GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Monday’s lesson in 12th-grade economics was on the federal deficit. My co-teacher reviewed with the students how and what the government currently spends money on, how and when the government raises money. “What happens,” she asked, “if you’re spending more than you make?”

Our students knew the answer from our personal finance unit from a few weeks ago: “You’re in debt!”

“So what should you do when you’re in debt?” she continued.

“Stop spending,” one student offered.

Another suggested, “Get more money!”

Conversations like this one remind me of why I’m excited and challenged by teaching: The economy is both much simpler and much more complicated than can easily fit in a 70-minute class. My co-teacher and I walk the fine line daily between simplicity for the ease of learning and complexity for the sake of accuracy. (more…)

On Monday, my colleague and mentor Steve Lazar wrote a letter to Mayor Bloomberg about the city’s release of a list of possible teacher layoffs by school. In his letter, Steve discussed the impact that the announcement had on the young teachers at our school, including me, “the third-year history teacher who is on the border.” After reading his post, I decided to give a little insight into what my day was like on Monday. Here’s what I wrote.

My friend the mayor released a list of potential teacher layoffs in New York City this morning. After I woke up, trying to will myself out of bed after a week off, I heard the news report and was suddenly even less excited to start my day.

Then I went to work …

… and taught 60 ninth-graders in my civics classes how to contact their representative concerning proposed gun control legislation in the House of Representatives.

Then, I took a look at the city’s school-by-school list of possible layoffs and saw that my school has five teachers that could be laid off if the mayor doesn’t get his way. Best part? It was just a number so maybe it’s me but then again maybe it’s not. I spent a small part of the remainder of the day wondering if I was one of the unlucky ones. I didn’t necessarily appreciate the suspense of it all.

Then I taught English to 30 ninth-graders. Well, kind of, anyway. Midway through the day, all of the outlets in my room blew, rendering useless the PowerPoint that I was going to project onto my board to teach my mini-lesson. Can’t win ‘em all … or apparently any of ‘em.

Then I came home, had dinner with my wife, and watched our friend the mayor on the news. I’m not too sure if the mayor thought about me and my fellow teachers today — maybe he did; after all, he made up a nice list! — but I know he didn’t think about my wife, and the grief that his list caused her today.

This is my third year teaching in New York City and my third year of hearing that I might lose my job. (more…)

• The city wants to incorporate college admission statistics into high school progress reports. (Post)
• The State Senate passed the bill that would set new layoff rules. (GothamSchools, WNYC, Daily News)
• The fate of the bill now falls to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who doesn’t support it, the Post says.
• Gov. Cuomo offered his own bill, to speed the adoption of new teacher evaluations. (Times, WSJ, NY1)
• Cuomo’s proposal caught the city by surprise and angered Mayor Bloomberg. (Daily News, Post)
• Michael Goodwin: The bill to end “last in, first out” layoffs is a good start but not a real merit system. (Post)
• A Bronx high school principal says losing his junior teachers would be devastating. (Daily News)
• PS 114′s story highlights issues with upping the weight of teacher ratings, Jim Dwyer writes. (Times)
• More than 1,000 of the teachers the city has proposed laying off work in Brooklyn. (Brooklyn Paper)
• The Panel for Educational Policy postponed its closure vote on Queens’ IS 231. (GS, NY1)
• More than 100 junior teachers signed a letter to support keeping seniority layoff rules. (GS, Daily News)
• PS 22 students returned to the city yesterday after appearing at the Oscars and on “Oprah.” (Daily News)
• The head of a school for disabled students says Cuomo’s cuts would hurt special ed. (Daily News)
• Los Angeles is shutting down a chain of charter schools accused of cheating on state tests. (L.A. Times)

• A bill to end seniority based layoffs passed the State Senate today. (Daily Politics)
• And was followed by Cuomo announcing his own bill to expedite the teacher eval system. (Daily Politics)
• Mayor Bloomberg’s aides are calling Cuomo’s bill a “scam” to foil LIFO’s repeal. (Daily News)
• Flanagan told Liz Benjamin that he’s a “principled, strong supporter” of unions. (State of Politics)
• An analysis finds little relationship between teacher layoffs and schools’ poverty levels. (Shanker Blog)
• The bill that would avoid a government shutdown includes significant education cuts. (Politics K-12)
• PS 22′s chorus is good because PS 22 supports the arts, says an arts ed advocate. (Gotham Gazette)
• A curmudgeonly Bravo network executive is not a fan of the chorus. (City Room)
• Students at Flushing International HS won a contest for a video about tolerance. (City Room)
• Jon Stewart makes fun of critics who say teachers get too many job perks. (Daily Show via Answer Sheet)
• Leonie Haimson & Steven Malanga debate the value of public sector unions. (NYC Parents)
• A report about federal duplications found 82 federal teacher quality funding streams. (WSJ via Russo)
• Unions will make a comeback when people associate “education reform” with them. (Ezra Klein)
• A blogger dissects Bill Gates’ suggestion that schools raise class size for good teachers. (GOOD)

A bill that would end the “last in, first out” layoff policy for New York City teachers passed in the State Senate today, but faces an uphill battle in the Assembly.

Introduced late last week by State Senator John Flanagan, a Long Island Republican, the bill rules out seniority as the sole factor in determining who gets laid off. Instead, 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.

The bill passed the Senate 33-27, with support from Republicans and two Democratic Senators — Jeff Klein and David Valesky.

Following the vote, Governor Andrew Cuomo put out a statement saying he plans to introduce a bill that would “expedite and expand ongoing plans to implement a statewide, objective teacher evaluation system.”

Rather than replacing “last in, first out” with other measures, which Flanagan’s bill does, Cuomo’s bill would put New York’s new teacher evaluation system in place sooner than was previously planned. The original law had it covering math and English teachers who teach grades 4-8 next year and expanding to all teachers and all subjects by 2012-13. Under Cuomo’s bill, the evaluation would cover all teachers beginning next year. (more…)

The city is postponing tonight’s Panel for Educational Policy vote on the last of its 25 proposals to close district schools this year.

City officials announced today that the school board would wait to vote on the proposal to shutter Queens’ I.S. 231 Magnatech until its March 23 meeting. It’s the second proposal the city has dropped from tonight’s agenda. Yesterday city officials announced that they were abandoning their plans to close P.S. 114, which was also scheduled for a vote tonight.

The panel was originally scheduled to vote on the proposal at one of last month’s marathon meetings dedicated to the city’s closure plans. The city delayed the vote after the legally-mandated public hearing to discuss the plans at the school in late January was disrupted by a snowstorm. The city then agreed to hold a second informal parent meeting, which was cancelled, again because of bad weather.

That meeting was rescheduled for last night, but the district’s parent council members did not attend. Parents told the city they wanted a more thorough meeting that included the district representatives and members of the school’s leadership team, and city officials agreed, said Department of Education spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld.

Any teacher can tell you of the kind of hard work being a city educator requires, and my experience is no different. I teach in Brooklyn’s Bushwick High School campus in a small high school with an environmental leadership theme. I teach math to students in all four grades, and I have a slight obsession with creating mathematical learning experiences that bring the subject alive for my students, especially because math is so often perceived as a monotonous subject that many students see themselves as simply “bad at.” I’ve also been working with a few other teachers in my school to make the environmentalism theme real for our students. One of my favorite projects from last year was coordinating a speaker from WE ACT for Environmental Justice who spoke to our students about food justice and sustainable development. We are working on creating a garden for the spring, which at the moment means converting a space on campus and writing grants.

Because my bottom line is the well-being of my students, I have also continued to attend events in my own time that I believe will support my own growth as an educator. Some of the most useful have included important history lessons — unfortunately many new teachers, myself included, lack historical knowledge of movements in education that can help inform their own place in the classroom at this point in time.

Years ago I attended an open forum discussion about the history of the education of English Language Learners. Many people spoke about the frustrations they have felt with the systemic barriers to providing the best education for these students, and we offered up not just our own techniques for doing so, but even ways of getting around some of the most imposing barriers. One teacher, Megan Behrent, expressed her view that if we only focus on how to make our own classrooms or schools better despite all the systemic issues, true progress in education will never take place. If we are committed to creating better educational opportunities for our own students, she argued, then we must be committed to having a positive impact on larger educational structures. Her argument was persuasive, and since that time I have become increasingly involved with organizations that I feel are striving for systemic improvements in New York City’s schools.

Working with the New York Collective of Radical Educators and the Grassroots Education Movement has exposed me to many incredible educators with more experience than myself, and to knowledgeable parents and students who have passionate feelings about education. (more…)

The day in layoffs:

• Troubled Columbia Secondary School would lose 14 of its 20 teachers to seniority layoffs. (NY1)
• The teachers and principals unions criticized the city’s layoff plans and tactics. (Daily News, NY1, WNYC)
• Mayor Bloomberg again said teacher layoffs could happen even if the city gets additional state aid. (WSJ)
• A group of young teachers launched a petition to keep “last in, first out” layoff rules. (GothamSchools)
• Michelle Rhee explains her support for the New York State bill that would end seniority layoffs. (Post)
• The Daily News says Gov. Cuomo should use his budget to support ending “last in, first out” rules.

In other news:

• Parents and community members lambasted Chancellor Cathie Black in Williamsburg. (Brooklyn Paper)
• A Queens warehouse is filled with art supplies and goods free for the taking by public schools. (Times)
• The city announced it won’t close PS 114 after all. (GothamSchools, Post, NY1, WSJ, Daily News, WNYC)
• New York City would be exempt from Gov. Cuomo’s proposed superintendent salary cap. (WSJ, Times)
• Now that the city plans to detox schools, the Environmental Protection Agency is stopping tests. (WSJ)
• But first, the EPA revealed that it had detected high PCB levels at East New York’s PS 306. (WNYC)