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State officials have grown anxious that the city won’t make a deadline to apply for $400 million in federal grants to improve failing schools.

Education Commissioner John King registered his anxiety in a letter last week to Marc Sternberg, head of the city Department of Education’s portfolio planning office. In an email, King wrote that the city has had months to finalize its plans for the grants, known as School Improvement Grants, and he wanted enough time to review the proposals before he approves them. That must happen before the end of the month.

King said he wanted to see the city’s plans by yesterday. The city responded by submitting a key section of the application: an explanation of how it plans to phase out 12 schools deemed “persistently lowest achieving” by the state.

According to details of the plan, released today, the city requested a total of $5.1 million to replace the schools with 17 smaller ones – or $300,000 per school. Five of the new schools opened this year and the rest are scheduled to open over the next two school years. (A list of the planned schools and their locations is below.)

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People on both sides of the charter school fight are not happy about a hefty City Council earmark that’s going to the teachers union’s charter school.

The funding, sponsored by City Councilman Erik Dilan and approved last month in the council’s annual capital budget allocations, gives the union $2 million to develop a plan for moving its charter school out of the two East New York buildings it shares and into space of its own.

The announcement comes as charter schools and their critics are locked in fierce debate over how the city funds and allocates space to charter schools. That dispute is central to a lawsuit, filed in May by the UFT and NAACP, that seeks to stop 16 charter schools from opening, moving, or expanding.

The lawsuit alleges that some charter schools receive disproportionate public resources, and some of its backers say the City Council earmark is another example.

Teacher activist Norm Scott called the funding “a double outrage, maybe a triple outrage.” (more…)

At the end of this month, I’ll be joining thousands of other teachers for the Save Our Schools March in Washington. People will march for lots of reasons, and you can read some great ones here, here, and here.

I am going to do something I don’t usually do with this piece, and make a rather conservative argument: I’m marching because I don’t have the answer.

I just finished up five and half years of teaching in the Bronx. I joined a school filled with some of the smartest and most thoughtful people I have encountered in the field of education. We were given a blank canvas on which to envision an ideal school. We did a lot of impressive sounding things, many of which worked, others of which failed miserably. Whether or not the school is a success or failure, of course, depends on one’s stance and perception. There were many teachers who felt like the early success of the school were ones only of appearances, where good press and high graduation rates hid a number of foundational problems. But for others (including myself for a long time, though less so recently) we were doing something wonderful in the service of our students. I may never relive the sense of possibility and efficacy I felt a few years ago, but it was recently captured perfectly by one of my colleagues.

Both views are simultaneously true. Regardless of where one stands on the value of my former school, there is not one person who thought our work was done. I left a school with many problems, some of them structural, others created by the mismanagement of the NYC DOE; some of them created by decisions I made, and others from my colleagues and administrators. The problems, like every single one of the 474 students the school serves, are immensely complex. So too will be their solutions.

And this is why I’ll join with thousands of others to march. (more…)

• Parents at the Shuang Wen School protested against investigations and their principal’s ouster. (Post)
• Students who failed June’s Regents exams, including in math, can’t retake them for a year. (Daily News)
• A city deal with a television network means high school sporting events will be televised. (Post)
• More teachers seem to have had their probation extended this year. (GothamSchools, Daily News)
• The Daily News says the state’s deadline on teacher evaluations is today, and it likely won’t be met.
• The Post encourages more whistleblowers to come forward with allegations of cheating in schools.
• The troubled Atlanta school system is delaying its superintendent search for a year. (AJC, AP)
• California schools are reevaluating restraint training for students with disabilities. (Times)

• The new excuses the “no excuses” movement makes, and ideas about how to evolve. (NYTM)
• Responding to the Atlanta scandal, Arne Duncan says cheating is not widespread. (Russo)
• A national summit meeting here will promote imagination’s role in schools. (Ed Week)
• Comparing teacher layoffs that happened to hypothetical layoffs based on value-added data. (Ed Next)
• The advocacy group 50CAN, similar to DFER, plans to expand to New York and is hiring. (50CAN)
• Criticizing charter schools for re-segregating when neighborhoods are segregated is unfair. (Eduwonk)
• A debate about what role affluent families should take in the school reform debate. (Joanne Jacobs)
• An argument that children of different social class require different education policies. (Flypaper)

Under pressure from the Bloomberg administration to make tenure tougher to receive, principals and superintendents are withholding job protections from some young teachers.

Instead of simply granting or denying tenure at the end of a teacher’s third year, they are extending the probationary period for some teachers by another year.

In 2006, just 30 teachers had their probation extended. As the city has moved to toughen all teacher evaluations, that number has risen steadily, to 465 last year. Reports from teachers and principals suggest the trend is likely to continue when official numbers about the past year’s tenure decisions is released in the near future.

The reports suggest that many superintendents, who make final tenure decisions based on principals’ recommendations, are responding to a directive that teachers who score low on a new rubric not get tenure. The city urged that teachers who scored in the “ineffective” range be denied tenure and teachers who fell in the “developing” range have their probations extended.

A low score on the city’s Teacher Data Report was particularly influential, even if other information, such as classroom observations, contradicted it, principals said. The reports, which only some teachers receive, use value-added formulas to estimate teachers’ effectiveness at increasing students’ test scores, and teachers with low scores are “red-flagged” in the city’s tenure system.

Of the nine teachers Principal Joe Lisa had up for tenure this year at IS 61 in Queens, six taught in subjects without data reports and received tenure. Three math teachers had their probationary periods extended. One in particular seemed to be a shoo-in, Lisa said. But his superintendent rejected the idea of giving her tenure this year. (more…)

Christopher Columbus High School students wait to receive their diplomas at graduation in the Lehman College auditorium.Tamjid Chowdhury, this year’s valedictorian of Christopher Columbus High School, said in his graduation speech that the fight to save his school from closing had ironically provided some of his favorite memories.

Tamjid Chowdhury, this year’s valedictorian of Christopher Columbus High School, said in his graduation speech that the fight to save his school from closing had ironically provided some of his favorite memories.

“It was one time I was awed by the sense of unity in the school,” he said of the rallies.

For teachers and staff at the Bronx school, another year under the threat of closure has ended with stories of coming together to improve.

The unity extended beyond protests at public meetings. Without anyone asking them to, a group of teachers at the school spent the year huddling together to redesign the school’s curriculum.

“We knew if anything good was going to come out of this year, we would have to generate it, and we would have to execute it,” said Christine Rowland, an English teacher who also works for the UFT.

City officials tried to close Columbus this year and last year, and they want Columbus phased out by 2014 to open a new school in the building. Teachers have tried to save the school multiple times by rallying behind efforts to convert Columbus into a charter school, and Columbus remains at the center of the lawsuit filed by the teachers union and the NAACP to stop school closures.

“It’s a really big blow to our psyche,” said Larry Minetti, an art teacher who has taught at Columbus for 16 years. (more…)

• Ex-Chancellor Joel Klein will head hacking scandal internal dealings for NewsCorp. (Times,Telegraph)
• The city’s new rollover policy will actually dramatically limit how much principals can save. (Times)
• Some teachers cite problems on this year’s Algebra II Regents exam, but the state says no. (Daily News)
• Chancellor Dennis Walcott said he is looking into cheating charges leveled by readers. (Post)
• Parents at PS 368 in Brooklyn say the arrival of a charter school could mean less gym time. (Daily News)
• The entrenched school board of Bridgeport, Conn., has asked the state to replace its members. (Times)

• The city’s former testing chief says the current data climate encourages cheating. (Hechinger)
• An attempt to change students’ subway habits after dismissal falls flat. (An Urban Teacher’s Education)
• K-12 testing programs should be more like pre-K assessments, not the other way around. (The Nation)
• For Hilary Lustick, graduation reflected on her students’ successes — and her own. (GS Community)
• Just 6 of 300+ communities aiming to be Promise Neighborhoods will get federal help. (Politics K-12)
• Top-25 lists of the top education influencers and educators on Twitter. (Education Next)
• Education reporters explain why they published a confidential document revealing city plans. (Notebook)
• The NEA also eliminated its opposition to merit pay, but no one seems to have noticed. (Mike Antonucci)
• A Philadelphia charter school that’s trying to stop unionization says its not a public school. (EdWeek)
• A teacher says he won’t miss the paltry Teacher’s Choice funds for buying supplies. (Accountable Talk)
• A legislator’s request that Arne Duncan offer NCLB flexibility guidance wasn’t answered. (Politics K-12)
• Inspired by Diane Ravitch, the Times is asking readers for advice about how to fix schools. (Edwize)
• Private donors are enabling the city to offer more youth jobs than it planned before budget cuts. (Patch)

An initiative designed to ease tension between district and charter schools in the city has moved slowly and largely under the radar this spring.

In December, then-Chancellor Joel Klein joined 88 of the city’s charter schools in signing on to a District-Charter Collaboration Compact, which mandates that charter schools “fulfill their role as laboratories of innovation” and requires the Department of Education to support city charter schools. The compact, which the Gates Foundation urged and is funding, emphasizes collaboration around issues of enrollment, space allocation, and instruction.

But after more than six months — which were bookended by Klein’s sudden departure and a contentious lawsuit over charter school co-location — little progress has been made toward fulfilling the compact’s requirements. In June, the New York City Charter School Center took a first step by hiring Cara Volpe, a former Teach for America employee, to be the city’s first district-charter collaboration manager.

Later, a not-yet-formed advisory council of district and charter school employees will help Volpe set priorities, according to city and charter school officials.

Volpe “will be expected to implement the council’s vision for identifying, establishing and implementing the partnerships, policies and programs that will help tear down the boundaries between great district and charter schools,” according to advertisement for the position, which the charter center posted online at GothamSchools’ jobs board, Idealist, and elsewhere.

Volpe’s work will come at a time when tensions around charter schools are at an all-time high. (more…)