GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Success Charter’s Eva Moskowitz has a new political action committee, Great Public Schools. (Post)
• Teachers such as those in Educators 4 Excellence are still offering policy critiques. (Wall Street Journal)
• Former rubber room teachers will report to the DOE’s press and human resources offices today. (NY1)
• In a letter, a McGraw-Hill spokeswoman says some critiques of state tests are unfounded. (Post)
• A mother is suing the city over personal documents dumped by a school. (Post)
• Many of the students at Renaissance Charter High School were unsuccessful in the past. (Daily News)
• The new playground at PS 185 in Brooklyn is based on old-school schoolyard games. (Times)
• Staten Island parents are complaining about worse-than-usual bus problems this year. (S.I. Advance)
• About one-eighth of eligible students have signed up for the city’s free SAT prep classes. (Post)
• Caitlin Flanagan warns against the closure of the Inner City Education Foundation. (Daily News)
• Research says low-stakes tests for younger children, as in China, could be good for learning. (Times)
• D.C. school officials fleshed out criteria for teachers’ test-score bonuses. (Washington Post)
• The Boston Globe says shiny new facilities don’t make schools great.

• The precise kinds of bonuses being offered to D.C. teachers just came out. (Teacher Beat)
• But whether the bonuses are handed out at all could be contingent on Fenty’s reelection. (Teacher Beat)
• Meanwhile, a laid-off teacher’s value-add allegedly includes fathering a student’s child. (WashPost)
• L.A., whose schools are led by two NYC expats, has a new teacher eval proposal. (LA Daily News)
• A teacher at William Maxwell HS credits Bloomberg with ruining his school. (NYCPSPB)
• Ruben Brosbe finds there’s a teacher equivalent of summer-backsliding. (GS Community)
• Poll: Majority of Americans favor teacher evaluations that use student test scores. (Time)
• Will newly lame-duck Chicago Mayor Daley’s next step be education philanthropy? (Sun-Times)
• Is the racial isolation of Albany’s charter schools a problem? (Joanne Jacobs)
• Economist James Heckman says we need to think outside federal department lines. (Ezra Klein)
• Russ Feingold is introducing a lot of NCLB legislation — because of election time. (Politics K12)
• Back-to-school spending habits have yet to bounce from need to want. (Times)

The administrative work centers that evolved from the rubber rooms are getting less crowded, but they may still be too crowded to disappear by the city’s December deadline.

On Monday, nearly 450 teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence will report to work in Department of Education administrative offices throughout the city, instead of to rooms or trailers where they would clock in and spend the day doing nothing. That’s about a third fewer teachers than the 650 teachers who left the rubber rooms at the end of the school year.

But the number of teachers still waiting for their cases to be resolved suggests that the city and union may not be able to meet their goal of clearing the backlog by the end of the year.

The city’s ability to clear through the backlog may depend on the number of teachers still awaiting charges. A GothamSchools analysis published in April showed that the city would face an uphill battle clearing the cases of the roughly 250 teachers who had not been charged at that time even if it spent all of September through December working on just those cases.

That conclusion was grounded in the assumption that the city would resolve all of the roughly 300 cases of teachers who’d already been charged over the summer. But that hasn’t happened. Though the city has dealt with many of these cases, and at a faster rate than before, some remain. (more…)

Before voting to renew Mayor Bloomberg’s control of the city’s schools last summer, New York’s legislature demanded that an expert be brought in to sift through the Department of Education’s data.

Critics of his administration felt the city had juked its school stats. To address their concerns, money was set aside for the Independent Budget Office to hire a DOE data watchdog. Nearly a year later, Raymond Domanico has arrived as the IBO’s Director of Education Research. Prior to  joining the IBO, Domanico worked for 11 years as the Senior Education Advisor to the Industrial Areas Foundation – Metro NY, a network of community organizations.

What about being the IBO’s director of education research appealed to you?

Back in July, I was hosting a group of people from Germany, from Berlin, who had come to visit our schools. At the close of dinner they said to me, “Ray, if you were in charge, what would you do with the school system?” And I gave them the same answer I’ve been giving a lot of people over the last year and a half. I said, “You know, there’s been so much change in the New York City schools and it’s happened so quickly, and we really don’t have a very deep sense of what worked and what has not worked.”

And so I found myself unable to answer the question as to what we should do going forward. It seems to me that given the amount of change that’s gone on, this is the appropriate time to step back and to do some in-depth analysis. (more…)

It’s a reality of teaching in a high-need school that many if not most of your students will suffer some backsliding over the summer time. Studies show that students regress around 2 months in reading and 2-3 months in math. The effects are especially pronounced in lower socioeconomic communities and among students who are English language learners. So, suffice it to say, the first day of school is always a little interesting/overwhelming/daunting at schools like mine.

But after Wednesday, I have to confess that students are not the only ones who backslide during the dog days of summer. While my students may have suffered learning loss from an extended period undoubtedly spent playing video games, watching cartoons, and visiting water parks, I felt equally dumbed down by “teaching loss.” While the students and I shared some poetry, created our class rules, and played a few icebreaker games, I still have to say I felt completely … off on Wednesday.

It’s hard to find your rhythm after two months of free concerts, beer gardens, and beach trips. The first day is also just generally tricky, because the essential lessons based around rules, routines and procedures don’t align with the usual flow of a workshop model-based day. Excuses aside, I’m anxious to overcome the summer rustiness that slowed down my teaching this week. In the meantime recognizing my own backsliding might force me to stop complaining about the kids’.

The difference between being anti-testing and being anti-today’s testing regime can sometimes get glossed over. But the wide space between the two positions was demonstrated damningly in a paper published this spring.

Written by two vehement advocates for the national tests now under construction, the paper is mainly a blueprint for what a re-imagined national testing system could look like. But it begins with a succinct, damning description of what its authors call our current “testing bind”:

Though no one intended to do so, we have created a testing bind that, as it tightens, drives attention away from the intended standards. The effects are greatest in the poorest schools. The nation’s current approach to raising achievement and increasing equity in the education system is having an effect opposite from the intended one. It is trapping poor children in a basic‐skills teaching program that gives them little chance to acquire the deeper knowledge and abilities we seek for everyone. And it may be lowering the learning opportunities even for many more privileged children as schools turn their energies to the test‐based basic skills program.

The paper, “An American Examination System,” is written by two people who may very well have a hand in shaping the new testing regime: University of Pittsburgh professor Lauren B. Resnick, who helped draft the “common core” standards endorsed by President Obama and many states, and Wireless Generation CEO Larry Berger, whose company is likely to make a bid to build the technological pieces of the national tests that will be tied to those standards. (more…)

The 2009-10 school year was quite challenging, so I am glad to have it behind me. But as I look ahead to this year, I’m finding myself excited and nervous in equal amounts around the three parts of my professional life:

Teaching
The last time I taught Ancient Global History was during the first George W. Bush administration, and I was living south of the Mason-Dixon line. This year, as my school is in the third year of bringing in a new social studies scope and sequence, my 11th-grade class will be Global History Through 1900. I never thought I would be excited to teach this content again, but I’m actually as excited for this class as I was my first year teaching American history.

Planning this course gives me two firsts: It’s both the first time I’m planning a course where I am really confident that I know what I am doing and the first time I’ve had a planning team to work with me. Both of these factors give me confidence that this will be the best course I’ve ever taught. We have a strong curriculum and some great projects planned, and I feel like I have mastered the side of the course that focuses on preparing students to take the Regents exam.

With that said, this is also the first time I’ve taught a new course with a team, and I have a teaching partner in one of my three sections. I’m nervous about relying on others and about the compromises that will be necessary to make my partnership a success. (more…)

• Just over 400 teachers previously in the rubber room will begin desk jobs Monday. (NY1)
• Some families were surprised to learn schools are closed Thursday and Friday. (Daily News)
• Schools on Staten Island take varying approaches to teaching about September 11. (SI Advance)
• Chicagoans are wondering what mayoral control will mean after Daley. (Chicago Public Radio)
• The ACLU is suing California school districts for charging fees for required coursework. (Times)

• Visiting his daughter’s classroom, a father who’s also a teacher feels frustrated. (Weblogged)
• Advice from 1954 about how to make a classroom un-dismal and “pleasanter.” (ACSD)
• Those Philadelphia turnstiles were approved in an un-public — and common — process. (Notebook)
• The Marist poll that found low support for Bloomberg on ed found lots for charters. (HuffPost)
• Jay Mathews asks Obama not to interrupt school time with his education address. (Class Struggle)
• Does Michelle Rhee’s campaigning for Mayor Fenty violate the Hatch Act? (Learning Matters)
• Noguera: “ideology and favoritism,” not research, set Obama’s education agenda. (The Nation)
• A nationally broadcast story about Mayor Bloomberg’s stumbling with the schools. (NPR)
• Joe Williams tells D.C. to elect Adrian Fenty for the sake of the city’s schools. (HuffPost)

Davis Guggenheim’s education documentary “Waiting for Superman” doesn’t come out for another two weeks, but teachers union president Randi Weingarten has already assumed a fighting stance.

In an email sent to reporters yesterday — most likely in response to this NY Magazine review — Weingarten describes the movie as a moving, perhaps even emotionally manipulative, inaccurate portrayal of the public school system.

She criticizes Guggenheim for his flattering portrayal of charter schools and goes so far as to say that most charter schools perform worse than district schools. They are “an escape hatch-sometimes superior, most often inferior,” she writes.

New York City’s United Federation of Teachers runs a charter school in Brooklyn, which has recently received mixed performance reviews. (more…)