GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• City officials are pushing back against a federal policy to assign every student a race. (NY1)
• The federal government is telling school districts to take a tougher stance on bullying. (Times)
• Joel Klein told teachers why he wants to release their value-added scores. (GS, Daily News, Post)
• Club football teams are fueling the squads at several city high schools. (Daily News)
• High schools in Queens continue to suffer overcrowding and large classes. (WNYC)

• Will Van Buren HS’s attendance rate drop with the loss of after-school sports? (Miss Eyre)
• Ed Sector is releasing a report tomorrow on how NYC teachers use student data. (Quick & the Ed)
• In a 2008 memo, experts warned the city against relying too much on value-added. (NYC Parents)
• John Legend’s education: from home school, to drop-out factory, to charter advocate. (Reuters)
• A charter school principal says charters should not stay out of Race to the Top. (Harlem Link)
• Rick Hess: next year’s Congress may not be as charter school-friendly as some expect. (EdWeek)
• The teachers union warns teachers against protesting a school’s closure. (Education Notes)
• After fighting to get into competitive high schools, some students are unhappy. (InsideSchools)
• A guidance counselor says having more counselors will increase the U.S. grad rate. (NY Times)

For parents of students in the “average” city teacher’s class, learning the teacher’s rating may not tell them very much, Chancellor Joel Klein wrote in a letter to principals today.

In his email, Klein explained the city’s decision to release teachers’ effectiveness ratings and the teachers union’s move to block this from happening. He noted that the ratings, which measure teachers against estimations of how much their students’ test scores ought to rise, would be most useful in identifying very high and low performing teachers. He wrote:

One indication will never tell the whole story, and sometimes it is hard to discern definitive evidence from data alone — such as with a teacher who is “average” according to these numbers, for example. But where teachers have performed consistently toward the top or the bottom, year after year, these data surely tell us something very important. Namely, we need to retain and reward the great teachers, and we need to develop the low-performing teachers. And those who don’t improve quickly need to be replaced with better-performing teachers.

Klein’s full letter: (more…)

This year, GothamSchools and WNYC are following three struggling city schools as they try to rapidly boost their students’ achievement as part of a national effort to fix the country’s lowest-performing schools.

As part of that effort, schools all over the country are experimenting with similar strategies. New York city won’t attempt some of the more severe models — like replacing a school’s principal and half its teaching staff — until next year, but some districts have already begun.

One of those districts is Jefferson County, Kentucky, which includes Louisville and six of the state’s lowest-performing schools. Education Week’s Dakarai Aarons is following one of those schools — the former Shawnee High School, recently renamed The Academy @ Shawnee — and its principal, Keith F. Look. Look and his staff members, half of whom are new to the school, are trying to re-shape the culture of the school, and Aarons writes that students are slowly coming around to teachers’ new heightened expectations of them.

One of the challenges, Aarons writes, is to accomplish all of that quickly, but without moving too fast:

With so many efforts under way, Mr. Look said he’s found pacing to be a priority.

“Part of my job right now is keeping folks from applying too much pressure to themselves to move things too fast,” he said. “I have teachers in this place who want so badly to do miraculous things that I have to control that … pacing so that they are just as effective or more in October, in January, and in March and in May.” (more…)

• The principal of Van Buren HS in Queens has inexplicably cut sports games and practices. (Post)
• The football coach at Abraham Lincoln HS says sports help students keep their grades up. (Post)
• But a principals union official says funding academics should come before funding sports. (Post)
• City teachers’ value-added scores won’t be released before Nov. 24. (Daily News)
• Some principals don’t want to see their teachers’ scores released. (Daily News)
• State officials aren’t saying whether the city should release the value-added scores. (Post)
• Chancellor Joel Klein lays out his argument for why the scores should be public. (Daily News)
• Diane Ravitch says the scores are so flawed that releasing them would only hurt students. (Daily News)
• The Post lambastes Michael Mulgrew’s suggestion that teachers should help evaluate themselves.
• Ruben Brosbe says knowing his value-added score has helped him improve. (Post)
• Eva Moskowitz explains why she wants to open a charter school on the Upper West Side. (Post)
• The principal under fire for writing an error-filled email was rated lowest on a UFT survey. (CBS)
• The principal stood by his anti-textbook words at school on Friday. (Daily News)
• The Daily News says the principal, Andrew Buck, should be fired as an example.
• Schools all over the city were freshened up Saturday during New York Cares Day. (CNN)
• More and more chefs are stepping in to help schools serve better lunches. (Times)
• An East Village elementary school produced a world music album to raise funds. (NPR)
• An online survey of city parents found they fear bullying more than terrorism. (Post)
• Tough love is the guiding philosophy at the city’s tuition-free De La Salle Academy. (Times)
• Some British schools are outsourcing math instruction to India. (Times)
• Long Island middle school students are taking classes in diversity. (Times)

• Bill Gates on what makes a good teacher and how he home-schooled his own kids. (Parade)
• Arne Duncan is making an appearance in Philly with Tony Danza, Ackerman. (Russo)
• In a debate, Kirsten Gillibrand made it clear she hadn’t heard of the teacher data dump. (Daily News)
• The promises made to teachers in their pension packages are like a Ponzi scheme. (Rick Hess)
• Explaining “Superman” to Taiwan, Rhee is a ninja and teachers are clowns. (Politico)
• New York’s timeline for implementing Race to the Top is incredibly fast. (EdVantage)
• An argument that value-added scores shouldn’t be shared even if they were perfect. (Ed Vox)
• Freedom of speech rights don’t apply to teachers setting curriculum, a judge says. (EdWeek)
• The Citizens United decision led to big spending by public sector unions, NEA included. (WSJ)
• Is it possible for a student to be highly motivated, cooperative, and getting 70s? (Pissed Off)
• Norm Scott’s Ed Notes: A History, including origins in progressive educating. (Ed Notes)

City education officials are saying they want to release teachers’ ratings publicly as a way of helping bad teachers improve and reward those who are excelling.

In an interview with John Gambling on WOR-AM (710) this morning, Deputy Chancellor John White said the union’s concerns about how parents and the public would use the data were legitimate. But, he said, those concerns should not be an obstacle to improving how teachers are evaluated. He told Gambling:

And these data show that, actually, there are plenty of teachers who every year, year after year after year, are performing at the top of their game. We need to honor those teachers. This is not just about failing teachers.

But there are cases where we see every year, teachers in the bottom. And you can sit there and say, “Oh there’s this exception, this teacher’s is not a perfect score, it doesn’t reflect this,” but at the end of the day when you have teachers who are performing way at the top year after year after year, way at the bottom year after year after year, you have to say: are we doing the right thing for kids? We’ve got to keep that teacher at the top, we’ve got to pay that teacher right, at the top, and that teacher at the bottom, they’ve got to get better or we’ve got to get a better teacher.

It’s unclear how making teachers’ ratings public would improve their performance, as principals and teachers already have access to the ratings. This year, principals are supposed to use the ratings as a factor in tenure decisions and by 2012 they will be a significant part of all teachers’ evaluations. (more…)

The teachers union has struck another blow to Victory Schools, a for-profit management group that has bitterly clashed with the union.

All but one of the 28 teachers and other instructional staff at the Sisulu-Walker Charter School of Harlem, which is run by Victory, signed union authorization cards and told the school’s principal and board they intend to unionize yesterday.

Victory operates nine charters in New York City; Sisulu-Walker is the third to try to unionize. The United Federation of Teachers has accused Victory of overcharging its schools for compliance and back-office work while underpaying its teachers and scrimping on class supplies and building maintenance.

Last summer, the union waged a battle with another of Victory’s unionized schools, Merrick Academy, after the school fired 11 staff members, notifying them by Fed-Ex. Three of those teachers were re-hired in September in an agreement with the union. The UFT has also never reached a contract agreement with Merrick’s board since teachers there voted to unionize in 2007. (more…)

Poor Miss Crabtree. She’s getting married, and she has to leave her job. Such things happened back in the day, before anyone thought of equal rights for women, tenure, or indoor plumbing.

Nowadays we no longer insist teachers take chastity vows, remain unmarried, fill the inkwells, clean the coal boilers, or do whatever else they did in the good old days. Still, without tenure Miss Crabtree could now be fired for some more contemporary reason. Perhaps she told her colleagues how much UFT teachers earn. Or maybe she insisted they provide services mandated for special education students. Maybe she didn’t do anything and they took the word of an angry student over hers. Perhaps they posted her scores (despite an explicit agreement not to — how can anyone trust these folks?) and decided to discontinue her, rendering her license useless in New York City. These things happen when teachers don’t have tenure.

Yet, I keep hearing, tenure is evil. Why? Because there are bad teachers out there! If you watch “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” you may walk out thinking they all hide behind the skirts of evil AFT President Randi Weingarten. You might even think Weingarten recruited them and granted them tenure, but she did neither. People who think she did are confusing her with folks like Joel Klein and his merry band of administrators, who actually have such powers.

Say what you will about Weingarten, but she’s the most “reform”-minded union leader in the history of civilization. Weingarten most certainly does not defend bad teachers.

In fact, I’ve never seen anyone at all say we want more bad teachers, or that bad teachers need to be retained indefinitely. (more…)

• The city and union agreed to delay the release of teacher scores. (GS, DN, NYT, WSJ, Post, NY1, WNYC)
• The consultants who designed the city’s value-added system warned not to use it to judge teachers. (DN)
• GothamSchools plans to use the scores, if released, as a reporting tool only. (Christian Science Monitor)
• In Denver, Mayor Bloomberg praised Colorado’s new teacher evaluation law. (Denver Post)
• A teacher had inappropriate relationships with middle schoolers at three different schools. (NY1)
• A Brooklyn principal sent out a memo riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors. (Daily News)
• The Daily News calls UWS opposition to a new Harlem Success charter “vile” and “moblike.”
• California can’t tell if its charter schools are providing nutritional school lunches. (L.A. Times)
• A controversial Virginia history text wasn’t reviewed by historians before its adoption. (Washington Post)