GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Nearly half of children in District 2 and District 3 who tried for gifted programs got in. (Insideschools)
• The head of a leading arts advocacy group is the new dean of Mannes College of Music. (New School)
• City teens protested cuts to summer jobs, runaway shelters, and afterschool programs. (Daily Politics)
• A teacher at Banana Kelly High School is teaching her students about refugees. (Learning Matters)
• Ruben’s personal backstory on how he knows good teacher evaluations matter. (GS Community)
• Part one of a travelogue about a visit to the School of One at David Boody Middle School. (Quick and Ed)
• A history lesson about why black activists broke their ties with teachers unions. (Black Agenda Report)
• In Philadelphia, a principal is retiring to save the jobs of two music teachers at his school. (Philly.com)
• And in Indiana, a superintendent is stepping down to save his district $123,000 a year. (AP)
• Republican pres. candidate Michelle Bachmann likes a mishmash of education policies. (Politics K-12)
• The Tiger Mom’s daughter was valedictorian and is going to Harvard. (Daily Caller via Gawker)
• Andy Rotherham says he’d putting money on NCLB not changing this summer. (School of Thought)
• Charter schools and district schools in Denver share resources, rather than compete for them. (GOOD)
• What one teacher did during her first week of “taking the summer off.” (Mrs. Ripp)

With just weeks before students and teachers disperse for the summer, principals are still without any official word of how much money they’ll be working with next year.

“No word of budget at this point. Not even summer school. I have no idea what’s going [on],” said a high school principal, who reported being told originally that the budget would arrive at the end of May, and then the first week of June. “I have no idea on what next year looks like at this point.”

Every year, the city enters a budget for each school into Galaxy, the Department of Education’s budgeting data system. Principals use the system to allocate those funds for the next year according to their needs and also city, state, and federal regulations.

But because of up-in-the-air negotiations over the city’s budget, which are centering on Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to lay off 4,100 teachers, school-level budgets haven’t yet been uploaded. That means principals don’t know even how many teachers they will be able to afford next year.

Last year, principals received their budget June 2 — and that was late, then-Chancellor Joel Klein told principals at the time. “Even though Albany has yet to pass its own budget, we can wait no longer to release school budgets,” Klein said. “We know you need as much time as possible to decide how best to spend the dollars available to your school.” (more…)

As city and union officials remain mired in budget negotiations, parents and education activists gathered at City Hall today with a new tool to battle against school cuts—scrolls of signatures that reached far beyond the steps.

They unrolled seven of the 50-foot-long lists, which they said contained of the names of 20,000 people who have signed a petition against the mayor’s proposed budget. That number included over 16,000 online signatures.

“Unless you’re stupid or ignorant, you understand that 20,000 of your constituents have signed this, and don’t want you to make these cuts. If you ignore that, you shouldn’t be in office,” said Council Member Robert Jackson, chair of the council’s education committee.

During the rally, UFT President Michael Mulgrew accused Mayor Bloomberg of “playing political games” with the city’s children. “We will not sit idly by as you attack our schools and the services we need,” he said.

Teacher Christian Ledesma leads stretches in his running group at P.S. 244 in Queens

Los Angeles is getting national media attention for its district-wide flavored milk ban today, but one Queens school implemented that policy months ago.

The Active Learning Elementary School (P.S. 244), or TALES, opened in 2008 with a mission to encourage healthy living as part of its academics. This winter, principal and founder Ivan Tolentino removed chocolate milk from the menu this winter after his hyper-conscious kindergartners pointed out the red flags contained on its food labels. Nutrition is an important element of TALES’ academic curriculum.

“Our students’ levels of awareness regarding healthy living are so high, that students regularly stop us to point out ingredients listed in their foods’ labels that they regard as unhealthy,” said Tolentino, a former physical education teacher.

It was this kind of initiative that earned TALES and three other health-conscious New York City schools an official recognition from President Bill Clinton this week as one of the healthiest schools in the country. (more…)

My first year of teaching was a constant struggle. Classroom management was my biggest problem, but I struggled with many of the other fundamentals of teaching. While I often look back at that first year as a personal failure, I know that I ended the year a much more effective teacher than I began. This was due in part to constant self-reflection and assessment, but I owe most of my improvement to my mentor, my instructional coach from my masters program, and working with an AUSSIE literacy coach.

The extra pair of eyes and many years of experience that each of these women offered gave me an opportunity to analyze my strengths and weaknesses with a fresh and helpful perspective. My mentor, a fifth-year teacher taught me many basics of classroom management and lesson planning. My instructional coach helped me understand what differentiation meant in terms of classroom practice. My AUSSIE coach helped me get a better grasp of the workshop model and guided reading.

Each of these relationships was focused on observations of my teaching and conversations about how to make it better. They were also all predicated on trust. I knew that each of these people were coming to my classroom to help make me a better teacher so I could help all my students learn.

I can’t help but juxtapose these experiences with the formal evaluations I had during my first year, and since. I had two formal observations in my first year of teaching, both rated satisfactory, and with minimal actionable feedback. In my second year I had only one formal observation, rated satisfactory, but without a post-observation. At the end of that second year, I had to rely heavily on my own assessment of my abilities based on my own reflections, student test scores and general feedback from peers. Based on this inexact measurement, I felt I was doing a pretty good job.

When I landed at PS 310 after being excessed, I realized quickly how many gaps there were in my self-assessment. (more…)

• Unions are divided over a plan to avert layoffs. (GothamSchools, Crain’s NY, Daily News, Times, WSJ)
• A watchdog group says the plan is nothing more than a “fiscal gimmick.” (Citizens Budget Commission)
• A New Jersey school district is set to limit homework to 10 minutes and ban weekend projects. (Times)
• A Harlem senior endures tragedy after tragedy to earn full college scholarship next year.  (Daily News)
• For the second day in a row, union masses gathered downtown to protest budget cuts. (NY1)
• At a town hall Q&A, Walcott ducked the hard balls to celebrate his daughter’s birthday. (GothamSchools)
• The city defends a plan to move Tribeca students into Chinatown school. (DNA Info)
• After Jaime Oliver criticized L.A. schools for too much flavored milk, the district banned it. (HuffPo)
• Chicago’s school board voted to rescind a planned 4 percent raise for teachers. (WSJ)
• A school yard billboard about the Barclays Center at Atlantic Yards was defaced (Carroll Gardens Patch)
• Joe Williams: The NAACP/UFT lawsuit has put Bloomberg’s education legacy on the line. (Post)
• The Post backs Williams up, saying Bloomberg would prove himself by ending “last in, first out” layoffs.

• Liz Willen is grinding her teeth because of the pressure of being a public school parent. (Insideschools)
• Zakiyah Ansari, a plaintiff in the UFT-NAACP lawsuit, explains the suit’s potential upsides. (EdVox)
• A Queens teacher is doing what seniors do every year: leaving high school forever. (Pissed Off Teacher)
• The city told principals this week it is cutting $10 million from the DOE’s custodial budget. (City Room)
• Norm Scott reports from Bloombergville, site of an ongoing protest against budget cuts. (Ed Notes)
• A parent made a video of city students describing why they value their teachers. (YouTube via Ed Notes)
• The New York Times sees a profit opportunity in the arrival of common standards. (Curriculum Matters)
• The City Council passed a bill requiring city agencies to post official documents online. (Gotham Gazette)
• A 16-year-old says it’s hard being a citizen whose parents immigrated illegally. (Radio Rookies)
• Collin says his old administrators used predatory observations to drive teachers away. (GS Community)
• A list of ten top education cliches, from Titanic references to moving the needle. (Title 1-derland)
• A new study says getting into gifted programs doesn’t make students learn more. (Joanne Jacobs)
• Students can see the difference in their writing from the beginning of the year to now. (Mr Foteah)
• Chicago teachers describe the defining moments and themes of the last school year. (Answer Sheet)

A meeting among the city’s public unions over a proposal that would help avert more than 4,100 teacher layoffs erupted in “fireworks” today, leaving prospects for a budget deal uncertain.

According to a union official who attended, dissension was sparked over the proposal to withdraw millions of dollars per month from a union-controlled health insurance fund. That money would be redirected toward closing a $270 million budget gap in the education department.

“Let’s just say there was a lot of fireworks,” the person said.

The meeting was called by Harry Nespoli, President of the Municipal Labor Committee, an umbrella organization of all of the city’s public unions. Earlier this week, he floated the idea of tapping into the fund – known as the Health Insurance Stabilization Fund – at a smaller meeting between just union leaders.

The meeting today, which was open to a larger swath of union members, was also planned by Nespoli. He said he hoped to build consensus on whether or not to move forward with negotiations. Now, it’s clear that’s not the case. (more…)

The 14 high schools the city is trying to close this year posted lower-than-average graduation rates — but they are not all the city’s worst.

Now, teachers union officials are drawing attention to three other high schools approved for closure that posted graduation rate increases two times or more than the city’s overall 2 percent gain. In the Bronx, Christopher Columbus High School’s 4-year graduation rate rose by 5.7 percentage points, to 41.6 percent. Norman Thomas High School, in Manhattan, saw its 4-year rate go from 37 percent to 47.8 percent. Brooklyn’s Paul Robeson High School saw a similar leap, to 50 percent from 40.4 percent last year.

“We knew that we had increased our graduation rate last year by 10 percent and have been saying that since November but no one pays any attention,” said Stefanie Siegel, a Robeson teacher who has been active in protests against the school’s planned closure.

“When our spirits were high after we won the court case last year, we made great gains in a short period of time,” she said.

That court case was the lawsuit the teachers union won to stop the city from closing 19 low-performing schools. Performance boosts at three of the high schools kept them off the chopping block this year. Two of the schools got higher progress report grades, 85 percent of which depend on graduation rates and students’ progress toward graduation. The city said it was confident in a leadership change at the third school.

The schools with oversized gains this year still lag well behind the citywide average 4-year graduation rate of 61 percent. And many of the other schools slated for closure continued to post dismal graduation figures. (more…)

Members of the Community Education Council for District 1 prepared for a meeting last night with Chancellor Dennis Walcott by compiling a 6-page list of questions about the most pressing issues facing the Lower East Side school district. They got few answers.

The council’s questions addressed space allocation in local school buildings, the implementation of new “common core” standards, and District 1′s unique all-lottery enrollment model, among other issues.

Their questions went largely unanswered in part because of a scheduling mishap: Walcott told the council on Monday that he would leave the meeting early so he could celebrate his daughter’s birthday. Having billed the meeting as a town hall conversation with the chancellor, the council decided to devote the entire hour to public comment instead of their own questions, according to Lisa Donlan, its president. About a dozen people asked the chancellor questions that were mostly personal, rather than policy-oriented.

Donlan said the Department of Education still could have addressed the council’s concerns more fully. Department officials came to the meeting with a 2-page response to their questions, which had been submitted earlier in the week.

“Clearly this was not a good faith effort to answer the CEC’s questions,” Donlan said.

The council’s questions and the department’s response are below. (more…)