GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

News from New York City:

• The principal of Queens’ PS 86 let students answer state test questions a week after the test. (Times)
• Large education nonprofits and local colleges have applied to open new charter schools. (Post)
• Private school tuition for special needs students is a growing expense for the city. (Wall Street Journal)
• Some hiring restrictions for teachers have been relaxed. (GothamSchools, WNYC)
• A major donor wants each SUNY school to be able to set its own tuition. (Times)
• Parents fought for air-conditioned school buses for special needs students and won. (NY1)
• State Sen. Bill Perkins’ main opponent, pro-charter Basil Smikle, has raised $130,000. (Post)
• A real estate developer has given more than $1 million for students’ summer jobs. (Wall Street Journal)
• The Post says any administrator who lets a no-show student graduate should be fired.
• The Post praises Gov. Paterson for vetoing a funding bill that would have capped charter school aid.

And beyond:

• The Gates Foundation continues to play a major role in setting the education agenda. (Washington Post)
• A New Jersey school tossed test prep to boost diversity and test scores. (Wall Street Journal)
• The head of Britain’s schools inspectors says bad teachers can be good for students. (Mirror UK)
• Teach for America continues to attract far more students from top colleges than it can accept. (Times)
• Computers in the home might actually hurt poor students’ performance, a study says. (Times)
• Sacramento’s superintendent is making his schools look and feel more corporate. (Sacramento Bee)

• Brian Austin Green and Megan Fox fight against budget cuts with a video. (Funny or Die)
• The AFT now has 1.5 million members. To celebrate, Randi danced. (EdWeek)
• A call for ideas about what to cut besides Race to the Top. (Flypaper)
• Diane Ravitch responds to criticism that she cherry-picks evidence. (Answer Sheeet)
• An argument that school reform rhetoric is counter-productive. (Learning First)
• Don’t forget to come see and discuss “Waiting for Superman” tomorrow. (GothamSchools)
• The DOE is looking for someone to run its iLearnNYC initiative. (SimplyHired)

Reports on the death of the charter school funding freeze may be exaggerated.

The reports have to do with a surprise side effect of Governor David Paterson’s decision to veto an education spending bill this week. Among the provisions that the veto eliminated was language that would have kept charter school funding at 2008 levels.

The change would require the city to give charter schools an additional $42 million next year. But the additional funds are not necessarily guaranteed.

“This is not a celebratory moment,” said Peter Murphy, policy director of the New York State Charter School Association. “This fight goes on.”

The ultimate fate of the charter school funding increase will depend on whether the governor and legislature reinstate the freeze during final rounds of budget negotiations. (more…)

At Lower East Side Prep, where half the students spend July in class, students dissected a Yeats poem.

Walking the hushed halls of Lower East Side Preparatory High School today, you wouldn’t know that hundreds of its students are still busy studying and learning. They just do it very quietly.

A transfer school for older students who aren’t on track to graduate in four years, Lower East Side Prep mainly serves recent immigrants from China as well as a handful of American students. Because few students enroll as fluent English-speakers, a whopping half of the student body takes summer school classes in preparation for the regular school year. That’s 300 of the school’s 600-student population. This summer the school is offering five ESL classes and other subjects taught in both English and Chinese.

Most Lower East Side Prep teachers speak Chinese and English and many have hard-to-find dual certifications such as ESL and geometry. Getting teachers with these qualities to work in summer school is always difficult, said principal Martha Polin. She began putting together her summer school team early this year. (more…)

The city is full of teachers and principals who consider themselves progressive educators. But their unorthodox ideas are constrained by policies that put test scores first.

That’s the conclusion that Jessica Siegel, a former high school teacher who now teaches journalism and education at Brooklyn College, made after attending a 600-attendee-strong conference about progressive education in April. In the GothamSchools community section, Siegel writes about encountering intrepid educators who try, with mixed success, to blend the alternative approaches for which New York City schools were once famous with the accountability-oriented policies that are currently in vogue.

One of the people Siegel spoke to was Brady Smith, principal of Validus Preparatory Academy in the Bronx. Smith told her that he makes sure his students develop their skills in real-world contexts, such as by proposing land-use projects for the Port Authority, and that he wants to join a consortium of schools whose students don’t have to take Regents exams to graduate. But he also said that he doesn’t totally discount the value of data analysis. Writes Siegel:

“We use data quite a bit,” Smith told me. “But we have a broad definition of data. We look at student work quite a lot. My stance is — what does student performance look like? There are ways to measure it authentically … more than any one test.”

Appearing before about 600 educators at a recent conference on progressive education, Deborah Meier threw away her prepared speech. In an inspired request, the MacArthur Genius Award winner and prominent advocate for progressive education asked attendees who started teaching in the 1960s to stand up. Then she called on educators who began their careers in the 1970s. She continued decade by decade to the present until a good part of the audience was standing.

Meier’s gesture made visible the long history — into the present — of progressive education in New York City’s schools. But it also raised the question: Where — in an era of high-stakes tests and number crunching — is progressive education?

Most progressive educators trace their roots to John Dewey, the early-twentieth-century philosopher who wrote extensively about the connection between education and democracy and proposed an educational model that was intellectual, pragmatic and applied. Over the past 25 years, the term has come to describe interdisciplinary instruction; alternative ways of gauging student learning, like performance-based assessment; project-based learning; advisory or guidance groups as part of the school day; small classes sizes; a full measure of art and music classes; and time set aside for teachers to plan and work together. For progressive educators, a shared vision of the purpose of education and how students should be taught unites all of these features.

At one point in the not-too-distant past, New York City was a center of progressive education. (more…)

With eight weeks to go before the 2010-2011 school year begins, the city is letting principals hire more teachers from outside the school system.

An update to the city’s year-old teacher hiring freeze means that principals are now free to hire people who are licensed to teach earth science, middle school general science, English as a second language for grades 7-12, Chinese, and Latin, even if they aren’t already working in the school system. There are more open positions in these areas than there are teachers whose jobs have been eliminated, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Ann Forte.

Principals were already permitted to look outside the city for special education, speech, and some Spanish bilingual subject teachers. New schools are also allowed to bring on new teachers for up to 40 percent of their hires.

The most recent change suggests that the city might be starting to get a handle on how principals decided to staff up for the coming school year. (more…)

• One of Gov. Paterson’s last-minute vetoes lifts a cap on charter school funding. (Daily News)
• New York City’s spending on charter schools could go up by $42 million post-cap. (Albany Times Union)
• The veto, meant to curb state spending on schools, could hurt some districts. (Buffalo News)
• Debbie Almontaser, the ousted principal of the Khalil Gibran school, dropped her last lawsuit. (Post)
• Two teachers accused of a tryst at James Madison HS last year were drunk, a report says. (Daily News)
• Arne Duncan says the Senate’s edujobs bill version won’t cut Race to the Top funding. (Seattle Times)

• A breakdown of snarky coverage from the AFT’s national convention. (Antonucci)
• So far Randi Weingarten has promised to be the union of solutions. (Seattle PI)
• She also promised to “fight smart.” Read a hilarious dispatch from an opponent. (EdNotes)
• Learning to teach by practicing on Second Life-style student “avatars.” (Inside Higher Ed)
• City charter and district schools both suspend about 8% of their students on average. (Curious 2)
• Meet the group that brought the new Chicago teachers union president to power. (Notebook)
• How a college graduate today compares to a college grad of the 1930s. (Quick and the Ed)
• Should schools really spend millions buying new technologies? (Larry Cuban)
• Obama’s edu-research team will focus on finding ways to support learning. (EdWeek)

Teacher turnover rates at charter schools nationwide are more than double those of traditional public schools, according to a study done by the National Center on School Choice.

Researchers found that charter schools lost 25 percent of their teachers to other schools and careers while district schools lost 14 percent, a difference the report called the “turnover gap.” The report’s findings are based on teacher survey data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics from the 2003-2004 school year.

“The odds of a charter school teacher leaving the profession versus staying in the same school were 130 percent greater than those of a traditional public school teacher,” the researchers noted.

The report’s authors found little data to support the idea that charter school turnover is higher because these schools have more leeway to fire teachers, a claim made by some charter school supporters.

(more…)