GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• New Jersey’s court may order Gov. Christie to spend more on schools. (WSJ, Star Ledger)
• A new K-5 school will open a year later while a KIPP school will get more space. (Daily News)
• A 7-year-old special education student in Queens was handcuffed after a tantrum. (Daily News)
• The PBS News Hour profiles a Bronx school serving nearly 700 autistic children. (Daily News)
• A Brooklyn teacher who made a Columbine joke avoided indictment yesterday. (Times)
• Questions about whether an ACS worker or “systemic failures” are behind a child’s death. (Post)
• Visiting Newark, Arne Duncan said the city could be a model for reform. (Star Ledger)
• Newark Mayor Cory Booker said he’s mulling merit pay but hasn’t talked to teachers yet. (WSJ)
• Rochester school board member: Brizard should pay for search for his successor. (Sun Times)
• George Will says local control of schools is code for control by teachers unions. (Post)
• Officials at Brooklyn’s Community Roots charter withdrew an application to expand. (Daily News, GS)
• The Supreme Court is asked if juveniles convicted of murder should get life without parole. (Times)
• People living in poverty are more likely to have only a cellphone, not a landline. (Times)
• A young teacher-farmer in Brooklyn got his start through the city’s Green Apple Corps. (Times)

• Students from IS 318 in Williamsburg won a national K-9 chess tournament. (U.S. Chess Fed)
• Momentum is mounting on the right against “homosexual indoctrination” in public schools. (TPM)
• A mom gets the disappointing news that her son’s special ed placement isn’t working. (Insideschools)
• Value-added misconceptions start with the idea that teaching is too complicated. (Jay Mathews)
• David Steiner wants a robust curriculum, but not a rigid “French straightjacket” one. (Flypaper)
• Donna Nevel says the sad state of Khalil Gibran Int’l Academy is the DOE’s fault. (GS Community)
• Some hypotheses about what Race to the Top 2.0 might look like. (Politics K-12)
• The correction on Michael Winerip’s story about private school reform pedigrees is a doozy. (Times)
• A podcast that’s “a love letter to teachers and students,” by a 10-year city teacher. (Mini Lessons)

When black and Hispanic students sit down to fill out their high school application forms, they tend to prioritize schools that are better performing and more racially diverse than their middle schools, which are on average, lower-performing and more racially isolated. But a study shows that the schools that actually accept them are more like the middle schools they come from.

That’s one of the findings in a study that tries to begin to understand the mysteries behind the city’s enormously complex high school selection process. Completed by New York University Assistant Professor Sean Corcoran and Teachers College Professor Henry Levin, the study was presented at a forum on high school choice at the New School today and also appears in the book Education Reform in New York City that was published this month.

Corcoran and Levin’s findings are interesting not only as an insight into why some students make the choices they do. They also add depth to the core claim of Mayor Bloomberg’s reforms: that by expanding students’ options for where they go to school, the quality of their education will improve. (more…)

The Department of Education recently announced that it plans to close the Khalil Gibran International Academy’s middle school, NYC’s first Arabic dual language program. There’s an important backstory.

In August 2007, New York City’s then Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott called Debbie Almontaser, then the acting principal of KGIA, into his office to tell her that Mayor Michael Bloomberg had lost confidence in her and wanted her to resign from her post. But that wasn’t all. Walcott also told her that the mayor wanted the resignation immediately because he intended to announce it on his radio show the next day. She was told that if she did not resign, KGIA would be closed. Knowing how much the school meant to the Arab community and to so many others, Almontaser submitted her resignation.

She brought suit soon after, charging that the city and the DOE had discriminated against her by bowing to anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bigotry in demanding her resignation. In March 2010, the federal Equal Employment Opportunities Commission upheld Almontaser’s charge of discrimination. It ruled that, in demanding her resignation, the DOE “succumbed to the very bias that the creation of the school was intended to dispel, and a small segment of the public succeeded in imposing its prejudices on the DOE as an employer.”

In a recent statement, Communities in Support of KGIA, a coalition of racial justice, immigrant rights, and peace groups and Muslim, Jewish, and Arab groups that formed after the DOE and mayor forced Almontaser to resign (and with which I have been intimately involved), outlined what happened and described the DOE’s four-year process of killing the school: (more…)

• Next year’s proposed budget could force out one of every three students in after-school. (Daily News)
• The Black Eyed Peas are opening an after-school Soho arts academy for 150 students. (NY1)
• Chancellor Walcott said he’d like to increase the number of single-sex schools in the city. (Post)
• Faced with budget cuts, some schools are replacing AP courses with online ones. (WSJ)
• When a promising student succumbed to the street, Abyssinian Church bailed her out. (Times)
• Eric Lane: a study of NY state voters shows schools aren’t doing enough to teach civics. (Daily News)
• An off-duty school safety agent won’t be charged for shooting at men who tried to rob him. (WSJ)

• A lengthy assessment of David Steiner’s tenure in Albany asks whether reform will go on. (Ed Next)
• A father has a brainstorm: Crowding could be solved if developers built charter schools. (Insideschools)
• A rundown of what Jean-Claude Brizard did in Rochester and what’s on his plate in Chicago. (The 312)
• Reform critics in NYC and Chicago have reasons to like Brizard but remain skeptical. (Huffington Post)
• Ed Sec Arne Duncan will visit Newark tomorrow, even though schools are on spring break. (Metropolis)
• A look back at N.J. Gov. Chris Christie and Ed Commish Chris Cerf’s long-term relationship. (Daily Kos)
• Liza Campbell: One downside of a younger teacher corps is a lack of collective memory. (GS Community)
• A parent at PS 29 speaks out about another parent’s $100,000 theft from the PTA. (Insideschools)
• A parents’ guide to the Broad Foundation, from some of its critics. (Parents Across America via NYCPSP)
• The Gates Foundation is funding a StoryCorps oral history series just about teachers. (Alexander Russo)
• A new and improved No Child Left Behind law in 10 easy steps, starting with national clarity. (Flypaper)
• The developer of a new math curriculum battles students’ “I’m not good at math” attitude. (Opinionator)

For the first time since introducing school support organizations in 2007, the city plans to end its contract with one of them. But unlike when the city closes failing schools, it has refused to publicly release data showing how the network has performed.

(Update 4/20: City officials now say they are planning to publicly release the data next week.)

Replications — one of several non-profit organizations that provide schools instructional and administrative assistance — will not be able to contract with schools next year, a Department of Education official confirmed today. Every year, the DOE ranks how well support organizations and networks are doing based largely on the test scores and graduation rates of the schools they work with. These rankings have been used to close low-performing networks, but this is the first time a support organization has lost its contract because of them. Replications’ founder John Elwell said today that the decision to cut ties with the DOE was a mutual one.

“I was going to ask them to let us out of the contract,” he said.

Elwell said that for two years, DOE officials have been threatening to end the department’s contract with him based on his network’s ranking at the bottom of the list. He said this year 20 other networks placed lower than his in the rankings, but Replications did not do well enough to keep its contract.

DOE officials have refused requests for the rankings, though they have shown them to principals. Former Deputy Chancellor Eric Nadelstern disagreed with the DOE’s decision not to release the rankings showing how Replications’ schools had performed. (more…)

What knowledge and skills do we want brand-new teachers in New York City to have before they enter a classroom? Besides the obvious — how to plan engaging lessons, how to support students with learning, and how to manage a classroom — what else is critical for the first-time teacher to know? What kind of conversations should an individual have engaged in before New York State grants that person the right to be the lone adult in a classroom full of impressionable minds?

These are some of the questions that a small group of individuals and I have been grappling with during member meetings of the New York Collective of Radical Educators. On the first Friday of every month we sit together to strengthen our analysis of these issues devise strategies to address them.

One of the very first actions that came out of this working group was the creation of an open letter from newer teachers in support of seniority rights. We feel that so-called “great new teachers” are being used as an argument to end the seniority rule for layoffs, even though we as newer teachers recognize the rule’s critical importance to keeping the most experienced teachers in our schools and protecting them from discriminatory dismissal as their compensation increases. I have had many conversations with newer teachers who initially expressed support for Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to end seniority-based layoffs, but then changed their tune as they heard more about the history of the struggle to win and maintain seniority-based layoffs and why its change would negatively affect our students and the cultures of our schools. Our arguments as newer teachers against “merit-based” layoffs are more fully outlined in our letter.

Over the last 10 years under mayoral control, New York City’s teaching force has become significantly less experienced. This change can be attributed, at least in part, to the DOE’s heavy reliance on programs like New York City Teaching Fellows and Teach for America to do teacher recruitment, which require only a two-year commitment from teachers they hire. Recruits to these programs are required to undergo almost no training or coursework in education before beginning teaching. Not only are they less prepared in basic teaching practices, they also have even less knowledge of education history than traditionally certified teacher who take courses in which they study historical movements within education. There are many important critiques of these alternative-certification programs that are worth developing further, but as I have a tendency to write rather long posts I am going to try to save my thoughts on these critiques for a future piece.

Instead I want to reflect on something I have been thinking about a lot lately: As the teaching force becomes less experienced, we are losing our collective memory. (more…)

News from New York:

• State ed chief David Steiner will return to the deanship of Hunter College’s ed school. (Daily News)
• Dennis Walcott called for civility in the school reform debate. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News, NY1)
• He also said again that he is standing behind Mayor Bloomberg’s teacher layoffs threats. (Post)
• Parishioners at a Bronx church prayed for Walcott’s success during his visit Sunday. (Post)
• In his speech at the church, Walcott promised not to speak ill of teachers. (Daily News)
• Monday was Walcott’s official first day as New York City schools chancellor. (NY1)
• Only 341 parents have applied for 425 seats on Community Education Councils so far. (WNYC)
• The teacher who miscarried after breaking up a classroom fight explains why she didn’t sue. (Post)
• Sixteen new charter schools are set to open this fall in New York City. (Post)
• Parents vow to block the city’s second attempt to place a charter school in P.S. 9. (Daily News)
• The Bronx Charter School for Excellence had to turn down 98 percent of applicants. (Daily News)
• A Brooklyn prep school was sanctioned for destroying evidence of molestation charges. (DN, Post)
• Some school custodians earn more than the teachers in the buildings where they work. (NBC New York)
• An NYC private school admissions group can link parents to school board members. (Times)
• The Daily News says New York State should make like Illinois and abolish “last in, first out” layoffs.

And beyond:

• More than anything else, the trait that public school reformers share is private school education. (Times)
• But in New York City, most recent changes have come about at the hands of public school grads. (Post)
• Rochester’s Jean-Claude Brizard is Chicago’s new schools chief. (Chicago Tribune, GothamSchools)
• Illinois’ new schools law could let Chicago Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel extend the school day. (Times)
• The $144 million raised for Newark’s schools has divided the city’s education establishment. (WSJ)
• An architect of No Child Left Behind accuses Obama of abandoning what works. (Daily News)
• A mother says banning chocolate milk in school lunches is unwise. (WSJ)
• Australian officials say their NYC-style reforms would have been better slower. (Sydney Morning Herald)

Jean-Claude Brizard, the embattled superintendent of Rochester, N.Y., and a former New York City Department of Education official, will be Chicago’s next schools chief.

Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel announced his superintendent pick at a press conference today, billing Brizard as a leader who is “not afraid of tough choices.” In three years as Rochester’s superintendent, Brizard alienated local leaders and the teachers union with his support for charter schools, tying teacher evaluations to student test scores, and closing low-performing schools.

Picking Brizard suggests that Emanuel could be preparing to tangle with Chicago’s teachers union, whose president, Karen Lewis, took an aggressive stance in her fights with Ron Huberman, the superintendent who resigned last year. The choice also signals yet again that administrators who cut their teeth under former New York City Chancellor Joel Klein remain in demand around the country.

Earlier this month, Klein told GothamSchools that Brizard was one of several New York City school officials, past and present, who were “being recruited in multiple venues right now” for big-city superintendencies. In addition to Chicago, other cities looking for leaders include Newark, Boston, Atlanta, and Providence, R.I. A current DOE deputy chancellor, John White, will become superintendent of New Orleans next month.

Brizard’s departure from Rochester is not surprising. (more…)