GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• A new data tool allows comparisons of opportunities offered from school to school. (ProPublica)
• The data comes from the U.S. DOE’s civil rights office and show great disparities. (Politics K-12)
• Maybe teachers, like athletes, should be offered premiums rather than incentives. (Matthew Yglesias)
• A teacher says a question on this year’s global studies exam was bad historiography. (GS Community)
• Andy Rotherham: Higher education needs to mend, but not end, tenure rules. (School of Thought)
• Aaron Pallas fires back against Joel Klein, who fired back against Aaron Pallas. (Answer Sheet)
• A main New Jersey charter school funder’s ATM receipt showed a $100 million balance. (Gawker)
• The Miami school Michelle Rhee held up as proof of choice’s benefits got an F. (Miami Herald)
• The UFT’s Michael Mulgrew released a radio ad thanking those who opposed layoffs. (UFT.org)
• Teacher evaluations a top priority at the National Education Association conference. (Teacher Beat)
• On the long, complicated, and sometimes arbitrary history of school co-locations. (Brooklyn Based)
• And we’ll be starting our weekend a day early. Check back for breaking news (and a little surprise)!

A judge today opened the door for construction to start at Brandeis Educational Complex in preparation for a charter school to move into the building.

The hearing was a part of the lawsuit filed by Brandeis parents to stop Upper West Success Academy from opening in the Brandeis campus, which is currently home to five high schools.

The city has said that it needs four weeks to prepare the building for Upper West Success, which would be the only elementary school in the building. Since teachers are set to begin work on August 2 and classes start August 24, construction on an elementary-only cafeteria and multipurpose room would need to begin immediately.

Judge Paul Feinman chose not to extend the temporary restraining order against those plans, saying that it made sense to allow some construction to begin in case the co-location was given a green light.

“I don’t see what harm there is to allow construction on the first floor to move forward,” he said. (more…)

A teacher who left the system to peddle a program he created to make up for shortcomings in the education department’s data system was fined this month by the city’s ethics board.

In 2009, Jesse Olsen was a teacher at Validus Preparatory Academy in the Bronx when he realized the school wasn’t accurately recording students’ attendance patterns. Realizing that the city’s school data clearinghouse, ARIS, couldn’t help, Olsen created a data system of his own, called Impact Solutions. The data system was one of several created around the same time by educators who were frustrated with ARIS.

By September 2010, Impact Solutions had already been picked up for use in 21 city schools, which were paying between $10 and $25 per student per year for the program, and Teach for America had started using it as well, we reported at the time.

Collecting those fees violated city ethics rules, the city’s Conflict of Interest Board ruled this month. The rules prohibit public employees from owning a business that contracts with their agencies and from using their positions to boost their business interests. Olsen violated both regulations when he began selling Impact Solutions to schools throughout the city, COIB ruled.

According to COIB’s report, Olsen didn’t learn that his business ran afoul of city rules until “in or around October 2010.” (more…)

UFT President Michael Mulgrew addresses graduates of Grady High School. Male graduates wore red caps and gowns, and female graduates wore white. Students with blue stoles graduated with Regents diplomas.

A sea of red dotted with white caps made up the graduating class at William E. Grady Career and Technical High School on Monday.

The color contrast on display during Grady’s graduation exercises reflected the school’s stark gender imbalance: 80 percent of students are male. They were the ones wearing red caps and gowns, while female graduates wore white.

Grady’s vocational programs — which include automotive technology, construction trades, and heating and air conditioning repair — tend to enroll mostly male students. A culinary program attracts both men and women. (A cookbook distributed at graduation, titled “We ♥ Julia: The Recipes of the Whisk & Ladle Bistro,” showcased senior culinary arts students’ top recipes, including Cuban black bean soup, Swedish meatballs, and spanakopita.)

But despite the odds, both of Grady’s two top graduates were women. Valedictorian Jannatul Noor is heading to Philadelphia University, and salutatorian Catalina Lucero, who said in her speech that she graduated with an 88 average, will attend the Fashion Institute of Technology. (more…)

As a high school special education teacher and adjunct instructor of education at Pace University, I was deeply concerned by with the nature and content of this month’s Global History and Geography Regents exam. The exam reflected a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of teaching Global History in public high schools and revealed that the New York State Board of Regents is at best conflicted about the purpose of the exam, and at worst wrong in its concept of  what history should be taught.

The recent results of a 2010 NAEP assessment in U.S. History have rightfully been damned by leading figures in the school reform movement as evidence of a startling lack of student knowledge about the history of our country. My experience administering the exam this year showed me that there is a disconnect between the State Board of Regents and teachers on history teaching. The victims of this disconnect are the students who deserve to be appropriately assessed on their understanding of global history but are not.

My main concern about this year’s exam lay with the “Document Based Question,” or DBQ, which asked students to synthesize primary source material into an essay that addressed the concept of human rights using three examples: the Ukrainian famine of the 1920s and 1930s, the Cambodian crisis of 1970s, and the conflicts in Rwanda during the 1990s. (more…)

• Harlem Day Charter School’s takeover is starting with mass student retention and teacher exodus. (WSJ)
• Some students didn’t get diplomas due to chancellor change-induced printing delays. (NY1, Daily News)
• State officials are investigating the financially troubled Believe network of charter schools. (Post)
• Chancellor Walcott said going without notes at graduations means no chance of plagiarism. (Daily News)
• Former State Sen. Craig Johnson, a charter schools supporter, is now working for Bloomberg LP. (Post)
• A Validus Prep student and the assistant principal she once hated are sharing their story. (Daily News)
• A deal to save day care programs means Brooklyn Prospect Charter School has no home. (Daily News)
• Federal prosecutors charged ex-custodians found to have bilked the city of $500,000. (Post, Daily News)
• A judged ruled that a Stuyvesant HS librarian accused of illicit behavior was discriminated against. (Post)
• The Post lambastes the NAACP’s Hazel Dukes for her behavior in the closure and co-location lawsuit.
• The CEO of Civic Builders says there’s no time for schools in the suit to find new space. (Post)
• Richard Whitmire: The debate over school reform is as polarized as that about abortion. (Daily News)

• An open call for principals to talk about their budgets on the radio today yielded not a one. (Brian Lehrer)
• As part of an afterschool program, a PS 1 student reports from a world without math. (Learning Matters)
• A new documentary looks at a transformative writing program at University Heights High School. (GOOD)
• NYSUT’s teacher evaluation lawsuit signals an end to New York’s Race to the Top love affair. (Flypaper)
• Chicago is getting $48 million in federal turnaround funds, but officials aren’t hopeful. (Catalyst)
• A survey by GLSEN found that gay teens report discrimination in New York City schools. (Passport Mag)
• Ed Sec Arne Duncan told state education secretaries to safeguard testing processes. (Answer Sheet)
• School boards are being advised to make the Common Core a group project. (Curriculum Matters)
• Teachers from the Caribbean are asking for help in becoming American citizens. (Daily Politics)

The City Council is requiring the education department to provide more transparent reporting to support claims for two of its signature achievements: higher graduation rates and fewer failing schools.

In the midst of finalizing next year’s city budget, the council managed to pass two bills that target the Department of Education’s bookkeeping. One of them requires the department to disclose more detailed information about students who leave the system without graduation. The second mandates the release of information about students who do not graduate when their high schools close.

Under the first bill, the DOE will be forced to provide more detailed data about student discharge rates, which critics say is overused by schools in order to inflate graduation rates. In 2009, Leonie Haimson, of Class Size Matters, released a report that found discharge rates steadily climbed since 2000. That prompted a state audit that concluded the dropout rate was in fact higher than claims made by the DOE.

Out of 88,612 students from the 2004-2008 cohort, 19 percent – or 17,025 – were discharged and 10 percent – or 9,323 – dropped out, according to the audit.

“This bill will for the first time allow us to know what happened to the thousands of students every year who are discharged from high schools,” Haimson said. “It will make it possible to see if they’re honestly reporting discharge rates. (more…)

Beleaguered Lehman High School could be getting a new principal, just three years after the city gave Janet Saraceno a $25,000 bonus to take the job, the New York Times is reporting.

As a GothamSchools reporter, Anna Phillips broke the story that Saraceno was accused of padding students’ transcripts with courses they didn’t take and grades they didn’t earn. A city investigation followed. Now that she’s reporting for the New York Times, Phillips is continuing to follow the Lehman story, and today’s update is that Saraceno won’t return to Lehman this fall.

Phillips writes that faculty and staff lobbied against Saraceno in an unsigned letter sent to news organizations last month:

The letter, which was not signed, criticized Dr. Saraceno for being “highly unapproachable” and rarely visiting teachers’ classrooms or observing their lessons.

“Perhaps the most egregious example of Dr. Saraceno’s gross negligence is her advocacy for a weak and poorly executed credit recovery program,” the letter states.

“On several occasions Dr. Saraceno has requested, via her assistant principals, that teachers get on board with grade changes simply because we cannot have students not graduate,” the letter says.

A spokeswoman for the principals union told me that the union could not confirm Saraceno’s departure. “We’ve heard that she might leave, but it’s hearsay,” said the spokeswoman, Chiara Coletti. “She’s a very good principal who was put into a school culture very different from the one she came from, and that can’t be easy.”

Students at Alpha School in East New York gather twice a day to form an 'A' shape and recite their code of respect.

Things are looking grim for Alpha School.

Despite the East New York alternative program’s last-minute attempts to convince the state agency that it had made a wrong decision, Alpha School will not be funded by the Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services next year.

Until last week, the program’s director, Barry Addison, had been in talks with OASAS commissioners and had been told to “sit tight.” But yesterday an agency official called to tell Addison, or Mr. B, of their final decision not to restore funding.

“They said, well, a decision was made, and they had closed their budget gap partly with closing me down,” he said. “There was nothing left for me to say.”

One of the city’s GED Plus programs, Alpha School graduated 32 students with GED diplomas last week. It has also garnered widespread community support, from officers in Brooklyn’s 75th precinct and politicians like State Sen. John Sampson.

Mr. B says he’ll spend the summer trying to find private-sector funds to open the school’s doors again in six weeks.

“It’s not what I do, I just don’t know how to reach out to philanthropists,” he said. “But if I’m going to do anything, I have to reach out.”