new public relations offensive.

“I think this is the defining moment for the charter school movement, as an advocacy movement, to wake up,” said Jeremiah Kittredge, who leads Democracy Prep Charter Schools’ political organizing.

Other charter schools in attendance included the Harlem Success, KIPP, Explore, Girls Prep and Achievement First networks, some of whom had never rallied parents to a public meeting before.

Girls Prep supporters raised their banners each time one of their parents or teachers spoke before the panel.

“As demand for charters has increased, so has the opposition,” said David Levin, founder of the KIPP network of charter schools. “People realize that now, and are making their voices heard.”

Meanwhile, many of the most outspoken opponents of charter siting plans at individual school hearings were notably absent. And union officials, who last month called for the city to stop giving city building space to charters until district schools reach their class size targets, sat out the meeting altogether.

“It’s a sham; why come?” said Lisa Donlan, the president of a Lower East Side parent council and one of a few vocal critics who did speak.

(The board did fail to pass one proposal last night: a contentious plan to site an all-boys district school, Eagle Academy, at I.S. 59 fell one vote short of the seven votes needed for passage because of the absence of one mayoral appointee to the PEP, Jim Whelan, and the abstention of another, Linda Lausell Bryant.)

Charter school supporters point to opposition from elected officials as evidence that they are under siege. By launching a public relations offensive, they argue, they can persuade lawmakers that they’re on the wrong side of the issue.

As if proving their point, today a top target of charter school supporters, Harlem’s State Senator Bill Perkins, announced plans to hold hearings questioning charter schools starting in March. Although Perkins helped start the city’s first charter, he has since become an outspoken opponent of their growth.

Chancellor Joel Klein is championing this new wave of activism. He told reporters last night that he called charter school principals, at the request of the head of a charter network, to encourage them to bring parents to the meeting. And in a Daily News op-ed yesterday, Klein forecast a strong charter school presence.

Skeptics of Klein pointed out an irony: he’s trumpeting a system that works because parents want to flee the district schools that he manages.

As the proposals came to a vote close to midnight, one of the few charter critics on the board, Manhattan Borough President appointee Patrick Sullivan, voted “no” on the plan to let Girls Prep expand, saying that he questioned the school’s success.

The measure passed anyway, but afterward, a tearful Miriam Lewis Raccah, the head of Girls Prep, made clear that Sullivan’s criticisms had reinforced her view that charters need to put up a strong show against their critics.

“I feel a little bit of relief,” she said, “but it’s also a little bit infuriating.”

Emails sent to GothamSchools offer a window into a school where parents, teachers, and board members are locked in a bitter fight, trading accusations about mismanagement, ceiling leaks, and an alleged lack of textbooks. Problems began late last year when teachers and union officials accused the charter school’s board of spending millions of dollars on a for-profit management organization, Victory Schools.

Now, teachers and parents are blaming the board for shortchanging students on classroom supplies and not making needed repairs. In response, the board is accusing teachers of fabricating the problems. Meanwhile, the school’s founding principal has left suddenly, citing personal reasons.

In 2007, an overwhelming majority of teachers at Merrick Academy voted to make the United Federation of Teachers their exclusive bargaining agent, but since then the UFT and school’s board have yet to reach a contract agreement. Last December, UFT officials held a news conference in front of the school to protest its contract with Victory Schools.

Kenneth Eriabadour, who has two children in the K-6 school, said he’s concerned about financial mismanagement.

“The school has no adequate heat, all the roofs are leaking,” he said. “There are no books, there are no materials for these children to study with. I used to go to Wal-Mart and get papers and pencils to send to school every week. Where is all the money going?”

Parents have been lodging their complaints with SUNY Charter Institute, which authorized the school and is tasked with its oversight.

Executive director of the institute, Jonas Chartock, said the institute forwarded parents’ complaints to the school’s board.

“The Institute was satisfied that the school had taken appropriate measures to address relatively common issues for school buildings — the temporary use of supplemental heaters when the furnace was being repaired and for classrooms where the existing heating system is now insufficient were installed and the school is working through appropriate channels to have the leak issues addressed,” he wrote in an email.

Interim principal Carolyn Thomas directed calls about the school to board president Gerald Karikari, who did not return calls for comment.

Opened in 2000, Merrick Academy’s founding board included Congressman Gregory Meeks and State Senate President Malcolm Smith, both of whom have left the board. Smith’s former business partner, Darryl Greene, still sits on Merrick’s board. In 1999, Greene was convicted of stealing half a million dollars from city agencies and, earlier this month, he backed out of business ties he had with the company selected to run a video slot machine parlor at Aqueduct Raceway.

The Department of Education’s charter school office has little contact with Merrick leaders, as the school is authorized by SUNY and leases its own building.

Here’s the email Jonas Chartock, executive director of SUNY Charter Schools Institute, sent to me:

The Institute was informed in writing yesterday that Merrick’s principal was taking an indefinite leave of absence for personal reasons. Long time assistant principal Carolyn Thomas has been named interim principal.

In the past two months, the Institute has received several complaints funneled through a small group of individuals in the school community. The Institute also received a letter of complaint from UFT President Michael Mulgrew. Prior to this period, the Institute had received few if any complaints about the school.

Per our policy, we referred all complaints to the school and its board of Trustees, with the exception of those involving the health and safety of students. An issue was brought to our attention regarding a heating problem and a leaking roof. The Institute’s Vice President and General Counsel spoke with the school’s board chair, a member of the board, the head of the parent teacher association, and the school’s principal. The Institute was satisfied that the school had taken appropriate measures to address relatively common issues for school buildings — the temporary use of supplemental heaters when the furnace was being repaired and for classrooms where the existing heating system is now insufficient were installed and the school is working through appropriate channels to have the leak issues addressed.

“I would never use the word ‘demand,’” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said during a news conference in the Bronx, saying he did not want to negotiate in public. “You will come out of this with an agreement down the road that hopefully both sides can feel, well, we did as well as we could, given the situation.” (via New York Times)

Semantics aside, the document that Department of Education officials sent to reporters on Tuesday is titled “contract proposals.” Though the New York Post wrote it had “obtained” the document, the list of demands was part of a complaint the teachers union filed and the DOE released to reporters, not realizing its contract wishes were included.

The three-page document includes negotiation priorities like making it easier to lay off teachers who have been excessed and shrinking the population of teachers who sit in the city’s rubber rooms while they wait for their termination cases to be heard. Though the mayor has repeatedly said he will not negotiate in public, he and Chancellor Joel Klein have been increasingly vocal about the changes they want made to the teachers contract.

The state labor relations board has certified that talks between the city and the union have reached an impasse, meaning that the two sides are headed for arbitration.

But the size of that disparity varies widely according to whether the charter school is housed in a city-owned building, the report said.

Charter schools that are housed in public school buildings receive only $300 less per student than district schools, according to the IBO’s calculations.

But charter schools that own their own buildings or lease them receive more than $3,000 less per student in public funding than district schools, the report said. In those schools, charters must pay for maintenance and other building costs themselves. Those costs are covered by the Department of Education for charters in city-owned buildings.

The report, prepared at the request of Panel for Educational Policy member Patrick Sullivan, is an attempt to resolve a long-standing question in the charter school debate.

Charter school advocates argue that, under the state’s funding formula, the schools receive significantly less per student. Critics counter that charter schools, especially those housed in city-owned buildings, receive many hidden subsidies that either equalize or boost charter school resources above what district schools receive.

Both supporters and critics of the city’s charter schools found elements in the report to support their positions.

“The IBO study validates the City’s policy of offering public space to charter schools in an attempt to provide charter school students with the same resources as their peers in other public schools,” Chancellor Joel Klein said in a statement.

Charter schools are not legally guaranteed space in public buildings, but the Bloomberg administration, which strongly supports the schools, has offered space in district schools to many charters.

James Merriman, head of the New York City Charter Center, said the report bolstered charter advocates’ claim that charter schools are slighted by the state’s funding formula. “When you add it up, the gap between district schools and charters isn’t even close, particularly for those charters that do not share public space,” he said.

Teachers union chief Michael Mulgrew disputed that interpretation.

“The difference between funding for public schools and charter schools in public buildings is negligible,” Mulgrew said. “When you add in the private funding that many charter schools get, I’m sure that we’ll find that many charter schools have resources that are well beyond those of public schools.”

At the same time, both charter school opponents and advocates also found nits to pick with the report’s analysis, claiming that it either inflated or understated the amount of public funding charter schools receive.

Parent advocate Leonie Haimson said that the IBO’s accounting of district schools’ per-pupil spending includes DOE central administrative expenses that are spent on things like data systems and consultants.

“A lot of it is being spent by DOE on highly questionable priorities that don’t really benefit students,” Haimson said. “How much do we actually see at the school level? That’s the disparity we are talking about.”

By contrast, the Charter School Center released a statement arguing that many charter schools in fact receive far less money at the school level than district schools serving the same neighborhood. “[B]ecause the City has rightly directed more resources to district schools in high needs neighborhoods, the gap for charter schools in those same neighborhoods is much wider,” the statement said.

Because of the complicated ways charter schools and district schools are funded, a fair comparison of how much money district and charter schools actually spend on students is difficult to draw cleanly.

The IBO accounting of district schools’ per-student spending did include most central administrative costs, and the amount of money actually doled out to schools varies significantly from school to school depending on what students are enrolled at the school. Charter schools receive a flat per-student amount of public funding, but most of their administrative costs also come out of that fund. In the case of schools housed in city-owned buildings, some maintenance costs are then covered by the city.

The report did not examine the amount that charter schools raise through private philanthropy each year. According to an analysis by Kim Gittleson, a research assistant employed by one of GothamSchools’ funders, Ken Hirsh, charter schools in the city spent on average $14,456 per student. That number is greater than the amount of public support charter schools receive but still less than the amount of citywide per-pupil spending for district schools.

Questions of how charter schools are funded, and the effect of the city’s practice of granting public building space to charters, are currently under heavy public scrutiny. Charter advocates are currently lobbying legislators to lift a freeze on charter school funding that keeps spending capped at 2008-09 levels. And a rancorous debate over the city’s charter school siting practices has been cited as one of the biggest political obstacles to raising the statewide cap on charter schools.

In his statement, Klein linked those two issues, indicating that the city’s siting practices for charters are likely to remain unchanged.

“Until the state’s funding formula is revised and charter schools are eligible for capital dollars like other schools, we will continue to work with communities and parents across the City to find space for new charters when it is available and presents the right fit with other schools in a building,” he said.

The full report is below:

Every spring semester, the union surveys its members to find the number of oversize classrooms — those that exceed the numbers of students outlined in the teachers contract — to see how many remain after the fall hearings on crowded classrooms are over. This year, union officials said there are 1,236 oversize high school classes in the city, but rather than being spread out among the schools in each borough, they’re in 32 schools. At this time last year, there were 176 crowded high school classes in the city, the union’s report states.

On the union’s list of schools that have crowded classrooms are several schools, such as John Dewey High School (105 oversize classes) and Sheepshead Bay High School (88 oversize classes), that are endangered. Both of these high schools are on the state’s list of schools it wants the city to replace, either by shutting them down and opening new schools or changing their leadership. Others, like Paul Robeson High School, will begin phasing out next year.

For an academic high school class to be considered crowded, it has to have more than 34 students.

In a statement sent to reporters, Department of Education spokesman David Cantor said the union’s numbers were inflated.

“Inflated UFT numbers are sure to dramatically decline. The current period of budget tightening — which has led to a small rise in class size — is an unfortunate time to release misleading numbers to score political points,” Cantor said.

The city’s own data shows that average class sizes rose in the lower grades last school year and again this year.

United Federation of Teachers spokesman Dick Riley said the union will file demands for arbitration for all 1,236 classrooms tomorrow and hearings will begin next week.

According to the DOE, the chances that all of these cases will actually come up in a hearing are slim. The department estimates of that of the 506 demands for arbitration that the UFT filed in the fall, 75 percent were either withdrawn or never scheduled.

The schools listed in the spreadsheet below have the highest numbers of crowded classrooms in the city:

UFT survey of second semester finds nearly 47,000 students

spending all or part of each day in oversized classes

As the second semester of the 2009-2010 school year begins, at least 1,236 classes in the city’s high schools are oversize, leaving an estimated 46,968 students in an oversize class for all or part of each day, according to a survey by the United Federation of Teachers.  The number is nearly five times larger than the number of oversize high school classes at the beginning of the second semester in the 2008-2009 school year.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew said, “Oversize classes and overcrowded schools can and should be a warning sign to the Department of Education, particularly if the overcrowding is due to the closure of other schools in the neighborhood.  The UFT will be filing official grievances on these oversize classes this week as part of the effort to reduce class sizes across the city.”

High schools with 100 or more oversize classes included John Dewey with 105 oversize classes; Murry Bergtraum with 143; and Hillcrest with 135.

Last year at this time the total number of oversize high school classes was 176.

As of February 9, 2010, one week after the second semester officially began, Queens high schools had 367 oversize classes; the number was 263 for Manhattan high schools, 485 for high schools in Brooklyn, 85 for high schools in Staten Island and 36 for high schools in the Bronx.

Potential reasons for the increase in oversize classes this spring include budget cuts that reduced the number of teachers and programs at schools;   the closure or phasing out of some schools, concentrating students in fewer buildings; and population increases in certain neighborhoods.

Class size limits in academic subjects in high school are set at 34 students.   The class size limits are established by DOE agreements with the UFT, along with state and City Council mandates.  The estimate of students affected was based on an average of 38 students in each oversize class.

Today’s announcement represents the second time during this school year that the UFT has found growing class sizes compared to the last school year.  In September 2009 a UFT survey found that there were nearly 7,500 oversize classes in the city’s elementary, middle and high schools at that time, compared with just under 6,000 oversize classes September 2008.

A Queens charter school that pays for pension costs directly out of its budget is cutting programs to afford pensions.

Stacey Gauthier at the Renaissance Charter School is worrying a lot these days — about money. This year she’s had to increase class sizes, cut the summer school program, and forgo hiring experienced teachers when an older teacher retires. Yet she still hasn’t cut enough to be able to afford the school’s rising pension costs, which have grown from $12,000 per teacher in 2004 to $21,000 per teacher this year.

Pension costs for city teachers have been rising steadily over the past decade, but for the most part the expenses have been hidden from individual schools, which rely on the city to cover all pension costs. Yet for a small number of charters schools like Renaissance that participate in the Teacher Retirement System (TRS) out of their own budgets, the ballooning price of a comfortable retirement has been acutely felt.

“We have another year to live,” Gauthier said. “We’re dipping into our savings now, which is okay, but if things don’t rebound, we won’t be financially viable.”

Although TRS costs have always been high relative to the private sector, their impact on charter school budgets has become especially burdensome since state lawmakers froze planned increases in charter school funding two years ago. (A breakdown of several charter schools’ pension and 401(k) payments is below the jump.)

The freeze made it harder for schools to pay their TRS contributions, which have increased by 10 percent since 2008. At a loss, schools said their pension payments are often coming at the expense of other school programs — a situation that the district schools could see themselves in if promised budget cuts are approved for next year.

“Our costs are growing astronomically,” said Vicki Zubovic, the managing director of development at the KIPP charter schools. “It’s becoming harder and harder to meet these needs.”

The TRS pension squeeze affects at least 12 charter schools in New York City. The rest offer some sort of 401(k) or 403(b) defined contribution plan in which employees contribute a portion of their salary to a fund and employers agree to match that amount up to a certain percentage.

The difference in cost between the two options is enormous.

The more generous public pension plan costs much more per student than a slimmer 401k retirement option.

According to an analysis using the fiscal audits from 2008-2009, on average, non-TRS schools contributed about 2 percent of all payroll expenses to their pension funds. TRS schools contributed around 14 percent of all payroll expenses to the TRS. This comes down to a difference of over $1,400 per student that TRS schools must spend on pensions that other charters are free to direct elsewhere.

Citywide, pensions cost on average $2,000 per pupil — a higher figure than charter schools face because district teachers are generally older and because of the way the TRS accounts for charter school pension costs. Overall, pensions make up $2.1 billion, or 10 percent, of the DOE’s total budget of $21 billion.

Most charter schools in the TRS joined because they are “conversion” schools that transformed into charters from traditional public schools — and as a result were required by the state to keep the same union benefits afforded district school teachers. But a handful of charter schools that belong to TRS opted into the plan on their own.

School leaders said they wanted to offer their employees the same benefits offered by district schools. There is simply no way that a 401(k) plan can offer the benefits that the TRS promises, such as free retiree health care and a guaranteed yearly pension that gets paid whether the market is down or not.

“We knew going in we were going to offer the TRS,” said Leonard Goldberg, the principal of Opportunity Charter School. “It’s hard for a teacher who has five, ten years in a system to try working in a charter school if the charter school doesn’t offer the same benefit.”

Goldberg said that TRS membership has helped Opportunity meet its goal of attracting and retaining experienced teachers. The plan is expensive, he said. But he added, “We believe at the moment it’s worth the investment.”

To compete, some charter schools that don’t participate with TRS have tried to make their 401(k) plans as lucrative as possible.

Take the plan at KIPP S.T.A.R., the only one of the four New York City KIPP schools that is not in the TRS. KIPP S.T.A.R. matches 50 percent of employee contributions up to the federal limit of $16,500 per year. In addition, the school offers employees a partially subsidized health care plan.

Despite all this, KIPP officials conceded that this plan, which is generous by most standards, still can’t compete with the TRS.

Not all unionized charter schools participate in TRS; two that offer 401(k) plans are Amber Charter School in Manhattan and Merrick Academy in Queens.

Even if the TRS schools stop thinking the plan is worth the investment, there’s nothing they can do: According to state law, once a school is in the TRS, it can never leave.

But that hasn’t stopped the schools from asking for relief. Several schools in the plan are pushing to get an increase in state funding to cover the costs. The UFT has proposed pension relief for charter schools that would require the Department Of Education to pay for the schools’ TRS costs. How that would work in practice has yet to be worked out.

But most schools in the plan agree that the simplest option — letting the charter schools opt out of the TRS — would not be a fair resolution.

“I think that there are some ridiculous parts of the pension, but we didn’t set that up,” said Gauthier of Renaissance. “The politicians, traditional public schools, they all have this benefit. Why are charter schools expected to be the sacrificial lambs?”

Here is a breakdown of charter schools’ pension plans and payments, as reported in their 2008-2009 audited financial statements. One note before reading: A small contribution to a school’s pension fund does not necessarily indicate poor policy on the part of the school. Because 401k/403b plans state that an employer must contribute to the plan only if an employee contributes, some schools contribute little to no money to their pension plans due to their employees’ decisions.

But one of the study’s authors says the reviewers misunderstood his work.

The reviewers argued that because Leadership Academy principals were frequently placed in more challenging schools than their counterparts in the study, differences in outcome could be due to other factors besides the principal’s training.

The review was completed by the What Works Clearinghouse, a program funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Educational Science and charged with judging whether education researchers’ conclusions are warranted by their evidence.

Sean Corcoran, an assistant professor at New York University and one of the study’s authors, said that it was “not surprising” that the report did not meet WWC’s evidence standards because the organization’s guidelines are designed to judge a different style of research than the one he completed.

Corcoran also criticized the review for misstating the study’s original conclusions. The review cites researchers’ conclusions that elementary and middle schools with Leadership Academy principals saw no statistically significant difference in students’ English and math scores. In fact, the study reported a statistically significant change in students’ English, but not math, scores.

When the study was released, Chancellor Joel Klein highlighted it as evidence of the successes of his policies. But some of Klein’s critics have pointed out that study’s findings were mixed, and did not address many questions about the success of Leadership Academy graduates.

The research firm that runs the review program, Mathematica, had been commissioned by the New York City Department of Education to do a long-term study of the Leadership Academy; that study was canceled before the NYU researchers published their study.

The WWC completes two kinds of evaluations of education research. Roughly a third of the research given “quick reviews,” as this one was, are found not consistent with the body’s evidence standards, said Russ Whitehurst, the former director of the USDOE’s Institute for Education Sciences and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Here’s the whole quick review of the study:

I met Ms. Stone at the beginning of my first day of school. “Remember,” she told me, “these are not your children. I have my children at home, and I am their mother every afternoon and evening. These students are not my children.” She runs her class from on high, leading with crystal-clear demands that follow upon explicit, oft-restated lessons. Her classroom is sparkling clean at all times. When I am in her room I marvel at the quiet, contented labor of her students. It would be as unnatural to act out or play around in her classroom as it would be to fly out the window. In fact her authority, as well as her entire pedagogical style, is very much like gravity: It is constant, and in its constancy it is calming and comforting.

Ms. Fire is always comparing her students to her own children. “My son would never talk to a grownup like that,” she says, or, “She is like my son with her math, but her reading is much better.” She told one girl, “Are you sure you want to talk like that right now, when I live two blocks away from you and see your mother at the store?” Ms. Fire is deep in her students’ business. And her students fight and act out, but only when Ms. Fire turns her back. They certainly get aggressive with one another far more frequently than do Ms. Stone’s students, but they also are kind and friendly with each other. In a word, there is more living going on in Ms. Fire’s room, more social interaction and far more discussion of various grievances. And Ms. Fire’s kids also do their work.

And I have to wonder: Why do they do their work?

You see, I sympathize with Ms. Stone’s methods. In fact, I model my teaching on Ms. Stone. It seems, well, easier. At least in theory. I try to maintain a constant, consistent tone because I am afraid to let my students live out their lives. Keep in mind, life can become very chaotic, very loud, when it is the life of 23 7-year-olds. I try to maintain a certain authoritarian distance because I know no other way of maintaining authority. Ms. Stone’s method seems far the more transferable — that is to say, it seems to be a method that can be practiced by a 23-year-old man as well as a more experienced woman. Yet my kids don’t get their work done the way Ms. Fire’s kids get their work done. How does Ms. Fire do it, and can I, perhaps, add a little Fire to my teaching? Is that even advisable?

Over the next few posts I am going to look more closely at Ms. Fire’s methods, in contrast to those of Ms. Stone, in order to point out what I see as some advantages and dangers of her teaching style.