GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• New and excessed teachers looked for scarce jobs at a Department of Education hiring fair. (WNYC)
• State education chiefs say they can propose their own, growth-based accountability systems. (Times)
• Atlanta officials want to fire everyone named in the cheating probe and launch new safeguards (WSJ)
• Teachers fired by a city charter school say officials were driven by anti-union feelings. (GothamSchools)
• A Queens teacher convicted of having sex with a teen was sentenced to 90 days in prison. (Daily News)
• The top winners in Google’s global student science fair were American women. (Agence France-Presse)

• A Philadelphia parent’s view of the administrator tapped for NYC’s Innovation Zone. (NYC P.S. Parents)
• Speaking of Philly, that buried investigation found signs of cheating at a third of schools. (Notebook)
• A suggestion that Atlanta’s Beverly Hall pull a Reggie Bush and return her trophies. (John Merrow)
• States are talking more about cutting special ed funding, once a sacred cow. (On Special Education)
• Stephen Lazar surveys teacher evaluation reform efforts and notes their shortcomings. (GS Community)
• A bid to depoliticize — or gut — San Diego’s school board ended with too few signatures. (Voice of S.D.)
• Oregon’s governor wants to remake schools by doing away with “seat time” requirements. (Oregonian)
• Ten things to know, and mostly hate, about the city’s graduation data. (Edwize)
• Students are pushing the state to administer the cancelled trigonometry Regents in August. (Facebook)
• PS 9′s Upper West Side block was once teeming with sociopaths — half a century ago. (City Room)
• A teacher who just retired turns her students’ reflections into words of advice. (Pissed Off Teacher)

Earlier this year, a small group of determined teachers at Opportunity Charter School marched into Leonard Goldberg’s office and confronted their boss.

They carried a letter that detailed their complaints with Goldberg’s response to their recent bid to unionize. Not only had Goldberg refused to recognize the staff’s vote to join the United Federation of Teachers, they said, he had begun waging an anti-union email campaign.

Goldberg, the school’s CEO, declined the letter and ordered them to leave, according to a teacher present at the meeting.

“He was screaming and yelling,” said the teacher. “He said ‘You’re not welcome in here,’ and threw us out of the office.”

By the end of the school year, that teacher and 13 of her pro-union colleagues – as well as one who opposed the union – were notified that their contracts would not be renewed. Five, including the teacher who described the Goldberg meeting, were members of the organizing committee that steered the union vote.

The school says it is a coincidence, but former teachers and union organizers believe the firings were calculated retaliation. They say Goldberg’s behavior in his office and his emails are just examples of his antagonistic attitude toward his teachers’ attempt to unionize.

“Opportunity Charter School has taken a negative stance since day one of the staff forming a union,” said UFT charter school representative Miles Trager, who met personally with Goldberg. “The firings further confirm their intention of quelling teacher voice at the school. ” (more…)

It seems that the biggest issue these days in education “reform” is the attempt to change how teachers are evaluated. Locally in New York, the state legislature passed a new evaluation system last year and the Board of Regents more recently released its guidelines for the implementation of that law, though much of the details remain to be negotiated between local districts and unions. Nationally, the Gates Foundation-funded Measure of Effective Teaching Project is starting to share some conclusions from the first two years of their study, and a recent report from the Center for Teaching Quality’s New Millenium Initiative by a group of Denver teachers has garnered some positive attention in the blogosphere from Renee Moore, Ariel Sachs, Dan Brown, and others.

Like nearly all issues in education, this one is complex. I have gotten to see just how complex it is from two vantage points within the NYC discourse: I have been working for the past semester to support the social studies teachers in NYC’s transformation schools who were subject to the pilot of new assessments that are to be part of the new teacher evaluation system. I am also on the UFT negotiating committee for the new system. Unfortunately, I am under non-disclosure obligations for both sides and can’t yet write from those experiences. I did, however, have the luck to be invited last night to participate in a webinar through the Teacher Leadership Network with a researcher from the Gates MET study, so I will use that study as a jumping off point for some comments.

There is tremendous reason to be skeptical, if not downright resistant, to Gates money being used to support this study, as Joanne Barkan so brilliantly documented in Dissent Magazine. I’m willing to put that aside for the minute, to assume the best intentions of the researchers who are working on this and other projects. The basic logic of the MET project, as well as all efforts to measure teacher effectiveness, seems to be as follows “if we can identify what goes into good teaching, then we can a) replicate it through better teacher education and development and b) remove ineffective teachers that will be replaced with the better developed teachers we will then be able to create.” The less benign version of this argument, which is motivating the politicized teacher evaluation laws passed around the country, is that “we need to identify bad teachers so we can fire them and replace them with good ones.” Again, I’m willing here to deal with the better intentions of former, despite all the others on the bandwagon.

The billion dollar question then becomes, what is “good teaching”? And unfortunately, this is the question I have seen dealt with in far too simplistic ways, if at all. (more…)

• AFT President Randi Weingarten said the country needs teacher-inspired education reforms. (Times)
• The ex-PTA treasurer at Brooklyn’s PS 29 must repay $82,000 that she stole. (Daily News, Post, Times)
• The private Brooklyn Friends School offers a summer program for public school students. (Daily News)
• Bronx students are taking part in a summer law program for minority women. (Daily News)
• After political feuding, New Jersey’s senate head killed Gov. Chris Christie’s education proposals. (AP)

• Pennsylvania found unlikely numbers of erasures on state tests but never investigated. (Notebook)
• The “more than a dozen” new standardized tests the city is preparing? Actually 408. (NYC P.S. Parents)
• Despite the no-layoffs budget deal, PS 102 in Brooklyn excessed teacher Andrea Schulman. (HuffPo)
• Ruben recounts his fourth year of teaching, which had high highs and low lows. (GS Community)
• KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg will no longer head KIPP Houston and its Turbo model. (Rick Hess)
• Parents in Buffalo want a “parent trigger” law to let them remake struggling schools. (City Journal)
• A group for new and alt-cert teachers, New Teacher Underground, is launching this week. (Ed Notes)
• An argument that Winerip’s take on charter school push-outs just proves choice works. (Flypaper)
• Read a full account from the mother who says Harlem Success pushed her son out. (NYC P.S. Parents)
• Two leading pundits offer edu-talking points for Republican presidential hopefuls. (Weekly Standard)
• The head of the city’s Leadership Academy to train new principals defends its track record. (Times)
• The city aims to improve life for the elderly by using school buses to take them shopping. (Daily Mail)
• Many countries with great schools are doing less testing these days, not more. Why aren’t we? (Salon)

Principals are grappling with the implications of a state policy change that allows them to award credit for shorter courses that students take online.

A regulation passed in June by the Board of Regents allows city high schools to award credit in online courses or blended learning courses, where the class is conducted partly online and partly in a traditional classroom setting, regardless of how much time students actually spend in the classes. City Department of Education officials lobbied the Regents in support of the change.

A dozen principals discussed the new regulations today at the meeting of a monthly panel led by Alisa Berger and Sarah Scrogin, two principals who have spearheaded activities within the Innovation Zone, the DOE’s subset of technology-centered schools. (Notably, Berger’s high school, the iSchool, and Scrogin’s, East Bronx Academy for the Future, have worked together in the past on intra-city distance learning classes.)

As members of the Innovation Zone’s selective iLearn cohort, which numbered 40 last year but is jumping to 127 this fall, the principals who attend the monthly meetings have used technology to reshaped their schedules, supplies, and teachers’ workloads. When it comes to using technology to change teaching and learning, the principals usually have a lot to say.

But when Scroggin asked them how they were thinking about responding to the change in seat time rules, they were quiet. (more…)

This year was surprising in a lot of ways. When the year began, I felt immediately behind and a little out of sync. This was in part because I started the year with 10 more students than the year before, but I wouldn’t put all the blame on that change. It wasn’t just the number of students that threw me off, but the personalities, performance and behavior of many of my new students. It was clear early on that this was a talkative group, there were more “rebels” than my previous years, I had five students who weren’t speaking English, including three who were brand new to the country, and six students were reading at an early kindergarten level. It was clear early on that this year would be a challenging one, and I admit to feeling a little overwhelmed.

But despite feeling myself on somewhat shaky footing, there were glimmers of hope. There was also a surprising confidence and persistence to try new things and create a classroom culture this year where my students learned to love to learn. This was an exciting realization, the moment when I understood that it was exactly because this year was going to be a great challenge, it was also a great opportunity.

Looking back on this year, there were many highs, and some pretty low lows. At times I feltdiscouraged with my own teaching, a lack of confidence from my administration, and I felt anxious about the needs and progress of my students inside and outside of the classroom. However, I think this past year, perhaps more so than any year prior, I rose to the occasion.

This was a year where I really tried to follow through on my intent to try new things. (more…)

• Michael Goodwin: Actually, Chancellor Walcott doesn’t control school investigators after all. (Post)
• Parents in Far Rockaway are protesting the city’s decision to deny their principal tenure. (Daily News)
• A South Bronx charter school is crafting a new model for schools to serve students in foster care. (AP)
• A mom says a Harlem Success academy pushed out her son, who has attention issues, in 2008. (Times)
• City families are paying high prices to prepare their preschoolers for the gifted screening test. (Post)
• Parents at Brooklyn’s PS 29 plan to confront their former PTA treasurer accused of stealing. (Daily News)
• The UFT’s $2 million award for housing its charter school has some observers uneasy. (GothamSchools)
• More than 1,200 families have applied for Chris Whittle’s new private school, to open in 2012. (Times)
• Stanley Crouch: New Yorkers are growing weary of the NAACP’s Hazel Dukes. (Daily News)
• Nationally, vocational programs in high schools are under threat from falling budgets. (Times)
• Laid-off teachers in Chicago staged an art exhibit of works showcasing their feelings. (Times)
• In Texas, the school personnel responsible for rolling out new exams have all been cut. (Times)

• Evaluating if the city’s Impact Schools initiative cut down on violence is almost impossible. (City Limits)
• An argument that urban schools miss out on good teachers because of late hiring. (Jay Mathews)
• Bridging the district-charter school divide brought some people to the Berlin Wall. (Eduwonk)
• A report from a union of teachers union activists in Chicago. (Ed Notes)
• Stephen Lazar says he’s marching on Washington to be part of a movement. (GS Community)
• A teacher wonders why he issues report cards when test scores decide promotion. (America’s Future)
• A Brooklyn parent makes the case that a proposed charter school isn’t really for the community. (EdVox)
• The principal of Ralph McKee HS on her hardest duty: attending a student’s funeral. (Soaring Seagulls)
• A before and after view of revisions to a “coaching plan” for a developing teacher. (Starting an Ed School)
• Federal authorities have gotten involved in checking D.C.’s cheating investigation. (D.C. Schools Insider)
• There might be a recession on, but enrollment and tuition at city private schools is rising. (City Room)