GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• This year’s Broad Prize for an urban district went to Charlotte-Mecklenberg in North Carolina. (EdWeek)
• Research suggests Charlotte’s district and charter schools are on par with each other. (Matt Yglesias)
• Proposed changes to ESEA could discount more disabled students from accountability. (On Special Ed)
• Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry says paddling can help children with ADD. (Atlantic Wire)
• Ask to rate training sessions she’d like to attend, a teacher writes her own list. (Miss Eyre/NYC Educator)
• A review of books that can be used in special education classrooms and their effectiveness. (Mr. Foteah)
• Advice on deciding which Regents exams to take and when, starting in eighth grade. (Insideschools)
• Report: High-performing students don’t gain as quickly as their low-performing peers. (Fordham Institute)
• A film playing on PBS tonight documents the lives of Filipino teachers in Baltimore. (Joanne Jacobs)
• More on the Common Core at McKee High School, complete with lesson plans. (Soaring Seagulls)
• Rupert Murdoch will be the keynote speaker at an education reform conference next month. (Digital Ed)

For the first time, the city teachers union could allow teachers to be removed from schools based on merit rather than seniority, a union official close to the negotiations said today.

As part of his middle schools initiative, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced in a speech this morning a plan to pursue federally-funded “turnaround” for 10 low-performing schools that would begin next year. The model, which replaces at least half of the schools’ teachers based on effectiveness –  rather than seniority – can only go forward with approval from the United Federation of Teachers.

The union has already been in “preliminary discussions” with the city about implementing the model next year and is “open” to further negotiations, an official said today.

“These are all struggling schools and we are willing to help struggling schools,” the official said. “It’s not a debatable point.”

This version of turnaround, one of four models the Obama Administration has mandated for low-performing schools, has previously been off the table in any past negotiations. Two other models, plus another turnaround version that resembles the city’s school closure policy, are already in place in New York City, but none are as aggressive. Together the 10 schools could get up to $30 million in federal grants.

Specifics about how teacher would be removed are still under negotiations, the official said. But any teachers removed because of the turnaround would remain on the city’s payroll as members of the Absent Teachers Reserve.

The mere willingness to discuss a plan to identify and remove unfit teachers from struggling schools is the latest sign of an evolved working relationship between the union and city. (more…)

In his first major policy speech, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott called for major changes to the ctiy's worst middle schools.

To shake middle schools from mediocrity, the city is turning to school reform strategies it considers tried and true.

In the next two years, the Department of Education will close low-performing middle schools, open brand-new ones, add more charter schools, and push more teachers and principals through in-house leadership programs, Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced today in a 30-minute policy speech, the first of his six-month tenure.

For 10 schools, the city will ask for $30 million in federal funds to try a new reform strategy set out by the federal government, “turnaround,” in which at least half of staff members are replaced, Walcott said.

The efforts—which the city plans to pay for with a mixture of state and federal funds—are meant to boost middle school scores that are low and, in the case of reading, actually falling.

“People have tried and struggled with the complicated nature of middle schools for decades,” he said. “But the plan I’ve laid out is bolder and more focused than anything we’ve tried here in New York City before.”

Experts and advocates who helped engineer the last major effort to overhaul middle schools, a City Council task force that produced recommendations but short-lived changes at the DOE in 2007, disputed Walcott’s characterization. They said Walcott’s announcement reflects a change in style but not substance.

“Much of what he said is not new,” said Carol Boyd, a parent leader with the Coalition for Educational Justice, which has long urged more attention for middle schools. ”There is a definite party line, except Joel [Klein] wasn’t able to deliver it with the same believability that Chancellor Walcott does,” she said. Boyd sat on the task force.

“There’s nothing new [or] interesting about this plan,” said Pedro Noguera, the New York University professor who chaired the council’s task force and has spoken out against school closures. “It sounds like more of what they’ve been doing, shutting down failing schools.” (more…)

In his first policy address since becoming chancellor in April, Dennis Walcott vowed today to close some failing middle schools while opening at least 50 more to replace them.

In the 30-minute speech, Walcott also proposed a slate of policies to boost teaching staffs and instructional programs at middle schools, long considered the city Department of Education’s weakest link.

We will have much more on what he said and what it means shortly. For now, here’s the complete speech as delivered at New York University this morning.

• The city is capping enrollment at some crowded schools, such as PS 236, where one class is at 36. (NY1)
• As schools follow a federal mandate to serve healthier lunch fare, lunch fees could start to rise. (Times)
• Some say the state is wrong not to include test-day site monitors in security plans. (GothamSchools)
• Education economist Roland Fryer has won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. (Bloomberg)
• Jonathan Levin HS for Media & Communications honors a teacher killed by a student. (Daily News)
• Publishing giant Pearson, with its huge education division, got perks to add city jobs. (Bloomberg)
• A columnist writes that Chancellor Walcott misled Staten Island parents about buses. (S.I. Advance)
• The head of schools in Elizabeth, N.J., was arrested for stealing from the district’s lunch program. (AP)
• Chicago is launching a site where parents can suggest how schools can use a longer day. (Sun-Times)

• A first look at hundreds of 80-year-old report cards discarded by a now-defunct Manhattan school. (Slate)
• Education isn’t the only area where private donations are making up for low city funds. (Gotham Gazette)
• A charter school parent organizer lands on a list of New York’s “Forty under 40.” (City Hall News)
• The latest issue of a journal about scientific research is all about early childhood education. (Science)
• A city teacher who has her smallest class ever says she is able to get through all her plans. (Miss Brave)
• As information grows and enthusiasm spreads, more countries are attempting school reform. (Economist)
• Praise for Community section contributor Mark Anderson‘s unusual focus on curriculum. (Flypaper)
• Jay Mathews: Sports, which most students play, could be key to improving high schools. (Class Struggle)
• A teacher asks for a little more from a book that turns education research into instructions. (Jose Vilson)
• Adjusting to the changes brought by the Common Core’s arrival is exhausting. (No Sleep ‘Til Summer)
• A history of “outrageous” cheating scandals, both debunked and confirmed. (ProPublica)
• The principal of a school focusing on the film industry laments a dearth of “good systems.” (Schoolbook)
• National teachers unions are among donors to Congress’s “supercommittee” on debt. (Politics K-12)

Since becoming chancellor in April, Dennis Walcott has made many public appearances but few policy pronouncements.

That’s set to change tomorrow morning, when Walcott is set to deliver the first policy address of his tenure, a speech at New York University titled “Why We Can’t Rest: How To Move the Middle.”

The city is mum on what exactly the speech will be about, but it’s clear that Walcott has spent some time talking about middle schools in the last week. On Thursday, he met with roughly a dozen principals of high-scoring middle schools — both district-run and charter — to ask them a question that has long bedeviled educators and policymakers: How to curb the performance drop-off that takes place after students leave elementary school.

The 2011 state test scores released last month told a familiar story: Middle school students scored proficient at a far lower rate than students in the elementary grades.

“We still need to increase our focus on those years,” Walcott said at the time.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the city has made improving middle schools a priority.  (more…)

When Education Secretary Arne Duncan urged the country’s education commissioners this summer to ensure their standardized tests were as secure and reliable as possible, he specifically recommended four measures that would help them do so.

Here in New York State, officials for the most part heeded his advice. Last week, Commissioner John King’s proposal to upgrade testing and scoring procedures included three of the four measures.

But state officials ignored one Duncan recommendation: to conduct “unannounced, on-site visits during test administration.” That raised a red flag for Kathleen Cashin, a member of the Board of Regents who supervised schools in Brooklyn and Queens for many years.

“That is a preventive way, if someone is thinking of cheating, they might think twice if they knew someone was in the building touring,” Cashin said at last week’s Board of Regents meeting.

Principals and teachers report they rarely or never see test monitors in their schools, but it wasn’t always that way. (more…)

New Yorkers following Chicago’s snowballing union-district standoff over plans to extend the school day may not realize that similar conversations take place inside city schools every year.

Chicago’s new mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and his schools chief, former New York City deputy Jean-Claude Brizard, are pushing schools to add 90 minutes to their 5-hour-long days, among the shortest in the nation. But they have offered teachers only 2 percent more pay, raising the ire of the teachers union, whose president, Karen Lewis, has said Emanuel is creating “a nightmare” by asking union members to override their union contract.

Even though the union has filed a lawsuit over the plan, Emanuel and Brizard decided to shop the proposal school by school, and teachers at at least nine schools have voted to extend their working hours—and the instructional day. The city and the teachers union send out warring press releases each time another school takes a vote.

Staff at New York City schools routinely take similar votes, but with less fanfare. There has been no system-wide push for a longer school day in years, and educators do not foresee a Chicago-style showdown repeating in New York.

That’s in part because the average New York City school day is already much longer than Chicago’s, and slightly longer than other major cities’, with many students in school for 6.5 hours or more. In addition, the district already struck a flexible deal with the union five years ago to extend the school day by 37.5 minutes four days a week for at least 290,000 city students, mostly those who struggle academically. How that time is spent is, to a large degree, up to each school.

Researchers say it is almost impossible to make a good estimate of the length of the New York City school day—something that one Chicago columnist found last week when he tried to tally the numbers—because instructional time requirements vary by grade-level and subject, and principals and teachers can decide together how they want to structure parts of the school day.  (more…)

• Michael Winerip: State education officials get free trips from — and do business with — Pearson. (Times)
• New York still sends disabled students to out-of-state schools with checkered reputations. (Daily News)
• A Staten Island couple is accused of stealing millions in lunch funds from for-profit preschools. (Times)
• The FDNY is cracking down on paper posted in school hallways and classrooms. (GothamSchools)
• The city has put the troubled Williamsburg Charter High School on probation. (GothamSchools, WNYC)
• The founders of Educators 4 Excellence say this is the year to revamp teacher evaluations. (Daily News)
• Peg Tyre: “Parent trigger” laws are solid theoretically but require parents to be sophisticated. (Times)
• Arne Duncan and Netflix’s CEO explain the Obama administration’s investment in digital learning. (WSJ)
• When a family moves from PS 321 to Moscow, they find an unusual school that’s tiny and warm. (Times)
• Chicago’s mayor and teachers union are still fighting over the length of the school day. (Times)
• Before some Chicago schools voted for a longer day, some had already added back recess time. (Times)
• Across the country, state education departments are slashing funds for “regional superintendents.” (NPR)
• The L.A. Times says the state should conduct erasure analysis and flag too-good-to-true score gains.