GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The city’s plan to increase school technology spending in a lean year is raising objections. (Times)
• Several schools are grappling with the reality of 20 percent of their students are homeless. (Daily News)
• The growth of Community Roots Charter School will hurt disabled students, parents say. (Daily News)
• PS 29′s ex-PTA treasurer was indicted for stealing about $100,000. (Times, Brooklyn Paper, NY1, Post)
• A new report says the city undercounted its dropouts. (GS, NY1, Times, WNYC, WSJ, Daily News)
• Despite a decline in its use, corporal punishment is still permitted in 20 states. (Times)
• Many states are dramatically scaling back their Race to the Top promises. (EdWeek)
• The schools chief in Providence, R.I., is resigning during a chaotic year. (Providence Journal)
• Los Angeles is giving up on the reading program that it has required for a decade. (L.A. Times)

• D.C. officials say they’ll investigate unusually high test erasure rates reported this week. (USA Today)
• But Michelle Rhee said D.C. already investigated the questionable results and found nothing. (Russo)
• Given perverse incentives, any cheating in D.C. schools shouldn’t come as a surprise. (Daily Beast)
• A kind suggestion: What education journalism needs is more GothamSchools. (Dropout Nation)
• City education activists talked school closures at a Ford Foundation conference. (Ed Notes)
• Gleaning education lessons from New York City and beyond is not as easy at it sounds. (Guardian UK)
• A school faces the reality that many of its graduates aren’t college-bound. (GS Community)
• A call for today’s education reformers to take a lesson from not-so-ancient history. (Mike Rose)
• Critics of the state’s looming budget will protest at City Hall and in Albany tomorrow. (Insideschools)
• After 21 years of vouchers in Milwaukee, there’s no evidence students were helped. (Journal-Sentinel)
• What to do if the only college that accepts you is one you don’t really want to attend. (Insideschools)
• Diane Ravitch rounds up the evidence against merit pay for teachers. (Bridging Differences)

City school officials have underreported the number of students who dropped out of high school in the past by reclassifying some of them, according to a report released by the State Comptroller today.

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. (more…)

Americans want more news coverage of how teachers and students are performing, according to a survey released today by the Brookings Institution.

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. (more…)

These days, as commentators aplenty bemoan the achievement gap between the United States and other developed countries (not to mention the gaps between groups within the United States), it has become popular to suggest all students should go to college. In some circles, it has become almost heretical to suggest otherwise.

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. (more…)

• Schools are at the center of Mayor Bloomberg and Gov. Cuomo’s budget deal squabbling. (WSJ, Post)
• Bloomberg says the budget requires layoffs; Cuomo says there’s actually a schools surplus. (Daily News)
• The budget deal spared five special education schools in New York City and six others statewide. (NY1)
• Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky makes a list of 40 New Yorkers under 40. (Crain’s)
• Both urban and suburban schools in New Jersey have been found to be underfunded. (N.J. Spotlight)
• The head of America’s Federation for Chess is pushing the game in elementary schools. (USA Today)
• The second-highest-scoring elementary school in North Carolina will close for budget reasons. (WSJ)

• An eighth-grader describes this week’s wait to find out where she’ll go to high school. (GS Community)
• A half-hearted defense of working on the weekends, by a teacher who craves quiet and time. (Mrs. Ripp)
• A member of the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board interviews Randi Weingarten and isn’t impressed.
• Teachers recruited from abroad say the city hasn’t kept up its end of their deal. (Jamaica Gleaner)
• Nine suggestions for how to raise the status of teachers. (NYT: Room for Debate)
• Eva Moskowitz says the high cost of small class size might be better spent elsewhere. (Washington Post)
• Nominations your favorite teachers to win this year’s Blackboard Awards. (Manhattan Media)
• A city teacher says education reform is likely to turn out like China’s Cultural Revolution. (HuffPo)
• Toward a more thoughtful approach to the ubiquitous class-starting “do now” assignments. (Coach G)
• Wisconsin school districts have been told not to agree to new teachers contracts for the moment. (AP)
• Alexander Russo attended Yale School of Management’s ed conference so you didn’t have to. (TWIE)
• A father insists that parenthood is fun, despite the somber mood at afternoon pickup. (Insideschools)
• All students are worthy of honors; some students are more worthy than others. (Pissed Off Teacher)

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today that teacher layoffs are still on the table in New York City, after Governor Andrew Cuomo’s budget deal lessened the cuts to education only slightly.

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. (more…)

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.

Audrey Bachman is an eighth-grader at MS 51 in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

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. (more…)