GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Why does closing bad schools cause anger? Review history. (HuffPost w/ Hechinger)
• City reporters get overcrowded treatment: a move to trailers. (CityRoom)
• Relations between teachers unions and Obama are chilling. (NPR)
• A magazine tackles the dropout crisis. (Washington Monthly w/ Hechinger)
• One story looks at New York and finds promising work. (WashMonthly w/ Hechinger)
• A new parent is heading the city’s family outreach efforts. (Insideschools)
• Who will memorialize fallen students of shuttered schools? (JD2718)
• Does New York benefit if the edujobs bill undercuts RTTT? (EdWeek)
• A new book reveals what a veteran ed reporter really thinks. (LearningMatters)
• And the Education Writers Association has a new blog. (EdBeat)

State of the CTU Address-Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis from Kenzo Shibata on Vimeo.

If anyone wondered what the union backlash to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s leadership would be like, watch this state of the union address by Chicago’s newly elected teachers union president.

Former high school chemistry teacher Karen Lewis pulled no punches in an address she gave on July 1, in which she laid out her plans for an adversarial relationship with Chicago school CEO Ron Huberman. After slamming the city’s school board for planned budget cuts and layoffs, Lewis addressed Huberman directly. “You’ve met your match,” she said.

Part of the American Federation of Teachers, Chicago’s union unseated former president Marilyn Stewart last month and voted in Lewis, who promised to take a harder line against Huberman.

Led by Weingarten, the national branch of the union has taken a softer approach to its relationship with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. And in New York, we’ve yet to hear rhetoric like Lewis’s from union president Michael Mulgrew.

A federal teacher jobs bill would send New York City schools $200 million, but could also chip away at federal grant money the city hopes to win.

The so-called “edujobs” bill has become the center of a politically charged debate. On one side are supporters of the Obama administration’s reform efforts and on the other are those who argue that saving teacher jobs is worth slowing the pace of change. The bill, headed for the Senate after passing the House last week, would send a total of about $622 million to New York State.

After a previous attempt to save teacher jobs foundered, the bill’s sponsor, Wisconsin Representative David Obey introduced a new bill that would redirect about 10 percent of funding for Race to the Top into a $10 billion fund for teacher jobs. Federal teacher quality and new charter school programs also would be tapped for the jobs fund.

Obama has threatened to veto the measure if passed in its current form, raising the ire of the national teachers unions. (more…)

Much of the debate about merit pay for teachers has focused on theoretical arguments. But for Robin Aufses, the English department chair at a private school in Manhattan, the issue is anything but abstract.

Aufses helped lead an experiment at her school last year in new ways of evaluating teachers. Starting in September, administrators plan to assign bonuses based on the evaluations. For now, Aufses writes in the GothamSchools community section, “Good thing it turned out to be a pilot program.”

Read Aufses’ entire account of the good, the bad, and the sticky in her school’s merit pay experiment. And let us know if you have an experience of your own you’d like to share.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the city’s plan to hire as many as eight executive principals, each with a $25,000 bonus, for next year.

Now thanks to a helpful commenter and confirmation from the Department of Education, we know who at least one of them is. The principal of Acorn Community High School, Andrea Lewis, is leaving to become the interim acting executive principal of Murry Bergtraum High School in lower Manhattan. As an executive principal, she’ll receive a $25,000 yearly bonus for agreeing to lead the struggling school for at least three years.

Lewis took over at Acorn Community in 2003 and described herself to InsideSchools — a parent-focused guide to the city’s public schools — as “a very procedure-driven person.” In the last three years, the school’s city-issued progress report grades have been gone B, A, B. In 2007 Acorn Community, which has just 700 students, had a four-year graduation rate of 68 percent and in 2009 the rate was 65.3 percent. Acorn Community’s assistant principal, Andrea Piper, will run the school next year.

With more than 2,600 students, Murry Bergtraum represents a major change for Lewis. Once a desirable destination for students interested in business, Bergtraum swelled in size and declined in performance in recent years as large schools nearby were closed. (more…)

Last spring I took a position as English department chair at a New York City independent school, giving me a chance to work in the city after many years in suburban schools. The head of my new school told me that he and the board planned to launch a performance-based compensation system and asked me to help administer it. Like many teachers, I object to being paid based on student test scores, but after learning that wasn’t the plan at my new school, I found myself intrigued.

I admit it: I believe in merit pay, performance-based compensation, or whatever you want to call it. I’ve been in education too long not to be frustrated with the lock-step salary system: No matter how hard a teacher works, she’s paid the same as everyone else who started the same year she did and has the same number of postgraduate credits she does. While no one goes into teaching for the money, we’re also not volunteers. And why shouldn’t great teachers make more than mediocre ones?

So in I jumped, working with a formula that the department chairs, grade leaders, and heads of the secondary and primary schools had created. We made classroom observations and assessed each teacher’s collegiality, commitment, and participation in activities outside the classroom.  Teachers were scored 1 to 4 in 20 different categories. The categories were weighted, producing final scores that fell into four ranges. Teachers who fell into three of the ranges would — when the plan went into full effect — receive bonuses.

Good thing it turned out to be a pilot program. We made some mistakes; we learned a lot; and we saw hope for the future. (more…)

News from New York City:

• Through credit recovery, closing Lafayette HS graduated an overage student who rarely attended. (Post)
• Summer school started yesterday in blistering heat but mostly with air conditioning. (NY1, Times)
• A city schools superintendent, Cami Anderson, is applying to open three charter schools. (Post)
• City schools are suspending students 40 percent more than they did four years ago. (Daily News)
• They’re also reporting much less major crime, and spending more on school safety. (Daily News, NY1)
• Investigators found that the principal of PS 50 in the Bronx helped himself with contracts. (Daily News)
• School construction workers held a boozy end-of-year party on a high school campus. (Post)
• Nicole Suriel’s drowning death is a lot like another field trip drowning that happened in 1994. (Post)
• Fearing repercussions, Suriel’s Harlem school, is rallying to keep its administrators. (Times)
• Economics is a central part of the curriculum at MS 223 in the South Bronx. (Wall Street Journal)
• More on the city’s controversial move to consolidate two programs for Rikers Island students. (Times)
• Queens high schools make up a large proportion of those on the city’s restructuring list. (Daily News)
• The New Teacher Project’s head says Randi Weingarten deserves credit for backing reform. (Daily News)
• Mayor Bloomberg said the UFT is like a bad lawyer because it defended weak schools. (Daily News)
• But recent history suggests that teachers unions are even less popular than lawyers. (NY Magazine)
• A Democracy Prep charter school teacher says he prefers his 403B to his old pension plan. (Daily News)

And beyond:

• Suburban Princeton, N.J., is grappling with the charter school question. (Wall Street Journal)
• The rigorous International Baccalaureate program is a growing alternative for advanced students. (Times)
• Fearing heckling, the Obama administration is staying away from teachers union conventions. (Times)
• More parents are trying to avoid vaccinating their children. (Wall Street Journal)
• A bid for mayoral control in Rochester is on the rocks without Albany’s support. (Democrat and Chronicle)
• Kansas City schools are set to start arranging classes by ability instead of age. (AP)
• A D.C. principal who has boosted performance has also made some enemies. (Washington Post)
• A Los Angeles school opened yesterday under the mostly-new-staff turnaround model. (L.A. Times)