GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Two of the three consortia competing for Race to the Top test grants won. (Edweek)
• The two groups won a combined $330 million to revamp states’ K-12 tests. (WaPo)
• Wendy Kopp reflects on Teach for America’s 20th anniversary. (WSJ)
• Debunking some claims on the virtues of small schools using statistics. (The Atlantic)
• D.C. banned chocolate milk in schools, NYC should do the same say parents. (GS)
• Seattle got a new teachers contract that ties test scores to teacher evaluation. (Seattle Times)
• Mike Petrilli argues against obsessing over the achievement gap. (Flypaper)
• D.C. high school students put their schools questions to Arne Duncan. (NPR)
• Should other states adopt Texas’ top 10 percent rule for college? (GOOD)
• And a made-up study finds that tests are biased against students who don’t care. (Onion)

Rhetoric around the city’s excessed teachers has cooled off since last year, but the issue hasn’t disappeared. More than 1,700 teachers remain on the city’s payroll without full-time teaching positions, officials said today.

Teachers enter the so-called Absent Teacher Reserve pool when they lose their jobs to budget cuts or school closures. At the ATR pool’s height this summer, nearly 3,000 teachers were in excess. Just over 40 percent of those teachers either found jobs, retired, resigned or went on leave, leaving 1,779 still without positions.

That’s roughly the same number who lacked teaching jobs at this time last year. DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte said that there are currently just over 1,200 vacancies in the city’s schools, around 100 fewer open positions than there were just after the start of school last year.

Principals are currently only allowed to hire teachers already on the city’s payroll, except in certain areas like special education, science and some foreign languages. Earlier this summer, the city also relaxed its hiring restrictions for schools in the Bronx that were having trouble filling their open positions. (more…)

With the Democratic primary a few weeks away, the battle over a West Harlem senate seat — turned charter school proxy war — is heating up.

On NY1 last night, Senator Bill Perkins and challenger Basil Smikle debated Perkins’ support for charter schools. Perkins accused Smikle of being too cozy with charter school supporters (“We all know that it’s the hedge fund charter movement that has initiated his candidacy, with the support of course of the New York Post,” he said). And Smikle fought back, charging Perkins with intentionally pitting charter school parents against district school parents.

More interesting than the back and forth is how Perkins is now describing his relationship to charter schools. Months ago, Perkins’ line was that he had been an early supporter of charter schools — he spoke on NBC’s Morning Joe about founding a charter school — but that the reality had not lived up to his expectations. Rather than acting as incubators for new teaching methods traditional public schools could adopt, charter schools had become rouge, unregulated agents, he maintained.

Now, Perkins’ explanation for his position has evolved. Replacing the narrative of charter schools not doing what they were intended to do is one about how his April hearing on charter schools directly impacted and improved the state’s charter school law. (more…)

Earlier this summer District of Columbia school officials decided to ban chocolate milk from their schools. Proponents of flavored milk argue it’s the only way to get students to drink milk, which provides the calcium, protein and vitamin D that children need. But as Colorado school chef Ann Cooper has pointed out, “Saying we need to add sugar and flavoring to milk to get kids to drink it is like saying we need to feed kids apple pie if they don’t like apples.”

NYC Green Schools has proposed that New York City schools also get rid of chocolate milk as the daily consumption of sweetened drinks has no place in a child’s diet. Here’s the truth about the chocolate milk served daily to New York City’s schoolchildren: It contains 22 grams of sugar, which is more sugar than half a can of coke, and it is sweetened with high-fructose corn-syrup, which is listed as the second ingredient.

With 40 percent of city children either overweight or obese, why does the Department of Education’s Office of SchoolFood still insist on chocolate milk? The question is especially vexing because the city decided recently to eliminate sugary drinks from school vending machines, citing irrefutable evidence linking the increased consumption of sugary drinks with the rising rates of childhood obesity.

One SchoolFood official told us that the SchoolFood office is “in the business of food” and that chocolate milk sells. (more…)

• The city has opened its registration centers for new students. (NY1, Insideschools)
• The city is shuffling principals to meet federal requirements. (GothamSchools, Post, NY1, Daily News)
• Community activists want the city to test all school buildings for toxins right away. (Daily News, NY1)
• Pedro Noguera says it’s time to stop pretending that poverty isn’t an obstacle to learning. (Daily News)
• Fifteen new school buildings and 17,000 new seats are opening this year. (GothamSchools, NY1, Post)
• Charter schools came up in a debate between State Sen. Bill Perkins and challenger Basil Smikle. (Post)
• New Jersey’s fired ed chief says Gov. Christie defamed him over the state’s Race to the Top loss. (Times)
• The schools chief in Newark won’t be coming back next year, N.J. officials announced. (WSJ)
• Newark’s school board president, Shavar Jeffries, wants tenure reform and school choice. (Star-Ledger)
• Scholastic Book Clubs is turning to social networking to sell titles. (Times)