GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Charter school heads will visit City Hall tomorrow to present Mayor Bloomberg with an audacious request: They would like him to go over state lawmakers’ heads and restore a funding freeze that Albany probably won’t.

This year, lawmakers froze charter schools’ per-pupil funding levels at last year’s level, denying school leaders almost $1,000 per student in an expected increase. Given the rotten budget climate, it’s likely the legislature will do the same to next year’s budget.

To fight back, charter school leaders tomorrow will meet with Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott — and, they hope, with Bloomberg, too — to suggest two possible solutions. Bloomberg can either “negotiate with Albany to remove the freeze,” as Charter School Center head James Merriman wrote in an e-mail last week. Or, Merriman wrote:

he can substitute other funds in the City’s own budget. (more…)

We already know that the Brooklyn School of Inquiry, a year-old school for the gifted in Bensonhurst, is the second-most popular gifted program in the entire city. Now we can see what exactly happens inside its classrooms.

As part of a fundraiser to celebrate its first year, BSI is releasing a new video every day this week about an element of the school’s arts offerings. Today’s installment: The violin lessons that all BSI students receive.

The other day, a mayor, two union presidents, and a schools chancellor walked onto a private jet. It was not the start of a joke; it is what actually happened when Mayor Bloomberg gave a ride to some of his toughest labor counterparts last week.

On the jet heading upstate with the mayor were teachers union President Michael Mulgrew, Council of School Supervisors and Administrators President Ernest Logan, schools Chancellor Joel Klein, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, the mayor’s Press Secretary Stu Loeser, and Mulgrew’s Deputy Director of Communications Peter Kadushin.

The group of labor and management leaders was in Albany to ask the legislature not to make severe cuts to state aid to the city’s schools in the final budget that gets passed. A spokesman for the teachers union wouldn’t say what the mayor’s passengers talked about.

Last year, then-teachers union Randi Weingarten made news when she traveled on the mayor’s jet to Boston and a goose slammed into the plane.

If you are currently teaching, then you are currently wrestling with differentiated instruction. Or, pardon me, Differentiated Instruction, in capital letters. These are two of the most powerful, totemic buzz words in the field right now, and they present a true challenge for the beginning teacher. I would like to share my journey with Differentiated Instruction, over two posts.

Differentiated Instruction, like other big ideas in the field of education, is intriguing, noble and vague. It has the satisfying flavor of an old idea: tailor your instruction to the specific needs of your students, in order to maximize effectiveness. But Differentiated Instruction also carries an intimidating pedigree of new research and scholarly categorization: children can be classified within spectra of learning types such as visual or aural, kinesthetic or, yes, existential. The beginning teacher, looking around his crazy classroom, can easily lose his read on the students in the haze of such classifications.

My school had a solution. I was told to use my Data (another buzzword, perhaps even more primal and frightening) from reading assessments in order to plan lessons for small groups. Simple enough. Rabbit table, my second-lowest reading group, has difficulty recognizing words with long vowel sounds, especially the long o. I drew up a long o worksheet, and then the table wrote a short booklet using long o words, illustrated the booklet and stapled it together. Ka-BANG! Differentiation!

What were the other reading groups doing all the while? Snake Table was working on their character analysis worksheets. Eagle Table was working on their character analysis worksheets. Armadillo Table was goofing around, but they were supposed to be working on their character analysis worksheets. My assistant principal, who is trying to help me differentiate my instruction, took this all in with patient dissatisfaction. (more…)

• The city is planning to spend nearly $1 million on computerized school clocks. (Post)
• More than 300 school system employees make more than $150,000, up 25 percent since last year. (Post)
• Faculty from Progress High School went on an expensive, taxpayer-funded retreat. (Daily News)
• So did faculty from another school in the same building, and teachers aren’t happy about it. (Daily News)
• Private schools that use Randall’s Island’s new public ballfields don’t pay rent to the city. (Times)
• The city is trying to escape some special education requirements to save money. (NY1)
• More than 1,000 students from 23 schools took part in Friday’s anti-Metrocard-cuts walkout. (Post, NY1)
• A columnist says this year’s summer school numbers suggests social promotion in the past. (Post)
• Most city valedictorians are women who do not speak English at home. (GothamSchools, Daily News)
• Many public pre-K programs accepted only a tiny percentage of applicants. (Post, Daily News)
• Hundreds of middle school students took part in a citywide science fair this weekend. (Daily News)
• In-Tech Academy is under investigation for making students to clean toilets as punishment. (Daily News)
• D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee says NYC can learn from D.C.’s new teachers contract. (Daily News)
• Chicago teachers elected a new union chief who opposes the mayor’s policies. (Chicago Sun-Times)
• California is weighing a bill to require kindergartners to turn 5 before enrolling. (San Francisco Chronicle)
• More and more schools are teaching engineering to students as young as in kindergarten. (Times)
• The Post praises Democrats for Education Reform for undermining teachers unions.

• About 600 students walked out of school today in support of continued free student Metrocards.
• Open less than a year, the Brooklyn School of Inquiry is the city’s second most coveted gifted program.
• And Park Slope’s P.S. 321 was the hardest pre-school to get into in the city.
• Pissed Off Teacher has trouble mustering enthusiasm among her students for a diagnostic test.
• Arthur Goldstein submits his remembrances of layoffs past.
• A professional development skeptic confesses that he found yesterday’s PD useful.
• A teacher in the Bronx questions why the state allows teachers to grade their own Regents exams.
• The UFT’s Jackie Bennett has more analysis of data on charter schools retention and achievement.
• To plug a budget gap, a NJ school asked parents to pay schools for their children’s housework.
• Two Brooklyn Tech students discuss their “SAT hangovers.”
• And P.S. 22′s choir wishes you a happy weekend with a nice cover of “I’ll Stand By You.”

Remember that time when we caught the teachers union prompting City Council members with cue cards? Barraged with criticism, then-union president Randi Weingarten said she regretted the lobbying tactic and pledged on television to “make some changes in the union.”

I never figured out what the changes were — until today. After the incident, Marvin Reiskin, the union’s political director, retired. He was due to leave at the end of the year, anyway, but the retirement happened a month or so earlier, my source told me. His replacement was Ireland native and former teacher Paul Egan.

There were other changes, too. Now, political moves can’t happen unilaterally. A new chain of command dictates who needs to approve certain actions.

More than thirty schools waiting to hear how they’ll have to change under a federal program targeting low-performing schools will have to wait longer.

The federal government is giving New York State $308 million to help fix its lowest-performing 5 percent of schools, 34 of which are in New York City. To receive the funds, school districts must explain to the state which of four pre-approved models of school improvement they plan to use. The city’s plans were originally due today, but they’ve been delayed as city and teachers union officials haggle.

“While we work to finalize labor issues, we’ve been granted a one week extension on our application,” Department of Education spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld said. “Given the wide variety of schools involved, we want to make sure we have as many options as possible to fix these struggling schools.” (more…)

The city’s list of graduation speakers this year includes Obama advisor David Axelrod (Stuyvesant High School), singer Mary J. Blige (Women’s Academy of Excellence), and news anchor Katie Couric (Edward R. Murrow High School).

But the most interesting information comes at the very end of the list, where Department of Education officials have included some information on this year’s high school valedictorians:

Additionally, the Department of Education for the first time collected data about the valedictorians at the City’s public high schools. Of the 339 valedictorians, 63 percent are female, 49 percent speak languages other than English at home, and 66 percent are eligible to receive free or reduced-price school meals

(more…)

Tucked inside 100,000 Metro newspapers this morning is the teachers union’s latest advertising blitz — a one page newsletter titled “NYC public school parent.”

On the front page is a column by United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew, who asks parents to call their elected officials to prevent school budget cuts. There’s also a guide to summer activities for children, a feature about a school’s film project that was paid for by a UFT grant, and an interview with education historian Diane Ravitch who says Race to the Top “is headed in the wrong direction,” and city charter schools are diverting too much attention away from the district schools.

The newsletter appears to be a counterweight to the thousands of flyers sent out a few weeks ago by Education Reform Now — an advocacy organization that supports charter schools and the end of seniority-based layoffs.

A spokesman for the union said the newsletter (Volume 1, Number 1) is being put out on a trial basis and is the UFT’s first-ever parent publication.