GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Although Debby Lee Cohen asked her children every day what they ate for lunch, it never occurred to her to ask them what their school lunch was served on, and so, like most New York City parents, she remained blissfully ignorant. A trip last spring to the Climate Change exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History, however, changed all that.

Cohen’s 7-year old daughter stood staring at a diorama of a life-size polar bear standing on a melted island covered with trash. Then she turned around and announced that she would no longer buy school lunch in order “to save the polar bears.” And that’s how Debby Lee Cohen discovered that in New York City school lunches are served on Styrofoam trays.

We interviewed Debby Lee, a teacher at Parsons The New School for Design, to find out the health and environmental hazards of using Styrofoam and what parents and educators can do to get rid of the Styrofoam trays at their schools.

Why are you so determined to get rid of the Styrofoam trays in our schools?

Styrofoam (polystyrene) trays are the worst kept secret in NYC schools. NYC schools use 850,000 trays per day, which amounts to 153 million trays a year! They are terrible for our children’s health and for the environment. Some children eat three meals a day directly off of these trays, which are made up of the chemicals benzene and styrene. Styrene, a possible carcinogen, leaches into hot foods and has been linked to central nervous system disorders such as headaches, fatigue, depression, and hearing loss. New York State passed legislation banning toxic cleaning products in all schools. Parents should demand toxic-free school lunches as well. We should not be taking risks with our children’s health. (more…)

• Joel Klein thinks the new teacher evaluation system is “problematical” and too vague. (Post)
• The Post calls the evaluation agreement “dubious” because it leaves much to union negotiations.
• Though the deal likely means more testing, it’s not clear what the local tests will look like. (DN)
• Commissioner David Steiner: the new evaluations could pave way to individual merit pay. (DN)
• Dan Brown, author of “The Great Expectations School,” thinks an evaluation overhaul was overdue. (DN)
• A Long Island economist calls on NY school districts to reject budgets with tax increases. (Post)
• A charter school group is running ads against seniority based layoffs, which charters don’t have. (DN)
• Parents at P.S. 15 in Red Hook are still fighting to get PAVE charter school out of the building. (DN)
• Gov. Paterson will introduce Rochester’s mayoral control bill into the legislature. (Gannett)
• A spate of attacks on school children in China continues with the death of seven students. (NY Times)
• A PA state senator and gubernatorial candidate calls for more school choice. (Wall Street Journal)
• Michelle Obama rolled out obesity-fighting measures that may include regulation (Washington Post)

• NYC charters enroll fewer special education students, but the gap isn’t as big as the union says.
• Today’s evaluation deal got mixed reactions from Paterson, Silver, and the school board association.
• Chaz wonders if the teacher evaluation deal will lead to the end of teacher tenure.
• The Chicago schools chief says he’s firing bad principals, but he may be exploiting normal turnover.
• A Brooklyn teachers union chapter leader calls on parents to get political over school budgets.
• The SUNY charter authorizer has already received 22 applications for its remaining 12 school spots.
• Suburban school districts in NY are freezing teachers’ salaries or cutting back raises.
• But Mike Petrilli at Fordham isn’t impressed by some of their sacrifices.
• Students at Buffalo’s Oracle Charter School made a video pitch for Obama to visit them.
• Rick Hess says the education bailout bill may be popular, but it’s not financially sound.
• New federal funding guidelines mean that Stuyvesant HS qualifies for Title I money.
• Diane Ravitch: there’s a double standard for interpreting students’ test scores.
• Peter Murphy says union fliers are claiming “big corporations” are behind the charter cap lift.
• A DOE official’s comment on teacher quality has Miss Eyre wondering if she would try the ‘burbs.
• Why would Duncan tell a reporter his agenda has “no public opposition“? Linda Perlstein asks.
• Norm Scott says Mulgrew’s big election win has given him license to make unpopular calls.
• Either home schooling is very popular in Houston, or the district is hiding HS drop outs.
• And NPR interviews Doug Lemov about the teaching techniques he’s studied.

A prolonged battle against the city’s plan to shuffle space at five Manhattan schools spilled onto the sidewalks of East 23rd Street yesterday.

The plan to relocate Chelsea’s Clinton School for Artists and Writers into the building shared by the American Sign Language and English Lower and Secondary Schools has drawn fierce criticism from parents at all of those schools. City officials have argued that even with the Clinton School in their building, the ASL schools will have ample space to maintain their unique sign-language based instructional program. But parents contend that moving the Clinton School’s nearly 300 students into the building will create overcrowded classes and prevent students from seeing each other as they sign.

Clinton parents have proposed staying one more year in their current space in P.S. 11, a rapidly expanding zoned school, but the city and P.S. 11 parents say that school is also nearly bursting with students.

A new teacher evaluation system that’s likely to become state law could mean that, for the first time, school districts will fire teachers if they repeatedly fail to boost their students’ test scores.

But to do that, the state and school districts will have to track student work in more detail than they ever have before. And state and city teachers union officials sold the idea as a way to create better professional development for teachers and principals.

The agreement struck between the state education department and the teachers union today means that, in three years, all New York teachers will be evaluated according to a new 100-point scale, with 40 of those points determined by student achievement data. The agreement was ushered out just in time for the June 1 second round deadline for the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant competition.

So far, the new teacher evaluation system exists only in concept. To flesh it out, school districts will have to create a new battery of customized tests or other ways to measure student learning. (more…)

Harlem Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz took her fellow charter school supporters to task today for backing a bill that would force the schools to admit more special education students.

In an email sent to leaders of the city’s charter school movement, Moskowitz said that charter schools already serve the same percentage of special education students that district schools do. Her email came after the State Senate voted to more than double the state’s charter school cap on the condition that charter schools serve at least half the percentage of special education students that their nearby district schools do.

Though Department of Education officials and the charter school lobbying group, Education Reform Now, consider the vote a major victory, Moskowitz told them they gave away “too much.” (more…)

Last week, the New York State Senate passed a bill that would increase the number of charter schools in New York from 200 to 460. Included in the bill was a provision that charter schools increase efforts to enroll students with learning disabilities — an attempt to appease critics who claim that charters significantly under-enroll students with disabilities.

Yet an examination of data provided to me by the city shows that while charters enroll fewer students with disabilities, the gap is not as large as initially reported by the state teachers union, known as NYSUT. According to Department of Education data, 13 percent of charter school students have an Individualized Education Plan, indicating that they have special needs, compared to 15 percent at traditional public schools. NYSUT reported the numbers as being 9.4 percent at charter schools and 16.4 percent at district schools.

The discrepancy stems from problematic data NYSUT received from the state education department. According to the state, the number of students with disabilities that a charter school reports enrolling often does not match up with numbers reported by school districts. As a result, the state does not consider its own data to be reliable.

As an alternative, I used a database known as CAPS, which is compiled by the city’s Committee on Special Education. CAPS includes information about every student in the city who has an IEP, so it provides a more accurate breakdown of the number of special education students at each school.

I found that the percentage of charter schools enrolling as many or more students with disabilities than their traditional public school counterparts increased from a quarter of schools last year to almost a third of schools this year. (more…)