GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

A frequent critic of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and friend to the teachers union is backing the mayor’s much-debated layoff estimates.

City Council Education Committee Chairman Robert Jackson said today that he believes Bloomberg’s estimates are probably an accurate reflection of the impact of the governor’s current proposed cuts.

Some critics of Bloomberg have accused the mayor of exaggerating the city’s financial straits in order to press the legislature to end the state’s seniority-based teacher layoff system. Governor Andrew Cuomo has said repeatedly that his proposed cuts to education spending should not necessitate layoffs in local districts.

“I believe Mayor Bloomberg and not Governor Cuomo,” Jackson said, saying that he has heard from local elected officials in other New York cities who have said that their communities are also facing teacher layoffs in spite of Cuomo’s insistence that none are necessary.

“The mayor has a better handle on New York City’s budget,” he said.  ”The local executives and the local representatives have a better handle on their municipalities.”

That’s not to say that he won’t have any objections to the mayor’s budget, Jackson cautioned, saying that he wanted to focus on preventing cuts to the state budget first. “And then I’ll turn my energies to Mayor Bloomberg,” he said.

Jackson’s comments came after a press conference in which he gathered with public school parents to urge both the governor and the mayor not to slash state education spending. Parents argued that the governor should seek out other revenues to avoid education cuts. And they said the mayor should be fighting the cuts harder, rather than focusing his energies on changing the current layoff system. (more…)

At the beginning of this school year in my second year of teaching special education, I spent some initial lessons introducing the concept of values and exploring three values that we would strive to uphold in the classroom: integrity, empathy, and respect. I elected to do this because I wanted to develop classroom rules collaboratively with my students — as opposed to simply unfurling my own pre-made list — and as I was planning for this, I realized that rules are developed fundamentally upon the values that one holds. I felt that these values were rich and could be explored in subsequent content areas, such as in discussions of characters in books (for example, we had fruitful discussions on how Edward develops empathy in the story “The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane“).

I often find the debates that are ongoing in the education policy world suffer from a lack of explicit acknowledgement of underlying values, even as those debates are really just a fundamental clash of values. As I read articles heralding the decline in union power and calling for budgetary bloodletting in public services, I might posit that some values that the authors would hold are that of efficiency, expediency, and force as an agent of change. As someone who has been in positions of management, I can understand the perspectives that channel from such values. We seek immediate and replicable solutions to problems, to make systems run more smoothly and efficiently, and to increase performance and productivity.

But there is another value I inherited from positions of management as well that often seems to get left out in these meta-level debates: empathy. (Notice that this is one of my three classroom values?) Empathy embodies the essentials of working with other human beings. As a leader, you must practice active listening, you have to be able to model the behavior that you want others to emulate, and you have to be able to foster trusting and meaningful relationships if you want to motivate and inspire others.

This isn’t just something I’m making up, by the way. Read most any literature on management and notice the focus on interpersonal skills (as well as on intrapersonal). Motivating others and inspiring high performance requires strong abilities to develop relationships with others. (more…)

Comptroller John Liu rejected a $20 million contract for teacher recruitment today, calling the proposal wasteful given the city’s current fiscal climate. Yet the main reason for the comptroller’s refusal came down to paperwork.

A spokesman for the comptroller’s office said that the five-year contract with The New Teacher Project was rejected this morning because of problems with the DOE’s submission. In reviewing the contract, officials in the comptroller’s office said that the DOE did not include information on conflicts of interest or what the dates of service would be. The department can choose to resubmit the contract.

The New Teacher Project, or TNTP, is a non-profit that handles the recruitment and training of New York City’s Teaching Fellows. It also studies teacher job markets around the country.

In a statement sent to reporters, Liu — a possible candidate in the next mayoral election — said he objected to the contract’s premise. The city does not need to spend money recruiting new teachers, he said.

“Twenty million dollars to recruit teachers as the DOE insists on laying off thousands of teachers seems curious at best,” Liu said. (more…)

• Suspensions of the city’s youngest students, ages 4 to 10, are up 76 percent since 2003. (Daily News)
• The Department of Education has been told to cut its budget by another 2 percent. (Post, Daily News)
• The city withdrew a space-sharing plan that would have displaced PS 32′s autistic students. (Daily News)
• Aggrieved Bronx Science teachers are trying new strategies to get rid of their principal. (Riverdale Press)
• The state of science instruction and achievement in city schools is not strong. (Gotham Gazette)
• The DOE asked PS 22′s chorus to take down a YouTube video rejecting a critic’s apology. (Daily News)
• Schools Chancellor Cathie Black and others participated in World Read Aloud Day. (NY1, Daily News)
• Students at Queens’ PS 94 raised $1,000 to honor a school social worker’s seeing-eye dog. (Daily News)
• Charter schools are replacing John F. Kennedy HS over community objections. (Riverdale Press)
• Arne Duncan said schools’ high NCLB fail rate shows the need for changes to the law. (Times)
• Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker: Teacher tenure rules need to be changed, not abolished. (Daily News)
• A merger of two charter school chains would create one of the country’s largest networks. (L.A. Times)
• Raleigh, N.C.: We don’t know how many students our old integration plan affected. (News & Observer)
• Hershey, Penn., is sending reigning high school champions to a memory tournament in the city. (Times)

• Without a change to ESEA, most schools will be labeled “failing” this year. (Politics K-12)
• Protestors of Cuomo’s education cuts chanted outside the governor’s office today. (Daily Politics)
• Richard Whitmire: white education reformers are allergic to talking about race. (Huffington Post)
• Deven Black: the Board of Regents shouldn’t add four weeks to the school year. (Education on the Plate)
• The Hebrew Charter Center’s head says secular Hebrew-language schools aren’t an oxymoron.  (Tablet)
• When districts start cutting public school funding, private schools benefit. (Abacus Mom)
• After more SAT-prep than ever before, a program’s students didn’t do very well. (GS Community)
• The UFT is mediating between the mayor and teachers, not advocating for teachers. (EdNotes)
• Chancellor Black read to P.S. 182 students today and gave the press 90 minutes’ notice. (DOE flickr)
• D.C.’s interim Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson is no longer “interim.” (Washington Post)
• Cutting teachers’ benefits without adding to salaries could make recruitment harder. (Flypaper)

City Councilman Charles Barron criticized Chancellor Cathie Black for failing to condemn a video posted by Stuyvesant High School students that used racial slurs. To Barron's right is Veronica Celestin, the mother of a Stuyvesant student.

Parents and politicians gathered today outside of prestigious Stuyvesant High School to condemn what they describe as a pattern of racial exclusion and insensitivity at the school.

The group was responding to an amateur rap video that shows four young white men — reportedly Stuyvesant students — using racial slurs. The video emerged after a former student at the school posted it to YouTube.

Recently critics have said that the city’s selective public schools don’t admit enough black and Hispanic students, and that the Department of Education hasn’t fully implemented its own anti-bullying program.

At today’s event outside of the ten-story school building in Lower Manhattan, several parents of students of color talked about their children’s experiences. Veronica Celestin, whose daughter Breanna found the video posted to Facebook, said they were disturbed by the “racist video.”

“This has been a very difficult and traumatic time for Breanna and our family,” said Celestin, reading softly from a typed statement.

Another Stuyvesant parent, Ruth Sowell, said that her child sometimes felt unwelcome at the school. Her son, Michael Bucaoto, is a Stuyvesant football player who is bi-racial.

“They didn’t treat him as an equal,” Sowell said. “He felt he had nowhere to go.” (more…)

As New York City plans to spend more on technology consultants and expand its online learning programs, an obstacle is presenting itself: schools aren’t as wired as people assumed.

At a panel discussion today about online learning — orchestrated by the city’s Department of Education and the Federal Communications Commission — Wireless Generation CEO Larry Berger talked about the challenges software developers face when they work in public schools. Some schools have the bandwidth to support classrooms where each student has her own laptop. Others can barely give their teachers wireless access.

Asked about some of the problems classroom technology poses, Berger said:

I think one of the hard things is that it’s almost never the case that you get to work in a school that has all of the infrastructure that you wish it had. What we start learning as we try to do initiatives that assume that kids would be on a computer, connected, and learning at their own pace, is that we learned that the schools we thought were wired aren’t that wired. (more…)

Buried in a New York Times article about the suspension of George Washington High School’s famed baseball coach is a reminder of the steep challenge students face when trying to switch high schools.

Fernelys Sanchez was admitted to Lehman High School in the Bronx but wanted to play baseball for George Washington’s winning team, the Times reports. So he moved into his father’s apartment in Washington Heights. Then he tried — for more than a year before he succeeded — to win a transfer.

But a policy shift over the last several years means that the city’s system of school choice largely closes off once students are in high school.

“For whatever reason, it has become increasingly difficult, almost impossible, to get a transfer to another regular high school,” Pamela Wheaton of Insideschools told me two years ago. City officials say it’s not educationally sound for students to change high schools unless they absolutely have to.

The city gives three reasons students can transfer from one high school to another: a long commute, a safety risk, or a health issue. Sanchez’s family said he tried all of them: (more…)

The scores are in.

After our college prep program and partner high school collaborated on a relatively robust effort to prepare our juniors for the January SAT, we recently received our students’ results.

Let me put it this way — our students are to the SAT what Congress is to fiscal responsibility.

After months of regular preparation, multiple, full-length practice tests and a coordinated campaign to ensure attendance, our students averaged 351 on critical reading and 371 on math, which earns them an average overall score of 722. In other words, despite all of our efforts, which represented a ramped-up approach as compared to previous years, our scores were as dismal as ever.

There is a consolation prize — the get-out-the-student effort resulted in a 28-percent increase in attendance, to 95 percent — but we were expecting much more of a bump in the scores.

This year’s crop of juniors is a promising bunch, overall, with higher rates of academic and civic engagement and greater college-going interest than peers from recent years (one of their teachers refers to them as the “golden class”). While their skills are still several years behind grade level, they are, on average, the highest-performing grade in the school. And yet — 722. (more…)

• The city is considering using Green Dot in its first turnaround efforts, at two Bronx high schools. (Times)
• The departures of Joel Klein and Randi Weingarten caused union-city relations to decline. (Observer)
• The baseball coach at George Washington HS has been suspended for improper recruiting. (Times)
• The Board of Regents filled five slots yesterday; one went to a former city official. (GothamSchools, AP)
• The Regents are considering raising the passing score on high school exams to 75 from 65. (NY1)
• A school official says a teacher fired for possessing drugs is harassing her to get his job back. (Post)
• Most City Council members said they oppose the city’s bid to take back schools’ savings. (Daily News)
• The Swedish-run charter school is set to open at Tweed this fall, but some neighbors aren’t happy. (WSJ)
• A former Assemblyman says attacks on teachers’ job security will help the profession’s prestige. (Post)
• The Wall Street Journal says Gov. Cuomo must face reality and change the way teachers are laid off.
• With Bill and Melinda Gates, Pres. Obama visited a technology school they funded. (L.A. Times, Times)
• A less extreme version of last year’s bill to change tenure and pay in Florida is likely to succeed. (Times)
• Memphis voters chose to cede control over the city’s schools to the county administration. (Times, WSJ)
• Even wealthy suburban districts are cutting back because residents don’t want to pay more taxes. (Times)