GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

News from New York City:

• A tentative state budget deal would limit school funding and leave seniority rules intact. (Times, WSJ)
• Mayor Bloomberg said the budget’s smaller school budget cuts would still require teacher layoffs.
• It had become clear that Cuomo’s revised budget wouldn’t include “last in, first out” changes. (Post)
• A new, progressive district school won’t open this fall after the city reallocated its space to KIPP. (Times)
• PS 146 in East Harlem bars teachers from communicating with parents without school permission. (Post)
• Deputy chancellor Marc Sternberg’s son is one of many children waitlisted for popular schools. (Times)
• PS 114′s supporters say the school could lose its best space to the charter school that’s moving in. (Post)
• After complaints, Brooklyn’s PS 29 says it will reinstate a daily Pledge of Allegiance. (Daily News, WNYC)
• State law requires the city to give pay increases to teachers even under an expired contract. (Post)
• New York State’s teachers union spent $3.8 million on conferences last year. (Daily News)
• Backers of the failed DREAM Act to give citizenship to college graduates are trying again locally. (NY1)
• Private companies say they can rid schools of PCBs faster than the city, and for less money. (Daily News)

And beyond:

• Analysis of Washington, D.C., test scores found high erasure rates at a top-scoring school. (USA Today)
• President Obama said his education law would potentially reduce the frequency of state testing. (AP)
• Los Angeles is going forward with its controversial value-added teacher evaluation formula. (L.A. Times)
• Under pressure, Steve Barr is leaving Green Dot, the charter school chain he started. (GS, Times)
• Chicago’s interim schools chief spent a recent meeting defending a school breakfast program. (Times)
• Los Angeles’s new schools chief asked for a pay cut to $275,000 from a potential $330,000. (L.A. Times)
• The Times says New Jersey’s school funding situation seems unconstitutional and unfair to students.
• Nationally, principals of struggling schools removed under federal rules often find new, better jobs. (AP)
• A school in Philadelphia is taking aggressive measures to battle students’ bad eating habits. (Times)

• On a new mag cover, Michelle Rhee is superwoman and Randi bears Kryptonite. (Reason)
• An Aspen Institute study shows why D.C.’s teacher evaluations don’t cut it. (Thompson)
• Managing the challenge of serving a community you aren’t from. (GS Community)
• New Jersey unions are forming an advocacy group to fight Chris Christie. (AP)
• The Newark teachers union president, meanwhile, takes a fighting stance. (NJ Spotlight)
• Video caught a Bronx mother training her 11-year-old to pickpocket. (NY Mag)
• The head of the College Board, Gaston Caperton, is stepping down. (NYT The Choice)
• The P.S. 22 chorus pays tribute to a fan: Susanna Hoffs, late of The Bangles. (PS 22)
• How to get involved in the fight against PCB’s in school buildings. (Insideschools)

Calling their protest “Fight Back Friday,” teachers and parents at a handful of schools wore all black today in opposition to Mayor Bloomberg’s threatened teacher layoffs and budget cuts. (more…)

Steve Barr argues that education activists need to move from campaigning to governing.

When Gideon Stein first picked up the 2009 New Yorker profile of California charter school leader Steve Barr, he put the article down without finishing it. The story was all about Barr’s decision to work with the teachers union rather than fight it.

“I was like, eh, how great can his schools be?” Stein, an entrepreneur and real estate developer based in Manhattan, recalled in an interview this week.

A board member of at one of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network schools, where teachers are determinedly not unionized, Stein didn’t believe that anyone working with a teachers union had a shot at turning a school around.

But at the urging of his family, he finished the piece and was so impressed that he asked Moskowitz to broker an introduction. Soon he flew to Los Angeles to visit Locke High School, the school that Barr’s group, Green Dot, took over in 2008. The trip was “transformative,” Stein said.

In Barr, he saw the solution to the problem that troubles many education philanthropists: Successful transformations urban and rural schools are too rare. They have not achieved “scale.”

“While I love my work with Eva, and I think Eva is just an unbelievable educator and advocate for children,” Stein said, “if you really want scale, I think you’re going to have to make some compromises.”

He asked Barr how he could help Green Dot’s mission of re-making schools in partnership with labor.

Now Stein is the president of Barr’s national organization, which changed its name today from Green Dot America to Future Is Now Schools. And he’s rejiggered his social calendar. “I’ve now had dinner and drinks with Randi 10 times in the last eight months,” he said, referring to Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Winning the Future (more…)

Like so many of my teacher friends, I was driven to teach in the inner city by a passion for social justice. And like so many of those same teacher friends, I struggle with the awkwardness of doing so in a culture different from my own.

To infuse standards-based English lessons with messages of personal responsibility and multiculturalism is a purely intellectual task, one that was reinforced in my Harvard education master’s degree program but that I truthfully could have intuited. To create unit plans that come from my own values is also not particularly difficult; I have no interest in teaching if not to share something of my deepest-held beliefs about the human condition. But for my students, almost all of whom are black and all of whom code my white, Jewish, upper-middle-class air as “different,” what I know is irrelevant unless they believe I truly get them and am not here hoping to save the world. Unfortunately, it’s this small, intangible piece with which I struggle. So often, I’m too glaringly aware of all the reasons I’m not a suitable role model for my students to exude the confidence they are craving.

But last week changed everything.

In response to an outbreak of fights and gang activity at our East Flatbush, Brooklyn, high school, my principal volunteered me to lead an intensive week-long course on what it means to be an “upstander” as opposed to a “bystander.” These words were developed by the organization Facing History and Ourselves as a way of distinguishing between the two different types of non-Jewish reaction to the Holocaust as it happened: Upstanders were people or countries who chose to fight the Germans or hide Jews, while bystanders were people or countries (including, for many years, the United States) who turned a blind eye on the Jewish plight and allowed millions of them to be extinguished.

My principal appointed a film artist to work with my students and suggested I take students to the Holocaust exhibit at the Jewish Heritage Museum. Beyond that, an entire week’s worth of class time with 15 students was entirely in my hands. (more…)

• The city’s elite schools admitted a smaller percentage of minorities who attended its prep. (Daily News)
• The state could get an on-time budget, but school aid is still the sticking point. (Wall Street Journal)
• A principal is under investigation for an alleged bias attack on one of his teachers. (NY1)
• The city’s $80 million ARIS data system is still evolving and struggling to get school buy-in. (WNYC)
• G.E. has avoided paying taxes through philanthropy, including a large gift to the DOE. (Times)
• P.S. 29 students will recite the Pledge of Allegiance after parents realized students didn’t know it. (DN)
• A charter school for older, under-credited students was approved in Brooklyn. (Brooklyn Daily Eagle)
• A crackdown on commercial bus drivers found two school bus drivers falsely licensed. (WSJ)
• Teachers at Queens’ PS 30 rallied against a plan to close the school. (Queens Chronicle)
• A D.C. principal was suspended because of allegations he doctored transcripts. (Washington Post)
• A Chicago school has seen more absenteeism despite an effort to keep students in class. (Times)
• A Texas superintendent’s leadership has drawn what some say are racially-motivated attacks. (Times)

• The census found that New York City’s population barely grew in the last decade. (Times)
• But Mayor Michael Bloomberg says those numbers are way too low. (Daily Politics)
• Florida’s governor signed an expansive merit pay plan into law at a charter school. (Orlando Sentinel)
• Why it’s important to understand the different ways child poverty can be measured. (School Finance 101)
• Does Joel Rose’s departure illustrate the gulf between talk of innovation and public sector reality? (Time)
• Customizing instruction is a way of getting beyond tracking, Mike Petrilli argues. (Flypaper)
• Green Dot’s Steve Barr discusses his plans to turn around two Bronx schools next year. (Inside City Hall)
• Responsibility for improving schools can’t be placed on teachers alone, a TFA alum argues. (Hechinger)
• The Times’ labor reporter is taking questions about unions and labor law. (City Room)
• Paul Vallas’ successor in New Orleans could be named in the next month. (Times-Picayune)
• Two N.J. principals have very different views of the value of social media in schools. (Hechinger Report)
• The state board of ed in Virginia voted to change the way they approve textbooks. (Curriculum Matters)

City school officials say they’re still crunching the numbers to figure out how many soon-to-be kindergarteners are on wait lists this year, but a familiar pattern of long lists is remerging in parts of the city.

Despite rezonings and the opening of new schools on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side, elementary schools are posting wait-lists dozens of children deep. Early reports are in for a few schools, such as P.S. 290 on the Upper East Side, which had a wait-list of 91 students last year and is telling parents they have 68 families on the list this year.

Jason Rowland, a father who lives in the P.S. 290 zone on the Upper East Side told me today that his daughter is number 34 on the wait-list. Rowland wrote:

We received a letter yesterday informing us our daughter has been wait-listed for PS290 for the upcoming kindergarten class. Not a big surprise I know considering the schools rep for wait-listing — but considering the Dept. of Ed. and City Council just went through complete re-zoning of the district and opened a new school — the news was especially outrageous.

Community Education Council for District 2 Vice-President Shino Tanikawa said that a rezoning on its own often doesn’t do much to decrease wait-lists, but the arrival of a new elementary school P.S. 267, could have. (more…)

Collin Lawrence is a former New York City teacher who is recounting his four years working at a Brooklyn high school. Read Collin’s previous posts.

During my second year at the Brooklyn Arts Academy, two students persistently acted out in their 10th-grade classes. One student, H, had a difficult time sitting still and staying focused, and he could turn on teachers in an instant if called out for misbehavior. He could be charming in one-on-one interactions but got into almost weekly confrontations with authority figures in the building, once even making a sexually lewd comment to a female teacher. The other student, V, had a physical disability that made him stand out to other kids. Perhaps to distract attention from this, V acted outrageously. He cracked constant jokes and roamed the classroom, rarely doing any schoolwork. My grade-level team tried many strategies to better engage these two students, but nobody (administration included) seemed able to reach either one of them.

In December, I was observing a 10th-grade English class in my role as grade team leader when I saw H standing at the door of the classroom. It wasn’t unusual for our students to leave in the middle of a class or show up in a classroom where they did not belong. The school did not have clear procedures to address this type of behavior.

The English teacher, Mr. J, was a first-year teacher who, though lacking experience, planned his lessons with great diligence. During my observation, his students were writing mystery stories. Mr. J was assisting the students as they worked in groups, so did not react immediately to the presence of H at the doorway.

H was motioning to his friend, Q, to come to the hallway. Seeing this, I told Q to stay put. H then walked into the room and whispered something in Q’s ear. At this point, the English teacher told H to go back to his own class. Instead, H resumed his post at the doorway. When Q started to get up, the teacher informed him that leaving the classroom would result in a referral. I also told him to stay in the classroom. “Guess I’m gonna have to take one for the team,” said Q as he defied our warnings and left the room with his backpack and coat. He did not return to English class and we later learned he had left the building.

Q was generally well behaved, so his open defiance struck me as peculiar. But again, students left in the middle of a class all too often, so I was not particularly alarmed and neither was the English teacher, who continued with his lesson. Later that day, I mentioned the incident to the principal, who concurred that it was strange, but did not say much about it at the time.

A couple of days later, on the Friday before winter break, Mr. J and I were called into the principal’s office. (more…)

• Elections for parents council members are approaching but the city isn’t telling parents. (Daily News)
• A noose was found in a tree near a public school in Howard Beach yesterday. (NY1)
• Harlem State Senator Bill Perkins has introduced his own version of the Dream Act. (Times)
• The Post says that CUNY professors who protested budget cuts yesterday were being infantile.
• A D.C. principal was put on leave amid allegations that he doctored transcripts. (Washington Post)
• Chicago’s “Safe Passage” program uses stimulus funds to help students get to school safely. (NPR)
• Karl Rove: Ohio should have gotten more attention for its new labor law, which cuts out seniority. (WSJ)