GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Teachers are fleeing the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, citing leadership problems. (Times)
• Tracing Bronx Science’s leadership problems back to Harold Levy, three chancellors ago. (Wonkster)
• Hilary Lustick: Republican presidential candidates don’t meet Common Core standards. (GS Community)
• Wyoming lawmakers are still hinting that they might give up on the Common Core. (Curriculum Matters)
• A new study suggests that 10 percent of all teachers nationally leave after their first year. (Teacher Beat)
• Congress is funding a new center to identify and promote ed technology innovations. (Digital Education)
• Teachers in Tacoma, Wash., are still striking, even though a judge ruled they couldn’t. (District Dossier)
• A teacher describes the excitement of teaching his third-graders new vocabulary words. (Mr. Foteah)
• An argument that schools have gotten a lot more boring recently as art and music diminish. (Salon)

With the city’s Teacher Data Reports now in the past, the teachers union is set to move forward on negotiations that will build on a pilot program that’s in place in 33 schools.

The controversial reports, which assigned ratings to about 10,000 teachers based on their students’ test scores, were championed by former chancellor Joel Klein. Klein said he would release the scores to the public after news organizations filed a Freedom of Information request for them — a move that the United Federation of Teachers quickly opposed in court.

But in his first major reversal from one of Klein’s policies, Chancellor Dennis Walcott has said he does not think the ratings, which the UFT agreed to in part on grounds that they would remain internal, should be made public. Yesterday, Department of Education officials told the New York Times that they would no longer calculate teachers’ ratings according to the TDR algorithm because the state is rolling out a different model.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew told GothamSchools today that doing away with the TDRs wasn’t necessarily a precondition for the UFT to work with the city on a new teacher evaluation model, required under state law. But he said their disappearance would clear the way for negotiations.

“I really do appreciate that Dennis has taken that position, unlike previous chancellors,” Mulgrew said. “But it does help that we have a better relationship and we’re working together. That helps getting to any deal.” (more…)

The Department of Education is giving a Brooklyn charter school with a history of trouble just weeks to fix its most flagrant violations.

We wrote in April that Williamsburg Charter High School had after a sharp enrollment decline.

Now, the city has placed the school on a one-year probation, saying it is “in material and substantial violation of its charter, and in serious violation of applicable laws and regulations.”

Those laws and regulations include ones governing management, finances, and the school’s relationship with the Believe High Schools Network — a relationship that the city says the school entered into illegally and must terminate within six weeks.

At least three of WCHS’s six board members are employed by the Believe network or one of the other two schools it operates, according to the letter, sent by Recy Dunn, head of the DOE’s Charter Schools Office, to the chair of WCHS’s board. “Any decisions made by the Board in regards to WCHS’s relationship with the Network would not be valid as those three members would have to recuse themselves; with only three voting Board members remaining, a majority vote decision would not be possible,” the letter states.

Whether the board actually voted on the Believe relationship is not clear: The board met only four times last year, instead of the required 12.

The letter also raises red flags about the school’s budgeting, pointing out that the school’s own reporting put current assets at about $509,000 and current liabilities — the amount for which it’s on the hook — at nearly $5 million. (more…)

More students than ever took exams that could earn them college credit last year. But the pass rate held steady at just over 50 percent.

The number of city high school students taking rigorous Advanced Placement exams last year jumped by 6.9 percent, according to Department of Education data released today. That follows a push by the DOE to expand access to college-level coursework to more students. The number of students passing the exams also rose by 7 percent, meaning that students’ overall performance didn’t improve.

Black students, who have lagged the most in both participation and performance on AP exams, did post higher scores, with 12.7 percent more passing tests than last year.

The DOE also released information about how New York City students did last year on the SAT. Nationally, performance dropped as the number of test-takers rose. But here in New York, 10 percent more high school seniors took the SAT, but students’ scores overall held flat or dropped by one point on the test’s three different sections.

Still, city students’ average SAT score is well below the national average. This year, NYC students scored an average total score of 1,327, while the national average is 1,483.

Both SAT and AP exam participation and performance will be factored into the college-readiness metric that the DOE will premiere on high schools’ forthcoming progress reports.  (more…)

Art on the walls makes a school environment beautiful, happy and bright – right? According to the FDNY, art on the walls can also make a school dangerous.

Last year, the fire department stepped up its inspections of public school buildings, adding the public buildings unit to three others that check into whether schools are meeting fire codes. Schools were warned if more than 20 percent of their wall space was covered with flammable materials such as paper and cloth, a frequent situation in a system where principals and students have long been encouraged to plaster hallways and classrooms with student work.

In total, FDNY cited approximately 1,500 violations in schools, and 500 of them were quickly fixed, according to an FDNY spokesman.

This year, the Department of Education gave principals a heads-up that the policy would continue. Although no policy has actually changed, principals were reminded of the specific fire code parameters this week, and the DOE is working with the FDNY, school facilities staff and the principals union to ensure compliance with the 20 percent rule, said Marge Feinberg, a DOE spokeswoman.

Many principals were caught off guard by the inspections and were worried about how their schools would be affected, said Chiara Coletti, a spokeswoman for the principals union. (more…)

For presidential hopefuls, 2011 is the year of campaigning. In the New York teaching world, thanks to the new Common Core standards, 2011 is the official Year of the English Teacher.

That’s right, it’s all about reading to identify flaws in others’ argument and writing airtight arguments of one’s own. Instead of the onus of literacy living principally in the English department, now all subjects at my school are expected to work together toward more coherent development of ideas in our students’ writing. Walk into any classroom in my school over the next couple of weeks, and chances are you will be hearing about paragraph structure, thesis statements, the use of evidence, or the difference between fact and opinion.

While it’s edifying to iron out my learning objectives with colleagues across the disciplines, the critical value of the Common Core Standards came to my attention while watching the Republican presidential last week. Rick Perry was asked to speak about his position on immigration, and he did. Kind of. After taking a hard line against anyone who would usurp America’s resources without due contribution, he went onto emphasize his pride in his own immigrant roots. He talked about how hard his Italian grandfather and father had worked to give him the opportunities he’s had in his life. He talked about how vital immigrants are to America’s prosperity. He closed with a sanguine (but apparently unmemorable) relish meant to further inspire American pride in anyone who hadn’t yet been swept away by his passion.

There was no connection, however, between his nostalgia and his original point: that we need to limit the number of immigrants entering our country without documentation, or make sure that those who do enter are properly taxed. In a national debate, the governor of Texas had just earned himself a 50 percent on one of my 10th-grade writing assignments. (more…)

• The city is eliminating Teacher Data Reports, saying new evaluations make them unnecessary. (Times)
• The DOE says it plans to fire administrators from Eximius College Prep for falsifying transcripts. (Post)
• Talks are open between the city and school aides’ union, DC-37, over averting layoffs. (GothamSchools)
• The DOE won’t move a suspension center onto the Petrides Campus after all. (Post, S.I. Advance, NY1)
• A parent-led lawsuit over charter school co-locations had its first day in court. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• In Newark, schools chief Cami Anderson’s reform plan starts with hiring many new principals. (Times)
• A look at teaching as a retirement option, which some baby boomers are pursuing. (Times)
• A bus company is under investigation after a student boarded the wrong bus and was left alone. (NY1)
• Five city schools — in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island — won a national performance prize. (NY1)
• For the first time in Chicago’s extended day battle, two schools voted against longer days. (Tribune)
• Philadelphia is adding more discretion into its “zero-tolerance” school discipline policy. (Inquirer)
• In England, 5- and 6-year-olds will take a compulsory reading test for the first time next year. (BBC)

• Small colleges in Vermont are letting some high schools, some in NYC, supply students. (Hechinger)
• In a teacher’s first “school-mare” of the year, his principal trashes his classroom. (Mr. Foteah)
• A guide to first-grade readiness from 1979 doesn’t smack of today’s metrics of success. (Chicago Now)
• A new report by advocates of education innovation says New York is uniquely facilitating it. (Bellwether)
• A version of the teacher evaluation briefing Linda Darling-Hammond gave Congress. (Answer Sheet)
• Only half of districts in Common Core states say they are rolling the new standards out. (Joanne Jacobs)
• Maine and Kansas are poised to lead an effort to craft national science standards. (Curriculum Matters)
• An evaluation method that found most charter schools lacking endorsed New Orleans’. (Mike Goldstein)
• Even without funding, Colorado is ready to ask vendors to create new state tests. (Ed News Colorado)
• Democrats are criticizing Republicans for criticizing NCLB, which they have also done. (Rick Hess)

Hundreds of Department of Education employees doomed to lose their jobs next month might not be laid off after all.

Talks to avert the layoffs of 737 school aides were rekindled this afternoon between the DOE and labor officials representing the employees, according to union officials who are directly involved in the negotiations.

“I can tell you that we made significant proposals to see if we can prevent these layoffs,” said one of the sources, who requested anonymity because negotiations were ongoing. “I feel very positive about the meeting today.”

The layoffs to non-pedagogical school staff were abruptly announced last month by the DOE and came after the city blamed the employees’ unions for not providing “any real savings that could have saved these jobs.”

The layoffs caught union leaders at DC-37, the city’s largest municipal union and its affiliate Local 372 off guard. Local 372 President Santos Crespo, who said he attended this afternoon’s meeting, criticized the layoffs as political and being too heavily concentrated in the city’s poor and minority communities.

The drama over layoffs at the Department of Education has persisted since last year, when Mayor Bloomberg first announced that thousands of teachers’ jobs would have to be cut because of widening gaps in the budget. Those talks temporarily ceased in late June, however, when the teachers union agreed to concessions in an eleventh hour deal to avert the layoffs. (more…)

Many of the 12 Race to the Top winners are facing implementation challenges, according to Education Week, but none so striking as New York, where a judge last month overturned a key element in the state’s teacher evaluation plans.

From EdWeek:

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said he would withhold funding from states that do not live up to their Race to the Top plans. But [State Education Commissioner John King] said he believes New York state and its union could avoid that fate.

The regulations “are entirely consistent” with the 2010 state law, he said, adding: “I remain extremely optimistic that we’ll find a way forward. Inevitably, there are moments of disagreement, but I’m confident about the long-term direction.”

King’s argument is the same that Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch made last month during the “On Education” panel that I helped moderate. I had asked whether New York is keeping its Race to the Top promises and whether it has the capacity to execute planned reforms, given the teacher evaluations decision, which had been handed down just the previous day.

Panelists didn’t really deal with the big-picture question, but they projected confidence about rolling out new teacher evaluations, the piece of New York’s application that most helped the state land $700 million in federal funds. (more…)