GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Mayor Bloomberg said he’s not going to offer senior teachers a retirement incentive. (Daily Politics)
• He also said it’s likely the city will have to make more cuts. (State of Politics)
• A Department of Education official is leaving to kick anti-gay marriage legislators out of office. (Times)
• Bloomberg get a “D” for letting Albany compromise Klein’s charter authorizing power. (City Hall)
• President Obama is relying on the Senate to save Race to the Top from millions in cuts. (WaPo)
• Thirteen senators have written a letter in opposition to the cuts. (Edweek)
• Jonathan Alter says cuts had to be made, but Obey pulled from the wrong places. (Newsweek)
• There could be a silver lining to cutting funding from RttT: more qualified winners. (Flypaper)
• A parent says her school is squeezed but the city says it can enroll more students. (NYC Parent blog)
• A teacher wonders what Bill Gates will say to a teachers union convention. (NYC Educator)
• In time for CA’s upcoming budget fight, a report says its schools are underfunded. (Educated Guess)
• And Stephen Sawchuk promises coverage of the new teachers union conventions. (Edweek)
• Finally, we’re extending our long weekend through Tuesday. Enjoy the break and see you next week!

An independent filmmaker group will screen “Waiting for Superman” next Saturday, unveiling the much-hyped film about American education before its fall release.

Director Davis Guggenheim has said he wants “Waiting for Superman” to persuade the public that education is “the issue of our time,” just as his earlier film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” energized people around environmentalism. And he’s gotten help from Bill Gates as he works to do that. The film, which I saw last week, vividly depicts the challenges facing public schools. It also endorses charter schools as a solution to the country’s education challenges and depicts teachers unions as a major impediment to improvement.

Guggenheim’s viewpoint has won the film criticism already from teachers union president Randi Weingarten. But her criticism only goes so far; at a recent screening of the film in Silver Spring, Maryland, the Washington Post reported that she joined Guggenheim and D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee in a walk down the red carpet.

The film will be screened at Envision, an event about documentaries that raise global issues. I’m hosting a panel about “Waiting for Superman” after it’s screened. More details about the event are here and below. And you can RSVP here (click “Registration”) — and get a ticket at a lower rate ($25, down from $35) by using the discount code IFPENV. (more…)

Source: Checkbook NYC

The Department of Education has spent more money this calendar year than any other city agency, racking up enough expenses to account for about a quarter of total city dollars.

That’s one nugget from of a host of financial information now available through a database Comptroller John Liu’s office launched yesterday that gives real-time updates to city expenses.

The database, called “Checkbook NYC,” currently reports around $40 billion in spending across city agencies since January 1. During that time, the Department of Education spent more than $10 billion.

The site lists each city agency’s total spending, then breaks down that total into categories of spending. For the DOE, those categories include central administration spending, general and special education instruction and school leadership, school food and student transportation. From there, users can click through and see each how much the department spent on individual transactions with vendors. (more…)

Chancellor Joel Klein often trumpets the importance of giving principals the power to hire the teachers they want. But Klein’s own ability to select his staff could soon be compromised.

A court case decided in 2007, known as the Long Beach decision, requires New York City (and municipalities throughout the state) to fill certain positions by hiring off of lists of people who’ve passed Civil Service exams. Most of these jobs are administrative or clerical — they include secretaries and associate supervisors of school security — but some are also held by high level managers, chiefs of staff, and some of the department’s press team.

Currently, many of these jobs are held by people classified as provisional employees, meaning they never took the exams because the exams didn’t exist or were given too infrequently. Over the next several years, all city agencies will have to significantly cut down on the number of provisional workers, either by laying them off or having current employees take Civil Service tests. (more…)

• With a hiring freeze in place, nearly 23,000 people applied to become teachers this year. (Post)
• Two schools in one building in Brooklyn post very different results. (Wall Street Journal)
• An appeals court blocked 19 school closures. (GothamSchools, Times, Post, Daily News, WSJ, NY1)
• Chancellor Klein writes that the ruling is a “tragic” blow to his reform efforts. (Daily News)
• Pedro Noguera and a colleague say school closures aren’t the best way to help kids. (City Limits)
• Juan Gonzalez says recent audits suggest principals have too much financial authority. (Daily News)
• Chicago’s high-intensity efforts to curb youth violence have officials optimistic. (Times)
• Los Angeles is again accepting applications from groups to take over its schools. (L.A. Times)
• D.C.’s school budget plans involve big cuts to special education costs. (Washington Post)

• A court upheld an earlier ruling barring the city from closing 19 “failing” schools. (WNYC, Times)
• Obama threatens to veto the edujobs bill if it cuts his education initiatives. (Edweek)
• Weingarten says the president’s “pet projects” shouldn’t be immune to budget cuts. (Edweek)
• Talk of cuts to Race to the Top is making some state officials very worried. (Edweek)
• If we make cuts to save teacher jobs now, we’ll have to make even deeper cuts next year. (Eduwonk)
• Jonathan Chait looks at how the left and right are reacting to education cuts. (The New Republic)
• Valerie Strauss asks how Rhee can see the problem with turnover, then threaten to leave. (WaPo)
• Early education advocates believe the school turnaround craze misses the point. (Early Ed Watch)
• On her last day on the job Chicago’s teachers union president talks school funding. (Fox)
• Brazil might beat the Netherlands in futbol, but what about in the classroom? (Flypaper)

The city has no plans to fight an appellate court ruling that will keep open 19 schools marked for closure, Chancellor Joel Klein said today. But it does plan to open new schools in the same buildings.

That’s despite the fact that the same closure proposals that judges deemed inadequate were also used to justify opening 17 new schools in those buildings.

Whenever the city wants to shut down a school or make several schools share the same building space, state law requires city officials to prepare “educational impact statements” (or EIS’s) that examine how the changes will affect students and the surrounding community. The EIS’s that the citywide school board approved in January included, in the same documents, both the plans to close the 19 schools and replace many of them starting next year.

Today, five appellate court judges unanimously ordered the city to reissue those EIS’s with more detail than what the court called “boilerplate information about seat availability.”

But Department of Education officials said today that ruling does not mean the city has to re-start the public approval process to co-locate the new schools in the buildings where they had planned to shut schools down. “The court’s decision relates to the phase-out of failing schools, not the siting of new schools,” said DOE spokesman Danny Kanner. (more…)

If Joel Klein handed over the reins of the Department of Education to its top graduates, we’d soon see stronger arts offerings, less tracking, and an end to the policy of assigning schools a letter grade.

The suggestions came from a panel of students who won scholarships available at schools managed by the nonprofit New Visions. Asked what they would do if they became chancellor, the students, and a few of their teachers, offered this advice:

“You should totally let us have cell phones in school,” said Karina Melendez, the cancer survivor who aspires to the Supreme Court. But then she got serious, saying she’d do away with the letter grades that schools are assigned annually. (more…)

As the city’s investigation into grade tampering by a high school principal enters its second year, morale at the school has taken a turn for the worse.

A majority of teachers at Herbert Lehman High School who took the city’s annual survey said they don’t trust the school’s executive principal Janet Saraceno. And 81 percent said the principal is not an effective manager.

Results from the survey of teachers, students, and parents also show that in the “safety and respect” category, Lehman is getting poor marks. In total, 23 percent of the school’s teachers and 63 percent of students took the survey, which is below the city’s average participation rates.

Lehman has struggled with student safety this year and is likely to have full-time scanners installed by next fall. While most teachers said they feel safe at the school, a majority also said that crime, violence, and gang activity are a problem.

After I reported on teachers’ complaints that Lehman’s principal was changing students’ grades, Department of Education officials responded by threatening to investigate the teachers. Since then, teachers report that the DOE has not contacted them, nor has the Office of Special Investigations, which is tasked with following up on complaints. (more…)

For the second time, the city’s attempt to close 19 schools has been foiled by the courts.

Five appellate court judges unanimously upheld a lower court ruling today that voided the city’s attempt to shut down the schools. The ruling means that the city will have to re-start the lengthy and arduous process to shutter the schools next year, when the city had hoped to begin closing them.

In March, a state Supreme Court judge ruled that the city did not follow the proper school closure process laid out in state education law. State law requires that the city prepare “educational impact statements,” or EIS’s, that analyze the effect that closing a school will have on the students and surrounding community, as well as hold a series of public hearings with local parent boards.

In their decision (available in full below the jump), the appellate court justices unanimously agreed, saying the city did not follow the legal requirements for a hearing, nor did the city prepare detailed enough impact statements. (more…)