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What would a protest be without a poster?

Hundreds of signs on display at the Save Our Schools March in Washington, D.C. on Saturday reflected the anger, passion and creativity of teachers who attended.

The posters had a wide range of targets, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan, charter schools, high-stakes testing, Republicans, and corporate influence in public education. Here’s a small selection of some of the best.

• Parents say a Staten Island charter school isn’t giving promised special education services. (Daily News)
• A Brooklyn principal accused of requiring unsafe behavior is also under investigation for cheating. (Post)
• The state is reviewing test security measures. (GothamSchools, Daily News, Times, Post, WSJ)
• A new policy is likely to reduce funding for daycare centers in some housing projects. (GothamSchools)
• A study shows that admission to specialized high schools doesn’t boost students’ SAT scores. (Post)
• The Archdiocese is scrutinizing the Catholic school head who touts “racial realism.” (Daily News, WNYC)
• The Daily News: Matt Damon shouldn’t criticize charter schools when he attended alternative schools.
• The superintendent of El Paso, Texas, was arrested for trying to defraud the district. (El Paso Times)

• A new study finds the city’s specialized high schools don’t actually add value to their students. (NBER)
• Not that any study is likely to dissuade New Yorkers from fighting tooth and nail to get in. (Daily Intel)
• Potential implications of the federal debt ceiling deal on K-12 education are not yet clear. (Politics K-12)
• Novelist Dave Eggers eulogizes the teacher who helped him love reading, and, in turn, writing. (Salon)
• But a professor argues that a love of reading just can’t be taught. (Chronicle of Higher Ed via Pondiscio)
• An interesting point about Newark’s “dance of the lemons”: The school that got lemons got better. (NCTQ)
• A principal envisions a school where reading the New York Times inspires each day. (Practical Theory)
• An argument that the problem with schools in Central Falls, R.I., is their tiny tax base. (Dana Goldstein)
• A special education advocate repeats a call for parents to weigh in on teacher evals. (NYC PS Parents)
• What teachers do in the first week of school can easily guarantee a bad year, a teacher says. (Mrs. Ripp)

• A complete roundup of the Save Our Schools rally from a city teacher who was there. (James Boutin)
• Save Our Schools march organizers are plotting their next steps and refining their platform. (Politics K-12)
• An organizer said the turnout was limited by teachers’ and parents’ low morale right now. (Answer Sheet)
• Norm Scott: “The GEM crew”bonded during the weekend and came home to the city stronger. (Ed Notes)
• After you’re done with our Matt Damon interview, here’s Jon Stewart’s SOS video address. (Russo)

New York State has launched a fast-moving process to tighten test security before it risks following Georgia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey into cheating scandals.

State Education Commissioner John King has convened a group to review “all aspects of the state’s testing system,” according to a statement from Jonathan Burman, a State Education Department spokesman. The group, which Deputy Commissioner Valerie Grey is leading, is planning to work quickly, Burman said: It was formed in mid-July and will announce a “series of measures” to ensure test integrity before the school year begins a month from now.

The announcement comes days before the state is set to release this year’s reading and math test scores and amid growing revelations about widespread cheating in Atlanta, Philadelphia, and New Jersey. It also follows mounting anxiety among state officials about whether schools’ performance had been inflated: Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said in February that New York wished to avoid becoming “the Enron of test scores, the Enron of graduation rates.”

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said he appreciated the state’s efforts but emphasized that New York City has for years “gone above and beyond” state requirements when it comes to ensuring test integrity.

“We welcome the state examining its standards, as it has always been its regulatory responsibility to ensure the reliability and security of state tests,” he said in a statement. (more…)

Two teachers say their experiences facing harassment after engaging in union activity are the surest sign that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is wrong about the need for tenure.

On Friday, Bloomberg said during his weekly radio appearance that tenure is a vestige of an earlier time, the McCarthy Era, when teachers and others were persecuted for their political views. In the Community section today, Peter Lamphere and Rachel Montagano argue that teachers can still face unofficial sanctions for their politics or identities, making tenure just as vital now as it was in the 1950s.

In February, Lamphere wrote in the Community section about his experience receiving unsatisfactory reviews for the first time after lobbying against an administrator at the Bronx High School for Science. Montagano is currently embroiled in a battle of her own to keep her job at MS 216 in Queens, where she faces incompetence charges leveled for the first time after she stepped up her union leadership.

Lamphere and Montagano write:

As two New York City teachers who have both been targeted with unsatisfactory ratings because of our union activity, we know from firsthand experience that tenure is one of the few protections for whistleblowers and teacher advocates. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg’s comments on his Friday radio show that tenure “may have been necessary in the McCarthy era” but is now a relic of the past highlight how out of touch he is with the current realities of the school system.

Bloomberg argued that protection for academic freedom was not necessary for public school teachers because we are “not writing papers about things that are very controversial.” However, in some schools, advocacy for students or for the employment rights of teachers can result in witch-hunts from school administrators that can border on the McCarthyesque. Tenure is meant to shelter teachers from the whims of these administrators.

As two New York City teachers who have both been targeted with unsatisfactory ratings because of our union activity, we know from firsthand experience that tenure is one of the few protections for whistleblowers and teacher advocates.

One of us, Rachel Montagano, as a union representative at MS 216 in Queens, experienced a repeated pattern of being scrutinized for her teaching practices immediately after conducting union activities. For example, after she refused to sign off on a safety plan that was written without teacher input, she was accused of insubordination. That began a pattern that has resulted in Montagano, a veteran reading coach who helped develop curriculum for the school, receiving her first-ever unfavorable reviews and facing incompetence charges. Administrators entered union meetings, or stood outside, sometimes writing down who showed up; a clear force of intimidation with the message, “we are watching you.” Without tenure due process, Montagano and some of her colleagues would already be facing unemployment because of her willingness to stand up for the safety of her students and for the rights of her colleagues. Meanwhile, their principal, Reggie Landau, set fire to his office with an illegal hotplate but has not faced sanction from the Department of Education.

The other of us, Peter Lamphere, as a union delegate at the Bronx High School of Science, participated in a harassment grievance along with 19 other colleagues from the mathematics department. Shortly afterward, he received unsatisfactory ratings for the first time in his career, and other teachers were subjected to various forms of harassment. A neutral fact-finder later supported the grievance and found that administrators’ belief that Lamphere was a ringleader of the grievance played a role in the harassment. Without tenure rights, Lamphere would have been fired long before the grievance was heard. Five of the six untenured teachers who signed the math department grievance had left the school within six months, either after being fired or fleeing before their careers would be destroyed.

We join a long list of educators who have been targeted because of their union activity or for aspects of their identities. (more…)

A contingent of New York teachers joined thousands of protesters from across the country in Washington, D.C. on Saturday to march against the Obama administration’s education policies.

Joining them was actor and budding philanthropist Matt Damon, who railed against “corporate reformers.” In an interview with GothamSchools, Damon exhibited a familiarity with New York City education politics, criticizing co-locations of charter schools and district schools and calling out the Success Charter Network in particular.

The march was the main draw of a four-day event called “Save Our Schools,” which included a conference and a film festival. A coalition of more than 100 teachers came down from New York City, including groups from the United Federation of Teachers (this reporter embedded with a UFT-sponsored charter bus) and the Grassroots Education Movement. GEM also hosted a workshop at the conference and showed its documentary film The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting For Superman to an audience of about 250.

More than a dozen speakers – including Diane Ravitch, Jonathan Kozol, Deborah Meier – spoke at a rally that directly preceded the march. The lineup featured songs, performances, poem readings, in addition to a pre-taped message from The Daily Show host Jon Stewart (here’s an excerpt). (more…)

The Mabel Barrett Fitzgerald Day Care Center sits within the Amsterdam Houses public housing complex, recently the site of a sweeping drug bust. A few blocks away, however, glitzy Lincoln Center is flanked by some of the most expensive apartments in Manhattan.

The location provides rich field trip opportunities for the Fitzgerald program, which this year received city funding to serve 58 low-income children. But now the center’s zip code could take a toll on its budget.

The threat comes from the funding structure underlying EarlyLearn, the Administration for Children Services’ ambitious reform of the city’s public daycare system. This summer, ACS is requiring that all public centers, including Fitzgerald, submit applications showing why they deserve continued funding, and next spring, some programs will learn that they have not made the cut.

The evaluation process will focus on quality. But it will also take into account something outside centers’ control: their address.

Under EarlyLearn, the number of city-funded daycare seats across the city will drop, and ACS plans to allot a larger portion of the remaining seats to neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of needy families. To assess need, ACS is looking primarily at the poverty level in the zip code where each center is located. That means that centers in high-poverty zip codes stand a greater chance of receiving continued funding, while the number of slots in more affluent neighborhoods could decrease sharply.

Childcare experts and center directors say this approach could shut out poor New Yorkers who live in relatively affluent areas. In particular, they say, residents of some housing projects are at risk of being left without the childcare on which they’ve come to rely. (more…)

• Teachers evaluated under a new system had the same lower tenure rate as other teachers. (Daily News)
• Sixteen other companies tried for the state contract that’s going to Wireless Generation. (Daily News)
• A Brooklyn principal assigned students a furniture-moving trip that involved an illicit U-Haul ride. (Post)
• Michael Winerip: Nonprofit news reporters uncovered evidence of cheating in Pennsylvania. (Times)
• A valuable Tiffany stained glass window from Erasmus High School has been stored in a closet. (NY1)
• Students enrolled in summer school are attending at a much higher rate than in past years. (Daily News)
• P-Tech High School, opening in September, is a model of business and education collaboration. (WSJ)
• A white supremacist former school board member is principal of a Bronx Catholic school. (Daily News)
• A Bronx man was arrested after interrupting church services to call for the principal’s firing. (Daily News)
• A popular teacher at a Bronx high school has won repeated awards for getting students involved. (Post)
• The nonprofit Chess-in-the-Schools is one of the biggest awardees of City Council donations. (Post)
• Reeling from attacks on its corporate sponsors, Scholastic is cutting back its curriculum division. (Times)
• Tougher new teacher evaluations are going into effect in Rhode Island this fall. (Providence Journal)
• Statewide, some superintendents say it’s hard to sell a union-crafted evaluation system. (Ithaca Journal)