GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Republican State Sen. John Flanagan introduced a bill to abolish “last in, first out” layoff rules. (Post)
• Eighty-five percent of New Yorkers supporting laying off teachers based on merit. (Post)
• A team of educators wants to open a charter school for pregnant and parenting teens. (Post)
• The city’s move to rid schools of PCBs will cost $700 million. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News, NY1)
• Some politicians and parents say the 10-year timeline for the toxin cleanup is too long. (WSJ)
• The UFT spent $1.4 million on its 50th-anniversary gala last year. (Daily News)
• Just 14 percent of teachers think the city’s efforts to stem bullying are paying off. (Daily News)
• Public Advocate Bill de Blasio said the city hurt PS 114 by not replacing its principal. (GS, Daily News)
• Teachers are learning about school gardens from the New York Botanical Garden. (Daily News)
• Educators 4 Excellence’s founders want to present their layoff plan to Michael Mulgrew. (Daily News)
• Blaue Gans’s chef raises money and nutrition awareness for PS 234 and PS 150. (Downtown Express)
• The teachers fired for hooking up in a classroom are suing the city. (Daily News, Post)
• Providence, R.I., is moving toward layoffs by sending pink slips to all teachers. (Providence Journal)
• The consulting firm hired to fix Newark’s schools was founded by N.J. ed chief Chris Cerf. (Star-Ledger)
• Andrea Peyser says a Pennsylvania teacher was in the right when she lambasted her students. (Post)

• AFT president Randi Weingarten and Stephen Colbert talk Wisconsin. (Colbert Report)
• Cuomo’s budget cuts funding for 11 schools serving blind, deaf, and disabled students. (Daily News)
• The Center for American Progress has a report on how principals try to improve teacher quality. (CAP)
• Elizabeth Puccini tours P.S. 276, a green school in Battery Park City. (GS Community)
• Stephen Lazar: Ending LIFO will sacrifice the dedicated teachers who want to stay. (GS Community)
• One of Rahm Emanuel’s first tasks will be deciding who should run Chicago’s schools. (Sun-Times)
• Indiana’s right-to-work bill died after Republican lawmakers decided it was a mistake. (Politico)
• Compton’s school board overturned parents’ petition to turn their school into a charter. (L.A. Times)
• Paying kids to do their homework seems to boost achievement, but paying for grades doesn’t. (NPR)
• Chris Christie said he doesn’t have support for ending collective bargaining in New Jersey. (WSJ)
• Also in N.J., Chris Cerf faces an ethics investigation for his consulting company. (N.J. Newsroom)
• Robert Pondiscio reviews Doug Lemov’s “Teach Like a Champion.” (Education Next)

As federal inspectors found toxic PCB chemicals in another city school this week, city officials committed to spending more than $700 million over the next decade to replace the light fixtures that leak the toxins.

On today’s Rise & Shine post, frequent commenter, parent and punster Michael M. wondered where those city funds would come from. It’s a good question, and one whose answer sheds some light on how the city shifts its resources in response to changes in priorities.

Some of the funds to fix the aging light fixtures were in fact included in Friday’s amendment to the city’s capital plan, which proposes to reduce capital spending overall by about $2 billion. As part of that plan, the city added $141 million to the Department of Education’s budget for interior work on occupied school buildings. The remaining $567 million that the city said today it plans to spend on the repairs over the next 10 years has not yet been allocated. (more…)

Back in September, when Nancy Amling first opened the doors to her new technology-themed high school in Chelsea, parents asked her what supplies they should buy. “I told them, ‘You don’t need supplies! We have laptops,’” Amling said.

Over the next few weeks, she and her staff learned that paper and pens have their place. But aside from the notebooks students carry around, almost nothing is traditional about Amling’s school.

Located in the basement of the Bayard Rustin Education Complex, the Hudson High School of Learning Technologies is part of the city’s massive investment in technology and online learning, known as the iZone pilot. The pilot is funded with a combination of Race to the Top money, private donations, and city tax dollars. (more…)

Two local news stories last weekend busted out a tired story line to support the attack on city teachers’ seniority rights. Carl Campanile wrote in the New York Post about how new small schools could lose high percentages of their teachers; and the Wall Street Journal’s Barbara Martinez profiled Stany Leblanc, an “excellent” teacher who, only in his second year, could lose his job to layoffs. On the surface, both stories are certainly heart-wrenchers. But there’s one big problem with the reporting: Nowhere in either story is it asked how long these teachers plan on staying in the classroom.

I’m sure Mr. Leblanc is a wonderful teacher.  It sounds like his students are lucky to have him. But anyone who wants to use him in an argument for how very difficult decisions should be made surely better seek out how long he, and others like him, will stay in the classroom. I’ll take a mildly effective teacher who will teach for decades over a highly effective teacher who will teach less than half of one in a heartbeat.

Here’s the bottom line: nearly 50 percent of teachers leave NYC schools within six years. For Teach for America teachers like Mr. Leblanc, that number is much scarier: Over 80 percent nationally leave within only three years.  This cannot be lost in any discussions about teacher layoffs or recruitment. While Michelle Cahill and Talia Milgrom-Elcott at the Carnegie Corportation, McKinsey , Teach for America, and other high-profile voices focus on recruiting more highly educated candidates to the teaching profession, those of us in the trenches realize we do not have a recruitment problem; what we have is a retention problem. (I’m borrowing this phrasing from fellow teacher Ariel Sacks.)

As I’ve written before, turnover is the single biggest challenge my seventh-year school has faced. For every Mr. Leblanc I encounter, I face nine other new teachers who struggle in their first couple years. My school devotes tremendous resources, including a portion of my time which could be spent with students, in order to turn struggling new teachers into competent ones. But when these teachers leave after 3-5 years, our investment is wasted, and we have to start over all again with another new, struggling teachers.

Journalists need to start telling the story of what effect turnover has on the lives of schools and students, particularly those for whom school is the primary source of stability in their lives, and for whom teachers represent the strongest adult relationships they have. They need to start telling this story now before hard working, career educators are sacrificed in order to keep teachers who are going to leave in the next few years anyway.

PS 276, also known as the Battery Park City School, opened in 2009 to alleviate overcrowding in its Lower Manhattan neighborhood and serves children in prekindergarten through eighth grade. It is also the first public school in New York City specifically designed and built to be a green school.

Entering PS 276

The discreet glass solar panels that extend over the entrance of the building, which will soon be collecting solar energy for the school, are the first indication that this public school is in a league of its own when it comes to sustainable education. Immediately confirming this impression is the high-tech video monitor in the lobby, which will receive data from the school’s solar panels and other energy sources to show students how much energy the school is generating and how much it’s consuming. To help students better understand the amount of energy the school is saving, the figure will be illustrated by showing its equivalent in planted trees or removed-from-the-road cars.

Video monitoring energy savings

The school, which was designed by Dattner Architects and built under the New York City School Construction Authority’s Green Schools Guide, is reported to have cost $80 million. Of that, $37 million came from the Battery Park City Authority, which paid for all the “green” details of the school such as the solar panels, sustainable building materials, and low-flow plumbing fixtures. The school’s “roof-mounted photovoltaic cells alone generate 50 kilowatts of energy, roughly one-third of the energy needed to light the school,” according to Dattner Architects’ website. The firm estimates that the school’s high-efficiency boilers, extra insulation, and photovoltaic solar panels will reduce the school’s energy costs by 25 percent.

One reigning feature of green architecture is lots of windows to reduce the need for overhead lighting, and PS 276 has no shortage of those in its classrooms with views overlooking the Hudson River. To further ensure the least amount of overhead light is used, light sensors in each classroom respond to the amount of daylight coming in and automatically dim should the sun suddenly peak out from a patch of clouds. The light sensors also respond to motion: If the sensors detect no motion in the classroom, the lights will automatically turn off. Principal Terri Ruyter admits this can be a problem when students are quietly working at their desks. (more…)

• PCB tests have come up positive at every school tested, including Bushwick’s PS 45. (NY1, Daily News)
• City officials are working on a plan to replace potentially toxic light fixtures at 772 schools. (WSJ)
• PS 276 in Canarsie faces a $22,000 bill for students’ unpaid lunch fees. (Daily News)
• Charter schools have higher science, social studies scores, but public schools made bigger gains. (Post)
• Mayor Bloomberg said Gov. Cuomo is wrong to say the city can spare teacher layoffs this year. (Post)
• Budget cuts mean Williamsburg won’t get a new school for at least five years. (Brooklyn Paper)
• Michelle Rhee is launching a national campaign against “last in, first out” layoff rules today. (Post)
• N.J. Gov. Chris Christie is bucking trends to proposed increased school aid this year. (Star-Ledger)
• Crowds of parents protested a plan to replace some Newark schools with charter schools. (Star-Ledger)
• Detroit’s graduation rate is up, but most schools prepared virtually no students for college. (Free Press)
• The states that didn’t win Race to the Top have ambitious reform plans they can’t fund. (Education Week)

• Newark is considering consolidating schools to make room for new district and charters. (Star-Ledger)
• Susan Edelman examines how state testing standards got so low so quickly. (Post)
• Assemblyman Peter Abbate criticized the DOE’s take-back of principals’ rainy-day funds. (Daily Politics)
• A Wisconsin-style bill anti-collective bargaining could not happen in NY, Sen. Chuck Schumer said. (T-U)
• A majority of Americans oppose efforts to block collective bargaining power, a poll reports. (USA Today)
• New York, like other Race to the Top winners, has been slow to start spending its money. (Ed Money)
• NYSUT began a $1.1 million ad campaign against Cuomo’s proposed ed budget cuts today. (City Room)
• A charter school advocate complains that the ad is “so yesterday.” (Chalkboard)
• The director of PS 22′s famed chorus has never seen the television show “Glee.” (GoCollege)
• Robert Jackson led a march outside Gov. Cuomo’s house against education cuts. (EdVox)
• A Harlem mother says she’s sympathetic to the Ohio mom who enrolled her children illegally. (HuffPo)
• Brooklyn’s Boys and Girls High School is fighting to stay open. (Brooklyn Movement Center)
• Richard Kahlenberg says Michelle Rhee’s war with unions is a distraction from the real issues. (Slate)
• Inspired by V-Day, Ruben is looking for suggestions for slogans to promote teaching. (Bronx Teach)
• Skype is launching a new site to help teachers use the chatting service in the classroom. (Innovative Ed)
• N.J. Ed Commish Chris Cerf says data on how many poor students charters enroll doesn’t exist. (S-L)

With little more than a week to go before the citywide school board votes on a Brooklyn elementary school’s closure, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio is entering the debate over the school’s future.

Canarsie elementary school P.S. 114 has been one of the most controversial stories of this year’s school closure season. Teachers and parents at the school have argued that the Department of Education caused their schools’ problems when it installed a principal who overspent her budget by $180,000. (more…)

New York State collects all of the student data it needs to meet federal guidelines, but the state has a ways to go before it starts using the data in ways that will boost student achievement.

That’s the conclusion of a report released last week by the Data Quality Campaign, an initiative of a group of education and legislative organizations meant to help states build their data tracking systems.

Since 2005, the group has surveyed each state’s education department to draw a picture of what kinds of student information school systems gather and how they use it to boost student achievement. The campaign compares each state’s system against a list of ten elements it calls “essential” for robust data tracking and another ten “actions” it says states should take to best use the data they collect. The initiative’s list matches the federal government’s criteria for student data tracking systems, which all 50 states committed to building as a condition of receiving stimulus dollars.

New York’s data tracking methods now include all 10 of the elements the campaign says comprise a good system. (Four of those elements — including the capacity to follow K-12 students into college and track their progress and a way to link teachers to their students’ information — have been added in the past year.)

But the state has so far taken only four of the ten steps the campaign says are needed to put that system to good use.  Among the actions New York has yet to implement:

• The state has not yet made data for all individual students who are being tracked available to their teachers and parents through online portals. Nor has the state developed “progress reports” for individual students and their parents and teachers that track performance over time. (more…)