GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• A former KIPP teacher explains how he lost faith in the dominant “reform” narrative. (Ed News Colorado)
• The Gates Foundation, which once ejected me from a meeting, wants to be more transparent. (AP)
• A Duncan aide passed off a fictional Chicken Soup for the Soul story as true. (Virginian-Pilot)
• First-year teachers should speak up and ask for help, but be ready to hold their own hands. (Miss Brave)
• At a Chicago “turnaround” high schools, the first day began with a “zero tolerance” declaration. (Catalyst)
• The best metaphor for school policy fads might be a hurricane, not a pendulum. (Larry Cuban)
• Back-to-school fashion tips from frugal, reasonable, dress-code-adhering Hollywood. (Daily News)
• “Waiting for Superman” director Davis Guggenheim thinks teachers are most important. (HuffPost)
• Dan Brown thinks Davis Guggenheim’s prescriptions for improving teaching are flawed. (HuffPost)
• Staffers at the U.S. Department of Education are very miserable, a survey says. (Politics K12)
• Some charter schools might get left out of the $10 billion edu-jobs bill funding. (Politics K12)

The 14 high schools saved from closure by a union lawsuit will open tomorrow with significantly lowered enrollments. A majority of the schools have seen their incoming ninth grade cohorts cut by half or more over last year.

Though enrollment numbers at the schools have increased since July, when the Department of Education last reported them, they’re still far below where they’ve been in years past. Many of the schools admitted fewer students through the high school admission process this year and are taking in more “over the counter” students. These are students who don’t apply to the schools, but are placed in them by the DOE, and more are likely to enroll in the coming weeks.

Of the schools the city wanted to close, the Choir Academy of Harlem had its ninth grade enrollment drop the most, from 64 students last year to 21 this year, a 67 percent decline. Brooklyn’s Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School is a close second; incoming freshman class is 66 percent smaller than last year’s class.

New Day Academy, a 6-12 school, saw the least change. Last year it opened with 79 ninth graders and, as of today, it has 73. (more…)

For the first time, the Department of Education’s charter school office is forcing all New York City charters to start parent associations.

The change is a direct result of the new charter cap legislation that Albany passed in May. In addition to doubling the number of charters allowed to open, the legislature amended state education law to say that charter schools located in New York City must establish parent or parent-teacher associations.

What remained unclear over the summer was whether the new provision would be enforced by the city, or by each school’s individual authorizer.

Today, the acting director of the city’s charter school office, Aaron Listhaus, sent a memo to leaders of all of the city’s charter schools — regardless of who authorized them or when — instructing them to start forming parent organizations if they have not done so already.

Listhaus gave the schools an October 1 deadline to check in with his office on their progress starting a parent group. Charter school authorizers have never before had to track whether their schools have parent groups. Hard numbers about how many schools will be affected by the change were not available today. But Listhaus and a spokeswoman from the New York City Charter School Center estimated that a majority of city charter schools currently do have parent organizations.

The full memo from Listhaus to charter school leaders is below: (more…)

What does a school do when the first day back is a Wednesday, but students have the rest of the week off?

While some parents and students are threatening to boycott the first day of school, one school has found a different way to use the day, though not for instruction.

The Beacon School, a selective high school on the Upper West Side, is using tomorrow as a purely administrative day. According to the school schedule posted online, most students will report to an advisory session for a little over an hour. Freshmen will get their photo IDs and all students can stay for an activities fair and lunch, but it’s not required, making the day more of an official check-in than a school day.

Chancellor Joel Klein and city teachers union president Michael Mulgrew have been careful not to say too much in public about contract negotiations, which started almost exactly a year ago and have been stalled for months.

But in New York magazine this week, Klein wished out loud for a New York City teachers contract that looks like the one hammered out this year in Washington, D.C.

That contract includes, for the first time, a voluntary performance-pay plan and allows principals to use a student test scores, rather than teacher seniority, to decide who to cut during budget reductions. It also limits the amount of time that excessed teachers can remain on payroll while they search for new positions (in New York, teachers can remain salaried indefinitely after they lose their position in a school).

Those changes are some (though by no means all) of the provisions that Klein is seeking in New York and which the United Federation of Teachers has fiercely resisted. But American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten insisted to the magazine’s reporter that the D.C. contract does not bring radical change:

Over breakfast in Washington, she was at pains to argue that, all appearances to the contrary, the union had made no large concessions, that “tenure was preserved intact,” that the contract “isn’t the breakthrough that New Yorkers and others think it is.” (When I put these claims to Klein, he fairly snorted: “If there are no concessions in there, give it to me! I’ll take that concession-free contract tomorrow!”)

Students and the mayor showed up at PS 111 in Long Island City, Queens last year for the first day of school.

The first day of school is chaotic, stressful, and exciting — all ingredients for an excellent photo opportunity. Amid the tumult of tomorrow, please take a few seconds to capture your students and children at their finest. They and their schools won’t look so polished until next year the next quality review, so send us your photos!  Email your back-to-school photos to tips@gothamschools.org

Teachers are starting the school year with 37.5 more minutes a week to figure out how to raise test scores.

In an email sent to principals on Friday, Chancellor Joel Klein announced that schools are now allowed to convert one period of tutoring time into teacher planning sessions aimed at boosting scores. The four-times-weekly, 37.5-minute sessions were introduced in February 2006 for teachers to offer small-group instruction.

“This time must be used in a structured way to look at data and student work, to examine curriculum and teacher practice and to diagnose what changes and supports are needed to improve performance for the students who need it most,” Klein wrote.

Klein’s email announcement marks the city’s first concrete response to the state’s more stringent test score standards. In July, when the scores were announced, Klein said schools would have to give struggling students “more attention” but didn’t specify how. Mostly, he and Mayor Bloomberg have focused on defending the city’s progress despite lower scores. In the email to principals, Klein dismissed challenges to the city’s claims as “belligerent critiques.”

Klein’s complete back-to-school email to principals is below: (more…)

News from New York City:

• Some parents and students say they are boycotting the first day of school tomorrow. (Post)
• One of those boycotting families say they’re heading to the Finger Lakes. (Post)
• Family advocates in half of city school districts didn’t answer their phones last week. (Post)
• Mayor Bloomberg said that’s because parents with school questions should just call 311. (Post)
• Teachers accused of wrongdoing don’t have to report for duty until next week. (Post)
• Staten Island families whose bus service was cut don’t know how they’ll get to school. (NY1)
• Half of city residents think Bloomberg has improved schools, according to a new poll. (Daily News)
• The superintendent of District 26 in Queens held a student back despite her teacher’s advice. (Post)
• Residents of a Harlem housing project are trying to stop a charter school from opening. (Daily News)
• A long-under-scrutiny principal of a high school in the Lafayette building was removed. (Post)
• The Ghetto Film School supports the Cinema School high school and turns teens into directors. (Times)
• New York City’s public schools are increasingly generating football stars. (Post)
• Chancellor Klein says “Waiting for Superman” is more powerful than “An Inconvenient Truth.” (NY Mag)
• Merrick Academy Charter School has rehired three of the 11 teachers it fired by FedEx. (Daily News)
• Brooklyn’s PS 261 threw some books and electronic equipment away. (Daily News)
• A Queens mom says her disabled son was sexually assaulted by fellow kindergartners. (Daily News)
• A new film focuses on what students in New York City schools are being fed for lunch. (WSJ)

And beyond:

• Across the country, schools are opening this year having changed major education policies. (WSJ)
• Newark is the latest city to see teachers, not administrators, head up schools. (Times)
• A retirement incentive contributed to a jump in teacher retirements statewide. (PressConnects.com)
• New York school districts are still trying to figure out what higher test standards mean. (Times Union)
• Albany’s charter schools are virtually all black and Hispanic. (Times Union)
• The $600 million spent on the school at the site of RFK’s assassination has raised questions. (Times)
• California is moving toward requiring children to be 5 before starting kindergarten. (L.A. Times)
• A look at D.C.’s schools if chief Michelle Rhee chooses to move on post-primary. (Washington Post)