GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The city plans to cut nearly 800 school workers in Bloomberg’s largest layoff. (Times, Daily News, Post)
• Budget cuts also left more than 2,000 teachers newly job-hunting this year. (GothamSchools, WNYC)
• A Bronx school enrollment office has wrongfully been turning families away this week. (Post)
• Bronx officials and parents are asking city officials to investigate the cancer scare at PS 51. (Daily News)
• Schools are grappling with teaching the anniversary of 9/11, which many students don’t remember. (AP)
• The ACLU is suing Newark, N.J., over spending details about the city’s Facebook donation. (Star-Ledger)

• Mike Petrilli: “Deniers” is as problematic a term as its opposite, “corporate reformers.” (Flypaper)
• A D.C. writer is reporting this year from a district, a charter, and a private school. (Sam Chaltain)
• The best education-related earthquake tweets, starting with a joke from USDOE. (Politics K-12)
• Michelle Rhee: “Despite earthquake … great sign of continued progress at DCPS.” (Twitter)
• Norm Fruchter: New York should follow Montana’s lead and opt out of NCLB, waiver or not. (EdVox)
• Satire: Students are giving the nation’s schools another chance and enrolling again this year. (Onion)
• Chicago’s new schools budget cuts programs that serve the city’s neediest students. (Catalyst)
• A teacher’s continuation of his “Class Warfare” fact-check, now through page 300. (Gary Rubinstein)
• Twenty-five percent of the new Race to the Top will be based on early childhood plans. (Politics K-12)
• An employee of a teachers’ “professional association” outlines union alternatives. (Ed News Colorado)
• Talking points for Randi Weingarten if she wants to be seen as reform-friendly. (Dropout Nation)

Budget cuts caused principals to cut thousands of positions this year, but the total number of teachers without permanent jobs rose only slightly, the Department of Education revealed today.

The Bloomberg administration also announced plans to lay off nearly 800 school employees who do not belong to the teachers union, which negotiated a deal in June to avert layoffs. Most of those employees — 737 of 777 — belong to DC-37, which represents school aides and other auxiliary school personnel. The layoffs are set to start in October.

When the city announced in July that schools would have to cut an average of 2.43 percent from their budgets, many principals complained that they had little fat to trim. They said they would have to turn to eliminating necessary positions and sending junior teachers to the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of teachers whose positions were cut or lost as a result of school closures or enrollment changes.

In the end, they sent 2,186 teachers to the ATR pool this summer. More than a thousand of those teachers have already left the pool, either by finding new positions or leaving the system. A DOE spokeswoman said many of the teachers were rehired by their original schools after funding became available to keep them there.

That leaves 1,940 teachers in the ATR pool with just weeks before the start of the school year.  Last year, the pool contained 1,779 teachers just before classes began.

Though small, the growth in the size of the ATR pool still places added financial stress on the department. (more…)

Department of Education staffers filing back into Tweed Courthouse after being evacuated today.

City schools joined the rest of the East Coast in being jolted out of the workday by a 5.8-magnitude earthquake this afternoon.

Most schools are not in session yet, but some of those that have already opened evacuated their staffs and students when the quake struck just before 2 p.m.

In Harlem, most Democracy Prep Charter School students had been dismissed at 1 p.m., superintendent Seth Andrew said, but those who remained evacuated with their teachers, then were dismissed until tomorrow.

At Teaching Firms of America in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a school that opened yesterday, staff gathered all of its students into a hallway, but school safety offices instructed them that they didn’t need to evacuate.

The Department of Education’s headquarters at Tweed Courthouse was evacuated, along with most buildings in the area. Staffers gathered on the steps and on the Chambers Street sidewalk.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott was one of the last people to reenter the building after DOE employees were let back into Tweed just before 2:30 p.m. He told us that the department would be checking on school employees working in the field, including many custodians who are in the process of touching up school buildings for the new year.

DOE staffers said they noticed their chairs shifting beneath them, chandeliers swaying above them, and City Hall’s position shifting in their windows. But other educators said they weren’t even sure an earthquake had struck. (more…)

• Official allegations of cheating have risen more than threefold since 2003. (Times, Daily News)
• Mayor Bloomberg is hiring more former city officials, but none from the DOE yet, at his foundation. (WSJ)
• Angry about undisclosed toxins at their school, PS 51 parents will meet to take action. (Daily News, Post)
• New initiatives aim to help parents who are incarcerated stay involved with their kids. (Gotham Gazette)
• Bed-Stuy’s Boys & Girls High School is galvanizing parents around its new tennis courts. (Daily News)
• D.C. is now the second-most charter school-dense city, and officials want more. (Washington Post)
• Advocates for a longer school day pan the current trend of cutting class time to save money. (Times)

• Finnish teachers seem to relish the challenge of reaching hard-to-educate students. (Smithsonian)
• A principal compares his suburban school to Jamaica HS, where he once worked. (Answer Sheet)
• On “Book TV,” Steven Brill and Diane Ravitch debated disclosures and education issues. (C-SPAN)
• A longtime teacher meticulously fact-checks Brill’s book, through page 200 so far. (Gary Rubinstein 1, 2)
• The New York Times and WNYC are launching a new site about the city’s schools. (SchoolBook)
• The new site will not live behind the Times paywall to facilitate “two-way” readership. (Nieman Lab)
• An argument that even if cheating was widespread, that’s still not a reason to cut tests. (Rick Hess)
• Are schools in Rick Perry’s state, Texas, really as bad as Arne Duncan said? Yes and no. (Politics K-12)
• A guide for teachers taking their first steps into facilitating student-centered learning. (Mrs. Ripp)
• Philadelphia is paying its embattled superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, $905,000 to resign. (Inquirer)
• A look back at Ackerman’s three superintendency, which was full of personality clashes. (Notebook)
• Three fired principals are suing New Orleans over its charter school saturation. (Courthouse News)

The city’s school year doesn’t officially begin for another two and a half weeks, but some students started classes today at a handful of charter schools with extended school years.

I visited one of those schools today, watching kindergarten and first-graders file into the brand-new Teaching Firms of America Charter School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.

When I arrived at 7:30 a.m., 15 minutes before the school officially opened its doors, already more than a dozen parents, with their children clung closely to their sides, had gathered by the main entrance of PS 308, where Teaching Firms of America is housed.

“I applied, but didn’t think I’d win,” said Damaris Rivera, a parent who won the lottery for admission into TFOA last spring. “I was excited, I was screaming. I couldn’t believe it.”

Rivera’s daughter was one of 100 students who filed through freshly painted halls to arrive at classrooms named after themes in African and African-American history, such as “Freedom” and “Umoja” (Swahili for “unity”). Inside, teachers worked to establish discipline guided by “choice theory.” (more…)

Graduating from one school to another for sixth grade is typical, but the arrangement is not ideal for student achievement.

That’s according to a new study the compared the varied pathways that city students took to eighth grade from 1995 to 2002. The report, “The Path Not Taken: How Does School Organization Affect Eighth-Grade Achievement?”, was just released in the Summer 2011 issue of the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

Led by Amy Ellen Schwartz and Leanna Stiefel at New York University, the researchers looked at “grade span paths,” or the grade configurations of the schools that students attended on their way to eighth grade. With more than 900 elementary and middle schools, New York City boasted 28 different grade span paths during the period studied, the report notes, making it an ideal laboratory to study effects of school organization on student achievement.

Looking at eighth-grade state and city test scores and controlling for a host of other factors, the researchers found that students who moved from K-4 schools to 5-8 schools and students who remained enrolled in a single K-8 school outperformed students who moved to middle school in sixth grade. But they couldn’t conclude why those arrangements were more successful.

“Our results suggest that changing school less frequently, changing schools at an earlier grade, a smaller size of the within-school cohort, and the stability of students’ peer cohorts are the most likely explanations for these positive performance differences,” the researchers write. (more…)

• Charter schools’ higher scores come with fewer special ed and ELL students at the schools. (Daily News)
• No one is saying what, or who, allowed the cancer-causing-chemical scare at PS 51 to happen. (NY1)
• A principal who changed grades is resigning but getting a new job. (Times, GothamSchools, NY1, Post)
• Michael Winerip: Michelle Rhee won’t speak to the paper that exposed cheating in D.C. schools. (Times)
• Census data are being mined for education insights, such as about back-to-school spending. (Times)
• A new state law prohibits barbers from selling a sugary alcoholic drink to children. (Daily News)
• Praising two new books about school reform, Joel Klein says parents and teachers must change. (WSJ)

• Collin Lawrence says his old principal threatened teachers to make them act. (GS Community)
• An excessed teacher says she was asked whether motherhood would interfere with her work. (NYC ATR)
• A tale of grassroots collaboration between a district and charter school. (Cranston Online via Eduwonk)
• Wyoming was an early adopter of the Common Core. Now it might be bowing out. (Flypaper)
• The feds killed Bloomberg’s bid to block New Yorkers from spending food stamps on soda. (City Room)
• A review of “Class Warfare” finds it tries, but does not convict, teachers unions. (NYT Book Review)
• Andy Rotherham: Chicago’s schools means Arne Duncan shouldn’t throw stones. (School of Thought)
• A teacher offers a (very long) checklist for what to get done on the first day of school. (Tween Teacher)
• D.C. has hired a pro-charter school group to assess the city’s public school system. (Washington Post)
• An argument that while NYC’s high school choice program isn’t perfect, it’s pretty good. (EdWeek)