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Amid mounting criticisms that charter schools do not serve the neediest students, the state’s charter school authorizers are making a push to approve more charter schools that make those children a priority.

This week, the Board of Regents gave its stamp of approval to several schools that describe their mission as serving high-needs students, such as children with special needs, who are homeless, or who are over-age for their grade.

The schools include a school run by the Children’s Aid Society, which plans to serve students in the high-poverty South Bronx neighborhood of Morrisania. That school was authorized by  the State University of New York earlier this year, along with several other schools that will target their recruitment and services to high-needs students.

SUNY also approved two ROADS charter schools, which say they will enroll students who are over-aged but lack the credits needed to graduate. Those join several other recently approved or opened schools that SUNY selected for their commitments to underserved children.

Cynthia Proctor, a SUNY spokeswoman, said the new schools would still be held accountable for their academic performance, even though high-needs students tend to fall short more frequently on test scores and some other measures of success.

“It is important to understand that the two goals are not mutually exclusive,” she said. (more…)

Lawyers for the Department of Education were back on the defense in Judge Paul Feinman’s courtroom on Thursday morning to argue a new twist on an old charter school co-location debate.

A new lawsuit argues that more than 80 charter schools sited in public school buildings have gotten free rides on facilities expenses such as utilities and building maintenance. Parent groups who brought the lawsuit earlier this summer are suing want the DOE to collect more than $100 million in rent money that they say should have been charged.

Today’s hearing on the lawsuit, which did not yield an immediate decision, comes less than two months after the same judge rejected the United Federation of Teachers and NAACP’s request to halt all charter school co-locations. That lawsuit argued that the co-location plans favored the charter schools.

In today’s hearing, arguments focused on the city’s policy, in place since 2003, that lets charter schools share space free of charge. Eighty two charter schools are now occupied in public buildings that house an estimated 27,500 students, according to court papers.

New York State charter law, first written in 1999, states that charter schools can be located within a public school building “at cost” based on what they are charged to rent, lease or own private or public space. How much “at cost” should be worth – if anything at all – was a major source of disagreement between the sides.

Arthur Schwartz, arguing for the plaintiffs, said in court that the charter schools in public school buildings should have to pay for the per-pupil costs because it provided them with inequitably favorable resources at a time when district schools are forced to cut their budgets.

“It gets at the heart of some of the disparities of the tales that we’ve heard in the schools,” Schwartz told Feinman. (more…)

Joining State Senator Velmanette Montgomery (center) are four students from Bard Early College High School (from left: Daphney Sanchez, Aishah Scott, Dwight Hodgson, and Lenina Mortimer). Behind them is Martha Olson, Dean of Administration.

Students taking part in new early college high school programs got a glimpse of their future yesterday at Long Island University’s Kumbel Theater and liked what they saw.

Staring back up at them were four success stories who graduated from one of the city’s first early college schools, Bard High School Early College in Manhattan: an admissions coordinator, a doctoral candidate in political science, a bioengineering student, and a multimedia producer.

“It’s one of those things that doesn’t make sense to you right now and that’s fine,” said Dwight Hodgson, who started at BHSEC when it opened in 2001. He is now back at his high school as an admission coordinator. “But there’s going to come a time very shortly where you’re going to sit back and say, ‘Wow, that was a life-changing experience.’”

Hodgson was speaking to new students in four early college programs crafted in BHSEC’s mold as part of the Smart Scholars Early College High School program, a state initiative to bolster partnerships between high schools and colleges.

Bard and City Polytechnic High School of Engineering, Architecture, and Technology, which has a relationship with New York City College of Technology, became the city’s first Smart Scholars schools in 2010 and this year they were joined by three other schools: Boys and Girls High School (with L.I.U.), Medgar Evers College Preparatory School (with Medgar Evers College), and Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or P-TECH, (with NYC College of Technology).

Each school is getting more than $400,000 from the state and the Gates Foundation, which provided the original Smart Scholars grant in 2009. The Smart Scholars initiative aims to bring the early college model, in which students take college courses while they’re still enrolled in high school, to low-income and minority students. (more…)

• At last night’s PEP meeting on Staten Island, parents criticized plans for local schools. (S.I. Advance)
• Nationally, scores on the SAT declined last year as the numbers of test-takers rose. (Times)
• But SAT scores in New York State held steady after years of gradual decline. (Post)
• Parents say problems with city bus routes are causing students to miss time in school. (Daily News)
• Comptroller John Liu: The DOE’s school space numbers are flawed. (GothamSchools, Daily News, NY1)
• The Independent Budget Office analyzed a wealth of DOE data. (GothamSchools, NY1, Times, Post)
• The city has a new residency program to prepare teachers just for struggling schools. (GothamSchools)
• A survey of changes for the new school year at Riverdale schools. (Riverdale Press)
• Most teachers in Tacoma, Wash., voted to strike but their vote fell short of a legal hurdle. (News-Tribune)
• Chicago’s teachers union is offering its own extended day proposal, and the city’s is pleased. (Tribune)
• D.C. schools are rolling out the country’s first standardized test about sex and drugs. (Washington Post)

• A Riverdale private school and KIPP NYC are both grappling with how to teach character. (NYT Mag)
• With a lawsuit looming, Arizona will stop monitoring teachers’ English skills. (Learning the Language)
• A proposal before Senate would get dump the “highly-qualified” designation for teachers. (Teacher Beat)
• New research finds that watching “Spongebob Squarepants” is bad for children’s brains. (L.A. Times)
• Jamaica’s chapter leader: Class sizes have grown while our excessed teachers are idle elsewhere. (ICE)
• UFT vice president Leo Casey points out that”Class Warfare” doesn’t grapple much with class. (Edwize)
• Former NBA star Magic Johnson is setting up a chain of 10 Edison Learning schools in L.A. (HuffPo)
• When one student needed encouragement, the mantra “Dare to Try” became a team effort. (Mr. Foteah)
• Diana Senechal, an education wonk who taught in New York, won a prestigious prize. (Core Knowledge)
• A charter school chain has launched a school data visualization tool that anyone can use. (Schoolzilla)

Two years after becoming the Department of Education’s official data monitor, the city’s Independent Budget Office has finished crunching a mountain of numbers.

The results, which include revelations about space-sharing arrangements, budget allocations, principal and teacher demographics, and student performance, are compiled in a comprehensive report released today.

The IBO received the data dump after state legislators designated the office as a DOE watchdog scrutinizing student achievement and financial information in the 2009 law reauthorizing mayoral control. Since then, the IBO’s education unit has grown to eight people from “basically one,” according to communications director Doug Turetsky. Raymond Damonico, the IBO’s director of education research, supervised the report’s creation.

The IBO also today launched a website that allows users to pull up the data for any city school. (Charter schools are not included in the analysis.)

Among the many highlights:

• Poor students at relatively affluent schools outperformed relatively affluent students at schools with many poor students.
• As of 2009-2010, school buildings housing co-locations were less crowded overall than buildings housing a single school. (more…)

Principals will soon get back an hour every day to focus on instructional leadership, if Chancellor Dennis Walcott achieves his goal of taking tasks off of school leaders’ plates.

Walcott has said since taking office in April that he wanted to simplify principals’ jobs. But even as he has directed principals to spend more time observing teachers and rolling out new curriculum standards, principals have still had to wade through a seemingly endless list of tasks handed down from Department of Education headquarters.

That list is starting to shrink. In a message to principals today, Walcott said the city has taken concrete steps to simply principals’ jobs. The steps include linking school records and city health records so that principals don’t have to chase down students’ immunization records; pre-populating some reporting forms with school data; and reducing the number of times principals have to give feedback about their satisfaction.

The DOE has also convened a team of officials in the Office of School Support to find more ways to reduce the time principals spend on tasks assigned centrally, Walcott said. And the department is working on making some data systems more user-friendly, including the brand-new Special Education Student Information System, which some principals say has been problematic since launching.

“You’ve sent a clear message: you are passionately engaged in raising the rigor of the work that your teachers and students do, but too many of you are frustrated by demands coming from outside of your school that do not contribute to your core work,” Walcott wrote in the Principals Weekly newsletter last night. (more…)

The Department of Education’s annual assessments of how much space is available in each school building are not always correct.

That’s according to an audit being released today by Comptroller John Liu, who is in the midst of scrutinizing DOE data in a series of reports. Liu, who is weighing a 2013 mayoral run, launched the audits this spring after holding town hall meetings in which New Yorkers suggested topics for investigation. Last week, he critiqued the DOE’s handling of the Absent Teacher Reserve, and he has at least three other schools audits in the works.

The newest audit examines the city’s “Blue Book,” which contains space estimates for each school building. The DOE and the School Construction Authority use the Blue Book to guide how many students can be placed in a school, and how many schools can fit into a building. Critics, including members of the City Council, say Blue Book numbers don’t always reflect reality — for example, suggesting that an additional class could fit into an art room — and that decisions based on them can leave schools crunched for space.

To evaluate the city’s success at ensuring accurate Blue Book data, Liu’s office analyzed entries for 23 schools and found that space assessments for 10 percent of all rooms were incorrect in a way that affected the school’s overall capacity.

“Proper space is essential for fostering a good learning environment, yet all too often the DOE is basing critical building decisions on its unreliable Blue Book, which bears too much resemblance to a house of cards,” Liu said in a statement. (more…)

A Bank of America employee, a fashion industry veteran, and a 311 operator are among the newest additions to the city’s teaching corps.

They are among 26 people being eased into the classroom through a new city program designed to train – and retain – high-quality teachers specifically for the city’s worst-performing schools.

Launched with little fanfare this summer, the NYC Teaching Residency for School Turnaround is the city’s latest effort to attract talent using an alternative certification program. But unlike the city’s NYC Teaching Fellows program, the residency isn’t throwing its trainees straight into the classroom. Nor is it quickly relieving them from their obligation to the city.

Instead, the program requires them to make a lengthier commitment, but only after they’ve spent a year working as assistants to in the classroom.

The teachers-in-training have been dispersed into two schools undergoing federally-funded “transformation” — Queens Vocational and Technical High School and J.H.S. 22 Jordan L. Mott — and are part of an experimental effort to overhaul schools deemed “persistently low-achieving” by the state.

Borrowing heavily from models that preceeded it in recent years, the program comes amid a growing nationwide focus on improving both the teacher quality and retention rates in high-needs urban schools. (more…)

• More than a third of city schools has gotten a new principal in the last five years. (Post)
• A new poll found that New Yorkers give schools higher marks than they did a decade ago. (Daily News)
• A teacher fired earlier this year after repeated complaints was charged with raping a student. (Post, NY1)
• The state Board of Regents yesterday approved 19 new charter schools to open in 2012. (Post)
• One of them, run by the Children’s Aid Society, will offer wraparound social services. (GothamSchools)
• Speaking at an Ohio high school, President Obama emphasized the schools part of his jobs plan. (Times)
• The House of Representatives approved a bill to give more funding to charter schools. (Times)
• Teachers in Tacoma, Wash., are on strike over pay cuts and proposed work rules. (Reuters)
• In New Haven, where union and city officials agreed to a reform plan, change has been slow. (WSJ)