GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• In Philadelphia, the school reform commission spent $1 million on turnstiles. (Notebook)
• CNN launches week of programming featuring concrete ways to improve schools. (CNN)
• 49 million students go back to school this fall; about 3 million will finish high school. (NCES)
• DFER endorsed Smikle, Bing, Hoyt, Squadron, Clark, Fields, Senator Diaz. (Daily News)
• A teacher is criticized for a lesson about derogatory words like “bastard” and “wuss.” (WashPost)
• A Minnesota charter school is housed on two semi-trailers. (Bemidji Pioneer)
• A new radio documentary explores proposed changes to teacher training. (America RadioWorks)
• Who wants the chance to fill David Steiner’s shoes at Hunter College? (Rick Hess Straight Up)
• Philadelphia’s mayor is making the black-and-Latino male dropout rate. (Inquirer)
• A fancy school in Moldova launches with new teaching materials, indoor toilets. (Jezebel)
• Ratings of one group proposing to rewrite tests differed “wildly” depending on reviewer. (EdWeek)
• The case for “Twitter-sized queries that unpack into full-bodied math… investigations.” (dy/dan)

New York Magazine’s news blog Daily Intel ran a post this morning summing up the Wall Street Journal’s take on the number of unemployed teachers who are “ignoring openings,” as the Journal put it. Both publications got facts wrong, but in their own ways.

Daily Intel’s post adheres faithfully to the WSJ and Department of Education’s line until the very last paragraph when its author took a left turn. She writes:

The Journal thinks Klein is holding on to the pool for philosophical purity. “For Mr. Klein, forcing teachers into vacancies would go against his philosophy of giving principals market-based autonomy and accountability.” So in order to promote free-market principals and accountability, Klein wants to offer job security for life to laid-off employees during a recession with no stipulations for getting them back into the city’s workforce? We must have missed that social-studies class.

Klein does not want to offer job security for life to laid-off employees during a recession with no stipulations for getting them back into the city’s workforce. In fact, he wants the opposite. (more…)

Students at 100 New York City schools will be among the first to take early versions of the new standardized tests being built with federal dollars.

The schools will test early versions of new third- through eleventh-grade exams that a consortium of 26 states — New York included — is creating. The same schools will get extra funding this year to pilot the new common core standards in their classrooms.

Because New York is a “governing state” in the consortium, its education officials have already agreed to begin using the new tests by the 2014 school year. It also means that New York officials, including city Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky, are helping design the new tests.

The PARCC group — Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers — won a $170 million federal grant yesterday, which it will use to build the tests.

The new exams will complement the new national education standards that New York has also agreed to take on. They will also completely overhaul the form that state standardized exams take, and when they’re given, Suransky said today. (more…)

With the school year about to begin, Department of Education officials are highlighting the fact that many of the city’s out-of-work teachers haven’t tried to find new jobs.

The common response from excessed teachers is that they have made an effort, but it hasn’t paid off — they aren’t finding work. Some report that the city’s website makes it difficult to apply for open positions.

Two readers, both in the pool of teachers who’ve been excessed and haven’t found new work, commented saying that they can’t see job vacancies because the department’s website doesn’t recognize them as excessed teachers.

One possible cause of this problem could be that some principals don’t understand how to register their excessed teachers with the city. When this happens, the DOE and its website don’t recognize the teacher’s new status.  (more…)

What’s the most resilient parasite? An idea. A single idea from the human mind can build cities. An idea can transform the world and rewrite all the rules.

~ Cobb, in Christopher Nolan’s “Inception”

The basic theme of the movie “Inception” is that ideas are incredibly powerful, but that placing them in people’s heads is very difficult. You can’t just put an idea in someone’s head that you want them to have because they will immediately recognize it as foreign and reject it; rather, you have to put more foundational ideas in minds, and then let them grow into larger ideas.

This seems to be an important lesson for those of us trying to change things in schools. We need to get to the ideas that serve as the foundation for the practices we know our students need. As I got ready to return to work this week, this idea of the challenges and power of inception resonated in my mind. It hits three questions that have been bouncing around my brain all summer:

1. Seven years after I first entered the classroom, what are the two or three ideas I have about teaching that are most worth fighting for and spreading?
2. As I become department chair and step into a pedagogical leadership role for the first time, what ideas are going to be most valuable for new and struggling teachers?
3. As my school enters its seventh year, how do we spread to new and resistant staff members the ideas that have made us successful? (more…)

• Families of about 2,000 pre-k students might wait til Tuesday to find out their placements. (Daily News)
• State Senator Suzi Oppenheimer plans to hold hearings on the re-calibrated state test scores. (Post)
• About 1,700 teachers currently lack full-time teaching positions. (GothamSchools, Daily News, WNYC)
• Many of them have not applied for new jobs or attended recruitment fairs. (Post, Wall Street Journal)
• The federal government gave states $330 million  to develop new tests. (Times, Washington Post, CSM)
• An education professor argues that politics, not proven results, drive Obama education policy. (SF Gate)
• Staten Island residents rallied against a city plan to reduce bus service for middle schools. (SI Advance)
• Opposition is growing to a city plan to help build a new Harlem Childrens Zone building. (Daily News)
• Merrick Academy is re-hiring three of the 11 teachers it laid off via FedEx. (Daily News, WNYC)
• A Staten Island teacher who sued the city over her suspension for using vulgar slang has settled. (Post)
• The L.A. Board of Ed formally asked for test scores to be used in teacher evaluations. (L.A. Times)

• 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…)