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As one might expect, Teachers College professor — and frequent critic of the Obama administration’s education policies — Aaron Pallas has some issues with “Waiting for ‘Superman.’” But his concerns lie not only with the documentary’s evidence, but also with whether the movie will actually change schools.

In the community section and in his Hechinger Report column, Pallas writes:

Having seen the film and bought the book, I’m skeptical that the ”Waiting for ‘Superman’” propaganda campaign is going to have much impact on education policy, despite all of the buzz for and against the film. … ”Waiting for ‘Superman’” doesn’t really lead the viewer to take a particular action. ”We know what works,” “Text this number to help,” and “Get involved” are exhortations that confront the viewer at the film’s conclusion — but they’re hopelessly vague.

And even if one accepts the premise that the message of the film is to support expanding charter schools, or make teachers more accountable for how their students perform, the likelihood of the film actually provoking movement on these objectives is muted by the fact that the nation just went through a Race to the Top competition in which precisely these goals were rewarded. As many states have just passed laws supporting these things, it’s hard to imagine much pressure for even more.

The main action urged on New York City’s “Superman” website is to ask gubernatorial candidates to support Common Core standards — which the state already adopted, Pallas notes.

Chancellor Joel Klein addressed concerns about school overcrowding in Queens yesterday. (Photo via Queens borough president)

Even with new school buildings and thousands of new seats, overcrowding has not abated in Queens schools, city council members complained last night.

At a cabinet meeting of the Queen borough president, where Chancellor Klein dropped by to give a back-to-school update, council members said that the city is only using a tiny fraction of the roughly 4,000 new seats. Meanwhile, some nearby schools are bursting at the seams, they said.

Klein’s questioners included Council members Karen Koslowitz, Danny Dromm, Mark Weprin, and Jimmy Van Bramer, some of whom ran for office as skeptics of the chancellor’s policies.

Koslowitz said that while the new Metropolitan Avenue campus has about 2,000 seats, only about 400 students are currently enrolled. Meanwhile, the nearby Forest Hills High School has nearly twice as many students as it was intended to serve, she said. (more…)

Here’s what you need to know about “Waiting for ‘Superman.” It’s not a film — it’s a propaganda campaign.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The term “propaganda” has gotten a bad rap, ever since its association with 20th-century totalitarian governments promoting troubling political objectives. But there is a long and honorable tradition of propaganda in the genre of documentary films. In its original formulation, “propaganda” is simply a deliberate effort to change what people know, understand and value, for a particular purpose. Propaganda can rely on many different media and symbols to carry its message. Documentary films have often sought to activate a sense of urgency about a social problem or condition that needs our attention. The medium of film is especially powerful because propaganda often appeals to emotion as much as reason, and film is very effective at evoking an emotional response. Much better than, say, a speech by Al Gore, Arne Duncan or Bill Gates.

I had the opportunity to view Waiting for “Superman,” the new documentary by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, at a pre-release screening at Teachers College last week. Based on the early buzz from proponents and detractors alike, I expected to see a film that lived up to its billing as “stirring” or “moving.” (more…)

CFE found that eighth-grade attendance was more closely associated with graduation rates than any other variable.

City high schools that serve similar students graduate their students at wildly different rates, according to a report to be released today.

Among schools with the neediest students, one school graduated 90 percent of students in four years. Another graduated just 34 percent, the report found.

The report confirms that the city’s highest-performing schools overwhelmingly enroll students who already had high test scores and attendance rates. But it also shows that even among schools serving the highest-need students, some do a much better job graduating students than others.

The report was prepared by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the group that successfully fought for an extra $5.4 billion in 2004 for the city’s neediest schools.

The study looked at ninth graders who entered high school in 2004.  It separated high schools into peer groups based on the demographics and eighth-grade academic performances of that class.  (Read the full report here.) (more…)

• The city has sent some students back to eighth grade after briefly attending high school. (Daily News)
• A new report shows that the best city high schools admit the strongest students. (WNYC)
• The East Village Community School released an album to raise funds for its arts program. (WNYC)
• The Archdiocese of NY is closing more Catholic schools and changing how they are financed. (Times)
• The state’s first all-girls charter high school opened this year in Albany. (Times-Union)
• A new report says Boston’s public schools are among the most segregated in the country. (Boston Globe)
• Oprah announced a $1 million grant to five charter school networks. (Philadelphia Inquirer, Denver Post)

• Edu-journalism wrongly follows a “Noah’s Ark view of life,” Nick Lemann says. (New Yorker)
• The Obama administration might make a “Race to the Top” for transportation. (Streetsblog)
• Progress reported by state tests may be realer than previously thought. (Ed Week)
• Is online coursework enough to prepare virtual teachers for virtual classrooms? (Ed Week)
• Oprah said, “This is our wake-up call,” in a special education episode today. (YouTube)
• A video interview with Urban Word, which uses poetry to teach children. (Detention Slip)
• Learning that a student’s virtual and real-life teacher should be the same person. (Ed Week)
• An infographic shows how racially segregated New York City is. (Fast Company)

The annual mayor’s management report on the city schools, out today, offers some old data points but also some new ones. Among them is a look at the Department of Education’s goals for the coming school year — and its explanations for why it didn’t meet some of last year’s goals.

In some cases, the city’s targets actually undershoot where it is already. For example, one of the DOE’s goals for the year is to have 72 percent of students attend school 90 percent of the time. Last year, just over 74 percent of city students met that bar.

But in other cases, the city’s goals are more of a reach. The city wants to see a jump of between 3 and 4 percentage points in the number of graduating seniors passing their math and American history high school Regent’s exams with a score of 55 or higher, for example.

And in cases where the city didn’t make progress, the report offers an unsurprisingly rosy view of why the DOE fell behind.

The backlog of hazardous building violations increased by 25 percent, for example, but the report says the city expected that increase, caused by a rise in fire-door and exit obstructions, to be merely temporary.

The city’s full management report for the Department of Education is below, and more information about the reports in general can be found here. (more…)

The scheduling problems that have plagued high schools like Herbert Lehman High School in the Bronx and William Cullen Bryant High School in Queens have been blamed on poor summer planning and an influx of new students registering.

But the confusion has also been caused by an overloading of the servers the city uses for its high school scheduling system, according to e-mails a reader sent us today.

The reader forwarded us this series of e-mails that the team overseeing the city’s high school scheduling system, called STARS, sent to schools last week. The memos detail how the city has responded to the problem so far, including adding additional servers and memory dedicated to the system.

But our source also tells us that the team overseeing the system has also had its staff cut, reducing their capacity to be responsive to the scheduling process. (We’ve asked the DOE to confirm this and will update when we hear back.) This year was the first year the scheduling system was used by both middle and high schools, the Post reported this morning.

Here’s the e-mail that schools received last Monday, September 13:

As we identified the application was slow last week, we have added additional servers to handle the load and the application was functioning fine on Thursday and Friday. The application is still slow this morning and we further investigated the cause and would require to reset the servers to resolve the issues. (more…)

Brooklyn Arts Academy was not my first school. Indeed, having grown up in suburban Chicago and attended college in Minnesota, I never considered the possibility of living in New York. Still, when I decided to move there to join my girlfriend (now wife) I thought I’d be prepared for it.

I always wanted to be a social studies teacher and teach in an urban public school. Unlike the many college-graduates who experiment with teaching through programs like Teach for America, I chose to get my teaching certificate as an undergraduate. I spent my fifth year of college student-teaching at a public high school of about 1400 students in St. Paul, Minn., and was hired there the following year.

I taught in St. Paul for three years. They were not easy years, but I learned a lot. The school was strapped for cash and teachers were often asked to do more with less: Class sizes were large (up to 44 students in one class) and I was given a quota for photocopies. I taught challenging students: immigrant students who struggled with language, special education students who struggled to fit in, students who struggled with drugs, and students who struggled to sit still. These were necessary challenges for a novice teacher. (more…)

• The city is limiting how far schools’ progress report grades can fall this year. (Daily News)
• The city’s new Innovation Zone is being unsettled by a wave of changes. (Gotham Gazette)
• Classes at Quest to Learn, the city’s video game school, don’t always look like learning. (Times)
• A Queens charter school had its application rejected by the state after applying to the city. (Daily News)
• Nearly 200 students spent the first days of school at Bryant High School doing nothing. (Post)
• New poverty guidelines mean that Stuyvesant HS will receive federal aid for the first time. (Post)
• Unusually, federal immigration authorities have subpoenaed a city student’s school records. (Times)
• The city’s longest-running rubber room occupant is still waiting for his work assignment. (Post)
• One of Newark’s top teachers was among those laid off due to budget cuts. (WSJ)
• Details in “Waiting for ‘Superman’” are out of date, but its director says the point remains. (Times)
• The Post says the teachers union complains about class size only to boost itself.
• The Times says federal suspension data show that schools are abusing zero tolerance.
• Chancellor Klein says school reform is needed for international competitiveness. (Delaware Online)
• Ed Sec Arne Duncan says virtual teachers won’t replace in-the-flesh ones. (Times)
• A psychologist says it’s possible to make tests that reward deep thinking. (Times)