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.

The petition grew out of a subgroup of NYCORE made up of young teachers focused on supporting teachers who entered the profession through alternative certification programs like New York City Teaching Fellows and Teach for America.

The group’s campaign came on a day that rhetoric between the city and its teachers and principals unions heated up over the question of layoffs. Many teachers and principals were surprised yesterday evening to read city projections of how many teachers their schools could lose in the newspapers before they had seen those estimates themselves.

Teachers and principals packed a room at the teachers union today as United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew and Council of School Supervisors and Administrators President Ernie Logan accused the city of fear-mongering and of trying to circumvent the unions’ collective bargaining rights.

“No one’s spoken to me about negotiating any of this,” Logan said. “I’m willing to talk. Nothing is off the table.”

The mayor is promoting a bill that would do away with the seniority-based layoff system in favor of a complicated set of other criteria, including teacher evaluation ratings, attendance records and value-added ratings.

The full text of the petition is below, and can be found online here.

An Open Letter from Newer Teachers of New York State

February 21, 2011

Dear parents, students, colleagues, school administraters, elected officials, and members of the public,

Currently, New York State’s seniority rule protects experienced teachers from layoffs, a policy sometimes known as “last in, first out.” In recent budget negotiations, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Black have pressured Governor Cuomo to overturn this rule. We, the undersigned teachers who have been teaching in New York State for five years or less, stand in solidarity with our more experienced colleagues and strongly support maintaining the seniority rule.

As newer teachers, we rely on our more senior colleagues for guidance and support.  Senior teachers offer us their advice, their formal mentorship, and their connections with communities.  Without more senior teachers, we would lose our bridge to lessons learned through years of dedicated work in the school system.

In addition, the rates of black and Latino new teacher hires in New York City have steadily declined since 2002, while the vast majority of New York City public school students are black and Latino. Opening up more senior teachers to layoffs would risk further decreasing the already sparse ranks of teachers of color.  These teachers provide guidance for younger teachers of all backgrounds, and play an important role in the lives of our students.

We also believe that Bloomberg and Black’s so-called “merit-based” system for retaining teachers will foster competitive, fearful school cultures that are detrimental both to teachers’ professional development and to student learning. In addition, Bloomberg and Black seek to measure teacher performance by student test scores, an imperfect measure at best, and one that encourages narrowly test-focused curricula.

Finally, Bloomberg and Black’s arguments against the seniority rule are based on the fact that newer teachers work for lower salaries than our more experienced peers; allowing experienced teachers to be laid off would therefore reduce the total number of necessary layoffs.  This argument, however, fails to account for the true cost of professional development and adequate support for newer teachers.  It also ignores the fact that teacher experience is one of the most reliable predictors of student learning.  If student achievement is the priority, then experienced teachers are more than worth their cost.

Ultimately, the debate over who to lay off is a distraction from the root causes of inequity that continue to affect our profession and the lives of our students; budget cuts should not include any teacher layoffs.  Education is an investment in our future, and cuts to education are ultimately short-sighted.  We reject political tactics that raise the specter of massive teacher layoffs in efforts to divide the workforce and pit parents against teachers.  In the interest of our students, we stand with senior teachers in supporting the seniority rule.

Sincerely,

Newer Teachers of New York State

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.

Chancellor Cathie Black said that the decision was made in response to the outpouring of public support the school has received since city officials announced they planned to close it.

“After extensive discussions with the PS 114 community and local elected officials about the struggles this school has faced and its capacity to better serve its students, we have decided to keep PS 114 open,” Black said in a statement. ”In the coming days we will work to develop a comprehensive plan for the school that will give it a real opportunity for success,” she said.

The city’s original plan was to replace P.S. 114 with two schools, Explore Charter School and a new district school. The city will move forward with its plan to site the charter school in the same building, city officials said today, but would abandon plans to open the new district school.

Orr credited help from City Councilmen Lewis Fidler and Charles Barron pressuring city officials to re-examine their decision to shutter the school. The citywide school board had been originally scheduled to vote on the closure plan at the beginning of February but had then delayed the vote because of the public outcry. Top city officials had acknowledged that parents and teachers felt abandoned by the city, but until today had indicated they would press forward with their plans to close the school.

“I think what it proves is that you can be heard, and perhaps the more appropriate approach, as opposed to cat calling and all of that, is to work with the city,” said Fidler, who had been a vocal opponent of the city’s plan to close the school. “I think the objective facts at 114 cried out for a different answer than the one [city officials] were giving.”

Fidler had committed to doubling the funding that the school receives from City Coucil from last year to this year, a promise he vowed today to keep.

Parents, teachers, and Canarsie’s elected officials have been lobbying against the city’s closure plan for months. In recent weeks they were joined by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who hailed the city’s decision to keep the school open. Earlier today, de Blasio released a report criticizing the DOE’s decision to shutter the school.

“This is a major victory for this close-knit school community,” de Blasio said. “P.S. 114 deserved a second chance—and now it will have one.”

This is one of the first times that the city has abandoned its plans to shutter a school in the middle of the process. Last year, the city granted a partial reprieve to the Bronx’s Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School, choosing to keep one of its technical programs open but closing the rest. This year the city also spared four schools it was thwarted from closing last year, choosing not to try to shutter the schools again because of progress they had made.

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.

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.

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:

Where is your humanity? Did you really need to release this list on the first day back form vacation? And why did you choose not to include more specific information? Is it because you want seven teachers worried about their jobs at my school rather than only the five who might have to be laid off?

And while we’re at it, why do five people need to be laid off (along with 4,661 other teachers across the city)? I have heard that the city has a multiple-billion dollar surplus; why can’t you use this? Why haven’t you taken measures to increase city revenues, rather than merely cutting costs? I did my taxes this past weekend, and ended up having to write the state a check for $1,200. I happily would have added a couple of hundred dollars to that in order to avoid losing teachers, and I’m no millionaire. While we’re at it, why are you letting their taxes go down right now?

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.

Or are you trying to help me, Mr. Mayor? Are you trying to make the streets of downtown Manhattan look like the streets of Cairo or Madison? Because it seem like you want a war, and nothing engages my students more than watching a war. So maybe I do need to thank you; my students might have the opportunity to witness the truly awesome power we the people can wield against those who abuse their power.

Sincerely,
Stephen Lazar

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.

• 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)

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.

While most schools would lose at least one teacher to layoffs, about 320 would not have any teachers laid off.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew denounced the city’s decision to release the list.

“This is more fear-mongering from Mayor Bloomberg and it is clearly the mayor’s strategy to create a panic among parents, teachers and communities,” he said. “Not only is this fear-mongering irresponsible, with a $3 billion budget surplus he doesn’t need to do layoffs at all.”

Department of Education spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said the list reveals how hard some schools with many newly hired teachers will be hit.

“This arbitrary standard means that some schools will lose up to half of their teachers, just because they have chosen to hire teachers new to the profession,” Ravitz said. “There is a better way to do this — we can change the law and keep the best teachers for our kids.”

Schools with the greatest percentage of possible layoffs:

1. Columbia Secondary School: 14 of 20 teachers
2. Brighter Choice Community School: 5 of 8 teachers
3. Spruce Street School: 3 of 6 teachers
4. High School for Excellence and Innovation: 6 of 12 teachers
5. Soundview Academy for Culture and Scholarship: 8 of 16 teachers
6. Brooklyn Brownstone School: 5 of 10 teachers
7. The Academy of Talented Scholars: 7 of 14 teachers
8. P.S. Q290: 3 of 6 teachers
9. Rockaway Park High School for Environmental Sustainability: 2 of 4 teachers
10. Cornerstone Academy for Social Action: 17 of 36 teachers
11. East Fordham Academy for the Arts: 7 of 15 teachers
12. Khalil Gibran International Academy: 4 of 9 teachers
13. Young Leaders Elementary School: 10 of 23 teachers
14. Esperanza Preparatory Academy: 11 of 26 teachers
15. KAPPA International High School: 13 of 31 teachers

Schools with the greatest number of possible layoffs:

1. New Rikers Island School: 21 of 69 teachers
2. Sunset Park High School: 20 of 51 teachers
3. P.S. 157 Grove Hill: 20 of 58 teachers
4. P.S. 86 Kingsbridge Heights: 20 of 119 teachers
5. New Explorations into Science, Technology and Math: 19 of 95 teachers
6. Cornerstone Academy for Social Action: 17 of 36 teachers
7. P.S. 1 Courtlandt School: 17 of 53 teachers
8. P.S. 58 School of Heroes: 17 of 66 teachers
9. Pioneer Academy: 16 of 41 teachers
10. P.S. 139 Alexine A. Fenty: 16 of 71 teachers
11. P.S. 85 Great Expectations: 16 of 101 teachers
12. P.S. K134: 15 of 40 teachers
13. P.S. 239: 15 of 66 teachers
14. P.S. 176 Ovington: 15 of 73 teachers
15. P.S. 70 Max Schoenfeld: 15 of 94 teachers

The pilot, known as iLearn, is part of the city’s $50 million Innovation Zone, or iZone — an initiative the Department of Education is touting as a strategy to improve schools during budget-conscious times. Funded through a combination of Race to the Top winnings, private donations and $10 million in tax dollars, the iZone is paying for experiments in online learning, staffing, and school time in 80 schools this year. Half of those schools are taking part in iLearn and are now offering students online Advanced Placement classes, credit recovery, and “blended” instruction that combines online classes with face-to-face instruction.

Though iLearn hasn’t earned much attention from the press, it accounts for roughly a quarter of the city’s iZone spending, or $13 million over the next four years. Mid-way through the school year, principals of iLearn schools report results that vary based on whether they’re experimenting with advanced courses or programs for their most struggling students.

Principals of small schools where there’s often too few students to fill AP classes are largely enthusiastic about the new programs. For them, iLearn is an add-on that helps their high-achievers.

But principals of schools that are experimenting with online credit recovery are more ambivalent. Putting a student who’s already failed his Algebra class in front of an Algebra credit recovery program works if the student is motivated, they’ve found. But schools are discovering that iLearn programs aren’t doing as well with students who need a teacher pushing them along or who can’t read well enough to use the programs.

When I talked to Alisa Berger, the co-principal of the NYCiSchool, “transformative” and “life-changing,” were a few of the words she used to describe iLearn. Berger has added four AP classes to her course offerings. For class discussions, her students use Skype to talk to a teacher at another New York City public school, creating in effect a virtual classroom.

Nancy Amling, principal of the Hudson High School for Learning Technologies, which is part of the blended learning pilot, said she’d been able to offer her small class of ninth graders online classes in five different languages. As the leader of a new small school, this frees her from having to hire a language teacher, though she said she’d eventually like to have one.

But principals across the city agreed that schools offering online credit recovery have had a more mixed experience.

“With the credit recovery model you have kids who have struggled, and to think that the computer is going to teach it to them when a live teacher couldn’t is a harder reach,” Berger said. “It needs a lot more thought than an AP course, where kids are intrinsically more motivated just because they signed up for the extra work.”

At Hillcrest High School in Queens, Principal Stephen Duch is using online credit recovery for students in his Senior Academy — a kind of transfer school within his massive 3,200 student high school. The program helps 80 seniors who are in danger of not graduating at the end of their fourth year.

Duch said that for more than half of these students, the credit recovery programs offered by Aventa and Compass — two of the most popular providers among the city’s schools — are letting them make up classes at a faster rate.

“These programs work extremely well with students who are near grade level in reading because they can go through these processes independently,” he said. “But as soon as the child has a significant delay in reading, then these online programs become problematic because they need an incredible amount of support to be able to move through it successfully.”

Because schools can only buy a limited number of “seats” in the online classes, Hillcrest holds tryouts to see which students are motivated enough to make good use of the programs. Those who aren’t and those who can’t read at a high enough level are put back in traditional classroom settings where they can make up their credits.

A spokesman for the Department of Education, Matthew Mittenthal, said the city plans to address this problem by buying “a range of content that spans grade levels so that students can be exposed to material appropriate to their reading level, regardless of grade and age.”

“In some cases, technology will be used to read text aloud and support students who are below grade level,” he said.

A principal who asked to remain anonymous, and whose school is part of the credit recovery pilot, said he planned to try the pilot for one more year, but harbored doubts that the online courses were better than his teachers’ regular credit recovery classes.

“I’m a little suspicious of this as good teaching,” he said. “It sounds exciting, it sounds sexy, it sounds modern, it sounds thoughtful,” he said. “Part of that is because there’s been very little interest in teaching and learning and a great interest in credit accumulation and data. This will speak well to credit accumulation and data.”

At the same time, he said, he’s been pleasantly surprised by his students’ preference of the online classes to their textbooks.

“I’ll say that in defense of the program, one of the things we’re learning from this is that the children we have seem to be more facile at thumbing through an online text to go back and get notes than they are a book,” he said.

Duch said that he believes the online credit recovery courses are more rigorous than Hillcrest’s earlier efforts with credit recovery. Because the courses test students at different points and don’t let them proceed unless they pass, they eliminate a teacher’s leniency, he said.

“There’s hard data to show the kid had to master this,” Duch said. “You’re not leaving it to the individual teacher to be able to say he did a sufficient job.”

Though the online classes cut out this problem of teachers rewarding students’ effort, they haven’t eliminated the problem of students passing their classes and then failing their Regents exams. David Ricaurte, director of Hillcrest’s Senior Academy, said that students who take online credit recovery classes still prepare for their Regents with classroom teachers because the material in the online classes is often different than what appears on the test.

Some of principals’ reservations about iLearn stem from its early glitches, most of which were dealt with by mid-October, principals said. Initially, Cisco agreed to give iLearn schools free access to an online portal it was creating for commercial purposes, which would have allowed teachers and students to sign onto all their online courses from the same place. But when it became clear that Cisco couldn’t build the platform in time for school to start, the city decided to quickly create one itself.

In September, some iLearn students couldn’t sign into their classes. The rough start meant that some schools abandoned the pilot for a couple months while the problems were sorted out and then started back up again mid-way through the semester.

Next year, more schools will join the iLearn pilot, which is overseen by its Executive Director Craig Butz and Arthur VanderVeen, the DOE’s Chief of Innovation Research & Development. According to a DOE spokesman, 323 schools have applied to join the pilot next year.

Schools with online credit recovery:
Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School
Curtis High School
High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology
Hillcrest HS
Innovation Diploma Plus
New Dorp High School
Port Richmond High School
Queens Academy HS
South Bronx Preparatory: A College Board School
WEB DuBois HS

Schools with online advanced placement classes:
ACORN High School for Social Justice
Bronx Engineering and Technology Academy
Bronx Leadership Academy II
Brooklyn College Academy
Brooklyn Generation School
Collegiate Institute for Math & Science
Eagle Academy for Young Men
ELLIS Preparatory Academy
Gramercy Arts High School
Gregorio Luperon High School for Science and Mathematics
High School of Arts and Technology
High School of Arts and Technology
Lower Manhattan Arts Academy
Marta Valle
Mott Hall High School
New World High School
NYC iSchool
N.Y.C. Lab School for Collaborative Studies
Renaissance High School of Musical Theater & Technology
Robert H. Goddard High School of Communication Arts and Technology
Scholars’ Academy
South Bronx Preparatory: A College Board School

Schools using the “blended” model:
Academy for Language and Technology
Bronx Career and College Preparatory High School
Brownsville Academy High School
City Polytechnic High School
East Bronx Academy for the Future
Global Tech Prep
Hudson High School of Learning Technologies
Murray Hill Academy
NYC iSchool
Olympus Academy
Queens Collegiate

I believe that extracurricular opportunities are a vital part of high school education. For me, participation on my high school cross country team helped me become both a good runner and a good person. I had some great teachers, but no single individual at my high school impacted my life as much as my cross country coach. A classroom teacher is not always best situated to convey lessons that seem to crystallize in the arena of sports. With running, for instance, it is easy to see how consistent effort over time leads to clear improvement, a correlation sometimes lost to kids as they struggle with academics. Because of this personal background, I have long wanted to be a coach as well as an educator.

The Brooklyn Arts Academy, as a new school, had no tradition of athletics. So in my second year, I partnered with the physical education teacher and successfully applied to the PSAL (Public School Athletic League) to start an indoor track team. After a bureaucratic process that involved a trip to Long Island City, we were given the go-ahead. In January, we put up flyers around school and began recruiting.

We were overwhelmed by the enthusiastic response when 40 boys and girls showed up for the after-school information session. Unfortunately, the twin hurdles of getting a medical examination and paying the participation fee dwindled our team’s starting membership to 15. The students, mostly junior girls and sophomore boys, were more or less new to organized athletics, having grown up without T-ball or AYSO soccer. This meant we not only needed to condition them physically, but also teach them about what it meant to be members of a team. For starters, we had to make sure they all had proper footwear.

Compounding our challenge was the matter of being a track team without a track. Our facilities amounted to a small weight room, a 60-meter-long eighth-floor hallway, and the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges, a short jog from school. On the plus side, our principal found money in the budget to buy team uniforms and it was amazing to see how a single article of clothing made students feel like they were a part of something special. It didn’t even matter that we had no mascot and the jerseys only bore the name of the school.

We built upon their pride by pushing them and praising them. We took them outside to run intervals in the Brooklyn Bridge Park on one day and had them running relay races in the hallway the next. We urged them to keep going when they complained they were tired and ended each practice by bringing everyone together to talk and stretch.

In the best of times, we were like a family. One particularly fond memory was when we celebrated the birthday of one of the athletes by bringing out a cheesecake for the team after practice. The young man was so touched that he was nearly in tears, and proceeded to cut the cake and make sure everyone had a piece, before proudly bringing the rest home to his parents. Staying past 5 p.m. everyday was a big commitment for our athletes, some of whom had other responsibilities, but the students felt justifiably proud when they left the building after almost everyone else had gone home.

It was much harder to keep the students feeling good about themselves once the competitions began. I too was embittered by the experience, and left with questions about the limitations of the small school model to provide viable extracurricular opportunities. I’ll discuss this experience in my next post.

The application, which was developed by the city’s main charter advocacy organization and is available through its website, allows parents to apply to multiple charter schools by filling out a single online form.

By introducing the online common application, charter advocates hope to increase demand for charters. They’re also trying to answer critics’ charge that the overwhelming and duplicative paperwork that marks the current admissions system discourages all but the most motivated parents and effectively screens out needy students.

Last year, the city introduced a paper common application, which parents could fill out and submit to any of the city’s roughly 100 charter schools.

The schools participating in the pilot are:

• A new poll says 85 percent of New Yorkers favor doing away with seniority layoff rules. (AP, NY1)
• Gov. Cuomo said he supports “an objective evaluation strategy for layoffs” over seniority rules. (Post)
• Lawmakers introduced a bill to change how teachers are laid off. (GothamSchools, WSJ, Daily News)
• Marcus Winters: Layoffs by lottery would be better for student achievement than “last in, first out.” (Post)
• The Daily News says Cuomo should support the bill with his budget that’s due next week.
• The Post says Cuomo’s support would give the bill the defense it needs against union opposition.

In other news:

• Randi Weingarten unveiled a plan that would give U-rated teachers a year to improve or be fired. (Times)
• City students lag behind the state and nation in science. (GothamSchools, Times, Post, NY1, Daily News)
• Parents at PS 18 in Middle Village, Queens, are fighting to keep the gifted program open. (Daily News)
• Defenders of PS 114 rallied in advance of the school’s closure vote next week. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• The New School for Leadership and Journalism has ended its journalism program. (Riverdale Press)
• Ninety-five UFT staff members earn more than $100,000, up from 69 in 2005. (Post)
• Students from hundreds of middle schools are playing in a citywide 3-on-3 basketball tourney. (NY1)
• The Daily News says the UFT’s spending on salaries and fêtes is too lavish.
• Texas is trying to cut down on the proliferation of highly paid school district administrators. (Times)
• Public schools in the Bay Area have increasingly been turning to private fundraising. (Times)

Fresh off a year-long tumultuous space fight, a Manhattan charter school is now facing parent protests over its decision to fire its principal mid-year.

Parents at Girls Prep Charter Middle School found out late last week that the school’s board had fired Kimberly Morcate, who began as the middle school’s first principal at the start of last school year.  A group of parents who support Morcate and who are upset that the school did not solicit feedback before deciding to let her go have started an online petition urging the school to reinstate her.

“I placed my daughter in Girls Prep Charter School because we were told we had a voice in the governance of the school,” the petition reads. “The loss of an amazing principal without so much as an explanation to the students, parents, or staff shows extreme lack of respect for us.”

Since the petition was launched yesterday, nearly 30 parents have signed their names to it. The middle school currently enrolls around 125 students in fifth and sixth grades.

Morcate saw the school through a turbulent first year marked by a heated fight for space in a Lower East Side school building, which mobilized some of the same parents who are now protesting Morcate’s dismissal. After a protracted public fight, the city granted the school space, but State Education Commissioner David Steiner overturned the decision late in the summer. The school was forced to delay the start of its school year before eventually finding private temporary space.

This year the school found itself in political crosshairs again, after the city proposed siting the middle school in space being vacated by Ross Global Academy Charter School, which the city is closing at the end of this year. Ross has accused the city of shutting it down and giving Girls Prep its space as a political favor to well-connected backers of Girls Prep.

Girls Prep was also dealt a blow in the fall when the city ranked the school in the lowest 15 percent of schools in its annual progress reports. Critics of charter schools argued that the city should not support the growth of a school that posted poor academic performance.

The city has proposed letting both Girls Prep’s middle school and elementary school expand in city building space next year. Aside from the protests from Ross, the proposals — which will be voted on by the citywide in the coming months — have not generated the same outcry as last year, and the neighborhood’s parent council leader has endorsed the plans.

Ian Rowe, the chief executive of Girls Prep’s parent network Public Prep, said that he was not concerned that a mid-year leadership change at the school would foster instability at the school, as parents worried in the petition. The school’s board is meeting with parents tomorrow to discuss the changes.

“We’re making this decision because we want to deliver on the commitment that we’ve made to provide their daughters with an excellent education,” Rowe said.

In addition to raising concerns about parent involvement, the petition criticizes the school for allowing Rowe to take the reins of the school. Rowe has two years of teaching experience but no experience or credentials as a school leader.

Rowe said that he would lead the school jointly for the rest of the academic year with Rebekah Marler, the former principal of East Harlem’s P.S. 50 who has also been working as a consultant with Public Prep.

UPDATE: This post originally quoted a signatory to the position and mistakenly identified her as a parent; it has been updated to correct the error.

Michael Hall, the father of a second grader at P.S. 114, said the Canarsie elementary school should remain open.

Teachers, parents, and community activists protested the city’s plans to shutter a Canarsie elementary school today in front of the Department of Education’s headquarters.

Unless the city’s plans change, next Monday the citywide school board will vote on P.S. 114′s proposed closure. But before that happens, members of the Coalition for Educational Justice and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio are trying to put pressure on DOE officials to change their minds. De Blasio described the city’s approach to P.S. 114 as “a horrible Catch 22.”

“The Department of Education for years neglected the evidence presented by parents and teachers that the school was failing and that the leadership was failing the students,” de Blasio said.

“And then, after years of neglecting that evidence and the very intense efforts of parents and teachers to try and make things better, the DOE turns around and says there’s no choice but to change things and close this school.”

Michael Hall, the parent of a P.S. 114 second grader, said the city had unfairly branded the school a failure.

“Just give us a chance,” he said. “We’re in good standing with the state. Good standing means close us? Go figure!”

Last night, State Senator John Flanagan introduced a bill that would end the practice and the same bill will be introduced in the Assembly by New York City Assemblyman Jonathan Bing.

The bill rules out seniority as the sole factor in determining who gets laid off. To replace the current seniority system, the bill offers eight pages of an extraordinarily complicated, prioritized list of which teachers and school supervisors would be first in line to be laid off.

Bing’s Chief of Staff Jake Dilemani said the bill was written with input from the mayor’s office, along with groups like Educators 4 Excellence — an organization of teachers who, with funding from the Gates Foundation, has put forward its own proposal to change teacher layoffs.

In a statement sent to reporters, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said that the bill would “send us back to the days before civil service protections, when people could be fired for being the wrong race or gender, too young or too old.”

Last year, when Bloomberg was threatening to lay off roughly the same number of teachers, Bing proposed a bill that would end seniority-based layoffs. At the time, opposition to the bill was so fierce that the bill was never voted on. But this year, anti-last in first out sentiments have reached a fever pitch, with the city’s four editorial boards lined up in favor of changes.

This year’s bill is substantially more detailed than the one Bing proposed last year.

If the bill is passed into law, there will be nine categories of school employees who will be laid off before their peers. Employees who fall into all of these categories would lose their jobs first, followed by those who fall into eight of the categories, and so on down the scale to employees who fall into two categories. If the city finds that it still needs the lay off people after that, the next rung of layoffs will hit teachers and supervisors who are in the first category — those with unsatisfactory ratings.

The categories, in order of layoff priority, are:

1. Teachers and supervisors who have received an unsatisfactory rating in the last five years. If the new teacher evaluation system is put in place before layoffs are carried out, then teachers labeled “ineffective” would be the first to go.
2. Teachers and supervisors who have been fined or suspended without pay in the last five years. This means that teachers who’ve been charged with misconduct or incompetence and have either pled guilty or been found guilty in the last five years would be laid off. For example, the Bronx principal who was found guilty of arbitrarily giving her teachers unsatisfactory ratings and was fined $7,500 would be laid off before another principal. Under the current system, a principal with less seniority would be laid off before her.
3. Teachers and supervisors who have been in the Absent Teacher Reserve pool for more than six months. These are school employees who were forced out of their jobs when their schools could no longer afford them and have not yet been hired by another school. They remain on the city’s payroll while some work in administration and others work as substitute or full-time teachers. Given that it’s rare for schools to excess staff in the middle of the year, the six-month deadline in the law would include most of the teachers in the ATR pool at the present time.
4. Any teacher or supervisor convicted of a crime in the last five years.
5. Teachers and supervisors who have been fined for being chronically absent or late in the last five years. Also includes employees who have been fined for “improper use or recording of leave time.” The terms “chronically absent” and “chronically late” are not defined in the teachers union contract as a set number of days, according to a spokesman for the UFT.
6. Teachers and supervisors who have been the subject of an investigation in the last five years that ended with the charges being substantiated. This covers school employees who have been investigated by the city school district’s special commissioner of investigation, the city school district’s office of special  investigations or the city school district’s office of equal opportunity. Having charges substantiated translates to an indictment, but it does not mean that these people have been found guilty.
7. Teachers and supervisors who, by the August 31 of the year in which layoffs take place, have not completed their certification.
8. Teachers who, for two years or more, have been ranked in the bottom 30 percent of teachers based on their students’ test scores. These rankings, which measure students’ progress against a model that predicts what their test scores should have been, cover a small percentage of teachers. Only teachers who teach math and English in grades 4-8 receive teacher data reports.
9. Teachers and supervisors who were not granted tenure after three years, but were put on probation for the year preceding layoffs. Recently, the Department of Education has begun encouraging principals to extend teachers’ probation rather than offer them tenure if they believe the teacher shows promise, but is not yet ready for a lifetime commitment from the city. Anecdotally, I’ve heard from teachers who’ve had their probationary periods extended by one or two years when their schools had a series of new principals, each of whom requested an additional year to get to know her staff.

And we’re not done yet.

If the city lays off all of the teachers who fall into multiple categories, then proceeds to the first category — those with unsatisfactory ratings — but discovers that it only needs to lay off a fraction of these people, then new measures come into play. Employees with the most unsatisfactory ratings in the last five years will be laid off first, followed by those who have been given U-ratings, as they’re commonly known, most recently.

Employees in the Absent Teacher Reserve will be laid off based on how long they’ve been in the pool. And teachers and supervisors who have been convicted of a crime in the last five years will be laid off based on how recent the conviction was. Among those who fall in the low value-added score category, teachers with the lowest scores will be laid off first, unless they teach children with disabilities or who require special education services.

If the city makes its way through this labyrinthine process and still needs to lay off more teachers, the ball rolls into the court of the Board of Regents, who will get to decide what types of teachers are laid of next. The bill contains a measure meant to protect high needs schools — defined as those where 90 percent of students get free or reduced lunch — against being overly burdened by layoffs. It states:

Any such regulations must ensure that in a high-need school the number of staff laid off shall not exceed the percentage of the overall number of positions in the school that represents half of the average percentage of staff laid off citywide.

If the Board of Regents does not come up with a layoff plan within 75 days, individual school principals will get to decide who to let go, using guidance from the city’s school chancellor. A committee of parents, teachers, and administrators is supposed to advise the principal in making this decision. However, if the city decides that it wants to eliminate all the positions within a certain license area (e.g. gym or art), it can overrule the Board of Regents and principals’ decisions.

More than 60 percent of New York eighth graders scored below basic level on the 2009 NAEP science tests.

New York City fourth graders did about as poorly on a national science test in 2009 as those in other large American cities, but the city’s eighth graders lag behind their peers.

More than 60 percent of city eighth graders scored below basic on the National Assessment of Educational Progress science exams. Nationally, 38 percent of students scored below the basic level, and 56 percent of students in large city school districts did not meet that bar.

The city’s fourth graders fared better. Still, 44 percent scored below basic on the science tests. In other large cities, roughly the same percentage of students didn’t score above the “basic” bar.

The Department of Education’s Chief Academic Officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, said that the city was focusing on introducing national “Common Core” standards into classrooms as a strategy to boost achievement in science. The standards include a focus on reading and writing non-fiction and technical texts in subjects like science.

“The gap between how our students perform in elementary and middle school is a real concern, which is why it’s crucial that we continue working toward the tougher Common Core Standards as quickly as possible,” Polakow-Suransky said. “That gap can be closed if we build literacy skills in science, as these new standards do, and prepare our kids for the critical thinking and problem solving they begin to face in middle school.”

A sampling of fourth, eighth and twelfth graders around the country take the NAEP exams every two years. NAEP scores are usually reported by state, but in 2002 several large cities including New York agreed to have their own figures reported separately.

Of the 17 city school districts whose results were reported today, New York City ranked seventh in fourth grade test results and eighth in eighth grade scores. Austin, Charlotte, Jefferson County, Ky., Miami-Dade, San Diego and Boston all bested New York City in both grade levels. On the eighth grade exams, Houston also performed better than New York.

Overall, New York City’s fourth-grade science scores were lower than the national average. But when the scores are broken down by ethnicity and poverty level, each of New York’s subgroups performed about the same on average as their peers nationally. (So for example, black fourth graders in New York City performed about the same as the national average for black students in that grade.)

The city’s eighth graders, by contrast, received lower scores than their peers nationally across all demographics except Asian students.

The results also indicate that fewer city students are doing well in science than in reading and math. More than 60 percent of the city’s eighth graders scored either basic, proficient or advanced in both reading and math in 2009.

The same was true across all of the large urban districts on average. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan called on cities to improve their science education.

“The results released today show that students in our cities are further behind in science than in reading and mathematics,” Duncan said in a statement. “With 44 percent of fourth graders and 56 percent of eighth graders scoring below NAEP’s basic level, these results show that large city districts aren’t preparing enough students to succeed in the knowledge economy.”

In 2009, the science exams were overhauled, which means that the new results cannot be compared to previous years’ to track progress, the exam’s administrators said.

The new science exams cover three content areas: physical, life, and earth and space sciences. Unlike earlier NAEP exams, questions “crosscut” the subjects so that a question about one content area also relies on knowledge from one or both of the others.

Stacey,

Thanks so much for your letter. In your last post, you write:

I would like to ask you for a moment to pretend that we had the advantage of knowing all we know right now about the school systems we work in and we were starting from scratch to set-up the best infrastructure to support a system of great schools.

You ask eight specific, intelligent, and important questions. And your post ends with:

So, I am tossing this ball to you. You now have the ability to build a school system from scratch knowing all you know now. What would you do?

In answering your questions I would explain my ideas on how to change the system. I certainly have lot of ideas about this. But when I read your letter I couldn’t help but think about the difference between focusing on changing the system versus the idea of systemic change. In my professional life, I am all about changing the system, and I spend a lot of time and energy on it. But in my intellectual life I think about systemic change.

Earlier this month I attended the 20th Anniversary Summit for Teach for America. Speakers talked of the potential for “real change” in education and the need for “revolution.” As with so much in education, these terms have very different meanings to different people. To me there is an irony here; many segments of the education community view Teach For America and affiliated groups as significantly outside the norm, yet the  “change” and “revolution” TFA and aligned groups support actually are not very significant when considering what systemic change would look like.

For another blog I wrote a post titled “Education Reform or Revolution.” Below is a long quote from it in which I discuss piecemeal change vs. paradigm change. In this context piecemeal change is equivalent to changing the system and paradigm change is equivalent to systemic change.

There are two major types of change – piecemeal and paradigm change. Alvin Toffler posits that there have been three great waves of change: from hunter/gatherer to agrarian, then to the industrial revolution, and now to the information revolution. When there are great changes in society there are paradigm changes in societal systems (family, business, etc. including education).

The change to an industrial society led to the industrialization of schools that mirrored many of its underpinnings; bureaucratic organization, autocratic leadership, centralized control, adversarial relationships, compliance, conformity, compartmentalization, etc.

The needs of an information age society are much different; team organization, shared leadership, autonomy with accountability, cooperative relationships, initiative, diversity, networking, holism, etc. If these are indeed the emerging societal needs, and they are clearly different than those of an “industrial” society, then we need a new educational system — a new paradigm — that aligns with those needs. … The types of reform we are currently focused on today really only fit the “piecemeal” definition of change. And it all fits within the current box —let’s call it the industrial model of education box. If we believe there is major societal change occurring, then nothing less than paradigm change is necessary.

Additionally, there is another idea that supports the need for systemic change. Over the past 50 years our society (specifically American society) has become increasingly apathetic; it’s trending to more inequality, not less; it does less to help those within it who need help the most; it has become increasingly focused on the “winners” at the expense of the many; it favors assimilation over diversity.

Piecemeal changes to an educational system supporting this societal trend will at best leave us with the status quo and, at worst, reinforce the increasing divisions within our society. On the other hand, paradigm change in education can be part of a co-evolution with society, supporting it and being supported by it, by moving from a system designed for sorting students to one designed for helping all children reach their potential.

I strongly believe that we need more than piecemeal change — we need systemic change; we need paradigmatic change. And, this change will only happen once we have some difficult, but important, conversations about the purpose of education in our society. A new system starts with this question: “What is the purpose of education?” and goes from there.

Stacey — I often think about how we as school leaders within the system work to change the system in the short term while also working towards real revolution, to paradigm change. What do you think?

Marc