GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

GothamSchools loves visitors. So we were delighted when a group of ninth-graders and their teachers from the Renaissance Charter High School for Innovation stopped by our offices this afternoon.

We talked about how we spend our days as reporters; how strong writing can benefit students no matter what career they end up in; and how the students might start a newspaper at their school, which just opened this year.

Just a reminder: If you’ve got a journalism class or after-school club and want to come visit, let us know.

Everyone has their accidental email story — the “reply all” that shouldn’t have been, the mixed-up addresses and ensuing confusion — so it’s not a shock that new Chancellor Cathie Black has her own. Still, it’s amusing. And interesting that she’s taking a hands-on approach to small details.

—-Original Message—–

From: Black Cathie
Sent: Fri 1/28/2011 12:46 PM
To: Green Linda; &All Tweed
Cc: Grimm Kathleen
Subject: Re: New Carpet Runner installation next week

Great news! Should we have waited til post snow?

Sent from BlackBerry

From: Green Linda
Sent: Friday, January 28, 2011 11:39 AM
To: &All Tweed
Subject: New Carpet Runner installation next week

New carpet runners will be installed at Tweed on Wednesday, February 2nd, and Thursday, February 3rd.  The installers will begin removing the old frayed runners located in the halls and outside of offices, beginning at 5:00pm, both days.  There should be minimal obstruction.

Please be careful where you see the installers working.

Thank you

Linda

Linda S. Green, J.D.
Building Manager
New York City Department of Education

Along with the rest of my history department, I had the great pleasure to spend my Tuesday at East Side Community High School in Manhattan as a guest evaluator of their students’ semester-ending roundtable presentations.

While my students at Bronx Lab and students at many other New York high schools spent the day taking a three-hour Living Environment Regents exam — which emphasizes memorization of a breadth of factual content — students at East Side, thanks to a state waiver exempting them from most Regents exams, spent the day in deep thought and reflection, applying and showing off what they had learned this semester.

We learned much to take back to our school, but what I saw also has much larger implications for the current local and national educational discourse.

I participated in two 90-minute-long sessions, one for an 11th-grade English class, and the other for a 12th-grade AP English class. While there were a range of skill levels and fluency in English amongst the students I interacted with, all six were impressive in their presentations and reflectiveness. Each student chose one piece of writing to share, along with a cover letter which summarized their learning. The seniors also held a debate in which they each had to argue, using the lens of a school of literary theory, which character from a text they read most challenged the status quo. In my group, students used the lens of feminist theory to articulate which character most undermined and transcended the patriarchy in their societies. (more…)

• The Gates Foundation has given the state $4 million to help implement Race to the Top. (Post)
• A new report shows suspensions doubled in city schools over the last decade. (GS, Times, WNYC)
• Particularly affected are special education students, which city officials have long known. (Daily News)
• City officials again said many top teachers will be fired if layoffs happen under “last in, first out.” (Post)
• The Daily News says students in the poorest districts, with the newest teachers, will suffer most.
• Graduating seniors won’t have to take missed Regents exams; others will in June. (GS, Post, DN, NY1)
• About 150 opponents of the city’s school closure plans protested at City Hall yesterday. (NY1)
• Parents at PS 114 are skeptical that the city’s closure plan will help the plagued school. (WNYC)
• None of the city’s seminfinalists in the national Intel Science Search made it to the last round. (Post)
• The Post urges the PEP to allow Upper West Success Academy charter school to open at Brandeis HS.
• A bus driver was arrested for leaving a sleeping child alone on the bus. (NY1)
• Voters in Memphis will decide whether to do away with their school system. (Times)

• Chancellor Cathie Black will appear on NY1′s Inside City Hall tonight at 7 and 10 p.m. (no link)
• Protestors gathered near Tweed to protest  school closures in spite of the snow day. (no link)
• A brief history of how Michelle Rhee learned to play politics. (Politico)
• A new study says private funding dramatically changes NYC charter schools’ funding picture. (NEPC)
• Miss Eyre: Why did it take four hours after bus service was suspended to cancel school? (NYC Educator)
• A Bronx teacher says we should be talking about seniority, not “last in, first out.” (JD2718)
• Deborah Kenny talks about the effect of federal education cuts on Morning Joe. (MSNBC)
• The SOTU was all inside baseball and laundry lists when it came to education matters. (Eduflack)
• AQE is starting a letter-writing campaign urging Gov. Cuomo to spare schools in his budget. (WAMC)
• Teach for America is getting $100 million from four donors to start an endowment. (AP)
• Andy Rotherham says focusing on pass/fail ratings for teachers prevents real innovation. (Time)
• Leonie Haimson reports on Tuesday’s City Council school closure hearing. (NYC Public School Parents)
• More dangerous PCBs — this time in Brooklyn’s PS 11. (Daily News)
• Advocates list their suggestions for how to help students as their schools phase out. (EdVox)
• Ruben Brosbe explains how his students are learning through art, even if it looks like they aren’t. (GS)
• Was Eric Nadelstern a visionary educator or an administrative pawn? (Peter Goodman)

City high school seniors who needed to take a Regents exam to graduate this month with a local diploma will not need to reschedule the test, state education officials announced today.

Instead, those students will be able to use passing course grades to fulfill their graduation requirements. Students are normally required to take five Regents exams to graduate. Students must score above a 55 for the test to be counted towards a local diploma; for the more rigorous Regents diploma, they must reach the 65 mark.

Seniors who want to earn a Regents diploma must wait to re-take the exams in June, the next time they are offered. The January tests that would have been given today will not be re-administered. This raises the stakes for some seniors who plan to graduate in June by reducing the number of opportunities they have to pass the exam this year.

State Education Commissioner David Steiner encouraged students to wait and sit for the exams later in the year. ”We hold a Regents Diploma as the goal for all,” he said in a statement. “However, this is the fairest course of action for the seniors affected this week.”

City and state officials spent the day discussing how to accommodate students who needed to take exams today to graduate as planned.

“We are pleased the State took this step that will alow those seniors with sufficient credits and coursework to graduate this month,” Chancellor Cathie Black said in a statement. “However, we fully understand how disappointing it must be to all of those students who studied so hard for their Regents exams, and for the teachers and parents who worked with them.”

City officials estimated that between 400 and 500 students would benefit from the state’s decision. Last year, just under 3,500 students graduated between January and May. Of those students, roughly 400 used the winter Regents exams to fulfill graduation requirements. (more…)

New York City’s public schools are suspending more students than they did a decade ago, and for longer periods of time, according to a report released today.

Data on student suspensions obtained by the Student Safety Coalition through Freedom of Information requests and analyzed by the New York Civil Liberties Union shows that the city’s public schools have doled out increasingly large numbers of suspensions each year since 2002. Black students are being suspended in disproportionate numbers, and a third of the suspensions have taken place during months when students spend weeks sitting for state exams. (more…)

As the snow began to fall last night, Chancellor Cathie Black headed to Harlem’s I.S. 195 to attend her first public hearing at one of the 25 schools the city wants to shutter.

The city has been holding hearings at each of the schools slated for closure all this month in advance of next week’s Panel for Educational Policy vote on the plans. At some of the closure hearings, city officials have faced off with angry, passionate crowds protesting the city’s plans.

Black did not see that anger at last night’s meeting, which no parents attended, reported WNYC’s Beth Fertig. The bad weather may have discouraged turnout, but the school’s chapter leader also told Fertig that the school has struggled with parent involvement and the city’s teachers union has not mobilized to challenge the school’s closure as it has elsewhere.

Earlier this month, Black paid a visit both to both I.S. 195 and the charter school that shares the building, KIPP Infinity. The district middle school, whose progress report grade dropped from a B to a D last year, was the first school school slated to close that Black visited. The city plans to use the space vacated by I.S. 195 to re-site KIPP’s high school and open a new district middle school, though the details of the plan have not yet been announced.

After the hearing, Fertig and a few other reporters got the chance to speak with Black. The chancellor discussed why city officials made the decision to close 25 schools this year, last week’s rowdy PEP meeting, and her decision to delay planned special education reforms by a year.

Here’s the full audio and a transcript of their conversation. Fertig’s full report on the meeting is available here. WNYC and GothamSchools are partnering on The Big Fix, an ongoing series examining the city’s efforts to improve low-performing schools.

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Reporter: So Chancellor, I just wanted to know first of all, why did you decide to come tonight?

Black: I think it’s very important. You know, I will attend as many meetings as I possibly can. Last night I did a town hall, tonight a joint public hearing, next week we have the two panel meetings.  It’s all a part of being the chancellor, of reaching out, of being – hearing what’s on people’s minds. I mean, we — these are hard, I mean, this is a difficult — it might have been a quiet evening but it’s still difficult for everybody. (more…)

Three Brooklyn students — from left to right, 7-year-olds Olivia and Jai and 9-year-old Isabella — used their snow day to build a snow fort in Prospect Park today.

We know what high school teachers would have been doing if there had been school today: proctoring Regents exams. But we’re wondering what other teachers and students would have been doing today if 19 inches of snow hadn’t fallen.

For Jai Jaroslaw, age “seven and three-quarters” and a second-grader at Brooklyn’s P.S. 321, the unexpected day off meant getting to spend the morning in Prospect Park building a snow fort.

If it had been a normal day? ”I guess I would be doing math, and now I would have lunch,” he said. Jai’s father, Victor Jaroslaw, a teacher at Fort Greene’s P.S. 46, would have spent the day teaching science.

What would your day have looked like if school had not been cancelled, and how are you spending the day instead? Tell us in the comments.

A big question mark hanging over today’s snow closure is what will happen to the high school students who were supposed to take Regents exams this morning.

Students are required to take the exams to graduate, and today’s test date was particularly important for some students hoping to graduate this month. City officials said today that schools ordered nearly 100,000 exams in six subjects, though frequently the number of tests ordered is larger than the number of students who sit for them.

No one seems to know yet exactly when those students will get a chance to take their exams. A GothamSchools reader told us that she spent 45 minutes waiting on 311, the city’s information hotline, this morning, before being told only that today’s administration had been canceled.

“We are in discussion with state education officials about finding a solution for students who were unable to take the Regents exams scheduled for today,” Mayor Bloomberg said during a press conference to discuss the surprise storm. “This is not a problem only for New York City. There are other cities in the southern part of the state that have exactly the same problem.”

A Department of Education spokesman said the city hoped to finalize arrangements with the state today. State policy is typically not to administer make-up Regents exams. (more…)