GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Today was Michelle Rhee’s last day as Washington, D.C.’s schools chancellor. (GOOD)
• D.C.’s teachers union conceded that Rhee didn’t make up the budget gap. (WaPo)
• One of a teacher’s top students is struggling in her other, larger classes. (Pissed Off Teacher)
• Sara Mead: there are too many poor students to make middle-class schools integrated. (EdWeek)
• Even high-performing schools are failing to meet federal “progress” standards. (Flypaper)
• There are promising new models of remedial education at community colleges. (Hechinger)
• A District 2 parent contests Chancellor Klein’s comments at a public meeting. (NYC Parents)
• A group of parent activists threw its support behind Tony Avella for New York State Senate. (Ed Notes)
• The AFT, not the NEA, has a member on the new NJ teacher effectiveness task force. (The Record)
• And happy Halloween! One WA school canceled its celebration for disrespecting witches. (ABC)

Put the Department of Education’s Deputy Chancellor for Accountability Shael Polakow-Suransky in a room with Diane Ravitch, one of the city’s most outspoken critics, and you might reasonably expect sparks to fly.

But when NYU’s Wagner Education Policy Studies Association put them together on a panel earlier this week, where they agreed turned out to be notable.

The topic of the panel was how federal involvement shapes local education policy. (I moderated the panel; Evan Stone, the founder of Educators 4 Excellence, also spoke.)

Ravitch opened by sharply criticizing the move to hold teachers and schools accountable for their students’ scores on standardized tests. But when talk turned to how future standardized tests should be built, Ravitch and Suransky agreed with each other. Ravitch said:

I’m very supportive of the idea of developing new assessments, and I think it’s a very important thing. But it will take years.

Just as these common core standards were written in a little over a year — it took me three years working on the California history standards. I worked on history standards in other states, and it was never done in only a year. So I would like to think that it’s going to take a lot of time to do this well because anything that’s done hurriedly is not going to survive…. (more…)

Infuriated by the union’s success in barring the closure of 19 public schools, Mayor Michael Bloomberg wondered to reporters last month why any parent would send their children to a “failing school.”

At Christopher Columbus High School, one of the 19, there are as many answers to that question as there are freshmen.

Half of the Bronx school’s 300 ninth graders selected Columbus as part of the high school admissions process. The other half were sent there by the city, sometimes after failing to find slots at other schools. Columbus’s principal, Lisa Fuentes, said a parent came to her last week after nine other Bronx high schools had turned her daughter away. Though she was old enough to be a high school senior, the student had only half the credits she’d need to graduate, making it impossible for her to get a diploma by the year’s end. Now she’s a Columbus student.

Today, I met four freshmen, each with a different story for how she or he came to Columbus. Three of them chose the school. That means that as eighth graders, Leslie Anne Alcantara, Gregory Woodson, and Edwin Santiago listed Columbus among their twelve preferred schools in the high school admissions process. (more…)

This week we started our after school program. Among the students in my group is Baby Face, my most challenging student. Throughout the day he seems unable to stay focused on the task whether it’s class discussions on the rug or independent work at his desk. Whatever the situation, he is either talking to his neighbor or getting into some other mischief.

But that changes during after school. In the after school program he is much more focused, and much more productive. I still sense a lot of the same pent up energy I see throughout the day, and yes it’s only two days into our program, but so far, he’s practically a star of the class. Why is that?

The most obvious explanation is the class size. Only six kids showed up from my roster yesterday. Today there were seven. With fewer students around, there’s fewer distractions for him. There’s also fewer temptations, in the form of his buddies, to cause distractions. So, while there’s still moments where he seems almost uncontrollably worked up, his work’s been mostly exemplary.

The other theory I have — which doesn’t negate the first — is based on another student in the group. (more…)

• SUNY wants to try fixing failing charter schools instead of shutting them down. (Post)
• The city says it is considering closing up to 47 schools this year. (GS, Times, Post, WSJ, NY1)
• What the two candidates for governor are saying about their education plans. (WNYC)
• The school where the principal wrote an error-filled email has other problems, too. (Daily News)
• Buffalo’s teachers’ contract covers cosmetic treatments, last year costing $9 million. (Post)
• Computers were stolen from Manhattan’s HS of Arts and Technology. (Post)
• Michelle Rhee’s kept busy until her last day as D.C. schools chancellor. (Washington Post)

• Nearly 1,800 city students will get free tickets to a Broadway show on the Scottsboro Boys. (NYTimes)
• P.S. 184 Shuang Wen is protesting a NY1 story on its after-school Mandarin program. (The Lo-Down)
• Schools have one more day to fill 850 vacancies before schools lose money for them. (InsideSchools)
• Buffalo teachers spent more than $9 million in public money on cosmetic surgery. (Buffalo News)
• Voters like mayoral control but don’t think Bloomberg has improved schools, a new poll says. (WSJ)
• A total of 41 states have now adopted common core standards. (Curriculum Matters)
• A challenge to the idea that economic integration will always boost poor students. (Flypaper)
• The Chamber of Commerce is backing candidates who favor scrapping USDOE. (Politics K-12)
• Special education advocates recommended keeping local diplomas available for now. (InsideSchools)
• Only a fifth of science teachers feel they have resources for hands-on experiments. (Answer Sheet)

Teachers union President Michael Mulgrew is charging that the city’s new engagement strategy for schools that could face closure next year is too little, too late.

City officials said today that they plan to ramp up communication with parents and staff at 47 schools that could face closure. The move is in part a response to a successful lawsuit the union brought last year, in which two courts ruled that the city failed to meet state legal requirements for notifying schools and their communities about plans for closure.

But Mulgrew said today that the public notice and earlier meetings are not enough. Rather than helping the schools improve at the first signs of struggle, he said, the city let them get worse, until they became candidates for closure.

“Engaging the community in the process I think is a good thing,” Mulgrew said. “At the same time, if we know we have schools that are turning in the wrong direction, why are we waiting til now to reach out to them?” (more…)

The city’s most established for-profit charter school management company is rebranding and recreating itself in light of a new law that forbids the group from running schools.

As of tomorrow, Victory Schools will be named Victory Education Partners and it will no longer be a traditional management company. The group will retain its for-profit status, but will continue to work in schools by offering a variety of services, from professional development to back-office support, that schools can choose to purchase.

The change was prompted by the passage of a new law last spring that doubled the cap on charter schools, and also barred for-profit companies from operating or managing new charter schools. One of three for-profit charter management groups work with New York City schools, Victory had to change or close shop in the city. It’s choosing to change.

Since 1999, Victory has managed 13 New York charter schools and it continues to run seven of them in the city, with an additional two in New York State. Most of them began when community or church groups discovered the charter management company and signed five-year contracts for services that came as one package. A contract with Victory meant the company would oversee everything from professional development to payroll. (more…)

The city is eyeing 47 schools for possible closure next year, including 16 that have not previously been targeted by the city or the state.

On the watch-list, which education officials released today, are 19 schools that the city tried to close last year but were saved by a successful union lawsuit. It also includes most of the 23 schools currently on the state’s list of lowest-performing schools that did not begin federally-mandated interventions this year. All 16 of the newly-identified schools are elementary and middle schools.

City officials said today they had learned lessons from last year’s thwarted closure process and are re-strategizing for this year.

The city is hoping to avoid some of the confusion and shock that marred their efforts to close schools last year by announcing their plans early and by clarifying their rationale for shuttering schools, officials said. Last year a state appeals court ruled that the city failed to meet legal requirements for notifying the community about its closure plans.

Officials have already posted their criteria for adding schools to their watch-list to the Department of Education’s website: schools were tagged if they received three consecutive C’s, or a single D or F, on their progress reports, or if they received anything below a proficient rating on their last Quality Review. (more…)

Marc Waxman, a principal of a charter school in Denver, and Stacey Gauthier, a co-principal of Renaissance Charter High School, are corresponding about school policy. Read their entire exchange.

Dear Stacey,

As I was preparing to write back to you I decided to read a column in Huffington Post by Randi Weingarten. And, as I was reading it I saw the link to the “manifesto” signed by your chancellor in New York City and my superintendent here in Denver. I won’t get into the arguments for or against each of these articles other than to say that the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. But, interestingly, the “manifesto” has a direct connection to your last correspondence to me. It states:

District leaders also need the authority to use financial incentives to attract and retain the best teachers. When teachers are highly effective — measured in significant part by how well students are doing academically — or are willing to take a job in a tough school or in a hard-to-staff subject area such as advanced math or science, we should be able to pay them more. Important initiatives, such as the federal Teacher Incentive Fund, are helping bring great educators to struggling communities, but we have to change the rules to professionalize teaching.

In last correspondence, you wrote, “Four years ago teachers voted overwhelmingly to participate in the Teacher Incentive Fund program (Partnership for Compensation in Charter Schools, a collaboration between CEI-PEA and nine charter schools).”

You may remember that the conversion charter school I co-founded and co-directed in Harlem, Future Leaders Institute, also voted on whether to participate in the Teacher Incentive Fund program. There, teachers narrowly voted against participation.

Now that your school has been part of the program for several years, I would love to hear more about how it is going. (more…)