GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Obama’s exclusion of TFA from the federal budget could signal TFA’s end as a policy darling.
• But federal Head Start programs would get a boost under the proposed budget.
• The next tribulation for P.S. 234 hopefuls? A lottery for kids who don’t have siblings at the school now.
• Peter Murphy takes a Buffalo state senator to task for waffling on charter schools.
• Mimi lays out how teachers spend their last moments in a classroom before mid-winter break.
• Do school libraries need actual books, or will computers do? Commentators weigh in at the Times.
• Virginia is for lovers of virtual charter schools, predicts Jay Mathews.
• The vote for new teacher quality standards in Houston was high noon at the OK Corral, Eduflak writes.
• Eighth graders have a few extra days to apply to new high schools.
• And Happy Valentime’s Day! (If you’re an ELL in Ms. Rubin’s class, that’s what you call it.)

Parents and supporters from Girls Prep Charter School (left) faced their counterparts from P.S. 188 and 94 at a protest yesterday outside of the Lower East Side school building where the charter school wants to expand.

When Girls Prep Charter School first requested more space in the Lower East Side school building it currently calls home, its principal and the leader of the district school that shares the building said they wanted a peaceful discussion. That hasn’t happened.

Yesterday, parents from district schools squared off against their neighbors at Girls Prep, separated by a few yards of sidewalk, each trying to shout the other down.

And both sides had the same message: give our school room to grow. (more…)

• The DOE told principals to tie some teachers’ tenure to test scores. (GothamSchools, Post, DN, NY1)
• State Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr. led a protest outside a Bronx rubber room to call for the rooms’ closure. (NY1)
• A year after protesting against a new transfer school, Canarsie is happy to have it. (Courier-Life)
• Some lawmakers want to make the Chinese Lunar New Year an official school holiday. (Times-Ledger)
• A Brooklyn school aide is accused of goading one student to beat up another. (Daily News)
• Elected officials foresee a budget fight over the city’s summer jobs program for teens. (Courier-Life)
• Seth Low’s new fiberglass cow will be decorated by the middle school’s students. (Post)
• The New Teacher Project’s leader praises changes to tenure rules that he says are coming. (Daily News)
• Los Angeles sup’t Ramon Cortines is on the board of a company that sells to the district. (L.A. Times)
• An Arizona school district installed wireless internet on its buses, and students love it. (Times)
• Students from Haiti have started to flood into some urban school districts. (Washington Post)
• After finding signs of cheating, Georgia has launched a broad inquiry into test score tampering. (Times)

• An all-star line-up of charter school opponents and supporters squared off on Democracy Now.
• Will the state ed department create a new district for turnaround schools? Ed in the Apple wonders.
• A Crown Heights school won a $10,000 grant to boost its Mandarin instruction programs.
• A proposal in Chicago would remove parent councils’ power to appoint principals and give it to the city.
• Accountable Talk calls the city’s plan to use student data in tenure decisions a “power grab” for Klein.
• The Times magazine goes in-depth on how much religion American students should get in history classes.
• The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture is pushing for healthier and easier-to-access meals at school.
• A group of Queens pols want Asian Lunar New Year to be made an official school holiday.
• The BBC thinks it can find some of the “world’s strictest parents” in outer-borough New York City.
• In the current polarized political climate, does arts ed have a chance? Not at all, argues Jane Remer.
• Norm Scott lists some slogans that showed up on posters at tonight’s rally against Girls Prep’s expansion.
• Arthur Goldstein argues that it’s teachers, not city officials, who really care about students learning English.
• And “all the scholar ladies” at a Wisconsin school channel Beyonce to put their hands up and get an A on it.

Yesterday’s snow day brought me a revelation about teaching: teachers need more time to engage in the kind of intellectual activities that we hope to engage our students in.  

We teachers need more time to read, write, investigate, research the big questions about our lives, discover new books and new perspectives on those questions, and work on new theories about how we live and work in the world. To be better teachers for our students, we need more time to be learners and seekers of knowledge ourselves!  

There are two categories for the kinds of learning a teacher should engage in. First, teachers need time to learn and explore in order to grow in our practice — to increase our pedagogical knowledge. We teachers need more time for this kind of learning because the necessary pedagogical knowledge for urban teachers is so vast; it is so much more than experimenting with new practices regarding instruction and classroom management. Our pedagogical knowledge also involves being up to date on research on how teachers can best obviate the hindrances to learning created when students are dealing with the foster care system, housing issues, inadequate access to quality healthcare, drugs, gang violence, teenage pregnancy, and the myriad of other outside factors that make learning difficult or impossible for them. Some teachers will see upwards of 150 of the city’s neediest children per day. There is literally no limit to what one can learn to become a better teacher for such children. (more…)

Department of Education officials debuted a new tenure process today will affect only one in ten teachers up for tenure this year, but for the city’s teachers union, that’s one too many.

Answering Mayor Bloomberg’s demand that test scores be used in tenure decisions this year, the department has broadened the criteria that principals use in evaluating teachers to include teacher data reports. These reports rank teachers based on their students’ scores on the state’s math and English exams and compare them to others teaching similar students over several years. Department officials say the reports will only be used to alert principals to teachers who are at the top and bottom of the rankings.

When Chancellor Joel Klein first introduced the data reports in 2008, he made an agreement with former United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten that the reports would not affect tenure evaluations or teacher pay. Today Klein doubled back on that agreement, sending a letter to principals that said including the data reports would make tenure more “meaningful.”

(more…)

It’s scary when schools close. No reasonable person wants to see that happen. But look at the closing schools and you’ll notice they all have certain things in common. The one that really stands out is the large population of students with special needs. Now don’t take this the wrong way — I make my living teaching kids like that, and I adore them for the most part.

But whose fault is it, really, if it takes my kids longer to graduate? I mean, most kids pass my beginning English classes. I always hope to pass 100 percent of my students, and I sometimes come very close. But when I see a kid who came from Korea 18 days ago carrying around a two-inch thick biology text, I’m not optimistic. How on earth is that kid gonna differentiate between enzymes and hormones? I just spent 10 minutes showing him the difference between “kitchen” and “chicken,” and I count myself lucky he got that far.

Unfortunately, school report cards are serious business nowadays. And don’t fool yourself into thinking they mirror report cards your kids get. If my kid, for example, came home with a D, it might be a long time before she’d see her iPod again. (more…)

• As more city students took AP tests last year, the citywide pass rate fell slightly. (Post, Daily News)
• The city AP score trend mirrors an identical national one. (Times)
• Kids really liked having school off because of snow yesterday. (NY1)
• The city wants to find a TV station to buy and air school sports footage. (Post)
• The company that made the cow statue stolen from a Brooklyn middle school is donating another. (Post)
• State ed chief David Steiner vowed not to let Rosa Bracero’s situation happen again. (Daily News)
• Bronx Community College is kicking University Heights High School off its campus. (Bronx Times)
• The principal removed from PS 24 last year is now assistant principal at nearby PS 12. (Riverdale Press)
• The BBC wants to find strict Bronx parents to get a couple of British teens in line. (Bronx Times-Reporter)
• Building delays will keep a young Bronx school from its own space for one more year. (Riverdale Press)
• Detroit plans to close 40 more schools at the end of the school year to save money. (Detroit Free-Press)
• A Chicago lawmaker would take the power to choose principals away from parents. (Chicago Sun-Times)
• Jay Mathews says research shows there’s no such thing as “learning styles.” (Washington Post)
• Virginia’s governor plans to multiply the number of charter schools in his state. (Washington Post)
• Letter-writers weigh in on proposed changes to NCLB and the Times’s position on them. (Times)
• Now that Asperger’s is not officially its own syndrome, special education rules will change. (NPR)