It’s the last day of 2010 and we’re flipping back our calendars to the very beginning for a look at the education goings-on of this past year and what they bode for the future. That is, tomorrow.

January

The year began with a 20-day race through public hearings on the city’s plans to close 19 schools. At Beach Channel High School, Jamaica and Columbus high schools, in front of Mayor Bloomberg’s house, Metropolitan Corporate Academy, and other schools (but not Kappa II), teachers, parents, and students rallied against the closure plans. Yet the mayoral appointees on the citywide Panel for Educational Policy, at a meeting that lasted until 4 a.m., voted to approve closing all of the schools.

Meanwhile, in Albany, legislators were negotiating changes to state law that would improve the state’s chances in the Race to the Top competition, which offered millions of federal dollars in exchange for education reforms. Gov. Paterson proposed eliminating the charter school cap altogether, in accordance with the Obama Administration’s preferences, and lawmakers spent the day of Race to the Top’s deadline trying — and ultimately failing — to reach an agreement. The state submitted its bid anyway, initially refusing to release it and ultimately revealing a host of long-shot promises and bizarre furniture requests.

Other changes were afoot in Albany. Because of our reporting, the state reversed a policy that barred charter schools from giving priority in admission to students identified as English language learners.

Back in New York City, it was mostly business as usual, with a new round of budget cuts, the fifth in two years, an impasse in union contract negotiations, and yet another reorganization of how schools get support from the central administration.

February

The shortest month was long on conflict. First, the teachers union sued to stop the 19 school closures that were approved in January. We looked at what would happen to their teachers — hint: the group of teachers without positions, known as the Absent Teacher Reserve pool, would swell — and to their students.

A second front opened over whether to tie teacher evaluations to student test scores, something national union president Randi Weingarten said she could support and local United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew initially said he couldn’t. When the city unveiled a new tenure process that would use test scores, the UFT immediately put up a legal challenge, arguing that the city had violated the union’s contract. Tying test scores to teacher evaluations wasn’t in the city’s list of contract demands (which were accidentally released about this time) but it might as well have been. Topping the list: flexibility in firing.

And communities in Harlem, the Lower East Side, Queens, and Red Hook were divided by vicious fights over charter school siting.

March

New York State was named one of 16 Race to the Top finalists but went home empty-handed, just as it had been expected to. Officials vowed to try again in the competition’s second round.

Also entering round two: The school closure showdown. High school decision letters went out late because of the court battle. Two days after decision letters were sent to students the State Supreme Court ruled the closure votes “null and void”, finding that the city hadn’t followed the complex state law governing school closures. We explained the implications, which included the placement of some students at schools the city said were too bad to keep open.

That’s not to say that the city and union couldn’t agree on anything. In fact, they worked on a deal to close the rubber rooms. And together they quaked at the doomsday budget being floated in Albany, which would have slashed $400 million from the city’s schools.

In other news: the number of teachers without positions decreased. New York State’s NAEP reading scores stayed flat and the city’s graduation rate went up. NYU historian Diane Ravitch’s book about came out and so did our own Elizabeth Green’s New York Times Magazine article on making a better teacher. The city restricted bake sales and parents protested, yelling, “Viva el cupcake!”

April

April was the month the Department of Education eliminated its division of teaching and learning and announced a major push toward online education. It was also the month that lawyers for the city revealed their argument for why the school closures should go through as planned: At least we tried to follow the rules.

Michael Mulgrew won his first full term as UFT president in a landslide vote but met some up-and-coming adversaries in the group Educators 4 Excellence, formed to lobby against “last in, first out” layoff rules.

The city announced it would close rubber rooms by the end of the year but it didn’t reach any agreement with the union on other contract issues, including “last in, first out.” We judged the rubber room timeline too optimistic.

We visited one school where classes felt like rubber rooms of their own and met students from several other schools who had defied the odds.

Looking toward Race to the Top’s second round, the State Senate introduced a bill to double the number of charter schools, while Harlem Senator Bill Perkins held his own heated charter school hearings.

May

The charter cap bill zipped through the State Senate but stalled in the Assembly. After a month of delay, legislators hashed out a last-minute deal to more than double the charter cap to 460. But questions remained about how other components of the new charter school law would be implemented.

The city planned for $750 million in cuts to schools and massive teacher layoffs, the nitty-gritty of which we explained. Education Secretary Arne Duncan stopped in New York City (and altered his itinerary at the request of the teachers union) to call for a federal schools bailout.

The city looked for extra change by charging schools for lunches that students left unpaid and permitting schools to fire parent coordinators.

The State Education Department and the teachers union inked a deal to tie teacher evaluations to student test scores; the city pushed back against the court ruling barring its school closures; and State Senator Eric Adams told baggy-panted students to Stop the Sag.

June

We read the state’s bulked-up second-round Race to the Top application so our readers didn’t have to. The state promised to replicate city initiatives; meanwhile, the city promised the feds it would “turn around” a host of struggling schools.

Mayor Bloomberg cut teacher raises to save money and prevent teacher layoffs— postponing speculation that layoffs would happen to 2011 — and teachers rallied against budget cuts. Devising their 2010-2011 budgets, principals started excessing teachers. Also shedding numbers: The schools kept open by court ruling, where we revealed that the city had discouraged enrollment.

We said goodbye to the rubber rooms and DOE press secretary David Cantor and hello to hip-hop Regents prep. The city and union ended the school year fighting over when the next one would begin: The city tried to delay the first day of school until after Rosh Hashanah, which fell during the week after Labor Day, but abandoned the plan, blaming the union.

July

Bad news abounded in July. The state admitted that test standards had been too low for too long. Thousands of students had been misled into thinking they had proficient skills, and once standards were raised, the proportion of city students passing the state reading tests dropped by more than 25 percent. After years of announcing gains, Mayor Bloomberg was left scrambling for a message. The city promised extra attention but not extra money for struggling students.

Also falling short: The city’s appeal in the school closure legal fight. An appeals court upheld the ruling barring the closures, though the city said it would stay the course on opening new schools.

New York State ended the month a Race to the Top finalist for the second time, but with improved prospects for winning. And the city started getting ready to adopt toughened, national curriculum standards.

August

City and state officials went to Washington, D.C., to pitch the state’s Race to the Top application and brought home about $700 million in school funds, of which about $300 million would go to the city. The federal “edujobs” bill sent about $200 million — and hope for a layoff-free year — to New York City.

Otherwise, the month was about as boring as a fifth-grader’s summer homework. Breaking the monotony: Chancellor Klein threatened to use emergency powers to expand a Lower East Side charter school (but didn’t), and protesters distressed by lower state test scores derailed the month’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting. We also revealed that a Brooklyn charter school was holding classes in illegal space and dug up 1974 footage of Muhammad Ali’s visit to PS 41.

September

The school year started — and then started again — with too many teachers (though too few in classrooms), not enough kindergarten spaces, and scheduling problems. We live-blogged the first day of school, traveling with Chancellor Klein to all five boroughs.

During September, we met the Independent Budget Office’s new education watchdog, teachers who built their own data systems to make up for problems in the city’s, and fans — and foes — of the education documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman.’” The city quietly released lower progress report grades based on diminished test scores. We learned some bad news — just half of the year’s summer school students were promoted — and some good news: City students reversed a trend and posted an SAT score boost.

We also got a hint of the policy issues that would define the school year: more budget cuts, major problems on the value-added teacher data reports, and changes to tenure policy, for which Mayor Bloomberg promised new rules, the union be damned.

October

In collaboration with WNYC, we launched “The Big Fix,” a reporting project about the city’s various efforts to fix failing high schools. Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx escaped the chopping block only to start the school year with a stripped down budget, growing needs, and students who mostly wanted to be there. William Grady High School banked on a new principal for needed improvements. And officials at Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School moved student by student toward a higher graduation rate.

Aiming to avoid more legal problems, the city started laying the groundwork for school closures early.  It closed out the month with 47 schools on the at-risk list and conflict with the teachers union over whether the city had tried to help them or neglected them. The city didn’t improve its relationship with the union when it said it would flout an agreement and release individual teachers’ value-added scores. The union immediately headed to court to halt the release.

The state told districts how to spend their Race to the Top spoils, we looked into the chancellor’s school visit history, and Eva Moskowitz got permission to open a charter school on the Upper West Side. The GothamSchools team found time during this busy month to travel to North Carolina for its first wedding (mine!).

November

Not much happened in November. We threw a party. And Joel Klein shocked the city (and most of his own deputies) by announcing his resignation after eight years as chancellor. Jaws dropped even further when Bloomberg announced that Cathie Black, a publishing executive with no experience or apparent interest in education, was his pick to take Klein’s place. We joined the scrum of journalists analyzing Black’s preparedness, Bloomberg’s mysterious search process, and the circumstances of Klein’s abrupt departure.

Parents, teachers, voters, and lawmakers took a stand against Black’s appointment, but Gloria Steinem gave her okay. That wasn’t enough for a special state panel convened to consider whether Black should receive the waiver required for non-educators to become chancellor — a majority of its members voted against her. City and state officials worked through the Thanksgiving weekend to reach a deal that would let Black become chancellor as long as a DOE official, Shael Polakow-Suransky, became her second in command in charge of academics. The next week, Black made her first visit to a city public school since her appointment.

Rupert Murdoch, Joel Klein’s new boss, bought Wireless Generation, a major education technology company based in Brooklyn. Looking forward, it’s unclear what Klein’s relationship will be with the company. But that’s for the future. For the past, here’s our take on Klein’s career at the DOE.

In non-Cathie Black news, Andrew Cuomo, no friend of teachers unions, was elected governor, but union-backed candidates won many other races. A preliminary budget brought back the specter of teacher layoffs, this time 6,100 in 2011. The city said it missed its rubber room deadline for just 16 teachers. And new, lower high school progress report grades came out, but some schools got higher grades that paved the way for them to stay open.

Then, bedbugs struck.

December

Where was Cathie Black? The DOE wouldn’t say, so we joined the NYC education press corps in calling on the city to reveal her whereabouts. We found her on the phone and on TV, but not at any low-performing schools.

Parents and elected officials filed lawsuits to block Black’s appointment. But during the year’s last days, a State Supreme Court judge dismissed all three of the suits, clearing the way for Black to take over on January 3, the first day of school after the winter recess.

Black’s first piece of business — assuming there’s no remaining fallout from a riot over bathroom access at Murry Bergtraum High School — is likely to be presiding over the latest round of school closures. The city finalized its intentions to close 26 schools, fewer than the maximum number possible but still the most in any year. Mulgrew promised a serious fight over the closures, suggesting the city might see a repeat of 2010′s school closure showdown in 2011.

There’s much more to look forward to in 2011, from changes to the way school safety data gets reported, continued sparring over teacher data reports, a new tenure process for new teachers, and, if Klein’s final missive is to be trusted, a push to address the ATR situation. The city is also looking at more federally mandated turnarounds next year, although federal reforms could be in jeopardy as the balance of power shifts in Washington. If nothing else, we can at least count on a musical performance featuring the PS 22 chorus during the Oscars in February.

You made it to the end of 2010! Have a happy New Year’s Eve and we’ll see you back here on Monday.

• Cathie Black will be gone by Easter and other 2011 education predictions. (Flypaper)
• A theater teacher highlighted by the union newspaper loses her job. (Dewey21C)
• Is cooperation between networks the next generation of the charter school idea? (Eduwonk)
• Value-added-based bonuses leave out Houston’s non-core subject teachers. (District Administrator)
• Twenty percent of incoming military recruits can’t meet basic academic standards. (Ed Week)
• The most courageous act is to use facts, not faith, to evaluate policies. (Larry Cuban)
• Diane Ravitch wins an academic honor named after Moynihan. (Bridging Differences)

We’re taking the rest of the year off. Happy holidays, enjoy the break, and check in for breaking news if it happens.

The final installment of Joel Klein's weekly memo to principals

In a nostalgic final missive to city principals this week, outgoing Chancellor Joel Klein suggested three things to do once he’s gone.

He urged lawmakers to end the last-in first-out process of teacher layoffs, pushed for an end to the Absent Teacher Reserve pool, and underlined his belief in the importance of closing struggling schools.

Klein’s statement that “we have to eliminate the ATR pool” ratchets up the city’s position on the pool of teachers — city teachers who lose their positions, don’t find new ones, but stay on the city payroll anyway. Previously, the city has asked the union, in contract negotiations, to add a limit to the amount of time a teacher can spend in the reserve pool. That would make the pool smaller, but it would not cause it to disappear altogether.

Describing the costs of keeping those teachers on the city payroll as exceeding $100 million a year, Klein argues:

We cannot afford it, and it’s wrong to keep paying this money. It amounts to supporting more than a thousand teachers who either don’t care to, or can’t, find a job, even though our school system hires literally thousands of teachers each year. That’s money that could be spent on teachers that we desperately want and need.

Klein also describes teacher layoffs as a sure thing. “I wish it were otherwise, but the economics of our state and city make this virtually impossible to avoid,” he writes.

The Bloomberg administration has a history of being bullish on layoffs in order to push for the end of the state law regulating how teachers lose their jobs. Klein reiterates that case in his letter:

If we have layoffs, it’s unconscionable to use the last-hired, first-fired rule that currently governs. By definition, such a rule means that quality counts for zero. Our children cannot afford that kind of approach. They need the best teachers, not those who are longest serving. (If you had to have surgery, would you want the longest-serving surgeon or the best one?) This doesn’t mean that many of our longest-serving teachers aren’t among the best, but this is not an area for “group think.” We need individual determinations of teacher effectiveness to decide who stays and who doesn’t.

Klein also quoted his favorite T.S. Eliot poem, “Little Gidding,” excerpting four cryptic lines that seem to summarize his “odyssey” as something more complex than a straight line of a progress:

We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.

Other curious lines from the poem:

… Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. …

Klein has sent a memo to principals every week for years. Read the full letter here and below.

Joel Klein’s Last Letter to Principals

At 9:30 this morning, the principal of the Ron Brown Academy in Brooklyn stood in her school’s auditorium, watching a fight break out.

Across from her, a tall girl in a tight pink shirt slapped at the girl in front of her. Three other girls grabbed the tall one’s arms and kicked at her legs. The girls broke apart as two boys doing cartwheels chased them off stage.

The principal, Celeste Douglas, broke into applause. She was watching the teenagers — who had grins plastered to their faces, and whose fight moves had been carefully choreographed by their teachers — perform their winter dance routine.

“Music makes me feel free,” said Justin, one of the dancers, after the performance. He is a seventh grader at Ron Brown, a middle school in Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Music has also provided the school with an opportunity to improve its test scores, boost attendance and jump off the state’s watch list.

An unusual solution

When Douglas first arrived at Ron Brown Academy in 2006, she found a school in crisis.

Attendance hovered just above 80 percent, students performed poorly on standardized tests, and the previous spring, state officials had put the school on the SURR list of the lowest performing schools in New York. Douglas had three years to improve the school or risk seeing it shut down.

Faced with low performance and small budgets, other schools have cut extra programming and reinforced ELA and math skills. “One of the first things to get cut in schools is the arts program. I felt a lot of pressure to do the same thing,” Douglas said today, sitting in her office, a space decorated with pictures of her students’ performances and trophies of their successes.

She knew that improving instruction was crucial, but she didn’t think it was enough. “The first issue was engagement. I realized our kids were just not coming to school,” said Douglas. “I was looking for something to engage kids and I didn’t know what it was.”

In 2007, she heard about a project at the Center for Arts Education to develop arts programs at low-performing middle schools. The program, called the School Arts Support Initiative, or SASI, demands a lot of partner schools. Working with an arts coach from the center, schools have to offer entirely new courses in drama, dance, music, and the visual arts. They have to hire a new batch of educators who, with help from the center, design the courses and teach them. And the schools must provide space for students to perform and practice; revise their scheduling to accommodate the new courses; and find funding to pay for it all.

Although a bulk of the program — the cost of the coach, professional development, and partnerships with theaters and drama organizations— comes from a U.S. Department of Education grant, the school itself must find funding for many of the other expenses, including art supplies and teachers.

At Ron Brown, space is tight, since the school shares a building with two other schools. About 240 Ron Brown students crowd onto a floor and a half. Some teachers have to share classrooms. Douglas’ budget didn’t have much room for growth, either.

But Douglas decided to work with the center anyway. The design of the program fit with her larger strategy of investing in helping teachers improve their instruction.

To raise the money needed to pay the extra teachers, she applied for outside grants. The school already had a dance studio; she took advantage of it and added a small arts studio inside a tiny classroom. The fact that she was already on a hiring binge allowed her to bring in new teachers who could play double roles at the school.

The school’s theater director also teaches English language arts. In addition to two full-time dance teachers and a visual arts teacher, other teachers help with directing and monitoring students during performances.

“People have come out of the woodwork,” said Brian Nagel, the visual arts teacher, “including a science teacher with a beautiful voice.”

The school is increasingly centered around art. As 6th graders, students are introduced to the range of art disciplines. At the end of the year, they choose an “art major,” which they study in more depth in 7th and 8th grade.

The school has altered the daily schedule to accommodate a full arts sequence. Each student attends an art class, even if that means that she has to be occasionally pulled from another class. Friday afternoons are also completely devoted to arts programming.

Douglas noted that she has had to make a lot of tough decisions to maintain the program, including excessing a math teacher last year instead of an art teacher.

“Out of the woodwork”

Developing an arts program was not just about introducing the students to art. The art classes are used to reinforce the student’s learning in other areas.

A key goal for teachers is to learn “how to marry the learning standards to the artistic process,” said Dr. Carol Feinberg, the director of the SASI program.

Students at the school have responded well to the changes. Some have even come from other schools to participate. A seventh grader, Jordan, who danced in the winter showcase, said he was failing classes at his previous school. He transferred to Ron Brown halfway through his sixth grade year. “My family comes from a long line of dancers,” he said, perched calmly on the edge of the stage. He is now active in an after-school activity called the rap and recording club and doing well in school.

Talent and interest has come from unexpected places. Nagle, the visual arts teacher, described a moment when a quiet sixth grade girl approached him in his studio. She pointed to the still life art pieces that hang in the hallways. “Trees are my life,” she said. “I want to learn how to do that so I can draw trees.”

Laura Hill, the English teacher who directs the school’s plays, said that one of the biggest successes has been getting the boys involved. At first, teachers struggled to get boys excited about dance that didn’t involve hip-hop, she said. But this winter, she was proud to see a large group of boys participate in the swing and jazz performances in the dance showcase.

Still, several boys mentioned today that their favorite dance piece was the finale, set to the song “I Whip My Hair” by Willow Smith.

“Pockets of success”

Douglas has started to see some promising results. For one, parents are more involved.

“I can tell you when I started, we would do a workshop and have two parents and now we have 50 or 60,” Douglas said. “We have found the best way to bring parents in is to celebrate their kids’ talent.” The winter showcase two weeks ago drew a large crowd.

School attendance has also improved, jumping from 86 percent in 2006 to 91 percent so far this year, according to the DOE. Test scores are also on the rise. The percent of students scoring at or above Level 3 on the state-wide ELA tests jumped from 21 percent in 2007 to 52 percent in 2009. No scores have been released since the state changed its grading standards, but the school received a B for student progress on its last progress report from the city.

One of the biggest triumphs has been getting off the SURR list in 2008, a full year shy of the deadline imposed by the state for improvement. “I am not going to say the arts are the Holy Grail,” said Russell Granet, the school’s arts coach. “But I do know from Ms. Douglas that the school is a much calmer place.”

Douglas plans to continue to develop the program, including adding a school orchestra. One of her goals this year is to support students who want to attend specialized arts high schools. “There is a lot of raw talent,” said Nagel, but none of the teachers or administrators knew how to help their students to create suitable portfolios or go through the stressful interview process.

Douglas is optimistic. “We are seeing pockets of success,” she said.

Said Granet, “It is not a process to be rushed. You need to plan it.”

Five of them are faculty at New York University’s Steinhardt School and Tim Farrell, a public affairs officer for NYU, has recorded conversations with them and posted them online.

In the first recording, Professors Leanna Stiefel and Amy Ellen Schwartz look at one of Klein’s major policy decisions: the implementation of a weighted funding formula. They find that the new formula only had a significant impact on high schools, but left little imprint on elementary and middle schools.

In 2007, Klein instituted Fair Student Funding: a program that would give schools money based on the needs of the students they serve.

“We looked at this from the 2002 to 2008 and we found that in the elementary and middle schools they were distributing funds more along the lines of what the kids needed, but in the high schools they weren’t,” Stiefel said. “So it was interesting, even though they didn’t formally adopt this until later, they were distributing along those lines.”

The formula’s full implementation was postponed under opposition from the teachers union and some high-performing schools, via a “hold harmless” provision that sent extra money that would have been taken away from some schools back to them.

In other recording, Sean Corcoran discusses school choice, Leslie Santee Siskin looks at the changes public high schools have gone through, and Jim Kemple talks about his research on student achievement.

The collection will be published next spring under the title Education Reform in New York City: Ambitious Change in the Nation’s Most Complex School System.

Now, the city has given those documents a makeover. But a review of last year’s and this year’s versions of the EIS for one school — Beach Channel High School in Rockaway, Queens — shows that while the reinvented statements are vastly more informative, they still skirt many of the points cited by critics opposed to closing the schools.

When a panel of judges blocked the closures last year, they acknowledged that the law gives city officials little guidance on what to include in the documents but does give them the discretion to close schools they believe are failing. But, as a panel of appellate court judges wrote, officials “abused that discretion by limiting the information they provided to the obvious — that students at phased-out schools would be accommodated at other schools to be determined.”

The revamped documents are city officials’ effort to cover their bases and go beyond “the obvious.” It’s still unclear how critics of last year’s process will greet the new statements. Union officials have said that they intend to pay close attention to how this year’s school closures unfold and possibly lobby Albany to change the process altogether.

The new format for the statements was finalized in October, when the Panel for Educational Policy approved changes to the city guidelines for the documents. At that time, the city released a template for the new statements. Now, the city has begun to release the statements for individual schools it wants to close.

The impact statement for the proposal to close Beach Channel has ballooned from barely nine pages last year to 31 pages. Here are two big questions the statements are intended to answer, and how city officials addressed them this year and last:

What will happen to the students who currently attend the school?

The new statement answers many questions about the school closure process that the previous iteration never even raised. For example:

— What happens to students who fall behind in their credits and thus remain “ninth-graders” after the school no longer serves ninth grade? (They will stay at the school and continue to take classes there. If they don’t have enough credits to graduate when the school finally closes its doors, they will be referred to one of the city’s programs for students older than 18.)
— What happens to the extracurricular activities and electives currently offered to students at the school? (They will begin to disappear, though city officials write that the decisions about exactly which activities and classes are cut will rest with the school.)
— What happens to the program for high school-age parents that is housed at Beach Channel? (It will stay in the building; city officials say the program will operate as long as there is demand.)

But the city also makes some questionable claims about how the school will serve its students as it phases out. One example: “As the school becomes smaller, students would receive more individualized attention through graduation to ensure they are receiving the support they need to succeed,” the statement says. But as the number of students at the school — and its budget — falls, the school will also lose teaching positions, making it unlikely that the staff to student ratio will increase.

What will happen to future students who might have attended the school?

Here, too, the new proposals offer far more detail than last year, but stop short of the thorough, far-reaching analysis some critics of last year’s statements hoped for.

Last year, one of the most commonly heard objections from parents was that the closure of the Rockaway’s last large high school would force students to leave the peninsula and attend schools much further away.

Only 9 percent of students residing in Beach Channel’s zone attend school there, the proposals note, whereas nearly half of the students at the new schools phasing into the building are from the neighborhood zone. City officials argue that the opening of better schools on the Beach Channel campus will benefit neighborhood students.

But after Beach Channel has closed its doors for good, there will be fewer total school seats in the neighborhood, something the proposal only obliquely acknowledges. The city’s enrollment projections for the schools in Beach Channel’s building the year after the school closes for good show seats for between 200 and 400 fewer students than currently attend the four schools in the building now.

So though the city says demand will rise, the supply is also shrinking. City officials note that when Beach Channel is closed for good and the new school is fully phased-in, the building will still only be half-full. If demand for seats in Rockaway grows, the proposal states, new schools may be opened.

The city also argues that, from a borough-wide perspective, it is replacing the seats lost by phasing out both Beach Channel and Jamaica High Schools with the new schools it plans to phase in. Those two schools currently serve 218 ninth-graders; the two new schools the city is planning to open in their buildings will open with a total of 220 new seats.

But both Beach Channel and Jamaica began this year with dramatically smaller ninth-grade classes than usual after a very complicated high school admissions process that took place while the schools’ fates hung on the outcome of a lawsuit.

When the city released a draft of the templates for the new statements, Leonie Haimson of the group Class Size Matters suggested that the city include an analysis of how many students in the area currently attend an overcrowded school and projections of how the school closings would affect those numbers in five years.

The new proposals list the other Queens high schools that have programs in the same specialized interest areas as Beach Channel’s. The lists of options the city provides include other schools the city is planning to phase out, such as Jamaica.

And most of the options are in other Queens schools that are already notoriously overcrowded. For example, of the 10 schools listed as having a business program, only Beach Channel and Jamaica are in buildings that are under 90 percent utilized; seven of the 10 are in buildings over 100 percent utilized.

UPDATE: This post has been updated to clarify city officials’ plans for adding seats in the Beach Channel building.

Though Chancellor Joel Klein now says that he told Mayor Bloomberg he would stay through the mayor’s second term and leave in the third, that wasn’t what the public heard at the time.

Nearly a year ago, Klein sat down for an interview with NY1 education reporter Lindsey Christ to talk about what Bloomberg’s third term would bring for the city’s schools. Here’s a snippet of the dialogue:

Christ: Are you planning on staying on for the next four years as chancellor? There’ve been a lot of rumors that you might move on…

Klein: I have no plans. I plan to stay here and be the chancellor. I’ve always said it’s the best job I could ever hope for. Working for this mayor has been a real privilege for me and so long as the mayor would like me to stay and fight for the children of New York, I plan to do so.

Many Department of Education employees have also said that Klein gave them no indication that he planned to leave. And yet a year later and Klein is on his way out. He said goodbye to Department of Education employees last week and when the schools reopen January 3, it will be under Chancellor Cathie Black.

Thanks to the new testing schedule, schools like mine have a little bit more breathing room in our curriculum. The run-up to winter break is no longer a frantic race to prepare the students for the English language arts exam a week or two after the vacation. But that doesn’t mean that high-pressure test prep won’t eventually take hold. In fact, I’m guessing soon after we return from break, the grueling march to get our kids ready will begin in schools like mine across the city.

But are we starving the kids to prepare for a famine? In many ways, and to varying degrees depending on a school’s approach to test prep, kids are deprived of meaningful, rich, effective instruction in the weeks or months leading up to the state exams. This may or may not prepare them better for this year’s test, but it undoubtedly shorts them in the long-term.

First, when Kaplan or Pearson test-prep materials take the place of a well-planned read-aloud or time for guided reading, the kids don’t learn as well. Second, the pressure and dullness of test prep certainly takes most of the fun out of learning for the kids. So ultimately students are learning less, and they’re enjoying learning less. This is not a formula for long-term success.

I can only hope as standardized tests become more authentic and meaningful, this practice will finally be exposed for its uselessness and be discarded. For the present, there are too many second-graders who are being forced to fill out weekly multiple-choice tests “to get ready” and third- through eighth-graders whose classrooms are taken over by a test-prep mentality. We are not helping these children by “starving them” in anticipation of the “famine.”

The move comes after an ongoing back-and-forth between the union and the city over how city officials ensure the accuracy of the data that determine the ratings. Yesterday, the union called a press conference to share stories of teachers who discovered that their data reports rate their effectiveness based on students and subjects they had never taught.

The feud over the ratings began in October, when city officials announced that they intended to release the teacher rankings to reporters. Union officials began collecting examples of errors on the reports, and then sued to block the release, arguing that the reports were too riddled with inaccurate information to be released.

Teachers union President Michael Mulgrew said Sunday that his staff has documented at least 200 cases in which teachers’ reports include errors. In its court filings, the union gave nearly 20 examples of reports, with teachers’ names redacted, that the union claims reflect errors.

But city officials countered today in a letter to Mulgrew that because there were no names attached to the examples the union cited, they have been unable to verify the letters. The letter, signed by Deputy Chancellors Shael Polakow-Suransky and John White, asked the union to share the details of those cases.

Mulgrew responded by formally asking City Comptroller John Liu and Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon to audit how the reports were created. “Because the DOE has already received the information requested in your December 20, 2010 letter and refused to take action, the United Federation of Teachers was compelled to” request the audit, Mulgrew writes.

City officials have said that the classroom-level data used to calculate the ratings was both provided and vetted by principals. But teachers speaking on Sunday reported that their principals were also concerned by mistakes in the reports but had been unable to correct the reports.

Cara Cibener, a humanities teacher at Tompkins Square Middle School, said her report was based in part on the test scores of students she never taught, and showed their progress on their exams in a different subject than the ones she taught.

“To be rated as an above average math teacher, when I’ve never taught math, and a below average [English Language Arts] teacher…is hard to see,” she said. “It doesn’t help me as an educator; it doesn’t help me serve my students better; I don’t think it would be enlightening for anyone outside of the school system to see.”

Cibener said she agreed with the city that parents should know what is happening in the classroom, but argued that releasing flawed ratings would cause parents to draw unfair conclusions before they get to know a teacher.

“Most teachers would be happy to talk to parents,” Cibener said. “It would be a shame if this ended the conversation.”

Robert Freeman, executive director of the state’s Committee on Open Government, said that as far as the laws on releasing the records are concerned, it doesn’t matter whether the reports are based on accurate data or not.

“If a record says that 2 and 2 equals 5, and there’s no exception that applies to that record, then it can be released,” Freeman said. ”[The freedom of information law] does not deal with the accuracy of the record.”

Here is the letter Polakow-Suransky and White sent to the union this afternoon:

And here is the union’s response:

Music teacher Gregg Breinberg with P.S. 22's chorus on The Today Show. The group recorded two songs last weekend that will air on Christmas morning.

The most famous public school chorus is headed to the Academy Awards this year, led by Gregg Breinberg, the music teacher behind the group’s rise to international acclaim. Breinberg took some time out of his busy schedule today to talk about the chorus’s beginnings and how the internet and YouTube made everything go “insane.”

How did you become a music teacher?

Well, I come from a musical family. So music was always ever-present in my house when I was growing up. Music just became part of my being and I wanted to find a way to share it and at first I considered putting my own music out there, but I knew I didn’t have the vocal chops to go in that direction. I’m a good writer and I’m a good arranger, so that’s where my strengths lie in terms of my musicality. I think life just kind of threw me on the right path.

I was kind of floundering once I got out of college — I went to SUNY New Paltz for my undergrad, for music — and I knew I needed to do something in music. Both of my parents are retired teachers and both worked in Staten Island. My family, my background kind of led to the teaching thing. That and them saying, “Just get a job and get the heck out.” So I got my masters at Wagner College in Staten Island — they were pretty much the only ones that offered a one-year all-inclusive program. So I was able to start teaching as soon as I secured my master’s degree.

How did you come to P.S. 22?

I started teaching music at P.S. 60, where I was for a year. It was a great year, I loved it, but then I got excessed. My principal really tried to keep me, but there’s no way around the system. It’s basically, the last person in was the first person out. I was the last one in and there were two teachers who returned from maternity leave, which forced me out of the building.

My new school was P.S. 22 and I was really happy because the principal was just really, really innovative and she loved people to kind of take their ideas and run with them. That’s been the strength of our school. The art teacher has an art background; people just aren’t given these positions. Sometimes they are just given with regard to seniority. Whereas my principal said no, I want experts in their fields because she knew what makes a school come alive are the programs. So I was very lucky to end up there.

But for the first year I had to kind of sit and bide my time because there was no music position available. I was a second grade teacher for my first year, everything was taught through music. Everything: synonyms, antonyms, math — everything through music. I was really in a panic because it was never my intention to be a classroom teacher. Then in 2000 I started teaching the chorus and general music.

You’ve been directing the chorus for ten years. How did it suddenly get so famous?

Once I started with the chorus, they were definitely getting what I’d now consider minor accolades, winning local contests. It was exciting though, it was a very slow build-up of excitement around these kids. I always said they were the best kept secret in Staten Island.

For the first three or four years just I wanted to keep the program going. You’re always afraid your program could be cut, so I was really intense — I was too intense — about teaching music. It was counterproductive in the results. Eventually I realized these kids are doing some great stuff and let them enjoy what they’re doing and I can’t be a music Nazi. I have to just make sure that they are are getting the main idea of music, which is that it’s something that can really change your life.

I would say that’s probably the key to the whole thing, one of the many keys. It’s one of the bigger answers to why these kids are so moving to people.

And then 2006 came, and we started getting our stuff onto the internet, and that’s when things just kind of blew up and really, it’s insane what’s going on right now in the most wonderful way. They’ve definitely made a name for themselves in the industry. It’s funny. They’re 10-year-old kids from public school. That’s just funny to me.

Do the kids audition for the chorus?

They do. They do have to have some semblance of musicality. Some kind of ear. But they don’t have to have the best voice. I’ll take a kid who seems really hungry over a kid who maybe can sing beautifully but isn’t showing any interest or enthusiasm or wanting to be part of the program.

How have you weathered the budget cuts?

Every year we worry about the program. I don’t think I have to worry about losing my position as a general music teacher. But in terms of the funding for my program, it’s very minimal, but it does require money and every year I have to leave for the summer just hoping everything will be intact. We’ve had some blows to the program but we’ve managed to work around them.

What about fundraising? You guys are celebrities!

It’s tricky, because the Department of Education has very strict regulations. It’s been driving me a little crazy because, God, we have such a money-making opportunity. There’s so much we could be doing to raise money for our own cause and other causes, music in schools, but it’s been very tricky to navigate through the department.

I just cannot even believe that DOE approved the Oscars. It was almost unfathomable when I heard the offer, so I didn’t get too excited because we’ve had big offers like that we just could not do — like making CDs, like movie projects, documentary projects, with amazing people.

Some of the biggest record companies wanted to work with us, but unfortunately it was just something we never could get approval for. But I’m still fighting because I really want that to work, because this should be captured and people should see what you can do in a public school setting and actually be doing something that’s like, woah, taking the whole world by storm.

Do other music teachers from around the city come to you for advice?

Oh God, daily emails. Honestly, I do my best to tell them what I think is most important, but it’s hard because my skills musically are innate skills. I don’t know if you can teach adults who don’t already have that…honestly I knew what I was doing form the get-go. Have I gotten better? Definitely. But in terms of my interaction with the kids and my knowing how to get the best out of the kids, that is just an innate thing. People are just innately teachers or they’re not. It’s hard to give advice because I’m just doing what I do.

I always tell people if you want to try harmony, start very simple. Get one section singing one note, and another singing another note and repeat and repeat and repeat. Constantly encourage. Leave a separation between your sections. Little technical things. I just remind them that just do what your passion is.

How did this Oscars invitation come about?

Basically, the producer, Bruce Cohen had contacted me. He called on a Friday and I was working with my chorus and the secretary called and said we have a big Hollywood producer on the phone. And I said take a message. The Pope could call and I would say take a message. When I’m with my chorus, that’s it. I don’t want to be bothered with anything else.

So I didn’t even take it seriously because I knew we had been turned down for Hollywood things before. I didn’t call back. On Monday or Tuesday I saw the message in my mailbox and I thought Ok let’s get this over with. And I called up and Bruce said, “Oh I’ve got such an amazing offer for you.”

So I was like listen, thank you, regardless of whether this happens or not — which is my basic answer when I think something won’t happen — we truly appreciate the offer. And I figured that’s the last time I’ll ever be talking to Bruce Cohen.

Then he called my principal and she said it’s a wonderful offer and thank you, but I would not have a clue as to how to go about this. He said he had some people who maybe could help out in terms of getting to the mayor’s office. He said let me see what I can do.

A week later my principal calls me and says are you sitting down and I said ok, and she said it was approved. The DOE approved. I was like no way, I couldn’t believe it. It was crazy, definitely, never expected.

What song are your students going to sing at the Oscars?

Everything is completely under wraps at this point. They tossed out a few ideas to me, but I’m not at liberty to say, and I don’t even know for sure. It’ll be a surprise.

The Student Safety Act requires the Department of Education and New York City Police Department to report arrests, suspensions, and expulsion data four times a year and mandates that the city include a breakdown of students’ race, gender, age and status as special education students or English language learners.

Advocates including the New York Civil Liberties Union have long complained that the city’s school safety officers are too aggressive and too often intervene in disciplinary actions best left to administrators. The advocates argue that the legislation will allow parents to better understand how often school safety officers are involved in incidents and with which students.

The bill was originally introduced in 2008 by Council Education Committee Chair Robert Jackson, but got lost amid the debate over extending term limits and has laid mostly dormant since then.

One provision in the bill’s original language that was not included in the final version passed today involves beefing up the role of the the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates complaints against New York City police officers. The board does not currently review incidents in schools, though NYCLU advocates said they will continue to push for the city to widen the Board’s jurisdiction.

NYCLU Applauds City Council’s Unanimous Passage of Student Safety Act

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

December 20, 2010 – The New York Civil Liberties Union today applauded the City Council for unanimously passing the Student Safety Act, legislation that will bring much-needed transparency to NYPD activity and Department of Education suspension practices in the city’s schools.

“This is a victory for all of New York City’s schoolchildren and the core democratic principle of open government,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said. “The Student Safety Act is one of the most comprehensive school safety reporting laws in the nation. It is an important step toward establishing safety and discipline policies that treat all children fairly, with respect and dignity, and toward the day when we provide a safe and supportive learning environment for all students.”

The City Council passed the legislation today in a 47-0 vote. It was supported by Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Education Committee Chair Robert Jackson, Council Member Melissa Mark-Viverito and Public Safety Committee Chair Peter Vallone, Jr.

The Student Safety Act provides a detailed framework for the reporting of discipline and police practices in schools on a routine basis. It will require the Department of Education (DOE) to submit an annual report on student discipline that shows the number of students subjected to a superintendent’s suspension (six days to one year) or a principal’s suspension (five days of less) during the school year. It also must include the number of suspension-related school transfers.

In addition to this annual report, the act will require bi-annual reports on the number of suspensions citywide for each month.  This will allow educators, policymakers and parents to determine whether suspensions increase during certain periods – such as high stakes testing time – of the school year

The bill also will require the NYPD to provide the council a quarterly report detailing the activity of its personnel in city schools. The quarterly report will show the number of students arrested and issued summonses broken down by patrol borough, and it will detail non-criminal incidents involving NYPD personnel.

Information in the annual discipline report and the NYPD’s quarterly reports will be broken down by students’ race, gender, age, grade level, special education status and whether they are English language learners.

The NYCLU and other advocates will be analyzing this data regularly to determine the impact of school safety policies on education.

“We commend the City Council for passing this important legislation, and look forward to continuing to work with lawmakers to create smart and effective school discipline and safety policies in New York City,” said NYCLU Advocacy Director Udi Ofer. “We’ll continue to work with policymakers to revamp school discipline and safety policies to ensure that all children are provided with equal educational opportunities. We will work for even greater accountability and transparency regarding NYPD and DOE practices in the schools. We have no doubt that smart discipline policies will increase New York City’s graduation rate and help close the achievement gap.”

The NYCLU will continue to call on the City Council to strengthen the Civilian Complaint Review Board and to broaden its jurisdiction to cover misconduct complaints against school safety officers. To provide additional transparency, the NYCLU recommends expanding the Student Safety Act’s reporting requirements to include student arrest data broken down by school and information on students who are “discharged” from school. A “discharge” is someone who leaves the school system without being counted as a dropout or a graduate, thus inflating the graduation rate.

With more than 5,200 uniformed officers, the NYPD’s School Safety Division is the nation’s fifth-largest police force – larger than the police forces in Washington D.C., Detroit, Boston, Baltimore, Dallas or Las Vegas. There are far more police personnel in our schools than there are guidance counselors or social workers.

NYPD school safety officers have the authority to detain, search and arrest children, yet they receive only 14 weeks of training – compared to six months for police officers – and are not adequately trained to operate in the special environment of the schools. All too often, police personnel intervene in disciplinary matters best handled by educators.

Police activities and DOE zero tolerance practices have a disproportionate impact on schools serving the city’s black and Latino children from low income families. In these schools, which often have permanent metal detectors, students are suspended and even arrested for minor disciplinary infractions, such as talking back, horseplay, writing on a desk, or bringing a cell phone to school.

Though few students, parents and educators know how to file a misconduct complaint against School Safety Officers, the NYPD reports that it receives approximately 1,200 complaints a year about police misconduct in schools.

The NYCLU has been working for three years along with the Student Safety Coalition for passage of the Student Safety Act.  The coalition is composed of the following organizations:

• Advocates for Children of New York
• Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, UAW 2325
• Bronx Defenders
• Children’s Defense Fund – New York
• Class Size Matters
• Correctional Association of New York
• CUNY Graduate Center Participatory Action Research Collective
• DRUM – Desis Rising Up and Moving
• Make the Road New York
• NAACP-Legal Defense and Educational Fund
• NAACP New York State Conference
• National Economic and Social Rights Initiative
• National Lawyers Guild – New York City Chapter
• New York Civil Liberties Union
• New York Lawyers for the Public Interest
• Suspension Representation Project
• Teachers Unite
• Urban Youth Collaborative
• Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice

I’ve been a teacher for 26 years. I don’t much agree with Mayor Bloomberg, and I’m not altogether sanguine over Cathie Black’s prospects as chancellor. Truth be told, I’ve disagreed with UFT leadership from time to time as well. But you’d think we’d all find common ground somewhere.

For example, there are bedbugs — we’re against them. We ought to do all in our power to avoid them. Yet Department of Education policy toward bedbugs baffles the imagination; it will not provide lists of schools that have bedbugs. That’s truly disturbing, and the rationale, that schools have few beds, is plainly absurd. (If you aren’t Lou Gehrig, does that mean you can’t get Lou Gehrig’s Disease?)

Right now the UFT and the DOE are fighting in court over whether they should release the names and scores of teachers who participated in a value-added experiment. The UFT says the scores are invalid and inaccurate, and the DOE seems to feel they’re of vital importance.

We can debate that, but can’t we agree that parents ought to be warned when their children are in danger of blood-sucking vermin? If my 14-year-old fails a test, I can point fingers at her teacher, or her school. Much as I adore her, I’d have to grant it might be her fault too. (I’ve personally known a teenager or two who’d neglected to prepare.) Still, if she brings bedbugs home from school, I’d immediately wonder why the school hadn’t warned me.

This might be a golden opportunity for Cathie Black to gain credibility as schools chancellor. She’s made a lot of controversial remarks about retaining teachers. With city class sizes already the highest in the state, it’s hard to imagine how fewer teachers wouldn’t cause them to explode. (Should city kids be in classes of 14, like her kids? Or will they be okay in groups of 50, like they were in the 1970′s, the last time teachers were laid off?)

Here and now, before even discussing that, we can do better. At PS 197, a DOE vendor botched a bedbug treatment, destroying books and supplies. Official DOE policy is to sit on their hands pending the results of an investigation. But PS 197 teachers took matters into their own hands, staging a carwash to raise funds for new supplies.

Maybe Black ought to roll up her sleeves and help. She need not wash cars, if that’s not her thing. But she could make sure the kids of PS 197 get all they need, even what the carwash failed to provide. She could get kids books now and investigate later.

I suggest before Black gets rid of teachers, she get rid of bedbugs, and do so with extreme prejudice. This will not only unite both parents and teachers, but also give her a real record of accomplishment. Perhaps future generations will sing her praises.

For now, though, at least we’ll have something positive to build on.

Unveiled in 2008 in Washington D.C., the Education Equality Project was intended to influence discussion of education policy in the presidential election. (Remember those wars — manufactured or not — within the Democratic party?) It was also a way for Klein to broadcast his views on a national scale, much like former D.C. schools superintendent Michelle Rhee is doing with her new advocacy group, StudentsFirst.

After Arne Duncan was named Secretary of Education, EEP seemed to lose steam. Now comes news (via edReformer) that EEP director Ellen Winn is leaving for a job at 50CAN, where she’ll be in charge of expanding the education advocacy group’s work beyond Connecticut.

Winn’s departure was expected, said Democrats for Education Reform Executive Director Joe Williams, who is on EEP’s board, but the group hasn’t found a replacement for her yet. Williams said the board hasn’t met for several months.

“I think the board needs to get together to talk about the future of the organization, which they’re planning to anyway,” he said.

Not long after EEP’s launch, message gaps began to appear between Klein and Sharpton. Earlier this year, Sharpton was replaced with two chairmen: United Negro College Fund President and CEO Michael L. Lomax, and Janet Murguia, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza. They, along with Klein, lead the group.

In talking about his post-chancellorship plans, Klein has said that he hopes to stay involved in education politics through EEP.

Actress Anne Hathaway, who is co-hosting the ceremony, visited the students at their Winter Concert last night to deliver the invitation in person. The students are, naturally, delighted. They just about die with excitement. They’re also singing at DOE headquarters this afternoon for Chancellor Joel Klein’s goodbye party. Last January, the chorus sang Jay-Z’s “Run this Town” at Mayor Bloomberg’s inauguration.

You might want to turn down the volume before listening.

Some of the chorus’s hits:

Lisztomania

Empire State of Mind

Eye of the Tiger

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