GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Mayor Bloomberg is going to Albany tomorrow to lobby for “last in, first out”‘s repeal. (Daily Politics)
• UFT President Michael Mulgrew will also be there for the union’s lobby day. (no link)
• Sen. Flanagan says most teachers wouldn’t defend the teachers he wants to lay off. (State of Politics)
• AFL-CIO President Denis Hughes says the LIFO bill is an attack on collective bargaining. (Daily Politics)
• Peter Murphy: Limiting the LIFO bill to NYC could also limit the opposition. (Chalkboard)
• A poll shows that most Americans don’t want to see collective bargaining weakened. (NYT)
• Of all the unions, Gov. Cuomo is closest to open war with NYSUT, NY’s teachers union. (Capital)
• Cuomo plans to propose a cap on school superintendents’ pay this week. (AP)
• Michigan’s former treasurer says keeping teachers’ bargaining rights intact is good policy. (Salon)
• A D.C. charter school supporter argues for giving the schools unequal funding. (Washington City Paper)

The debate over the state’s seniority-based layoff system is sometimes portrayed as dividing young teachers at risk of losing their jobs under the current system and older teachers bent on protecting theirs.

But a group of young teachers is arguing that the current system benefits them too, and they’ve started a petition urging the city to preserve it.

“As newer teachers, we rely on our more senior colleagues for guidance and support,” the petition reads. “Without more senior teachers, we would lose our bridge to lessons learned through years of dedicated work in the school system.”

The petition, which launched online yesterday evening, had around 75 signatures by this afternoon, said one of its authors, Stephane Barile, a teacher at the Facing History School and member of the the education and social justice group New York Collective of Radical Educators. All of the signatories are teachers who have been teaching for fewer than five years, which means that unless they teach special education or certain subjects like science, they could be at risk of losing their jobs if layoffs happen this year and the current system isn’t changed. (more…)

In an unusual concession to community protests, the city has decided to keep open a Canarsie, Brooklyn, elementary school slated for closure.

The debate over whether to close P.S. 114 has been one of the most heated this year. Its supporters have argued that the city doomed the school by allowing its former principal to mismanage it for years and didn’t help the school before sentencing it to close.

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio broke the news of the reprieve to teachers and parents this evening at a rally that had been previously planned to protest the closure plans. Meanwhile, Department of Education officials spread word to the neighborhood’s elected representatives, who have been outspoken in their support of the school.

“We’re absolutely ecstatic,” said Jimmy Orr, the vice-president of the school’s parent association and the father of two P.S. 114 students, who learned of the news at the rally. “We burst into clapping and yelling and hooting and hollering.”

Parents and teachers petitioned the city for years to remove Maria Pena-Herrera, a principal who overspent her budget by $180,000 and was hiring unnecessary staff, before city officials ousted her in 2008. The school was left with thousands of dollars of debt and saw its students’ test scores drop dramatically. (more…)

GothamSchools won two first prize awards in a national competition for education journalism, the Education Writers Association announced today. One award, in the journalism blogging category, went to our editorial staff plus our Newsroom contributor Kim Gittleson. The other, in the community blogging category, went to Community section contributor Ruben Brosbe and Community section editor Philissa Cramer.

This is the second year in a row that GothamSchools has won first prize in the journalism blogging category. Last year was the first year that the annual awards included a category for online news.

The other journalism blogging winners were Valerie Strauss, author of the Washington Post blog The Answer Sheet, and Emily Alpert of Voice of San Diego for her education blog Schooled.

Other New York City education reporters received honors: NY1′s Lindsey Christ won four awards in the broadcast category, including first prize in the investigative reporting category for her story exposing that District 16′s community education council was effectively defunct due to low participation, despite having an administrative assistant assigned to the council. Helen Zelon and a team of City Limits reporters won second prize in investigative reporting for their stories on the Harlem Children’s Zone. The New York Times’ Sharon Otterman won a special citation for beat reporting in the large news organization category. And

Disclosure: I serve on the board of the Education Writers Association. The contest is judged by an external panel.

It’s the first day back from break, but Stephen Lazar’s mind isn’t on his global history students.

Instead, Lazar is worrying about which five teachers at his school, Bronx Lab School, are on the city’s school-by-school list of potential layoffs. He can count seven colleagues new enough to be on the chopping block.

In the GothamSchools Community section, Lazar writes in a letter to Mayor Bloomberg about the effect of layoff lists on teachers. He writes:

What you did this morning, Mr. Mayor, is crueler than anything I have ever seen a teacher do to her or his students (and I once had a teacher give me a zero on a test I missed for the funeral of one of my best friends, who was also in the teacher’s class). You want me arguing in the teacher’s lounge today about layoffs rather than talking about how we can best serve our students. You want me thinking about events in Albany, rather than thinking about how I can get the 34 students in each of my global history classes to think about the fact that events in Cairo should mean something to them.

Dear Mr. Mayor,

I just wanted to thank you for the welcome back to school you had waiting for me in the papers (and on GothamSchools) today. I’m assuming, though, that before that, you’d want to know how my vacation was?

Like many teachers, for me last week wasn’t a vacation at all. I spent the week preparing to teach a new unit on revolutions in global history. I have taught this unit before, but the events in the Middle East are far too relevant to ignore, so I spent hours finding just the right video clips and news articles to show my students that people do have power to change their lives and environments. As I finished up yesterday evening, I was more excited to teach today than I had been in a long time, even though the first day back from break is always one of the most challenging.

But you see, here’s the rub: I am not thinking about teaching today anymore. I’m not really thinking much about my students, either. I’m trying to figure out who the five teachers are at my school are who could be laid off. Our first-year history and math teachers are obvious, but I’m not sure who the other three are. We have Spanish, English, and health teachers who are new to our school, but I can’t remember how many years they have in the system. We have a third-year history teacher who is on the border; could he be in danger? Or maybe it’s the fourth-year P.E. teacher who is about to become a first-time father this month? The doubt is all I can focus on right now.

And if that’s all I’m thinking about this morning, I can only imagine what it’s like for the seven of them. I can’t imagine they will be able to focus on their students this morning, either.

You see, Mr. Mayor, I am not writing you to defend seniority rights (even though I do now and have always supported them, even when they could have cost me my job last year). I am not writing you about the new layoff law before the state assembly (even though it is convoluted and ridiculous). I am writing you, Mr. Mayor, to ask you a few questions: (more…)

Here’s something to ease the return from vacation: Footage of the chorus from Staten Island’s PS 22 closing out last night’s Academy Awards with a spirited performance of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The 64 students wore blue and green PS 22 T-shirts for their trip down the red carpet.

This weekend, Daily News columnist Michael Daly held chorus director Gregg Breinberg up as a reason for getting rid of “last in, first out” layoff rules. Daly argued that if Breinberg were a new teacher, the policy would force him to leave the system.

In fact, it was a “last in, first out” policy that led Breinberg to PS 22 in the first place. Here’s what the acclaimed teacher told GothamSchools in December:

I started teaching music at PS 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 PS 22 …

Breinberg also told GothamSchools he was flummoxed by the Department of Education’s fundraising regulations. But last week the group announced that it would begin accepting donations via the Fund for Public Schools’ alumni giving website.

News from New York City:

• The city’s teacher layoffs list shows that 4 in 5 schools would be affected. (Times, WSJ, NY1, Daily News)
• UFT President Michael Mulgrew says the list is just meant to scare teachers. (GothamSchools)
• The highest proportion of layoffs would happen in Harlem, where 1 in 6 teachers would be laid off. (Post)
• The UFT said avoiding layoffs could start with cutting the teacher recruitment budget. (S.I. Advance)
• A teachers at PS 156 in Queens is suing over the way she says her principal treats students. (Post)
• Mayor Bloomberg said parents shouldn’t worry about toxic levels of PCBs in school buildings. (NY1)
• About 1,500 teachers are paid by DOE while they are actually doing work for the teachers union. (Post)
• The city’s 43 transfer high schools have raised graduation rates for at-risk teens. (Daily News)
• Cathie Black has rescheduled her parent meeting that competed with the UFT’s. (S.I. Advance)
• PS 22′s chorus performed at the Oscars last night, singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” (Daily News)
• Michael Daly: PS 22′s 10-year chorus teacher is reason for ending “last in, first out” rules. (Daily News)
• The city might start reimbursing parents for transporting their special education students. (S.I. Advance)
• CUNY is planning to open a new community college in Manhattan as soon as next summer. (Post)

And beyond:

• After abandoning its racial diversity plan, Raleigh, N.C., might integrate schools by achievement. (Times)
• The mayor of Providence, R.I., reassured teachers who received termination notices. (Times)
• Rhode Island’s schools chief says budget-related layoffs don’t have to happen by seniority. (Post)
• N.J. Gov. Chris Christie’s fight with the teachers union is only the most fierce of his union battles. (Times)
• In Ohio, local boxing gyms are picking up refugees from schools’ canceled sports programs. (Times)
• Paul Krugman says Texas’s example shows that children are bearing the brunt of the recession. (Times)
• Few charter school operators have opted to take federal money to turn around failing schools. (EdWeek)
• David Kearns, a Bush I-era USDOE official and founder of New American Schools, has died. (Times)

City officials released a list Sunday showing how many teachers each of New York City’s public schools could lose to layoffs this year if the state’s current seniority law does not change.

The release comes at the same time that the state legislature is considering a bill that would end the current “last in, first out” layoff policy, which requires districts to dismiss teachers based on seniority. The list shows how Mayor Bloomberg’s planned-for 4,675 potential layoffs would be distributed across its nearly 1,600 schools and the city’s different neighborhoods. The list was first reported by the New York Times.

No teachers who work in special education, bilingual special education, English as a second language, or speech improvement would be laid off. Math and science teachers would also be less affected than their colleagues who teach other subjects. About 3 percent of math teachers would be laid off, whereas 9 percent of social studies teachers would lose their jobs.

More than half of the school employees who would be laid off under this plan are elementary school teachers. The layoffs carried out under this plan would also disproportionately affect newer schools. Of the 20 schools that would lose the greatest percentage of their teachers, all of them were opened between 2007 and 2010. (more…)

• Ending last-in-first-out layoffs could make the teaching force more white. (EdNotes)
• Mini-profiles of new high schools opening this fall are up on Insideschools. (Insideschools)
• Wisconsin teachers make almost 75 cents in benefits for every dollar in pay. (WSJ)
• A teacher pulled from her school mid-year after protesting has generated a rally. (Notebook)
• A debate about the new Michelle Rhee book and why D.C. schools struggle. (Taking Note)
• Public colleges fail those who survive the nation’s worst high schools. (Washington Monthly)
• Teachers unions are strong even in states without collective bargaining. (American Spectator)
• A compilation of research that supports ending last-in-first-out layoffs. (TNTP)
• Some of our commenters are unhappy with us and even a critic feels bad for us. (JD2718)