GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• A new city initiative targets black and Latino men, and Mayor Bloomberg is giving $30 million. (Times)
• Schools are competing for space once slated for a charter school that was shut down. (Riverdale Press)
• A Harlem school is under investigation for giving students credits they didn’t earn. (GothamSchools)
• Bloomberg is 1 of 6 donors paying to restore January Regents exams. (GS, NY1, Times, WSJ, WNYC)
• The Wall Street Journal says a leaked presentation shows the AFT is not on parents’ side.

• Geoff Decker captured the full exchange between Matt Damon and the Reason reporter. (GS YouTube)
• NewsCorp’s Wireless Generation is building software for the Gates Foundation. (Impatient Optimists)
• A profile of Patrick Sullivan, the PEP member who speaks out against mayoral policies. (Capital NY)
• This year, NBC is involving unions in putting together its “Education Nation” coverage. (Russo)
• State test scores released already don’t suggest that 82 percent of schools are failing. (Politics K-12)
• Colorado is planning to spend about $26 million on its ramped-up testing program. (Ed News Colorado)
• Collin Lawrence said he reached some male students through weight training. (GS Community)
• A career-changer describes teaching in her own children’s school. (Charting My Own Course)
• Philadelphia’s embattled superintendent is definitely getting another year on the job. (The Notebook)
• After visiting a few homes, Chicago’s schools chief rolled back his demand for house calls. (Sun-Times)
• The Fordham Institute reports a harassing phone call from a Save Our Schools supporter. (Flypaper)

Less than two years after pledging that he did not want to end tenure, Mayor Bloomberg struck a different chord today.

“Do I think it’s needed at the public school level? No,” he said today.

The statement came days after Bloomberg’s most recent escalation in rhetoric against tenure protections. During his weekly radio address last week, he said tenure is a vestige of the McCarthy Era of the 1950s, when teachers were persecuted for their political views.

But until today he had not said outright that he opposed tenure’s existence for public school teachers. In fact, in a Nov. 2009 speech at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., he declared, “Let me be clear: We are not proposing an end to tenure.” Last year, Bloomberg promised “to end teacher tenure as we know it,” but by making it tougher to achieve, not doing away with it. That vow appeared to bear fruit this year when the number of city teachers awarded tenure fell dramatically.

Bloomberg was responding to a question I asked about what protections he thinks teachers should have given that Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott made clear that people who observe cheating should report it. (more…)

A Philip Randolph High School is under investigation for credit accumulation fraud. (Credit: NYC DOE school web site)

A high school that posted suspicious swings in graduation rates in recent years is under investigation for giving students credits they didn’t earn.

Teachers and other staff members at A. Philip Randolph High School said they blew the whistle after seeing administrators abuse a practice that allows students to quickly make up credits in classes that they previously failed.

Department of Education officials said the Office of Special Investigations began probing A. Philip Randolph last month after Chancellor Dennis Walcott received several emails earlier this summer alleging illicit use of the practice, known as “credit recovery,” to artificially improve the school’s graduation numbers. After years of mediocre performance, the school’s graduation rate increased nearly 30 points two years ago and was one of the city’s highest.

This year, with less than a week before graduation day, school administrators ordered guidance counselors to enroll all failing seniors into online credit recovery courses so that they could graduate on time, one of the counselors said. She said the courses were crammed into one or two days and often went unsupervised.

When she and the school’s programming coordinators protested to administrators, they were rebuffed, the guidance counselor said.

“I said to them, ‘That is not right,’” she said. “You’re asking us to do something unethical.” (more…)

Collin Lawrence is a former New York City teacher who is recounting his four years working at a Brooklyn high school. Read Collin’s previous posts.

I feel incredibly proud of the 10 or so young men who participated in the after-school weight lifting program that I supervised in my fourth year at the Brooklyn Arts Academy. I started this club after the track team I helped organize in my second year proved unsustainable, but it did not attract students who were consistently dedicated at first. Perhaps the success of the program in my fourth year could be explained by the fact that the students who got involved were all senior boys who had known me since they were sophomores.

My last class ended around 2:30 p.m. and I would head over to our small weight room shortly thereafter. The boys were usually waiting for me by the door. The room consisted of three treadmills, four stationary bikes, an area for bench pressing and squatting, and another area with dumbbells for arm curls and rows. We could also do pull-ups, dips, and sit-ups. I generally divided the boys into groups of three or four and had them work through a few different stations. Sometimes I would lift with the kids, and other times I would watch them while I ran on the treadmill. By about halfway through the year, I knew I could trust them to lift safely, put the weights back when they were finished, and generally encourage one another.

But it wasn’t always this easy. When the boys started with me, many had never lifted a weight before. They assumed they were strong, maybe because they could hold their own in a fight. So it was a revelation for them to discover that the strength required to lift heavy weights had to be built over time. (I always enjoyed the first few days of the program when the students discovered that I, at about 5’8” and 135 pounds, could easily out-lift almost all of them). At first, the students just wanted to pick up any weights they could find and do some exercise. I had to teach them a systematic and disciplined approach to building muscle.

I started the boys on a routine that had them completing three sets of six repetitions for a given weight. When they could do that, they were allowed to move to seven reps, and then eight. Once they could do three sets of eight reps, they were allowed to add more weight and go back down to six reps. In this way, the students were able to witness their own improvement over time. For some of my more insecure students, the growth in their self-confidence as they gained strength was evident.

What I liked most about the weightlifting club, though, was that it became a safe space for my boys to figure out how to become men. (more…)

• Prep has begun at Harlem Prep Charter School, which is taking over a failing charter school. (NY1)
• Since 2002, the city cut erasure analysis and reduced random monitoring to stop cheating. (Daily News)
• The Daily News says concerns about cheating are just part of a union-led assault on accountability.
• The number of teachers rated unsatisfactory rose 16 percent. (GothamSchools, Daily News, Post, NY1)
• An 80-year-old teacher is suing to reverse her termination for refusing to work. (Daily News, Post)
• The Bronx Catholic school principal tied to racist groups has been fired. (Daily News, WNYC)
• Ex-Schools Chancellor Cathie Black netted more than $2 million in 2010, not from the city. (Daily News)
• The company that owns the University of Phoenix is buying an online math education company. (Times)
• Several D.C. schools being scrutinized for cheating saw big test score drops last year. (Washington Post)

• A teacher in the ATR pool says weekly assignments this year will complicate her child care. (NYC ATR)
• Seventeen states still can’t link student performance to individual teachers. (Inside School Research)
• A new study says some of TFA’s selection criteria correlate with higher student scores. (Teacher Beat)
• A city teacher reflects on being one of few current K-12 educators to speak at the SOS rally. (Jose Vilson)
• Even the country’s best and most motivated teachers say they feel under attack. (Learning First Alliance)
• In 1900, Ladies Home Journal predicted that schools would give out healthcare and vacations. (GOOD)
• Liza Campbell says her campus, Bushwick, is moving toward needed restorative justice. (GS Community)
• GEM and E4E debate seniority in the pages of Costco’s newsletter. (Costco Connection via Ed Notes)
• In California, where layoffs go by seniority layoffs, a proposal not to rehire that way. (Voice of San Diego)
• A principal ponders the place of international studies in a crowded curriculum. (Starting an Ed School)
• The debt deal means there’s no chance that schools will get new federal funds this year. (HuffPo)
• A reminder that huge inequities persist among districts despite gap-closing efforts. (School Finance 101)

For at least the sixth straight year, principals rated more teachers as unsatisfactory.

Last year, 2,118 teachers received unsatisfactory ratings, setting them along a path that could lead to termination. That number, making up 2.7 percent of all teachers, was 16 percent higher than in 2010 and more than twice the number of U-ratings handed out five years ago. In the 2005-2006 school year, just 981 teachers received unsatisfactory ratings.

About 80 percent of the teachers who received unsatisfactory ratings were tenured, according to Department of Education data. And about a quarter — 511 — received the scarlet rating last year as well.

The numbers suggest that principals are responding to the city’s sustained push to usher more weak teachers out of the system, and the city says 86 of the U-rated teachers have already resigned, including 41 who were denied tenure. But they hardly reflect a sea change in the way that principals rate teachers.

For that, the city is counting on a new teacher evaluation system that will do away with the binary satisfactory/unsatisfactory rating choice altogether. State law now requires districts to enact evaluation systems that use student test scores as a component and sort teachers into four categories from “highly effective” down to “ineffective.” (more…)

Usually a multi-piece series of articles should be published close together, but I have definitely made people wait — in anticipation, I’m sure — for the next part of my series about what I stand for as an educator. I apologize for the five-week delay, and though I know excuses are overrated, I have at least been working on some pretty interesting things.

A small collective of organizers kicked off the New Teacher Underground series that I wrote about a few months back when the idea was still a newborn. Also, as Hilary Lustick wrote last week on GothamSchools, the Grassroots Education Movement held an initial meeting to plan the creation of a campaign against high-stakes testing, which we are hoping to launch in the fall. We were also preparing for the Save Our Schools March on Washington and national conference, which I attended last weekend. And I have been attending a weekly reading group sponsored by Teachers Unite about restorative justice, a theory of community-building that encourages all communities to take a restorative, rather than punitive, approach to how we respond to harm. Within a school setting, restorative justice frameworks start by helping students and teachers develop a stronger sense of community so that discipline concerns become less common to begin with, but it also provide transformative alternatives to traditional punishments like suspension and detention that do little to help students think through how their actions affect the larger community.

The restorative justice work is something I am particularly excited about, in part because I know it is something I can bring directly into my school. In fact, the Bushwick Campus where I teach has begun a building-wide, teacher-initiated push to integrate more restorative discipline practices into each of the four school environments in the building. The hope is that we can build stronger school cultures, take a more preventive approach to discipline, and reduce the use of suspensions, which cause students to feel isolated from school and have been demonstrated to exacerbate behavioral issues, not improve them. It will be a lot of work to start building these practices, and certainly suspensions cost less in money and effort. But I have come to believe that developing restorative approaches to community-building and disciplinary policies in our schools is one of the only ways we can create school environments that are nurturing places in which to grow and learn.

In fact, the use of restorative justice practices in schools is a prime example of the third “real reform” that I initially outlined: Department of Education policies that promote a socially just approach to schooling, education, and discipline. (more…)