GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The city plans to test students at 80 schools on their arts educations this year. (Daily News)
• The city’s survey shows that at 20 schools, 75 percent of teachers don’t trust their principal. (NY1)
• The nonprofit Turnaround For Children employs mental health services to help schools improve. (WSJ)
• More bedbugs were found in city schools last year. (Daily News; GothamSchools days ago)
• The UFT says it hasn’t seen figures showing 1 in 5 teachers failed a pilot of new evaluations. (Post)

A State Supreme Court judge has ruled that the city can move forward with its plans for 22 school closure and 15 co-locations.

In May, the UFT and NAACP filed a suit charging that the city had not adhered to the law and its own promises when planning the closures and charter school co-locations.

In a decision released late tonight, Judge Paul Feinman denied the UFT and NAACP’s request for a preliminary injunction that would have stopped the city from moving forward with its closure and co-location plans while those charges are considered. A temporary restraining order preventing the plans from advancing had been in place since early June.

Feinman’s decision came just hours after State Education Commissioner John King approved 12 of the closures, of schools on the state’s list of “persistently low-achieving” schools. The UFT and NAACP suit had argued that the city could not close schools on that list without state approval.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott applauded the decision, which he said validated the Bloomberg administration’s approach to fixing low-performing schools. (more…)

• Rahm Emanuel will send his children to the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. (CBS2)
• But Emanuel’s not happy to talk about the choice. He has good company. (Parents Across America)
• PEP member Patrick Sullivan says a mayoral committee is pushing arts testing. (NYC P.S. Parents)
• A new teacher screening system in Illinois could undo some schools’ recent hiring. (Catalyst)
• Cheating on standardized tests was widespread, long before No Child Left Behind arrived. (Slate)
• Arthur Goldstein: The city’s decision to continue burning dirty oil at schools is dangerous. (HuffPo)
• Twin studies show student stability and teacher attrition at Los Angeles charter schools. (Joanne Jacobs)
• A new federal initiative aims to interrupt the “school-to-prison pipeline.” (Politics K-12)
• Checker Finn: Maybe American students have gotten stronger, but we’re still a nation at risk. (Flypaper)
• NCLB politics are bringing together strange bedfellows of union leaders and Republicans. (AEI)
• British reformer Sir Kenneth Robinson shares advices for Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott. (Thirteen)
• A starting-out city teacher expounds on the importance of reciprocal mentoring. (Rick Hess Straight Up)

The city cleared a hurdle today when state education officials approved proposals to close twelve of its lowest performing schools.

In a letter sent to Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, State Commissioner John King said that the proposals, submitted earlier this month, satisfied state guidelines. The approval clears the way for the city to receive more than $5 million in federal funds for closing the schools and opening new ones in their place.

But the schools could still remain open because of a pending lawsuit. The lawsuit, brought by the NAACP and United Federation of Teachers, alleges that the Department of Education violated state education laws in its attempt to close 22 schools.

King’s ruling addresses at least one argument in that case. UFT lawyers argued that the city’s phase-out plans could not move forward until they received approval.

A final decision on the lawsuit could come as early as tomorrow. (more…)

As they wait to hear the results of their principal’s budget appeal, parents and teachers at Manhattan’s PS 3 are sounding the alarm over rising class sizes.

Tomorrow is the deadline for principals to tell the city how they plan to spend their budgets. With schools experiencing average cuts of 2.43 percent, they are likely to see class sizes grow as teaching vacancies go unfilled.

In April, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said that 4,000 planned layoffs would cause average class sizes to rise by about 1.5 students. But the School Leadership Team at PS 3 says the elementary school has been warned that, even now that layoffs have been averted, classes could grow to as large as 30 students in the fall.

Last week, we reported that PS 3′s principal, Lisa Siegman, has filed an official appeal of her budget, saying, “I couldn’t staff the school for the classrooms” with the $5.4 million allocated to the school. Yesterday, the SLT sent a letter to Walcott — and a host of other public officials — imploring him not to let class sizes skyrocket.

“Even excellent teachers have limits to their energy, time, patience, and ability to solve the infinite array of problems that facilitating learning involves,” the letter reads. “At PS 3, we have seen firsthand how increase in class size can negatively impact teachers’ energy and students’ ability to learn.”

The full letter is below. (more…)

Besides his Joel Klein hire, his company’s $27 million state contract, and his entrance into education politics, there’s another schools angle to Rupert Murdoch, the embattled media tycoon.

Long before Murdoch’s News Corporation was accused of employing illegal news-gathering strategies, Murdoch and his wife, Wendi Deng Murdoch, were supporters of the Shuang Wen School. The Chinatown dual-language school was revealed last year to be illegally charging families for mandatory Chinese instruction.

In 2004, the Murdochs pledged three years of financial support for Shuang Wen’s after school programs, according to an article published in a city’s Chinese language paper at the time. That pledge amounted to half a million dollars, the Grand Street News later reported. In 2008, Murdoch praised the school during a lecture delivered in Australia.

Shuang Wen’s longtime principal, Ling Ling Chou, was removed several weeks ago under cloud of at least nine separate investigations into the school. Her interim replacement, Iris Chiu, has not received a warm welcome: Shuang Wen parents are defending Chou and fighting against the DOE’s investigations and oversight. They have filed a lawsuit alleging that discrimination is behind the city’s scrutiny, and some say they might withdraw their children in protest.

Wendi Murdoch’s relationship with the city schools extends beyond Shuang Wen. Until at least last year, she was a board member of the Fund for Public Schools, the Department of Education’s private fundraising arm. It’s unclear whether her tenure on the board began before or after Rupert Murdoch approached fund vice-chair Caroline Kennedy for help getting Grace, his oldest daughter with Wendi, into the private Brearley School.

The Bronx charter school accused of rigging its admissions procedures to admit successful students has been put on probation.

The news, reported today in the New York Times, comes after Anna Phillips broke the story on GothamSchools in May that teachers and parents at Academic Leadership Charter School said the school tests students for admission. State law mandates that charter schools admit students through a lottery.

The testing allegations weren’t borne out in the city’s investigation, possibly because city officials did not speak to staff members who had resigned or parents of students who were not admitted, Phillips now reports for the Times. But investigators still found more than enough improprieties to warrant putting the school on probation.

Phillips writes:

… city officials found that at Academic Leadership, which has about 200 children in kindergarten through second grade, hundreds of applicants were left out of this year’s drawing. The lottery was supervised not by an impartial observer, but by a member of the parent association, the letter said. And while students who applied after the lottery should have been added to the waiting list, scores of them were not, it said.

Academic Leadership is the first charter school in the city to be disciplined for breaking admissions rules, Phillips reports. Recy Dunn, head of the city Department of Education’s charter schools office, wrote in a letter that the school suffered from “a pattern of failed operational oversight by school leadership” that extended well beyond admissions procedures.

• Ex-Chancellor Cathie Black was involved in a car accident in the Hamptons on Saturday. (Post)
• Academic Leadership Charter School in the Bronx was disciplined for its admissions procedures. (Times)
• The Panel for Educational Policy delayed votes on two contracts, one with consultants. (Daily News)
• A lawsuit aims to force the city to remove toxic PCBs from schools faster. (Daily News, WSJ, NY1, WNYC)
• Public Advocate Bill de Blasio wants changes to the city’s co-location process. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• Tenants of a public housing project in Harlem over the city’s plans to move a charter school in. (Times)
• The state ruled that the city can go ahead with its plan to put a charter school in PS 9. (GothamSchools)
• A new study says most student-teaching programs are bad for participants and children. (Times)
• Memphis, Tenn., is delaying the start of school because the city can’t pay for its contracts. (AP)
• Los Angeles’s schools chief suspended a rule that would have limited homework’s weight. (L.A. Times)

• In 20 schools piloting new teacher evaluations last year, 18 percent of teachers failed. (Crain’s NY)
• A look at NewsCorp’s education division suggests some issues that aren’t hacking-related. (EdWeek)
• An argument for why growing numbers of angry teachers actually bodes poorly for unions. (Jay Greene)
• The UFT also thinks its once-beloved bonus program should end; others aren’t as sure. (Hechinger)
• Collin Lawrence describes his school’s efforts to look good on its Quality Review. (GS Community)
• Mike Petrilli: Contrary to popular opinion, needy students are actually doing better these days. (Flypaper)
• The NAACP’s general counsel reiterates the group’s rationale for joining the UFT’s lawsuit. (BET)
• The iconic Ms. Frizzle fails when measured against D.C.’s evaluation rubric. (Answer Sheet)
• A major advocacy campaign seems to be brewing in favor of school in Colorado. (Alexander Russo)
• Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer wants an end to City Council earmarks. (City Room)
• A California school is under fire for spending more to help its struggling students. (Voice of San Diego)

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio discusses recommendations from a report on co-locations

Charter schools in public school buildings are here to stay, but the city’s divisive policy for carrying out those plans has to go.

That’s the position of a report released today by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, whose office studied co-location proposals for controversial charter schools and concluded that the Department of Education’s planning processes were still fundamentally flawed.

The report, titled “Consensus For Reform: A Plan For Collaborative School Co-Locations,” says the DOE misrepresented planning documents and ignored community criticism on its way to “bulldoz(ing) through the process of co-locating schools.”

It’s the second straight year that the public advocate examined how “major changes” in school buildings were implemented by the DOE. Last year’s report focused also on closures and followed a lawsuit that reversed DOE plans to phase out 19 schools.

De Blasio released this year’s report just days before a ruling on another lawsuit is expected, this one targeting 15 charter school co-locations. Two of the charter schools listed in the lawsuit – Upper West Success and Teaching Firms of America – were case studies in the report.

The report acknowledged that the DOE has “made improvements toward clarifying its proposals and explaining its decisions to better inform parents of proposed changes.” (more…)