GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Four of the 15 campaigns the lobbying group Democrats for Education Reform is targeting this fall are in New York.

The group is actively raising money for Andrew Cuomo’s gubernatorial campaign, the re-election campaigns of State Senator Craig Johnson and Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, and for Basil Smikle’s race against State Senator Bill Perkins. DFER also wants to raise money to run other campaigns to influence other state senate races, but a report the organization released today didn’t specify which races.

Hoyt and Johnson led Albany’s efforts to pass legislation that helped New York win the federal Race to the Top competition. Both supported lifting the cap on charter schools early on, ignoring fierce opposition from the teachers’ unions — which aren’t endorsing them in this election. Cuomo has been less vocal so far on education, but DFER’s financing is a sign that he might favor the kind of policies the group endorses: the spread of charter schools, the introduction of merit pay, and the weakening of teacher tenure policies.

DFER has spent more than $17 million in three years trying to influence local elections, according to the report. The amount appears to have jumped recently. Last year, the group’s executive director told GothamSchools that DFER had spent “a few million” since 2006. The energy stems in part from the Race to the Top, President Barack Obama’s grant competition that prompted 34 states to change their laws to match Obama’s reform goals, which DFER vigorously supports.

Read DFER’s six-page report (in pdf) on its political goals here.

A Manhattan high school principal accused of tackling a student last spring has been removed and is facing disciplinary charges, Department of Education officials confirmed.

Juan Alvarez, principal of the International High School for Business and Finance — now called College Academy — was forced out of his school last week after an Office of Special Investigations report found that he had been overly aggressive with a student. DOE officials would not release the report, but a teacher in the George Washington campus, where Alvarez’s school is housed, said that Alvarez had tackled a student from another school in the building.

City officials have not decided whether to fire Alvarez. The high school’s new interim acting principal is Junior Miller, the former principal of the School for the Physical City, which was closed for poor performance at the end of last school year.

Klein listened to a student's presentation on Theodore Roosevelt yesterday.

Yesterday in an eighth-grade social studies class, Chancellor Joel Klein pulled out his wallet and gave students a window into his philosophy of leadership.

Prompted by a student’s summer project on Theodore Roosevelt, the chancellor stood and removed a slip of paper from his wallet. He explained that he carries around a quotation from a speech Roosevelt gave at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1910.

Here’s the full text of what Klein read the students:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man or woman who points out how the strong man or woman stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself or herself in a worthy cause.

The quotation sheds light on the worldview of a chancellor whose boasts about narrowing the achievement gap have recently been challenged and who is sometimes accused of steamrolling over public dissent. (more…)

There is a scene in the movie The Hurt Locker where a soldier who has just returned to civilian life after years defusing bombs in Iraq stands paralyzed in a grocery aisle full of cereal boxes. This scene resonates with me. This September is the first one in five years where I won’t be “in the trenches” in a city school.

From 2006 until June, I taught tenth-grade history at a small Brooklyn high school that I will call the Brooklyn Arts Academy. It was a relief to leave a struggling and at times dysfunctional school. Yet as I test the waters of the nine-to-five work world, I feel like something is missing and I find myself unable to let go. Plus, like the soldier in the cereal aisle, I don’t seem to know what to do with my newfound freedom.

So I have decided to chronicle the tumultuous four-year saga that marked my tenure at the Brooklyn Arts Academy. My blog is titled “Growing Pains” because that’s what the school experienced during my time there, which began at the start of the school’s second year, when only ninth- and tenth-graders were enrolled. Every new school must create structures, communicate expectations, and work to build an institutional identity and memory. This process is bound to be messy anywhere. But at the Brooklyn Arts Academy, which had a disorganized and at times hostile administration and an alarmingly high teacher turnover rate, growing up was especially problematic. I stubbornly stuck it out for four years, longer than every other teacher who started with me save one, and so bore witness to enough drama to last a lifetime.

Over the next year, I’ll revisit this drama from the shock of my first day to the bittersweet goodbye of my last one. (more…)

• Nearly a quarter of students didn’t show up for yesterday’s one-day school week. (Daily News)
• At some schools, students picked up their class schedules and went back home. (Post)
• We live-blogged Chancellor Klein’s five-borough schools tour. (GothamSchools)
• Klein and the union president chose very different schools to visit. (Wall Street Journal )
• City schools and teachers will have to do more with less this year. (New York Times)
• Bullied as a child, Governor Paterson signed an anti-bullying-in-schools bill. (Post)
• Former rubber room teachers are working in district offices and food services. (Post)
• Schools saved from closure are opening with fewer students, teachers, and classes. (Daily News)
• These 19 need to be replaced, not given more money, Klein said. (WNYC)
• The city wants the right to open gifted programs without holding public hearings. (Riverdale Press)
• Two Chinatown schools are in line for new classroom additions this year. (Downtown Express)
• 88 new school safety agents graduated from the NYPD last week. (Queens Courier)
• Madonna’s daughter Loudres is in the drama program at LaGuardia HS. (Daily News)
• After losing Race to the Top, NJ is reviewing the education consultants it hired. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

• 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…)