GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• A rundown of Republican presidential candidates’ education ideologies and track records. (Hechinger)
• Nat Hentoff challenges Chancellor Walcott to bring the Constitution into city schools. (Village Voice)
• A teacher recounts her days volunteering in a school-supplies rich evacuation center. (GS Community)
• First up in New Schools Venture Fund’s new series of video interviews is Sal Khan. (NSVF via Eduwonk)
• A Denver education advocate critiques Colorado’s treatment in “Class Warfare.” (Ed News Colorado)
• Budget cuts often force a choice between maintaining staff or sustaining PD. (YNN via Teacher Beat)
• The deadline for Teach for America alums to write a winning blog post is midnight. (Teach For Us)
• State education commissioners are worried about Race to the Top delays being allowed. (Politics K-12)
• A charter school founder confronts the uncomfortable question, “Am I a reformer?” (Mike Goldstein)
• A relatively new private school is rebranding itself as offering an international angle. (City Room)
• On the surprisingly rich lineage of social justice-infused mathematics instruction. (Flypaper)

Disgruntled teachers at Opportunity Charter School won their bid to unionize last week after a state agency approved the United Federation of Teachers to represent them.

A ruling by the Public Employment Relations Board dated Aug. 26 officially certified the union to serve as “exclusive negotiating agent” for Opportunity’s teachers, paving the way for the UFT to assume all collective bargaining rights on behalf of its employees.

With the ruling, the UFT now represents 13 New York City charter schools.

The decision comes nearly four months after teachers held a secret “card check,” during which a majority of teachers signed authorization cards stating that they wished to be represented by a union. Administrators refused to recognize the results within 30 days, setting up the official hearing process through PERB, which began in June.

In reviewing the union vote cards, PERB threw out nearly a third of votes that belonged to teachers who were no longer employed at Opportunity, according to a UFT official. That includes more than a dozen teachers who were abruptly fired at the end of the school year. (more…)

I got the first call Thursday afternoon. A recording asked if I could volunteer at a shelter during the hurricane. Press 1 for yes or 2 for no.

I felt a wave of the familiar not-working-but-still-getting-paid-teacher-in-summer guilt. I thought about the fact that I didn’t have kids and what my mother would say. I pressed 1, mentally crossing my fingers I wouldn’t be called to volunteer. That evening a voicemail message told me to report to Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn Friday morning for my 12-hour shift. I was in shock. I played the message for my roommates and they howled with laughter, especially when the awkward automated voice said “12-hour shift.” At this point, I didn’t know these calls were only being made to city workers.

The next day I made my way to Clara Barton. I knew it was the right thing to do, and honestly, feared I might get in trouble if I didn’t show (the message was unambiguously in the imperative). There were about 15 of us that day — an industrious bunch — and we got to work unpacking the large bins that had been stored at the school for years for an event like this. They were filled with instructional videos and books, forms, walkie-talkies, flashlights, notepads, signage, batteries, tape, markers, pens, and more. Along with the three other teachers in the group, I drooled over this abundance of brand-new school supplies — particularly the oodles of Post-It brand poster paper (with the sticky back!) that every teacher knows cost 30 bucks a pop. Our schools might stop just short of putting campus safety in charge of supplies, but apparently the city’s Office of Emergency Management had plenty to go around.

We were to be an evacuation center: a place for evacuees to check in before heading to a “satellite” hurricane shelter. I ended up with the job of entering information on the website OEM uses to keep track of its staff and evacuees. By now I knew of course, that only city employees had been asked to volunteer. I wondered why there were so few teachers — most people were from the Human Resources Administration. Eventually I heard back from the teacher friends I had texted. Many of them had been contacted; they had all said no. Two were away, the rest were just not interested. I didn’t get the sense that anyone had refused out of spite for the Department of Education or the city; it seemed more that they weren’t keen on spending a hurricane working at a shelter. (more…)

The Department of Education gave out temporary assignments yesterday to nearly 2,000 teachers who are on the city payroll but who do not have permanent jobs in schools.

That didn’t stop dozens of teachers from lining up outside the Brooklyn Museum yesterday afternoon for one of the last hiring fairs before school starts next week. Members of the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of teachers whose positions have been cut, mostly due to budget cuts or school closures, received special invitations to the job fair from the DOE, encouraging them to be “proactive” in their job search.

If those teachers are not offered jobs this week, they will be asked to rotate between different schools on a weekly basis as substitute teachers, according to an arrangement made by the teachers union and the DOE earlier this summer to avoid teacher layoffs. In previous years, ATRs were typically assigned to one school for the entire year to cover for absent teachers.

There were 1,940 teachers in the ATR pool as of Aug. 19. Typically, the pool shrinks in the first weeks of the school year as principals hasten to fill open positions.

Those who logged into the job portal for excessed teachers yesterday morning found information on what schools to report to in September.

English teacher Jerome Madramootoo, who was excessed after the city began phasing out Jamaica High School in June, said he was assigned to work at Newtown High School in Queens next month, but given no specific information about what he would be doing there. (more…)

Eva Moskowitz did not generate the idea for Harlem Success herself; Randi Weingarten has been criticizing her successor, UFT President Michael Mulgrew, to her friends; and former Chancellor Joel Klein thinks that at least two of his former deputies have gone soft on reform in their new school districts. These are among the claims in “Class Warfare,” Steven Brill’s new book on the education reform movement.

Much of “Class Warfare” will be familiar to GothamSchools readers. The book’s main characters include, on one side, former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and, on the other, teachers unions president Randi Weingarten; many of its main plot points center on New York City, and some of the key classroom scenes take place in Harlem.

But the following insights — some of them more solidly sourced than others — were news to us. Here’s a run-down of Brill’s most intriguing New York-related reporting:

The war behind the war: Bloomberg v. Klein

• On labor issues, Bloomberg sometimes undercut Joel Klein. Klein’s team thought they could get the UFT to sign off on a change in the teacher termination process. But Bloomberg, who was nearing reelection, told them not to push their luck. “The mayor blinked,” the DOE’s one-time labor chief, Dan Weisberg, told Brill. “The mayor just gave up.” Weisberg said he “clashed almost daily” with City Hall over back-channel contract negotiations in 2005. (more…)

• A teacher who thought he would be laid off is returning to PS 124 instead of starting law school. (WNYC)
• Parents want the city to keep its promise to test school sites for toxins before next week. (Daily News)
• The UFT began its appeal of last week’s teacher ratings ruling. (GothamSchools, WSJ, Post, WNYC)
• The city’s centers where families new to the city can register for school open today. (NY1, S.I. Advance)
• The city is trying to terminate a teacher who was convicted of manslaughter but not murder. (Post)
• Kansas City’s schools chief resigned abruptly after two years heading turnaround efforts there. (Times)
• Now he’s heading to Detroit’s turnaround district, where he’ll $1.6 million over four years. (Detroit News)
• Los Angeles is giving school district insiders first crack at taking over struggling schools. (L.A. Times)
• New Jersey schools are tweaking policies in response to a new state law targeting bullying. (Times)
• Advocates for the country’s few remaining one-room schools tout the arrangement’s benefits. (WSJ)

• A teacher who lasted one semester at a Bronx school explains his path to being a “bad teacher.” (Salon)
• What’s the point of criticizing a teacher evaluation system that hasn’t been built yet? (Shanker Blog)
• On the conspicuous absence of people of color representing educators publicly. (Jose Vilson)
• A teacher tackles “decision fatigue” head-on by taking small steps to have a better year. (Miss Brave)
• Richard Rothstein: “Class Warfare” misrepresent unions, and it misrepresents reformers, too. (Slate)
• An ex-Wireless Generation employee sacrificed stock when she moved to Gates Foundation. (Eduwonk)
• Launching an in-depth look at five Las Vegas schools undergoing turnaround this year. (Las Vegas Sun)
• A teacher-quality nonprofit says releasing TDRs could widen the achievement gap. (NCTQ via Russo)

The city’s plan to release teachers’ rating data to news organizations threatens public employees across the state.

That’s one argument the United Federation of Teachers is making as it moves toward its final attempt to prevent teachers’ individual ratings from going to press. Last week, the state’s Appellate Court echoed a low-level judge in ruling that the ratings, known as Teacher Data Reports, are public information and should be released.

Today, the union asked the Appellate Court for permission to take the case to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. If the Appellate Court doesn’t grant permission, the union can also ask the Court of Appeals itself. The Court of Appeals doesn’t accept every case brought before it, and if it declines to hear this one, the Appellate Court’s decision would stand and the union would be out of options.

The Court of Appeals is more likely to take on cases that are potentially precedent-setting. Today’s filing stresses the “considerable violence to the limited but real privacy protections public employees possess” that the release of Teacher Data Reports could inflict, in addition to noting, as the union has done repeatedly, flaws in the reports themselves.

“In finding that the subjective, evaluative, and pre-decisional information contained in the inaptly named Teacher Data Reports, or ‘TDRs,’ is not exempt from public disclosure under FOIL, this Court has significantly narrowed the rights not only of new York City teachers but of all public employees in the State of New York,” the filing begins.

The UFT’s complete filing is below. (more…)

Scott Stringer is joined by his school board representative Patrick Sullivan and City Council members to demand a quick payback of stolen money from Verizon.

Opponents of the Department of Education’s $120 million contract with Verizon aren’t letting the contract’s approval silence their criticism.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer led a press conference today to demand that Verizon return hundreds of thousands of dollars that it earned through a contractor’s fraud.

City investigators found that Willard Lanham overbilled the DOE by $3.6 million while subcontracting with Verizon and IBM. The investigators’ report concludes that Verizon concealed irregularities in Lanham’s accounting until the department raised red flags of its own. Verizon made as much as $800,000 through the illicit transactions, according to the report.

Lanham, the man at the center of the scandal, was arrested and charged with mail fraud and theft, but his trial has not yet started.

Verizon officials said they would pay back the money, but Stringer said the fact that the company hasn’t done so already calls into question its integrity.

“You must return the money,” Stringer said. “You must send a signal to the city that you will be a good corporate citizen.” (more…)

It’s a common refrain: Teachers say that high-stakes tests constrain them in the classroom.

At our “On Education” panel last week, high school history teacher Stephen Lazar said he would would trade a higher salary for freedom from the Regents exam his students must pass to graduate.

“I would give up any raise in a second if you told me that once I showed that I can get my kids to pass the Regents — which I’ve shown over the past six years — that I can throw [the tests] out the window … and then I can really teach [students] how to think,” he said.

But what if the exams aren’t as limiting as Lazar and other teachers say? What if they’re actually useful? That’s the argument that Ama Nyamekye, a former city schoolteacher, makes in the Community section today.

In “A Teacher Finds Good In Testing,” Nyamekye describes what happened when she stopped resisting the Regents exam and started learning from it. She writes:

I once dismissed standardized testing for its narrow focus on a discrete set of skills, but I learned that my self-made assignments were more problematic. It turned out they were skewed in my favor. I was better at teaching literary analysis than grammar and punctuation. When I started giving ongoing standardized assessments, I noticed that my students showed steady growth in literary analysis, but less growth in grammar and punctuation. I was teaching to my strengths instead of strengthening my weaknesses.

Read Nyamekye’s complete essay, which originally appeared yesterday in the Commentary section of Education Week.