GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Michelle Rhee fired 241 of 4,000 D.C. teachers (6%) today citing poor performance. (WashPost)
• 737 of D.C. teachers were rated “minimally effective” by the new IMPACT eval. (Teacher Beat)
• Geoffrey Canada responds to critical analyses of the Harlem Children’s Zone. (Ed Week)
• “Big money has a way of making itself heard over hard data.” (Walt Gardner)
• A brief video history of P.S. 8 in Brooklyn Heights. (Brooklyn Heights Blog)
• Submit questions to Arne Duncan for a July 29 radio town hall with teachers. (ed.gov)
• USDOE has a tool showing where Promise Neighborhood grants came from. (data.ed.gov)
• Duncan is also cracking down on for-profit universities, and their stocks follow. (Hechinger)
• The Education Voters of New York group released its first report. (Imagine: NY Schools)
• Mayor Bloomberg sympathizes with child abuse victims: he once cried as a baby. (Daily News)

UPDATE: I changed the headline in response to Smith’s comment below.

Source: NYC DOE

The number of students enrolled in summer school has increased more than 16 percent compared to the same time last summer.

That’s according to a snapshot of summer school enrollment and attendance from Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday of this week that city officials released today.

The jump isn’t a surprise. This year, the city and state raised the bar that determines who passes the state exams and who falls into the low-scoring range that requires them to attend summer school.

But the number of students compelled to attend summer classes could fall next week, when the state releases the official results of its third- through eighth-grade math and reading exams. Because the state delayed its testing schedule this year, the city set its own cutoffs that were used only to decide who would be sent to summer school.

It’s possible that some students marked as failing under the city’s provisional scoring could end up officially scoring high enough to be promoted to the next grade without the extra class time. If that happens, the students will be given the option to drop out of their summer classes. (more…)

When her second-grade special education students produced a news broadcast about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Lizzie Hetzer wanted to share their work. After all, the project marked a welcome departure from the heavy focus on structure and routine that had defined the year, and her students had risen to the occasion admirably.

Sharing her enthusiasm wasn’t so easy. In the community section, Hetzer, who is moving from PS 12 in Brooklyn to PS 39 this fall, writes about what happened when she tried to find an audience for the news broadcast outside the school.

She writes:

I reached out to a few community news sources that expressed interest in featuring the broadcast. Sadly, my school administration did not support this move. It’s a shame that there seems to be so much red tape and so much fear of bad publicity that my special education students, even with parental support, cannot have the spotlight for a minute or so to share their good work. (more…)

Removing bad teachers from the city’s schools is no easy task, but then again neither is finding someone who wants to do that professionally.

In a job description posted online last week, the Department of Education advertises for an open position in the Labor Support Unit, which initially sounds sort of friendly. Members of the unit have to be certified principals or superintendents who’ve shown they can turn around poor performing teachers.

But when that fails, they also need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the teachers union contract and a district attorney’s knack for making a case against the offending teacher. (more…)

Structure and routine is a refrain that starting-out special education teachers hear incessantly. The right classroom management strategy creates the perfect classroom, we’re told.

Yes, my second-grade special education students at Brooklyn’s PS 12 needed some sort of structure and routine to thrive. Yet so often, it seems as though structure is equated to teacher control. Exact routines. Little freedom. No down time. I knew my students needed something more, something different. There were moments when they excelled and shined, but it wasn’t when they were doing desk work, sitting on the rug, or taking part in skill and drill curricula.

Our escape from a teacher-dominated structure began with a field trip to the New York Aquarium that coincided with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. After our visit, I posted a few links to site and articles about the oil spill on our classroom wiki and invited my students to look around the websites. They were riveted by the images of the dirty water and oil-covered sea creatures. One of my toughest and overage students sat in front of her laptop and said to herself, “This is so sad. I want to help.” We brainstormed a few ideas as a class. How could we help? We contemplated sending toothbrushes, collecting pet and human hair for the booms (yes, my second-graders know what booms are!), and sending supplies like paper towels and heavy-duty bags. Ultimately, we decided to put our effort in closer to home, by creating a news broadcast about the spill.

The link to our regular classroom activities came from comic books, which my students had been reading. One of my awesome educational assistants, Janice Pierce, suggested that we create superheroes who could help out on the Gulf Coast. Our team of superheros, the Superpsychics — Environmentra, Bubble Girl, Dragon Boy, Diamond Woman, Heart Girl, Rainbow Girl, Green Hulk, and Superboy — was born. The students were at last engaged in writing. I’d never seen them work so intently.

By late June, we had completed two major projects — a video and a comic book. (more…)

Common standards have only just arrived on the national scene, but they are already making their way to the city’s schools.

On Monday, New York State officially committed to adopt national “common core” standards for what students should be expected to learn, which were released in their final form in June. But city officials have been laying the groundwork to introduce the standards to schools since May, and principals and some teachers started getting their feet wet this week.

That doesn’t mean that students will begin to see drastic changes in the lessons they’re taught and the tests they take this year, however. Instead, city officials said this week that their plan is to use next school year to let network leaders, principals and teachers determine how far their current teaching is from the new bar and figure out the best way forward.

By doing so, they’re hoping that schools can avoid the kind of nasty shock that comes from abrupt changes to testing standards that state officials are warning will happen this year as the state makes its tests more difficult to pass.

“What we want networks to do is help schools figure out what their entry point is,” said Josh Thomases, the city’s deputy chief schools officer. “Some schools may need to wade in; some schools will just need to dip their toes in.” (more…)

• Many New York State school districts illegally ask about enrollees’ immigration status. (Times)
• A 14-year-old who allegedly killed his family had been suspended from IS 72′s summer school. (Times)
• The DOE has so far been mum on its staffer taped calling parents a racial epithet. (Queens Tribune)
• PS 72 in East Harlem got a new soccer field — on its roof. (NY1)
• Psychology professors say bullying can stop only if schools understand child development. (Times)
• A UPenn professor wants to start a business incubator for education entrepreneurs. (AP)
• Ex-New Yorker Ramon Cortines will step down as Los Angeles’s superintendent next year. (L.A. Times)
• There is growing concern that the United States’s college completion rate is too low. (Times)
• Restrictive contracting rules require California schools to overpay for construction. (S.F. Chronicle)
• Oakland, Calif., has a plan to improve scores by improving students’ social services. (Times)