GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

We’re all guilty of it — leaving lights on in a room we’re not using, tossing the plastic water bottle we bought into a non-recyclable-trash bin. No matter how many books, articles, and documentaries are made about the environmental crisis facing our planet, we still frequently fail to do what would be in the best interest of our planet and, consequently, ourselves.

I used to think the problem lay with our behavior, our inability, as Gandhi so elegantly put it, “to be the change we want to see in the world.” But after attending a workshop by the Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education, organized by parent Michele Israel of PS 107 in Brooklyn, I learned that the source of the problem is not our behavior but our thinking, and that’s what the institute is trying to change with children in grades K-12.

Aleidria Lichau, the lead sustainability educator at the Cloud Institute, illustrated how our thinking was at the heart of the problem by making the parents and educators attending the workshop play a form of musical chairs. As the chairs became more scarce, each of us developed strategies to cope. Some shared a chair, others found other places to sit; but none of us thought, as the institute would say, “upstream,” to actually solve the dilemma we were in, for example, not letting the music play in the first place. The institute conducts similar games with students to help them understand how their thinking is driving their behavior and to demonstrate that the significant environmental problems we face cannot be solved with the same level of thinking we’ve used to create them. (more…)

• Former Klein deputy Chris Cerf will be New Jersey’s education commissioner. (WSJ, Star-Ledger)
• Students rallied in favor of a City Council bill to change how school safety incidents are reported. (NY1)
• City Council could vote on the long-idle bill as early as Monday. (WNYC)
• A Greenwich Village parent sued to stop the Children’s Aid Society from moving its preschool. (WSJ)
• The Ca. Board of Ed. called for an investigation into the Compton parent trigger campaign. (L.A. Times)
• Michelle Rhee says Cathie Black’s lack of education experience shouldn’t disqualify her. (Post)
• D.C.’s interim chancellor says she will review union concerns over teacher ratings. (Washington Times)
• Some parents at closing Boston schools say they may leave the public schools entirely. (Boston Globe)

• A spending bill in the Senate could affect federal funding for school turnarounds. (EdWeek)
• Obama is making concessions on some reforms to keep Race to the Top alive. (Flypaper)
• A principal discovers his teachers’ criticism of him and does not take it well. (GS Community)
• Ten questions for chancellor-designate Cathie Black (or you, of course). (City Limits)
• New York is looking for a top-tier engineering school to move in. (NYT)
• It’s definitely not the most wonderful time of the year to be dealing with students. (NYC Educator)
• A look at 19 successful TFA alums, some well-known, others less obvious. (Fast Company)
• Michelle Rhee: Three years ago, D.C. saw me as New York sees Cathie Black now. (Post)
• The AFT is worried that common core standards are too focused on assessment. (EdWeek)
• California’s Board of Ed wants a charter conversion campaign investigated. (LA Times)
• Gov. Schwarzenegger defends the conversion plus the policy that led to it. (Washington Post)
• A survey finds SC students like single-gender classes, but it has some problems. (Slate)
• A list of 20 “education influencers” you can follow on Twitter. (Distance Education)

Why is Mayor Bloomberg so confident that Hearst executive Cathleen Black will make a great chancellor? Maybe because her “superstar” management skills are exactly what Joel Klein most desperately lacked.

In a new piece for Capital New York, our own Anna Phillips describes how Klein’s big ideas suffered from a “confused system of accountability” in his own staff. The confusion worsened after the departure of his longtime aide Kristen Kane, who served informally as Tweed Courthouse’s “chief manager.”

“No one was paying enough attention to how ideas, once conceived and adopted, were executed,” Anna writes. She adds:

As one former Department of Education official put it, “In terms of delegating properly, ensuring everyone has clearly accountability lines, and it all kind of synthesizes at the top … He just doesn’t do that.”

Klein’s weakness became clear when top school officials disagreed with each other.

When there were internal turf wars and power struggles-which there were, often between his top advisers as they competed for attention and funding for their pet projects-he didn’t intervene. “He hated conflict,” said a former official. “When he became aware there was infighting, he might have a cabinet meeting to tell people to shut the fuck up, we have this one goal and if you’re not on board, leave. That was his idea of managing.”

Rather than a kind of Klein lite — also from the business world, but more smiley — Black may be more like Klein’s opposite, Anna’s sources suggest. She can execute, she just doesn’t yet have the ideas.

Collin Lawrence is a former New York City teacher who is recounting his four years working at a Brooklyn high school. Read Collin’s previous posts.

Despite the small number of teachers, the Brooklyn Arts Academy rarely held all-staff meetings. Instead, each teacher team appointed a representative to a weekly meeting dubbed “the central table.” This representative voiced his/her team’s concerns and reported back directives from the principal.

In my first year, central table meetings sometimes lasted long into the evening, fueled by the idealism and enthusiasm of the teacher-leaders. Sometimes, the meetings even continued long after the principal left.

This was the case at one meeting in mid-March when the agenda was to reflect on what had been going well and what improvements were needed in terms of the new teacher teams and the school as a whole. I was not in attendance for this meeting, but a few of my colleagues told me that they stayed at school past 7 p.m. filling up the walls of the conference room with chart paper. At the end of the night, there were one or two charts of paper listing the school’s strengths. The rest of the room was wallpapered with bullet points, each one documenting an area of the school that the teachers felt needed work.

One of these bullet points read “lack of principal presence.” (more…)

• Cathie Black’s tour took her to Medgar Evers College Prep yesterday. (NY1, WNYC)
• But Medgar Evers’ principal said Black’s visit was too short for Black to have learned much. (Daily News)
• Teachers are fleeing troubled — and on the chopping block — John F. Kennedy HS. (Riverdale Press)
• Advocates of the yet-unpassed Student Safety Act released data about in-school arrests. (Daily News)
• Staten Island parents are upset Black didn’t ask about school buses when she visited. (S.I. Advance)
• Robert Hughes and James Merriman advocate small school-charter school collaboration. (Daily News)
• The Post says the city’s move toward toughening tenure is good, but ending it would be better.
• Los Angeles is seeking corporate sponsors for its school buildings. (L.A. Times, Times)
• The high school in Central Falls, R.I., where a mass firing was averted, is still struggling. (NPR)

• Mayor Bloomberg told city agencies to cut capital budgets by 20 percent each year for a decade. (NY1)
• Cathie Black passed through Medgar Evers College Prep today. (NYT, GS, Daily News)
• The Black parody Twitter account was suspended today, but here are some of its tweets. (Observer)
• A private school headmaster argues that Black is unprepared to be chancellor. (HuffPo)
• What would happen if Black was a substitute teacher for a day? An imagined narrative. (HuffPo)
• Norm Scott at Joel Klein’s last PEP: “I come to praise Joel, not to bury him.” (YouTube via EdNotes)
• Norm Fruchter on Klein’s legacy: the chancellor “played big,” but didn’t get big results. (EdVox)
• The city’s delay in cleaning PCB’s from schools has prompted criticism. (Gotham Gazette)
• Award-winning math and science teachers gave Arne Duncan their tips for ed reform. (Ed.gov)
• In spite of all of the hype, “Waiting for Superman” didn’t perform well at the box office. (Rick Hess)
• The L.A. school board approved a plan to let schools seek corporate sponsors to raise money. (Times)

UFT President Michael Mulgrew speaks to teachers gathered outside DOE headquarters at Tweed Courthouse to protest the city's plans to close 26 schools.

In the opening shot of this year’s battle over the city’s plan to close 26 schools, teachers union chief Michael Mulgrew vowed to take the fight all the way to Albany.

State law gives the city ample leeway to close schools, and the union’s successful lawsuit that last year blocked the city from closing 19 schools was based primarily on process questions rather than a policy challenge.

This year, Mulgrew said, the union plans to fight to change the policy and will lobby for changes to the law if necessary.

In the first of what he vowed would be many protests, Mulgrew accused city officials of neglecting their responsibilities to help schools improve.

“Their job is not to sit back and monitor data,” Mulgrew said. “Their job is to come in and say, ‘what can we do?’”

Teachers from across the city rallied outside the Department of Education’s headquarters at Tweed Courthouse, with the protest beginning on Chambers Street and spilling around the corner onto Broadway.

Mulgrew criticized Mayor Michael Bloomberg for his aggressive school closure policies, which the union president characterized as “bragging” about how many schools the city has shut down. In a speech last year, the mayor promised to shutter the lowest-performing 10 percent of city schools.

“The only way to do that is to sit back and not give the schools the support they need,” Mulgrew said. (more…)

Chancellor-designate Cathie Black visited Medgar Evers College Preparatory School today.

More than a month after being named the next schools chancellor, Cathie Black has yet to see the system at its most troubled.

Black has been to 13 schools, making stops in each of the five boroughs and in schools at each grade level. The majority of schools she’s visited have earned either an A or a B on their annual progress report, meaning they are in no danger of being closed for poor performance. She has been to five “C” schools, none of which are on the city’s “to-be-closed” list.

Asked today if she thought she was getting a “realistic” view of the city’s schools, Black said she had.

“I’ve been to the South Bronx, and that’s about as realistic as you can get, and I felt the same thing,” she told Daily News reporter Rachel Monahan. “The principal has been there for four years. And I asked if [the school] looked like that four years ago, and she said no it did not look like that. So that comes from leadership.” (more…)

Here are some reasons I don’t have time to cook dinner, do my laundry, or write a column about you, Cathie Black.

1. I spend two nights a week attending classes towards my second master’s degree in Teaching Students with Disabilities. A master’s degree is required of all New York City teachers.
2. Each night, I bring home student work in order to read it, smile because of it, and decide what my students needs are. This is how education happens. (Not just by looking at test scores, by the way.)
3. I’m constantly reading books about how I can improve my practice. Ones I refer back to frequently are Punished by Rewards, Beyond Discipline, The Explosive Child, and The Power of Their Ideas. Have you read these? Do you know who wrote them? (more…)