GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The city’s first-day attendance was 77 percent, down from 84 percent last year. (no link)
• A teacher who ended the year in the rubber room still doesn’t know where to report for duty. (Fidgety)
• Starting the school year off with a poem about teaching in the modern era. (Ruben Brosbe)
• Dana Lawit on what innovations in pencil technology tell her about teaching. (GothamSchools)
• Reader photos from the first day of school depict a lot of shellshocked students. (City Room)
• A former blogger describes how his school reacted to landing on a federal failure list. (Jay Mathews)
• A questionnaire from her son’s Brooklyn school caused one mother to ask who he really is. (Finslippy)
• A city teacher who relocated to Beirut is amazed by the positive feelings at her new school. (NY Teacher)
• Diane Ravitch lays out the topics she sees dominating discussion this school year. (Bridging Differences)
• A D.C. teacher says the District’s students, not Michelle Rhee, define the city’s schools. (Mother Jones)
• Houston is looking for individual tutoring to make a big difference — and it might. (Starting an Ed School)
• New-wave speed bumps in Canada put children first. (Yahoo News)
• The After School Corporation helps parents practice reading with their children. (Vimeo)

One of the state’s charter school authorizers is putting the brakes on a city directive that would force all charters to form parent associations.

Yesterday, the head of the city’s charter school office issued a memo to all charter school leaders in the city — even at schools the city did not authorize — saying that state law required them to form parent groups. The city would oversee schools’ compliance with the new requirement, the memo said.

Hours later, the director of the State University of New York’s Charter School Institute, Jonas Chartock, issued a memo of his own. It said that SUNY-authorized schools can ignore the city’s directive. (Chartock’s full letter to SUNY charter schools is below.)

Charter schools are exempt from the law that governs the rest of the state’s schools, Chartock said. And because the new parent association requirement is part of that broader law, it does not apply to charter schools, he said.

The confusion centers on the minute details of amendments to a law that were hastily written in late-night negotiations in May. (more…)

Lehman High School has metal detectors this year and a new neighborhood business: a phone storage truck. (via Twitter)

Someone must have tipped off this phone storage business to Lehman High School’s new metal detectors.

As of today, any of the Bronx high school’s several thousand students hoping to sneak their cell phones into the building will be out of luck. Though many schools ignore the city’s cell phone ban, those with scanners are often more severe, causing students to turn to bodegas and local businesses for storage space.

In the words of whoever posted this photo on Twitter: “Look who’s making 4,000 dollars today in front of Lehman High School!”

Even with names like “Pure Loyalty,” underground storage businesses are often unreliable and some students choose to evade the scanners through various and complicated forms of trickery.

Near the end of last year I switched over from pens to pencils. The shift was born of convenience: Walking down the hallway, I could always find a pencil on the floor. Some students didn’t care for my lost-boy pencils, saying they were old (well loved, I assured them), wrote funny (lead is different then ink, I explained), and boring (I couldn’t beat a lavender gel pen). But over time I came appreciate the flexibility and subtle security of writing something I could erase.

Cleaning out my room at the end of the year I safely stored my ragtag collection of pencils. I assured myself that this fall my students would fall in love with pencils and the potential for self-improvement that they embody just as I did.

So it was with great excitement that I read this summer about Sharpie’s new Liquid Pencil. The Liquid Pencil promises to combine a pencil’s capacity for erasure with the flow of an ink pen. This new shiny innovation would change everything, I thought. Eager to get my hands on one, I scoured back to school sales at my local Brooklyn office supply stores.

This is how many teachers spend their summers. Not fixating on writing utensils (which I’ll admit in the grand scheme of the teaching profession plays but a small role) but rather reflecting on the past and planning for the future. (more…)

As he does every year, Chancellor Joel Klein takes a five-borough tour on the first day of school. For the second time, we’re chronicling his journey and the first day of school for the city’s 1.1 million students in 1,600 schools. Anna and Maura will be sending dispatches from the road all day.

Want to add your own first-day-of-school stories or pictures? Email us.

2:59 p.m. And that’s a wrap. PS 65 has broken out the celebratory pizza, and Klein is taking a slice of his favorite snack. “That’s what you should blog about,” he said to Maura, who’s now on the way back to the GothamSchools office, the year’s first first day of school complete. Only 179 more school days until summer vacation.

2:58 p.m. A final note about the PS 65 Dolphins. Why are you like dolphins? Principal Scamardella asked a group of third-graders. Their answers ranged from “because we’re nice” to “because we keep our hands to ourselves.”

2:57 p.m. Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew just called to respond to Klein’s claim that he didn’t come along on Klein’s first-day tour for political reasons. The real reason was purely logistical, he said.

“Yesterday they invited us and I had already told people I was going to different schools,” Mulgrew said. “I don’t know why he’s trying to make this about him and I.”

2:50 p.m. The city just posted a peek into what reporters missed while they were stuck in traffic earlier today: Manhattan Village Academy students discussing the importance of leadership.

2:43 p.m. Principal Scamardella says familiarizing PS 65 teachers with the “common core” standards for what students should learn is the biggest task ahead of her. She also says PS 65 is devising a new way to grade students that allows students to participate in the grading process.

2:36 p.m. Klein pops into a science class where the teacher is reading aloud from The Secret Science Project that Almost Ate the School, a children’s book that she paints as a cautionary tale for students who don’t take their schoolwork seriously — “especially in science!” Unlike most of the teachers Klein visited today, she doesn’t interrupt her instruction. She’s animated, and her students are engaged. (more…)

• City schools are starting classes today with higher expectations but not more funding. (Daily News)
• With a new school year comes a new round of fighting over how to fix failing schools. (NY1)
• This year’s strange first-week-of-school schedule hasn’t been an issue in recent memory. (Times)
• Most parents who don’t like the strange schedule are still sending their kids to school today. (Daily News)
• To avoid a schedule like New York’s, Los Angeles isn’t starting school until Monday. (L.A. Times)
• A judge failed to rule on Staten Island middle school bus service, leaving some students stranded. (NY1)
• This week is not just the start of public school but the opening of private school applications. (Times)
• Higher standards on state tests could put more students at risk of being left back. (Daily News)
• Fred Smith says problems with state tests go far deeper than inflated scores. (New York Post)
• The Daily News says improving state tests should include a look at how they treat Christianity.
• City schools won’t be offering flu vaccines this year. (Daily News)
• The principal of Brooklyn School of Inquiry has an unorthodox past and parent support. (Daily News)
• Leon Goldstein High School is counteracting budget cuts by selling homegrown software. (Daily News)
• Advocates are continuing to push for more transparency and discretion in student discipline. (WSJ)
• A Brooklyn pizzeria is offering free slices to students with good grades. (Daily News)