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Geraldine Maione, principal of William E. Grady CTE High School, speaks to a teacher getting ready for summer school.

“Everything about this school has improved. Everything.”

Geraldine Maione, principal of William E. Grady Career and Technical Education High School in Brighton Beach, does not hesitate when asked about the trajectory of her school.

Maione just finished her first year at Grady, where she was greeted with a staff weary of leadership changes, a curriculum that has see-sawed between emphasizing traditional academics and the school’s signature “shops,” and a D grade on its 2009-10 progress report.

She was also given $1.4 million of additional “transformation” money through the federal government’s program to improve low-achieving schools.

At the end of her first year, staff members say they’ve felt the impact of Maione’s leadership and the additional funds—though it is unclear if the school is yet making the academic gains it needs to avoid facing closure in the future.

The transformation money helped pay for an array of cosmetic changes to the building and school trips to colleges throughout New York state, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC.

The entrance area was repainted from black and white to maroon and yellow, the school colors. The front doors are now framed by planters, filled with flowers, that double as benches. Murals featuring civil rights leaders and faces of current students fill once-blank hallway walls. (more…)

Commencement is meant to celebrate student achievements, but for me it was an opportunity to recognize the privileged place of a teacher. For me, it underscored the opportunity that small school faculty have to make a profound difference in the lives of disadvantaged students.

Last Monday, the Kurt Hahn School graduated its first class of seniors. It was an emotional day for everyone present to celebrate the accomplishments of these individual students and of our school. My principal’s commencement address mentioned students who had won film contests, had made tremendous academic gains despite linguistic or ability setbacks, or had initiated one of the increasing number of student groups springing up each year. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, he remarked, if these triumphs — not mere test scores and teacher performance ratings — were the headlines in our local papers? We can link these accomplishments to our school’s particular attention to character development, but there are countless sets of values we could have chosen and gotten the same results. What makes a small school any different from a big school is the combination of personal attention and cohesion that the adults working there are willing to maintain.

The city’s push to open small schools over the last decade, in large part with funds from the Gates Foundation, was intended to provide students with more opportunity for individualized attention and the opportunity to be truly “known” by a teacher. Having seen this initiative in other cities, I’ve always been especially fond of it here in New York. (more…)

• Schools that get high progress report grades will be able to keep their rainy-day funds after all. (Times)
• Construction has started on renovating the Brandeis HS building for Upper West Success. (WNYC)
• The City Council awarded the UFT $2 million to help the group find space for its charter school. (Post)
• Summer school started with a bang at Boys & Girls HS, where students set off fireworks. (NY1)
• The Performance Conservatory School valedictorian who wasn’t allowed to graduate speaks out. (NY1)
• New revelations from Atlanta show that school officials held weekend cheating parties. (AJC)
• The head of a tutoring nonprofit says East Harlem needs a planned charter school. (Daily News)
• Across the country, budget cuts mean some schools are shortening their days or even weeks. (Times)
• Cities and states are grappling with even bigger funding shortfalls as stimulus dollars end. (Reuters)

• A city teacher describes the annual end-of-year game of musical classrooms. (America’s Future)
• DOE budget cuts mean there are fewer places for kids to get free lunch this summer. (Daily Politics)
• A progressive overview of what school reform is doing to American teachers. (Dissent Magazine)
• Charter advocate James Merriman lists five missed facts about the UFT-NAACP lawsuit. (Eduwonk)
• Andres Alonso, who left the DOE for Baltimore, is taking hard line against cheating. (Class Struggle)
• To win the next Race to the Top round, states will have to launch pre-K testing. (Politics K-12)
• The elephant in Collin Lawrence’s school was his principal’s leadership, he reports. (GS Community)
• Members of a famous school chorus finish off the year by explaining what they learned. (PS 22 Chorus)
• Anecdotal evidence suggests that the city’s teacher attrition estimates might be low. (Ed Notes)
• Residency programs train teachers who want to make an entire career in the classroom. (Hechinger)
• Updates on Promise Neighborhoods in four American cities, from Georgia to Minnesota. (Paul Tough)
• The UFT’s Leo Casey offers a five-point proof of Joel Klein’s “bad-faith” arguments. (Edwize)
• Class sizes are likely to grow at some city schools because of budget cuts. (Insideschools)

Reporter Maura Walz’s journey from GothamSchools to Georgia placed her in the South just in time to cover the education scandal of the century — or at least the summer.

Atlanta’s steadily increasing state test scores were, at least in part, driven by cheating, according to investigators appointed by former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue. Today, Perdue’s successor, Nathan Deal, released the results of the two-year investigation.

Investigators looked at more than half of Atlanta’s 100 public schools and found evidence of cheating in the vast majority of them. They found that more than a third of the city’s principals had knowledge of or input into cheating at their schools; thousands of students had been denied extra help after being given scores they didn’t deserve; and “a culture of fear, intimidation, and retaliation” inhibited whistle-blowing.

State officials say criminal charges are likely to follow for some of the 180 teachers, principals, and district officials named in the report.

From Walz’s story for Georgia Public Broadcasting:

The governor refused to comment on how much responsibility for the cheating lies with former Superintendent Beverly Hall, who retired last week. But the report cites what investigators call a “major failure of leadership.” (more…)

Three months after announcing that he would take a taxpayer’s suggestion and audit the Department of Education’s online data system, Comptroller John Liu is asking the system’s most frequent users for feedback.

Liu announced in March that he would audit the Achievement Reporting and Innovation System, the department’s data warehouse known as ARIS, which has attracted no shortage of critics for its $81 million price tag and early glitches. In June, Liu’s office distributed a satisfaction survey to some ARIS users, including teachers.

“As part of the audit, we are evaluating whether the system meets users’ needs,” read an email containing the survey sent June 14 by Vince Liquori, director of financial audit in the comptroller’s office. A high school teacher who received the survey sent it to GothamSchools after the deadline to complete it, June 24, had passed.

The 21-question survey asks respondents for details about how they use ARIS and whether they think they system is helping them boost student achievement. The survey also includes a free-response section for respondents to list what they like and dislike about the system and identify which of its features they would change.

The survey comes as ARIS continues to contend against lower-budget competitors for teachers’ attention. (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 beginning of my fourth, and final, school year at the Brooklyn Arts Academy started with a bang. At our first staff meeting, shortly after introducing the new teachers, the principal brought up what he characterized as “the elephant in the room.” Near the end of the last school year, he’d received the results of our school’s annual “learning environment survey,” and he took them quite personally. According to the survey, 71 percent of teachers strongly disagreed with the statement that “the principal is an effective manager who makes the school run smoothly.” Another 24 percent disagreed, and only 5 percent, or one teacher, agreed.  What did he do, he wanted to know, to deserve such low ratings?

Before any teachers spoke, the principal introduced a couple people who were in the room, including our school’s network leader. This individual was the head of one of numerous networks that provide institutional support to city public schools. He told us that, of over 500 schools surveyed, our results were better than only four. He went on to say that our school was doing well on paper (meaning credit accumulation, test scores, attendance, etc), and that his own observations suggested that the teachers here were generally positive and hardworking. He accused us of “passive aggression,” and said that if we had a problem with our principal we needed to talk it out “in-house” rather than taking it out via the survey, the results of which are public. At this point, the principal again asked for teachers to speak. He expressed a sincere desire to know why we felt the way we did.

There was stunned silence for a moment, and then, having determined to be a vocal advocate for teachers this year, I spoke up. One thing that I think bothered us, I said, was that there was a perception that specific teachers were targeted for U-ratings. I explained that this made people afraid to speak up or talk about the issues we saw in the school because we were worried that we might be next. The principal at first responded by claiming he only gave one U-rating and that it was for attendance-related reasons, but then pivoted and started talking about how teacher-turnover isn’t necessarily a bad thing because not everyone is cut out for this type of teaching. In defense of this argument, he cited Geoffrey Canada, the well-known president and CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone, who purportedly had a very high teacher-turnover rate every year. The fault I saw with this comparison was that our school was losing good teachers every year, not just the ones who struggled.

The network leader, acting as a mediator, asked if I meant that there should be greater transparency about teacher observations and the criteria used to judge teachers. I concurred. (more…)

News from New York City:

• The end of stimulus dollars is causing steep cuts at schools with fewer poor students. (WNYC)
• The principal of Shuang Wen Academy, which is in turmoil, has been removed. (NY1)
• Top students at Jamaica High School dispute the city’s charges that the school is failing. (Times)
• Despite a 2004 court order, the DOE still awards no-bid contracts to custodial companies. (Post)
• The city says it took eight years and more than $1 million to fire a teacher who behaved badly. (Post)
• Tomas Hanna, a Philadelphia official, is the DOE’s new chief of innovation. (Philly Daily News)
• A lawsuit charges that a bus matron left a child with special needs far from her house. (Daily News)
• The mother of a student who committed suicide is suing over bullying at Queens’ PS 84. (Daily News)
• The city is moving to fire Andrew Buck, a principal whose leadership drew criticism. (Daily News)
• Judges ruled that churches can keep using city school buildings while they appeal a ban. (WNYC)
• Summer school classes start today at most city schools. (NY1)
• Teachers at PS 41 left a kindergartener behind when a class trip ended at an amusement park. (NY1)
• In letters, readers from around the city say that the UFT and NAACP are, in fact, defending equity. (Post)
• The private, all-girls Brearley School is abuzz over rumors about the principal’s resignation. (Times, WSJ)

And beyond:

• Georgia investigators say cheating in Atlanta was rampant, criminal, and came from the top. (AJC)
• The nation’s largest teachers union endorsed Obama and tying evaluations to test scores. (Times, WSJ)
• A nonprofit group in Chicago helps Hispanic students navigate magnet school admissions. (Times)
• New Jersey’s tiny charter schools office is evaluating more than 150 applications. (N.J. Spotlight)
• Thirteen states passed major education reform bills this year that emphasize school choice. (WSJ)
• To cut costs, Chicago is weighing pulling city police officers from its schools. (Chicago Sun-Times)
• David Brooks: Diane Ravitch makes some good points, but she’s wrong about testing. (Times)

Collett Powell, a senior at the Bronx School of Law and Finance, kicked off graduation exercises June 23 by singing the Star-Spangled Banner. Powell, who graduated with a Regents diploma, won the school’s award for excellence in music.