GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Public Advocate Bill deBlasio brought his wife, a public school mom, to oppose cuts today. (City Room)
• An interview with KIPP’s CEO about graduates’ 33 percent 6-year college graduation rate. (Rick Hess)
• A 10-year blogger of education technology issues, Will Richardson, is ending his run. (Weblogg-ed)
• The UFT’s blog was named best blog by the New York Labor Communications Council. (Edwize)
• A 1943 article about U.S. students’ lack of history knowledge could have been written today. (NPR)
• The principal of a D.C. school where cheating is alleged resigned on Friday. (D.C. Schools Insider)
• On early childhood, the Obama Administration hasn’t gotten much from Race to the Top. (Sara Mead)
• When you actually know American education, The Economist’s coverage can seem shallow. (Flypaper)
• Kindergarten is a time of simultaneous separation and clinginess, a father observes. (Insideschools)
• With a new indictment, the CityTime scandal is looking like the biggest theft ever. (Running Scared)
• Bigger budget woes have derailed President Obama’s bid to reauthorize NCLB. (American Prospect)
• Kentucky became the first state today to ask the feds for flexibility in accountability. (Politics K-12)
• Preparing for Aug. 29, MATCH Charter School surveys its new students and staff. (Starting an Ed School)
• Our condolences to Mayor Bloomberg on the death of his mother, Charlotte, at age 102. (Times)

An optimistic press release that was later retracted is the latest sign that discussions to settle a lawsuit over charter school co-locations are intensifying in advance of the suit’s first day in court.

On Friday, the NAACP announced an agreement with the Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott to remove three schools from its lawsuit against the Department of Education. The announcement did not explain the changes, but indicated that the same solution could potentially be applied to each of the 19 charter schools listed in the suit.

“Our conversations with the Department of Education are beginning to bear fruit,” NAACP CEO Ben Jealous said in a statement from the press release. ”Resolution on these three schools gives us hope. It allows us to focus on reaching the same agreement with regard to other schools.”

But education department officials said they were caught off guard by the press release, which was later retracted. They immediately called charter school founders and principals to deny that a deal had been struck.

In an email sent to the city’s charter school network on Sunday, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, whom Jealous credited for the deal, said he was “outraged that the NAACP issued a false statement about an agreement that does not exist.” (more…)

A screen shot of the web site registered 9 days ago that touts Eva Moskowitz for mayor in its title.

Two websites registered recently — one earlier this month — raise an intriguing possibility: Could a charter school leader jump into the next mayoral race?

The website addresses tout Eva Moskowitz, the founder of the Success Charter network, and Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone and Promise Academy charter schools, for mayor. Neither site includes any content.

The websites, EvaMoskowitzForMayor.com and GeoffreyCanadaForMayor.com, might reflect mounting concern among charter school supporters that Mayor Bloomberg’s successor will not continue his level of support for charter schools.

The nervousness may have increased when Anthony Weiner resigned from Congress last week. Of all the likely mayoral candidates, Weiner had appeared to be one of the more supportive of charter schools.

“Personally, as a New Yorker, Bloomberg’s successor has weighed heavily on my mind,” Democracy Prep charter network founder Seth Andrew, who registered the URL touting Canada in December, said in an e-mail statement. “While I think Mr. Canada would be a great choice, we’ve never talked about it and he’s made it publicly clear that he loves his day job.”

Andrew used his personal email and mailing addresses to register the Canada site.

EvaMoskowitzForMayor.com was registered anonymously through a hosting service based in California on June 6, according to WhoIs.Net, which publishes records of web site registrations.

Responding to a request for comment by e-mail, a spokesperson for Moskowitz said that she had never heard of the domain. “Looked into it. Don’t know anything about this domain. Let me know if you find out who bought it,” Jenny Sedlis, the director of external affairs at Moskowitz’s charter network, wrote via e-mail. (more…)

Last week, Mayor Bloomberg said he wasn’t happy about a state decision to eliminate January Regents exams. But he said city officials hadn’t decided whether to push back officially against it. Now it appears they have.

On Friday, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott joined his counterparts in four other big-city school districts in formally petitioning the state to reinstate the January exam date. They argue that the change will affect urban students disproportionately because those students are more likely to take nontraditional pathways to graduation. (Dozens of principals from suburban Long Island have also joined the chorus of city principals asking for the decision to be reversed.)

In separate letters to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and to Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and Commissioner of Education John King, the five superintendents — from Syracuse, Buffalo, Yonkers, Rochester, and New York City — suggest a compromise. “At a minimum,” they say (twice), the state should consider adding back the five Regents exams typically taken to meet graduation requirements. The letters argue that simply reducing the number of exams offered in January would cut costs but would still allow students to graduate.

The elimination of the test date was part of a slate of changes that the Board of Regents said would close an $8 million budget gap in the state’s testing program.

The letters came from the Conference of Big 5 School Districts, which last weighed in on policy issues in May when it suggested changes to the appeals process for teacher evaluations that were not accepted. The website for the conference listed on the letters sent last week is not active. (more…)

• Chancellor Dennis Walcott said his optimistic nature leaves him hopeful there won’t be layoffs. (Post)
• The ROTC program at Francis Lewis HS is the nation’s largest, with 15 grads at West Point. (Times)
• Local NAACP leader Hazel Dukes testified at a Harlem charter school space hearing. (NY1)
• The DOE’s planned spending on education technology tops $900 million next year. (NY1)
• Problems with special ed evaluations are being blamed on a new data system, SESIS. (Daily News)
• A new charter school in the Bronx, Tech International, will give all students computers. (Post)
• Several Manhattan private schools plan to give iPads to all of their students. (Post)
• Susan Edelman: Pension costs mean the city is spending more on schools without great results. (Post)
• Students will get an extra day of summer while teachers prepare. (GothamSchools, Post, NY1, WSJ)
• A look at the 1916 yearbook from William Bryant High School shows much has not changed. (Post)
• Stanley Crouch: If Mayor Bloomberg wants a schools legacy, he has to fight the UFT. (Daily News)
• Tuition at city private schools is up 80 percent in the last 10 years; some now charge $40,000. (WSJ)
• San Francisco plans to move all special education students in private schools into public ones. (Times)
• As homeschooling grows up, some families are planning high school completion rituals. (Times)
• John Marsh: The fight between Diane Ravitch and others misses the point on poverty. (Daily News)
• The Post praises CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein for targeting community college quality.

• Assembly members are accusing the city of cutting school funds after getting state aid. (City Room)
• Escaping poverty through education is less American than one might think. (Inside School Research)
• School of One’s need for customization could make scaling up tough, but worth it. (Quick and Ed)
• Liza Campbell: The city’s priorities leave little room for engaging teaching. (GS Community)
• Meet the German man behind international data comparison industry. (The Atlantic via Russo)
• A list of 12 qualities great teachers share, by a principal who taught at Beacon HS. (Answer Sheet)
• Snapshots from the Fight Back Friday protest against budget cuts at PS 193 in Brooklyn. (Ed Notes)
• The “College for all?” debate continues with a look at vocational education in Queens. (The Nation)

Elected officials and Department of Education deputies are the most common graduation speakers at city schools this year.

Novelists will take the stages of two elite schools known for their prowess in math and science, according to a list of graduation speakers the DOE has distributed. (The list is posted below.) E.L. Doctorow will speak at Bronx High School of Science, which he attended, and Stuyvesant graduates will hear from alumnus Gary Shteyngart.

The graduation speaker with the most packed schedule is Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who is scheduled to speak at 15 schools over eight days. The schools include his alma mater, Francis Lewis High School; a school for students with severe disabilities; transfer schools; and two low-performing high schools that aren’t set for closure, Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn and Washington Irving High School in Manhattan.

Notably absent from the list: Ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner, who had been set to speak at his alma mater, Brooklyn Technical High School, before resigning amid scandal this week. The New York Times reports that Public Advocate Bill deBlasio will replace Weiner at Brooklyn Tech. DeBlasio is also the featured speaker at MS 51, a selective middle school in his own neighborhood of Park Slope.

The city also released statistics about high schools’ top graduates:

For the Class of 2011, there are 375 valedictorians. Of these students, 65 percent are female, 49 percent speak a language other than English at home and 66 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

Those breakdowns are virtually identical to last year, when there were only 339 valedictorians because fewer schools had graduating classes. (more…)

In my column last week I wrote about how frustrating it is that so much of my education advocacy work focuses on trying to fight off many of the disastrous changes being imposed upon schools in New York City. While I believe passionately that reforms like accountability in the form of high-stakes tests and the conversion of public school space into privately managed charters (www.waitingforsupermantruth.org) will do great harm to our public school system, in no way do I feel that schools in New York should be left as is. Like most educators I know that our schools could be incredible places of learning, but I also know that it would take a genuine commitment to real reforms to make that happen.

Last week I gave a list of my top four reforms that I feel could truly transform our public schools. Each one connects deeply to my own experiences as an educator in a system where one’s desire to have a positive effect is sometimes frustrated by factors outside of one’s own control. Below is an explanation of the first two, which may seem obvious but are in no way a current reality for most New York City schools. I’ll follow up with the second two next week.

School environments that are deeply engaging and invigorating places in which to spend time. This probably seems like an obvious one, but if you are a teacher or student in the New York City public schools, odds are pretty good you understand why this is a critical goal that most schools are not close to meeting.

There are quite a few ways this could come into place. Right now the only afterschool programs offered in my school are sports (which very few students take advantage of), and Regents exam tutoring. Students have complained about the fact that there is nothing going on in the afternoon, but there is little funding for after school programs and no incentive for the administration to pay for it. I can only imagine the type of activities that could be happening every day if there were funding that was specifically tied to extracurricular programs.

There should also be more interesting programs going on during the school day, or planned throughout the year. (more…)

Classes will start a day later than planned in September so that teachers have more time to plan how to bring new curriculum standards into their classrooms.

The city’s school schedule had teachers reporting for duty Sept. 6, the day after Labor Day, and students were scheduled to arrive the following morning. Now, students will stay home an extra day while their teachers undergo training in the “common core” curriculum standards being rolled out citywide. The first day of school for students will be Thursday, Sept. 8.

The surprise one-day extension of summer break is the result of an agreement among the city, teachers union, and principals union. Chancellor Dennis Walcott, UFT President Michael Mulgrew, and principals union president Ernest Logan are sending a letter to families today explaining the change.

“While in many classrooms this work is already underway, next year teachers will challenge all of our students to think critically, to read and understand more difficult texts, to do more writing, and to apply the math they are learning in the real world,” the letter reads. “We have heard again and again from principals and teachers that they need more time to plan for this important new instructional work.”

The agreement to change the schedule at a time when the city and teachers union are feuding on several fronts, including over school closures and planned layoffs, signals that there is, as Walcott has said, “energy” behind the new standards. (more…)

• Chronic absenteeism, especially in the early grades, is on the decline. (Times)
• More students are eligible for gifted programs based in local school districts. (NY1)
• But five districts had so few students make the cut that they won’t offer gifted classes at all. (Daily News)
• Lehman High School football backers are suing over the school’s too-short football field. (Times, Post)
• Principals still don’t know how much money they have to spend for the next year. (GothamSchools)
• Protesters presented 20,000 signatures opposing school budget cuts and layoffs. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• A parent describes on-the-ground damages already wrought by budget cuts at her school. (The Villager)
• Chicago’s teachers union is adjusting to a newly contentious era after a long calm in relations. (Times)
• A teacher at PS 55 was arrested for using his belt to break up a fight between students. (Daily News)