GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Charter schools special edition:

• As politicians argue about charter schools, the schools are busily admitting new students. (NY1)
• Some charter schools staff up with family members of school officials and board members. (Daily News)
• The number of children on charter school waiting lists is growing by a third, to 43,000, for next year. (Post)
• The Post says State Sen. Bill Perkins’ charter school hearings today shows he’s in the union’s pocket.
• A columnist profiles Democracy Prep, a high-performing charter school in Sen. Perkins’ district. (Post)
• The Post: Merryl Tisch’s call for equal facilities for charter and district schools shows she hates charters.
• A mother explains why she entered her third child into every charter school lottery in two boroughs. (Post)
• A second mother whose son has always attended a charter school describes his success there. (Post) 
• Two school reform fans say opponents of charter schools are pretty much out of arguments. (Post)

In other news:

• Not everyone likes the way the admissions glitch at Bard High School Early College was resolved. (Post)
• A teacher at Queens’ PS 15 was arrested after five students said he sexually assaulted them. (Post, NY1)
• The state’s comptroller says New York could end July in the red for the first time. (BusinessWeek)
• Some educators hope parents ignore today’s Take Our Daughters and Sons To Work Day. (AP)
• Students from MS 15 in the Bronx won a national chess tournament held in Minneapolis. (Daily News)
• A second judge barred Detroit’s emergency financial manager from closing schools. (Detroit News)
• Museums are sending their exhibits into schools to make up for budget-cut field trips. (Times)
• N.J. districts face big teacher layoffs after voters declined to raise their taxes to plug budget holes. (Times)
• A Boston teacher training program is modeled after the way doctors are trained in medical school. (NPR)

• Councilwoman Inez Dickens told students to skip school and attend Perkins’ charter school hearing.
• The Harlem School of the Arts is getting a second chance, private donations, and a reorganization.
• At least of that money is will come from Mary J. Blige.
• New York State could get nearly $1.5 billion if Sen. Harkin’s education jobs bill passes.
• Reporting a story on I.S. 237 students’ film, a NYTimes writer becomes part of the story.
• Rather than dismissing problems with value-added, supporters need to address them, writes Rick Hess.
• Charter Revision Commission should make the DOE a city agency, says Adrienne Kivelson.
• Parents are having a hard time finding out whether their children made the gifted & talented cut.
• Allowing alt cert. programs to create masters programs de-professsionalizes teaching, a blogger writes.
• Corey Bunje Bower: giving alt cert performs this right could be a “troubling precedent.”
• Norm Scott reads parents’ district-to-charter conversion stories as an indictment of Klein.
• Unusually high attrition and a clerical error have complicated admissions at two high schools.
• Columbia University will give Klein an honorary degree on commencement day.
• Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz is holding a forum on school overcrowding.
• Looking at NAEP scores, Jay Mathews says teacher layoffs may not impact learning all that much.
• Cleveland gave layoff notices to 800 school employees yesterday, 500 of them teachers.
• A 26-year old Baltimore special education lawsuit finally came to an end on Monday.
• And RttT reviewers offer some insight into what irritated them the first go around.

New York City is full of parents unafraid to say exactly what they think of their childrens’ schools, but the Department of Education is finding that all too often, that passion is getting out of control.

The DOE currently mediates parent-on-parent disputes two to three times a week, according to Chief Family Engagement Officer Martine Guerrier. She revealed the statistic at a Tuesday meeting of the citywide school board, which approved a regulation giving the department the right to boot parents from parent associations if they verbally abuse or physically threaten other members.

Guerrier said the regulation is needed because the department has little recourse against bullying that has caused intimidated and frightened parents to quit the parent associations at their schools.

But members of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, which represents parent associations across the city, said the regulation’s language is so vague that it could be used to curb parents’ speech.

“This vague and extremely broad language easily lends itself to abuse and inappropriately patronizes hard-working PA officers by treating them like squabbling kindergartners,” CPAC members wrote in an e-mail to Chancellor Joel Klein. ”To the extent there are actual threats to the safety of others, they can be dealt with under existing law.” Reiterating their arguments yesterday, CPAC members asked the panel to delay its vote. (more…)

In a year when legal wrangling complicated the high school admissions process, the city managed to place more than half of eighth-graders in their first-choice school, city officials said today.

Still, more than 6,500 eighth-graders didn’t get into any high school at all, according to the Department of Education’s annual press release touting admissions results. The city released the results today, nearly a month later than usual and more than two weeks after the department mailed out admissions decisions that had been delayed by a lawsuit over school closures.

The 80,412 students who submitted high school applications included 8,382 students who applied to one of the 14 high schools the city tried to close this year. Originally, the department planned to assign those students to another high school listed on their application. But after the city lost a lawsuit stopping the school closures, the department generated new matches for the students, giving 1,397 of them a choice between attending a school the city has deemed failing and another school the student ranked lower. (The other 7,000 students ranked the schools slated for closure so low on their applications that they were placed elsewhere.) Students have until the end of next week to choose, according to a letter sent to principals last week by Leonard Trerotola, the department’s high school enrollment director.

An additional 174 students who were matched with schools originally slated to close will be able to submit an application in the supplementary round, typically reserved for students who were not accepted to any school. (more…)

The head of a national advocacy group for improving school facilities is warning that a Brooklyn school building cannot support a charter school expansion plan that the citywide school board approved last night.

Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century Schools Fund, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that helps both district and charter schools plan their building space, composed a report on how space is used at Brooklyn’s P.S. 15. The elementary school shares space with PAVE Academy Charter School, which will expand in the building while it awaits construction of its own private building. Filardo’s report, prepared at the request of New York’s Campaign for Fiscal Equity, was submitted as testimony against the city’s plan at last night’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting.

“My overall impression is that even following the most optimal collaborative planning process and support from [the Department of Education], it will not be possible for PS 15 to support the continued expansion of PAVE per the DOE proposal,” Filardo writes.

At the most, Filardo estimates that P.S. 15 could give up one full classroom and one half-sized classroom without harm. But the city’s plan requires much more: it will allocate an additional five full-size classrooms and three resource rooms to PAVE over the next three years. (more…)

GothamSchools Editor Elizabeth Green’s cover story in the March 7th edition of the New York Times Sunday magazine tackled the problem of preparing teachers for K-12 classrooms in the United States.  Embellished with the provocative title “Building a Better Teacher,” Elizabeth’s piece profiled two approaches to teacher preparation:  a grassroots approach emerging outside of the academy which focuses on a set of techniques that teachers can use to increase learning time and improve learning environments, and a research-based approach developed in colleges and universities emphasizing the knowledge and skills that enable teachers to teach particular school subjects effectively.  Elizabeth’s story opened with a description of Doug Lemov, who has developed a taxonomy of 49 instructional techniques that he and others believe are critical to effective teaching, and especially to closing the achievement gap between poor, minority children and their more advantaged peers.  If we were to judge the relative merits of the two approaches based on the amount of ink devoted to each in her article, we’d conclude that, in the battle for the minds of education policymakers and practitioners, classroom management (i.e., Lemov’s taxonomy) had won, and pedagogical content knowledge (i.e., the work of Deborah Ball on Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching) had lost.

The disproportionate emphasis on Lemov’s approach in Elizabeth’s article surprised me.  To be sure, he’s a fine human-interest story, and the schools he works with have shown remarkable performance on state achievement tests.  But Elizabeth briefly acknowledged the lack of a research basis for Lemov’s approach, writing:  “And while Lemov has faith in his taxonomy because he chose his champions based on their students’ test scores, this is far from scientific proof.  The best evidence Lemov has now is anecdotal…”  Why would she and the Times choose to feature an approach with so little evidence to back it up?

Lemov’s book, “Teach Like a Champion:  49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College,” was published two weeks ago, and currently ranks #30 on Amazon’s bestseller list.  I wanted to see what he had to say about the research evidence underpinning the techniques.  A thin research base does not, of course, mean that the techniques are not valuable—I expect to learn quite a bit from studying them, and seeing if there are opportunities to adapt them for teaching my graduate students (who will tell you that classroom management is not my strong suit.)  And, of course, who wouldn’t want to be a champion teacher?  Because it is, after all, a competition, right?  (more…)

• The state will now allow programs such as Teach for America to offer their own master’s degrees. (Times)
• Chancellor Klein is turning his sights to the up-to-$134-million-a-year teacher reserve pool. (Daily News)
• Some call State Sen. Bill Perkins a hypocrite for opposing charters when he benefited from choice. (Post)
• City charter schools’ success is too strong to ignore, a Stanford research center head writes. (Post)
• The head of the NYC Charter School Center describes some schools that might not get a charter. (Post)
• Some students didn’t get into any high school, and many more were shut out of top choices. (NY1)
• The upcoming school year could be the most austere one in years for school districts nationwide. (Times)
• Los Angeles finalized a plan to shorten the school year by five days. (L.A. Times)

• The USDOE is rescinding a 2005 rule on Title IX, but the change is largely symbolic.
• More than 2,000 schools, districts and non-profits are planning to apply for federal innovation grants.
• Arthur Goldstein outlines the first battles in what he calls “war” between the city and its teachers union.
• A pro-charter group continues its advertising blitz with an upstate radio ad campaign.
• John Merrow fondly remembers a star principal who was slain in D.C. this week.
• A teacher refuses to use the words “test prep” with his students, but says that’s all he’s doing anyway.
• Corey Bunje Bower has mixed feelings on New York’s new teacher certification plans.
• A forthcoming report on education schools in Texas is drawing controversy even before its release.
• InsideSchools takes a look at the benefits of a “gap year” between high school and college.
• An Education Sector blogger dives into the ruthlessly competitive world of bulletin board decorating.
• And what can Joel Klein learn from the NFL draft? A blogger has a list of lessons.