GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• City schools fared worst in Mayor Bloomberg’s budget plan. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News, NY1)
• Areas where more teachers are new will feel the brunt of the cuts hardest. (Wall Street Journal)
• Chancellor Klein writes that he wants to start layoffs with teachers rated unsatisfactory and ATRs. (Post)
• Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute says higher class sizes won’t hurt students. (Daily News)
• The Times blames Albany for the cuts but wonders whether so many teachers need to be laid off.
• The Daily News says the teacher cuts show that state legislators aren’t putting children first.
• Juan Gonzalez: A tax rule has banks making profiting from charter school construction. (Daily News)
• A parent group is pushing for an alternative to school closures that helps struggling schools. (City Limits)
• A Bronx teacher is putting his students to work on an urban farm in a food desert. (Daily News)
• A team of Stuyvesant HS students, all women, won a prize for envisioning a bionic eye. (Post)
• State Sen. Bill Perkins opposes some school choice, but voters have choice about him, the Post writes.
• A handful of city private schools have dropped an admissions test whose scores keep rising. (Times)
• Students at some schools are using virtual worlds to develop their business skills. (Times)

• A debate is shaping up over whether Congress authorized Race to the Top. Politics K-12 weighs in.
• Capital One bank is opening a student-run branch inside Harlem’s Thurgood Marshall Academy.
• A “neighborhood schools sellout” explains her difficult decision to send her kid to a magnet program.
• It will take $4 billion a year to get nutritious school meals to America’s hungry schoolchildren.
• Britain’s Conservative Party is taking some inspiration from the KIPP charter school chain.
• Colorado’s two teachers unions disagree over whether to support that state’s new tenure bill.
• A parent tries to shield her seventh-grader against the trauma of HS admissions but it may be too late.
• Mrs. Mimi plans to blog about the “Top 100 Children’s Novels of ALL TIME.” First up: The Egypt Game.
• Just because a school isn’t ranked high doesn’t mean it’s not good, Chancellor Klein told Australians.

Chancellor Joel Klein likes to say that many of the teachers who’ve lost their jobs and remain on the city’s payroll aren’t trying to find new work. But a back-of-the-envelope analysis of teachers in the reserve pool shows that even if all of them doggedly pursued open positions, nearly a quarter are trained for jobs that are disappearing.

Most teachers in the absent teacher reserve — a pool of people cut from schools when they were closed or enrollment dwindled — are certified to teach core subjects that every school offers. But the most recent data shows that almost a quarter of teachers in the pool are only licensed to teach classes like swimming, jewelry-making, and accounting, among other subjects that are nearly extinct in the public schools.

The pool also includes music, dance, and art teachers for whom getting a new position will be difficult in a year when schools will have to lay off thousands of teachers. (more…)

Congress has a unique opportunity right now to help combat child hunger.

Right now, Congress is considering the Child Nutrition Act, which is renewed every five years and sets the rules and funding levels for federal nutrition programs, including school lunch and breakfast programs. President Obama, who has set the goal of ending child hunger by 2015, is calling for $1 billion a year in funding for the act over the next 10 years.

That sounds like a lot — but according to Joel Burger, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, it will take $4 billion a year to get healthy, nutritious meals to the 13 million children in the United States living in the more than one in 10 households that experience hunger or the risk of hunger. And unfortunately, the bill that emerged from the Senate Agricultural Committee allocated just $450 million a year to the cause, not even half of what President Obama recommended.

As the House of Representatives drafts its bill, which is expected to be released later this month, we are urging all New Yorkers to sign the City Council’s online petition urging Congress to support President Obama’s call for $1 billion a year in funding. Although it’s not the $4 billion a year NYC Green Schools and groups that fight child hunger support, $1 billion a year would help cover a much-needed increase in reimbursements for healthier meals. (more…)

Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed cutting 6,400 city teaching jobs today — but he said without action from Albany, the exact number of layoffs is still anybody’s guess.

The mayor’s annual budget proposal would leave 2,000 teaching jobs unfilled and lay off another 4,400 teachers. And Chancellor Joel Klein urged principals to begin preparing for massive reductions that could cause classes to grow by nearly 20 percent.

But Bloomberg and Klein emphasized that all of the numbers could change depending on what happens in Albany, where legislators are now a month overdue in setting a budget for the state.

The city based its budget proposal on the governor’s proposed state budget, which cuts nearly $500 million from school aid to New York City and is more severe than the State Assembly’s proposed plan.

“If we don’t have any specificity in Albany, we have to act on what is a conservative best guess,” Bloomberg said. (more…)

• Without new funds, Mayor Bloomberg plans to cut 6,400 teachers. (Times, Post, NY1, Wall Street Journal)
• The Times says the coming teacher layoffs show the country needs a second education stimulus.
• The city is planning to spend $5 million a year on recruiting new teachers. (Daily News)
• For the first time ever, CUNY has a waiting list, for students who apply after this week. (Daily News, NY1)
• Political consultant Basil Smikle officially declared his plan to challenge State Sen. Bill Perkins. (Post)
• The director of the Harlem Success lottery documentary said her funders include charter backers. (NY1)
• The archbishop of New York outlines a strategic plan to boost Catholic elementary schools. (Post)
• Readers weigh in on whether charter schools work, representing a wide range of views. (Times)
• A TV documentary about for-profit education led to a selloff in for-profit schools stocks. (AP)
• Oklahoma City schools will try NYC’s failed cell phone incentives experiment. (The Oklahoman)

• State Senator Bill Perkins’ primary challenger will be political strategist Basil Smikle.
• New York and 37 other states formally said that they’ll apply for Race to the Top, round two.
• Wayne Barrett accuses the UFT of using for-profit charters as a “laughable canard…to inflame the debate.”
• May is the month for seventh graders to start thinking about where they will apply to high school.
• Should a student be forced to choose between dropping a class and going to prom? A teacher wonders.
• A major critic of Duncan’s ed policy, Wisconsin Rep. David Obey, won’t run for re-election.
• What can school leaders learn from the late principal of Murrow HS? A former teacher there has a list.
• Newsweek is up for sale, but Jay Mathews says he’ll compile his list of top high schools no matter what.
• An ELL teacher says her students gain language skills faster when they try to read more difficult texts.
• Teenage researchers in L.A. are examining how school budget cuts help erect barriers to college.
• And the ever-impressive P.S. 22 choir kids take on Icelandic singer Björk’s “All is Full of Love.”

In an attempt to improve some of the worst schools in the country, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is offering states four methods of turning around their lowest performers. But New York City officials say the union contract here rules out one of the three —  the so-called “transformation” model — even though it’s the only one that wouldn’t cause teachers to lose their jobs.

The other three methods either turn schools into charter schools, close them down, or force their principals and at least half of the staff to be fired. “Transformation” calls for the principal’s removal, but keeps the school’s staff in place.

Yet crucially, it also requires that schools use students’ test scores as a significant factor in evaluating teachers, that merit pay be put in place, and that teachers whose students don’t show enough improvement be fired. Since New York state law bars principals from using student data in teachers’ tenure decisions and the teachers contract only allows merit pay for entire schools that perform well, not individual teachers, city officials claim they cannot use it.

That’s despite the fact that the city actually wants to use the transformation model at some of the 34 schools on the state’s turnaround list, a Department of Education official said. He mentioned (but did not name) a small group of schools that are improving and have above-average graduation rates despite their overall-poor performance. (more…)

Charles Murray is a very confused guy.  His op-ed piece in today’s New York Times uses the dreary impact of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program on student achievement to justify policies expanding school choice.  Let’s get over the fact that school choice plans don’t show big impacts on students’ performance on standardized tests, he argues.  After all, we’ve known for a long time that it’s hard for schools to overcome the family advantages of cognitive ability and motivation.  Rather, he proposes, we should support school choice because it can allow a small number of parents to choose a curriculum that’s better than that offered to students in traditional public schools.

Setting aside some of the most remarkable inconsistencies—Charles Murray, 2010 edition, doesn’t think that test scores are meaningful measures of academic performance?  Has he met Charles Murray, 1994 edition, who was quite comfortable in The Bell Curve reducing the whole of human intelligence to a single score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test?—Murray fundamentally misunderstands the historic logic of the charter schooling movement—an exchange of autonomy for accountability.  We can argue over the scope of that autonomy and accountability, but even those who have disagreed on this site about whether charter schools are properly labeled as public or private schools generally agree that it’s appropriate to hold them accountable for their students’ performance on assessments measuring standards that are the de facto public curriculum of the state in which they are located.  Certainly, the charter movement gains energy from studies showing that students in charter schools may outperform their counterparts in traditional public schools on state assessments.  Charter schools may strive to expose students to a curriculum that’s more ambitious, but the standards of the state cannot be ignored. (more…)