GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Rochester is one state Senate vote away from getting mayoral control of schools. (ROCnow)
• More than a quarter of city schoolchildren didn’t attend the last day of school. (WNYC)
• Many charter management groups would be unable to run on public funds alone. (GothamSchools)
• No fewer than four documentaries about ed reform will hit movie theaters this year. (USA Today)
• A group of Muslim families rallied for schools to observe Muslim holidays. (NY1)
• A pilot program took Chicago teachers on a tour of the city’s different cultural enclaves. (Tribune)
• After all the debate, you can finally read Texas’s social studies standards online. (Edweek)
• Moderate Dems are fighting a plan that would divert RTTT funds to the edujobs bill. (Politics K-12)
• Inwood parents and the city are at odds over an outgoing principal’s performance. (Times)
• Two small Philly high schools are graduating their first classes with different results. (Inquirer)

When the New York Post ran a story last week praising a Harlem charter school network’s test scores, a few principals wondered why their own schools’ scores hadn’t arrived.

State and city officials were also puzzled. City eighth graders sat for the science and social studies exams only weeks ago and the state won’t release the results for months, so how did Harlem Village Academies have their scores?

Harlem Village Academies Chief of Staff Matt Scott explained that because the network grades its own tests and the state publishes scoring guides online, it was able to figure out how its students fared in advance of the state’s official release. According to the network, all of its eighth grade students passed the state’s science and social studies exams this year.

“We do not release test scores for Science or Social Studies until the school report cards for 2009/2010,” said SED spokesman Tom Dunn. “They are not scheduled for release until next winter. The charter school promoted their own performance.”

The early release highlights the different ways that charter and district schools grade their students’ state tests.

(more…)

A recent national study on Charter Management Organizations, or CMOs, by non-partisan Mathematica Policy Research, sheds some light on the role that these organizations play in the national educational landscape.

According to my own measures, CMOs ran 37 of the 77 charter schools in New York City during the 2008-2009 school year — and they have plans to open dozens more in the next decade. While CMOs attract large amounts of philanthropic support, anti-charter critics charge that they are opaque and run their schools more like for-profit institutions. This interim report offers fodder for both supporters and detractors. I found five points to be particularly interesting:

• CMOs need philanthropy to exist: All 44 CMOs in the study relied on philanthropic dollars to support operations. The average CMO relied on philanthropy for 13 percent of total operating revenues. CMOs funded by NewSchools Venture Fund report that 64 percent of their central office revenues come from philanthropy. The report concludes: “At least for now, these CMOs are unable to support their central offices (which often comprise 20% or more of total CMO spending) and facilities costs on per pupil revenues alone.”
• CMOs rely on alternate certification programs, like Teach For America, for talent: According to the report, almost 20 percent of teachers at CMO schools come from alternative certification programs like TFA. In addition, many of the people in managerial and leadership positions are TFA alumni. CMOs claim that teachers trained in the TFA mode are accustomed to longer hours and “No Excuses” approaches and therefore require less training in the culture of the CMO. The authors question the ability of CMOs to expand if they rely so heavily on one source of talent.
• CMOs have had problems expanding to high schools: Across the country, CMOs operate a disproportionate number of elementary and middle schools. (more…)

Students from East Harlem’s Isaac Newton Middle School for Math and Science were briefly famous yesterday after a video about them landed on YouTube’s home page and was watched nearly 150,000 times.

The video touted a project the students did as part of the extended-day program run by the nonprofit Citizen Schools. The project had them film, produce, and star in their own public service announcements. Watch the winning video, which promotes the program, here.

And here’s one of the videos the students made to fight obesity:

• The top prospect for reforming gifted program screening would test children at age 3. (Times)
• The Harbor School’s aquaculture program could renew oyster culture for the whole city. (Times)
• A new study finds that charter and district schools are about even. (Christian Science Monitor)
• Merrick Academy Charter School conducted its PTA elections in a weird way. (Daily News)
• PEP member Patrick Sullivan wants to see reports about wrongdoing at JFK HS. (Daily News)
• Blaming the UFT, the Daily News lambastes the outcome of the first-day-of-school fight.
• Coaches help some Latino students enroll in colleges that offer them a challenge. (USA Today)

• Here’s a round-up of education advocates’ response to Paterson’s budget veto. (Gotham Gazette)
• One teacher says her “last goodbyes” to this year’s crop of students. (Miss Brave Teaches NYC)
• While the teacher who goes by “Mildly Melancholy” is leaving the classroom forever. (Mildly Melancholy)
• The rubber rooms: just like “The Breakfast Club” but with teachers and less group bonding? (Daily Intel)
• A “charter-curious” district school teacher offers her take on “The Lottery.” (Charter Curious)
• Listen to Bill Gates’ full, unedited speech at a national charter schools conference. (WBEZ)
• Gates told charter leaders he thinks they are starting a “revolution.” (Seattle P-I)
• Gates also wishes “the world had one [education] agenda…embraced by teachers.” (District Dossier)
• If desirable school districts outside of D.C. test more, then maybe the city should too. (Class Struggle)

Last week, I wrote about a test prep program at New Design High School that aimed to boost Regents exam scores through original hip-hop songs.

So did it work? According to the school’s unofficial results on the three exams the program prepared students to take this year, the answer is a qualified yes.

Scores jumped on the English and U.S. history exams. Nearly twice the number of special education students passed the American history test, and the number of current or former English language learners who passed the exam nearly tripled. But students didn’t fare so well on their Global History exams, which are typically taken in tenth grade.

Using the songs alone is not enough, said Philip Courtney, the head of Urban Arts, the nonprofit that developed the hip-hop program, called FreshPrep. Courtney said the results point to a need for better teacher training about how to integrate the competitive games that are part of the program, not just the music. Teachers who worked all parts of the hip-hop program into their test prep posted the best results, he said, giving as an example Laura Rubin, whose American history class I visited. Nearly three-quarters of Rubin’s students passed the U.S. History Regents exam.

Urban Arts is revamping the program before rolling it out in six new schools next year. This summer, the group will test out a hip-hop curriculum to help students prepare for the Integrated Algebra exam.

Evangelista

As inspiring as success stories can be, all too often city students struggle and then fall through the cracks.

Harlem Link Charter School principal Steven Evangelista saw this reality up close recently when he heard from a student he had tried, and failed, to locate since 2001. The student, Tom, was calling from Rikers Island.

In the community section, Evangelista argues that making it easier for teachers to stay in touch with students like Tom could change the students’ lives. He writes:

Each year, through various public and private agencies, our educational and correctional systems have spent tens of thousands of public dollars on Tom’s education and rehabilitation. Talking with him on that phone call from jail, I learned that the pattern I first observed with him in 2001 — when well-meaning social workers, psychologists and teachers based both at his school and the Administration for Children’s Services disappeared from his life with the stroke of a pen and a transfer to a new setting — would continue as service providers flitted in and out of his life. …

Maybe there is nothing I could have done to help Tom along the way. I don’t know. But I do know that I don’t understand a world in which a child could be so short on support that Rikers seems an inevitable destination. I also don’t understand a world in which, despite all of the agencies, all the social workers in and out of Tom’s life, all the hearings, I was maybe the one person looking for him, and I couldn’t find him until it seemed far too late.

My friends Barbara and Jane were with me that Sunday afternoon when I answered the call from 718-777-4300. “Just pick it up, see who it is,” said Barbara, over my protests that I’d already had about 10 missed calls from the same number that morning and didn’t want to deal with any telemarketers over the weekend. When I grudgingly answered, I heard, “Please hold,” and as the Rikers Island switchboard put through the call, a saga 10 years long began a new chapter.

It was my former student Tom calling, responding to my letter to him and my entreaty to his Legal Aid lawyer to have him get in touch with me and allow me to visit him in jail.  That phone call on Memorial Day weekend 2010 was the first time I had spoken to Tom since 2001, when he was in the fourth grade, I was a young teacher, and we were about to lose touch — he by bouncing around from PS 192, where I met him, to special education school to detention center to jail on Rikers Island, I by leaving the school where he had been in my third-grade class to look for a better environment in which to teach and, a few years later, by leaving the district altogether and starting Harlem Link Charter School with Margaret Ryan.

In the third grade, Tom touched me as few people have because it was clear that he had special gifts but without consistent and serious guidance he was headed for trouble. By the time he was eight, he had about every risk factor you could name: orphaned, neglected, disabled, hyperactive. With more agency identification numbers than birthdays, it’s no wonder he landed in the tracked “bottom class” that was assigned to me, the lowest ranked among six or seven sections of third-graders at my gargantuan elementary school. Though he never seemed to sit still or attend to his lessons, though he ran circles around the routines his novice teacher was trying to put in place, Tom was a sponge for knowledge and somehow, through sheer eagerness to learn and some uncanny survival skills, met the academic standards in reading and arithmetic that year.

In the nine years between his transfer to what I had heard was a “special education school downtown” (“He was scared” was all another teacher could tell me about the situation as he left) and the Memorial Day phone call, I used every tool I could find to search for him: phone calls to colleagues, new lists of special education schools, and Google and other resources on the Internet.

In about 2007 I found Tom registered at a detention center in the Bronx. Concerned but elated that he was seemingly back in the system where I could contact him, I called the school office there to ask about him. “No recollection of that one,” said the person responsible for registration there. (more…)

Friday is the deadline for principals to decide how to spend their budgets next year, but many have already made one tough call: To cut teachers.

A high school teacher who is being excessed sent GothamSchools the letter her principal gave her, which advises her to seek positions at other schools by attending job fairs that took place in the past.

She’ll have the summer to try to land a job at another school before being added to the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of teachers who work as substitutes because their jobs were eliminated.

Most schools are required to hire from the ATR pool or pick up teachers who are choosing to leave other schools. Schools that opened in the last three years are the exception: they can hire 40 percent of their teachers from outside the system. And some teaching positions, such as those in special education and science, can still go to brand new teachers.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education said the city would not know how many teachers had been excessed until after principals submit their budgets on Friday.
(more…)