GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The city named Manhattan’s PS/IS 18 best prepared for the possibility of an emergency. (NY1)
• Murry Bergtraum HS student Joseph Butler is graduating with 15 years of perfect attendance. (DN)
• After a budget-truncated school year, Hawaii will now legally require 180 days of school. (AP)
• Chicago’s school board gave the green light to class sizes of up to 35 students. (Chicago Sun-Times)
• The federal government is developing new rules to regulate colleges and student loans. (WSJ, Times)

• A home computer causes slightly lower reading and math scores. (Freakonomics)
• Meanwhile, a city teacher uses video technology to teach writing. (Innovative Educator)
• One city school didn’t have calculators for Regents-taking students. (Pissed Off Teacher)
• Three ways for schools to get better and cut their budgets at the same time. (Learning Matters)
• The Times picks up the school safety budget increases we reported on first. (CityRoom)
• Three funders will gather here next week to talk about educating ELL’s. (EdWeek)
• Grading each other, Chicago teachers gave more “unsatisfactories” than principals. (Catalyst)
• Pittsburgh has a new teachers contract, negotiated partly by the Gates Foundation. (AP)
• The contract includes voluntary individual merit pay and a school-based program. (EdWeek)
• A study of a more learning time program finds disappointing results. (Quick and the Ed)
• A write-up of the study showing Harlem Success lottery winners outperform losers. (EdWeek)

How does New York’s Race to the Top application compare to other states? An analysis of school district and union buy-in to state applications published yesterday by EdWeek gives some clues.

On a piece of the application that is worth 60 out of the total 500 points, New York outperformed the national average – but not staggeringly so.

One of the ways a state can win Race to the Top is by proving that its school districts and teachers union support the reforms the application proposes. States prove this by turning in Memorandums of Understanding signed by each of those groups. The more MOUs a state submits, the more points it gets toward the 60-point categories for buy-in. (You can read the full scoring guidelines for the competition here.)

In New York, all of the state’s 744 school district superintendents agreed to participate in New York’s plan if the state wins grant money. That’s a lot more than the average of 61 percent of school districts that signed onto their states’ plans nationally, according to the EdWeek analysis. (more…)

Seated before an audience of people hoping to become charter school founders, Dirk Tillotson delivered a piece of advice: “You’ve got to be crazy to do this.”

It was early spring, and Tillotson, who founded a program to help mom-and-pop charter schools open, was offering this line as both a warning and a challenge. His audience didn’t hail from the KIPPs or Harlem Success Academies of the charter world and they didn’t have millionaires in their corners, which is why they’d come to him.

Charter schools were created as a way to test out new educational ideas, but the barriers to opening an experimental school are formidable. Some schools open as franchises of charter school networks, which often help principals through the application process by providing support and greasing political wheels as needed. Others find wealthy supporters who can pay for education consultants.

And yet a third class of charters exists: known as mom-and-pops or community charter schools, they’re typically opened by teachers or parents with few connections and big ambition. (more…)

David Cantor, head of the Department of Education's press juggernaut, is leaving. (Courtesy of Cantor.)

After five years of taking our phone calls and returning most of them, Department of Education Press Secretary David Cantor is moving on.

He had the job longer than any of his predecessors, overseeing both periods of high-frequency press outreach and long droughts of stay-the-course defense.

His departure will make it even harder for reporters to extract information out of an opaque organization, especially considering he’s leaving behind an office full of recent hires. It will also finally allow him to escape from complaints — sure to return given the dismal budget climate — that the school system spends too much money staffing its press office.

Cantor is going over to Widmeyer Communications, where he’ll remain on the education beat as the senior vice president in charge of PreK-12 education, arts, and philanthropy. Widmeyer was founded by Scott Widmeyer, an operator in the education world who cut his teeth working for teachers union president Al Shanker. But it does work for the non-union side of things, too, including the Gates Foundation and Pearson.

Cantor sent over this statement: (more…)

Pre-exam anxiety and post-exam elation and regret are in the air today, but those feelings are also streaming through Twitter.

By mid-morning today, the first day the city’s high schoolers are sitting for their Regents exams, thousands of tweets included the word “Regents.” A Twitter search paints a portrait of how students spend their time studying for and stressing out about their tests before they take them and how they celebrate after they finish. And it even includes a rare tweet from inside the exam hall.

“Good luck to everyone taking the Regents this week, including myself for my FINAL chance,” wrote one student. Jitters abound, though some students are entering the exams with confidence:

Some students warn that Twitter can abet cheaters, while others plan their cheating strategies:

(more…)

Our last post featured Michele Israel, a parent at PS 107 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, who was instrumental in starting an edible garden at her school: We spoke with Michele about the planning stage and how crucial it is to win the support of your principal, custodial engineer, PTA board, parents and teachers. This week Michele will help us identify start-up costs and sources for funding.

Working on PS 107's school garden

Michele’s first recommendation is to “start small,” with maybe just a couple of beds to see how much work is involved and how enthusiastically the garden is received by the school community. Michele estimates it will take anywhere from six months to a year to research the materials you will need for your garden and find capital. In the case of PS 107, members of their volunteer garden committee were assigned different tasks, such as fundraising, grant research, community outreach, and vendor solicitation. Keep in mind that your start-up costs will be where you spend most of your money as they will include lumber for the beds, soil, seeds and tools. Once you have those materials, the costs for your garden dramatically decrease (unless you decide to expand the garden, which should be part of your consideration when putting together a budget).

The start-up costs for PS 107′s garden were approximately $4,000 and included recycled plastic lumber for their beds, which is significantly more expensive than untreated lumber. If you start small, your costs will probably be closer to $2,000, according to Michele. (more…)

Jaritza Geigel, a student organizer with Make the Road New York and the Urban Youth Collaborative, led a walkout to protest cuts to student subway access.

As part of a blog post about the walkout for EdVox, Jaritza also added this overall sense of the state of education in the city:

We are done having Mayor Bloomberg close down schools, which only increase over-crowding; we are done having funds removed overnight from our schools; we are done seeing valuable teachers laid off; we are done being treated like criminals; and we will not tolerate the mayor’s silence on this issue.

• Hispanic students are severely underrepresented at city charter schools. (Times)
• Local students sometimes videotape their fistfights and post them on YouTube. (Daily News)
• Scholars to Work, a year-old city program, sets students at vocational schools up with real jobs. (NY1)
• Guardians aren’t happy that some students at In-Tech Academy were made to clean toilets. (Daily News)
• The Post calls on Education Commissioner David Steiner to improve the state’s testing program.
• All over the country, schools are cutting the programs that helped them improve. (Wall Street Journal)
• Budget cuts and politics don’t bode well for Newark’s teachers union’s negotiations. (Wall Street Journal)
• Newark’s teacher absenteeism rate is twice as high as most urban school districts’. (Wall Street Journal)
• Some New Jersey school districts are having to charge tuition for summer school this year. (AP)
• A Philadelphia school designed by Microsoft has taken a while to hit its stride. (AP)

• Every state applying for RTTT round 2 got more union buy-in this time. (EdWeek)
• To stave off a strike, Chicago will borrow $800M to give teachers 4% raises. (Sun-Times)
• In NYC, school-based positions have been cut more than Tweed positions. (Leonie Haimson)
• Principals are suing to block the new 55-25 retirement incentive. (CSS Blog, scroll down)
• NYSUT lobbyist Melinda Person is a triathlete, and on 40 under 20 40 list. (City Hall)
• A new study suggests that kids with more friends do better in school. (USA Today)
• Jay Mathews wonders about the aftermath of a powerful principal’s retirement. (WashPost)
• A Boston principal and a school head in Niger have things in common. (Mike Goldstein)
• A blind teacher says she was attacked for protesting special ed cuts. (Suite 101)
• Obama is making a personal effort to boost the federal edu-jobs bill. (EdWeek)
• Could weak accountability kill the charter school movement? (Flypaper)
• A profile of a Florida school literally praying for budget help. (WSJ)