GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

City Councilmember Robert Jackson speaks at a protest against cuts to arts education on the steps of City Hall.

Roughly 350 arts specialists will be among the 4,000 teacher layoffs next year if the City Council signs onto Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget, according to a report released today by an arts education advocacy group.

Building on 135 arts positions eliminated this school year, the layoffs would amount to a 20 percent reduction in the number of arts teachers working in city schools in just the last three years.

Eight City Council members and dozens of angry parents came to City Hall today to announce the report, prepared by the Center for Arts Education, and to protest the potential cuts.

Gretchen Mergenthaler, whose eight-year-old son Declan attends P.S. 98 in Inwood, said that he is offered either art or music once each week, but no dance or theater.

“We have a gorgeous auditorium that we don’t even use,” Mergenthaler said. “This is a picture of P.S. 98 before any budget cuts. Can you imagine it after?”

Today’s report is an analysis of data that the city has been releasing since it overhauled the way arts funding is allotted to schools. (more…)

• Redone after criticism, online parent elections drew fewer votes and more complaints. (Daily News, Post)
• Gov. Cuomo proposed soothing pension woes in part by making 65 the new retirement age. (Times)
• Third-year teacher Juhyung Harold Lee says he’ll go to law school if layoffs aren’t decided soon. (WNYC)
• City efforts to address space issues could bring settlement in the UFT-NAACP lawsuit. (GothamSchools)
• Chancellor Walcott: I’m even more hurt knowing that the national NAACP supports the suit. (Daily News)
• The fundraising arm of the schools department is starting to track alums from graduation. (Daily News)
• State reviews of four struggling city schools resulted in a recommendation that they be closed. (Post)
• Responding to last year’s student drowning, the city tightened field trip rules. (GothamSchools, Times)
• Parents at PS 107 in Park Slope say a new kindergarten will make the school too crowded. (Daily News)
• A 16-year-old girl was shot just after leaving the Soundview campus in the Bronx. (NY1, CBS New York)
• State lawmakers could decide to raise SUNY and CUNY tuition by 5.5 percent in five years. (NY1)
• Seven parochial schools on Staten Island are closing this year, putting pressure on public schools. (NY1)

• The DOE’s ex-chief operating officer has the same job in Joel Klein’s News Corp. group. (BusinessWeek)
• The Panel for Education Policy is looking to hire help with logistics and compliance. (Simply Hired)
• A muffled recording of last night’s New America Foundation talk on the future of teaching. (Russo)
• Instructions for this week’s Fight Back Friday against budget cuts; 40 schools are participating. (FBF Blog)
• A look at the Broad Superintendents Academy, which this year got 758 applications for 8 spots. (EdWeek)
• Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney isn’t a big fan of common standards. (Politics K-12)
• Teacher Mark Anderson launches a multi-post series on the role of curriculum. (GS Community)
• A mom says her son is bored during the lead-up to the English Regents exam. (Insideschools)
• Educational models are like Apple products: Something new comes out right after you buy. (Jose Vilson)
• What is the UFT doing at MS 216, where teachers say their principal is harassing them? (Ed Notes)
• A former city principal is among the readers weighing in on Diane Ravitch’s “miracle” op/ed. (Times)
• John Merrow of PBS is interviewing Wendy Kopp next week in New York, and vice versa. (JCC)
• An annual talent show highlighted strengths and weakness of Collin Lawrence’s school. (GS Community)
• The New York Times’ tutoring story today looked pretty much just like a similar story last year. (Daily Intel)

A contentious legal battle between the city and the teachers union could be inching toward a settlement as school officials race to re-write plans that are key to the dispute.

In the past month, city officials have revised each of 20 space-sharing plans outlining how charter schools would be housed inside district buildings. The way that previous plans allocated space between charter and district schools is a central criticism of the teachers union’s lawsuit.

The sweeping revision effort is in direct response to the lawsuit, filed May 18, Chancellor Dennis Walcott acknowledged in a statement.

Several of the plaintiffs listed on the lawsuit praised the revisions and indicated that they might lead to an out-of-court settlement.

In a conference call with reporters, Ben Jealous, the president of the NAACP, a lead plaintiff in the suit, said his organization’s ultimate goal was to place all students in their school of choice. “We are open to all options to settle this suit,” he said.

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said in an interview today that he was “happy” with the efforts. UFT lawyers, he said, have expressed cautious optimism that the revised plans would satisfy their demands.

The city’s move means that the plans, many of which were already approved by the Panel for Educational Policy, will require new votes by the PEP and new public hearings to solicit community feedback on their terms. The city began holding new hearings this week. (more…)

The Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the advocacy organization whose historic, years-long lawsuit brought increased funding to the New York City schools, is closing its doors — at least in its current format, The New York Times reported this afternoon.

The organization’s last employee, Executive Director Helaine Doran, will leave at the end of the month because the group has run out of funding, the Times reports.

The development comes despite the fact that the dollars won by the group’s lawsuit have fallen far short of what was promised in a settlement between the group and the state in 2007.

The Times is right to describe the development as part of a greater shift in the way that philanthropists think about education advocacy, one that has made groups like former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee’s Students First active in New York City while the Campaign for Fiscal Equity struggled. The old mantra was that urban districts failed because they have been historically under-funded; now, advocates are more likely to argue that funding is necessary but not sufficient. (Another budget watchdog, the Educational Priorities Panel, dissolved in 2007, also due to a loss of funding.)

But it’s also possible that the dissolution of CFE could actually signal a renaissance of its original efforts: litigation aimed at forcing New York to spend more on needy school districts. (more…)

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott listens to a student presentation on their school's progress report.

Statistics students at a Brooklyn high school took an unusually high-profile final exam today: They presented an analysis of the city’s school report cards to an audience that included their principal and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott.

Their teacher, Eleanor Terry, had invited the Chancellor via email, hoping to put together an official audience for her Advanced Placement statistics students at the High School for Telecommunication Arts and Technology.

The school earned an A on its most recent progress report. But that didn’t stop students — who wore buttons depicting their statistics class mascot, the “normalcurvasaurus” — from scrutinizing the way their school was graded. They examined technical issues including bias in survey questions, the way students are broken into deciles by their eighth-grade test scores, and how different scores were weighted to come up with their school’s final grade.

The students peppered their presentations with recommendations for Walcott, ranging from offering the student surveys online to factoring a school’s size into its grading.

Walcott spent more than an hour scribbling notes during the presentations. When students described difficult experiences in freshman physics classes and adjusting to high school, which they said could affect the student progress section of the report, Walcott asked, “Should we be doing something different freshman year?”

“The kids were unbelievably impressed that he said he would come. And I can’t say my reaction was any different,” Principal Phil Weinberg said. (more…)

With end-of–year excursions planned at many schools, the city has adopted new rules for field trips, particularly those that involve water.

The new regulations come nearly a year after Nicole Suriel, a sixth-grader at Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science, and Engineering, drowned during a field trip to a Long Island beach. An investigation found that the school had not collected permission slips for the trip and took the students to a beach that was not patrolled by lifeguards.

Now, schools will have to collect Department of Education permission slips for each trip, ensure that lifeguards are present when students swim and that lifejackets are worn during other water activities, and send extra chaperones on trips with more than 30 students.

The new rules were developed during a review process that began after Suriel’s death, department officials said. Typically, the Panel for Educational Policy must approve new regulations before they can go into effect, but Chancellor Dennis Walcott decided that the field trip rules should be adopted immediately on an emergency basis.

“Tragically, last year we lost one of our students in an accident on a school field trip to the beach. While we can never change history, we can take action to prevent future tragedies and better protect our students on field trips,” Walcott said in a statement. “That is why today I signed an emergency order expanding supervision requirements for field trips and strengthening guidelines around swimming.” (more…)

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.

The Brooklyn Arts Academy is special for offering electives, taught by local professionals, in areas such as hip-hop dance, emcee, deejay, music production, digital photography, fashion design, choir and band. Many students who attend the school were drawn to it for this reason. At the end of each semester, students would show off their new skills in an arts showcase. Sometimes these were held in our cafeteria, and other times in an auditorium we rented from a local college. I never missed one of these performances, and they almost always inspired the same conflicted feelings: pride and awe at my students’ abilities on stage, combined with frustration and embarrassment at the rowdiness and disorganization of the event as a whole.

For a few students, the arts showcase was a time to shine. There was one student who everyone called Michael because he fashioned himself after Michael Jackson. He always had a solo during the hip-hop dance performances and would bring the house down with his impeccable rendition of the moonwalk.

There were two young men — one black and one Hispanic — that formed a rap duo good enough to sign with a label. They kept the crowd spellbound with their brilliant flow and rhymes such as “some of my boys / lost themselves in the bong / truth blowing like bombs or condoms put on wrong / never stepped out of the hood / but say that they gone / I want to travel on planes / because of my songs.”

Another one of my students wasn’t as good as a rapper but amazed me with his stage presence. He could work the crowd like no other, raising his hands in the air and getting people to clap along with him, a wide smile across his face. He performed an unforgettable duet with his girlfriend, rapping the verses while she sang the chorus. (more…)

It’s no news to teachers that the national discourse on public education is all too often far removed from the reality of the classroom. Discussions of curriculum are a case in point. These discussions tend to be polemical and based on politically skewed notions of what is fundamental to learning, which does little for the needs of children, nor teachers. As John Merrow —in his review of the current educational debates, “The Influence of Teachers” — dryly observes, the battle between reformers and their opponents is “fundamentally irrelevant to the world children live in.” The “experts” that often hold sway in the court of public opinion on critical matters such as curriculum don’t often have much of a clue of what it takes to stand and deliver.

Were these experts to come into my classroom to deliver their expert understanding unto my students, I have the feeling that most of them wouldn’t last much past the moment that they first get cussed out or a chair is thrown, let alone the moment wherein they realize that they don’t truly understand how to break down a concept critical to understanding content, stripped right down to its procedural foundations. At this foundational and essential level of teaching, pedantic debates like phonics vs. whole language become petty. It’s all about what students actually need.

What is fundamental to the world children live in, at least within the confines of the classroom, is the content that is delivered to them. And what is even more fundamental is how this content — the curriculum — is delivered to them. Standing at the focal point of this delivery, so central and influential in a student’s immediate realm of existence, is the teacher.

Though the teacher has ultimate control over pedagogy (methods and strategies they use to deliver the content), it is all too often that they don’t have a full say in the development of the curriculum which they are expected to deliver. This curriculum more often comes prepackaged at great expense to the district from an external contractor. For example, in my elementary school (and as far as I understand, most of the city et al) we are expected to utilize McGraw-Hill’s Everyday Math curriculum, Houghton Mifflin’s social studies texts, Harcourt’s science texts, in addition to the reading and writing workshop pedagogy and curriculum laid out by Teachers Colllege. (more…)