GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Though the citywide school board has already voted to close Christopher Columbus High School, students, teachers, and alumni rallied on the steps of City Hall today to make the case for their Plan B. Columbus’s faculty wants to convert their large, traditional high school into a charter school, but it will need the city’s permission first.

“I think our challenge has been to get the Department of Education to take our proposal seriously,” said Columbus teacher Christine Rowland. In the last year that Columbus has been working on its charter application, the city has promised to help, then offered conflicting advice and no support, Rowland said.

At the rally today, Columbus faculty and students urged the DOE to accept their proposal to keep their school open. In order to convert into a charter school, more than half of Columbus students’ parents have to vote to approve the change and Rowland said the school has already collected many of their ballots. But the response from a DOE spokesman indicated that the department isn’t interested.

“Columbus ranks in the bottom 6% of all high schools across the city, and one of every two students who walk through its doors doesn’t graduate on time,” spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld wrote in an email. “We’re not willing to gamble that the same organization that has failed kids year after year can suddenly turn around. This commnity needs new and better schools for families, and that’s what we intend to provide.”

Reversing its earlier findings, the city’s Independent Budget Office has concluded in a new study that most New York City charter schools receive more funding per student than their district school peers.

A year ago, an IBO study found that charter schools housed in public school buildings received $305 less per student than district schools for the 2008-09 school year. Now, the office has revised its methodology and has reached a very different conclusion.

In 2008-09, charter schools in district space were given $701 more per student than traditional public schools, the new study finds. For the 2009-10 school year, that disparity shrunk to $649. (more…)

So many parents and activists showed up for a City Council hearing on school food last week that the hearing room overflowed.

The hearing, called by Robert Jackson, chair of the council’s Education Committee, and Darlene Mealy, chair of The Contracts Committee, specifically focused on the policies and contracts of the Department of Education’s Office of SchoolFood. First, council members questioned Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm, SchoolFood director Eric Goldstein, and Executive Chef Jorge Callazo. The bulk of the questions focused on the collection of lunch fees from reduced and full paying students, on the universal free breakfast program, and on the procurement of more local produce for school meals.

This is what I learned:

• Five hundred of the city’s 1,600 schools participate in the universal free meals program, meaning all the students at those schools receive free lunch. For the rest, parents must fill out forms requiring them to reveal their income (it is the only time the DOE asks families to do so) to determine whether they qualify for free or reduced lunch. As the New York Times reported earlier this week, a family of four earning $28,665 or less qualifies for free lunch; for reduced lunch the cutoff is $40,793.Reduced-fee students pay 25 cents a meal and full lunch students pay $1.50 a meal. Schools often don’t collect these small lunch fees. Many parents who qualify for free or reduced school lunch haven’t filled out the forms for a variety of reasons, while other parents simply aren’t paying for the lunch their children are eating. In fact, some schools already owe as much as $30,000 for lunches not paid. At this rate, the DOE stands to lose as much as $8 million by the end of the school year.Chancellor Black is threatening principals that if they don’t collect the money that is owed, the money will be deducted from their schools’ budgets. (more…)

• Chancellor Black is set to appear in Albany today to oppose proposed education budget cuts. (NY1)
• The $580 million in school cuts Gov. Cuomo has proposed are especially deep and divisive. (Times)
• School funding advocates shouldn’t bother fighting the budget cuts, writes Bill Hammond. (Daily News)
• A DOE website was letting schools spend funds on sex-help books and cocktail guides. (Daily News)
• The educators behind Teacher U are opening a freestanding education school. (GothamSchools, Post)
• Educators 4 Excellence proposed a “last in, first out” reform that mirrors the city’s. (GothamSchools, Post)
• Achievement First East New York has sent an autistic student at to detention many times. (Daily News)
• The city’s one-school-per-week PCB testing turned up toxins at an East Harlem building. (NY1, WSJ)
• President Obama’s budget proposal calls for more Race to the Top funding. (Times, Washington Post)
• It’s a shame that Teach for America faces a $20 million federal cut, Richard Cohen writes. (Daily News)
• District and union officials from all over the country, but not New York, are collaborating in Denver. (AP)

• Obama’s budget is out and it includes a modest increase in education spending. (EdWeek)
• Though he’s requesting a lot less money for the “teaching and learning” fund. (EdWeek)
• The budget includes $900 million for a Race to the Top for school districts. (NYT)
• Rotherham says he’s skeptical the Race to the Top funding request will survive. (Eduwonk)
• Alison Stewart talks school turnarounds and phys ed with three education thinkers. (PBS)
• A new school librarian gets stuck in an unbelievably bad graduate class. (Education on the Plate)
• One UFT member says the union’s new ad attacking Mayor Bloomberg is too soft. (Chaz)
• Another thinks it’s just right. (Accountable Talk)
• Norm Scott: Why won’t UFT president Michael Mulgrew defend seniority layoffs? (Ed Notes)
• A college counselor travels to the Teach for America summit and reports back. (GS Community)
• How did PCBs end up in public schools and what do they look like anyway? (WSJ)
• Always putting “children first” could mean putting teachers last. (More Thoughtful)

A teacher advocacy group supported by prominent opponents of the law requiring seniority-based teacher layoffs has unveiled one of the first detailed proposed alternatives to that law.

A task force of 11 members of Educators 4 Excellence, the group of teachers critical of many union work rules, presented their recommendations to Mayor Michael Bloomberg earlier this month. The group is financially backed by the Gates Foundation and is linked to the advocacy group Education Reform Now.

Much of their proposal is composed of recommendations that are already being pushed by Bloomberg and Chancellor Cathie Black. In speeches and editorials, the Bloomberg administration has strongly advocated scrapping seniority-based layoffs. Instead they propose laying off teachers whose principals have rated them as unsatisfactory or who currently lack full-time teaching positions in schools.

E4E’s proposal goes one step further, arguing that teachers who have racked up high numbers of unexcused absences during the school year should also be among the first to lose their jobs. Under the plan, teachers who were absent more than 22 days last school year and this one without a doctor’s note would be laid off first.

Still, the city could be forced to lay off far more teachers than who might be covered in E4E’s proposal. The most conservative recent estimates indicate that the city may be forced to lay off more than 6,000 teachers if severe state budget cuts go through. (more…)

The logo of Teacher U, whose founders will create a stand-alone graduate school of education called Relay.

The founders of Teacher U, the nonprofit organization that developed a novel way of preparing teachers for low-income schools, will create their own graduate school of education, following a vote by the Board of Regents last week.

The new Relay School of Education will be the first stand-alone graduate school of education to open in New York since 1916, when Bank Street College of Education was founded, and the first in memory to prepare teachers while they are serving full-time in classrooms. The new institution will open its doors next fall; current Teacher U students will remain enrolled at their partner school of education, the City University of New York’s Hunter College.

The Regents’ decision inserts a new model for preparing K-12 teachers into New York’s education landscape. Unlike alternative certification programs such as Teach for America and the New York City Teaching Fellows, Relay will not rely on existing colleges to provide its teachers with coursework required for certification; the new graduate school of education will design and deliver all of those courses itself. And Relay will likely take teachers who come into the school system through alternative programs like TFA.

Meanwhile, unlike most traditional schools of education, Relay will make training teachers its sole priority and will make proven student learning gains a requirement of receiving a Master’s degree.

The new school has already generated opposition from several existing schools of education, including from a top official at CUNY. In formal responses to the Teacher U group’s proposal, leaders of existing schools cited concerns about quality and the fact that, as officials at Fordham University put it, a new graduate school of education would be “duplicative in a market with sufficient program offerings,” according to a summary of concerns(PDF) made public by the Regents.

The Board of Regents approved the proposal with a unanimous vote and one abstention last week nevertheless, said Tom Dunn, a spokesman for the state education department. He added that State Education Commissioner David Steiner, who helped form Teacher U in his last job as dean of the school of education at Hunter College, recused himself from discussions about the application.

During recent visits to Teacher U’s current program, instruction topics ranged from how to tailor reading discussions to the racial and class backgrounds of students to how to write on a white board without covering your face with your writing arm. Much of Teacher U’s curriculum is devoted to passing on lessons learned by teachers at the charter schools that founded Teacher U, such as those collected by Uncommon Schools managing director Doug Lemov in his book Teach Like a Champion. (more…)

“When I found out I wasn’t crazy.”

Such was famed feminist Gloria Steinem’s response to a question posed by writer Malcolm Gladwell during a panel session this weekend at Teach For America’s 20th-Anniversary Summit in Washington, D.C. Steinem was responding to a Gladwell query about when she knew she had been successful in her campaign for equal rights for women.

The sentiment she was describing — a sense of calm and comfort upon realizing the presence of like-minded people who supported and were engaged with her struggle, who shared similar beliefs and the conviction to act on those beliefs — rang true for me this weekend.

Of the roughly 11,000 current and former Teach For America corps members gathered in Washington, the overwhelming majority had taught and/or were teaching in a school with another corps member. I didn’t, and I missed the camaraderie that came with working alongside someone who was recruited because of shared experiences and trained on the same principles. Working upwards of 60-, 70-, 80-hour weeks over the last few years has gotten tiring without the reinforcement of like-minded colleagues acting in concert.

Thus I feel rejuvenated after 36 hours of immersion in the wacky world of Teach For America. A Friday night dinner with founder and CEO Wendy Kopp was followed by an evening reception, where I was delighted to find myself around a hotel bar sometime past 11:30 p.m. in deep conversation about educational inequity in post-Katrina New Orleans. (more…)

• 13 elementary schools in the city could lose half their teachers if severe layoffs happen. (Daily News)
• Parents at PS 65, where half of teachers have less than five years’ experience, fear layoffs. (Post)
• The UFT is firing back at Mayor Bloomberg with a “last in, first out” ad of its own. (Daily News, NY1)
• The groups that won increased school aid say Gov. Cuomo is shortchanging the city. (Daily News)
• Cathie Black’s first six weeks as chancellor have been filled with ups and, mostly, downs. (AP)
• Harvard professor Ronald Ferguson has kept a low profile studying the racial achievement gap. (Times)
• The city has stopped letting principals spend school funds on cameras meant for spying. (Daily News)
• Mayor Bloomberg said schools might stop giving lunch to students who don’t pay. (Post, Daily News)
• PS 129 in the Bronx was locked down briefly on Friday after two gunmen sought refuge inside. (Post)
• Minority students continue to be underrepresented at specialized high schools. (GS, Post)
• Students attended a fair advertising new high schools this weekend. (NY1)
• The Daily News says college-readiness revelations mean the state must improve Regents exams.
• Thomas Carroll: Education budgets are secondary to the right priorities, like charter schools. (Post)
• A city nonprofit that offers low-quality GED prep gets more than $10 million a year in federal aid. (Post)
• Acceptance letters to private school kindergartens went out on Friday. (WSJ)
• D.C. officials are finding unexpected uses for the city’s teacher evaluation system. (Washington Post)
• Jay Mathews: Michelle Rhee’s biggest missteps included picking the wrong battles. (Washington Post)
• Two years after Detroit’s schools were declared in a state of emergency, the crisis there persists. (WSJ)
• Some Alabama students have designated today free of profanities — a “no-cussing” day. (Times)
• The Chicago Tribune says the city’s new mayor will inherit a school system primed for reform.

• The number of black and Hispanic students admitted to elite high schools is down, again. (GS, NYT)
• Some schools think it kinder to mail home specialized high school acceptance letters. (InsideSchools)
• Cathie Black is doing better one-on-one with teachers than with the public. (AP)
• Peter Murphy: absent some big changes, the college readiness gap won’t budge. (Chalkboard)
• Laying off teachers based on U-ratings sounds good, but in practice merit can be arbitrary. (GS)
• Told his students aren’t progressing fast enough, a teacher has to face hard truths. (GS)
• DiNapoli says the state could save money by focusing on at-risk students. (Politics on the Hudson)
• Randi Weingarten says she asked Bloomberg to let the union “police itself” in 2004. (NPR)
• School-related comments bookend a list of Bloomberg’s worst gaffes. (Daily Politics)
• When turnaround principals move from school to school, their work is sometimes undone. (Early Ed)
• If Congress approves Race to the Top spending for 2012, it might be for districts-only. (Politics K-12)