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A two-year-investigation found that a Bronx principal, Janet Saraceno of Lehman High School, illicitly changed students’ grades.

We first reported the concerns in October 2009, months after Lehman teachers went to the DOE’s Office of Special Investigations with their allegations. The teachers reported that dozens of students, at a minimum, had been given credit for courses they failed or even did not take. They charged that Saraceno was turning Lehman into a “diploma mill” in order to show gains on the city’s school performance metrics.

OSI’s report, sent to Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott a week ago, concludes that Saraceno improperly changed some students’ grades but dismisses a host of other test-tampering allegations. It does not include a recommendation for Walcott to follow.

Its existence was first noted today on the Twitter feed of a New York Times reporter, Fernanda Santos. She wrote that it appears that Saraceno is moving on to a position in the DOE’s central administration, advising schools on instruction.

In June, the New York Times reported that Saraceno would not return to Lehman. But the principals union would not confirm her departure. (more…)

The start of school in three weeks comes as initiatives to revamp instruction, assessment, and teacher evaluation ramp up.

The climate of change — and what it might mean for the city’s schools — is the subject of the “On Education” panel discussion that Manhattan Media is hosting next week. I’m moderating the panel along with Andrew Hawkins, managing editor of City Hall News.

The discussion, set for Thursday morning, is part of a series of policy breakfasts that Manhattan Media periodically holds, and the company put together the panel of government and policy leaders whose positions have helped shape the city schools.

I’m happy to report that the lineup now includes a working teacher, Stephen Lazar. A GothamSchools Community section contributor, Lazar helped organize the EDUsolidarity blogging event that attracted over 100 educators nationally to write about why they support their unions.

The other panelists are

• Leo Casey, a UFT vice president;
• Sydney Morris, co-founder of Educators 4 Excellence;
• Eva Moskowitz, founder and CEO of the Success Charter Network;
• Shael Polakow-Suransky, the DOE’s chief academic officer;
• Bill Thompson, who is running for mayor;
• Merryl Tisch, Board of Regents chancellor; and
• Joseph Viteritti, a Hunter College public policy professor.

I have plenty of questions of my own to cram into the hour-and-a-half-long event. But I’m happy to take suggestions in the comments section for what I should encourage panelists to discuss.

New York Academy of Sciences Education Coordinator Stephanie Wortel and Emoni Toure, 13, examine a bobcat skull.

This summer, Donald Doehrer learned to identify the skull of a predatory animal by its fang-like front teeth and eye sockets in the front of the head.

He is now eager to explain how to extract DNA from a banana at home, and how many cells are in the human body (several trillion)—concepts he learned while attending a free science class at the Children’s Aid Society’s Frederick Douglass Campus.

But the highlight of the summer class, according to Doehrer, 12, who is entering seventh grade at PS 165, was viewing worm cells through a high-powered microscope for the first time.

“They showed us how small cells could be,” he said. “They said each worm had 90,000 to 100,00 cells. I didn’t think it was possible, then they turned up the magnification on a worm, and we could see all these little white blotches that were cells.”

Doehrer is one of nearly 600 students from low-income backgrounds receiving supplementary science and math instruction this summer from scientists who are being trained as teaching fellows by the New York Academy of Sciences. The program, which places city graduate students in the sciences in after-school and summer classrooms administered by the Department of Youth and Community Development throughout the city, just completed its pilot year.

The students, most of them minorities who hail from neighborhoods with high poverty and low high school graduation rates, are attending summer programs run by the Children’s Aid Society and other community organizations that offer free day- and after-school care. The NYAS offers several three-week long science curricula and a math curriculum, which are taught by different scientists at each site.

The new program comes at a time when the federal government has made improving science education a priority, particularly for states vying for second-round Race to the Top money. (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.

The end of my final school year at the Brooklyn Arts Academy was going exceedingly well.  My 10th-graders achieved unprecedented success on the global Regents exams — over 70 percent passed, up from a 33 percent pass rate my first year at the school — and three students even scored 97 or better. On the final full day with students, we took them to a local park to play sports. I held my own in the basketball game, but when we switched to touch football I wowed the crowd by running the first kickoff back for a touchdown. I was leaving my students with a maximally positive impression.

With the Regents exams graded, my final grades submitted, and my classroom cleaned out, I spent the last few days of the school year in the company of my colleagues.

It had been a crazy four years, and I felt pride in my own growth mixed with sentimentality to be moving on from a place in which I’d invested so much. I had informed my administration back in March that I would be moving to China to accompany my wife during her dissertation research year and I had requested a leave of absence from the Department of Education. With my final year at the Brooklyn Arts Academy winding down, I looked forward to the accolades I expected to receive during my end-of-year evaluation and at our final staff meeting (I was particularly proud of the fact that I never took a sick day during those four years, and joked that I wanted a “medal of honor” in recognition of the accomplishment).

With the students gone, the atmosphere around school was calm and relaxed until Tuesday, June 22, when one of the secretaries delivered a stack of papers to each teacher. Each piece of paper in the pile represented a discrepancy in the official attendance taken by the school and the attendance taken by the teacher during the class period. For example, if a teacher marked a student as absent first period but this student was marked present on the official attendance taken during period three, than a discrepancy was noted. Teachers were told to sign each document to acknowledge our error in marking the student as absent. The size of the packet of papers given to each teacher varied, but even mine, one of the smallest, contained about 60 sheets.

Having never been given documents like this before, the teachers felt anxious and were unsure what to do. Many teachers no longer had records of their attendance from dates as early as February. Some teachers also feared what the repercussions might be if they did not sign the documents. As a group, we decided that none of us should sign or turn in the papers until we’d collectively received some answers to our questions. (more…)

With school doors set to open in just weeks, City Councilwoman Gale Brewer wants to know why the education department hasn’t hired a contractor to handle the resurgence of bedbugs in its classrooms.

“I ask that you immediately initiate a bedbug treatment contract to deal with this issue before the start of the school year,” Brewer wrote to Chancellor Dennis Walcott last month.

Brewer penned the letter in response to a GothamSchools report that showed a tripling in the number of bedbugs cases found in schools last year, to 3,590.

The surge of cases has placed strain on the Department of Education’s pest management division, which is required to treat every case of bedbugs. Normally, that work is handled by a private pest management company, but schools have been without a specialized contractor for nearly a year.

Bidding on the new contract began nine months ago, but the DOE has yet to award it, spokeswoman Marge Feinberg said. Feinberg said that the city planned to respond to the letter, which also requested a list of the schools that were treated for bedbugs, but had not yet done so. (more…)

• The parent council in Queens’ District 24 might oppose the city’s new sex-ed mandate. (Queens Tribune)
• A meeting about contamination at P.S. 51 in the Bronx drew many parents. (GothamSchools, NY1, Post)
• Juan Gonzalez: Previous tenants of P.S. 51′s old building announced their waste products. (Daily News)
• Two city teachers who returned to the classroom after being found to have hit children were fired. (Post)
• A summer camp for girls in Illinois aims to excite them about the prospect of manufacturing jobs. (Times)
• Education Secretary Arne Duncan said he remains pessimistic about revising NCLB. (Bloomberg)
• Philadelphia’s embattled schools chief, Arlene Ackerman, dared city officials to fire her. (Inquirer)

• Obliquely criticizing Rick Perry, Arne Duncan said he “feels very badly” for Texas’s children. (TPM)
• An argument that Michele Bachmann’s ascendancy reflects a change in GOP education policy. (Slate)
• Jose Vilson calls for more attention ought to be given to who evaluates teachers. (Future of Teaching)
• In a new program, students at a Chicago vocational high school will breed racehorses. (AP)
• Meet a teacher who found herself on the “do-not-hire” list Chicago says it doesn’t maintain. (Reader)
• President Obama’s jobs plan might include school construction and teacher salaries. (Ed Money Watch)
• A study found that teacher coaching that one of the researchers designed boosts scores. (Teacher Beat)
• A parent worries about making her daughter a pioneer in gentrifying her neighborhood school. (Babble)
• Philadelphia business leaders say they are being asked to help buy out the superintendent. (Inquirer)
• It’s official: States don’t have to adopt the Common Core to get NCLB waivers. (Politics K-12)
• Nick Ehrmann: Debates about education technology and human capital should be integrated. (HuffPo)

Chancellor Dennis Walcott addresses P.S. 51 parents.

Admitting that they had responded too slowly to news of toxic chemicals at a Bronx elementary school, Department of Education officials said the city would accelerate environmental testing of leased school sites.

At a public meeting tonight for people who attended or worked at P.S. 51, which was shuttered two weeks ago over concerns about toxic chemicals detected there, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced that the city would complete reviews of 31 sites where leases are up for renewal by the beginning of September.

The announcement comes after mounting criticism of the way the department’s has dealt with toxic chemicals in schools, especially PCBs found in older light fixtures. A nonprofit law firm, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, announced yesterday it planned to sue the DOE over the fixtures on behalf of New York Community for Change, a parent organization.

Hundreds of anxious P.S. 51 parents and students, past and present, came to the Bronx High School of Science tonight to learn more about safety concerns at the school.

Walcott also revealed where P.S. 51′s 225 current students would attend school next month. They will be bused two miles to a Catholic school building, St. Martin of Tours on East 182nd Street, where P.S. 51 will be the only school on site, he said.

Walcott also apologized repeatedly for the DOE’s slow response to the safety concern. The city detected unsafe levels of a toxic chemical at P.S. 51 six months ago, before Walcott became chancellor, but did not disclose that fact to families until this summer.

“I own this,” Walcott said. “I am the chancellor, and I will take full responsibility for this.” (more…)

The vast majority of City Council members are sounding the alarm over the city’s plans for overhauling its child care system.

We wrote about the initiative, called Early Learn, last month. Reporter Chris Arp found that child care center directors and advocates were deeply concerned about being able to prove by the Sept. 12 deadline that they would be able to meet steep new standards — and foot more of the bill themselves.

“It’s going to put us all out of business,” Larry Provett, the director of a Williamsburg child care center, told Arp. “All programs are at risk, very much so.”

Now 42 of the City Council’s 51 members have signed on to a letter to Mayor Bloomberg asking him to delay Early Learn’s rollout. They say they are concerned that Early Learn, as it is currently constituted, would shrink the city’s child care system, eliminate jobs, and disproportionately burden some centers that serve poor students. The funding structure would make it harder for centers located in some housing projects to receive funding, Arp reported in a second article about Early Learn.

Earlier this summer, the city restored funding to several child care centers on the brink of closure, a move that the council members praised in a press release about their letter to the mayor.

“Quite frankly, it is disheartening that only two months later, we’re once again being faced with a series of devastating cuts to child care, this time nicely packaged in an [Request for Proposals] meant to strengthen the very system it would gut,” said City Councilwoman Annabel Palma, chair of the council’s general welfare committee, in the press release. (more…)

The vast majority of public commenters at last night’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting seemed to think that a $120 million contract with Verizon was the only thing on the agenda.

Amid dozens of angry comments about the Verizon contract, exactly one audience member spoke out against another set of contracts on the agenda: ones that would hand over the reins of 14 failing schools to six nonprofit managers.

The speaker, a parent, urged the panelists not to approve the contract because the Department of Education had not made the full contracts available for them to review.

“These contracts will be approved, but they will not be reviewed before hand,” said Paola de Kock, a member of the Citywide Council on High Schools, who spoke in between Communication Workers of America strikers. ”What you will be approving tonight is unethical for our children.”

Shortly after the panel okayed the Verizon deal and most audience members departed, it gave a green light to the contracts, which are part of a larger plan to “restart” failing schools. The panel’s approval was a final step in the city’s bid to link the schools with the nonprofits, known as Education Partnership Organizations, in order to receive federal School Improvement Grants for the schools.

The contract won approval with just one vote against it after Shael Polakow-Suransky, the Department of Education’s chief academic officer, answered questions from the panelists about how the city would hold EPOs accountable and measure the progress of the schools undergoing “restart” under their supervision. (more…)