GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

More than a month after the citywide school board voted to close 19 schools, City Council and Comptroller John Liu are reexamining the criteria that city officials used to declare the schools failures.

Liu, who campaigned for comptroller on the promise of auditing the Department of Education’s data, announced today that his office is beginning an investigation of the DOE’s progress reports — the annual report cards that assign each school a letter grade, largely based on students’ test scores. Later this afternoon, the City Council’s education committee held a hearing where members accused department officials of targeting large, struggling high schools without considering what would become of their current students. Department officials defended the schools they chose to close, citing the schools’ abysmal graduation rate.

“This is not a random list,” said Deputy Chancellor for Strategy and Innovation, John White. “These are the lowest performers even considered among a set of schools where students are not achieving at acceptable levels.” (more…)

Diane Ravitch offered a first look at her new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” at a GothamSchools event in December where she explained that seeing education theories play out in reality caused her to change her mind about standardized testing, school choice, and the entire notion of “accountability.”

Today, the book officially hit shelves, after receiving a spate of favorable reviews in major newspapers. People who have been following Ravitch’s transformation in recent years will find much of her argument familiar. Still, her book offers those who are new to the story a 240-page primer on major trends in education policy — trends that Ravitch says are undermining the country’s once-great schools.

While the book contains Ravitch’s take on New York City’s recent education history — hint: she’s not positive — it is by no means solely about New York. Ravitch also weaves tales from San Diego and Washington, D.C, where activist superintendents have pushed aggressive changes, into a big picture about the general direction of American education. New Yorkers did play a special role in helping Ravitch prepare the book for publication: Diana Senechal, a city teacher who has contributed to GothamSchools, was her research assistant.

Visit the community section to read an exclusive excerpt from the book, in which Ravitch describes why her favorite high school teacher wouldn’t succeed in today’s data-driven teaching environment. Also, Queens teacher Arthur Goldstein, who received an advance copy, offers a glowing endorsement.

I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of Diane Ravitch’s new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.” It is, frankly, a revelation, and anyone interested in education, particularly New York City education, needs to read it right now.

For anyone who’s wondered where on earth Joel Klein dreamed up his “reforms,” look no further. A substantial source of inspiration appears to be a three-stage process — a New York City experiment that gave a false impression of success, a San Diego experiment that eluded success altogether, and a stubborn determination to replicate both in overdrive.

As both Bloomberg and Klein were business experts using business models, they used a “corporate model of tightly centralized, hierarchal, top-down control, with all decisions made at Tweed and strict supervision of every classroom to make sure the orders flowing from headquarters were precisely implemented,” Ravitch writes. It appears they didn’t squander their valuable time on troublesome input from teachers, parents, or any contradictory voices whatsoever. In fact, Ravitch points out that though the mayor had promised increased parental involvement, it was actually reduced. Parent coordinators were hired, but in fact, they actually “worked for the principal, not for parents.” (more…)

Education historian Diane Ravitch’s new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” comes out this week. This exclusive excerpt is from Chapter 9, “What Would Mrs. Ratliff Do?”

My favorite teacher was Mrs. Ruby Ratliff. She is the teacher I remember best, the one who influenced me most, who taught me to love literature and to write with careful attention to grammar and syntax. More than fifty years ago, she was my homeroom teacher at San Jacinto High School in Houston, and I was lucky enough to get into her English class as a senior.

Mrs. Ratliff was gruff and demanding. She did not tolerate foolishness or disruptions. She had a great reputation among students. When it came time each semester to sign up for classes, there was always a long line outside her door. What I remember most about her was what she taught us. We studied the greatest writers of the English language, not their long writings like novels (no time for that), but their poems and essays. We read Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Milton, and other major English writers. Now, many years later, in times of stress or sadness, I still turn to poems that I first read in Mrs. Ratliff’s class.

Mrs. Ratliff did nothing for our self-esteem. She challenged us to meet her exacting standards. I think she imagined herself bringing enlightenment to the barbarians (that was us). When you wrote something for her class, which happened with frequency, you paid close attention to proper English. Accuracy mattered. She had a red pen and she used it freely. Still, she was always sure to make a comment that encouraged us to do a better job. Clearly she had multiple goals for her students, beyond teaching literature and grammar. She was also teaching about character and personal responsibility. These are not the sorts of things that appear on any standardized test. (more…)

Here’s a sign that our reporting on a grade-changing scandal and the intense pressure on schools to perform or shut down have entered the public consciousness: Law & Order used the storyline last night.

Returning to NBC’s 10 pm spot, the series debuted “Boy on Fire” last night, a story that (judging by the sudden flood of emails I got) seemed to strike a chord with the city’s public school teachers. I didn’t catch the episode, but those who did report that it bore some similarities to the case of grade-changing at Herbert Lehman High School in the Bronx, where the executive principal who was hired with a $25,000 bonus  is still under investigation for changing grades in order to boost the school’s graduation rate. (more…)

• Despite new initiatives, the DOE still does not make data about bullying available. (Gotham Gazette)
• The city launched a new school violence hotline yesterday. (NY1)
• Spending on Metrocards is lower and more efficient than the $1 billion spent annually on buses. (Post)
• Three East Village schools are the first in the city to ditch meat in some of their school lunches. (NY1)
• Experts say homelessness among city students is on the rise. (Columbia Spectator)
• President Obama backed the Central Falls mass firing and other turnaround efforts. (Times, AP)

• A new school violence prevention program hopes to hear the chatter that comes before the crime.
• Politics K-12 picks its Race to the Top finalists (and New York isn’t among them).
• Tom Carroll puts Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee in the top three. NY is a “likely loser,” he says.
• Andy Smarick thinks no one will get the entire list of finalists correct by guesswork.
• Teachers unions are backing the wine-in-grocery-stores proposal with an eye to where the profits will go.
• DOE charter chief Michael Duffy: before mayoral control vocal parents made the system dysfunctional.
• A francophone charter school finds it needs money to find space, and needs to find a space to get money.
• Helen Zelon says she was surprised that Harlem Children Zone isn’t tracking all of its students.
• After being saved by stimulus fund, 90 after school programs are once again in trouble.
• NYC should learn from North Carolina’s connected high schools and colleges, writes a Hofstra professor.
• For how to deal with years of fiscal belt-tightening, look to Kansas City writes Rick Hess.
• Good books and good teachers can still turn kids off reading, leaving book choice as the last resort.
• And P.S. 41 has architectural renderings of its green roof, or Greenroof Environmental Literacy Laboratory.

A case study: There is one student, a boy that I will call Lucas, who had Ms. Stone one year and Ms. Fire the next. Actually, he was my student for three weeks. The principal took him out of my classroom and put him in Ms. Stone’s. She could tell, after observing him for a few minutes, that he was far too much for a first-year teacher like me.

Lucas has that fatal combination, which I have met a few times since, of severe emotional disequilibrium and remarkable intellectual ability. On my first day, he walked right over to my computers, without saying a word of greeting, and turned them on. He then called me over and said, quite calmly, “These computers don’t seem up to date, Mr. Arp. What is this? Windows ’98? I can tell it’s ’98 from the icons and the desktop background. Is that the kind of classroom you run? And why are there no words on your vocabulary wall?” By the end of the day, he had gotten into two major fights, and would not listen to a word, not a single word, I said.

I’m sure that veteran teachers have met quite a few Lucases, but I was totally overwhelmed. The tone of adult authority that drove the rest of the class had absolutely no effect on Lucas. Perhaps veteran teachers have developed strategies for their Lucases. Let’s see how he did with Ms. Stone and Ms. Fire. (more…)

Joel Klein and Eva Moskowitz at the Harlem Success lottery in April 2009. (GothamSchools)

There’s a lot more than school siting and closures in the 77 pages of e-mails between Chancellor Joel Klein and charter school operator Eva Moskowitz.

The e-mails, obtained by the Daily News, include a little bit of news — such as that Bill Clinton considered weighing in on the charter schools fight — and a lot of insight into the way Klein and Moskowitz think about the politics of education. We’ve read every word of the 150+ e-mails and have collected the highlights below. 

A PERSONAL CHALLENGE: Moskowitz puts her expansion goal in personal terms, in an April 2007 e-mail to Klein: “I plan to be educating 8,000 of your children by 2013.”

SHE DIDN’T LIKE THE TWEED WORKFORCE, EITHER. We know that district school leaders and parents often clashed with Garth Harries, the Tweed official who for years led efforts to insert small schools and charters into their buildings. Now we learn that Moskowitz fumed at him, too. On May 16, 2007, she praised a new Department of Education official, Tom Taratko, to Klein. “He got done in 2hrs what garth could not accomplish in 9 months,” she declared, adding, “look out for him and hire more!!!!!” The more typical Tweed worker she describes this way: “maddening sluggishness and people afraid of their own shadows.”

POLITICKING FOR EXPANSION: In July 2007 Moskowitz described to Klein how she and her main financiers, John Petry and Joel Greenblatt, shored up support for her application to open three copies of the original Harlem Success Academy. They courted New York State Republican Committee chairman Ed Cox, who was at the time chairman of SUNY’s charter board. (more…)