According to the city’s proposed budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1, the department is $350 million short of being able to fund its teaching spots. Mayor Bloomberg is pushing to close that gap by eliminating more than 6,000 teaching spots, 4,100 by layoffs.

Insiders say council members are likely to grill Walcott on why the city’s layoff estimates haven’t wavered, despite two changes in chancellors since Bloomberg first unveiled them in November. They are also likely to demand why the city didn’t cut other parts of the department’s budget that doesn’t directly affect the classroom, such as transportation and special education, both of which are projected to see a big spending boost next year.

Many council members have said they don’t think layoffs are necessary to balance the city’s budget, and a few say they won’t vote for a budget that includes layoffs. Robert Jackson, chair of the council’s education committee, is among the elected officials set to appear at a rally against the layoffs proposal an hour before the hearing’s 10 a.m. start. He’ll be joined by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who has been lobbying against the proposed layoffs on his own; Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who advocates cutting contract spending to boost the staff budget; and other officials.

But most council members haven’t stated where they stand so clearly. Tomorrow’s hearing is a chance for them to signal their intentions, offer suggestions for alternative cuts, and construct a roadmap for a month of political jockeying over the city’s spending plans.

Between the end of the council’s budget hearings on Monday and the end of June, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn must broker a deal between the council and the city to get the budget approved. Last year, council members allocated most of their discretionary spending to keeping their vow not to approve a budget that cut school spending. In exchange, the city agreed to cut central spending at the DOE and several other departments.

This year, reaching a deal that fully restores school cuts could be a taller order. Many council members are still chafing over having had to cut services to senior citizens last year. Those services are again on the chopping block, as are daycare programs, firehouses, libraries, and other services important to council members’ local communities. Council members know that using all their discretionary budget to restore school cuts would leave these other services out to dry while averting only half of the city’s planned teacher layoffs — hardly a politically expedient resolution.

In my second period 10th-grade world literature class, which tends to be the most precocious and defiant of my three classes, a restless energy fills the air. We are concluding a human rights unit in which students focused on how survivors of human rights violations demonstrated courage, and I’m trying to psych them up to write the final project: an essay about someone they know who demonstrates great courage. As we are brainstorming potential people we could interview, a student named Joseph blurts out, “I want to interview you, Ms. Lustick! You got the courage to come in and teach us black kids every day.” I wait a beat, for a burst of laughter or some other response, but rest of the class waits silently for my reply.

When a student calls out, two sides of a teacher’s brain light up. The content-driven side of my brain gets excited: wow! That student made a fascinating point! I’d really like to hear more! I bet other people do too!  Listen to the content-driven side of your brain and students will learn very quickly how easy it is to get you off track. So a teacher quickly learns to beef up the management-driven side of her brain. The management-driven side of my brain can hear a student call out just about anything and it will compel me to do one of two things: repeat, flatly, that I’m only calling on students with their hands raised, or show this by flat-out ignoring the comment in favor of a student whose hand is up. It’s usually this latter strategy that I employ. It’s less disruptive to the lesson, while sending the same message: I will take your comment as soon as you raise your hand. I always feel it’s the more impartial and professional of the two strategies. It says, “I don’t discriminate against specific students or their opinions; I simply only acknowledge those with their hands raised.”

But there’s a layer to this particular comment that complicates that. It is so personal and racially charged that ignoring it could look like it is being done out of fear, or out of embarrassment at the answer. Because to be entirely honest, I do think I have courage. My students challenge me every day to prove to them that I see and care about them for who they are, and if I’m not willing to prove that in every fiber of my persona, everything else I’ve planned will probably be a waste. Joseph senses some of this, I’m sure, but not the nuances. To pretend what he’s saying is ridiculous or not worth hearing would be fake of me, and my students can’t stand it when I am fake.

So I’m left with an impossible decision: Should I respond to his comment, showing I can engage in a racial discussion but forgoing part or all of my lesson? Or should I ignore him in favor of a student with his hand raised, allowing the learning to continue? In a split second, I know I must make the latter decision and speak with Joseph later. I’ll know whether I made the right decision at the exact moment it is too late: When I call on another student, I almost flinch in anticipation of raucous laughter and exclamations of “Yo, Joseph, she violated you man! She totally ignored you. Oooooh…”

But no — there is just silence, with the exception of Thomas asking if they have to turn the interview notes in with their papers. “Yes,” I respond. “You have to show your own process.” Phew, over the hurdle. Class continues, and the two sides of my brain are back in action as one.

I speak privately with Joseph later about his comment, asking him all the questions I wanted to ask him in class. He says he didn’t even mean to say the word “black”; it just came out. What he meant by it was “kids acting like this”: He gestures around as the rest of the class talks, laughs, and otherwise wastes time instead of working on their essays.

“Poor behavioral choices?” I prompt. He nods. I’ve heard other black students complain about “black people” when they really mean to complain about irresponsible or disrespectful behavior. I want to ask Joseph why this is, whether it’s a mere joke, and whether he agrees with me that perpetuating negative stereotypes, in jest or not, is an example of internalized oppression.

“So why didn’t you say that?” I ask him.

He shrugs. “I don’t know,” he insists. He doesn’t seem interested in engaging in the topic anymore. I’ve given him the space to have this conversation, and now it is he who is shying away. I wonder what it will take for me and my students to be able to have the kinds of conversations we so clearly want and need to have, still play our roles as teacher and students, and still get our work done.

• The city could lose $44 million for needy schools if it can’t make a teacher eval deal. (NY1, Daily News)
• Some parents say schools call children’s services on them to retaliate for complaints. (Daily News)
• The city has fined 10 teachers for inappropriate comments about gender and race. (Post, Daily News)
• Michael Goodwin: Many teachers have written to me to share evidence of cheating in their schools. (Post)
• The street in front of Murrow HS has been renamed for the school’s longtime principal. (Daily News)
• Controversial principal Andrew Buck used DOE supplies to ask parents for tenure support. (Daily News)
• Two charter high schools run by New Visions are among those that might not open. (Daily News)
• Two months into his chancellorship, Dennis Walcott is keeping a blistering pace. (WNYC)
• Students who were shut out of city high schools at first found out last week where they’ll go. (Times)
• David Einhorn, the man who might take over the Mets, is a big charter school supporter. (Post)
• One of the DOE’s food suppliers bought a lot of applesauce from China last year. (Crain’s NY)
• Tribeca parents are upset that some kindergartners are assigned to a Chinatown school. (Tribeca Trib)
• Parents have lost hope after their Bronx charter school was ordered closed after one year. (Daily News)
• Eric Grannis, charter board member & Eva Moskowitz’s husband: Charters should integrate. (Daily News)
• Charter school parents rallied against the NAACP. (GothamSchools, Daily News, CNN)
• The Daily News praises a charter school parent for condemning both the NAACP and UFT.

And beyond:

• A proposed state law would require those attacking school budgets to identify themselves. (Times-Union)
• As Detroit turns more schools into charters, some wonder if the district will survive at all. (Free Press)
• Los Angeles’s new schools chief, John Deasy, aims to start an anti-poverty nonprofit. (Bloomberg)
• Los Angeles is going to start donating uneaten school lunches to hunger nonprofits. (L.A. Times)
• Some states are considering pushing back age cutoffs so children are 5 in kindergarten. (Times)

Students at Samuel Gompers High School in the South Bronx held a protest march today to ask for more support for their struggling school. (Patrick Wall)

Students at a South Bronx high school staged a march today to demand that the city seek more federal support to improve their school.

The students, who attend Samuel Gompers High School, have a specific improvement model in mind: the “re-start” option that is one of four models districts can follow in order to receive federal school turnaround funding.

Gompers is one of nine poorly performing high schools that are eligible for the federal help, but are not part of the city’s application for federal turnaround grants. Twenty-two other schools are receiving the grants, and 11 schools are already working with federal grants under the “transformation” improvement model.

“Why hasn’t the DOE given the grants to all the schools?” Gompers sophomore Sony Cabral asked at the rally. “They’re setting us up for failure.”

The students ended their march, which attracted about two dozen students, at the nearby Banana Kelly High School, one of the schools slated to receive the restart funding.

The city chose schools for the restart plan that it felt showed signs of improvement and enough leadership capacity to work with outside organizations to make serious adjustments, said Department of Education spokesperson Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld.

“The schools we didn’t choose for restart just did not have the type of leadership and staff in place that we felt could effectively team up with an educational partnership organization,” said Zarin-Rosenfeld.

School officials said that the nine schools that are not part of the city’s turnaround application will still get some support. The city Department of Education is adding an extra $300,000 to their budgets and offering help from teams in the Children’s First networks, which support schools with a range of needs from professional development to budgeting.

Under the restart model, the DOE will contract with non-profit education management organizations to help turn around low-performing schools. The management organizations, which will receive a portion of the federal grant money, will have the authority to recommend budget and staff changes to the schools chancellor, Zarin-Rosenfeld said.

The partner organizations and the schools will work to revamp curriculum, support students who are behind, and help teachers improve their practice, he said.

“We need as much help as we can get”

The Department of Education counts Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education High School among the city’s lowest-performing schools. The school’s graduation rate last year was 51 percent, below the citywide average of 63 percent. The city gave it a C overall on its 2009-2010 progress report, with an F for the section on school environment, which factors in parent, teacher, and student surveys about schools’ academic expectations and school safety.

Of the school’s 780 students, nearly three-quarters qualify for free or reduced price lunch and about one quarter receive special education services.

The Gompers students who organized the march are members of a student organizing group called Sistas and Brothas United. The group, which trains young people to organize around issues in their communities, is affiliated with the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. The students said they joined the group out of a concern that the city would shut down their school for its low performance.

The 20 or so Gompers students in the group meet regularly to discuss problems they see at school and possible solutions. They’ve staged class walkouts, attended education rallies and have met with their school administration.

The students say more engaging lessons and new computers and textbooks would motivate students and increase attendance. One student said his history class uses textbooks in which the most recent president is Ronald Reagan. Other students said that the principal, Joyce Mills Kittrell, could interact more with students.

“We definitely need new teachers and a new principal,” said Lopez, the Gompers junior. “Or at least help her to do a better job. I feel like she’s not even there.”

Kittrell has not replied to previous requests for an interview. The principals and staff at restart schools are not automatically replaced, unlike other school improvement models.

Phasing out Gompers could still be on the horizon. “If the school continues to struggle and does not improve, we would certainly consider replacing the school with a better option,” he said.

Lopez and other students at Gompers said that they hope to fix the problems at their school before school officials loses faith. To do that, Lopez said, “We need as much help as we can get.”

Anxiety at Banana Kelly

When the march reached Banana Kelly, several students there joined the protest. A dean at Banana Kelly, Daniel Jerome, said that some teachers at the school are nervous about what the restart model will entail. Jerome said teachers worry that the new management organizations will implement drastic changes without getting input from staff and students. “The fear is, are these organizations going to be like quasi-charters?” Jerome said.

Jerome also said he was concerned the new organizations, working under contract for the city, would feel pressure to show quick improvements at the schools, particularly in the form of graduation rates and test scores. “Are they going to raise the graduation rate by pushing kids out or make us teach to the test?” Jerome asked.

Banana Kelly students who joined the Gompers protest said that their school needs more resources, not new management. “We have great teachers and principals,” said Shainel Fowler, a junior at Banana Kelly. “But it’s up to the government to give them the resources they need.”

Fowler said the school lacks a library and a gymnasium. Physical education classes often meet on a baseball diamond behind the school.

Zarin-Rosenfeld said teachers and community members will have a role in the restart process. “Staff will be intimately involved with the partner organization,” he said. “And we intend to keep this process transparent so that families know exactly what’s going on in their schools and how they can help turn them around.”

Students and families protested today in Harlem against the NAACP's involvement in a lawsuit against school closures and charter school co-locations with district schools. (Chris Arp)

About 2,500 people rallied in Harlem this morning, calling on the NAACP to withdraw from its lawsuit with the teachers union against the city Department of Education. That lawsuit seeks to stop the closure of 22 schools as well as the placement of several charter schools in district school space.

Speakers at Thursday’s rally included charter school parents and teachers, Harlem Children’s Zone president and CEO Geoffrey Canada, and the actor Seth Gilliam from “The Wire,” whose child is a on a waiting list for a charter school. Speakers and attendees denounced the NAACP’s participation in a lawsuit they said would harm charter schools primarily serving students of color.

“Ms. Dukes, turn your back on this lawsuit,” said Kathy Kernizan, the parent of a student at the Uncommon Schools charter network, referring to Hazel Dukes, president of the NAACP New York State Conference.

A letter to Dukes with signatures from charter school advocates was circulated through the crowd asking the organization to withdraw from the suit. A spokesperson for the New York City Charter Center, which helped organize the event, said that more than 2,000 signatures had been collected this week.

“We gotta demand quality education,” Canada told the crowd. “We have to be prepared to fight for that.” The city Department of Education’s proposal calls for two of the charter schools associated with the Harlem Children’s Zone, the Promise Academy charter schools, to be co-located inside district schools.

The charter center spokesperson said the protest, held outside the Harlem State Office building at 125th Street, was not the work of any one organization. But at least two groups appear to have taken leading roles: the charter center, an advocacy and support organization for charter schools in the city, and the Success Charter Network created by Eva Moskowitz. Many of the families at the rally had children at one of the Success network’s nine schools. (Seven of the network’s schools are named in the lawsuit.)

Click here for a slideshow of photographs from the rally.

A representative from the New York City Charter School Center distributed flyers with excerpts of the NAACP’s mission statement to people entering the rally. Center officials argued that the lawsuit contradicts the NAACP’s mission to “ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race based discrimination.”

In a telephone interview, Kenneth Cohen, the regional director for the NAACP’s Metropolitan Council, said that the lawsuit supports the organization’s mission. Fighting co-locations of charter schools inside district schools, he said, challenges the unequal distribution of resources to district schools. ”We do want alternatives for our parents in those communities,” Cohen said, “but the bottom line is that it doesn’t mean you neglect the public schools also.”

Earlier this week, Dukes told GothamSchools that she would meet with parents who want to meet, but criticized plans for a rally.

It’s not clear what the exact consequences would be for the 18 charter schools named in the lawsuit if the NAACP and the teachers union are successful. The charter center spokesperson said that new charter schools, deprived of space they were counting on, could be prevented from opening, while existing charter schools could be evicted from their current spaces or prevented from enrolling new students.

Charter schools are publicly funded but operated by private boards and regulated by the state. New York education law does not grant charter schools funding for facilities. Arguing that the lack of funding is inequitable, the Bloomberg administration has offered some charter schools district space. The alternative for charter schools is to raise private funding to pay for leases or constructing new facilities.

At the rally, many parents described the lawsuit as an attempt to close charter schools. A flyer handed out to families at Harlem Success Academy 1 to organize the rally, obtained by GothamSchools, endorses that characterization. “WE NEED TO FIGHT TO KEEP OUR SCHOOLS OPEN,” the flyer says.

Charles Moerdler of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP, the firm representing the UFT in the lawsuit, would not directly comment on the spokesperson’s characterization. Moerdler repeated the lawsuit’s claim that the proposed co-locations challenged by the suit violated decrees from the state education commissioner. ”How the court addresses that is up to the court at the end of the day,” Moerdler said.

Cohen also disputed the claim that the suit was aimed at closing charter schools. “There might be a misconception there,” Cohen said. “We’re not fighting to close any school.”

Charter school parents and students, many of whom held signs calling on the NAACP to drop the lawsuit, made up the bulk of attendees. Parents from several Success charter schools said their children’s classes were starting later than usual to allow children to attend the rally.

Tracey Edwards, who attended the rally with her daughter Saniah Delrio, a first-grader at Harlem Success Academy Charter School 4, said she felt emotional about the rally. She praised her daughter’s school, saying it had allowed Delrio to read at her grade level and spurred her imagination. “I don’t understand why a school like this should be bothered with, want to be shut down at all when the kids are excelling,” Edwards continued.

Majella Dominguez, a third-grader at Harlem Success Academy Charter School 1, expressed enthusiasm for her school and for Thursday’s rally. “I think it’s great,” Dominguez said, “ ’cause they’re fighting for our school to get more space.”

Dominguez said one of the things she liked about her school was that it offered instruction on Saturdays for students who need it.

Zelda Owens said she learned about the rally only five minutes or so before it began. Owens, whose child attends Future Leaders Institute in Harlem — not one of the charter schools named in the lawsuit — said the issues raised in the rally affect all parents.

“As a lifelong Harlemite, I do recognize the fact that charter schools have given parents incredible options in educating our children,” Owens said. “And I believe that any option, one that adds tremendous demonstrated value, is something that all parents should fight for whether they’re in charter schools or not.”

Many charter school parents disputed the NAACP’s argument that charter schools located inside district space hurt district schools.

One parent at the rally, Julius Tajiddin, represented a district school, Frederick Douglass Academy II Secondary School, which is slated to be co-located with a Harlem Success school. Tajiddin, who said he is the chair of the school leadership team at Frederick Douglass, said the lawsuit is motivated not by a desire to limit choice, but to protect the needs of district school students.

He said that co-locations often force classes at district schools into hallways and stairwells. “It’s about resources,” said Tajiddin.

The first schools to participate in the program here used one of the less dramatic of the four models laid out by the Obama administration for how schools can be overhauled. To comply with a requirement that the principal of the school be removed, one set of schools played a game of musical principals. And officials’ efforts to reach an agreement with the teachers union on how to use a more drastic model — one that requires removing teachers as well as the school principal — faltered. Late in the school year, officials to turned to the “re-start” model instead.

A new package on Education Week’s web site suggests that New York’s rocky experience is not entirely unique. The package showcases reporting on other cities’ turnaround efforts, including reporting from GothamSchools. It also shows that a wide majority of schools receiving the turnaround funds opted for the less dramatic “transformation” model that was the first city school officials turned to.

In Denver, a turnaround plan for a group of schools became so contentious that it was a top issue in a recent school board election, according to coverage from Education News Colorado.

In Philadelphia, Superintendent Arlene Ackerman has embraced the restart model, welcoming charter school networks to take over 15 schools. She’s invested additional resources in another group of 18 schools called “promise academies.” But her efforts have faced resistance, too, including a lawsuit by the teachers union protesting the removal of a teacher who challenged the turnaround plan, the Philadelphia Public School Notebook reports.

And in Kentucky, a principal has removed half of the original teaching staff and changed the name of his school altogether. It’s now called the “Academy @ Shawnee,” Education Week reports.

Read the full package here.

In mid-November 2008, the Brooklyn Arts Academy received notification that it would undergo its annual “school quality review” in about 10 days. Every public school in the city of New York is subject to a SQR. The results, published online, provide feedback to school leaders and information to the public. The SQR specifically focuses on how schools gathered and analyzed data in order to improve instruction. During the 2008-09 school year, a school could be rated as underdeveloped, underdeveloped with proficient features, proficient, or well developed. Our administrators believed the school met the criteria for proficiency, but our reviewer saw things differently.

In the days leading up to the SQR, school administration made a hasty but concerted effort to prepare Brooklyn Arts Academy to receive the best rating possible. First, teachers were required to attend a meeting in which we were informed about the process and asked to plan particularly engaging lessons during the days of the review. Six of us, myself included, were selected to meet with the reviewer. We were told to familiarize ourselves with the principal’s “school self-evaluation statement” and also given a list of possible interview questions from which to prepare.

Additionally, the assistant principal emailed all teachers five days before the review requesting that we submit 3-8 “learning targets” from our classes to her, ASAP. We were told to phrase these learning targets in the form of “I can” statements, and that each target should reflect what we hoped our students should know and be able to do by the end of the semester. I hadn’t previously articulated specific learning targets, but I took a look at my curriculum, wrote some up based on my assessments, and submitted them.

Three days later, I received another email from the assistant principal. This time, my learning targets had been entered across the top of a spreadsheet. The names of my students were written in the left-hand column. I was to rate each student, for each learning target, as having demonstrated mastery (M), proficiency (P), or as “not yet” having demonstrated proficiency (NY). So I retroactively went back and translated my students’ grades on different assessments from As to Ms, Bs and Cs to Ps, and Ds or Fs to NYs. The AP admitted freely that the SQR motivated her request, but she also explained that filling out this chart now would help us monitor student progress in the future.

A day before the review, we received one final email from the assistant principal. This one was titled “Are you differentiating tomorrow?” and asked us to email her back with a description of our lesson if we were planning to teach in a way that offered different tasks and goals to students with different skill levels.

On the day of the review, a Monday, I walked into the school and saw that the hallways had been repainted. Intriguing quotes from progressive educational theorists such as Paulo Freire and Alfie Kohn now adorned the walls.

The reviewer, though, saw right through our superficial preparations. By the time he met with the group of teachers in the afternoon, he’d clearly made up his mind about the school. We’d been told to expect questions about our own teaching, and I’d even brought a binder with me in case I needed to refer to my curriculum or assessments. But the reviewer was more interested in asking our opinions of the administrators. We praised our assistant principal for her efforts at being a larger presence in our classroom and muted our criticisms of the principal. The reviewer nodded knowingly at our comments, and even used the adjective “airy-fairy” to describe the principal.

In his write-up, the reviewer specifically critiqued the school’s lack of consistency, noting that it led to “insecurity amongst teachers and at times mixed messages for students.” He also noted that many students were not being challenged and that there was no clear mechanism for using data to help plan differentiated instruction. He singled out the assistant principal for commendation and also praised the teachers as “enthusiastic, committed, mutually supportive and keen to develop their practice as part of a learning organization.” The principal was likewise praised for his “clear vision for the further development of the school.” The school was rated underperforming with proficient features.

After being informed of the rating, the principal and AP jointly emailed the teachers and staff. The email was humble and self-reflective, praising us for our participation and outlining the results of the review. At the same time, the principal noted that the rating would “feel like a rebuke given the hard work we’ve been doing and the high stakes nature of this exercise.” He would appeal the rating, though it would not be overturned.

The low rating on this SQR did motivate some deeper structural changes. Indeed, the future path of the school may have been fundamentally altered as a result of it.

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio is organizing a “Parent Day of Action” against the city’s 4,100 planned teacher layoffs. Yesterday, de Blasio launched a website featuring videos of parents speaking out against the cuts. Tomorrow, starting in Brooklyn during the morning commute, de Blasio will be joined by parent volunteers to collect anti-layoff testimonials from other New Yorkers at sites throughout the city. The testimonials will be posted in real time to de Blasio’s Twitter and YouTube pages and to his own parent advocacy site, according to spokesman Matthew Wing.

In Manhattan, parents and teachers in the Brandeis High School campus are rallying at 5:30 p.m. against the potential addition of a charter school, Upper West Success Academy. The rally precedes a public hearing about the co-location, which would bring an elementary school into a building that so far has only middle and high school students. The hearing is sure to draw supporters of Upper West Success, one of few schools in Eva Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network that is not named in the UFT-NAACP lawsuit.

And in the Bronx, student activists are planning a half-hour march at the end of their school day to demand that the city use federal funds to help more low-performing schools. The students, from the Urban Youth Collaborative and other groups, are walking to Banana Kelly High School, which the city announced earlier this month would receive new funding and supports, from Samuel Gompers High School, which was not included in the city’s “restart” plans.

Attending one (or more) of tomorrow’s events? Send pictures and comments to tips@gothamschools.org.

Flier faxed today to City Councilman Robert Jackson

The main purpose of a charter school parent rally tomorrow is to demand that the NAACP withdraw from a lawsuit that threatens some charter schools. But not everyone being recruited to the rally is being told that the NAACP is its intended target.

The office of City Councilman Robert Jackson received a fax at 3:33 p.m. that asks elected officials to “support us and come speak at the rally tomorrow.” The fax, whose origin was not identified, says the rally is “to save our schools from the lawsuit” and is signed “Harlem Parents.”

Jackson, who chairs the council’s education committee, is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by the UFT and NAACP to stop 22 school closures and prevent 17 charter schools from opening, moving, or expanding.

In fact, more than 1,600 parents have signed on to a letter to the NAACP, according to Kerri Lyon, a spokeswoman for the New York City Charter School Center, which is supporting the rally. “They clearly know who is standing in their way,” Lyon said.

But when the NYC Charter School Center sent a flyer by email to a Brooklyn charter school on Monday, it did not bill the rally as being focused on the NAACP. A parent at the mom-and-pop school sent the flyer to GothamSchools.

“Fight for your ability to choose where your children can attend school,” the flyer exhorted, asking for RSVPs to a phone number at the center. The flyer said that the UFT and NAACP had filed a lawsuit to stop charter school co-locations but did not single out the NAACP’s involvement.

“My understanding was that the rally was simply to denounce the lawsuit,” the parent said.

The parent said she didn’t feel great about “the switcheroo” but said she still supported the rally. “It does make sense to call out the NAACP, though,” she said. “It seems to me they are playing politics and don’t understand [charter schools'] long-term benefits to their entire African-American community.”

A group of students from Isaac Newton Middle School screened their spots last night at the Midtown headquarters of advertising giant McCann Erickson (the same company that bought Sterling Cooper two seasons ago on the TV show “Mad Men”).

“Bullying is a topic that is all around the world, so we’re trying to send a message about it,” said Brandon Simmons, a seventh grader. Then he switched to pitch mode: “Our intended audience is students.”

Simmons and his classmates, sixth-graders Genessy Vasquez and Karina Pena, made the commercial in an after-school program, called “Ad Lab,” created by the nonprofit Citizen Schools.

The thirteen students in the Ad Lab program have been working on the commercials since February. After the group decided to address bullying, each student picked jobs: Simmons was the art director for his commercial, while Pena was the director. Then they began a process that included analyzing commercials, then copywriting and pitching ideas before shooting, editing, and finally presenting their spots.

Last year, a video about the Ad Lab program was featured on YouTube and garnered over 150,000 views. Three schools are adding the program next year, according to Aidan Thomas, who created the program.

In his commercial, Simmons plays Karma, clad in a cape, shutter-shade sunglasses, and a large, K-shaped pendant. Thanks to his intervention, a bully ends up with juice all over her shirt, while the teased party gets a sharp new outfit. As Simmons put it before the screening: “That’s what karma’s all about: what goes around, comes around.”

The rest of the students, all middle schoolers from the East Harlem school, created two other commercials. One depicts the conflicted conscience of a potential bully (in “Angel & Devil”) while another imagines a school where everyone communicates by singing, and picks on the one girl who chooses to talk (in “Locker Slam”).

In response to years of pressure from parents and anti-bullying activists, the city announced in February that it would require school safety personnel to be trained on bullying issues.

Dane Wimer, Wayne Ruiz, and April Santos film their commercial.

Citizen Schools, which currently operates in six city schools, makes projects like Ad Lab the centerpieces of its school improvement model. (Its New York City executive director, Nitzan Pelman, is also on GothamSchools’ board.) The organization places volunteers and Americorps teachers in after-school programs in middle schools and asks them to develop “apprenticeships” for students along with the school staff. The apprenticeships, usually 10-week-long programs, give students an experience of fields like science, marketing and journalism, that culminates in presentations called “WOW! events.”

The apprenticeships are a component of a larger “career and college connection” curriculum, which Citizen Schools says encourages the middle schoolers to map out a plan towards a specific career. “If they know where they want to go, then they have a goal,” said Stacey Gilbert, a Citizen Schools spokeswoman.

Thomas, who has worked as a Citizen Schools Teaching Fellow at Isaac Newton for two years, said he was in a unique position to start Ad Lab: His mother, Joyce King Thomas, was formerly McCann Erickson’s chief creative officer. Together, they created the first iteration of the program, in the spring of 2010.

Videos of the advertisements, available below, will also be posted on YouTube.

Flyer outside Harlem Success Academy 1 on Tuesday. (Tony Richards)

Charter school parents and advocates are planning a massive rally tomorrow to demand that the NAACP withdraw from the city teachers union’s school closure lawsuit.

The UFT is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit to halt 22 school closures and prevent 17 charter schools from opening, moving, or expanding. But the New York State Conference of the NAACP also signed on, as it did last year to a similar suit that ultimately blocked 19 school closures. Last year’s suit did not challenge the city’s charter school co-location plans.

Organizers expect the rally to draw thousands of attendees from dozens of charter schools, including all 17 named in the lawsuit, to 125 Street in Harlem at 8:45 a.m. Thursday. At least some schools are delaying classes to allow parents, teachers, and students to attend.

Critics of the lawsuit “can march and have rallies all day long,” said Hazel Dukes, president of the state NAACP chapter. “We will not respond.”

Dukes said she joined the lawsuit for the same reason that the NAACP brought the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, which ended “separate but equal” schooling based on race. “Co-location is not the answer,” Dukes said. “We are setting up separate and unequal education.”

But city officials and charter school advocates say the civil rights group is working to stymie school options that would benefit mostly minority students. When the suit was filed last week, Chancellor Dennis Walcott said he was “perplexed and bothered and bewildered” by the NAACP’s involvement. Last year, he decried the organization for signing on to the union’s school closure lawsuit.

“The NAACP are the people who I think are perhaps misplaced here,” said Kathleen Kernivan, a charter school parent who plans to attend the rally. “I’m an African-American woman. Why would the NAACP get involved in something that would negatively impact me, its constituents, and its future constituents?”

Preparations for the rally were already underway at some city schools yesterday. Parents at Harlem Success Academy 1, one of six schools in the Success Charter Network affected by the lawsuit, were called to an emergency meeting before school Tuesday.

“The teachers union and NAACP sued to kick our children out. We need to fight to keep our schools open,” read a flyer handed out to parents who attended the meeting. “ALL parents, teachers, scholars and staff will attend a rally to fight to keep our schools open.”

Meeting attendees also received phone numbers of local NAACP leaders and the template for sending a letter to Dukes requesting a meeting and that the organization pull out of the lawsuit.

“Any parent that wants to meet with me, I will meet with them anywhere they want,” Dukes said. But about the rally, she said, “We’re not even going to dignify it with a response.”

HSA 1 will not open until 10 a.m. Thursday, allowing students to attend the rally with their parents, the flyer says. “Bring your scholar to the rally,” the flyer reads, later saying, “Parents need to take children back to school after the rally. We know it’s hard, but we want all children to be safe.”

“We never miss school,” said a teacher at Success Charter school who contacted GothamSchools about the rally. “It could almost be a blizzard outside and we still come to school so the fact that we are getting a delay on Thursday is a big deal here.”

Kernivan has a son in second grade at a Brooklyn charter school that’s not affected by the lawsuit and a daughter who just got off the wait list at Leadership Preparatory Ocean Hill Charter School, whose opening is in jeopardy. She said she began receiving text messages from other charter school parents about the rally yesterday and plans to attend, after dropping her daughter off at day care, even though it means she will have to work late.

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Kernivan said.

Guidance counselor Joe Nofal at work in East Flatbush. (Courtesy of Nofal)

Like all of his colleagues, Joe Nofal begins his work day by 8:05 a.m., when staff members at the Brooklyn middle school hold a morning meeting. But Nofal technically isn’t on the school’s staff.

That’s because Nofal sits in the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of teachers whose jobs have been eliminated but who are still being paid by the Department of Education.

The city assigns teachers in the reserve, known as ATRs, to work as long-term substitutes. But officials say they would rather take ATRs off the payroll altogether. Ex-Chancellor Joel Klein’s last message to principals before he left the DOE took aim at ATRs: He asked for permission to lay off the reserve teachers, saying that the city was spending as much as $100 million a year to support teachers who “don’t care to, or can’t, find a job.”

Nofal’s daily life troubles Klein’s characterization. Having worked as a guidance counselor for six years, Nofal both wants a job in a school and is working in one: The DOE assigned him to a middle school in East Flatbush, where he is one of three guidance counselors offering mandated counseling sessions to 40 students a week. He also sits on a team of teachers that assesses students before recommending them for special education services, has worked directly with parents, and once brought in a representative of the District Attorney’s office to speak about gang activity.

Most of Nofal’s day, like that of many guidance counselors, is spent responding to events as they arise. “A lot of the day is handling crisis situations,” he said. “If a kid is having a hard time in the classroom, we’ll pull them out and speak with them.”

Nofal’s work at his current school closely resembles what he did for four years as a guidance counselor at Brooklyn’s P.S. 114, which cut his position last year: “I’m still in charge of mandated [for special education services] kids,” he said. “I’m still helping in the classroom. It’s basically the same.”

Nofal began his career in Florida after earning a master’s degree in counseling. When he moved to New York, he landed a job at P.S. 114 in Canarsie, a poorly managed school that narrowly avoided closure this year. Last year, Nofal was told his position was being cut for budget reasons and he was being excessed. In debt because a former principal refused to make spending cuts, P.S. 114 excessed two guidance counselors and six teachers last year, a P.S. 114 teacher told GothamSchools in January.

“I was told that they couldn’t afford me in their budget,” said Jessica Shirley, the other guidance counselor excessed from P.S. 114 in 2010. She has spent the year as an ATR at the Brooklyn Generation School.

Nofal and Shirley were among nearly 2,000 teachers excessed last year as city schools slashed their spending. More than half of them, 54 percent, were hired by other principals before school started in September.

But Nofal said he didn’t even know he should be looking for another permanent position. “I wasn’t familiar with being an ATR,” he said. “After speaking with my principal and the union, I was under the impression that I would return to 114 at the end of the summer.”

In fact, principals were told that teachers they excessed would be placed elsewhere this fall, according to Barbara Morgan, a department spokeswoman.

The city has criticized ATRs for failing to use the online job placement process, called the Open Market System, to look for a new position. But Nofal said he didn’t receive information about the online listings. And Shirley said she received only partial information about her future. “I was told by my principal that I would be getting a call,” she said. “I didn’t know the specifics.”

Two days before the beginning of the semester, Nofal was told by email that he would be placed at the East Flatbush middle school. The first time he met his coworkers was while they were planning the year’s schedule of events. “It was extremely uncomfortable,” he said.

From the beginning of the year, Nofal regularly checked the Excess Staff Selection System, a job board created for ATRs, to no avail. “I uploaded my resume to the site, my cover letter,” he said. “But the jobs didn’t change. From September until March the same jobs were up.”

Nofal faces a steep challenge. Most ATRs are licensed to teach subjects that are in demand, such as bilingual and special education, but many are eligible only for jobs that have virtually disappeared in the current budget climate. There were 155 guidance counselors in the ATR pool in mid-April, Morgan said.

Nofal has made the tried to make the best of his temporary position. “After a period of getting used to it here, I feel like I’m getting along with everyone,” he said. “I feel like I’m getting along with the teachers.”

And most importantly, he said, he feels attached to his students: “I have a relationship with the kids. We’re making progress, and I don’t want to abandon that now.”

His hard work might pay off: Nofal and Shirley both say their principals told them in the last week that they would be hired permanently, as long as the schools’ budgets allow.

But after last year’s experience, Nofal said he knows better than to assume that he will continue working with the same students next year. “It’s up in the air whether I will be at the same school, with the same kids,” he said. “With budget cuts, it’s a question mark where I’ll be next year.”

That’s because schools are facing the prospect of once again trimming their budgets and eliminating positions. Their cuts could send additional teachers into the ATR pool and force the city to reshuffle where teachers without permanent positions are working.

“It would be awful to have to start again, but I would do that if I have to,” Shirley said.

Lisa Nielsen: Students should be free to opt out of school.

The city Department of Education has adopted a laser-like focus on sending its graduates to college. But that doesn’t mean all of its employees are on board.

Lisa Nielsen, who works in the DOE’s office of educational technology, is advancing the idea that not only is college not for everyone, neither is high school. In the Community section today, Nielsen explains why she put together a guide to help teenagers figure out how to “opt out” of high school and continue learning and developing on their own.

She writes:

Despite outdated constraints involving issues like seat time, student funding, and resource allocation, we are making progress toward bringing more personalized and engaging learning opportunities to students through a handful of efforts, such as the iSchool and the Innovation Zone. But while students are doing better in a more innovative climate, ultimately we are just using updated tools to meet narrow and outdated measures on which our students, teachers, and school leaders are judged.

It is not enough to personalize learning for everyone to go down the same path — to college, without consideration of what comes next. Instead, schools need to embrace the many alternatives to the traditional college route that would better meet the needs of many learners today. What is missing at the DOE is the important work of letting students discover, define, and develop their own passions, talents, and interests and determine personalized, meaningful, and authentic measures of success.

Nielsen, who writes the blog The Innovative Educator, told me she hears frequently from teachers who say they fear they are boring students by teaching a test-driven curriculum. But when she tries to talk about the issue with other administrators at the DOE, she told me, it’s usually dismissed. “I feel like the conversation is not up for discussion,” she said.

That wasn’t true in the past at the department, said Nielsen, who has worked for the DOE for more than a decade. Under former Deputy Chancellor for Teaching and Learning Carmen Farina, who resigned in 2006, schools were encouraged to adopt programs that let students’ passions guide at least part of what they learned, Nielsen said.

“We were moving in the right direction and I was hopeful,” she said. “It’s not like the whole time I’ve been working in education I’ve been sad about what I’ve been seeing.”

The current climate might be exemplified by the disclaimer Nielsen pasted at the end of her Community post: “The views expressed in this piece are Nielsen’s alone and do not represent the opinions or endorsement of the NYC DOE or any other entity.”

The Teenagers Guide to Opting Out Not Dropping Out of School

I have more than a decade’s worth of experience in educational innovation. I spend my days working with administrators, teachers, and students finding ways to innovate learning in an effort to establish student learning environments that are more engaging, authentic, and connected to real life. I’ve worked in various capacities such as technology coach, literacy coach, and educational technology professional development manager, and I currently serve as a technology innovation manager at the DOE. Before that I did similar work for Teachers College Innovations at Columbia University.

I am fortunate to work for an agency that focuses on and embraces technology and innovation. Despite outdated constraints involving issues like seat time, student funding, and resource allocation, we are making progress toward bringing more personalized and engaging learning opportunities to students through a handful of efforts, such as the iSchool and the Innovation Zone. But while students are doing better in a more innovative climate, ultimately, we are just using updated tools to meet narrow and outdated measures on which our students, teachers, and school leaders are judged. It is not enough to personalize learning for everyone to go down the same path — to college, without consideration of what comes next. Instead, schools need to embrace the many alternatives to the traditional college route that would better meet the needs of many learners today. What is missing at the DOE is the important work of letting students discover, define, and develop their own passions, talents, and interests and determine personalized, meaningful, and authentic measures of success.

This is why I have published an online guide that helps teens leave school. Recognizing that I am no better than a high school dropout, I created ”The Teenager’s Guide to Opting Out (Not Dropping Out) of School” because for many students, school has become a barrier, rather than a sanctuary, for learning. You need only spend a few minutes on Facebook groups like ”Parents & Kids Against Standardized Testing” and “Testing is not Teaching!” to get a sense of the frustration felt by parents about school systems that prioritize testing over the mental and physical well-being of children. You need only attend education conferences, like the recent iNacol Virtual School Symposium where the audience replied with a resounding “BORING” to the keynote speaker’s request for “one word to describe high school,” to realize something has gone very wrong. ”The Teenager’s Guide to Opting Out (Not Dropping Out) of School“ is geared directly at teens who don’t fit the standardized mold and are desperate for a life customized to their personal goals for learning and plans for success.

I also created this guide for the teenager I was back in the 1980s when I had no idea there were alternative options to traditional school. I thought my options were simply to graduate or drop out. I feel for today’s youth who, like me, dislike sitting still all day being told what to do. Instead of finding an environment more suited to student needs, they are being medicated at extraordinary rates to help them comply with the institutionalized setting. As movies such as ”Race to Nowhere” suggest, we also have students who are becoming physically and emotionally ill as a result of school, even to the point of suicide, and schools are telling parents flat out that they don’t care.

The guide was also written for those like my cousin Adam Ritter, a valedictorian-track high school honors student who said this to me:

School is torture because I am required to spend all my time doing menial tasks, worksheets, and rote memorization. This takes too much time away from being able to discover my hobbies, interests, or passions. I’m in tenth grade and I don’t foresee having the ability to do that before I graduate high school.

Not only is this situation hurting our children directly, but we are losing some of our most passionate teachers. Earlier this year, I met one such teacher who explained she was being forced to turn her vibrant, passion-filled classroom into a bubble-sheet-completion factory.  I asked if she could just close her door and continue the work she had been doing, but she explained there was no way out: Administrators do drive-by test prep collection. She and many others have reached out to me in desperation. They explain they can no longer stand feeling morally responsible for taking the light out of their students’ eyes with a test-prep, test-taking curriculum.

“We have an educational system that thinks weighing the animal more frequently is more important than feeding it.” - Stephen Krashen, education professor at the University of Southern California

During a professional development workshop I held last week, a few teachers who are aware that I, like others (i.e. Joe Bowers, Alfie Kohn, Chris Doyle), know standardized tests are poor measures of success for the 21st-century student shared their disappointment with me. They shared that there is so much test prepping, assessments, and tests, that they are left with little to no time for actual teaching and learning. Furthermore, they said, there is no talk of or time for passion-driven learning in today’s data-driven classrooms. They reported that morale is at an all time low, students and teachers feel beaten down, and some are just plain burnt out. With this in mind, it’s no wonder that drop-out rates are as high as they are or that for some, school might not be the preferred setting for learning.

The term “high school dropout” has negative connotations where youth and their parents are often viewed as being lazy or failures (see this heated thread on Facebook on the topic) if they don’t comply with the demands of institutionalized schooling. It implies something is wrong with the student. Sadly with no knowledge of other options, some students do go on to pursue lives that follow the stereotype. “Opt out,” however, is what students do who realize that the problem lies with their schools, rather inside them. As films such as “Race to Nowehere” and “Waiting for ‘Superman‘” show, for many, the problem is indeed the institution. But charter schools are not the only exit strategy for students who don’t want to stay: Instead, they can pursue alternatives to live and learn in their own way.

I aim to illuminate some of these alternatives in ”The Teenager’s Guide to Opting Out (Not Dropping Out) of School.” Contributors include parents and teens who have chosen this unorthodox path with much success. One such contributor is Deven Black, a New York City teacher-librarian, who is a two-time opt out. Black left the Bronx High School of Science at 14, tried again at his local school, and then opted out there, too. He explains that for him, Manhattan was a 12-mile-long, 1.5-mile-wide educational experience. A brief subway or bus ride could deliver him to any one of dozens of museums of art, natural history, craft, or occupation. Or he could emerge from underground into what seemed like a different city where the people spoke Chinese, Italian, Spanish, or Ukrainian and the food in the restaurants were the best kind of spoon-fed learning. He went on to have many successful careers. After finally finding a college that met his criteria he received his college degree at 43. Six years later, tired of restaurant management and looking for something else to do, his son’s elementary school principal suggested he try substitute teaching. It was magic. Deven signed up at a prestigious university, where he got a master’s degree to meet the city’s requirements, and became a full-time teacher at age 50. Now he is getting a second degree so he can remain his school’s librarian. He is still waiting for graduate school to teach him something useful that he doesn’t already know.

The guide dispels myths such as “you can’t be a high school opt-out to get into a good college” and “school actually prepares you for success in life.” It asks questions like, “How can school prepare students for life when all the tools we need to succeed in the world are blocked and banned in school?” and “How can we prepare students for the world when we give them little choice or control to discover, explore, and learn about what it is they are interested in?” It also reveals that even when people such as myself and contributors to this guide do everything they are told, which is basically “get good grades and finish college,” they are often left unsure of where to go or what to do next because the purpose of school has become to make students dependent learners who are good at doing as they are told for school life, rather than critically thinking about success in real life.

“The Teenager’s Guide to Opting Out (Not Dropping Out) of School” aims to empower teens and their parents to unplug from the status quo and take back their learning. For some people, this means opting out of traditional schools and opting into any number of options including attending alternative schools that are not required to submit to the same government mandates, pursuing learning online through an online school or by designing their own learning using Open Education Resources, or by completely claiming their right to own their learning like teenager Leah Miller did. As a high school sophomore at Oakwood School in California, Miller opted out of school. Now she has developed a presentation that outlines why she made that decision. Part of her plan includes a 2-week-long visit to New York City where she can investigate her passion for theater. She says she “plans to explore and soak in the city” and adds, “I know that I will learn bucket loads from this trip.”

My guide provides examples and ideas for individuals interested in opting out of school and opting in to a learner-centered life — one where they are able to pursue passions and outline goals for personalized (not standardized) success, not just in school, but in life.

Lisa Nielsen is a technology innovation manager at the Department of Education. The views expressed in this piece are Nielsen’s alone and do not represent the opinions or endorsement of the NYC DOE or any other entity.