GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• A DOE tech official who resigned is seen to have helped her partner gain city contracts. (Daily News)
• Some worry the creation of a core curriculum at CUNY will limit its more selective colleges. (Times)
• Mayor Bloomberg said the UFT is creating “havoc and disruption” with its school closure lawsuit. (Post)
• The Daily News says the UFT’s school closure lawsuit shows the union is not working for kids.
• The State Senate will hold a hearing Monday on discipline processes for teachers. (Post)
• Teachers and staff at Academic Leadership Charter say it illicitly screens students. (GothamSchools)
• City officials say they will open a new elementary school at Peck Slip, but not until 2015. (Tribeca Trib)
• The playground at Brooklyn’s PS 39 will be closed for three years, upsetting families. (Daily News)
• Parents at Manhattan’s PS 42 say explicit paintings at an adjacent gallery are inappropriate. (Post)
• A nonprofit group visited 100+ schools to help students express feelings about Japan’s tsunami. (NY1)
• Parents in the Bay Area say they have to fight to get their children special education services. (Times)
• Los Angeles is pushing to lay off librarians by arguing that they don’t teach. (L.A. Times)

• Most city schools have gym teachers now, but too few have adequate gym space. (Insideschools)
• The new movie meant to rebut “Waiting for ‘Superman’” features real, live teachers. (Socialist Worker)
• Many are asking if college is worth the high price. Andy Rotherham answers yes. (School of Rock)
• An Al Shanker quote Joel Klein has been using in anti-union speeches is likely apocryphal. (Edwize)
• City Council members are pushing back against the city’s proposed day care cuts. (Daily Politics)
• Calling themselves “Chiefs of Change,” state ed heads call for changes in federal aid. (Politics K-12)
• Republicans and Democrats seems unable to communicate about changes to NCLB. (Rick Hess)
• Find out how much of your city taxes went to fund education thanks to a new calculator. (MBPO.org)
• School funding advocates are launching a “Reality Tour” about school budget cuts. (Capital Tonight)
• California’s teacher of the year explains why teaching to the test is sometimes a good thing. (ASCD)
• Georgia school boards that once rejected charter schools will now get to decide if they survive. (AJC)
• Our story about Academic Leadership Charter School cuts at a key charter critique. (Daily Intel)

A change to the city’s high school admissions timeline could alleviate eighth-graders’ anxiety.

In the past, eighth-graders did not all find out at the same time where they had been admitted to high school. Some students — those who won admission to the city’s elite specialized high schools or to LaGuardia High School, a performing arts school — found out in mid-February where they got in. Students who didn’t apply to those schools or weren’t admitted didn’t learn what high school had accepted them until late March.

Starting next year, all high school applicants will find out at the same time in February where they are headed to high school, according to an Insideschools report about tweaks to the admissions process.

The change will likely come as a relief to students, many of whom found the two-part schedule stressful. In March, eighth-grader Audrey Bachman wrote in the Community section about “the empty feeling of not knowing” where she would go to high school after many of her classmates already knew their options:

But when I think about all of this, all this drama and emotion … all for one thing that is determined by some test?  What 13-year-old should have to deal with this? The fact that the high school process in New York City is set up in a way that makes some kids feel like losers and some kids feel like winners in the end is not a very good life lesson.

The Academic Leadership Charter School, founded in 2009, is housed inside Mother Hale Academy, a district school in the South Bronx.

A South Bronx charter school is screening children for admission based on their performance on academic tests, according to parents and several current and former employees of Academic Leadership Charter School.

As a charter school, Academic Leadership is required by New York state law to admit students through a random lottery. But multiple parents and staff members described a process designed by the school’s director to weed out low-performing students.

Four parents who tried to enroll their children at Academic Leadership, an elementary school, this year or last year said that school employees tested their children before deciding whether or not to accept them.

“They took my son to a class to watch him in the class and see if everything was okay. He was in the class an hour,” said Khalilur Munshi, describing his experience with the school this winter.

Dissatisfied with his neighborhood school, Munshi had taken his son, a second-grader, to Academic Leadership to try to enroll him in the middle of the school year. An employee told him that the second grade had open slots and no waiting list, and then his son was taken to sit in on the class, Munshi said.

When his son returned, a staff member told Munshi that there actually was a waiting list and that school officials would let him know if a spot opened up.

“I could tell they weren’t going to take my son,” he said. After the visit, he called the school three times to check on the status of the waiting list and never heard back.

Several former and current school employees said that the school’s director and founder, Norma Figueroa-Hurwitz, a long-time New York City educator, orders teachers to test applicants in order to admit the most advanced students. The employees all asked to remain anonymous out of concern that speaking on the record would jeopardize their careers in education.

Reached by phone, Figueroa-Hurwitz denied that students were tested before they were admitted and declined to answer further questions. The same day, her husband and the school’s co-founder, Ted Hurwitz, called GothamSchools to respond on Figueroa-Hurwitz’s behalf. He said that the school tests students only after they have been admitted through the lottery for the purpose of “placement.”

Asked why parents would say otherwise, he said, “I don’t know why. I don’t understand that. We do anything and everything we can. We might do that to get a head start, but I can’t understand that personally.” Hurwitz said that he now spends one day a week at the school. (more…)

Parents supporting P.S. 9 and Brooklyn East Collegiate at last night's PEP meeting

A contentious plan to move a charter middle school into Brooklyn’s P.S. 9 was one of six co-locations approved at last night’s school board meeting.

P.S. 9 parents came to the Panel for Educational Policy meeting with a plan of attack against the city’s proposal to move Brooklyn East Collegiate Charter School into the building. One by one, parents took their allotted time to point out specific aspects of the plan that they said were impractical for both schools. They also drew attention to P.S. 9′s own bid to expand into a middle school.

Their expansion plan, however, was not up for consideration and the panel, which has never rejected a co-location proposal, voted to move forward with the space-sharing plan.

Marc Sternberg, the Department of Education’s deputy chancellor for portfolio planning, argued that Uncommon Schools, the charter organization that runs Brooklyn East Collegiate, has a strong record with middle schools. (more…)

• Even as layoffs loom, the city is recruiting 500 new teachers in shortage areas. (Daily News)
• Parents and school leaders are relieved schools are undergoing “restart” and not worse. (Daily News)
• Popular Community Roots Charter School faces expansion opposition. (Times, Gothamschools)
• The union is leading a lawsuit to stop school closures. (GS, Times, Post, Daily News, WNYC, NY1, WSJ)
• Voters in most state districts approved school budgets, including in Albany. (Times, Times Union)
• Statewide, about 1,200 former school officials earn $100,000+ pensions. (Post)
• The Post says public-employee pensions are threatening to debilitate the state’s finances.
• Kingsbridge Innovative Design Charter School is the city’s shortest-lived school. (Daily News)
• The Daily News says the state must stand firm against bids to scale down its teacher evaluation plan.

• A pro-charter school group in Albany waged war on a charter-neutral schools budget. (Times-Union)
• A Brooklyn politician says the settlement paid by Lehman Brothers should go to schools. (Daily Politics)
• More on the issues with teacher data reports in classrooms of high-performing students. (Edwize)
• A profile of GothamSchools says we’re at the frontier of news reporting. (Columbia Journalism Review)
• An argument that lack of teacher turnover costs just as much as turnover itself. (Megan McCardle)
• Joel Klein went stats-free when saying “most” teachers don’t like traditional training. (Dana Goldstein)
• A mural at IS 159 in Dyker Heights is growing as students every year add to it. (City Room)
• Alex Grodd, the founder of an up-and-coming lesson plan sharing site, is a juggler. (Sara Mead)
• Ed Secretary Arne Duncan is pushing ex-DOE deputy John White as Louisiana’s schools chief. (AP)
• Democrats for Education Reform’s L.A. office shares a building with a city rubber room. (DFER.org)

For the second time in two years, the city teachers union is suing to stop the Bloomberg administration from closing schools and opening new ones in their place.

The union’s lawsuit, which it filed along with the NAACP and a host of elected officials and parents, challenges plans to close 22 of the 26 schools that education officials hope to phase out this year.

Last year, the union successfully stopped the city from closing 19 schools by persuading a State Supreme Court judge that the closures violated various requirements in the state’s education law. These ranged from not following the law about public notification of hearing dates to failing to failing to map out the predicted impact of school closures.

This year, the city took pains to follow public notification rules, beginning the process earlier in the year, and by last month, 26 schools had ended up on the chopping block.

Perhaps as a result, the United Federation of Teachers’ argument against closures this year is broader and more complicated. And unlike last year, the union is also seeking to prevent charter schools from moving into public school buildings, charging that the city did not prove the co-locations would be equitable.

“The department continues to insist that phase-outs and closures of schools and co-locating untested schools is the answer, while depriving the remaining students in those designated, 22 schools of the resources to succeed academically,” said Kenneth Cohen of the NAACP at a press conference this morning.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott — who said he learned about the suit not from UFT President Michael Mulgrew but from a reporter this morning — said he was “saddened” by the suit. As deputy mayor, Walcott decried the NAACP last year for its involvement in the school closure lawsuit because he said the group prevented the city from improving school choices.

“We totally disagree with the union,” Walcott said. “We have met the letter of the law and we will continue to meet the letter of the law as far as these schools are concerned.” (more…)

In one of its lower-profile decisions this week, the Board of Regents voted to require districts to recreate exams that the state used to provide.

As part of a slate of cost-cutting measures meant to close an $8 million hole in the state’s testing program, the Regents voted to do away with all high school foreign language exams. Next month, Regents exams in Spanish, French, and Italian will be administered for the last time.

Because passing a foreign language exam is required for students aiming for a Regents diploma with advanced distinction, considered the gold standard of New York State diplomas, districts will have to create local assessments for students who wish to earn credit in those subjects.

New York City already has this experience. The city already offers homespun high school exams that can be used for advanced Regents credit in nearly 20 languages that are either taught in city schools or native languages for significant numbers of city students. The languages include Albanian, Chinese, Polish, and Urdu, among others.

So last year, when the state cut exams in Latin, German, and Hebrew, which had been taken by 4,500 students statewide the previous year, the city decided to develop and administer its own exams in those subjects, according to Matthew Mittenthal, a DOE spokesman. (more…)

• The city’s revised school capital plan shifts spending from physical buildings to technology. (NY1)
• The Board of Regents voted to closed a year-old Bronx charter school in financial trouble. (Post, NY1)
• The state teachers union says it might sue over test-score-heavy teacher evaluation rules. (WNYC)
• Educators 4 Excellence’s founders say using test scores to judge teachers is just fine. (Daily News)
• Teacher Arthur Goldstein says test scores miss a lot of what makes good teaching. (Daily News)
• The Post says John King’s big challenge is wresting the State Ed Department from teachers unions.
• Parents at PS 9 are trying to stop a charter school from moving in. (GothamSchools, Daily News)
• Teenagers who burned PS 29′s playground say they were making a YouTube film. (Brooklyn Paper)