GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Gov. Cuomo wants to get rid of formulas that automatically increase education spending. (AP)
• But Shelly Silver and Dean Skelos both seemed to call the governor’s bluff. (Daily Politics)
• A principal sharply criticizes Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign against teacher seniority rights. (EdNotes)
• A rundown of this year’s school closure issues, and the schools on the chopping block. (Gotham Gazette)
• Parents, students, and two City Council members were arrested protesting school closings. (EdVox)
• City Councilman Al Vann questions about the effectiveness of the Harlem Children’s Zone. (WNYC)
• A new URL for a private school admissions test: ERBLearn.org, not ERBTest.org. (Abacus Mom)
• Cathie Black doesn’t seem to know as much about retaining teachers as firing them. (JD2718)
• The case of PS 114 symbolizes the tension between improving schools or closing them. (Ed in the Apple)
• Investigators found PCBs in another Brooklyn school building, this time in East New York. (WSJ)
• James Merriman: It’s not a conspiracy that charters open where district schools close.  (Charter Center)
• Students at a Brooklyn middle school embroidered positive sentiments. (Be Nice Project)

Setting aside the fact that tomorrow night’s school closure vote will take place in the middle of a “crippling” ice storm, the citywide school board meeting could match last year’s chaos.

Last January, the city tried to push 19 school closures and 32 space utilization changes through the citywide school board in one night, leading to a 12-hour meeting that lasted until four in the morning. Students teachers, and parents showed up by the hundreds to defend their schools and the teachers union held a street-filling rally complete with a jumbotron.

Tomorrow night, the city has lined up only 11 schools for closure and six space utilization changes that include grade truncations and and co-locations. The remainder of the school closure votes will take place in a second marathon Panel for Educational Policy meeting on Thursday.

But if the work load is lighter, that may not be true of the turnout. Charter school advocates are planning to show up en masse to support the few charter school co-location votes before the Panel for Educational Policy. (more…)

Department of Education officials frequently claim that students who attend schools that are phasing out benefit from being there. As school officials told City Council members last week, students get more attention and a stronger push toward grad as the schools get smaller.

Today, two posts in the GothamSchools Community section challenge the city’s story. In the first (reposted from the blog EdVox), Melissa Kissoon describes what happened to her school after it started phasing out. She writes:

My first two years of high school at Lane were great. There were clubs and extra credit activities to help students get ahead or to help struggling students pass. …

Now all the great teachers we once loved have either switched to the other schools in the building or have just gone to another school completely. Now there is no money for the last year of students within my school. For example, there is no longer a library!

A second Community piece, by Christine Rowland, looks at graduation and dropout rates at the four schools where she has worked — two of which closed in 2006 and two of which are up for closure this year. At last week’s City Council hearing, the department presented data that showed that both graduation rates and dropout rates climbed at schools in the process of phasing out.

Rowland dug into the DOE’s data archives and found that that pattern hasn’t always been true. (more…)

A few weeks ago I sat in the library at Christopher Columbus High School and listened to a Department of Education official explain to our confused and upset parents that closing our school would actually benefit their children. The official argued that the school’s closure would actually increase students’ chances of graduating, rather than damage them.

This seemed a counterintuitive idea to me, so I decided to dig into the data. The DOE keeps a wonderful public archive of graduation and dropout data in longitudinal reports. I looked at what happened to students at Bronx high schools Roosevelt and Taft during the years they phased out, and compared them to Columbus and John F. Kennedy along with city averages.

Why did I focus on these schools? I began my career as an English as a Second Language for seven years at Kennedy. In 1999 I was invited to become a staff development specialist for the DOE’s Office of Bilingual Education (later the Office of English Language Learners) and for two years I visited Roosevelt every Tuesday and Taft every Wednesday to support their bilingual and ESL teachers. Then in 2002 I moved to Columbus, where I’ve worked as teacher and UFT Teacher Center staff. Looking at these four schools provided me a glimpse into the sad unraveling of the places I spent my career.

First, I took a look at the 7-year longitudinal studies — those showing the ultimate outcomes for students who entered Taft and Roosevelt in the last four years the schools admitted students. In both cases, graduation declined for the first couple of years by a small amount, with the final two cohorts doing significantly worse. Roosevelt graduated only 17.6 percent of the students who entered in 2002, and Taft graduated just 29.5 percent of them. These outcomes did not compare favorably with either the citywide average for those years, or schools currently on the chopping block, Columbus and Kennedy.

Conversely, I took a look at dropout rates for the same cohorts. Here we see rates in the closing schools rising to the point where, in the final cohort, over 80 percent of the final cohort at Roosevelt dropped out, and over 70 percent of the final cohort at Taft. (more…)

City officials came the closest they’ve gotten to acknowledging the Department of Education’s role in a Brooklyn school’s problems on Friday when a deputy chancellor said he was aware that teachers and parents feel abandoned.

Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky spoke at P.S. 114 — a Canarsie elementary school the city hopes to phase out next year — after more than two hours of parents and teachers testifying that the DOE ignored the school’s problems. Though they’d petitioned the city to remove a principal who overspent her budget by $180,000 and was hiring unnecessary staff, Maria Pena-Herrera wasn’t forced out until 2008. Now, the school owes the city thousands of dollars and has seen its students’ test scores plummet in the last year.

Polakow-Suransky responded to the outpouring of anger by telling parents that the city hasn’t made a final recommendation to close or keep P.S. 114 open.  (more…)

Melissa Kissoon is an 18 year old graduate of Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn and a youth leader with Future of Tomorrow and the Urban Youth Collaborative. This post originally appeared at EdVox, a blog featuring members of UYC and the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice.

I was a victim of high school phase out. My first two years of high school at Lane were great. There were clubs and extra credit activities to help students get ahead or to help struggling students pass. I had some teachers I really liked and there were many teachers who had been in the school for over 15 years. Overall it was a great school despite its reputation and as a student, I would say it was improving. Then one day in 2007 the principal and deans got us together to tell us our school is phasing out, which meant that they would be putting another school into our building and would no longer accept any new students or freshman. Also, the building would be incorporating not one school but FOUR. Do you know what it’s like to have four new schools come into your school building?

Once the four new schools came, it was hard to be proud of a school that was no longer ours. I was a cheerleader for my school, so school pride was something that was very important to me. The four schools came and took the fourth floor in our building and we weren’t allowed to set foot on the fourth floor anymore. Then when the next year came, and there were more students in the new schools and fewer in our school, the DOE split the rest of the floors in halves. So, if your classroom was around the corner, you could no longer just walk over to your room, you’d have to go upstairs and around and back down stairs to make it to your class. As a result of this, many students became late for their classes. Students missed class time and got in trouble because our school was chopped up and our building was divided!

Now, all the great teachers we once loved have either switched to the other schools in the building or have just gone to another school completely. Now, there is no money for the last year of students within my school. For example, there is no longer a library! Lane doesn’t have enough money for a library and the other four schools have small budgets, so none of the students have a library. Students with essays due and no printer or computer can’t print-then they struggle to figure out how to pass their class.

Almost all the after school activities belong to the other schools, including the sports and the ROTC. Two of my friends are in their last year at Lane this year, which is also Lane’s last year open. (more…)

“Last in, first out” news:

• Gov. Cuomo won’t heed Mayor Bloomberg’s call to wrap repeal of “last in, first out” into his budget. (Post)
• But the state might be weighing a plan to let Bloomberg fire some teachers, including ATRs. (Post)
• The current budget would cut all teachers hired since 2006, Bloomberg said. (Times, NY1, Daily News)
• That number is probably 15,000, but could be as high as 21,000 teachers, he said. (WSJ)
• Meet a young teacher (who belongs to Educators 4 Excellence) who would be laid off. (Post)

Also in New York City:

• The city twice assigned a weak student to high school, then sent her back to eighth grade. (Daily News)
• Schools that already weren’t providing required ESL instruction are cutting ESL classes. (Daily News)
• The city is trying desperately to fire a top-paid teacher who is not allowed near students. (Post)
• Speaking in London, Joel Klein said it’s easier to prosecute murderers than fire bad teachers. (Post)
• The former president of the PTA at Brooklyn’s PS 29 is suspected of stealing $100,000. (Daily News)
• The city’s closure hearing at Brooklyn’s PS 114 turned rowdy on Friday night. (NY1)
• Prospect Heights parents protested against plans to reshuffle schools in the neighborhood. (NY1)
• The Daily News says the PEP allowing a charter school on the Upper West Side is a moral issue.
• Chris Whittle, the persistent for-profit schools investor, will open a new private school next year. (WSJ)
• Twenty-five years after the Challenger shuttle disaster, the city offers space instruction. (NY1)

Elsewhere:

• A proposed law would give Mass. parents time off work to help their children in school. (Boston Globe)
• D.C. chief Kaya Henderson’s task: Do what Michelle Rhee did, without backlash. (Washington Post)
• Some of the revamped AP courses are launching this year, but U.S. History is not. (Times)
• Schools are dealing with ongoing emotional fallout from parents’ job losses. (Times)
• George Will says American schools are falling hopelessly behind the rest of the world’s. (Post)

• If the state cuts the city’s ed budget by $1 billion, 15,000 teachers would be laid off. (Reuters)
• Here are New York’s new state teaching standards, newly Regents-approved. (NYSED, PDF)
• A woman who lied to get her children into better schools deemed new Rosa Parks. (NPR)
• The UFT mapped the locations of schools slated for closure and charter schools. (Edwize)
• There’s reason to be concerned about the Promise Neighborhoods project. (Paul Tough)
• Ohio’s state teacher pension board is recommending big benefit cuts. (Dayton Daily News)
• A prominent ed researcher says he is skeptical of much of ed research. (Larry Cuban)
• Joel Klein’s new nonprofit has a mailer urging support for closing schools. (Daily Politics)
• Another argument that the U.S. should mimic Finland, in a slightly unusual place. (TNR)
• Finland’s success story doesn’t support either side in US’s ed wars. (Quick and the Ed)

Chancellor Cathie Black showed what she has learned and what she hasn't in her first month on the job on NY1 last night.

Chancellor Cathie Black’s interview on Inside City Hall last night is worth watching in full. The interview exposes just how much Black has been able to absorb in her first month on the job — and how much she hasn’t.

In a moment first highlighted by NY1 education reporter Lindsey Christ on Twitter, Black declared, ”The public school system in New York City has been unbelievably successful since the birth of our nation.” She was responding to a question from host Errol Louis about why she chose to send her children to private rather than public city schools.

Black did not elaborate, but the statement is confusing given that public schools in New York City did not emerge until the early 1800s.

Another moment of exposure had to do with teacher attrition. After a discussion about the “last in, first out” policy, Louis asked Black if she was concerned that almost half of New York City school teachers leave after 6 years in the classroom (PDF link).

Here’s how Black responded:

Well you have to know, like, what’s really at the heart of the issue. I don’t know that we know what’s really at the heart of the issue. Teaching is a hard job. We want the ones who are committed. We want the ones who make a difference. We want the ones who want to work hard and really change the lives of these young people. They’re there on a mission. So, you know, some are going to leave.

She then returned to the “last in, first out” question, arguing that perhaps teachers would be less likely to leave if they weren’t concerned about being laid off. “Right now there have to be a lot of teachers thinking, ‘Maybe I don’t have a job next year.’ Can we afford to have thousands of teachers think to themselves, ’I have to leave the system now because I may not have a job in a few months?’ That’s going to be a catastrophe,” she said.

For years, researchers have asked why teachers leave schools — particularly struggling schools. A 2007 paper by a group studying New York City teachers, the Teacher Pathways Project, summarized the major findings this way:

• “Teachers are more likely to stay in schools in which student achievement is higher and teachers — especially white teachers — are more likely to stay in schools with higher proportions of white students.”
• “Teachers who score higher on tests of academic achievement are more likely to leave,” as are teachers from out of town.
• Less-qualified teachers are more likely to stay at a school than teachers with higher qualifications, “especially if they teach in low-achieving schools.” (more…)

Our comments section is about to get a little bit nicer.

Our comments section has its moments of glory, instances of brave citizens discoursing civilly despite a national education debate dominated by divisive misconceptions.

But too often, it’s ugly down there. Too often, comments include personal attacks and deliberate deceptions.

And so we embark on a niceness campaign. Down the road, we are open to making more major changes, such as asking commenters to log in with a registered verified identity or creating a community policing system where other commenters can vote comments up or down a la Gawker.

Another idea is to change the structure so you can respond right underneath other readers’ postings and flag comments you find inappropriate. We hope you will share more ideas.

For now, we have drafted a recommended list of principles to govern our most basic (and, at present, only) moderation decision: Do we allow a comment to be published, or do we delete it? (Right now, given our editorial capacity, every comment that the WordPress computers don’t flag as possible spam is published immediately by default. For more on the spam catchers, see #4 below.)

Most of these principles we already follow in an ad hoc way, but we want to codify them. The list is below. Please share your feedback. Once we’ve got something we all like — or at least, most of us like — we’ll publish it permanently on the site.

Draft GothamSchools Community Policy

We encourage vigorous debate and welcome constructive criticism of our coverage. However, we do reserve the right to moderate these discussions and occasionally will delete comments that violate our community policy.

1. No obscenity, vulgarity, profanity, racism or sexism. If you think something might cross the line, it probably does. Disagreement with people’s arguments is fine, but personal attacks — including on other commenters and GothamSchools writers and editors — will not be tolerated. We tend to agree with Jon Stewart that Nazi analogies are rarely appropriate. We reserve the right to judge what crosses the line. (more…)