GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Yankee Mark Teixeira, Chancellor Walcott, Mayor Bloomberg and Housing Authority Chairman John Rhea stand with DREAM students

Mayor Bloomberg announced a plan to move at least one charter school out of its home inside a district school building today. But the plan does not involve a change in the legal battle that the city faces over its decision to grant space to some charter schools.

Instead, the DREAM Charter School will move out of a district school building and into a new space in East Harlem that it will share with 90 new New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) apartments.

The new building, an $85 million project that will replace a parking lot connected to the Washington Houses, is being constructed through a mix of private and public dollars.

Of the public dollars, $32.5 million will come from a Department of Education program that provides matching grants to help build facilities for charter schools, which are publicly funded but receive no direct state support for facilities expenses and are not guaranteed public space.

Another nearly $30 million will come from housing development funds.

“NYCHA properties happen to have pockets of a scarce and really valuable resource in our city: underutilized land,” Bloomberg said at a press conference today announcing the deal. (more…)

More litigation could be targeted at Tweed’s plans to close struggling schools, even as one lawsuit seems to be headed toward an amicable settlement.

The New York City Parents Union announced this afternoon that it plans to file a separate lawsuit against the Department of Education, charging that its policy of closing low-performing schools and co-locating charter schools in district space was illegal. The lawsuit, according to the announcement, would effectively stop all school closure and co-locations from moving forward.

“We, the public school parents, challenge the cynical chicanery of Chancellor Walcott and the DOE. We reject the privatization agenda supported by Mayor Bloomberg and his appointees. Our children deserve the best education and a supportive administration, and we will fight for all children to receive equal access to a quality education,” the statement said.

The lawsuit would also seek to reverse charter school co-locations because they aren’t charged market rent for space in district school buildings. (more…)

Nearly 35,000 elementary and middle school students are being told this week that they should attend summer school based on their low test scores, the city Department of Education announced today.

The figure — 34,069 students between third and eighth grade, to be precise — represents nine percent of all students in those grades. And it is an increase of more than 10,000 from the number of students recommended for summer school last year.

As part of Mayor Bloomberg’s vaunted initiative to end what he calls “social promotion,” students who do not pass annual state English and math exams must either attend summer school or repeat their grade.

The figures released today are the first public indication of what city students’ performance on state tests this year might look like. The results have not yet been released. (more…)

Prom has been an important topic of conversation for some students since our first graduating class entered our school three and a half years ago. It’s been on the minds of many more of these students, now seniors, since fall. Daily discussions of the event began as soon as we returned from spring break in April.

Last Tuesday, was “A Night to Remember” — our school’s first senior prom, a thoroughly planned and coordinated affair. I was in attendance, and found myself unexpectedly moved at the sight of our soon-to-be-graduates decked out in color-coordinated suits and dresses.

They’d watched it on “Glee” and seen it in the movies — now they were there. If a school’s first report card marks the transition from being a new, small school to just a small school (no longer new) for teachers and administrators, prom was that rite of passage for students. A student later shared with my principal, “I actually felt like I was in a movie.”

I was frustrated in the weeks leading up to prom. There were too many conversations about what to wear and whom to go with, and not enough college considerations for my liking. The problems that needed to solved around prom and other senior activities like senior trip seemed miniscule in comparison to other issues that needed to be addressed — graduation requirements, financial aid applications, college selections.

I have different priorities than my students. I should. I’m the adult; they’re adolescents. (more…)

• City and union officials are considering raiding a health care fund to avert teacher layoffs. (Daily News)
• University Neighborhood Middle School is one of 100 city schools testing out new standards. (WNYC)
• Crowding in kindergartens means fewer seats in public school pre-K programs this year. (Times, Post)
• Local leaders and elected officials are trying to save two Brooklyn day care centers. (Daily News)
• The NAACP’s supporters are divided over its involvement in the UFT’s school closure lawsuit. (Times)
• A study by Eva Moskowitz’s charter school network finds no class size bump from co-location. (Post)
• Ed Sec Arne Duncan signaled that he might lift the mandate that students be proficient by 2014. (Times)
• Some staff at Staten Island’s IS 49 say a few troublesome students are indicative of deeper issues. (Post)
• In Canarsie, a second city student lost part of a finger in a schoolyard accident last week. (Daily News)
• The city will pay $1.6 million to the family of Nicole Suriel, who drowned on a field trip. (Post, NY1)
• Two city principals say eliminating January Regents exams will hurt low-income students. (Daily News)
• A city mother who opposes the Christian Right says churches shouldn’t use public school space. (Times)
• The Daily News criticizes the city for giving students too much unexplained time off from classes.
• Newcomb, N.Y., is trying to save its school system by recruiting students from abroad. (Times)
• As he takes over in Chicago, Jean-Claude Brizzard likens the schools to Frankenstein’s monster. (Times)
• As the Catholic Cardinal Hayes High School tries to avoid closure, its alumni are feuding. (WSJ)

• BET examines co-locations: “where you stand depends on where your child sits.” (BET)
• Democratic governors are increasingly willing to take on public employee unions. (EIA Intercepts)
• An online commenter defending Michelle Rhee’s progressive bona fides is her employee. (Crooks Liars)
• Teach For America is bringing 5,200 corps members in the fall, largest numbers in history. (TFA)
• Mark Zuckerberg told eighth graders at their promotion ceremony to do what they love. (TechCrunch)
• Compare legislative change by consensus to change by confrontation; see success. (Quick and the Ed)
• Education majors get higher GPA’s on average, a study of colleges finds. (Teacher Beat)
• Inside a Philly classroom where a teacher teaches out of a storage closet. (Notebook)
• The hyped Khan Academy is an impressive innovation, but it should have come from ed schools. (Hess)

Council member Steve Levin and State Assembly Member Joan Millman rally with staff, parents and children outside two closing day care centers.

(Update: A spokesperson for the city Administration for Children Services tells GothamSchools that Strong Place and Bethel Day Care Centers will continue operating until Friday, June 17, in order to give parents more time to find alternative care options.)

A charter school with an uncertain future has found private space for the next school year, hoping to appease the neighborhood opposition where it’s currently co-located.

But in the process, it collided with another citywide controversy: the mayor’s decision to close day care centers.

Brooklyn Prospect Charter School has co-located at Sunset Park High School since it opened two years ago, but that community wants them out. So last week, the school signed a one-year lease this week to move into 238 Hoyt Street in Boerum Hill. A permanent, privately-funded facility scheduled to open in 2012 is being built down the road.

The challenge is that the previous tenants at the rental building were two popular day care centers that have been neighborhood institutions for over 30 years. Bethel Day Care and Strong Place Day Care are two of eight programs ending as a result of Mayor Bloomberg’s budget cuts.

Today, Bethel and Strong Place were among five centers to close their doors for good. Parents, employees and young children from the centers joined Council Member Steve Levin outside of the building to protest the cuts.

“We’re here to stand up against what the city has done. Stand up against what the Brooklyn Prospect Charter School has done,” said Levin, who was joined by State Assembly Member Joan Millman and about 30 others. “These programs, we have fought for year after year, so that your children have a safe place to stay.”

The centers would have closed regardless, but Levin partially blamed Brooklyn Prospect’s pursuit of the $750,000 lease for the inability to restore funding.

“It’s tough enough to get funding restored for the daycare centers, but when you have a charter school come in and sign a lease, it makes it all the more difficult,” he said.

The lease includes a termination clause that would allow the centers to stay if they could afford the rent. That looked increasingly unlikely, however, with Bloomberg holding firm to his budget cuts. (more…)

Irma Zardoya, the new CEO of the city's Leadership Academy, said that she wants to focus on building new principals' support networks.

The head of the city’s principal training academy has an unprecedented line on her resume: she has worked as a principal before.

Irma Zardoya, who was principal of The Bilingual School in the Bronx for nine years in the 1980s and served as a district leader for many years after that, replaced Sandra Stein as CEO of the city’s Leadership Academy last month.

Stein, who had led the academy since 2005, came to the position from Baruch College, where she wrote about principal training and created its Aspiring Leaders Program. Stein’s predecessor, Robert Knowling, came from the corporate world.

In an interview at the Leadership Academy’s headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, Zardoya said that she doesn’t have immediate plans to change the content or aim of the academy. But she is zeroing in on one goal that might separate her from her predecessors. She wants to work on building new principals’ relationships with other administrators in their districts.

“Everyone needs to be responsible for a [new principal’s] success, so that when the person is placed they are not lonely, so that the superintendent is aware of who this person is,” she said.

The Bloomberg administration created the New York City Leadership Academy and its Aspiring Principals Program in 2003 to train administrators for service under former Chancellor Joel Klein. The original idea of the academy, which had former General Electric C.E.O. Jack Welch on its original advisory board, was to apply leadership principles from the corporate world to education.

The academy’s most recent graduating class made up 23 percent of first-year principals this school year. (more…)

• Religious leaders will pray for an end to “immoral” budget cuts to education this weekend. (Daily News)
• A 16-year-old Bronx student was shot in the hip on her way home from school. (Post)
• A Brooklyn charter school’s new home would displace two beloved day care centers. (Daily News)
• The state plans to grant News Corp a contract to build a student data system like ARIS. (Daily News)
• Joel Klein predicted that he will lead several education acquisitions in the next few months. (FT)
• The number of certified arts teachers here is declining for the first time in four years. (NYT, GS)
• City Council Member Mark Weprin criticized Race to the Top spending on new tests. (Queens Tribune)
• A Queens fifth-grader who lost the tip of his finger in a lunch incident blames his school. (Daily News)
• Details on the proposed new teacher pension tier that Governor Cuomo unveiled. (Patch)
• The Times, Post and the Daily News endorse Governor Cuomo’s proposed pension reforms.
• A Staten Island Catholic school teacher was placed on leave for a relationship with a student. (Post)

• The state DOE is poised to grant a no-bid contract to News Corp, home of Joel Klein. (DN)
• Census data from 2009, just released, show increased spending on city schools. (Littlefield)
• The journalist who published Duncan’s Diane Ravitch criticism faced off with her. (Akamai)
• Charter schools’ success rates challenge district school-based turnaround strategies. (Flypaper)
• Protests are being planned across the city to address budget concerns. (Insideschools)
• Miss Eyre joins the chorus against eliminating the January Regents exams. (NYC Educator)
• New Jersey looks about to debut a public-private school partnership program. (Ed Week)
• Census data show that more Hispanic adults are finishing high school. (Associated Press)
• A report on arts education finds that spending and teaching positions are down. (CityRoom, GS)