GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Four prospective charter schools could force the state to define precisely how involved for-profit companies can be in the operations of charter schools.

When the legislature lifted the cap on charter schools in May, it also banned for-profit companies from managing or operating charters. But four of the schools applying to open next year are partnering with Arrow Academy, a Texas-based for-profit management organization.

Arrow’s ability to open the schools will come down to how close a for-profit company can work with a school before the state considers it to be managed by them.

The four are applying for charters from the state Board of Regents, and their applications are also currently being vetted by the city Department of Education. A city spokesman said today that Arrow’s relationship with the school would be like any other charter or district school that contracts with a for-profit company to provide school services.

Arrow Academy had originally intended to apply to manage the schools itself, the company’s head, Jim Christensen, said today. But when the law changed, the company altered its application so that instead, it will contract with the school’s board to provide curriculum and teacher training. (more…)

A beginning teacher cannot change his or her teaching personality at whim, at least not consistently. She cannot decide to “be more fun.” So, in order to make a classroom more fun, which is to say more engaging, more exciting and child-focused, a beginning teacher should change the classroom activities. The most straightforward change that I have seen is to make the classroom project-based.

This might sound like a “duh” idea, especially to more experienced teachers, but I mean to suggest that everything, everything be project-based. Take, for example, the curriculum outlined in Everyday Mathematics, used in most city elementary schools. The daily lesson plans have an attractive hands-on focus, but there is only one lesson per unit, entitled “explorations,” in which the students work together on larger projects. Now whether the project is group-based or individual, it seems intuitive to me that the entire math unit (be it shapes, number patterns or measurement) should be structured towards a larger goal. I have seen, and used, a unit-plan focusing on shapes that resulted in a class performance of “The Greedy Triangle” by Marilyn Burns. Some students worked on Hexagon and Octagon posters, drawing objects from life that conformed to those shapes, while others cut out and painted shape costumes. After a few lessons, my job became easy, walking between the tables, correcting students if they said “square” when they should have said “rectangle.”

During the independent reading block, we find that some students read while others pretend to read. This is because some students like to read and find it pleasurable, while others do not. Duh. And yet we still ask students to read silently for up to an hour, while we run from bored student to bored student using all of our imagination to keep their attention on their books. But I am done pleading with a student to enjoy reading, to have fun doing something he or she does not naturally enjoy. (more…)

All that’s left is the waiting.

Federal officials could announce the winners of the second round of the Race to the Top grant competition as soon as next week. But before they do, teams from each finalist state, including New York, went to Washington, D.C. last week to make their case for a slice of the $3.4 billion in grant funds that remain to be doled out.

Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said yesterday that “no surprises” came from the judges during the state’s 90-minute presentation and question-and-answer session Aug. 10. Tisch said the reviewers focused on the meat of the state’s school reform plan, including the timeline for a new teacher evaluation system, the curriculum being developed for new national standards, and school turnaround strategies.

“I just thought it was a very fair, frank conversation,” she said.

Accompanying Tisch in D.C. were State Education Commissioner David Steiner and Deputy Commissioner John King, as well as Chancellor Joel Klein and teachers union chief Michael Mulgrew.

Tisch recruited Klein and Mulgrew for the second round to avert the troubles of the state’s first-round presentation, when judges focused on whether the state would be able to fulfill its promises without more union support. (more…)

• A judge told the state teachers union it can’t spend more on the Basil Smikle-Bill Perkins race. (WSJ)
• The city is piloting a new anti-truancy initiative. (GothamSchools, Daily News, Post, NY1)
• A Westchester County serves city students incarcerated over addiction and does a good job. (NY1)
• For the third year, Manhattan’s Millennium HS will hold classes in hallways. (Downtown Express)
• A state labor board is trying to halt Merrick Academy’s move to fire teachers. (GothamSchools)
• A problematic study found that a quarter of teens say gangs are present in their schools. (L.A. Times)
• Chancellor Klein tells parents that despite lower scores, the achievement gap is still closing. (Post)
• Paul Tough says Promise Neighborhoods should get funding even without strong evidence. (Times)
• San Francisco’s school choice system frequently shuts middle-class families out entirely. (S.F. Chronicle)
• Detroit is fighting against a judge’s orders to spend more on school security. (Detroit Free Press)

• Gov. Paterson formally applied for New York’s share of federal “edujobs” money. (Office of the Governor)
• Lessons on parents and schools from last week’s parent-led PEP meeting shut-down. (Quick and the Ed)
• How one elementary school teacher learned to stop worrying and love the fun. (GothamSchools)
• Rep. George Miller has called a congressional hearing on school turnaround companies. (Politics K-12)
• Mark your calendar for new student registration, which starts Sept. 1. (Insideschools)
• How the two national teachers unions are run has affected their stands on Obama’s agenda. (EdWeek)
• City schools could help slow the spread of HIV with better sex ed, advocates say. (Chelsea Now)
• The writers behind the L.A. Times’ controversial story on value-added answer readers’ questions. (LAT)
• Fewer than one in four ACT-takers are ready for college-level work, the test-makers said. (Flypaper)

A state employment panel is suing to bar a Queens charter school from firing the teachers it dismissed a month ago.

The Public Employment Review Board is seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent Merrick Academy from firing the 11 staff members — roughly a third of the school’s teaching staff — that the school fired in July. The move comes after the city’s teachers union appealed to the board to intervene on the teachers’ behalf. The eight teachers and three teaching assistants were notified they’d been fired via FedEx and some believe they were targeted for protesting the school’s policies and calling for union representation.

The board’s ruling states that “there is reasonable cause to believe an improper practice has occurred,” and says it will seek an injunction from the State Supreme Court to prevent the firings from going through.

In 2007, an overwhelming majority of teachers at Merrick Academy voted to make the United Federation of Teachers their exclusive bargaining agent. Merrick became the first of several charter schools to unionize as part of the UFT’s campaign to bring the typically non-union schools under contract. But since then the UFT and school’s board have yet to reach a contract agreement. (more…)

The city sent letters to the parents of more than 5,000 frequently absent students today, urging them to make sure their children come to school in September.

When school starts, phone calls will follow the letters, Mayor Bloomberg said today, describing the first fruits of the interagency task force on chronic absenteeism he convened in June.

Following the task force’s recommendations, the city is launching a campaign to boost attendance among the most absent students at 25 schools. Bloomberg announced the campaign, called ”Every Student, Every Day,” today at Brooklyn’s PS 345, where 91 percent of students attended on average last year.

The city’s 90.74 percent average attendance masks the fact that 20 percent of students missed more than 20 days of school last year, Bloomberg said. That figure was first reported by Center for New York City researchers in a 2009 report that called on the city to marshal the efforts of city agencies and community groups.

The 25 schools participating in the Every Student, Every Day pilot will assign volunteers from programs such as City Year, Citizen Schools, and Learning Leaders to mentor the most frequently absent 1,500 students. They’ll also host special attendance-focused parent meetings early this fall. (more…)

Possibly taking a cue from today’s New York Times editorial, Chancellor Joel Klein took to the airwaves today to try and explain the drop in scores.

On WNYC, host Brian Lehrer asked Klein when he knew that the state math and reading tests had become too easy and why he continued to trumpet the yearly score increases. Klein defended the way the city discussed test scores, saying the mayor began calling for tougher standards in 2006. He added that whenever the city called press conferences to announce the test scores, “we always put it in context.”

Anyone who sat through those announcements likely remembers that over time, Klein began to emphasize comparisons of the city’s scores to the rest of the state’s scores, rather than focus on the proficiency rates alone. But unlike state officials, he did not caution parents that their children’s scores were inflated. (more…)

As an elementary school teacher, I have always been afraid of fun. The noise, the energy and the constant excitement of play seemed too close to chaos. And, as I have written in previous posts, I was one of those new teachers who feared chaos more than anything else. I created clear, predictable schedules and hyper-articulated procedures. Every morning, we sang about the rules before the day began.

This summer I have had an opportunity, mostly with my nephews, to watch kids play. I am not their teacher and we were not in a classroom, and so I was able to sit back and, for the past two months, learn a thing or two about fun. These lessons will be invaluable in the coming year. Over the next two posts I will first discuss how why fun can and, in fact, must be used in a successful classroom. In the following post I will suggest ways in which teachers and administrators can create a fun elementary school.

It took me a while to recognize a basic feature of fun: it is not pleasure. This is clearest in organized fun, such as team sports. Very rarely do I see smiling on the baseball diamond or basketball court. Team sports rely on a competitive energy and a drive to succeed that are exciting in their own right, not merely as a means towards the sensation of victory. But it is also rare, in my experience, to see smiles on the jungle gym, where kids play in a non-competitive manner. Watch a group of kids play house, for instance, and you will find kids so engrossed in their make-believe that they don’t take breaks to laugh. Yet at the end of a day of make-believe, those same kids will certainly tell you that they had fun. Fun, in other words, is anything that is wholly engaging. (more…)

• The city doesn’t hold summer school on Rikers Island, even though students would have to come. (NY1)
• The Times says city officials have to do more to help parents understand the test score bubble burst.
• Critics of high school Regents exams say they’re basically impossible to fail. (Albany Times Union)
• Some parents hire coaches to prep their kids for private school playdate interviews. (WSJ)
• Three schools the city treated for PBC contamination aren’t in the clear yet. (Times, WSJ)
• New York City parents want bilingual nannies. (Times)
• A Bronx student who beat the odds got a surprise visit by some Yankees. (Daily News, NY1)
• Randi Weingarten says parents should learn teachers’ ratings, but not from the newspaper. (L.A. Times)
• Georgia’s governor wants an investigation into cheating allegations. (Atlanta Journal Constitution)