The poll, conducted last week by Marist, found that just 27 percent of New Yorkers approve of how Mayor Bloomberg is handling the city’s public schools. That’s down from 53 percent in June 2009, the last time the question was asked. Since then, longtime chancellor Joel Klein resigned and was replaced with education newcomer Cathie Black; test scores plummeted after revelations about the quality of state tests; and Bloomberg has waged high-profile battles over school closures, charter schools, and teacher layoffs.

Black’s own poll numbers have been abysmal. Just 17 percent of New Yorkers approve of her performance, according to a Quinnipiac poll earlier this month, and 34 percent said they didn’t know who she was or couldn’t judge her. (In contrast, Klein’s approval rating, always the lowest among public officials, bottomed out at 33 percent in 2007 after he cut school bus routes in the middle of winter.)

Today’s poll also probed New Yorkers’ views on the fight over “last in, first out” layoff rules, which Bloomberg wants to end, and found that half see the mayor’s position as a power grab.

The poll asked respondents for their assessment of Bloomberg’s motivation for seeking to end seniority layoff rules, offering them choices first between concern for the city’s budget and a bid for additional school control and then between budget concerns and a desire to weaken the teachers union. Respondents could also say they were unsure about Bloomberg’s motivation.

Given the first choice, half of the people polled said a bid for control is behind Bloomberg’s anti-”last in, first out” campaign. Thirty-eight percent said they believed Bloomberg is driven by budgetary concerns. This split was even more pronounced in households with public school parents (57 percent to 34 percent) and with union members (59 percent to 32 percent).

The second choice yielded a more even divide, with 44 percent of respondents saying Bloomberg is motivated by budget worries and 43 percent answering that Bloomberg is trying to weaken the teachers union. But respondents from households with public school parents and households with union members were more circumspect, with 50 percent of the first group and 48 percent of the second group citing anti-union sentiment.

The poll also contains bad news for the teachers union, which has been battling the idea that its support for maintaining seniority layoff rules is driven by self-interest. Fifty-six percent of respondents said the union’s stance is meant to “just protect teachers with seniority,” while 35 percent said they thought the union was motivated by a desire to “keep teachers with the most experience in the classroom.” Surprisingly, a higher percentage of respondents whose households include a union member — 62 percent — said they thought the teachers union’s fight is aimed only at protecting senior teachers.

The breakdown of survey responses by political affiliation suggests Bloomberg’s recent school policy moves hold ideological appeal for Republican voters. Thirty-six percent of them said they approve of how he is handling the public schools, and 71 percent of them said, as Bloomberg has, that the union is merely protecting its longest-standing members by defending “last in, first out” layoff rules.

Data released on high school admissions by the Department of Education today shows that while fewer eighth-graders applied for seats in public high schools — down from 80,412 last year to 78,747 this year — the process has become more competitive. Fewer students were matched to one of their top five choices and more of them weren’t matched to any schools at all.

City officials’ explanation for this shift is that more eighth graders’ top choices were concentrated in the same set of schools. With so many students vying for the same schools — many of them among the city’s top-performing — fewer students got what they wanted.

This year, 83 percent of students landed one of their top five high school choices, down from 86 percent last year. The number of unmatched students — eighth-graders who weren’t paired with a high school and who will have to reapply to schools with open seats — swelled from 6,694 last year to 8,239 this year.

DOE officials attributed the sudden popularity of some schools to the city’s decision to include schools’ graduation rates in the high school directory. Schools with graduation rates above 90 percent saw a 30 percent rise in applications, while schools whose graduation rates are below 50 percent received 34 percent fewer applications.

The school with the highest number of applications, Baruch College Campus High School, is listed as having a 100 percent graduation rate. It received 7,606 applications, 61 percent more than last year.

“What we see is that when families have more information, especially with regard to graduation rates, they naturally gravitate toward those better options for their kids,” said Deputy Chancellor Marc Sternberg in a statement. “So we need to keep providing families with more high quality schools.”

Another possible explanation for the increase in applications to top schools is that students might have been deterred from applying to schools the city said it would try to close, in part because of the schools’ low graduation rates. Earlier this year, the citywide school board voted to close 14 high schools starting this summer. Students who had applied to the schools couldn’t be matched there, making it more likely for them to wind up without a placement at all. In contrast, last year, a lawsuit required that students be assigned to schools the city had tried to close.

Not all students learned which high schools they’ll attend next year. In addition to the over 8,000 eighth-graders who were not assigned to a high school, some schools sent acceptance letters to students’ homes. While these letters will take a few days to arrive, other students were told directly by their guidance counselors today. Eighth-graders who were not matched must apply by April 15 to schools that did not fill up in the main round of admissions. They’ll find out by the end of May where they’ll enroll in September.

Here are the 10 most-applied-to high schools this year:

The Department of Education has set up a new email address —bedbugconcerns@schools.nyc.gov — to receive complaints about bedbugs in city schools. School officials can also send photographic evidence of suspected bedbugs to the address so the department can identify, and try to end, infestations.

The new procedure was made public today by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who is counting the address’s creation as a personal victory. Stringer asked the city last year to let school personnel submit bedbug evidence by email, according to a press release from his office. Until now, school officials had to send physical specimens by mail to a department office in Queens in order to initiate treatment, according to Stringer’s announcement, a process that cost precious time in the fight against the invaders.

The city has long maintained that bedbugs are not a major problem for schools, but parents and school personnel continue to complain about the pests — often without getting a response.

“Several teachers in my school have found bedbugs in their classrooms. At least one has given a bedbug sample to the principal. A student even complained of being bit by bedbugs in the classroom,” a teacher wrote to GothamSchools today. “My principal is not remotely interested in the issue and does not respond to staff emails about our concerns. What can we do?”

One caution: The collateral damage of waging war against bedbugs can be costly for schools. After four classrooms at Brooklyn’s PS 107 were damaged during bedbug fumigation last fall, teachers had to hold a car wash to replace supplies.

Here’s the complete press release from Stringer’s office:

BOROUGH PRESIDENT STRINGER HAILS IMPORTANT VICTORY IN BATTLE TO RID NYC PUBLIC SCHOOLS OF BEDBUGS

Hailing “an important victory” in the battle to rid New York’s public schools of bed bugs, Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer on Thursday congratulated the Department of Education (DOE) for agreeing to his suggestion that school officials should be able to email evidence of bed bugs to DOE for a rapid identification and response—instead of mailing them and waiting days for an answer.

“Bed bugs have no place in our classrooms, and that’s why I asked the city back in November to speed up the process by which school officials alert DOE to infestations,” Stringer said. “Although I’m concerned that it took this long to adopt a common-sense procedure, I’m glad to have played a role in bringing about a needed change.”

Although DOE did not publicly respond to the Borough President’s request last year for a speedier procedure, the new guidelines were recently distributed to principals. School officials now have the option of emailing photographs of a suspected pest to bedbugconcerns@schools.nyc.gov. Earlier, the Borough President noted, they were required to capture a specimen, position it in a plastic bag, seal the bag, secure it with tape and send the specimen through the U.S. mail to DOE in Long Island, City. Only then, after an identification process that could take days, would the DOE respond.

“Anyone who has ever discovered bed bugs in their home—or suspects they are present—would never stand for such a slow-moving reaction,” Stringer said. “We still have to combat this problem wherever it surfaces in our schools, but at least now parents, teachers and administrators can get a more instant response. The longer we have to wait for DOE to respond, the more difficult and costly an infestation will be to control.”

Since last year donations to Getting Tools to City Schools have risen threefold due to an increase in corporate grants and in sales of the binders to schools. The response to GTCS’ eco-friendly binders has been so positive that Dennis is considering expanding his line of products to include 100 percent recycled tabbed pocket folder/dividers as well as custom-printed, eco-friendly binder labels of school logos. Although most schools don’t commit to buy binders until the summer, over the last few months Dennis has met with over a dozen public school principals who have verbally committed to buying the binders, which, if all goes according to plan, would result in the sale of about 10,000 binders. With that money Dennis anticipates providing over 3,000 public school students this coming September with free school supplies; last year his organization served 1,000 kids.

Whether a school is buying the binders or receiving the free school supplies, Dennis offers a free presentation about sustainability and how it directly relates to the life cycle of the binder. Students learn about the paper mill where the recycled binder covers are produced; they assemble the binders themselves under Dennis’s guidance. At the end of the school year, Dennis returns to the school when the students disassemble their binders. He collects the used covers, which are sent back to the paper mill to be recycled, while the school keeps the metal rings for reuse the following year. In the fall Dennis returns with new recycled binder covers, and the students use the metal rings from the previous year to assemble new binders. In this way students participate in sustainable living firsthand. In addition, money raised from the sale of the binders helps to provide low-income students with the supplies they need to succeed in school. GTCS provides students with a 3-ring recyclable binder, notebook paper, pencils, pens, pocket dividers and a pencil pouch.

Dennis understands that with the tremendous budget cuts schools are facing, principals are looking for a great deal as much as they are a good cause. Getting Tools to City Schools is an approved Department of Education vendor offering a significant discount to New York City public schools. The recycled binders are also a smart economic choice, because schools only have to buy the metal rings once since they’re designed to be reused. After the initial purchase of the binders, schools only need to buy the recycled covers, which dramatically reduces costs over the long run. And of course, GTCS binders also keep wasteful vinyl binders out of our landfills. Each year 40 million vinyl binders are sold in the United States, accounting for 35 million pounds of landfill.

Individuals as well as schools can purchase GTCS’s reusable binders. For every binder that is bought at full price, GTCS will give a free binder to a student at a low-income public school. The other advantage to the paperboard binder covers (which are FDA approved and Forest Stewardship Council certified) — your child can decorate it however she wants, allowing for full creative expression.

Maura Walz, far right, and the rest of the GothamSchools team at associate editor Philissa Cramer's wedding last fall. Photo by One Love Photo.

Here’s a small piece of news for New York, and a big one for GothamSchools: This will be my last post here.

Later this week I head to Atlanta, where I am about to begin covering education for Georgia Public Broadcasting. (That’s why we’re hiring.) In Georgia I’ll be part of a really exciting new project that will report on schools all around the South and will let me fulfill a long-time dream of working in radio.

Maybe, if I’m lucky, you’ll see links to some of my stories in Rise and Shine. If you know anyone who works in Georgia’s public schools, definitely let me know!

I’m excited to get to know a new school system with entirely different challenges and accomplishments. But I will miss New York and its byzantine system and impassioned parents, teachers, students and policy wonks.

I don’t want to leave without thanking you — GothamSchools’ readers, commenters and tipsters. Thanks for helping me learn something new about the New York City public schools every day I’ve been on this job. Thanks for holding me accountable when I’ve erred. And, most of all, thanks for being such curious and passionate readers with an intense interest in bettering schools.

No matter how much you can argue about the solutions to the problems of public education here — when you even agree on what the problems are — New York City is filled to the brim with people who care deeply about creating excellent public schools for every student. No matter what happens, your quest for better schools will make for a fascinating story. And it’s a story I will continue to follow as I transition from GothamSchools reporter to one of its many dedicated readers.

So farewell, and good luck to you all.

Every spring, in what has become a ritual in recent years, parents register for kindergarten at their nearby elementary schools for the following year ,and every spring, thousands are wait-listed. Department of Education officials said they received 8,000 more kindergarten applications this year than last year. While more than 92 percent of those families have been accepted to their zoned schools, 3,195 of them are still waiting for a placement.

DOE officials emphasized that between now and the end of May the wait list numbers could fluctuate. During the intervening months, some families will move away, enroll their children in private or parochial schools, or win lotteries for charter school admission. Officials said they would open more kindergarten classes where they could find space.

But come the end of May, families who still don’t have seats in their zoned schools will be sent new schools to choose from. Last year, nearly 1,000 kindergarteners did not get spots in their zoned schools. Some of the new assignments sent families to less-coveted schools just down the block. Others sent the 5- and 6-year-olds on treks as arduous as a nearly 3-mile hike from Sunset Park to Red Hook, in the case of four unlucky Brooklyn families.

“We understand parents are anxious, but this is only the beginning of the admissions process and every single year we see waitlists shrink or disappear completely throughout the spring and summer,” DOE spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld said in a written statement. “We’re already planning meetings with parents in communities that have waitlists, and we’ll continue to work with schools every day on reducing waitlists across the City.”

This year, some schools on the Upper West Side and Upper East Side saw their wait lists shrink, but not disappear, as a result of two new elementary schools that opened this year. P.S. 87 on the Upper West Side had 125 children on its wait list last year, but after a new school opened nearby, it now has a wait list 48 children deep. Even parents who are happy to gamble on that new school may not get in — P.S. 452 has a wait list of eight students.

Other schools have long wait lists where they used to have none. P.S. 49 in Middle Village, Queens has 74 students on its wait list whereas last year it had none. P.S. 143, another Queens elementary school, had 24 students on its wait list last year and this year is up to 79.

Last year at this time, roughly 2,000 rising kindergartners landed on wait lists. Next year’s wait lists could be even longer. Siting state cuts to school construction funding, the Department of Education has decided to cut 16,000 seats it planned to build out of its capital plan.

Below is school-by-school wait list count for schools that have more than 20 children still waiting for a seat.

2011 Kindergarten Waitlists

While we teachers often find ourselves fighting against misguided reforms, there’s also a lot to fight for. As the largest local teachers union in the country, the United Federation Teachers here in New York has the ability to have an incredible impact on education and the direction of education reform. We could be building grassroots support for reforms that would transform education, including culturally responsive curriculum, smaller class sizes, parent and teacher empowerment, the alleviation of poverty-related factors that affect learning, and creating classroom environments that put critical thinking instead of test prep at the forefront.

Research and analysis have repeatedly demonstrated that the reforms listed in the first paragraph do not benefit students. It should seem obvious then, to most informed individuals, that teachers unions would be doing serious work on the ground to mobilize teachers in the fight against them. And of course they would be clearly presenting a positive alternative that could actually transform teaching and learning. This is why I love unions: They provide an opportunity for working people to have a significant voice in these matters, and they can organize their members in support of good policies and against bad ones.

And yet for some reason the Unity Caucus that leads the UFT, which has had practically unchallenged control over the union for decades, is not fighting in a way that so many people wish they would. They have chosen not to come out strongly against charter schools, which concerns me and and many others who are wary of the spread of charters as a privatizing tactic that has already begun to change the very nature of our public school system. On the contrary, they have started two of their own charter schools that occupy space in public school buildings. They have repeatedly undermined teacher protections and due process rights. The former president of the UFT and current president of the national AFT, Randi Weingarten, most recently said she would support the dismissal of tenured teachers without due process using a rating system that includes faulty test scores. Instead of capitulating to corporate-minded reformers who are pursuing these ill-advised changes, she should be arguing firmly that the focus on this small percentage of “bad teachers” is hugely misguided and a serious waste of resources that could be going into improving our schools.

Just as significantly, the UFT leadership has not adequately mobilized its members or galvanized school chapters to unite with parents and fight  these misguided reforms. Instead, Unity continues to practice a failed method of preserving their seat at the table by capitulating, and of hoping that the Democrats whom they support with endorsements and finances will side with teachers and students. Too often the union relies solely on the legal system and the hope of a DOE error somewhere in order to try to stop the destruction of the public schools.

I’ve attended several Delegate Assembly meetings where members have brought up resolutions and essentially begged the leadership to do more to mobilize the base, to very little avail. The question I ask myself regularly is: Why are we, as a union, not fighting? Does the leadership not see mobilizing teachers and parents as a viable strategy? Does it not want to fight corporate reforms? Are UFT officials scared of losing control of the rank and file if the leadership makes a concerted effort to support us in organizing ourselves? I have been in far too many conversations, including two this past weekend at the NYCORE conference, where people have suggested their own theories about the true answer to the question, “why are they not really fighting?”

At the most recent meeting of the Grassroots Education Movement we were lucky enough to be joined by Rafael Feliciano, president of the teachers union of Puerto Rico. He shared some lessons from his union’s struggle against union-busting and privatization, and the lesson that resounded with me most profoundly was the need for continued and consistent organizing with teachers, students and parents at the very local, school-based level. He said that as the president of the teachers union he viewed the union’s role as supporting the individual actions of school communities to agitate around each school’s concerns. He said he would field calls from union leaders in an individual school who would say “we don’t have working toilets and parents are upset,” or, “we don’t have adequate books and the community wants to hold an action.” His response would be, “Do it! Organize it and we will support you and your parents in every way we can.”

The Unity Caucus leadership of the UFT doesn’t seem to take on a role that even closely resembles this kind of an organization. Their strategy focuses heavily on endorsing and depending on the support of politicians and while they pay lip service to fighting these corporate reforms they don’t seem to want to do the ground work to organize around the fights. This is particularly surprising considering the climate in education right now wherein so many teachers are simply itching to counter the attacks against them.

At a friend’s school the Unity-aligned chapter leader told her staff that they should not be involved in Fight Back Friday. The Fight Back Friday in my school, for the record, was amazing. Nearly every member of the staff participated, and at the end of the day we had over a quarter of our staff speaking to parents, students and community members at the nearby subway stop about why our schools need more teachers and resources, and about why teacher protections protect students. Nearly everyone we spoke to was supportive of teachers, and it led to some great conversations that never would have happened had teachers not taken it upon ourselves to educate, organize, and mobilize.

While the UFT leadership organized for a turnout against school closings at a Panel for Educational Policy meeting in January and then walked out of the meeting, it has done no sustained mobilization against the destructive school closings policy. Schools will close as planned unless something is done. I was one of the organizers of the large anti-school closings rally in January which UFT delegates voted to support, and yet Unity did nothing more than bury an announcement of the rally at the bottom of its weekly email update to chapter leaders.

Schools that are facing co-location of a charter school in their building that will take away resources and space for enrichment find little to no help from the UFT leadership. In fact, many of these schools reach out to GEM for support, and we have created a collection of resources to provide support and advice on fighting both school closings and co-locations.

GEM is a small (but growing!), unfunded group of dedicated educators, parents, and concerned citizens. Without question the union has significantly more resources at its disposal to organize, educate and mobilize around these issues. If the union would help schools fight these attacks by organizing something like Fight Back Friday across the city, imagine what kind of impact that could have. Instead of thirty schools, Fight Back Friday could be happening in hundreds of schools. Instead of talking to hundreds of parents and community members, in one day teachers could be talking to tens of thousands.

Unions, as a collective representation of working people, can be an incredibly powerful counter-force to corporate interests. Individual working people can have very little impact on policy because they do not have the financial prowess on their own to affect national policy the way those with a good deal of money at their disposal can. I am proud to be a member of a union, and I am very proud of my fellow UFT members. But when union leadership becomes too far-removed from the lived reality of their rank-and-file members and spends a significant amount of their time with the very people who are pushing the policies they should be fighting, they run the risk of losing sight of their mission. If the UFT had a leadership with a social justice orientation that viewed its role as strengthening educators’ ability to educate and mobilize against misguided reforms, then I would not only be proud of my union but proud of its leadership as well.

The report, which comes out of an audit completed by Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s office in January, examines a group of students that are labeled as “discharged,” meaning they have left the school system for legitimate reasons, such as moving to another state or deciding to enroll in a G.E.D. program. It finds that some of these students should actually have been labeled as drop-outs, but because of paperwork errors or school officials’ failure to follow state regulations in certain cases, they were counted as discharged.

Students who are discharged don’t count towards the city’s drop-out rate and some advocates have argued that principals can misuse the discharge code, entering students who simply dropped out in order to inflate their graduation rate artificially. Overall, the comptroller’s report found that even with the improper discharge classifications taken into account, the city’s graduation rate was “generally accurate.”

To determine whether the city’s Department of Education was improperly classifying drop-outs as discharges, auditors in the comptroller’s office examined the records of students who started high school in 2004 and should have graduated in 2008, but were discharged along the way. They randomly chose 500 of the 17,025 general education students who were discharged and 100 of the 1,923 discharged special education students.

Through interviews with principals and guidance counselors and analysis of students’ records, auditors found that 74 of the 500 (about 15 percent) discharged general education students and  should have been considered drop-outs. For special education students, 20 of 100 did not have enough documentation to prove they had been discharged.

The report notes that in the vasty majority of these cases of improperly labeled students, schools weren’t able able to find enough documentation of students’ new schools or entrance in G.E.D. programs to satisfy the State Education Department’s requirements for discharge.

But in some cases, the report says, the students had clearly dropped out. According to the report, one student who quit high school to join the military was classified as discharged. Another dropped out and was labeled as such, but then the school changed the students’ classification to discharged and couldn’t provide auditors with documentation to show why.

DOE officials responded to the report by saying that most of the students who the comptroller designated as erroneously discharged were not hidden drop-outs. Instead, they are victims of a discrepancy between the city and state’s standards for proving students have been discharged.

“We believe that, in practice, they [the state standards] impose an unfair and unwarranted burden on school principals, administrators, counselors, and outreach workers,” said Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow Suransky in his written response to the audit.

In response to the audit, school officials challenged some of the report’s findings. One example they cited as evidence of the state’s overly strict standards was the case of a student who left her New York City high school and returned to West Africa after her father was deported. Her uncle confirmed that she had left but because her school couldn’t verify this directly with the student’s father, auditors said she should have been labeled a drop-out.

In the report, the comptroller’s office responds that the student was discharged in 2004 but it wasn’t until May of 2010 that city officials interviewed the girl’s uncle and learned that she had returned to West Africa in 2007. For the three years between when she stopped going to high school and when she left the country, the city had no documentation proving she had been in school.

Lower East Side Prep High School Principal Marth Polin said that properly discharging students is not easy. Many of her students are recent immigrants from China and it’s not unusual for them to leave the U.S. or New York City without telling anyone at her school.

“It’s very arduous,” she said of the discharge process. “The problem is they often don’t tell us they’re leaving, and then we’re held accountable for them.”

When Polin’s students do tell her where they’re going, they still have to sit for a planning interview, sign papers saying they are discharging themselves (or their parents are), and provide a plane ticket proving they are leaving the country. Once they’ve left, they have to prove they’ve enrolled in a new school, otherwise they’re classified as drop-outs.

“I don’t think it’s entirely fair because any of us that do take a lot of immigrant kids, we do take the biggest hit,” Polin said.

“It may be arduous but there’s no other way to get around to actually verify this stuff,” said Leonie Haimson, executive director of the advocacy group Class Size Matters. Two years ago, Haimson and Jennifer Jennings, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University, released a report on the city’s increasing number of discharged students.

Haimson said that because schools are graded — and sometimes closed — based on their graduation rates, principals have an incentive to use the discharge label for their students who drop out.

“It’s a combination of sloppy oversight and an accountability system which really hurts these kids the most, by having schools push them out and then lie about it,” she said.

More than 70 percent of respondents said that they wanted more news coverage of teacher effectiveness and of student academic performance. Nearly the same percentage want to know more about school safety, curriculum, finances and school reform.

In previous studies, the report’s authors have found that education policy and curriculum issues are frequently under-covered in national news. Of the national news stories on education examined in a 2009 study, just under 5 percent were about education reform, and just 3.4 percent covered curriculum.

Many of the report’s other findings are unsurprising — for example, the survey found that younger adults, who are more likely to have school-age children, want more education news than senior citizens do.

The survey found that people — especially young people — are accessing their news through new channels, including cell phone text messages. Nearly as many people turned to websites for their education news as they did to national television. But the report’s authors were surprised at how many people, including the youngest respondents, rely heavily on daily newspapers for their information about schools:

The fact that those under 30 were even more likely than the middle-aged to rely on newspapers for education news suggests that expanding education coverage might be a useful strategy for newspapers trying to shore up their readership among the young.

The report also notes that even parents, who have the most access to school-based networks and newsletters, still look to newspapers for education news.

The report is a follow-up to two other studies that the Brookings Institution published in 2009 and 2010. Those studies found that less than 2 percent of all national news coverage was dedicated to education and that digital technologies are changing the way that news organizations cover education.

Read the new report in full here.

Yet if the United States is truly to “win the future,” as President Obama encourages, it will be necessary to do with skilled craftspeople as well as resident scholars. In other words, at a certain point a 4-year college is not for everyone, and in this era of budget cuts to education it is critical to maintain community colleges as well as vocational and non-academic post-secondary programming options.

As the director of a college prep program that works within a public high school, I’m certainly a cheerleader for the benefits of college. Our program works with students from the ninth grade on to familiarize their families and them with the college process and to make well-informed, high-quality decisions on where to apply and matriculate.

Even so, a few months ago I decided to create an option for a dozen seniors who are uninterested in or unsure about attending college in the fall. Instead of participating in a 90-minute weekly class led by our college counselor that readies students to transition into college, these students, about 20 percent of their class, choose to attend a workshop with our career counselor to learn about a variety of post-secondary options.

Don’t get me wrong — college is still on the table for these students, whether for right after graduation or sometime thereafter. But so is a career as an auto mechanic, or nurse, or computer technician, or carpenter.

My decision to create this alternative, known as Pathways, proved controversial in certain quarters of the school, which seemed to equate it with giving up on these kids.

Rather than giving up on these students, my decision to create Pathways is intended to put them in better position for the future. A recent study by the Harvard Graduate School of Education found students need more diverse options — just 30 percent of young adults have a bachelor’s degree by age 27.

Our high school has had five graduating classes, and the most students we have ever had matriculate to college in the fall following graduation is roughly 70 percent. Some of our students choose to matriculate later, but about 20 percent of our graduates have never opted to attend college.

The majority of those students who do matriculate end up in remedial classes; many never graduate yet end up in debt nonetheless.

Until we — as a school and college prep program — start to educate and prepare our students better, these figures are not likely to change. So I felt responsible to acknowledge the reality of our seniors’ preparation and preferences. I listened to the students, who expressed a desire to find a job, join the military or do anything besides college.

Of course, desiring employment or enlistment is far different from knowing what to do to achieve those ends. In one-on-one interviews with our Pathways students, we learned they are largely unaware of what they need to do to access a sustainable job and career. One student wanted to go into business; when we asked what kind of business, he said business, unaware of the myriad options. Another student wanted to go into the military until she had a falling out with the recruiting officer. Few had resumes ready.

So our career counselor, in partnership with a 12th-grade teacher, has embarked on a five-month plan to prepare the students as much as possible for the world of work. They will make those resumes, create professional e-mail addresses, shadow people on the job, apply for jobs and internships and endure mock interviews, among many other tasks. When college acceptances arrive, those who applied will get assistance in considering the possibilities and making a well-informed decision.

Some high schools boast of 100 percent acceptance rates and similarly high matriculation rates. While I certainly believe in the virtues of a college education and experience, I do not think college is a one-size-fits-all solution. Perhaps it is a worthwhile goal for all students upon birth and through elementary and middle school. In high school, however, especially with seniors who have not been adequately prepared, I believe it is incumbent upon adults to listen to the students and their families and facilitate well-informed decisions based on the facts at hand.

Public school teachers could probably be forgiven for rolling their eyes. For the past two years, city officials have responded to cuts in education funding with threats of teacher layoffs and for two years, the layoffs haven’t materialized.

Well aware of the city’s history of layoff threats, Bloomberg and Chancellor Cathie Black have described the budget crisis as more serious than in the past and the threats more real. They’ve lobbied Albany to change the current seniority-based layoff process and they’ve released a list of how many teachers each city school could lose.

So with that in mind, it makes sense to look back to last year, when we published a guide to how layoffs work when and if they ever happen. Some of the information is outdated — we no longer have a Governor David Paterson and the city has confirmed that a majority of the laid-off teachers would come from elementary schools — but most of it is still relevant. For example:

When will I know if I’m being laid off?
Department of Education officials hope to give principals their budgets for next year by June 1, so you could find out shortly afterward that your position has been eliminated at your school. But that doesn’t mean you’ve been laid off.

If any of the moving parts change — if Albany alters the budget cut or if the federal government passes the education bailout bill — the news may come quite a bit later.

If I’m a teacher and I am laid off, do I get severance pay?
No. You will be paid through the summer and for the vacation days and sick days you didn’t use.

How long will my health insurance last?
Your city health insurance will expire 90 days from the day you are laid off. At that point, you can extend your health benefits with COBRA, which allows you to keep your insurance temporarily but requires you to pay the entire premium. It’s cheaper than getting individual health insurance.

In the words of one school official: “Go see your doctor; go to the dentist; go to the gynecologist, do it all.”

Feel like New York City teachers need a morale boost?

Here’s a chance to show your favorite teachers that you appreciate them, even as they field criticism from cable news anchors and worry about possibly losing their jobs.

Right now, the Blackboard Awards are seeking parent nominations of outstanding teachers and principals. They can be from district, charter, private or parochial schools — you just need to explain why they’re great. The awards program, which is run by the Manhattan Media group, is also surveying parents about their children’s schools to determine which deserve recognition. The winners are honored at a gala in June.

The deadline for suggesting a teacher or principal for the award, or to rave about your school, is this Thursday, March 31. Submit your nominations here.

Last week in Hebrew school, I was sitting with a group of friends who all knew what high school they are going to next year.

They all had such poise.

Because they all knew what schools they were going to, all of the worry and stress for them was gone. But while they were feeling relaxed, I was biting my nails, anticipating this Thursday, March 31, when I’ll hear what school I’m going to.

The New York City high school admissions process is crazy. Two rounds: In the first round, which ends in February, you hear back from specialized schools (Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, etc.). You can take the specialized test to get into these schools and/or audition for LaGuardia, an arts school. If you’re accepted into a specialized school, then you will also hear back from your regular list of schools. This, according to the Department of Education, is to give a student some time to decide between the two schools you were accepted into. (It also gives the schools a way to figure out how many spaces they have left.) If you are not accepted into any specialized school, the city has no reason to to let you know what regular school you were accepted into, so they make you wait another six weeks. That’s the position I’m in right now.

Being at Hebrew school was just an example of how uncomfortable it is for me to have to be with people who are so confident and happy while I l feel like I don’t know what’s going to happen in my future. Lucky for me, the schools that I want to get into are ones that I haven’t been rejected from. Unlucky for me, I still have to wait to hear while other people get to relax in the feeling of knowing.

I have mixed emotions about being excited for high school. Even though the friends who know what school they’re going to aren’t afraid to show it, they don’t brag. In any case, it’s the adults who ask me most about what high school I got into. And when I tell them I’m still waiting, I can’t help but wonder if they think any differently of me.

My dad told me a story from when he was in a Latin class in high school that he just couldn’t ace. There was always one kid who did well and one day when my dad asked when he studied and for how long, the guy answered, “On the bus this morning.” My dad learned from that experience that when it comes to taking tests, either you are good without trying, or you have to work really hard to do well.

I keep asking myself if I’m the same smart kid I thought I was, and if I’m the same smart kid everyone else thought I was. What does it mean that I didn’t do well on a test? Do the people who know what happened think that I’m not smart anymore? No matter what the answer is, there’s still that unwanted feeling of failure that lingers in the air, whether or not it’s true.

It’s scary to have such strong expectations about something that you really want. No matter how much I want to go to the school I want to go to, I have no idea and no control over what is going to happen. All I know is that come Thursday, there aren’t going to be the people who know and the people who don’t. Instead, everyone will know. The fact is, you’ll either get your first choice, your second choice, and so on — or one that you didn’t want at all. Everyone is going to get into a high school. The scary part is whether or not you get into one that you want.

But when I think about all of this, all this drama and emotion … all for one thing that is determined by some test?  What 13-year-old should have to deal with this? The fact that the high school process in New York City is set up in a way that makes some kids feel like losers and some kids feel like winners in the end is not a very good life lesson. In the end, no matter what happens, everything is actually going to be okay. And trust me: I know that’s terribly cheesy in every way possible. But it’s true.