GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• President Obama called for renewed attention to closing the racial achievement gap. (Times)
• Ed Sec Arne Duncan said New York City is losing a third of its high schoolers to the streets. (WNYC)
• The DOE’s John White will head New Orleans’ schools. (GothamSchools, Times, Post, Daily News, WSJ)
• A speechwriter for Randi Weingarten plagiarized an NY1 story about the city’s tech spending. (NY1, Post)
• The state teacher evaluation task force said its recommendations can’t be implemented right away. (Post)
• Community members rallied against layoffs at Queens’ PS 306, which could lose half its teachers. (NY1)
• A teacher at Fort Greene’s PS 46 was arrested for assaulting a 7-year-old student. (Courier-Life, NY1)
• Harlem Success Academy’s low-key lottery included 9,000 applicants for the chain’s nine schools. (NY1)
• A Bronx organization has been both protesting charter schools and promoting them. (Riverdale Press)
• Public advocate Bill de Blasio is surveying parents of children with special needs. (Daily News)
• City officials broke ground on the Harlem site that will house a Promise Academy Charter School. (NY1)
• Bloggers say Obama’s recent comments have sent mixed messages on standardized testing. (Times)
• Chicago is opening a new charter school modeled after elite soccer academies. (Chicago Tribune)

• Leonie Haimson: John White has consistently ignored parents’ concerns. (NYC Public School Parents)
• Gov. Cuomo: Mayor Bloomberg is peddling “propaganda” by threatening teacher layoffs. (Daily Politics)
• It’s not clear how the impending government shutdown will affect the education dep’t. (Politics K-12)
• Mike Petrilli suggestions that suddenly idle government workers volunteer-mob D.C. schools. (Flypaper)
• An assessment of charter school management organizations finds they range in quality. (ProPublica)
• IS 278 reopened today after being closed due to a construction fire yesterday. (GerritsenBeach.net)
• The report about EMOs overstates how many charter schools are run by for-profit groups. (Eduwonk)
• Seth Andrew explains why his charter school network is taking over Harlem Day Charter. (HuffPo)
• A fight over Finland is at the heart of tensions threatening a national standards coalition. (Rick Hess)
• Chicago Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel is starting to signal where he stands on schools. (Russo)
• Once again, the city has extended the deadline for parents to run for district councils. (Insideschools)

New Orleans has picked John White, a top official in New York City’s education department, as its next superintendent, the Times-Picayune is reporting.

The report sends another blow to New York City Schools Chancellor Cathie Black, whose leadership team has been hemorrhaging members. But it also signals that cities continue to be eager to hire administrators who cut their teeth under her predecessor, former schools chancellor Joel Klein.

White would replace Paul Vallas, who is leaving the charter-school-rich Recovery School District at the end of the school year. The Times-Picayune reports that the decision could be finalized at a meeting of the state board of education on Friday.

The Recovery School District referred a request for comment to Louisiana’s state board of education, which did not immediately have a statement. White did not return a request for comment.

Currently the city’s deputy chancellor for talent, labor, and innovation, White began his career in education as a teacher with Teach for America, then ran the organization’s Chicago office. In New York, he has risen from an aide inside the office that creates new schools and shuts down failing ones to a leading official overseeing the city’s ambitious Innovation Zone project. (more…)

A high school that is slated to close just lost its second principal in a year, and community members are agitating to play a stronger role in selecting their next leader.

Katherine Kefalas, the embattled interim acting principal of Brooklyn’s Paul Robeson High School, was removed yesterday, Department of Education officials confirmed, and a new interim principal, Ronald Wells, was named.

Students and teachers say Kefalas, who had shepherded South Shore High School in the final months before it closed, was never a good fit for Robeson and wasn’t giving the school what it needed to improve.

“We needed someone strong, passionate, and committed, who believed in our community and our students and had experience to stand on,” said Stefanie Siegel, a longtime Robeson teacher. “She had none of this and to make it worse she was afraid, defensive, and didn’t listen or respect the knowledge, history, and experience here. … She was not the right person for Robeson and that was obvious from the minute she stepped in the building.”

But they are also saying that want more control over who their next principal will be. “We don’t want an inexperienced principal to take over a school in crisis,” 10 members of the school’s student government wrote in a statement. (more…)

Regular readers know that I’m spending the academic year in Israel because of my husband’s studies. While I’ve spent most of time here on GothamSchools business, I’ve also been reporting about Israeli schools — and the picture I’ve been painted over and over isn’t pretty.

In the New Republic this week, I look at the state of Israeli school reform in the year since former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein visited Jerusalem. I write:

Boasting a disproportionate number of Nobel laureates, patents, and high-tech start-ups, Israel is famous for its professional achievements in science, math, and engineering. Yet its students sit stubbornly near the bottom of developed nations on international exams. Hidden behind the national scores are wide achievement gaps—between Arab and Jewish students, between immigrants and those native-born, and between students in the cosmopolitan cities and those in developing regions of the country. What’s more, Israel’s robust early childhood enrollment—85 percent of children attend preschool—and low high-school dropout rate don’t appear to be correlated to academic gains. Class sizes are large, teachers are poorly educated and paid little, and discipline is considered a major problem. “Every time I see on the news the low scores [on international exams], I feel shame,” said Eti Yedidya, principal of Jerusalem’s well-regarded Geulim School. “It’s frustrating to know that you are doing everything you can do and it’s not enough.”

In a country known for innovation, why has desperately needed educational change moved so slowly? And why haven’t reformers coalesced around an agenda to improve schools in the way they have in the United States?

My reporting pointed to a few answers to this question, including political instability and pressures, a lack of school data, and unresolved cultural ideas about the purpose of education. Read my full report.

• Pending legislation in Albany would let school districts delay pension payments for two years. (WSJ)
• Fort Hamilton HS students will walk out to help the teacher who threatened a rampage. (Brooklyn Paper)
• More students than ever are learning online, but experts don’t know if the trend is positive. (Times)
• The city’s plan to turn Khalil Gibran Academy into a high school follows years of turmoil. (Courier-Life)
• Starting this week, schools and the police will have to make student discipline data public. (WNYC)
• The city is pushing back against new requirements for discharging students. (GothamSchools, Times)
• School custodians bilked the city out of $600,000. (GothamSchools, Post, NY1, Daily News, Times)
• Teachers who were recruited from abroad say the city hasn’t helped them with legal issues. (Daily News)
• The family of one teacher recruited from Guyana is in immigration limbo after he died. (Daily News)
• A principal fired over claims that he inappropriately touched students is suing the city. (Daily News)
• States are reaching the “funding cliff” when stimulus funds for education end. (Education Week)

• Teachers College is making new attempts to add value to Morningside Heights. (Columbia Spectator)
• One of TC’s strategies: Opening its own public elementary school. (Starting an Ed School)
• Mayor Bloomberg said Cathie Black’s dismal poll numbers are no big deal to him. (Daily Politics)
• The actual text of the state’s teacher evaluation proposal appears to be missing in action. (Flypaper)
• Chicago is pulling a New York City and cracking down on kindergarten redshirting. (Trib via Russo)
• All of the urban school districts up for the Broad Prize have been finalists before. (PR Newswire)
• Could Santiago Taveras’s new job violate the city’s conflict of interest rules? (Norm’s Notes)
• Collin Lawrence’s students threatened to pull a French Revolution on their principal. (GS Community)
• The children of helicopter parents learn a lot of words, fast. (Lily’s Blackboard via @emilyschoolsyou)
• Advice for a family with a 16-month-old child planning a schools-motivated move. (Insideschools)
• Eric Hanushek tries to simplify all the research on teachers’ added value. (Ed Next)
• Vote now for one of 13 student-made covers for the next high school directory. (DOE via Insideschools)

An audit by the state comptroller found that the city might have underreported its dropout rate by reclassifying dropouts as “discharges,” or students who have moved out of the district. But new procedures actually make it extremely burdensome for schools to classify students as discharged, school officials say.

Until this year, high schools could classify a student as discharged to another state or city as long as the student provided proof of address that was confirmed by two people. That meant the student was removed from his original school’s roster without hurting its graduation rate.

But now the city requires city schools to prove that a school elsewhere requested transcripts of students they say are discharges, not dropouts. School administrators say this requirement presents a mountain of new paperwork for overworked personnel and, sometimes, real difficulty, as transfer students often encounter complications enrolling in new schools.

Students might take a long time to find a school in their new home. They might have a hard time navigating an interstate paperwork shuffle. Their new school might not require a transcript. Or they might be kept out of out-of-state schools altogether because of their disciplinary records or language needs, according to Rhonda Hugel, assistant principal at Lower East Side Preparatory High School, which serves a large Chinese immigrant population. “Who knows if these states have the resources for the kids,” she said.

The stakes are high. If schools don’t get sufficient documentation from a student’s new school within 20 days, he could be counted as a dropout, and the school’s graduation rate could fall. (more…)

Custodians defrauded the city out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by listing “no-show” custodial employees on their payrolls at two Bronx high schools.

A report released today by Special Commissioner of Investigation Robert Condon details how custodians at Harry Truman High School and the Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus kept employees on the school’s custodial payrolls during hours when they were not working. Some of these same employees were put to work doing construction and maintenance work on another custodian’s private properties and paid with school funds.

The report finds that custodians Trifon Radef and Nicanor Fernandez put at least four people on the payrolls of Truman and Roosevelt who were paid for hours they never worked. The report calls them “ghost employees” and recommends that the six men no longer be allowed to work for the city’s Department of Education. It also calls on the DOE to examine its policy of allowing custodians to hold multiple jobs at different schools.

“The current system allowed multiple individuals to be paid over many years although they never appeared for work,” the report states. “It is unacceptable that one or more supervisors did not question their whereabouts and uncover this scheme.” (more…)

At least half a dozen major city school districts are combing the country for new superintendents — and they’re frequently looking to administrators who cut their teeth working under former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.

Boston, Newark, Chicago, New Orleans, and Atlanta are all looking for new superintendents, and Providence, R.I., just lost its leader. Deputy Chancellor John White was floated as a candidate in Chicago and is under consideration in other districts, including New Orleans, according to sources familiar with the searches. Districts have also eyed Jean-Claude Brizard, the Rochester, N.Y., superintendent who once worked for Klein, and Andres Alonso, another Klein deputy who now runs the Baltimore public schools.

“As far as I know, they’re all being recruited in multiple venues right now,” Klein said today in a phone interview. “Who knows where the music will all stop.”

The hunts for talent have high stakes for the community of education entrepreneurs that we’ve called “idealocrats.” On one hand, these reformers argue that the next frontier in their battle is to transform not just a school or a set of schools but an entire school district. Yet the same people regularly point out that there is a limited pool of people who are both ready and willing to take on this challenge.

“People are looking for people who have the credibility to speak to the classroom question but also have the leadership capacity that too often isn’t really sought in the education space,” said one person familiar with the searches. “Cities are not willing to compromise on a kind of institutional person. And yet you’re talking about paying people … to go out and take a beating every night.”