GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Midwood High School students dress themselves in condoms, for the sake of fashion. (City Limits)
• Bill Gates and Chancellor Joel Klein teamed up on school reform at the Aspen Ideas Festival. (WSJ)
• A Brooklyn teen who died after a drinking binge was an A student at Grover Cleveland HS. (Daily News)
• Restauranteur and public school parent Bill Telepan is working to remake school lunches. (CBS)
• A Dallas journalist recounts his visit to two NYC schools that share a building. (Tod Robberson)
• Late Yankees announcer Bob Sheppard chaired the speech department at John Adams HS. (Times)
• The showdown over the edujobs bill highlights disarray within the Democratic Party. (Politico)
• The bill’s toll on Race to the Top might not be a big deal, since RttT is so darn big. (Flypaper)
• A journalist asks whether portable classrooms are really as bad as some say. (The Educated Reporter)
• Add school budgets to the list of casualties of BP’s Gulf Coast oil spill. (EdWeek)
• It’s official: Lehman High School is getting metal detectors. (Bronx Times Reporter)

People who aim to open charter schools will now have to prove that they have support from their community. They’ll also need a plan to attract and retain needy students.

Those are the two biggest changes among a slew of new requirements for charter school applicants that officials at the State University of New York’s Charter School Institute say will focus their attention on schools’ plans to serve needier students. But the new chartering process also retains many elements of the old one, officials said today.

The new process is an addition born from the new state law that more than doubled the number of charter schools allowed in the state. Rather than simply applying for a charter, prospective school leaders must now respond to criteria issued by one of the state’s two main authorizers in the form of a Request for Proposals. SUNY’s draft documents are up for just over a week of public comment before being finalized early next month.

In addition to the new requirements, charter authorizers now have to rank applications based on a new criteria. But Charter School Institute director Jonas Chartock said that it is unlikely to fundamentally change the core commitments of its review process. The institute’s process has been nationally recognized for weeding out weak applications. (more…)

Well, that was fast. It hasn’t been two weeks since the Department of Education said goodbye to its press secretary and now it’s about to wish another member of the truth squad farewell.

Much like a retired teacher, press deputy Danny Kanner is headed to Florida. After eight months in Tweed, he’s leaving to become Governor Charlie Crist’s spokesman in his bid for a U.S. Senate seat. Kanner won’t be straying too far from education issues, as they’ve already become a major part of Crist’s campaign.

In April, Crist made headlines when he decided to veto a bill that would have given teachers one-year contracts, effectively eliminating tenure. Though popular with Republican leadership — Crist’s party at the time — the bill outraged teachers and their unions.

Kanner’s departure could give new press secretary Natalie Ravitz an opportunity to shape the press office, though Ravitz said it was “to be determined” whether Kanner will be replaced. Other positions, such as for a Spanish-speaking press officer, have gone unfilled.

State education officials are responding to widespread calls to make state tests more difficult. But they’re getting some harsh criticism from a surprising corner: the head of the Buffalo school system.

As Education Commissioner David Steiner and Deputy Commissioner John King travel around New York explaining their plans to overhaul the state exams, they’ve largely met with support. In New York City, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has called for tougher exams. But last week, Buffalo School Superintendent James Williams told The Buffalo News that he doubts Steiner and King’s approach will really improve the state’s schools.

“I think they’re two people who don’t know what they’re doing,” Williams said. “A more rigorous test is not going to improve student achievement. It’s not going to improve the graduation rate. I think it’s ridiculous.” (more…)

Myrta Cuadra-Lash, the executive director of Sinergia, hopes to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone in East Harlem. (via Sinergia)

If Myrta Cuadra-Lash gets her wish, she could become Latino New York’s version of Geoffrey Canada, the now-famous founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone.

The executive director of the non-profit Sinergia, Cuadra-Lash is applying for a federal grant to create a Children’s Zone for Latino youth. She’s focusing on East Harlem, which is predominantly Latino, whereas the population currently served by Canada’s program is African-American. Though Cuadra-Lash’s idea is in its early stages — she’s applying for a one-year planning grant — she’s already brought three public schools, Mount Sinai Medical Center, two colleges, and other community organizations on board.

Promise Neighborhood grants are part of the Obama administration’s goal to replicate Canada’s program, an anti-poverty experiment that follows children from birth to adulthood. Zeroing in on a few neighborhood blocks in Harlem, the Children’s Zone offers parenting classes, after school activities, and has started its own network of charter schools. The program has received high praise — and some questions about the strength of its results so far and its scalability. (more…)

• A city policy means students who pass Regents exams aren’t penalized for excessive absences. (Post)
• Dozens of city students are working in East Coast nature conservancies this summer. (NY1)
• Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. is sending millions of dollars to local schools. (Daily News)
• To evade pension reductions, many more New Jersey teachers are retiring this year. (AP)
• Upper West Side parents are pushing real estate developers to build more schools. (Times)
• Parents and advocates say in a lawsuit that California’s school funding formula is unfair. (S.F. Chronicle)
• Florida school chiefs want lower-than-usual test scores reviewed before they’re released. (Miami Herald)
• Los Angeles schools patch their budget holes by opening their doors to big-budget films. (AP)

• Teachers say heavy-handed principals need to deliver extra on student performance. (Jay Mathews)
• Schools in Texas get credit for boosting scores even if a student gets no answers right. (Rick Casey)
• Steven Brill is writing “a narrative about the so-called education reform movement. (Alexander Russo)
• Whatever happened to carefree summers, asks the mom of a rising first-grader. (Insideschools)
• Teacher dispatches from the weekend’s American Federation of Teachers convention. (Twitter)
• Bill Gates, the convention’s keynote speaker, is “the most dangerous man in America.” (Leonie Haimson)
• A hotly anticipated anti-Race to the Top resolution never made it to the floor. (Teacher Beat)
• The new national edu-stats chief is an NYU prof who studies privatization. (Inside School Research)
• Early childhood expert Sara Mead’s new blog launched with a look at lessons from Singapore. (EdWeek)
• What Spain’s World Cup victory has to say about education reform. (Flypaper)

So many schools are getting turned around, restructured, or intervened-upon these days that parents have added a new phobia to their list: the school-closure fever.

Parents at a Bronx elementary school recently scheduled a protest demanding that their school not be shut down and their principal keep his job. They also wrote a blog post. But the school is not actually scheduled for closure at all.

The Bronx’s P.S. 73 is one of 47 schools in the city who haven’t made the annual progress on their test scores required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act for five years running. The schools are assigned a “Joint Intervention Team,” a group of city and state officials who visit the school and recommend how to improve it.

The intervention teams can recommend that a principal be removed or a school be phased out, but they can also make less dramatic suggestions to change how the school is run. And it’s likely to be three more months before the team issues its recommendations on P.S. 73, DOE spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld said. (more…)

A reader recently drew my attention to a deceptively unassuming chart that the city often uses to defend its heavy reliance on state tests.

The chart shows how neatly eighth graders’ scores on the tests predict their future academic success. The higher the score they get, the better their shot at graduating high school with a Regents diploma — the only kind that will count come 2014.

But the reader pointed out that the chart also includes a more frightening statistic: Students who score at a level considered proficient by every measure, a 3 out of possible 4, only have a 55% shot of getting a Regents diploma.

(more…)

Selections from the 2009 fifth-grade social studies test.

The principal who allowed her fifth-graders to re-take parts of the state social studies test told the Times that she had a good reason for doing so. The students, she said, had somehow failed to answer entire sections of the test.

How is that possible? While the Department of Education prepares an official investigation, we thought we’d look at the test itself.

A low-stakes annual exam that’s the first in a battery of social studies tests that students take between fifth and eighth grade, the 2009 test is divided into two booklets. Booklet 1 has multiple choice questions and questions that require short written answers. Booklet 2 has “document-based questions” that require short written answers and an essay. The existence of each booklet and all three parts is clearly stamped on the front page of Booklet 1.

Here’s each booklet in turn: (more…)