Council members said they remained optimistic that the layoffs, which affect school aides who are among the lowest paid workers in the city could be averted. But they said any deal would require more energy from education and City Hall officials.

“I know that there’s a strong effort being made on the members’ part,” said Leroy Comrie, of Queens. “I’m not sure that the administration feels wedded to the need to get anything done.”

The meeting was convened by the council’s Black, Latino and Asian caucus. They invited Chancellor Dennis Walcott to explain why the layoffs were primarily affecting low income minorities, according to several members who attended. Council members also complained they were not given notice before the layoffs were announced in August.

Letitia James, of Brooklyn, called the process “an attempt to circumvent the City council. They could have come to us before and asked for some assistance and approval.”

The layoffs actually came from individual principals, who had to cut an average of 2.4 percent from their budgets in July. Rather than eliminate teacher positions, which were spared as part of concessions made by the United Federation of Teachers, many principals chose to cut the school aides.

“The chancellor explained that schools received their budgets at the end of June and made school level decisions about which staff they were keeping and which staff to excess,” said DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz.

DOE budget officials have estimated that the layoffs will save $35 million and Walcott said at the meeting that previous proposals brought to the table by the union representing the workers, Local 372, did not amount to any real savings. Local 372′s parent labor association, District Council 37, had an opportunity to agree to concessions during budget negotiations in June, but walked away from those talks.

There are now just eight days remaining until pink slips take effect. On Oct. 7, 737 employees will lose their jobs, triggering what would be the largest layoff within a government agency since Mayor Bloomberg took office.

Schools are closed for the rest of the week and any further discussion will likely be picked up on Monday.

With the deadline narrowing, council members said that they will push for the DOE to delay the layoffs so that there is more time to come up with solutions, which could include public hearings or a budget modification. Any such move would likely require the support of Speaker Christine Quinn. Quinn declined to comment on specifics. Through a spokesman, she said the council was “still in conversations with the administration and union with the goal of preserving jobs.”

Among the book’s many highs and lows is a moment at the end of the Class of 2009′s school year when five students receive college scholarships from Jerry Seinfeld’s foundation. Fifteen students in the city received the scholarships, and five were members of International’s Class of 2009. (Another moment is prom, the event that led to Hauser’s 2008 New York Times story and inspired the book.)

We recently spoke to three of those winners, now college juniors. They are Mukta Mukta, seen wrestling with her religion and independence throughout the book; Freeman Degboe, a ham who introduces himself to Seinfeld as “the next Jerry Seinfeld”; and Marie Feline Guerrier, a mini-celebrity in Brooklyn’s Haitian community.

Mukta, who immigrated from Bangladesh in 2002, is now a junior nursing major at the University of Vermont. Degboe, who came to the United States from Togo in 2006, joins her there and is now studying film and television. Guerrier, a Haitian immigrant, is now studying health sciences and nursing at Long Island University.

Mukta Mukta is a junior nursing major at the University of Vermont.

How did you end up at International High School?

MM: In 2002 I moved to Nebraska first, and I went to school there for two and a half years. I was here in March at the very end of the year, so I started in New York with sixth grade. I was in a middle school in New York and one of my teachers – an English teacher – told me about International and she told me it’s a great school, it’s a new school, and it’s a small school with less students and I got in.
FD: My father moved first and then he brought the rest of us to Brooklyn. During that first week we tried to go to different schools. We went to I.S. 292, but they only took my little sister because they said I was too old. So, they sent us to this office and they told me to go to International High School. I went there and they told me to come back after break – I think it was second semester. I didn’t have to take any tests; I just showed my transcripts from Togo and they accepted me.
MFG: My dad had a friend of his who knew about high schools and who referred me to International High School. My high school experience started shaky, but I said to myself I am in the United States and the reason I came here was for a better future. Especially for Haitians, graduating is a great thing and they believe in education. My family worked hard to bring me here so it’s my job to work hard, not just to make then proud but to help me in the future.

What was your most memorable high school assignment?

Freeman Degboe is a junior at the University of Vermont studying Film and Television.

MM: Writing the college essay. The college essay was really meaningful for me because I got to know myself better, knowing the fact that I don’t believe in religion and questioning religion – my religion and religion and beliefs in general. It was a strong side of me that came out.
FD: My college essay. They push you a lot to actually re-think the reason why you left your country and how you struggled and the way you think about what you’ve been through and what you want in the future. Or, in my U.S. Government class with Mr. Rice we wrote about gender differences after watching this documentary called “Born into Brothels.” Living in Brooklyn, we were all homophobic at the time, but writing this essay and learning about what’s going on – it changed my thinking completely. So I went from being one of the homophobic guys to being someone who learned how to tolerate everyone else.
MFG: I did so many things that I enjoyed. In science I remember building a bridge. This is the time when we worked as a group and that is something I adore. We worked in groups to build bridges not just for one class but for weeks. Also in social studies one research assignment helped me to see what I really am. I did an essay about human pigmentation and what makes our skin color the way it is. It was amazing and I got to present in front of the whole class to tell them why their skin is the way it is.

What life lessons did you learn by being a student at International?

MM: I learned that being where I’m from is very special because, you know, seeing myself right now in Vermont, people find it fascinating, being from another country and having another language, having that culture.
FD: It’s just so different because there are so many ethnicities and I got to talk to people that I wouldn’t have talked to back home. I learned so much. I like to see different people, to see what kind of similarities we have. In Vermont there’s not as many immigrants here; the population is more white. When I first came here there were only three black guys in my building, and I was really nervous. But then I had my first hall meeting with the resident adviser and we all got together and went around and I’m like, “I’m from Brooklyn and I speak five languages.” After that people started coming up to me. The guys were like, “Oooh that’s so cool!” So the whole floor became my friend.
MFG: We are individuals but at the same time we are so connected to one another. I’m Haitian, but if you are white or Jamaican or Latino, we are different groups but we are also connected. I think it’s amazing going to a school with all immigrants, it’s huge diversity. It’s beautiful. This is the place where I had the opportunity to learn about people of different races, different cultures. It helped me to grow as a person.

Do you think International prepared you for college?

MM: International really prepared me for college in terms of getting into the college process, applying for college, getting scholarships that I would have never found on my own. But the one thing that I would argue is that International did not prepare me for the tough classes. All of the classes that I took here, I’m like I haven’t learned this at all. I guess it’s not challenging enough compared to the position I’m in right now.
FD: It was a big shock, but I would say I was very well prepared for most classes in college. In the classes most of the people were born here or they come from schools that really prepare them. I thought I could just jump in. UVM is a big school so the zoology courses are really hard. Either you went to a school that really prepared you for it or you struggled.
MFG: I am really prepared for my classes. Like when I first came here I was getting As and Bs in all my classes. They’re easy if you put your mind to it and do all your work. It’s not that different than high school, I just put my time into it and everything is perfect.

Marie Feline Guerrier

MM: I’m majoring in nursing so I’ll be graduating next year with my BS. This was my second choice though. In my advisory we did an activity where they asked us what career did you want to get into. And I always wanted to get into the medical field, but being a doctor was my first choice. I had a lot of immigration issues going on at the time, and at that point I was legal, but I didn’t have a green card or a U.S. passport and that created a problem. Because of the immigration issues I had to choose nursing because I have my visa to be in the U.S. until 2012. So, if something goes wrong at least I’ll be closer to completing my program. If I chose pre-med, what am I going to do after? Am I going to be here or not?
FD: I actually switched my major from zoology to film and television. When I started the zoology major, I decided I didn’t like it. They gave me biology, chemistry, calculus and I never had calculus before in my life so I had to get out of it. We did some science in high school, but it wasn’t really at that level. The professor wrapped up everything we did in high school in like two days. So, I switched my major completely. It’s way better. It’s a lot of reading and the reading is really, really hard, but it’s English so it’s better than science. I can just take a dictionary or ask the professor if I don’t understand something.
MFG: I’m a nursing major student but I’m in the health sciences program right now and I’m going back to the nursing major next semester. The number one thing is that I want to keep my GPA high and so I don’t want to be in a program where I can’t keep my GPA high. I want to be in a program where I can catch up.

What should New York City do to help immigrants like yourselves get a better education?

MM: It’s really important to start sort of slow. But at the same time, to remember that you need to progress, to go up instead of staying at the same level. You need to give them real world experience instead of keeping them in hiding. There were a lot of things we were not taught in high school that other students knew. The more you increase the capacity, the higher up students are going to go.
FD: I would say they have to do more to really push them to learn English faster. For me, it was easy because I learned English before I came here so I picked it up faster, but others that didn’t know English struggled more and I think some of them didn’t even go to college. Some of them I never heard them talk English and I’m just wondering how they graduated.
MFG: To make students feel comfortable with the country to be more successful. To do more group work because it helped me so much to know the outside world. As a Haitian immigrant who came to this country not knowing English, things were kind of harder for me. My English wasn’t great, but it was my job to adapt myself to this school and this country. I would sit with students who were from other countries so this helps you to speak the English language more.

Did you read “The New Kids” yet? Thoughts?

MM: It got published? I’m going to have to buy it. I’m so busy with classes and exams.
FD: I started reading it. It’s very true. I’m not really like that anymore, but a lot of people tend to tell me that all I do is flirt around, but I think that’s the way that I am. Guys in America don’t really compliment women. Where I’m from, men compliment the ladies all the time, they smile at them, but here, they take it as flirting.
MFG: I bought it and I started reading it. I love it. That’s the first book I will read, I will focus and read it. It is so true, it’s reality. She paid attention to everything. I love it. It’s real life. It’s what happens in New York City schools.

Building more oversight over contracts was one of the goals of the reauthorized mayoral control law passed by state lawmakers in 2009. The law handed review power of contracts to the Panel for Educational Policy, the citywide school board controlled by the mayor. But since 2009, several panel members have complained that they lack the information necessary to review contracts before approving them, making their oversight authority meaningless.

In the case of the contract with Future Technology Associates, the firm accused of fraud yesterday by the city schools investigator, panel members had less than a day to review detailed information about the contract before voting on it in September 2009, according to email messages obtained by GothamSchools. Officials shared the information in response to a request by the Manhattan representative on the panel, Patrick Sullivan.

The contract came up for a renewal vote at the first meeting of the PEP after the mayoral control reauthorization. In an email to Sullivan the day of the meeting, department General Counsel Michael Best cited reauthorization as motivating school officials to prepare more thorough background materials.

Sullivan, an opponent of the Bloomberg administration’s education policies, responded that those materials — which included a draft agreement between the city and Future Technology Associates — were not sufficient. He said that a day to review them was not enough time.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment today. School officials have previously said that it would be impossible to provide detailed information to panel members because in most cases the contracts are still under negotiation when they come up for PEP approval.

In his 2009 email, Best said that his “understanding” was that the city’s practice was in line with those of boards of educations around New York, which he said do not review draft contracts before approving them. He said the more powerful Board of Education that existed before Mayor Bloomberg won control of the schools in 2002 operated the same way.

A spokeswoman for the New York State School Boards Association, Barbara Bradley, disputed that characterization, saying that New York school boards have access to full contracts before they approve of them. “They do their homework, they don’t rubber-stamp the contracts,” Bradley said. “If they want to go through it line-by-line, they could. But they’re also relying on the superintendent at the board meeting to lead them through this kind of thing, or their school attorney.”

In an interview today, Sullivan called on the chairman of the PEP, Tino Hernandez, who is a mayoral appointee, to step down. “Someone needs to take accountability for the failure of the PEP here,” Sullivan said. “The PEP didn’t carry out its oversight role as mandated in the state education law, so I think we need to have a chairman who is willing to make that happen.”

Hernandez, the former chair of the City Housing Authority who was appointed to the PEP in 2004, did not respond to emails from GothamSchools today.

Gbubemi Okotieuro, the PEP’s Brooklyn representative, seconded Sullivan’s request for more information about contracts. He suggested that the Department of Education share the information it has on each contract one to two months before it comes up for a vote. “Don’t just give me two weeks notice. Give me good information well before a major contract is about to come up,” he said.

The 2009 reauthorization also handed more oversight power of contracts to the city comptroller, who reviews contracts after they are approved by the PEP. In July 2010 the DOE proposed that the PEP vote to give blanket approval of all contracts, but it withdrew this proposal after John Liu, the comptroller, spoke out against it and brought it to the attention of state legislators.

Department of Education officials have identified 20 schools — 11 with middle school grades and 12 in Brooklyn alone — for “early engagement conversations” that could lead either to closure or another lease on life. This is the second year that the city, eager to stem some of the public outcry over school closures, has held conversations with low-performing schools before announcing which schools it plans to close. This year’s notice comes even earlier than last year, by a few weeks.

Department officials compiled the shortlist by looking at schools’ progress report grades, their Quality Reviews, the results of state evaluations, and the efforts they’ve already undertaken to improve. But in starting the early conversations, the department hopes to learn why the schools are struggling and whether other efforts could help them, according to Marc Sternberg, the DOE deputy chancellor in charge of school closures.

So far, the DOE has sent letters to elected officials in the schools’ districts, the districts’ elected parent councils, and their superintendents. Next, principals and DOE officials will jointly begin holding a series of meetings with families and teachers to discuss each individual schools’ options.

“We’ll take the feedback into consideration as we explore options to improve performance and support student success, and continue to work with all of our schools to ensure that students have access to high quality options,” Sternberg said in a statement.

One principal, whose school received an F on its progress report, said she was “shocked and humiliated” when she found out her school would be listed publicly.

“Even though the F grade implies that we’re failing, we’re certainly not a failing school and we’re not failing our children,” the principal said.Eleven of the schools are middle schools or include middle school grades, signaling where the department could start making room for some of the 50 new middle schools it plans to open in the next two years.

The schools represent only a small fraction of those with progress report scores low enough to put them on the chopping block. Schools that receive an F, D, or three consecutive C’s or below — this year, 116 schools — can be closed, according to the DOE’s guidelines.

Some of those schools have little reason to worry. Schools that are at full enrollment or even over capacity, such as P.S. 148 in Queens, are rarely closed. And other schools have had good grades in the past, so the department is likely to put them on notice but not out of existence. P.S. 112 in the Bronx, for example, had A’s on the two progress reports before this year’s, when it got a D. And schools with brand new principals, such as P.S. 161 in Brooklyn, are also not likely to be shut down.

Other schools with low progress reports are charter schools authorized by the state, which the city legally cannot close.

But schools not on the list of 20 could still wind up fighting for their existence as the city makes decisions about which schools to replace with new schools. And the department has not yet turned its attention toward high schools, whose progress reports will come out next month.

The schools undergoing early conversations:

P.S. 137 John L. Bernstein, Manhattan
P.S. 277, Bronx
New Millennium Business Academy, Bronx
Ms 142 John Philip Sousa, Bronx
Aspire Preparatory Middle School, Bronx
Satellite Three, Brooklyn
P.S. 256 Benjamin Banneker, Brooklyn
Knowledge And Power Preparatory Academy, Brooklyn
P.S. 019 Roberto Clemente, Brooklyn
P.S. 022, Brooklyn
P.S. 161 The Crown, Brooklyn
Middle School For The Arts, Brooklyn
I.S. 171 Abraham Lincoln, Brooklyn
P.S. 298 Dr. Betty Shabazz, Brooklyn
General D. Chappie James Elementary School, Brooklyn
General D. Chappie James Middle School, Brooklyn
P.S. 215 Lucretia Mott, Queens
P.S. 181 Brookfield, Queens
P.S. 014 Cornelius Vanderbilt, Staten Island
J.H.S. 296 The Halsey School, Brooklyn

Pedro Noguera and Karen Sprowal talk after the "Miseducation Nation" panel ended.

Panel members at an event critiquing current school reform policies last night criticized  testing, large classes, and charter schools — and also a university professor sharing the stage with them.

More than 100 people filled a school auditorium in Manhattan to attend the four-member “Miseducation Nation” panel, which was convened in response to – and got its mocking namesake from – NBC’s “Education Nation” summit, a two-day event that wrapped up earlier that day at Rockefeller Center.

Pedro Noguera, an NYU professor who studies urban education, was invited to speak on the panel and for most of the evening, he was on the same page as his fellow panelists, historian Diane Ravitch, Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters, and teacher Brian Jones of the Grassroots Education Movement. They all criticized policymakers for adopting reform ideas that they said were not working – and ignoring alternative ones, such as smaller class sizes and culturally-relevant curriculum, that they said would improve schools.

The panel also criticized the media coverage, which they characterized as biased toward current reform policies. The event was hosted by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, a national media advocacy group. ”We feel beleaguered and we feel there is only one story told repeatedly in the mainstream media,” Haimson said.

More than 100 people, many of which were teachers and parents, packed into the auditorium at P.S. 66 School of the Future.

When moderator Laura Flanders opened up questioning to the audience, criticism quickly turned on Noguera, a board member of the SUNY Charter School Institute, which oversees many of New York City’s most prominent charter schools.

Veteran teacher Michael Fiorillo first brought up the subject when he asked Noguera to explain how he could support opening charter schools, while at the same time being such a vocal opponent of closing the ones that they replace.

Then, Karen Sprowal spoke up. Sprowal is a former Harlem Success Academy parent who has become a vocal critic of charter schools since the story of her child being counseled out was reported in a New York Times column. “What will you do to hold Eva Moskowitz accountable?” Sprowal asked Noguera.

Noguera defended SUNY charter schools as ”the best-performing charter schools in the country” and said his role as a board member actually allowed him to ensure that they followed the rules or else face closure.

But he was not apologetic about his support for high-performing charter schools.

“I think we need ways to change and improve our schools and if charters become one means to do that, I support it,” he said.

Noguera’s responses were not popular with the audience, which jeered him. They also weren’t well-received by Haimson either, who called his answer “pathetic.”

Noguera, who along with Ravitch also appeared as a panelist at the NBC event, said neither one was productive.

“All of these issues are very complex,” Noguera said. “And I think that it’s hard to create a public forum where we can address the complexity of them and I don’t think we did that tonight. I don’t think the education summit did any better either.”

A new partnership between a statewide network of teacher training centers and Microsoft will give teachers access to discounted computer hardware and software, and help using them. Announced this week, the Tech4Teachers program will flood New York State Teacher Centers with new technology options at lower than market-rates. There are 250 center sites in New York City and 130 more throughout the state, offering in-person and virtual assistance to public and private school teachers.

Microsoft’s assistance comes at a time when state budget cuts have constrained resources at the teacher centers, which provide professional support in the form of online and face-to-face training to teachers across the state. The centers were cut from last year’s state budget, but this year the Assembly budgeted $20.5 million for them, approximately half of what the centers have been funded for in the past, according to Gail Moon, the state’s acting teacher centers program director.

Though the centers receive support from the state’s teachers union and some local unions, including the United Federation of Teachers, they primarily rely on the state for funding.

The partnership with Microsoft may alleviate some of the financial stress on teacher centers, staff members said, adding that the stress is particularly sharp now that the centers are  tasked with helping teachers and networks understand new instructional standards and integrate technology in their classroom.

“The way we’re looking at doing that is using technology by offering more webinars, electronic video conferencing capabilities, more professional development to more people, and then reducing the cost,” said Stan Silverman, co-chair of the centers’ technology committee.

Silverman said he will also use the program to show state legislators that teachers centers need more resources.

The teacher centers have partnered with Microsoft and Intel in the past to support teachers interested in digital learning, according to Silverman. But he said Tech4Teachers would address teachers’ needs better than before, because the training is targeted to the state’s new Common Core math and English curriculum standards.

The partnership isn’t costing the teacher centers, which work with state teachers unions to offer teacher-directed professional development programs, and most of the online training programs offered by Microsoft will be free to users, Silverman said. But teachers and schools will have to pay for the technology and some on-location training with their own budgets.

Microsoft’s donations are likely to make technology training more attainable for teachers, said Sig Behrens, the company’s U.S. education manager.

“There’s a lot of attention being drawn to the limited resources teachers have,” he said. “We’re trying to do our part to help out on the cost.”

Behrens also said the discounted technology program could expand to other states next year after the technology companies see how it is used in New York.

Brian Rafferty, a member of the Community Education Council for District 24, announced his resignation at the council’s meeting by reading a letter of protest he had written to Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott.

“The Community Education Council serves no purpose other than to be a shield between the Department of Education and the parents of schoolchildren citywide,” Rafferty wrote in the letter, which he also posted on Facebook.

Rafferty echoed complaints that parents around the city have sounded for years about the weak role of the councils, which are seen as one of the few venues for parents to voice opinions about DOE policies, even though their only statutory function is to redraw school zone lines. Over the summer, after a disastrous set of council elections that had to be conducted twice, Walcott replaced the head of the DOE’s family engagement office.

But Rafferty suggested that little has changed since then. He said council members did not receive maps of new school zones until just before a recent public meeting about them, so members could not respond to parents’ criticism.

“We were as blindsided as the parents, and our job, as whipping boys for the DOE, was to take the brunt of the parents’ lashes without any regard to our own opinions on this,” Rafferty said.

“We are the volunteer appointed go-betweens who waste our time swallowing the vitriol and scorn of angry parents so the DOE doesn’t have to taste it. We bear the punches of the angry parents so that the DOE doesn’t have to feel the frustration,” he said.

This is not the first time Rafferty has made the news. Last year, Rafferty, who is also executive editor of the Queens Tribune, said the New York Post fabricated a column under his name advocating for the public release of teachers’ ratings.

Rafferty’s full letter of resignation is below.

September 27, 2011

To Chancellor Dennis Walcott:

The Community Education Council serves no purpose other than to be a shield between the Department of Education and the parents of schoolchildren citywide.

I would feel better about the work we do if I considered us to be an annoyance – that would mean that we’ve gotten under somebody’s skin and we have to be dealt with.

The reality is quite the opposite. The Dept. of Education does what it wants to do, when it wants to do it and to whomever it feels like. It does not care about the parents – and why should it? It views the parents as unnecessary in the process.

And let me be clear, I’m not talking about those who are here tonight, any other CEC night, at parent-teacher conferences, asking kids about their homework, making sure they put their studies first and involved in their children’s lives. No, I’m talking about the great majority of parents that have neither the time, interest, desire or understanding to do what they need to in order for their children to succeed. That is the great silent majority – the people who don’t care enough to try their best.

The Dept. of Education uses the human shield of the Community Education Council to deflect the anger, resentment, scorn, lack of information, frustration – and good ideas – of the vocal minority. The DOE doesn’t care about the angry rabble, about the people who know they are right and want to work from within the system to make a change.

That’s us. The few of us on the board who were selected to be the shield, and those of you sitting in the audience tonight and on other nights who hurl arrows at the DOE, at the Mayor, at Portfolio, at zoning rules, at the Chancellor.

Do they hear your complaints? For the most part – no. And why? Because WE sit here. Because we are the volunteer appointed go-betweens who waste our time swallowing the vitriol and scorn of angry parents so the DOE doesn’t have to taste it. We bear the punches of the angry parents so that the DOE doesn’t have to feel the frustration. We hear the cries of parents whose children languishing in overcrowded schools do not have the opportunity to use a bathroom – so that the DOE can sleep soundly.

We are the middleman that doesn’t deliver, the punching bag that can’t fight back.

A perfect example of this is the two recent zoning meetings we have had. These are often well-attended, with parents that have very clear positions on what should or should not be included in new zoning. At both of these meetings the parents were there to protest, but we – the board – didn’t have the zoning map until the meetings. We were as blindsided as the parents, and our job, as whipping boys for the DOE, was to take the brunt of the parents’ lashes without any regard to our own opinions on this. We didn’t have the chance to turn the maps back to the DOE and say change it. I did not attend those meetings because I can no longer bear the frustration, the anger, the resentment and scorn. I’d have no problem with it if the DOE said, “Hey, we’ve got your back. Don’t worry, we’ll solve those problems.”

In some cases the problems seem too big for the DOE to handle; in others the DOE has its own agenda. In still more, the DOE couldn’t give a damn.

Some of my colleagues on this board may disagree with me. That is their prerogative. Some of the parents in the audience, the teachers, administrators and others may also not see things the way I do. That’s fine – we don’t all have to always be on the same page.

The simple truth here, as far as I see it, is that my function – and that of any CEC – is that of window dressing. There have been the rare instances when we have affected change, but the losses column towers high over the gains.

Additionally, I was initially inspired to resign this position in protest to the flawed election process that transpired in the spring, where people who earned votes were removed from ballots due to the flawed rules adopted by our legislature.

In neighboring District 28, the 4th and 5th highest vote-getters in a district that only initially selected 7 were not seated on the board pursuant to Chancellors regulations, which state that when not enough people are selected, ALL those who received no votes get voted on again. The people who received votes in the initial round were denied seats on the board while the people with fewer – or no – initial votes ended up placed on the board. The rule allows for eliminating certain candidates, but only if there aren’t nine members selected. District 28 only has eight.

That is a perfect example of the how absurd the law is and how inconsequential we all are. If the DOE doesn’t want you on the board, they won’t have you.

It is because of all of these reasons that as of tonight, I am resigning my position with the Community District Education Council of District 24. I have enjoyed the company, I have relished the tasks and I have learned a great deal – but my fists are too bloodied from pounding them against the great immovable object that is the New York City Department of Education.

Though many have chastised Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Chancellors Joel Klein, Cathie Black and Dennis Walcott and various bureaucrats at the City level, my blame rests solely on the New York State Legislature and their spineless rubber stamping of a process that takes away local authority, discourages parental involvement and offers absolutely no oversight to ensure that the people in charge, in the middle or at the bottom are doing their job.

And despite all of this, the City’s children have made improvements in the last decade – depending who you ask. Clearly, their plan has worked, and they can keep doing what they have with or without you, me, or anybody else. If anything, that shows just how useless all of this is, how we are wasting our time and how – despite all symbolism and flair – my statement tonight will not matter.

File that next to nearly everything else we do on this board. I quit.

Sincerely,
Brian M. Rafferty
Community Education Council, District 24

Union members and community members join Santos Crespo at P.S. 66 in the Bronx to protest school aide layoffs today.

With the deadline to prevent layoffs of hundreds of school aides nearing, a familiar player is being introduced to help break up an impasse on negotiations.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who has already rejected one proposal by DC-37 and its affiliate Local 372, which represent the aides, has accepted an invitation to meet with members of the council “discuss the issue pertaining to the DC37 layoffs,” according to an email sent out to the members today. The meeting is scheduled to take place tomorrow afternoon.

Union officials are hoping that the City Council, which successfully brokered the deal to save more than 4,000 teacher layoffs in June, can once again come up with a solution to save jobs.

One tool the council won’t have is money; while the fight to prevent teacher layoffs took place before the 2012 budget was finalized, now all of the council’s funds have been committed.

“I assume this meeting is an attempt to help resolve some of the issues preventing an agreement between the union and the DOE,” said an aide for one of the council members who will attend the meeting.

The meeting is being convened by council members from the Black, Latino and Asian Caucus. School aides are the lowest paid school employees and are disproportionately black and Latino.

So far, there has been no progress made in direct negotiations between union officials and the DOE, which announced lay offs of over 700 employees last month. At the time, DOE officials said that DC-37 employees were targeted because they were not willing to agree to budget concessions earlier in the summer. But talks reopened earlier this month and Walcott has said he continues to be open to more proposals.

“The unions asked to present us with a proposal they believed might avert layoffs, and of course I am always willing to listen,” Walcott said in a statement today.

Walcott said he rejected the first proposal, which proposed to equitably distribute the aides across the school system at reduced hours, because it would have placed additional burden on individual school budgets forced to absorb the new aides.

“The union’s proposal would not be fair to our schools  and principals, who made careful decisions on the allocation of resources and staff, so we will not move forward with it,” Walcott said.

In response, officials revised its proposal and brought a new one back to the DOE’s labor office yesterday, but has yet to hear an answer yet, Local 372 President Santos Crespo said.

“The fact that they have meet with us a second time, it does show some promise,” Crespo said at a rally in the Bronx today.

If a deal is done it will have to be made either tomorrow or early next week. This week is shortened due to religious holidays and pink slips for the workers are scheduled to take effect on Oct. 7. Any deal that is struck by the two sides will then have to be ratified by union members.

“We have a short window of time here,” Crespo said.

Since then, P.S. 12 has seen a jump in test scores and has stayed off the city’s list of schools on the chopping block. Dixon attributes the improvement to changes in the school’s culture and instructional practices.

She joined Deidre DeAngelis, principal of New Dorp High School on Staten Island, on a panel during the conference on alternatives to school closures that several advocacy groups organized Saturday. The pair discussed the strategies they used to help their once-failing schools stay open and, in New Dorp’s case, turn into a model of successful school improvement for the city and federal education departments.

Those strategies — adding tutoring, offering more teacher training, connecting students and teachers, and engaging families — predate the structural and human capital changes the Obama administration has mandated for failing schools. They suggest that strong leadership is enough to change a school’s course — a view that a top Department of Education deputy shared at Saturday’s conference.

“Nothing that happens in Tweed is going to move student achievement as much as 95 percent of things that happen in a school building,” said Marc Sternberg, the deputy chancellor in charge of closing and opening schools. “Where there is a great school leader, great students and great teachers will follow. If there isn’t that person who can galvanize a team and bring folks together around a common vision, the school is not going to move forward.”

When Dixon was assigned to P.S. 12, she said, the school had just been labelled a school under registration review (SURR), a state designation for persistently low-achieving schools. She created an after-school tutoring program that helped boost the school-wide passing rate on state exams — this year, nearly half of students received a score of 3 or 4 on the math exam, and 35 percent received a 3 or 4 on the reading test. She also added extra training for math and literacy teachers. And although it has been tough as the school’s budget tightens, Dixon said she has also built “crucial bonds” to the neighboring community, IN THE FORM OF?

“Community engagement means putting yourself in front of parents,” she said. “We host community events. We work with the [nearby] charter school.”

DeAngelis, who became principal of New Dorp High School in 1999, also stressed family engagement in her presentation.

If a principal does not invest time in parent outreach, she said, “it’s time to move on. You need to have a passion for working with families. Otherwise why do this job?”

DeAngelis detailed how student achievement rose after the school created eight specialized “small learning communities” to give the school of about 2,700 students a small-school feel, using funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Teams of New Dorp teachers studied student performance data and recommended that the school add mock Regents exams, send parents a report on student progress, and tweak the curriculum to target areas where students struggled most, such as grammar and sentence construction in English.

The best thing the DOE can do to support principals, according to Sternberg? “Get out of their way and allow them to do their work.”

A chart in Fryer's report shows the effect of incentive programs from city to city. (Click to enlarge)

Despite several spectacular setbacks, Harvard economist Roland Fryer isn’t ready to throw in the towel on incentives to boost student performance.

In recent years, New York City abandoned two different inventives programs that Fryer designed — one for students and another for teachers — after it became clear that the promise of more cash for higher test scores wasn’t paying off.

But Fryer, who last week was awarded a “genius grant” by the MacArthur foundation, has experimented with incentives in other cities and gotten different results. In a report released today, he and a colleague from Harvard University’s EdLabs offer instructions for designing incentives programs and argue that, contrary to what economic theory would predict, programs that reward “inputs” such as reading or completing homework are more effective than those that reward “outcomes” such as test scores, as New York’s program did.

In Houston, students who were paid $4 for each math skill they learned mastered more skills — and they did even better when the prize grew to $6 a skill. In Dallas, students who were paid to read books read more books.

More study is needed to figure out exactly why the Texas students responded to incentives and students in New York City did not, the researchers write. But they hypothesize that New York City students might not understand that comprehending content is key to raising scores. The researchers write:

After each of the ten exams administered in New York City, our qualitative team asked students how they felt about the rewards and what they could do to earn more money on the next test. Every student found the question about how to increase his or her scores difficult to answer. Students answering this question discussed test-taking strategies rather than salient inputs into the education production function or improving their general understanding of a subject area.

Fryer’s report is one of three released today by the Hamilton Project, an economy-focused research initiative of the non-partisan Brookings Institution. A second report, by a team of Columbia University researchers, takes New York City data into account when concluding that changing conditions within schools — such as their start time, grade configuration, or teacher deployment — can boost student achievement just as much or more than changing system-wide policies. And a third proposes that states and cities use separate tests to measure student achievement and teacher effectiveness.

King delivered the message in a letter to district superintendents yesterday that suggested he had fielded worries about the cost and content of a new initiative to bolster test security.

First, King sought to allay concerns about the news, reported by the New York Times this weekend, that erasure analysis detected some test score improprieties.

“Obviously, this was not a large-scale, in-depth pilot of erasure analysis, nor did it rise to the level of a major finding or report,” he wrote, noting that the results of only eight exams were analyzed.

But he said indicated that erasure analysis could be on the horizon as the state continues to weigh initiatives to protect against cheating — and that it would already have been in place if the state had funded the Board of Regents’ recommendation for erasure analysis last year.

“Even this small body of evidence reinforces the larger message of the Department’s comprehensive test integrity review launched in August 2011 shortly after I became Commissioner: we need to take strong steps to ensure the integrity of New York State tests,” King wrote.

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Some administrators who staffed the tables lining the hallways of the first seven floors of Brooklyn Technical High School aimed to inspire students to consider careers in health, law enforcement, or the culinary arts.

Others faced higher stakes: To convince families to take a chance on an under-the-radar school. Because the Department of Education uses enrollment as a factor in deciding which schools to close, schools that attract few applicants could face dire consequences.

Sheepshead Bay High School

Geri Riley, a teacher at Sheepshead Bay High School in Brooklyn, passes out pamphlets and cookies to families.

Sheepshead Bay High School’s teachers drew families to their booth with homemade chocolate chip cookies. “My sister made them. I don’t know if it’s the cookies or interest in the school, but we’re doing well,” said Geri Riley, the Advanced Placement government and economics teacher, as parents stopped to eat and learn about the school’s various specialized learning academies.

Riley said enrollment at the school, which tops 2,000, is on the decline. This year, the school is undergoing “restart,” one of four federally mandated strategies for low-performing schools, and a nonprofit partner is taking over its management.

School for International Studies
Sean Ahern, one of two culinary arts teachers at Brooklyn’s School for International Studies, turned heads in his chef’s uniform and hat as he passed out brochures. His job was twofold: to sell families on both the culinary arts and on his school, which is struggling to keep enrollment numbers up and even recruited a public relations firm this year to help convince families to send their children.

“This kitchen is so fantastic. It’s state-of-the-art,” he said to one student and pointed to a picture of the school’s newly-renovated classroom-turned-kitchen. “Write to the chancellor and ask him why this kitchen is not being used 24-7? We’re Cobble Hill, which is really hot for restaurants right now. But we’re a small school of only 500.”

Cobble Hill High School for American Studies

Elizabeth Rodriguez, assistant principal at the Cobble Hill School for American Studies, talks to a parent while her daughter Raven Lozada, 12, reviews her notes on high schools

“Hey there, sweetie, what are you looking for in a school?” was Elizabeth Rodriguez’s warm greeting to anyone who lingers in front of the table for Cobble Hill High School for American Studies, where she works as the assistant principal of safety and security.

“Fun,” one student responds.

“Okay, so you want extracurriculars … cheerleading, chess?” Rodriguez responds, running through a list of activities at the high school, which was able to beef up its after-school offerings with funding from federal School Improvement Grants it received after landing on the state’s list of low-achieving schools. With the funds, she said the school was also able to increase professional development options for teachers and purchase a number of new computers.

“We for a long time had been building up our ELA and math scores. But with the transformation dollars, while other schools are struggling financially, Cobble Hill is at a point where it definitely helps us,” she said. Still, the school cut several teaching positions this year due to budget constraints.

A mother in the crowd wants to know about internships. “We’re a small school,” Rodriguez said. “So if there’s something you want that we don’t have, we’ll get it for you.” She also touted the classes in law and the school’s Advanced Placement and honors course offerings.

Rodriguez’s daughter Raven Lozada is applying to high schools this year, but probably won’t go to Cobble Hill. She wants to go to Telecommunications Arts and Technology High School in Queens.  ”It’s a block from my house,” Raven, 12, said. “They have a lot of good programs, but I’m a little disappointed because they don’t have a good visual arts program.”

Clara Barton School for Health Professions
When they arrived shortly after 11 a.m., Lisa Hardison and her daughter, Anniah, 13, made a beeline for the Brooklyn high schools, stationed on the seventh floor. Hardison was the picture of a proud mother as they approach their first booth of the day: Clara Barton School for Health Professions. “She’s never been absent from school in four years. She got the coaches award for track,” Hardison said of Anniah, who attends Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women. “She’s athletic. We want a school where she can play volleyball and run track.” “And no uniform,” Anniah adds.

“We’ve already ran out of brochures,” says Cassandra Simpson, 17, a Clara Barton senior dressed in green scrubs, shortly after noon.

“That’s a good sign, isn’t it? Like a doctor’s waiting room, you want to see lot’s of people there,” Keith Holgate, an assistant principal, said of the brochure shortage, which he described as a sign that the school’s reputation is spreading. “Many of our students go on to nursing school or health school,” he explained to the Hardisons and a handful of families milling around the school’s table.  He said his school’s big selling point is its internships that place seniors in local hospitals. ”We push our students to go on for their Registered Nurse degree,” he said. “They’re going to college.”

Pelham Academy of Academics and Community Engagement
Anthony Rivera, principal of Pelham Academy of Academics and Community Engagement in the Bronx, brought 47 students, 12 parents and four teachers to the fair. As classes 802 and 805 jammed into the elevator for a tight, sweaty ride up to the fourth floor, Rivera explained to me why he chose to arrange the trip instead of leaving it up to individual parents.

“This is our first graduating class, and we thought we’d generate more interest if we organized an event where we all went together,” he said. He also said that he wanted to see the steps of the high school application process firsthand so he could better guide families.

Flushing High School
The sixth floor, where Queens schools whose names begin with the letters A through H set up their tables, was clear of the shoulder-to-shoulder traffic present on the floors for Brooklyn and Manhattan schools. Flushing High School, which is in its second year of transformation, packed up its booth and left well before the end of the day on Sunday after running out of school brochures. Queens schools tend to put their greatest emphasis on the borough fair, to be held next month, which is easier for families to attend, said Erin Dowding, an English teacher and college counselor for Flushing International High School, a school for recent immigrants.

She explained that her school does not make the fair the centerpiece of its enrollment plan. “A lot of our students come to the U.S. for ninth grade. We get a lot of  over-the-counter enrollment,” she said, after the high school application process has sorted most students into city schools.

Chelsea Career and Technical High School 

Imani Norwood-King, right, a senior at Chelsea High School, talks to prospective students while her computer-networking teacher, Ray Ruiz, chats with a parent behind her.

“Computer Networking! Arts! Graphic Design — Come to Chelsea!” chanted Imani Norwood-King, 17, a senior and student government vice president at Chelsea Career and Technical High School, one of 11 schools to receive transformation funding from the federal government last year to boost performance.

“Chelsea is great right now. Percentage [of students] passing [exams] has gone up dramatically because we can offer more time for students to prep for the Regents exams,” said Ray Ruiz, a technology teacher. “With the funding, we’re able to do much more — Saturday classes and extended day so kids can stay until 4 or 5 p.m. And we just got new Mac labs.”

“A lot of parents told me they are afraid to send their kid to large schools because they cold get lost,” he said “But Chelsea is a small school, about 500 kids at most, so we’re able to know everyone.” The city shrunk the school’s enrollment by half over the last several years.