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I spent last Friday at the Carnegie Corporation of New York along with a handful of other teacher bloggers and a number of education journalists for an Education Writers Association seminar on “The Promise and Pitfalls of Improving the Teaching Profession.” I hope to write more about the experience soon, but despite some major flaws in the setup of the event, I walked away with an overwhelming sense of excitement.  This was in part from having met some wonderful, like-minded educators, but it was also because of the many wonderful conversations I had with journalists from around the country who are genuinely interested in getting better at their jobs, asking tough questions, and then actually listening to what the teachers have to say.

In talking with some of the journalists during and after the conference, many said that they didn’t come away with many story ideas, so I thought I would take the time to give some suggestions here for some good, meaty education stories that are out there for which I have not seen much reporting. I shared the idea with my colleagues in attendance, some of whom beat me to the punch. I’ve linked to their posts below.

National Stories

Why would anyone want to be a teacher?: I can’t remember how many times on Friday when, after describing one of the many challenges we face, a reporter asked me why anyone in his or her right mind would choose to become a teacher these days. There are a number of great pieces to be written looking for the answers.

Parental Views of Good Teaching: There is much conversation and debate around evaluating teaching performance, but I would love to read a piece about what parents want for their students at different levels.  This could be a great series: How does this change from early years through high school? Does this vary by class, race, ethnicity? (more…)

News from New York City:

• The city says it will audit high school grades and test scores better. (Times, Daily News, Post, NY1)
• Mayor Bloomberg said new revenues wouldn’t necessarily reduce layoffs. (Post, Daily News)
• New small schools are likely to be disproportionately affected by layoffs. (Post)
• Stany Leblanc, an excellent second-year teacher in the Bronx, could be laid off this year. (WSJ)
• The heads of the state’s four other city districts have signed on to oppose “last in, first out” rules. (Post)
• City Council Education Committee Chair Robert Jackson led a budget cut protest in Albany. (NY1)
• The city is halving plans to build new school seats in the next five years. (Post, Daily News)
• The Viscardi School teaches the city curriculum with adjustments for students’ severe disabilities. (Times)
• Insiders pin the state’s inflated test scores on former Education Commissioner Richard Mills. (Post)
• Cathie Black has scheduled a meeting with parents for the same time as a UFT parent meeting. (Post)
• Former school safety agents say in a discrimination lawsuit that headquarters is full of debauchery. (Post)
• A top Los Angeles teacher says city parents should know their children’s teachers’ scores. (Daily News)
• The Daily News says schools’ discrimination is why few minority students enter specialized high schools.
• The Post says Cathie Black was silly to support suspending a student who wrote “kick me” on a Post-it.

And beyond:

• Gov. Cuomo wants districts to share services but has proposed cutting incentives to do so. (Times)
• New York’s 3020-a process for teachers accused of misconduct is costly and slow. (Times-Union)
• Detroit is planning to close half its schools and raise high school class sizes to 60. (WSJ)
• Autistic students at an Edison, N.J., school run a coffee shop to raise money for their classes. (Times)
• High-performing public schools in Los Angeles are converting to become charter schools. (AP)
• Charter schools in Texas might soon get access to low-rate loans that public schools can get. (Times)
• To manage shrinking budgets, Bay Area schools are cutting gifted programs. (Times)
• The labor-management conference gave districts a rare opportunity to show off. (Washington Post)

• Cathie Black said a cut of school rainy-day funds doesn’t punish principals who save. (Daily News)
• Ross Global Academy is giving up its fight against closure but fired its principal. (InsideSchools)
• The city is dropping plans to add 17,000 school seats because of state cuts. (Gotham Gazette)
• The Fordham Foundation rates states’ U.S. history standards, gives NY an A minus. (Fordham)
• Robert Jackson will lead a protest against education cuts in Albany tomorrow. (State of Politics)
• NYSUT is launching an ad campaign urging lawmakers to extend the millionaire’s tax. (WNYC)
• UFT president Michael Mulgrew lands on the “losers” list for the quail episode. (City Hall)
• It’s not about the quail, it’s about the UFT’s sense of self-entitlement, writes Norm Scott. (Ed Notes)
• Rick Hess predicts a collision between the Common Core and school choice backers. (EdWeek)
• A big report on preparing students for college “wanders into fantasyland.” (Class Struggle)
• Two upstate school districts have now frozen administrative salaries. (State of Politics)
• Here’s a school-by-school update on how well Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 schools do. (WBEZ)

Chancellor Cathie Black with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn at the Brooklyn International School today.

At the end of a week in which students across New York City were supposed to highlight ways they can celebrate each other’s differences and fight against bullying and harassment, city officials announced an expansion of their anti-harassment initiative.

School safety teams will now be required to include a staff member trained in diversity awareness and in efforts to battle bullying and harassment, officials announced today. The city is also collecting some of principals’ most successful responses to bullying, and plans to formally recognize schools with strong anti-bullying programs.

City officials, led by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, have been expanding their anti-bullying efforts — known as the “Respect for All” initiative — since 2009. Since then, elementary school teachers and counselors have joined middle and high school teachers at anti-bullying training, and annual school surveys and quality reviews have begun to rate school on how accepting the environment is. (more…)

For the first time, the city’s main charter school advocacy organization is making a push for parents of Spanish-speaking students to apply to charter schools.

The New York City Charter Center is starting an ad campaign in buses and bus shelters in the South Bronx and East Harlem in hopes of reaching Spanish-speaking families who are unfamiliar with charter schools. The ads, which are in Spanish, say that charter schools — “escuelas charters” — are free, public schools that offer their students individualized attention. They include a number for a Spanish-language hotline parents can call to get applications or ask questions.

The ads will run in 300 city buses and on 10 bus shelters.

Last May, when New York State’s legislature more than doubled the number of charter schools that can open, it also approved a teachers union-backed proposal to could force some charters to enroll more non-English speaking and special education students.

The law set a vague requirement that charter schools serve similar percentages of non-English speaking and special education students as the other public schools in their district. Currently, city charter schools enroll smaller percentages of these students than do traditional public schools. (more…)

Consider it a bit of spring cleaning. We’re bringing our comments section out of the dark ages today and introducing a new platform called Disqus, which we hope will make your conversations better and our lives a little easier.

You’ve probably used Disqus before on other sites (it’s free; it’s pleasant-looking; it’s popular), but here’s how it’s going to change things at GothamSchools.

• Conversations: Instead of replying to someone else’s comment by adding your thoughts way down at the bottom of the thread, you’ll be able to respond directly below the comment. Your response will be indented, setting itself apart as an exchange that other readers can join, or can skim over before checking out others’ comments further down. The idea is to eliminate some of the confusion caused by people trying to talk to each other while other readers are jumping in and writing about different topics.
• Your identity: If you want to post anonymously, you still can. We have never and will never share your email or IP address with anyone else. But if you’d like to create an account with Disqus or use your Facebook or Twitter accounts, you can now do that.
• Liking and flagging: If you think another reader’s comment is spot-on, or is a nice addition to the discussion, you can now “like” it. We’re also moving to a system where we’re counting on our readers to help us moderate the comments. If you read a comment that you believe should be removed, click the flag icon and one of the site’s editors will be notified. Here are three questions we’d like you to think about before you flag a comment: Is it spam? Is it libelous? Is it off topic? If it falls into any of those categories, you should feel empowered to flag it! If not, please leave it be.
• Sorting: GothamSchools’ comment threads have always shown the oldest comments first. But now, you can choose to organize them so that the newest ones, or the most “liked” ones, are the first ones you see.
• The shrinking sidebar: While we’re getting used to Disqus, we’ve removed a few elements that have long been housed in the sidebar. “Chalk it up” is gone, as is the list of recent comments. They could return one day, once we’re sure how to make that happen.

We’re new to Disqus, and Disqus is new to us, so there are bound to be a few glitches as we settle in. If your comments aren’t appearing immediately, or you’re getting caught in our spam filters, hold tight and we’ll fix it as fast as we can.

I debated going to Teach For America’s 20th Anniversary Summit right up until the last minute last weekend. I was tempted by memories of the contagious energy that comes out of TFA events and by the hope of seeing old friends from my cohort. But I was also wary because I often end up feeling alienated and irritated by the content and structure of TFA events. I decided ultimately to save the price of bus fare and the admission ticket and stay home.

It’s easy to get caught up in the spirit of TFA and be inspired by the message and the stories (which, unless they’ve changed since my last experience, are pre-formulated so as to end with “And that is why I teach for America”). And for some, myself included, it is also easy to sit, stew and scribble vitriol in the margins of your agenda about “vague statements,” “missing the point,” and the inappropriateness of “teacher-as-hero.” What I continue to find incredibly difficult is to keep a balanced perspective and piece apart the good and the bad. So, for my own sake, I tried to pick out two small things that embody the good and the bad.

One of the most important lessons instilled in me with TFA was the “academic impact model.” (As a caveat, I have seen many non-TFA teachers fully embrace this model, and it certainly was around before TFA.) The academic impact model is an image with “Student Achievement” at the top, being driven by “Student Actions,” which are driven by “Teacher Actions,” which are ultimately driven by “Teacher Skill, Knowledge and Mindset.” In other words, it is the teacher’s actions and mindset that drive everything else — it is the teacher’s job to always, always, always reflect on what he or she could be doing differently to drive student outcomes.

It can be so frustrating to watch a teacher set up a student for failure and then blame it on the child. When meeting with teachers at both my previous public school and current charter school, I have found too many teachers too easily dismiss the lack of individual student achievement as the fault of the student or the family: “That kid is just plain lazy.” “The only problem is that they don’t do anything with their kid at home.” “That kid just doesn’t know how to behave; they are never doing the right thing.” “This kid still hasn’t gotten it and we’ve gone over it a thousand times.”

Is it the teacher’s job to go to extreme lengths to involve themselves in the child’s home life? No. (more…)

• The city has spent way more than it planned to on its high school admissions system. (Times, Post)
• The city is telling principals to use funds or return them. (GothamSchools, Times, Post, NY1, Daily News)
• State test scores show gains for city students in science, social studies, and high school subjects. (Post)
• The UFT official thrown out of an Albany restaurant says portion size wasn’t the issue. (Daily News)
• The principal of Bronx Engineering and Technology Academy is starting a new school. (Riverdale Press)
• Joel Klein and Wendy Kopp attended a launch event for a planned for-profit private school. (The Villager)
• Lower Manhattan parents are hoping the city approves a proposal for a new school. (Downtown Express)
• Teachers heard arguments for changing pay rules at the labor-management conference in Denver. (AP)
• Los Angeles’s new schools chief is launching an NYC-inspired support foundation. (L.A. Times)
• Education advocates are trying to revolutionize Indian schools by reducing rote memorization. (Times)

• Former State Senator Craig Johnson is now a consultant for Democrats for Education Reform. (Newsday)
• All over the country, fights are increasing between states and their teachers unions. (Politico)
• Ed. Sec. Arne Duncan clarifies (a little) where he stands on teacher layoff policies. (EdWeek)
• Liz Willen calls on the city to revamp its “inequitable, illogical” high school admissions. (Insideschools)
• By placing its members in charter schools, Teach for America is abandoning its mission. (GS Community)
• The Regents are surveying New Yorkers about how they want graduation requirements changed. (NYT)
• A bad observation turns into a good one with the words “you didn’t do anything wrong. (NYC Educator)
• NY’s State Education Department issued its annual school report cards today. (Ithaca Journal)
• Andy Rotherham lays out what he thinks are the five biggest myths about vouchers. (Time)
• The Obama administration isn’t planning to leave rural schools out of the RttT of 2012. (Hechinger)

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today that his threats to cut more than 6,100 teaching positions — including over 4,600 through layoffs — should be taken more seriously than ever before, and the city will have to fight to avoid even more cuts across city agencies.

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s proposed state budget reduces state aid to New York City schools by $1.4 billion, and the city schools system is also facing the end of $850 million in federal stimulus funds. To negate those cuts, the city has moved $1.86 billion in city funds to the Department of Education since June, Bloomberg said today.

But overall city expenses are still rising enough to necessitate the cuts in teaching positions, which were originally projected in the city’s preliminary budget outlined in November, the mayor argued.

Teachers union President Michael Mulgrew said that the mayor’s layoff proposal was “more and more bizarre,” given the increase in city revenue going to fill in gaps in DOE funding and the Cuomo administration’s claims that state cuts should not mean local layoffs.

“We’ve already lost nearly 5,000 teachers to attrition in the last two years, and class sizes are skyrocketing across the city,” Mulgrew said. “It’s time the Mayor joined us in fighting for the children of our city by supporting the extension of the state millionaire’s tax, rather than continuing to focus, as he and Chancellor Black did in Albany this week, on a bogus strategy to lay teachers off.” (more…)