GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Some believe the city is underestimating teacher attrition for next year, overestimating layoffs. (Times)
• Even before the petition controversy, the DOE tried to involve parents in politics. (GS, DN)
• The State Assembly budgeted $32 million for teacher centers, but that may be cut. (Daily News)
• 200 city schools are relying on a private data management instead of the one the DOE built. (NY1)
• A Queens high school forgot to offer gym to some students, jeopardizing their graduation. (Post)
• Gov. Cuomo said school districts should find and cut waste rather resort to layoffs. (NY1, Post)
• The city isn’t happy with Cuomo’s suggestion that it collectively bargain how layoffs are done. (Post)
• The Post says Cuomo is delusional if he thinks he can work with the union on layoffs.
• A reporter sits in on a delicate talk between a D.C. teacher and his evaluator. (Washington Post)
• Arne Duncan said 10 NCAA teams should be tossed out for low academic performance. (WSJ)
• NJ Gov. Chris Christie doesn’t plan to name a Newark schools superintendent until May. (WSJ)
• Four D.C. elementary students were hospitalized after ingesting cocaine. (Washington Post)

For months, Department of Education employees have been trying to mobilize parents to public meetings and to sign petitions in support of city political goals, parent coordinators said today.

Evidence of that effort came to light yesterday after a staff member of the DOE’s parent outreach office distributed a petition to hundreds of parent coordinators urging state lawmakers to abolish the current seniority-based teacher layoff system. City officials renounced the petition and said that political organizing would stop going forward.

But parent coordinators from schools in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens said today that the Office of Family Information and Action’s push to have parent coordinators politically mobilize parents began months ago and that the message was spread by several OFIA staffers. The coordinators spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their positions at their schools.

In January, OFIA held a parent organizing workshop for parent coordinators in Manhattan. Staffers did not mention advocating against the current layoff system at that meeting, said a parent coordinator who shared detailed notes taken at the session. Instead, staff focused on asking the coordinators to build relationships with satisfied parents who would be willing to show support for the DOE at Panel for Educational Policy meetings.

“I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone, honestly, and I didn’t really trust my own ears, so I wrote things down,” the parent coordinator said.

OFIA officials said that they were frustrated that the panel meetings — which have been frequently contentious — have been dominated by parents angry at city policies. OFIA staff encouraged parent coordinators to bring “Happy Harry” parents to citywide meetings, according to the parent coordinator’s notes, rather than “Angry Sally” parents. (more…)

Built for Williamsburg Charter High School, the eight-story building has a fitness center and a two-story rock climbing wall. It's for sale for $30 million.

The owner of a brand-new school building in Williamsburg is putting it on the market for $30 million after its tenant, the Williamsburg Charter High School, failed to pay rent.

According to a real estate listing for the property, which sits on Varet Street in East Williamsburg, the charter school needed to enroll over 1,000 students this year in order to cover its annual $2.3 million rent. But the school — one of three managed by the Believe High Schools Network — fell short, enrolling only 850. The listing states that enrollment suffered because of construction delays, which pushed the school’s move-in date back by a year and caused school to begin three weeks late this year.

“Understandably, the delay of the move and of the start of the school year led to some families choosing not to enroll their students after the lottery or to transfer,” wrote Believe High Schools Network spokeswoman Jacqueline Lipson in an email. “We also lowered enrollment for incoming students during that transitional time.” (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.

I saw nine science teachers come and go in the four years that I taught at the Brooklyn Arts Academy. In a small school that always had a high teacher turnover, science teachers seemed particularly hard to find and retain.

In my first year, there were three science teachers on the staff. One of them was a no-nonsense African-American woman with 10 years of experience. She was a master of classroom management but also disorganized. At one point, she did not work for a few weeks while her certification credentials were sorted out. What eventually led to her leaving, however, was her failure to properly document student lab time, a prerequisite for students to sit for the Living Environment Regents exam. When the principal figured this out, days before the test, he angrily chastised her. I was not at that meeting, but she told me that she had “never been disrespected by a man” so much in her entire life. After that, she had no interest in staying.

The second teacher stayed on the principal’s good side during the year but had aspirations of being an administrator. He took on a lot of leadership roles and wanted to become the school’s dean. When it became clear that he would not receive an administrative post at this school, he left to find one elsewhere. The third teacher stayed, but only for one more year.

My grade-level team had no science teacher at the start of my second year. (more…)

• City and union officials have not discussed teacher evaluations since January. (Daily News)
• City principals are spending $2 million this year on a private alternative to ARIS. (NY1)
• Just 17 percent of voters approve of Chancellor Cathie Black, according to a new poll. (Post)
• City officials apologized for trying to recruit parent coordinators to lobby. (GS, WSJ, DN, NY1)
• Several principals told Black yesterday that it needs to be easier to remove bad teachers. (WNYC)
• Gov. Cuomo’s proposed school cuts are unconstitutional, argues the leader of the CFE lawsuit. (DN)
• More high-achieving students are opting for CUNY over private colleges. (Daily News)
• A Brooklyn principal attributes high test scores to a mentoring program. (Daily News)
• Parents at Brooklyn Heights’ P.S. 8 want to expand it to a middle school. (Brooklyn Paper)
• A bill to end tenure for new teachers in Florida is headed to the governor for signature. (Times)

• Testimony from a local ed professor that a teacher should lose tenure. (David Bloomfield, PDF)
• Finland: “…and that’s why all of the young, talented people want to become teachers.” (Hechinger)
• A parent explains why she left her district’s parent council, which felt impotent. (Insideschools)
• John Boehner would like Obama to consider supporting D.C. vouchers. (WashPost)
• A guide to new charter schools opening in the city, plus reviews. (Insideschools)
• Inside the much-ballyhooed Rocketship model of blended learning. (Education Next)
• Deputy Chancellor John White is touted as a possible Rahm Emanuel schools czar. (Catalyst)
• Post-RTTT, Arne Duncan will return to the bully pulpit to do local schools advocacy. (Politics K12)
• D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray is “comfortable” with a one-person superintendent search. (WashPost)

An office inside the Department of Education improperly recruited its employees to lobby against the state’s seniority-based layoff system, city officials acknowledged today.

Staff at the city’s Office of Family Information and Action asked hundreds of parent coordinators to distribute a petition urging state lawmakers to abolish the current layoff system. In the e-mail, an OFIA staffer asked parent coordinators to gather signatures from parents and other members of their school communities and return them to the DOE. The e-mail message went out to nearly 400 of the 1,000 parent coordinators around the city.

The petition asks state lawmakers to “allow the City to keep it’s [sic] most effective teachers by ending the State’s ‘Last-In, First-Out’ policy, allowing teachers to be retained based on their performance, rather than just seniority.”

The message, which was first reported this morning by the teacher activist Norm Scott, echoes the position of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Cathie Black, who have made ending the seniority-based layoffs this year a chief political goal. The city teachers union strongly opposes ending the system and has argued that the city should instead focus its lobbying efforts on fighting budget cuts.

DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said that the petition had not been approved by top city officials.

“While we strongly encourage parents to speak out on issues concerning their children’s education, it was not appropriate for Department of Education staff to prescribe a specific solution for parent coordinators, or parents, to advocate,” Ravitz said in a statement. (more…)

Some teachers are planning to push back against attacks on their job protections by taking to the streets outside their schools. Others are planning to take to the blogosphere.

In the Community section today, Liza Campbell writes about her colleagues’ plans for next week’s Fight Back Friday, which include picketing on the street after school.

I also heard today from Community contributor Stephen Lazar about an effort he’s helping spearhead for teachers across the country to blog on Tuesday about why they support their unions. His post will appear on GothamSchools.

Here’s what Lazar and a group of other teachers, including some from New York City, are are asking teacher-bloggers to do:

We encourage you to publish a piece on March 22 entitled “Why Teachers Like Me Support Unions.” In this piece, please explain your own reasons for being a proud union member and/or supporter. Including personal stories can make this a very powerful piece. It would be great to also explain how being a union member supports and enables you to be the kind of teacher that you are. We want these posts to focus not only on our rights, but also on what it takes to be a great teacher for students, and how unions support that.

The full description of the project is below. (more…)

One of the major reasons I became involved in educational advocacy work was because I saw the ways in which relentless focus on standardized testing was creating schooling environments that were less and less conducive to real learning. My first year I worked with a set of 30 or so 11th-graders who had struggled to pass the Regents math exam they needed to graduate; that test became my entire life as I struggled to find ways to prepare students whose math proficiency level was far below a ninth-grade level. I was successful with 28 of them, but not because I taught math in a way that made me proud. I thought constantly about ways in which I could make my classroom a more engaging learning environment where students could grapple with complex ideas, and while I was lucky to have a supportive administration I felt that so much of the broader direction in education reform was actually pushing education further from this ideal.

But as I have become more involved I now see that the problem is not just standardized tests. In fact, it seems that so much of the education reform agenda is not about creating engaging, enriching school environments but is instead about privatized management of schools that employ a non-unionized workforce and about attacking the very teacher protections that allow schools to be dynamic places where all staff can contribute opinions without fear of retribution. Tenure, for example, came into being so that teachers could not be fired by principals without due process. Tenure protects teachers who defend their departments from harassment, inform parents or DOE officials about negligence in their school, or who have personal or political disagreements with principals. Protections and contractual agreements make schools better places to work, which means lower teacher turnover, happier teachers and thus happier students in turn. A sign outside the capital in Madison, Wisc., last week made the case for teacher protections clear: “My Working Conditions Are My Students’ Learning Conditions.”

In response to the relentless attacks, Sam Coleman, a member of both the Grassroots Education Movement and NYCORE came up with the idea of supporting schools in organizing school-based actions for educators, parents and students across the city who wanted to push back. He named his intitiative Fight Back Friday. The idea also developed because there was an urgency for more actions at the local level, yet the UFT leadership seemed unwilling or unable to take on organizing of that kind.

On Friday, Jan. 21, members of my school community participated in our first Fight Back Friday. We joined parents, school staff and community members across the city to raise awareness about, and stand in solidarity with, schools facing closure and co-location votes at upcoming Panel for Educational Policy meetings. The theme for the day was “Wear Black and Take Our Schools Back.” Nearly all of my colleagues wore black on that day. It was an incredibly unifying experience that was better for staff morale than anything I could have anticipated. Over 30 schools have participated in Fight Back Fridays since the movement began last year. Each individual school’s action takes on a different tone depending on the particular concerns that are most pressing for that school, but they all heighten dialogue and raise awareness about critical issues facing education right now.

The next Fight Back Friday is planned for March 25, and it will focus on some of the most pressing issues facing public education. (more…)