GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The Department of Education is set to share equally in new budget cuts and a hiring freeze. (Post, WSJ)
• After protesting school aide layoffs yesterday, the UFT will join Occupy Wall Street rally today. (NY1, Post)
• City Council Speaker Christine Quinn weighed in on the layoffs fight for the first time. (GothamSchools)
• Comptroller John Liu panned the city’s phys. ed. program. (GothamSchools, Post, Daily News, Times)
• Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is looking into prices set by the school lunch industry. (Daily News)
• Hyde Leadership Charter School, which christened its new building, focuses on character. (GS, NY1)
• A tentative contract deal for Catholic school teachers includes higher health care premiums. (NY1)
• A national report finds that minority students are suspended from school at higher rates. (USA Today)
• Libyan schools are grappling with how to teach and operate after the government’s overthrow. (Times)

• The city is set to ask all agencies, including the DOE, to slash their budgets in the next year. (City Room)
• A math teacher outlines five things the game Angry Birds can teach that aren’t about math. (dy/dan)
• Fewer applicants have tossed their hats in the ring for more Promise Neighborhood grants. (Politics K-12)
• A new study finds that 60 percent of Teach for America teachers keep teaching after two years. (PDK)
• Randi Weingarten is hosting a party for Steven Brill, whose book included her, at her home. (Ed Notes)
• Texas Gov. Rick Perry mandated 30 minutes a day of gym class for all students in the state. (HuffPo)
• Hawaii is now the first and only state to recognize surfing as an official school sport. (ESPN)
• James Merriman: When charter schools get free rent, they pay in relinquished autonomy. (Eduwonk)
• Manhattan Borough President officially announced his candidacy for mayor last night. (Daily Intel)
• Education experts weigh in on whether top students are getting left behind. (Room for Debate)
• After a long weekend, a realization that many teachers spent it catching up. (Miss Eyre/NYC Educator)

A rally against the planned layoffs of school aides who belong to DC-37

Using new strategies, City Council members are mounting a final push to stave off the school aide layoffs that are scheduled to take place at the end of the week.

Speaker Christine Quinn spoke to Mayor Bloomberg today about the layoffs, according to a Quinn spokesman, who said she plans to schedule a joint public hearing with the Finance and Education Committees to find out more about the scale of the proposed cuts. The DOE has maintained that the layoffs would save at least $38 million, but union officials dispute that total.

“By our calculations, it should be closer to $22 and $25 million,” said District Council 37′s Local 372 president Santos Crespo at a press conference today. The event brought dozens of union and elected officials out in support of Crespo’s union workers. It was then followed by a larger rally this evening that attracted Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Quinn’s announcement comes just days after the Black, Latino and Asian caucus discussed the option following a meeting with Chancellor Dennis Walcott in which little progress was made. Quinn has kept the issue at arms length up to this point, but inveighed against any future teacher layoffs last month on the first day of school.

Crespo, who has offered three concession proposals to Walcott, said the council’s intervention is the union’s best option at this point.

“What’s going to make [the DOE] respond is going to be the City Council. If that happens, then we’ll get to the bottom of this and see where the money is really going.” (more…)

A picture taken by Civic Builders days after ground broke on construction in June 2010; The school was completed on Aug. 18 this year.

By the time Hyde Leadership Charter School expanded into high school grades three years ago, overcrowding at their co-located Department of Education building had become severe. Limited to two floors for over 700 students, classes were held in hallways and high school students complained of filthy conditions in the bathroom they had to share with elementary students.

“It was terrible,” said Dominic Batista, a junior. “It was like a jail.”

Rather than jockey for more space in an increasingly crowded public school system, the growing school took a road less traveled for a charter school in New York City. Keeping its elementary and middle school at P.S. 92, Hyde developed a private facility for its high school just down the road on Hunts Point Avenue in the south Bronx.

Today, the gleaming 30,000 square foot building was on display at an official ribbon-cutting ceremony with elected officials and community members. Inside the auditorium – which splits time as a gymnasium and cafeteria – Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. recalled how prostitutes and arson used to dominate this stretch of Hunts Point Avenue in the South Bronx. Hyde Leadership, he said, was an example of how the area, still the nation’s poorest congressional district, was turning a corner.

The facility was developed and is now managed by Civic Builders, the nonprofit real estate developer for charter schools. The group bought the property in 2010 with lending help from Goldman Sachs and the Low Income Investment Fund.

The price for giving up rent-free public space – about $1 million more per year – was worth it, said Celia Sosa, the school’s director.

(more…)

City students aren’t getting the physical education they’re supposed to, according to the latest Department of Education audit out of Comptroller John Liu’s office.

The audit — which follows others in recent weeks about the DOE’s space planning and handling of the Absent Teacher Reserve — concludes that the DOE is doing too little to monitor physical education compliance at individual schools.

According to state law, students in kindergarten through sixth grade must have at least two hours total of physical education each week, with daily instruction until third grade and at least three times weekly after that. But of the 31 elementary schools that auditors surveyed, only two appeared to be meeting the requirements for all students.

Some principals told Liu’s office that they didn’t know the state’s physical education requirements. Others said they lacked the space or personnel to offer as much physical education instruction as they would like, especially after budget cuts. And still others said they had felt pressure to curtail physical education in favor of academic subjects.

In their response to the audit, DOE officials said they would do more to make principals aware of the state’s physical education requirements and would create a formal plan for delivering physical education within the next year. But they emphasized that they do not monitor the amount of time that schools spend on any single subject. (more…)

• Occupy Wall Street protesters are set to join in this afternoon’s school aid layoffs protest. (Daily News)
• Advocates recommended reforms to CECs, which have parents feeling shut out. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• Hyde Leadership Charter School is christening a new Hunts Point building today. (Daily News)
• Thieves made off with 21 computers from Central Park East II, a school in East Harlem. (NY1)
• PS 29′s ex-PTA treasurer hasn’t made payments required by her plea deal for embezzling. (Times, Post)
• Students aren’t buying much from school vending machines that offer only healthy choices. (Times)
• A survey of Chicago charter schools finds they share the same funding woes as other schools. (Tribune)

• Common ground reigned when Teach for America’s founder talked with the NEA’s chief. (Teacher Beat)
• Teachers at PS 277 in the Bronx don’t know how their efforts yielded an F grade. (Schoolbook/WNYC)
• Charter schools were twice as likely as district schools to get F progress report grades. (Gary Rubinstein)
• A city teacher recalls being wrongly assigned to special ed and ESL classes in his youth. (Jose Vilson)
• None of the finalists in a national contest to find the most innovative teacher is from New York (GOOD)
• A teacher-blogger who’s up for the prize explains why she favors recognition but not rewards. (Mrs. Ripp)
• SUNY’s Charter Schools Institute rejected a Victory school for Long Island. (Newsday via HuffPo)
• A city teacher offers 10 reasons for his colleagues to start their students on blogging. (Mr. Foteah)
• A New Jersey’s education law expert offers five myths about Chris Christie’s ed policy. (Answer Sheet)
• The leaflet that the Grassroots Education Movement is handing out at union ATR meetings. (NYC ATR)
• A guidebook to winning an NCLB waiver signals that judging will play a major role. (Politics K-12)
• An investigation finds half of students in Colorado’s costly online schools drop out. (Ed News Colorado)
• The big new idea is for schools to do homework at school and schoolwork at home. (Curriculum Matters)
• A study finds it’s not a longer day but how the extra time is used that matters. (Inside School Research)
• NYC charter exec James Merriman starts a blogging stint with a call for elevated dialogue. (Eduwonk)

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer at today's task force announcement

A task force made up of parents and elected officials is calling on state lawmakers to restore some control over city education policy to elected parent councils in each district.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer formed the task force on Community Education Councils in June, after a disastrous election cycle enraged parent leaders. Today, several parent leaders joined Stringer in announcing the task force’s recommendations.

The recommendations include turning oversight of the councils over from the Department of Education to an independent agency, clarifying and broadening the councils’ responsibilities, and streamlining the election process.

Members of the task force were divided over which independent agency should supervise the councils and what specific policies parent leaders should be able to influence. But they all agreed that the DOE is incapable of engaging parent leaders.

“Our report lays out a road map for reforming the chronic mismanagement of the CECs, especially the ongoing failure to truly engage parents in the electoral process,” Stringer said today at a press conference.

Taking control of the CECs away from the DOE would cut at the heart of mayoral control — and would require state legislators to battle Mayor Bloomberg over the role of parents. (more…)

One month into the school year, the United Federation of Teachers is hosting a series of meetings for the teachers without permanent assignments in city schools who comprise the controversial Absent Teacher Reserve.

Set for each borough over the next week, the meetings are meant to explain the deal the teachers union struck with the city this summer over the ATR pool to avoid teacher layoffs, according to Peter Kadushin, a UFT spokesman.

Representatives from the union will also field feedback from teachers about the deal, which requires teachers in the ATR pool to be reassigned to different schools multiple times over the course of the year. In previous years, teachers whose positions had been eliminated were typically assigned to one school for the entire year.

The first meeting was scheduled for today at the union’s Bronx office — with meetings at UFT offices in other boroughs to follow. In the past, the union has held meetings for teachers in the ATR pool at its central office at the beginning of the school year, Kadushin said.

Teachers in the ATR pool have been working in temporary jobs inside schools that were assigned by the DOE for the month of September. Next week, the teachers will begin rotating to substitute teaching positions throughout the school system on a weekly basis — assignments they expect to receive from the DOE later this week. (more…)

News from New York City:

• School aides are set to be laid off this week after talks failed on Thursday. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• The layoffs will affect poor schools hardest and will steer clear of Staten Island entirely. (Times)
• State education officials were talking about grade inflation on Regents exams back in 2004. (Post)
• The city’s charter center is helping schools that are unaffiliated with networks apply to open. (Times)
• A mother is suing the city over a sexual assault she says her 5-year-old received at school. (Daily News)
• The archdiocese is set to give Catholic school teachers a final contract offer today. (Daily News)
• Hell’s Kitchen residents are balking at a gay sports bar’s bid to open on a school’s grounds. (NY1)
• A new New York State law requires schools to bench football players who hit their heads. (AP)
• Shuang Wen School parents rallied against the Department of Education’s ongoing investigations. (NY1)
• The longtime basketball coach at Medgar Evers College Prep was fired over his philosophy. (Post)

And beyond:

• Michael Winerip: North Carolina encourages top students to enter teaching and stay there. (Times)
• An anti-immigration law is keeping Hispanic students in Alabama out of school in droves. (USA Today)
• The U.S. DOE will reward teachers colleges whose graduates boost student test scores. (WSJ, Times)
• Outside New York, programs offer incentives for participation and performance in AP courses. (Times)
• A review of 20 years of Chicago’s test scores finds they did not accurately reflect performance. (Times)
• George Will: The Obama administration’s No Child Left Behind waivers represent federal overstep. (Post)
• The Times says the NCLB waivers are a good innovation but shouldn’t demand so much so fast.
• Officials want tighter SAT security after cheating, which led students to party schools. (AP, Post, Times)
• The film “American Teacher” shows teachers, some in New York, working multiple jobs. (Daily News)
• New Jersey’s education chief turned down charters for two Mandarin schools in wealthy districts. (Times)
• Students at a San Francisco school for court-involved teens are producing a newspaper. (Times)
• A former NFL quarterback says teachers should have to follow players’ rules: Perform or be fired. (WSJ)