GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The city is developing new tests for all students whose purpose is to evaluate teachers. (Times)
• A teacher whose students all passed a state exam ranked low because their growth was small. (Post)
• Charter school waitlists have grown after more families submitted applications last year. (Post, NY1)
• Chancellor Walcott asked for laxer teacher discipline rules. (GS, Daily News, Post, NY1, Times-Union)
• A top student-athlete at Wings Academy who had been accused of robbery was cleared. (Post)
• A well-regarded Catholic high school for boys in Harlem is closing for financial reasons. (Times)
• Los Angeles high schools are giving students who raise state test scores higher grades, too. (L.A. Times)
• New Jersey’s Supreme Court could order billions of dollars in new school funds today. (WSJ)
• Jean-Claude Brizard is officially Chicago’s schools chief today, under secret terms. (Chicago Tribune)

• An expansive apology from the DOE to exasperated parents. Hint: It’s not real. (Insideschools)
• True or false: UFT : Joel Klein :: NYSUT : Commissioner of State Ed Department. (Ed in the Apple)
• There are organizations out there doing “restarts” with success. In NYC? Who knows. (EdVox)
• A Gates-funded group changed its mission statement to reflect its critics’ fact-check. (Answer Sheet)
• Is the once-bland, now fiery Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss education’s Lou Dobbs? (Jay Greene)
• There’s tons of funding for education advocacy. What about arts education advocacy? (Dewey21C)
• Early childhood advocates are wondering if Head Start can save itself by going for-profit. (Hechinger)
• Despite making gains this year, a group of special ed students were battered by state tests. (Mr. Foteah)
• Linda Darling-Hammond spoke at Teachers College on the value of democratic education. (The Nation)
• Norm Fruchter: Mayor Bloomberg’s comments about public school parents show his true colors. (EdVox)
• N.J. Gov Chris Christie has revised upwards the state’s estimates of its school spending. (Metropolis)
• Student-decorated lunch tables are on display in Union Square to benefit arts in the schools. (NY1)
• A meditation on love on the occasion of finishing NYC Teaching Fellows’ courses. (GS Community)
• An argument that the social networking site Twitter is “a teacher’s best tool.” (GOOD)
• Education Secretary Arne Duncan joins Twitter with a Chicago Bulls lamentation. (Twitter)

The city needs changes in state law to speed and ease teacher firing procedures, Chancellor Dennis Walcott told members of the State Senate in Albany today. He asked legislators to change who judges teacher discipline cases and also the legal standard those cases must meet.

Yet the city’s rules are actually the toughest in the state and in many ways are a model for reform, state and union officials told the senators during a hearing on the state’s 3020-a process, the legal process that governs the discipline of tenured teachers. Districts that want to terminate a tenured teacher must prove their case in a 3020-a hearing.

The hearings process has long been seen as unnecessarily time-consuming and expensive. Statewide, cases routinely take as long as two years to be resolved and some principals choose not to bring cases against teachers rather than have to take on the long and burdensome 3020-a process, senators said.

“I really haven’t met anyone who thinks it’s going swimmingly,” said State Sen. John Flanagan, who convened the hearing.

Until recently, New York City was a case study for how 3020-a hearings could drag on. By last summer, the city was paying more than 700 teachers under investigation to report each day to “rubber rooms.” But after Mayor Bloomberg turned his attention to the rubber rooms, the city and teachers union reached an agreement to close them by speeding up the hearing schedule, paying neutral arbitrators to work more days, and rotating cases randomly among the arbitrators.

The backlog was cleared of all but 16 cases in just four months, by the end of 2010, and the accelerated timeline remains in place. (more…)

Last December, Community Board 12’s executive committee was discussing charter schools when committee members realized something: There were almost as many different perceptions of  charter schools as there were people in the room.

This epiphany, recalled board chair Pamela Palanque-North, was the inspiration for a forum the board held Saturday to give Washington Heights residents the basic facts about charter schools.

“This is an opportunity for us to have something called an educational intervention,” Palanque-North said in her opening remarks at the forum, titled “Our Children, Our Choices: An Informative Discussion on Public and Charter School Options.” About 35 neighborhood residents attended the event, which was organized by the board’s youth and education committee and translated live into Spanish.

The panel included charter school advocates and also critics, such as sociologist Pedro Noguera and the public school teacher who directed a new movie that takes aim at the idea that charter schools can fix all educational ills.

But perhaps as notable as who sat on the panel was who did not: a representative from the city Department of Education. Community Board 12 had advertised that Chancellor Dennis Walcott would speak on the morning’s first panel, although DOE officials said Walcott had never agreed to appear. (more…)

I finished my last graduate courses on Tuesday. As I walked to the train talking with a colleague who had begun the NYC Teaching Fellows program at the same time as me, he remarked on how different we had become since that first summer during our initial training before entering the classroom. How innocent we were then! Teaching changes you, indelibly.

I remember how on top of the world I felt at that time, even as I knew the challenges that awaited me. I had been a manager at a demanding and innovative grocery retailer and was physically fit, accustomed to breaking down pallets of heavy groceries, dealing with crazy customers, and working on one full meal a day with 4-6 hours of sleep and a 1 1/2 hour to 2-hour commute each way on what was generally a middle-of-the-night series of subway trains. Yes! I finally had adapted to NYC after a recent move from Lake Tahoe and felt I was ready to tackle anything. Phew. Folks. What hubris, what folly.

See, the thing is that teaching takes much more than simple ambition, physical drive, stamina, and dedication. It takes deep internal spiritual and emotional wellsprings to maintain composure and constancy. Every facet of your being will be challenged, every hidden assumption, every underlying prejudice, every underdeveloped part of your psyche and soul, every trigger of anger or annoyance will be released and exposed and prodded and overturned. You will be scraped hollow. You will be on the verge of mental breakdowns — or actually have them, depending on your level of mental stability. You will nearly break into tears — or actually break into tears, depending on your level of stoicism — in front of other adults or students. Oh yes. Teaching changes you.

And there will be days when you wonder, given how close to the breaking point you can come, just at what point a human mind becomes broken and can no longer be made whole again. (more…)

News from New York City:

• PTAs around the city vary widely in how much they raise and can spend. (Daily News)
• Educators 4 Excellence is among many ed policy groups to get Gates Foundation funds. (Times)
• Mayor Bloomberg is under fire over the comments he made about parents. (Times, Daily News, NY1)
• He also reassured a kindergarten teacher with five years’ experience she won’t be a laid off. (Post)
• Special education policy changes have led to a backlog in evaluations. (GothamSchools)
• East New York school marching band members were abandoned on their way to a festival. (Daily News)
• Students at PS 181 in East Flatbush are enjoying a playground they designed themselves. (Daily News)
• Albor Ruiz: Cutting after-school programs now will cost even more in the future. (Daily News)

And beyond:

• President Obama used his weekly radio spot to say that incentives can turn schools around. (AP)
• A portrait of Bridgeport High School in Washington State, where Obama didn’t opt to visit. (Times)
• Michelle Rhee and George Parker, D.C.’s former union chief, are teaming up for reform. (Times)
• Los Angeles’s teachers union is seeking a court order to stop new teacher evaluations. (L.A. Times)
• Levittown, Penn., epitomizes the performance and budget troubles facing American schools. (Times)
• A Connecticut teacher offers a 5-week class on current events after the AP history exam is over. (Times)
• Some school districts are turning to online lessons to make up school days cancelled due to snow. (AP)

• Bloomberg: Parents supporting struggling schools “don’t understand the value of education.” (City Room)
• A new weekly email newsletter will send teachers best-practice research on instruction. (BPW)
• Think tank education studies are more likely to be covered than academic studies. (Ed Week)
• PISA scores from around the world suggest lots of studying time doesn’t always pay off. (Hechinger)
• Pawlenty’s presidential plans could make education a topic in the 2012 election. (Politics K12)
• Steve Brill’s new book, Class Warfare, goes inside “the fight to fix America’s schools.” (Facebook)
• A list of ways to help educators accept change that comes strangely courtesy of IBM. (Ed Week)
• P.S. 9, the popular Upper West Side school, will phase out its gifted program. (Insideschools)
• A heartfelt thank you to our friend Anna Phillips; they are lucky to have you. (GothamSchools)

Bumps in rolling out new special education rules are holding up crucial assessments of the city’s youngest students, advocates say.

Consequences could be severe if the assessments aren’t completed by the June 15 deadline. Students who don’t receive placements by that date but do need special education services are entitled to full reimbursement of private school tuition dollars, according to state law.

That’s not likely to happen: Even in a typical year there aren’t enough private school placements for all the students who are entitled to them. But the crunch does suggest the city faces difficulties in cutting its growing expenditures on private school special education placements, which Mayor Bloomberg complained last year costs the city $100 million annually.

Months into the rollout of a set of special education reforms meant in part to integrate disabled children into their neighborhood schools, advocates report that the city is scrambling to evaluate children with special needs who will be entering kindergarten this fall.

“It’s going to be really difficult to get things into place for a large number of families of students who are going to come into kindergarten next year,” said Maggie Moroff, the coordinator of the ARISE Coalition, which supports special education advocates. (more…)

Dear Readers,

After two plus years at GothamSchools, I am signing off. Today is my last day working with two of the top education reporters in the country — Elizabeth Green and Philissa Cramer — who have graciously shared their wisdom and friendship with me, and whom I will deeply miss.

Assuming that the apocalypse will not occur this weekend, I have accepted a job covering New York City education issues for The New York Times. And as of June 1, that’s where you can find me.

I’d say it speaks well of GothamSchools that the NYT has acknowledged its work, but I don’t think it ever needed the recognition. It’s been an honor to help Elizabeth, Philissa, and Maura Walz build this site into a singular and irreplaceable institution. I know it will remain that way.

(And let me say for anyone applying to fill my seat: this is a fun job. And this office has a great view of Manhattan. How many people have fun jobs? Other than Michelle Obama, how many?)

Thank you for reading, for commenting, for contributing, and yes, on occasion, for correcting. And if it’s not too uncouth, I hope to win you over to my new side of the Internet. But I know that will be a fight.

For now, I’m off to go camping.

best,

Anna

Collin Lawrence is a former New York City teacher who is recounting his four years working at a Brooklyn high school. Read Collin’s previous posts.

When I taught at the Brooklyn Arts Academy, I loved Fridays. Before school, I sometimes bought myself breakfast as a reward for making it through the week. In class, Fridays were often quiz days. Watching my usually rambunctious students working diligently on their exams made me feel proud. At the end of class, I enjoyed walking around and chatting with them about their weekend plans. I also liked to stand in the hallway after school and watch our students interact. Many stopped by to shake my hand on their way out of the building. I felt elation and relief that another week was over.

My fellow teachers shared these Friday highs. The support and camaraderie of my colleagues kept me going through the school year. Despite the fact that I’m a relatively reserved person, I had, by virtue of my longevity at the school and ability to motivate others, been designated the unofficial social coordinator of the staff. Sometimes, I’d send out an email inviting people to happy hour while other times I just went around Friday afternoon to find out who might be interested.

There was a core group of five of six of us who were the regulars at Friday happy hours, but every teacher on staff came out at one point or another. We didn’t always go to the same place, but we had two or three locations, in walking distance of the school, that we went to with some consistency. Once we had drinks, the commiseration began. Though a small school, we actually didn’t have much chance to talk to teachers who weren’t on our grade-level teams during the week. So Friday afternoon was a good chance to compare notes. We talked primarily about two topics: students and administration.

We vented about the students who disrespected us and gushed about the students who were making us proud. Since I’d taught for three years at this point, I often fielded questions from the new 11th- and 12th-grade teachers about how to handle specific students I’d taught as 10th-graders. These teachers gave me a lot of positive feedback, sharing what former students said about my teaching. Though I never knew exactly what my administration felt about my performance, my colleagues made me feel appreciated when they spoke of my reputation among their students. (more…)