GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• A new state teacher evaluation system will tie grades to test scores. (Times, Wall Street Journal, Post)
• A new charter school, Explore Excel, says it will take in three grades of any school closed nearby. (Post)
• Supreme Court nominee Elana Kagan is one of many illustrious alumnae of Hunter College HS. (Times)
• Brooklyn high school students aired their movie about Dominican life at the Tribeca Film Festival. (NY1)
• Real estate brokers are wary about advertising apartments’ proximity to individual schools. (Times)
• Pro-charter school state senators say pressure by teachers unions won’t change their positions. (Post)
• High school pitchers will soon have limits on how many pitches they can throw in a game. (Daily News)
• Los Angeles will test all students in order to identify more gifted ones from minority groups. (L.A. Times)
• The Obama administration wants $375 million over five years for non-abstinence only sex ed. (Times)
• D.C.’s teachers contract will be approved, with some reforms for now going unfunded. (Washington Post)
• With money tight, D.C.’s Michelle Rhee is hiring new top-level administrators. (Washington Post)
• The high rate of students requiring remedial classes in college threatens academic advances. (AP)
• A professor argues that ed schools should give students a full year of classroom training. (L.A. Times)

• Deputy Chancellor Eric Nadelstern says two-thirds of city teachers need improvement.
• For the second year, parents associations can pay for non-union classroom aides.
• Bloomberg says he’ll stay out of state races, except to support charter-backer Sen. Craig Johnson.
• A son remembers his mother’s extraordinary year teaching a gifted class before they were common.
• Arthur Goldstein wins his case to lower class sizes at Francis Lewis HS and the DOE ignores the decision.
• What’s in a 3? A teacher grades students’ state English tests and finds the standards are too lax.
• PTA fund raisers are becoming more important as city schools’ budgets take a hit.
• Elana Kagan could become Hunter College HS’s second most well-known alumna.
• Miss Brave describes the seven students who are causing all the trouble in her class.
• After watching another teacher’s class, a Bronx teacher argues for required observations.
• Michael Regnier: charter school critics’ talking points are like Yogi-isms.
• On Wednesday mornings, P.S. 29 students bound into school for “cool clusters.”
• Should “reforms” go into the jobs bill? Education experts weigh in.
• The Hechinger Institute launched a new national education news website: Hechinger Report.
• And WNYC’s Beth Fertig is looking for your city school memorabilia.

New York State’s Education Department could shrink to a historically low number of staffers next year, Education Commissioner David Steiner said this weekend.

Speaking at the United Federation of Teachers’ conference on Saturday, Steiner said told an audience of teachers that Governor Paterson’s proposed budget cut would eliminate 5o to 60 staff members if it goes through the legislature unchanged.

“We haven’t had so few colleagues in living memory,” he said.

Those cuts would come at the same time the department takes on more responsibility. (more…)

One of my personal pet peeves is class size, and as a new chapter leader I thought compliance was quite straightforward — you grieve the oversized classes, and on a bad day you lose and you’re screwed for a term. On a better day you win, kids win, and class sizes are corrected (at least to the extent prescribed by the UFT contract, which still leaves city kids with the highest class sizes in the state).

But I hadn’t counted on fighting City Hall. Whatever City Hall wants, City Hall gets, and unconnected little guys like me, or the 4,500 kids attending our school, are routinely left by the wayside. 

It’s not only the kids, of course. When I became chapter leader I learned our school’s UFT chapter had a soda machine in the check-in room. We made some sort of profit from each can of soda, how much I had no idea. The company that filled the machine was kind of cute — they forgot to send checks when I took over.

We called. Nothing happened. Called again. Another excuse. We finally told our contact, whom we knew only by first name, to send us a check or move the machine out. No response. Then we unplugged the machine. Three days later we got a check. The only way to deal with these folks, I thought, is to make them offers they can’t refuse. But they’re small potatoes.

Both our chapter and the cute company learned that weeks later when City Hall rolled in and took over everything. (more…)

• Hedge-fund executives have emerged as a dominant force in the charter school movement. (Times)
• Several high-profile Assembly members are supporting the State Senate’s charter school bill. (Post)
• Two charter school principals say the bill would make charters serve more special-needs students. (Post)
• At its annual conference, the UFT honored the NAACP for its help stopping school closures. (Post)
• Budget cuts were the primary focus at the all-day teachers union conference. (NY1)
• Mayor Bloomberg could adjust his budget to prevent teacher layoffs if he wanted to. (Daily News)
• The Times says teacher evaluation systems just aren’t good enough yet to do layoffs by quality.
• The teachers behind Educators 4 Excellence say their school could lose 30 teachers to layoffs. (NY1)
• The DOE is looking into testing claims against a principal who coached survey answers. (Daily News)
• The UFT and community groups are seeking funding to fight absenteeism. (GothamSchools, Daily News)
• One of Bronx Prep Charter’s first students describes how the school helped her get to UVA. (Post)
• A school for deaf students says sign language means it can’t share space. (Daily News, Chelsea Now)
• Staten Island’s community superintendent is resigning at the end of the school year. (S.I. Advance)
• A 9-year-old budding supermodel is also a student in the gifted program at Queens’ PS 150. (Post)
• Chancellor Klein explained to Israelis where to start in reforming the country’s schools. (Jerusalem Post)
• The siblings of Obama’s newest Supreme Court nominee, Elana Kagan, teach in city schools. (Times)
• Claims about how much class sizes will suffer because of budget cuts could be overblown. (Crain’s NY)
• Michael Mulgrew says he apologized to Joel Klein for calling him “Chancellor Numbnuts.” (Post)
• In letters, readers weigh in on the teachers union head’s not-so-nice nickname for the chancellor. (Post)
• Internships and face time with celebrities are hot items in city schools’ auctions. (Wall Street Journal)
• Across the country, parents are raising more money for schools to make up for budget cuts. (USA Today)
• A tough budget climate is creating conditions ripe for what feels to many like teacher-bashing. (NPR)
• Rochester takes an outsider’s view of mayoral control in New York City. (Democrat and Chronicle)
• This is the first year that there is no Advanced Placement Italian exam. (Wall Street Journal)
• China is paying to help some of its teachers to take positions in rural American schools. (Times)
• New Jersey unveiled a proposal to award bonuses to teachers based on student test scores. (Times)
• For the first time, the state is participating in a national program that rewards top teachers. (Daily News)
• KIPP founder David Levin takes Sundays off from work, except when he calls former students. (Times)
• Letter-writers respond to Charles Murray’s op-ed about why charter schools succeed. (Times)

• After a rough year, things are looking up for one of Miss Eyre’s students.
• A group of Bloomberg allies asked lawmakers to lift the charter cap and change tenure law.
• Colorado’s tenure-busting legislation moved forward very late last night.
• Diane Ravitch and James Merriman squared off on charter schools on Inside City Hall last night…
• …While UFT President Michael Mulgrew will appear on that program tonight. (No link)
• Civil rights groups are asking NYC teachers and school staff members to answer a survey about bullying.
• The Dallas teacher who campaigned to bring back “paddling” just got fired.
• Miss Brave profiles the 25 percent of her students who cause 90 percent of the problems.
• Michelle Rhee is doubling her senior staff in an effort to raise school standards.
• An argument that the education sector should take a lesson from the military.
• A South Bronx teacher gives some tips for boosting first-period attendance.
  
• A Duke professor who let her students grade themselves gives the experiment an A+.
• And happy Mother’s Day! A 12-year-old with Asperger’s interviewed his mom on StoryCorp today.

The last time he led a New York City project, Geoffrey Canada, the founder of Harlem Children’s Zone, had the teachers union as his opponent. Now the two are partnering on a grant proposal that would take struggling elementary schools and surround them with the support services that barely exist outside their doors.

Naturally, the two have a buffer: Good Shepherd Services and the Children’s Aid Society, which is the lead applicant for an Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) grant — money that was set aside as part of the federal stimulus package. The grant proposal calls for $30 million to be used over four years to reduce absenteeism in nine schools in low-income neighborhoods like Harlem, the South Bronx, and Central Brooklyn.

All of the schools that are eventually chosen for the grant will have low-performing students, but they must also have a large number of students who don’t attend class. At least 30 percent of their students must be chronically absent, meaning they miss a month or more of school, hence the grant’s name: “Attend, Achieve, Attain,” or “a3.” (more…)

A poster advertising the Jerusalem education conference where Joel Klein will be speaking.

If the past is any guide, Israel could be the next foreign country to import New York City-style school reforms.

Chancellor Joel Klein is leaving Saturday night for a two-day trip to Israel, during which he will argue that education reform is both possible and necessary at a day-long education conference hosted by Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat.

The last country Klein visited in his capacity as chancellor, Australia in 2008, adopted a New York City-style school grading system shortly afterward. Klein also visited the United Kingdom shortly before its education minister announced plans to adopt a similar school grading system, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Ann Forte.

Klein’s reforms already have some fans in Israel. During his keynote speech Sunday night, titled “It Must Be Done,” Klein will appear alongside Shay Piron, a rabbi who heads an advocacy group that is promoting major changes to Israel’s schools. Among Hakol Chinuch’s goals are closing achievement gaps among different groups of students, linking schools’ funding to their students’ socioeconomic status, and empowering principals. 

Klein’s trip, which New York City is not paying for, begins tomorrow night and will end early Tuesday morning, Forte said.

State Senator Eric Adams already has six billboards in Brooklyn asking the borough’s young men to pull up their pants and he’s now taking that message to the city’s schools.

At a public meeting at M.S. 61 in Crown Heights this week, I picked up one of the posters Adams’ staff was distributing. I don’t know about you, but my favorite part is the diagram of a pair of pants that sags, in concert, with a man’s boxers.