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Dennis Walcott at Teachers College.

In his first speech since being named chancellor, Dennis Walcott poured on the charm, asking everyone to “dial down the rhetoric” and giving no hints of any new reforms he’s planning.

Walcott spoke at Columbia University’s Teachers College on Saturday morning, filling in for ousted Chancellor Cathie Black, who was originally scheduled to speak as part of the day-long “academic festival.”

While Black quickly gained a reputation for verbal faux pas and blunt remarks, Walcott was warm and light, cracking jokes about his recent high-profile stint making waffles for students — and even jokingly flirting with the namesake of the morning lecture, Phyllis Kossoff.

Walcott’s charm even moved the crowd to applaud the much-maligned Black.

Carefully avoiding new policy announcements, Walcott focused most of his speech on trying to bridge different sides in the reform debate. He told the crowd about his childhood in Queens — noting that he grew up, and attended public schools, in the same borough as ex-Chancellor Joel Klein — and the role that great teachers had in his success.

“Unfortunately that’s not a storyline we hear as often as we should, especially when it comes to education,” Walcott said. “The conversation we hear about is poor versus the wealthy. Charter schools versus district schools. And who is to blame for the failures of our education system.

“People on both sides of this debate have been guilty of contributing to the current polarized atmosphere,” he said.

“The poisonous debate is hurting our children, plain and simple. (more…)

• The city is planning a major rezoning of downtown schools to address overcrowding. (DNAinfo)
• Commissioner David Steiner said he wasn’t up for the “grinding implementation” of RttT. (Flypaper)
• Incoming Chancellor Dennis Walcott made waffles, as promised, for P.S. 10 students. (GS, NYT)
• The state is soliciting comments on its draft regulations for teacher evaluation. (NYSED)
• A Bronx classroom can feel normal until its students are affected by violence. (GS Community)
• Walcott won’t suffer the gaffes that Black did, but he’s more of the same in a bad way. (NYCEducator)
• The LA police have agreed not to ticket students who are late, but on their way to school. (LA Times)
• As part of its plan to convert a third of schools into charters, Detroit is inviting operators in. (Detroit News)
• Houston’s school board voted to revamp teacher evals to include value-added data. (Houston Chronicle)
• Tennessee and other states are also re-thinking their teacher evaluations methods. (Teacher Beat)
• We’re off on Monday for Passover. And don’t go to school on Monday! It’s spring break.

Dennis Walcott officially becomes the new schools chancellor on Monday, but today he had to be content with playing chef. Walcott stopped by a Brooklyn elementary school this morning to make good on a promise that his personal waffle recipe is the best in the world.

Lily Potter, the P.S. 10 third-grader who originally issued the challenge a year ago, said she felt Walcott had exceeded expectations.

“He said one of his hobbies is cooking and I said ‘Well, prove it,’” Potter recounted. “He’s a man of his word,” she said. (more…)

I picked up my students last Friday with a big smile on my face. I recently recommitted myself to keeping an overwhelmingly positive attitude.

“Good morning! Are you ready for a great Friday?” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster at 8:15 am.

“Mr. Brosbe, it’s not a great Friday for me,” said the little girl at the front of the line.

“Why not?”

“Because — because …” Before she could explain, huge tears starting rolling down her cheeks.

Upstairs, she was finally able to tell me why it would not be a great Friday for her. The night before there had been a fight outside her apartment. Two people, including the son of her mom’s friend, were killed. (more…)

• A talent show at a Brooklyn high school was cancelled after several participants fought. (Daily News)
• Some school districts are pushing back against mandates they say are costly without benefits. (Times)
• A fight between a school aide and former student at IS 278 in Queens caused several injuries. (Post)
• Dennis Walcott got a waiver and will officially become chancellor Monday. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• Walcott got both open arms and hard questions during his tour yesterday. (WNYC, Daily News)
• Walcott also said he shares Mayor Bloomberg’s opposition to seniority-based layoffs. (Post)
• Georgia now has an anti-”last in, first out” law it didn’t actually need. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
• The Post says David Steiner, by resigning, is surrendering in the battle to improve schools.
• The federal budget deal extends a small school voucher program in Washington, D.C. (Times)
• Chicago is weighing a property tax increase to stave off layoffs and class size increases. (Times)

• Sonya Lamonakis, a Harlem teacher, moonlights as a boxer, and her AP watches her bouts. (ESPN)
• Andy Rotherham says there are no lessons to be found in the tale of Cathie Black. (School of Thought)
• Just a reminder: Plenty of editors, politicians, and policy wonks backed Black at first. (Edwize)
• A brief history of 40 years of teacher layoffs in the New York City schools. (Brooklyn Ink)
• Chinese schoolchildren perform slightly terrifying dance routines every morning in gym class. (Gawker)
• Many of the teachers a Colorado district chose to talk to a reporter oppose its policies. (Dana Goldstein)
• Kevin Carey: Republicans are both attacking teachers unions and backing their agenda. (New Republic)
• More high school students are taking tougher classes, but racial gaps persist, a report finds. (Hechinger)
• Students who attend schools that are phasing out describe how they’re affected by the closures. (EdVox)
• Did New Orleans juke the schools stats that led Arne Duncan to call it “most-improved”? (Answer Sheet)

A popular Brooklyn charter school is backing down from its expansion plans after facing fierce resistance from local officials.

Allison Keil and Sara Stone, co-principals of Fort Greene’s Community Roots Charter School, sent a letter to parents today announcing that they had decided to delay the school’s plans to add a middle school starting in September. Expressing surprise at the intensity of opposition to Community Roots’ expansion, they wrote, “The impact of the reactions of the press, politicians and the other schools in our shared campus make it impossible to proceed in good faith.”

Keil and Stone’s response is unusual: Resistance sometimes seems only to redouble the city’s determination to open or expand charter schools. In nearby Prospect Heights, for example, the city is pushing forward in its bid to move a charter school into the PS 9 building, even after PS 9 parents won a judgement from the state against the city’s original plan.

Families of fifth-graders at Community Roots will now have to search for middle school spots for their children, more than a month after the city’s middle school application deadline.

Community Roots, which attracts families from both Brownstone Brooklyn and local housing projects, received a five-year renewal of its charter in January. In early March, the Department of Education gave notice that it planned to expand the school inside PS 67, where it is currently housed, and scheduled a Panel for Educational Policy vote for the end of this month.

But recent weeks witnessed a surge of opposition to the school’s expansion. (more…)

Principals who worried that new, toughened state math and English exams would hurt their performance reviews had good reason: Far fewer principals earned high marks from the city last year.

Data on principals’ performance ratings, which GothamSchools obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request, show that the number of principals who “substantially exceed” expectations fell by roughly 60 percent from 2009 to 2010. (A full list of all principals and how they scored is at the end of this post.)

The decrease parallels a drop in test scores and fewer schools earning “A” grades on their progress reports. The percentage of elementary and middle schools to get A’s on their city-issued report cards fell from 84 to 25 percent — a drop precipitated by more students failing the exams and the city grading schools on a curve.

With fewer principals earning the city’s highest rating, more fell into the middle. Principals can earn one of five ratings: does not meet expectations, partially meets, meets, exceeds, or substantially exceeds. The number of principals rated as “exceeding” expectations rose from 465 to 608 and the number who “meet” expectations climbed from 114 to 376.

The number of principals earning substandard marks also rose. In 2009, only five principals were rated “does not meet” expectations, but that number more than quadrupled to 21 in 2010. Even with the increase, the percentage of principals earning the lowest rating is now only 1.4 percent of the 1449 on the city’s list. (more…)

Just days after announcing his impending departure from the State Education Department, Commissioner David Steiner decried “a genuine crisis” in schooling and lamented what he said is a loss of vision in education from a time when “every schoolchild, in every public school, was savored by the adults of the state.”

Steiner’s cutting remarks, made at a state teachers union event last weekend, were first reported in the New York Post today, and they can be seen in full in the video above.

Steiner himself uniquely possesses that kind of vision, writes Matthew Levey in the Community section today. Levey, the parent of three elementary school-aged children and the former president of District 2′s Community Education Council, argues that Steiner has been a lone voice advocating for classical education and reasoned dialogue at a time when test-based accountability is in vogue and debate over reforms often turns acrimonious.

Writes Levey:

Steiner struck me as a man with a long-term vision of what it means to be educated, something glaringly absent from the reform debate. At a sparsely attended talk on the Upper East Side last October, Steiner asked how we expect to make the long journey to a “better educated” student population without a detailed map for the trip. Last weekend, speaking at a state teachers union event, Steiner reflected on his tenure, pointing out that if we want to develop such a vision “we do not start by yelling at each other.”

Amidst the shouting, recriminating and celebrating attending Dennis Walcott’s designation as chancellor, even a keen follower of education politics could have missed the news that New York State Education Commissioner David Steiner is stepping down. Steiner cut a low profile in the mass media, so it’s ironic, yet consistent, that his announcement and its implications provoked little discussion in the broader ed reform community.

Steiner struck me as a man with a long-term vision of what it means to be educated, something glaringly absent from the reform debate. At a sparsely attended talk on the Upper East Side last October, Steiner asked how we expect to make the long journey to a “better educated” student population without a detailed map for the trip. Last weekend, speaking at a state teachers union event, Steiner reflected on his tenure, pointing out that if we want to develop such a vision “we do not start by yelling at each other.”

Unnamed “education insiders” say Steiner’s “superstar” deputy, John King, has the inside track. King’s prior work draws hosannas, but his career doesn’t suggest he’s a visionary in Steiner’s mold.

When I heard Steiner speak last fall, we were in the midst of being bombarded with the news that Davis Guggenheim had “cracked the code” in “Waiting for ‘Superman.’” I was fighting apocalyptic thoughts after the New York Times profiled a new middle school suggesting that having failed to engage teenagers, our only option is to have them play video games. And we learned that the average Atheist knows way more about the Bible than the average Christian. A friend neatly captured my concerns when he said, “I weep for the Republic.”

In an essay accompanying his profile of a Bronx middle school this past weekend, Jonathan Mahler neatly channeled Steiner. We shout that only class size matters or the key is accountability, or we need more school days, or we must focus on teacher quality, or grant more charters. As Henry Longfellow wrote (and Barry Manilow made popular), we’re like ships that pass in the night, “only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.” Our current ‘debate’ is not some Hegelian dialectic leading to a vision for the future; it’s a twisted mashup of Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow, a tale “full of sound and fury. Signifying nothing.”

Back in October I foolishly hoped Steiner would bring some balance to these debates. (more…)