GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Advocates are worried that the city’s new evaluation system could penalize teachers of students with special needs.

The nonprofit organization Advocates for Children of New York recently released a fact sheet calling on parents to ask how the new system, which will be piloted in more schools next year, will affect those teachers.

Sixty percent of the new evaluations is based on subjective measures like principal observations, and the other 40 percent is based on student test scores. AFC’s concern is that teachers who work with high-needs students will be at a disadvantage because they likely won’t see the gains in test scores that other teachers will.

That will make it more difficult to earn a high evaluation score, lowering the incentive for teachers to take on students with disabilities and English Language Learners.

“Teachers are basically going to be looking at lower test scores, and lower evaluations because they’re so heavily reliant on test scores,” said Maggie Moroff, special education policy coordinator for AFC. “We’re worried that they will be teaching more to the test in those classes.” (more…)

A legal challenge that prompted city education officials to rewrite all of its co-location plans was denied today.

Well before the co-location was approved in February, parents at Brooklyn’s PS 9 had battled against the city’s plan to move Brooklyn East Collegiate Charter School into the building. In April, then-State Education Commissioner David Steiner halted the co-location plan, agreeing with the parents that the city Department of Education’s space-sharing plan had many flaws. After the city revised the plan — along with all of the other co-location plans that had the same problems — parents appealed again.

Today, state officials rejected that appeal, clearing the way for Brooklyn East Collegiate to take over classrooms and some shared space in the Prospect Heights building this fall.

The decision comes as a blow not just to PS 9 parents but to others across the city who are trying to prevent co-location plans from moving forward. Steiner’s April ruling on PS 9, which has come to be known as the Espinet decision, emboldened groups of people at other schools facing co-locations this fall to file their own appeals with the state. In recent weeks, State Commissioner of Education John King dismissed two other appeals, allowing site plans for Coney Island Preparatory Charter School and Explore Charter School to move forward.

Today’s decision did not come from King, but from his deputy, Valerie Grey. (more…)

My fourth and final year at the Brooklyn Arts Academy saw a flurry of structural revisions and new initiatives. The fire under the feet of the school’s administration was the need to show improvement on the upcoming School Quality Review (SQR). The review would take place in early December, so we needed to hit the ground running.

In addition to the transition to an outcomes-based assessment system, teachers were asked to serve as an advisor to a group of students, with the purpose of helping each one track his or her academic progress. Upon my suggestion, we set up an “office hours” system in which teachers met with students one-on-one during lunch or after school. The short conferences drew on the newly established outcomes-tracking system and were meant to motivate students to achieve proficiency on their outcomes. Not every teacher followed through with these conferences, but I made a concerted effort to touch base with each of my 20 or so advisees once every couple of weeks.

In addition to using my lunch hour for this purpose, I also participated in morning meetings four times a week. We were scheduled to meet twice with our department, and twice with our grade-level teams. Department meetings focused on refining our learning outcomes and developing a four-year scope and sequence.

The process of creating the scope and sequence was a confusing one. We were first asked to choose 10 “power standards” related to history that we hoped every student could meet upon graduation from the school. For example, one standard that we agreed to use was that all graduating seniors should be able to “fully defend [his or her] arguments with evidence and if prompted rebut contradictory arguments, identifying weaknesses in [his or her] own or other’s arguments.”

Once we choose our power standards, we were asked to plan backwards from the 12th grade to ninth grade. (more…)

• American students remain low-performing on a national geography assessment. (Times)
• A report calls for a renewed focus on problem-solving and engineering in science education. (Times)
• Mayor Bloomberg is soliciting bids for a new engineering school to open in the city. (WNYC, NY1)
• Five reasons why Rupert Murdoch likely chose Joel Klein to manage NewsCorp’s scandal. (WNYC)
• The number of confirmed cases of bedbugs in city schools tripled last year. (GothamSchools)
• Erasure analysis shows test irregularities in dozens of New Jersey schools. (N.J. Spotlight)
• The Daily News praises Ruben Brosbe’s treatment of his tenure decision on GothamSchools.

• Thirty-six states are applying for Race to the Top’s second round, including New York. (Politics K-12)
• The Early Learning Challenge is like Race to the Top in that it promotes risky reforms. (Sara Mead)
• The city’s talk-focused teacher evaluation deal requires the union’s will to succeed. (Peter Goodman)
• Kevin Carey: When people outside schools break rules, we don’t blame their industries. (New Republic)
• Federal authorities actually have several tools to punish school districts that cheat. (Politics K-12)
• An anonymous teacher describes how credit recovery worked at his/her school. (NYC P.S. Parents)
• A parent wants to correct information that’s wrong in ARIS but wonders if anyone cares. (Insideschools)
• Evidence from Chicago suggests that principals will move to fire teachers when they can. (Ed Next)
• Ex-chancellor Joel Klein stayed mostly seated as new boss Rupert Murdoch was pied. (YouTube)
• Insiders at NewsCorp see Klein’s ascendant role of fixer as a threat to their longtime counsel. (WSJ)
• President Obama wants the nation’s CEOs to give more money to education, as critics blanch. (Yahoo)

Bedbugs, the parasitic insects whose infestation levels have reached near epidemic proportions in New York City, were discovered in schools at an unprecedented rate this year, according to totals released by the city Department of Education.

There were 3,590 confirmed cases of bedbugs found in schools this year, a rate that more than tripled the 2009-2010 totals. The DOE did not release which schools were treated for bedbugs.

The city is battling back without the help of specialized exterminators. A troubled no-bid private contract with a bedbug pest control company was terminated in November, leaving just over a dozen employees in the DOE pest control unit to fight the growing case load.

The increase is significant, but not a complete surprise. The upsurge actually began during the 2009-2010 school year. In February, I reported that through just five months of the 2010-2011 school year, there were already 1,700 confirmed cases, far surpassing the previous year’s total of 1,019. (more…)

People with an interest in the city’s school system are beginning to throw their support behind prospective candidates for the 2013 mayoral race, according to Friday’s campaign finance filings.

Campaign finance filings released on Friday showed that two top officials with Democrats for Education Reform, a major education lobbying group, donated exclusively to Scott Stringer, who defeated charter school operator Eva Moskowitz in the 2009 Manhattan Borough President primary with support from the city teachers union.

Joe Williams, executive director of DFER, gave a total of $1,500 to the Stringer campaign in two different donations. Elizabeth Ling, DFER’s New York State political director, gave $150, according to the filings. Stringer was the only candidate to whom Williams and Ling donated.

Ling, who serves on the board of one of Moskowitz’s Success Charter schools, said it was too early for DFER to endorse anyone just yet and that the group is “continuing to build relationships at all levels.” (more…)

Sometimes the simplest explanation might well be the most accurate.

That’s the conclusion that Ruben Brosbe, GothamSchools’ longtime Community section contributor, drew after finding out whether he would be given tenure last year.

Brosbe was at the front edge of a trend last year when he had his probationary period extended. This year, he joined a large number of new teachers when his probation was extended again. But while some teachers who did not receive tenure said they could see no justification, Brosbe concludes that he didn’t get tenure because he hadn’t yet earned it.

In the Community section today, Brosbe writes:

For a while I looked for something to blame it on, other than myself. I hadn’t taken criticism well in a meeting late the previous year. Had I poisoned my relationship with my principal? Was something written on my blog misconstrued as critical or unprofessional? Was I still red-flagged by the DOE? I thought and I thought, until I came to an important realization: I wasn’t ready for tenure.

While I know I made significant improvement in certain areas of my practice, and took some exciting risks this year as a teacher, I knew that I still had room to grow.

It always seemed strange to me that one could be granted tenure after only three years of teaching. As we all know, most teachers are still in the process of learning and establishing themselves as professionals in the midst of their third year. So, to give someone tenure before this third year has even finished always seemed odd.

Nonetheless, in a system that does little to recognize performance otherwise, tenure represented a rare milestone of merit, and I wanted it when I was eligible. I was disappointed then when my principal informed me last year that my probation would be extended. She felt I had room to grow with regard to modeling in my reader’s workshop. I accepted this, and when I later heard that, per our superintendent’s directions, tenure was especially difficult to earn for teachers who were new to a school, as I was, I took some solace in the possibility that it wasn’t entirely personal.

Additionally, at a panel on value-added data run by Educators 4 Excellence in November, Sandra Tacina, Director of Talent Analytics for the DOE, informed the audience that in the previous year, teachers who scored lower than 50 percent on their Teacher Data Reports were red-flagged in tenure decisions. I wonder if she realized that this applied to at least one member of the audience. Once again, I took this as a sign that my principal’s decision was partly beyond my control, and perhaps beyond hers as well. I took this as a sign that with the right amount of improvement, I would secure tenure this year.

It was a bumpy road though. I could sense from the tone of observations and informal conversations with my administrators that my confidence was misplaced. Before we even reached winter break, I had a strong suspicion I would not be getting tenure this year either.

As spring rolled around, all teachers up for tenure in my building were asked to submit portfolios for tenure. (more…)

• The city Housing Authority is supporting itself by selling or renting space to charter schools. (Crain’s NY)
• Parents at PS 29, where a PTA officer stole funds, have raised money for their principal. (Brooklyn Paper)
• With budget decisions due Friday, city principals are still struggling with inadequate funds. (NY1)
• Parents are suing the DOE after a staff member raped their 13-year-old daughter in school. (Daily News)
• Daycare center directors are worried about a costly overhaul of the city’s system. (GothamSchools)
• States are starting to develop alternative accountability plans to No Child Left Behind. (WSJ)
• A new study found that Texas schools are more frequently suspending or expelling students. (Times)
• Chancellor Walcott and State Sen. Jeff Klein launched an anti-asthma initiative. (Daily News)
• The Daily News says the city should not let momentum around teacher evaluations dissipate.