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.

Charter schools can grade their own students’ exams because in the eyes of the State Education Department, each charter school is treated as its own school district, or “local education agency.”

New York City’s district schools grade their tests collectively, as they’re all part of the same local education agency. Every year, the city pulls teachers out of their classrooms to grade state tests — these could belong to their school or other schools — but in most cases charter schools grade their own.

The exception is the math and English exams. Most of the city’s charter schools grade these tests together as part of a consortium run by the New York City Charter School Center. Similar to district schools, each charter school that participates sends teachers to grade for several days, though the Center uses software to ensure that teachers do not grade their own schools’ exams, said Charter Center head James Merriman. But the grading consortium is optional and charter schools must pay for the service, so some schools choose not to.

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. CMO leaders say that expanding to high schools has proven difficult, both because the students arrive with an array of problems that the schools are ill-equipped to deal with and because “a highly prescriptive education model that works for middle school students may become a liability in high school… [S]tudents accustomed to highly structured courses can become too dependent on their instructors. If that happens, these students are unlikely to acquire the skills needed to navigate the more independent educational environment they will encounter in college.”

• CMO growth alone will not be able to improve entire school districts: Although CMOs have expanded rapidly, the recent pace of new CMO creation has slowed dramatically. The report notes that Arne Duncan’s goal of turning around the lowest performing 5,000 schools by 2014 can’t be reached by the current CMO crop alone, since these CMOs only plan on opening 336 new schools in that timeframe. Furthermore, the report points out that expanding often puts CMOs into shaky financial terrain: “Expansion may not equal sustainability: According to our survey, CMOs with two to six schools draw an average of 9.6% of their operating budgets from private funds. That proportion increases to an average of 14% for CMOs with seven to ten schools, and to 16.3% for CMOs with more than ten schools.”

• The majority of CMOs are clustered in five states and a handful of cities in those states: More than 80 percent of CMOs are clustered in a handful of places: California, Texas, Arizona, Ohio, Illinois, New York, and the District of Columbia. They make up a large share of big charter markets, but are relatively sparse in smaller markets. Furthermore, CMOs tend to open schools in regional markets—that is, there are very few CMOs that have national ambitions.

List of NYC CMOs counted in study:

Achievement First
Beginning with Children Foundation – not included in survey because it had less than 3 charters open in 2007.
Green Dot
Harlem Children’s Zone – not included in survey because it had less than 3 charters open in 2007.
Harlem Village Academies – not included in survey because it had less than 3 charters open in 2007.
Lighthouse Academies Inc
KIPP NYC
St. Hope
Uncommon Schools

Not included in study but included in my list (Most were not included in the Mathematica study because they had only one school open in 2008-2009):

Ascend Learning Inc
Believe High School Network
Boys and Girls Harbor Inc
Explore Schools Inc
Hyde Foundation
Icahn Associates Corporation
Public Prep
Ross Institute
Success Charter Network

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:

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.

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. “He’s probably already gone, if he was ever even here. We have 300 students in this facility, and they come and go all the time. You can’t expect me to know them all.”

—

In the nine years since I last saw him, Tom has made a series of poor choices.  At the apex of these choices he committed a felony: robbery in the first degree. As a consequence he spent his 16th through 18th birthdays in a variety of jail and prison facilities from Rikers to the Bronx to Goshen, upstate. In December 2009, three years after imprisonment for his crime, he was released on parole. Within three months, he was back in jail for violating parole.

While Tom alone is responsible for his behavior, I’ve seen the long arc of his life since 1999 and understand that the truth is a bit more complicated. As he told me over the phone, he has lacked adult guidance over the years. That’s as gross an understatement as I’ve ever heard.

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.

Coming of age behind bars, having no family support to speak of and lacking a consistent adult authority figure, Tom was simply unprepared for life on his own. To make matters worse, when his parole began Tom also learned what it means to be homeless. It came as no surprise to this observer to learn that soon after being released, he made a thoughtless and self-destructive decision to skip a parole hearing. The sad tale thus continued in March 2010, when Tom was picked up by the police on that infraction and wound up back in jail, the one place he didn’t want to go.

In the weeks between Tom’s re-arrest and his 19th birthday this summer, he has found himself trapped in a Kafkaesque process in which the correctional system is doing its best to provide him with some support for life on the outside. I have joined him in the middle of this journey and gained yet another paradigm-shifting education in the process. Tom has been through a series of hearings intended to release him to a nonprofit agency that would provide him with some combination of life skills training, temporary housing and substance abuse treatment and prevention. Each hearing has seen new obstacles arise and has ended in delay and continued imprisonment.

Taken on their own, each obstacle is logical, even beneficial. In one instance, an agency wasn’t aware of an earlier diagnosis, and requested a screening. Another time, after an animated display by a prosecutor, a judge decided Tom would be at risk of recidivism without an escort to his destination agency, something for which he is not eligible until age 19. With Tom’s maximum 45-day stay for violating parole now approaching 90 days, these hearings paint a picture of a bureaucracy that seems to refuse to coordinate information well enough both to serve justice and provide Tom with a chance to rehabilitate himself.

So for Tom, with yet another hearing scheduled in a few weeks, it’s more of the same: waiting in his cell and requesting “protective custody” as much as possible to avoid the violence of the other inmates. When I visited him, Tom showed me fresh handcuff marks on his wrists. “It’s not the guards, it’s the other inmates,” he said. Whatever Tom learned in third grade, it may have put him on the path to getting his GED before being released on parole — a glimmer of hope that he might recapture the promise I saw 10 years ago — but it did not provide the survival skills needed to stay out of jail or the social skills to deal with the target on his back that accompanies his status as one of the youngest inmates on Rikers Island.

—

When Margaret and I started designing our school, the word link kept coming up in our conversation, leading to the school’s name: Harlem Link. There were interdisciplinary links between subjects in the curriculum, links between home and school, collaborative links through co-teaching, links with institutional partners for field trips, and more. As the school prepares to graduate its first class of fifth-graders and send them out into the world, another link is taking center stage: the special relationship between teacher and student. I know our fifth-graders are prepared to navigate the challenges that come with adolescence and growing up as they move on to competitive middle schools. They have had a much more concerted, coherent and rigorous experience than Tom did when he began bouncing around the system. Perhaps equally important, we are laying the plans to keep track of, support and invite back to Harlem Link our alumni as they progress through middle school, high school and college.

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. In the research I’ve done in the last month, partly to prepare to set up an alumni program for Harlem Link and partly in response to my experience with Tom, I have learned that a federal privacy law prevented me from having access to Tom’s records after he left my classroom. As his former teacher, I was deemed a no longer “interested educational party.” That’s right: The system is set up so that when something momentous happens in a child’s life, good or bad, his or her former teachers are officially not part of the educational community that can celebrate or provide succor on that occasion.

There are schools, of course, that track their alumni well. There are schools that measure their success longitudinally by finding out where their students go to college and what type of lives they lead decades after graduation (something we intend to do). There is nothing in the law preventing a school from asking alumni to stay in touch. What bothers me is the tremendous expenditure of resources that comes with dedicating staff time and technology to this effort when the most basic of this information is easily available in the New York City Department of Education’s servers. As a small school, we will do what it takes to keep these strongest links alive. But because of our limited resources, I know we will struggle to do it.

I’m talking to my lawyer friends to understand the reasoning behind this law — or regulation, since this interpretation is not specifically spelled out in the law — but in the meantime I am determined that nothing momentous will happen in the educational careers of our alumni without their elementary school teachers knowing about it.

Someone asked me recently why I wanted to make a big deal of Harlem Link’s 90 percent teacher retention rate in the past two years. With the school year winding down and this big graduation approaching, it’s been a time of reflection and celebration for many fifth-grade families. The notion that we are a larger family as a school and the famous saying, “It takes a village to raise a child,” have come up repeatedly in different settings as families and students try to cope with the idea of moving on to the next school. To my questioner I say, the fact that our teachers are sticking around means, among other things, that Harlem Link will be better able to keep those teacher-alumni links intact.

I am back in Tom’s life now. I can’t see him every day for 180 days as I did 10 years ago, but I’m willing to bet that in those days I learned and today I still remember more about him and what he needs than the sum of all of the specialists and case workers who have appeared and disappeared in his life since. I wish I could have participated along the way, could have spoken to some of the people who had to learn his family history (or, in some cases, not even get that far) over and over again. And I’m determined that in 2020, none of our teachers will have to say the same about any of our proud graduates.

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.

Sharmin Mollick

GothamSchools readers might remember reading about Sharmin Mollick and Karina Melendez, two top high school students who overcame great odds to graduate this week. Now you can meet them.

Mollick and Melendez received sizable scholarships through their high schools, which are part of the nonprofit New Visions. Tomorrow evening, scholarship winners from New Visions schools will discuss their tortuous paths to college on a panel that GothamSchools is hosting.

The panel is open to the public, and RSVPs are welcome but not required. Details are available on the GothamSchools calendar.

The state’s education spending for next year is still in limbo: Yesterday, Paterson vetoed a budget that included $419 million in education aid, and the legislature may or may not override the veto. But with no players — neither the governor nor the legislature — showing interest in unfreezing charter school funds, advocates are now setting their sights on next year.

“People are already lining up for the 2012 budget,” said James Merriman, head of the city’s Charter School Center.

One last hope for charter school supporters is that Mayor Bloomberg might himself un-do the funding freeze with city funds. Charter school leaders have been petitioning City Hall to fill in the funding freeze using city dollars.

On Friday, the mayor made his first public call for equal per-pupil funding for charter schools in a letter sent to Governor David Paterson, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Democratic Conference Leader John Sampson (printed in full below the jump).

But the mayor stopped short of demanding that some of the funds be given to charter schools this year:

It is in keeping with our commitment to fairness and equity that we treat all public schools, charter and non-charter, alike. Given the complexities involved, it would be unreasonable to think that all of the issues involved will be resolved in this session. What is essential is that we move forward with a commitment to end disproportionality.

Charter school advocates said they still trust the mayor’s pledge to assist them in their fight.

“The letter makes clear that the mayor has a commitment to achieving funding parity; he says it very, very clearly,” Merriman said. “And I think the mayor also recognizes that there’s a kind of Albany end-game to approve the cap lift on one hand but not equally fund the schools on the other.”

You can read more about charter school funding here and here.

The change is part of a wider attempt to end programs under the city’s alternative schools office, known as District 79, that city officials believe are ineffective, Department of Education officials said today. Earlier this year, the city announced it was also closing its only school designed to transition students from detention back into mainstream high schools.

“Despite some of our best efforts, we’re not making the gains for the students in some of the specialized programs,” said Timothy Lisante, District 79′s deputy superintendent for corrections and detentions.

In an interview today, Lisante and District 79 Superintendent Cami Anderson said that consolidating the two programs would allow for smoother day-to-day operations of the school. Restarting the program will also give the city the opportunity to redesign its placement process, directing some students towards coursework that will prepare them to return to their community high schools and giving others more vocational training.

“The prime vision here is to do everything we can to create a program that will accelerate [student's] progress so they can return to their home school or, if they’re older, go into a rigorous GED program,” Anderson said.

But teachers union officials are crying foul at the city’s timing, arguing that the last-minute announcement was disrespectful to the school’s teaching staff.

“We’re certainly for improving programs but no one’s going to convince me that they just woke up in June and thought this had to be done,” said United Federation of Teachers Secretary Michael Mendel.

The city currently runs two academic programs on Rikers Island. Students under the age of 18, who are legally required to attend school, enroll in the Island Academy, while Horizon Academy enrolls older students who opt into the program. (Last month, I visited the Island Academy for a Top Chef-style competition among its culinary arts students.)

Together, the schools employ about 197 staff, including teachers, counselors, psychologists and other support staff. On an average day, approximately 900 students attend classes at the two schools, each of which are split into a number of different sites throughout the island’s detention facilities.

Lisante estimated that the new school that opens in the fall will serve the same students but with about a 20 percent smaller staff. City and union officials said today that they were negotiating whether and how the schools’ staff members can apply for positions in the new program. Lisante said that the city would consider teachers who currently teach at the schools but would also look at outside candidates.

Mendel charged that announcing the restructuring so late in the year put teachers at a disadvantage; teachers will now have to reapply for their jobs over the summer, when many have already made plans to travel.

Data on the two schools’ credit accumulation and Regents pass rates wasn’t immediately available today, but I’ve asked the DOE for the schools’ achievement statistics and will update the post when I receive them. Because students in the schools are so transient — many students stay on Rikers Island for only around 30 days — achievement data for the programs is tracked differently than for other city schools.

City officials said today that they took the September arrival of new Department of Corrections Commissioner Dora Schriro as an opportunity to re-evaluate the educational programs in the city’s correctional facilities and that the new plan came as a result of recommendations from the corrections department as well as from teachers in the two schools.

In an interview today, Schriro said she had spoken to the DOE “regularly but infrequently,” but that the two departments share the same goal. “We’re looking for opportunities to be more efficient but more effective as well,” she said.

Like all teachers, teachers awaiting trial on misconduct or incompetence charges don’t have to work over the summer. Because of a deal the city and teachers union struck in April, those whose cases are still pending at the end of the summer will report for duty Sept. 7 not to a rubber room but to a school or district office, where they will do administrative work. In the past, teachers who finished the school year in a rubber room would begin the next one still languishing there.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said today that the city had begun to make headway on its promise to clear the backlog of cases against teachers by December. In April, there were about 650 cases open against teachers.

“Cases are moving much faster now that they have agreed to actually follow the timelines,” Mulgrew said. “They’re surveying all the cases, which they really were not doing, and they’re saying this is ridiculous, this is ridiculous. They’re clearing a lot just by going through each and every one. … The numbers are dropping quickly.”

The city estimated it was spending about $30 million annually to pay teachers to sit in rubber rooms, which had drawn ridicule from the New Yorker magazine and even provided a storyline for the final episode of the television series “Law and Order.”

It appears that no matter is too small for the city’s teachers union and the Department of Education to bicker over, not even what day class should start.

Negotiations to change the first day of school have broken down because the union is insisting that all schools choose when to open and the city is demanding that all schools open at the same time. Rather than work out a deal to move the first day of school five days back, the two sides have taken to publicly sniping at each other.

In a letter the city sent to principals today, Chancellor Joel Klein blamed the union for refusing to agree to his preferred schedule. United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew responded by holding a press conference where he blamed the Chancellor for being inflexible.

“Parents should be outraged that Chancellor Klein has refused to exert the authority he has to properly manage the school calendar,” Mulgrew said.

The city wants to move the start of school from Wednesday, September 8 to Monday, September 13, to make the first week of school a full one. Under the current schedule, students will report for one day of class on Wednesday. But because of Rosh Hashanah, a major Jewish holiday, they will not have their second day of school until the following Monday.

Klein’s proposal would push back the start of school and make up the missed day by turning Brooklyn-Queens Day, a midweek teacher training day in June, into an instructional day.

Mulgrew said that all schools should be able to choose whether to change the start date and, if they do, how to make up the lost classroom time.

“There are areas where schools want their kids in school on September 8,” he said. ”So that’s why I do believe we give schools the authority and the autonomy to make the decision.”

A spokesman for the union said most of the demand for the September 8 start date had come from parents in low-income neighborhoods, but could not name any specific schools.

Department of Education press secretary David Cantor said allowing every school to select its own start date would complicate bus routes and food services. It would also cause problems for parents who have children in different schools.

“There’s nobody who has kids in different schools who would want the days to be different,” Cantor said, adding that the department has not heard from any parents who want school to open on September 8.

After his retirement, technology became more commonplace, and professional development sessions began to focus on the Next New Thing. For some reason, I missed the first round of Smartboard training. Everyone was amazed, I was told. The following session entailed usage of tablets, which were very cool, and would quite possibly replace Smartboards (except they didn’t). You could write on them and your miserable handwriting would magically turn into computer fonts, just the thing for the teacher with awful handwriting (me). Unfortunately, by the time the session ended we hadn’t managed to turn on our tablets.

The next round of training was learning how to set up the Smartboard, which you apparently had to do every single time you wanted to use it. This took 10 minutes, during which time you had to trust the kids would engage in whatever meaningful activity you’d provided. I say “trust” because you’d be too busy fiddling with the Smartboard to check.

Last semester’s round of training utilized more advanced Smartboards, which were mounted to the wall and no longer required the ten minutes setup time. You could put all sorts of stuff up there, you could play games, you could illustrate whatever you were discussing, you could write, play music, maybe have it do a little dance — the possibilities were endless.

Smartboard training this week incorporated suggestions on how to use it to teach English. A young English teacher got up and showed us a PowerPoint presentation. Up until now, every PowerPoint presentation I’d ever seen was read aloud. I’d assumed, therefore, that PowerPoint’s prime function was to prolong life by cultivating boredom. However, this teacher used it to present questions that might serve to stimulate discussion. It seemed like a great idea.

But as good as the presentation was, I still felt like I’d wasted my time.

Here’s why. Like many city teachers, trailer or no trailer, I don’t have a Smartboard, I’ve never had a Smartboard, and (except for the very first day of a word-processing class I taught for five months) I’ve never had a functional computer installed in my classroom. In fact, the only reason there’s technology in my trailer at all is because I pack my little Macbook Pro into my schoolbag every morning. A few months ago we read a dialogue in which a character referred to eating lobster.

“What’s lobster, Mr. Goldstein?”

I struggled mightily to draw one, to the great amusement of my class. Kids seem to revel in watching me display total and utter incompetence, endlessly amused by my futile efforts. It makes up for all the times I’ve screamed at them to come on time, to do the homework, to answer the question, to pass the test, and all the other countless atrocities I’ve perpetrated.

I had an idea. I opened my Macbook, went into Google images, and found a photo of a lobster. I walked around the room displaying my 13-inch screen to the kids like a first-grade teacher introducing the Cat in the Hat. Eureka!

If I’d had a Smartboard I could have projected it on the screen. Smartboards are slow to come to the trailers, though. The last piece of technology placed out there, a 19-inch Sharp TV and VCR, was immediately stolen, along with our last box of paper towels. With people out there pilfering crap nobody wants, no one’s banging down our doors to install expensive equipment.

However, I’m thrilled to report that, after having requested it for eight years, our current tech guys have glued white plastic over my chalkboard and I can now use dry-erase markers out there.  No more chalk for me. Let the people in the main building boast about their Smartboards, their computers, their heat and air-conditioning, and their solid floors and walls. I’ve got a whiteboard, and my years of complaining have finally paid off.

I’ll take my victories where I can get them.

On this, the last day of the school year, I’d like to wish a joy-filled summer to all Gotham readers-teachers, students, parents, citizens, wonks, and even principals. With a city full of vacant trailers, perhaps Tweed will send us some joy by blowing them all up for the Fourth of July.

I’ve got a lawn chair, a laptop, and a longing to cover that story.

Discussions between the city and teachers union to start classes on Sept. 13, rather than Sept. 8, as is currently scheduled, fell apart when the two sides couldn’t agree how to make up the missed time, according to an email Chancellor Joel Klein sent to principals today.

Klein said the union declined to turn Brooklyn-Queens Day, a midweek teacher training day in June, into an instructional day. Under the current schedule, students will report for one day of class on Wednesday but because of Rosh Hashanah, a major Jewish holiday, will not have their second day of school until the following Monday.

“We understand and are sympathetic to the stress some families may feel because of the schedule during the first week of school, and regret that we were unable to make a change we saw as straightforward and fair to all,” Klein wrote.

Families came close to ending the school year without knowing when the next one would begin. One reader who sent us Klein’s email pointed out that the message went out at 8:54 a.m., just two and a half hours before school was scheduled to let out for the summer.

I’ll update this story when I hear back from the teachers union.

Dear colleagues,

As you are no doubt aware, the current schedule for school to start in the fall has students returning to class on Wednesday, September 8, 2010.

But over the past few weeks, we heard directly from many parents and school communities concerned about the impact of Labor Day and the Jewish holidays on the first week of school. They asked us to consider moving the first day of school to Monday, September 13, 2010.

Recognizing the importance of not losing an instructional school day, the parents who wrote us further proposed that our teachers and staff use that Wednesday, September 8, 2010, as a professional development day, and instead use what is known as Brooklyn-Queens day, a professional development day that falls on Thursday, June 9, 2011 as an instructional school day.

Both the Mayor and I thought this proposal made sense for all involved and, in fact, would save parents the hassle of finding child-care for a one-day, mid-week holiday in June.

But in order to move forward with this plan, we needed the agreement of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).

Unfortunately, the UFT refused our proposal and therefore we are left with no choice but to keep the calendar unchanged.

I also want to briefly address UFTs statements in the press that we should allow different schools to start classes on different days. That idea is simply not feasible.

We cannot have a chaotic system where different schools start classes on different days, which would require different bus schedules as well as different food schedules. It would be confusing to parents, a further strain on our budget, and disruptive to the overall school calendar.

We understand and are sympathetic to the stress some families may feel because of the schedule during the first week of school, and regret that we were unable to make a change we saw as straightforward and fair to all.

But given our inability to reach an agreement with the UFT, we will proceed with starting school on Wednesday, September 8, 2010.

I wish you and your families an enjoyable, relaxing summer, and look forward to seeing everyone in the fall.

Sincerely,

Joel I. Klein

Chancellor