GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Nearly half of students who started ninth grade in 2006 are enrolled in college right now, but only a quarter of them were ready for it, city data shows.

The numbers were revealed today when the Department of Education released high school progress reports for last year. For the first time, the reports include data about each school’s course offerings and college enrollment rate, although that information will not be factored into schools’ grades until next year.

Schools that receive a grade of F or D, or get three C grades in a row, could face closure. This year, 41 schools received D’s or F’s, an increase over last year, while fewer high schools received A grades than in any year since the progress reports were created in 2007.

Speaking to reporters this morning, Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief academic officer, attributed those changes to a tougher set of requirements around student performance on state tests, credit accumulation, and documentation for student discharges.

“I think we’re tightening things up and we’ve gotten a more precise result,” he said. (more…)

The biggest change to this year’s high school progress reports, being released this morning, won’t affect schools’ scores.

In a nod to the growing recognition that a high school diploma does not guarantee college success, the Department of Education is adding three “college readiness” data points to the annual reports. They will calculate the percentages of students who passed college-level exams or courses; who would not require remedial courses at CUNY colleges; and who enroll in college the fall after they graduate. Starting next year, those figures will factor in to schools’ final grades, but this year the department is including them for informational purposes only.

Another change to the reports does reflect the growing focus on the quality of high school work — and is factored into the results. The credit accumulation metric, which looks at how many courses each student passed, has been narrowed to focus on classes completed in the core subjects of English, math, social studies, and science. In the past, a student was counted as having appropriately accumulated credits if he passed 10 classes, regardless of what they were. Now, at least six of the classes have to be in the core subjects.

One thing that won’t be on the reports: credit recovery numbers. Since last year, the department has been collecting data on the number of students who receive credit through non-traditional means after failing a class. The practice is sanctioned in policy but has been accused of being abused at some high schools, where students have been awarded credit after doing only minimal work.

Another change will help some schools relax. (more…)

• Michael Winerip: An expanded remediation program at CUNY shows city grads are far behind. (Times)
• Mayor Bloomberg said the UFT’s teacher evaluation complaints are meant to sabotage change. (Post)
• More than 50 school workers have been caught in the last two years taking illicit sick days. (Daily News)
• A 12-year-old IS/218 student will head a national youth group under Rev. Al Sharpton. (Daily News)
• Bronx parents say they don’t think a City Council space data law will curb overcrowding. (Daily News)
• A shooting outside PS/IS 298 on Friday left a mother of 13 dead and a student and parent injured. (Post)
• Manhattan’s PS 75 won a national health award by adding more fruits and vegetables to lunch. (CBS NY)
• The city’s Republican congressmen are pushing for an abstinence-only sex ed curriculum. (Daily News)
• Some Manhattan private schools that are famous for their workload are giving less homework. (Times)
• Suburban private schools are wooing Manhattan parents with low tuition and less pressure. (Times)
• In Chicago, more parents seem to be hiring consultants to help with public school admissions. (Times)
• Many Silicon Valley executives send their children to a technolog-free Waldorf private school. (Times)
• Atlanta high schools played fast and loose with rules to keep low-performing students from testing. (AJC)

• Stalled negotiations may keep schools from receiving millions in RTTT money. (GothamSchools)
• Merryl Tisch is being floated for possible candidacy in the 2013 mayoral race. (GothamSchools)
• A model middle school gets the go ahead for high school grade expansion. (GS Twitter)
• Steve Jobs wanted 11-month school years, longer days and no unions, according to bio. (HuffPo)
• A dormitory program for high-risk high school boys is stabilizing their lives. (The Local)
• Oversight at charter school on DOE survey led to its low progress report grade. (SchoolBook)
• George W. Bush is back in politics, this time in a small school board race in Colorado. (Salon)
• Columnist on a school visit outs principal after she bails for Obama Speech. (Morning News)

Months after a deal to let a handful of city schools receive federal funding, requirements continue to keep millions of Race to the Top dollars off-limits to all but 2 percent of city schools.

When New York State won $700 million in the federal Race to the Top competition last year, it put some funds to use on statewide initiatives. But nearly $350 million went into smaller funds with specific aims: to build new curriculum models or train teachers, for example. Now, the state has started opening those pools up to districts — but it has set an eligibility requirement that the city can’t meet.

The state requires that districts commit to putting new teacher evaluations in place by next year — with union support. That requirement can be found in several of the Requests for Proposals for Race to the Top-related initiatives that the state has begun releasing.

In one application for funding that it submitted last week, the city could not show it had the union’s support for the new teacher evaluation system in most of its schools, in the form of a required Memorandum of Understanding, so it only applied for money for the 30 schools that do.

Those 30 schools are among 33 included in a partial teacher evaluation deal hashed out this summer, when the union and city saw that federal school improvement grants were at stake. At the time, UFT President Michael Mulgrew said he wanted to see the outcome of the pilot before expanding the evaluations to more schools. And as the year has worn on, slow-moving negotiations about the new evaluations have seemed headed for an impasse. (more…)

Tisch speaking at a GothamSchools panel earlier in August.

Talk is swirling that an unexpected contender from the education world is being drafted to run for mayor of New York City: Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents.

Education, political, government insiders, and Tisch herself say Tisch has been courted by political consultants as a potential candidate to succeed Mayor Bloomberg. The election is still two years out, but so far no clear favorite has emerged from the crowded field of Democratic hopefuls. Even more room is open in the thin slate of independent and Republican candidates. And so far no candidate fits the mold that Bloomberg has established: nonpartisan, well-connected, and wealthy enough to fund a campaign without making many promises.

Some believe the charismatic Tisch, a registered Democrat from the billionaire Tisch family, could emerge as someone to fill that void. More than a half dozen government and education officials, most of whom only spoke anonymously because they didn’t want to speculate, confirmed her name has been surfacing since last year.

“I wouldn’t be surprised so you can’t count her out yet,” said a source.

Longtime New York City political consultant George Artz said he had also heard the chatter but doubted that Tisch would actually run. At this point, he said, a lot of names are being thrown around, including that of Tisch’s own brother-in-law, Jonathan Tisch, Chairman and CEO of Loews Hotels. Still, Artz said, Merryl Tisch had the pedigree to be a solid candidate.

“I wouldn’t be stunned by it,” Artz said. “Merryl’s been around and she obviously has substance, contacts and money – all the ingredients you need to run for political office.” (more…)

Much of my coursework and my thinking over the past eight weeks, since I started graduate school, has focused on leadership. This shouldn’t surprise me, since one of my courses has the word leadership in its title. Still, I find this theme reappearing in my Education Sector Non-Profits class as well as the course on Pursuing Teacher Quality. The question of what makes a good leader intrigues me, because I think there’s such a dire need for leadership in education right now. I certainly didn’t witness much of it at any level during my time in the classroom.

While my classes have presented a number of different models and approaches to leadership, one constant seems to be a need for a clear vision. It sounds ridiculously obvious and simple, but looking back on my experience in the Bronx, there was a shocking absence of vision. At the school level, too few principals articulated a clear and inspirational vision for what teachers and students should be accomplishing. Yes, every school is required to have a mission statement, but I rarely saw schools translate this from a superficial document into meaningful action that pulled them together internally toward a collective purpose.

If vision was missing at the school level, it was even more absent from the city Department of Education at the level where it was arguably more vital. Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein spoke constantly about the need to close the achievement gap, lower drop-out rates, and raise graduation rates. Their approach was clearly focused on data-driven results and greater accountability for schools and teachers (not so much for themselves). But this speaks to their strategies. It did not lay out a vision, or at least not one that a communities, students, teachers, and school leaders could passionately rally behind.

As I’ve thought about my own teaching, I wonder if I laid out a vision for myself and my students. I know that my driving goal was to prepare my students to pursue whatever path they chose. I wanted to give them the academic and social-emotional skills to succeed against all obstacles. Underlying these ideas was the hope that my students would become lifelong learners, critical thinkers who loved the pursuit of knowledge. Sounds nice, right?

But to what extent did I express this to my students, parents, or myself? (more…)

• Some public school teachers are bringing students to Occupy Wall Street for civics lessons. (NY1)
• The UFT says an inchoate teacher evaluation system is being abused. (GothamSchools, Post)
• New York State has pledged to launch testing for kindergarten students. (GothamSchools, WSJ, Post)
• Children in Harlem and Washington Heights rallied to support after-school education. (NY1)
• The co-principals of Community Roots Charter School say they scrimp to afford collaboration. (Times)
• Fred Smith: Big gains on the city’s state test scores this year show more scrutiny is needed. (Post)
• The Wall Street Journal notes a new study that finds charter schools help black students.
• The next stop for the Harkin-Enzi ESEA reauthorization bill: the full Senate. (Washington Post)
• A formula error has about 3,400 retired Chicago teachers are getting too-high pensions. (Times)

• The UFT headquarters has become a home away from home for Occupy Wall Street. (Edwize)
• Pre-K registration for this school year ends in just eight days. Sign up! (Let’s Talk Schools)
• The Grassroots Education Movement met tonight to plot how to organize ATR’s. (EdNotes)
• How to use cognitive behavioral therapy to cure the malady of “teacher anxiety.” (Ed School)
• A school board member could face consequences for something he wrote on Facebook. (LA Now)
• An aide to Ed Towns said that the abortion rate in Bed Stuy “needs to be high.” (Politicker, Brooklyn Ink)
• Parents for Occupy Wall Street are holding a “Family Sleepover” this weekend. (Gotham Gazette)

Starting in 2014, children will have to take a test when they start kindergarten, according to a commitment New York State has made to boost its chance of winning up to $100 million in the federal “Early Learning Challenge.”

Currently, New York City administers a school readiness exam, called Bracken, to children applying for gifted programs. But in most schools across the city and state, kindergarten teachers learn about their students’ strengths and weaknesses over the course of the year. Now they will have a standard “kindergarten readiness measurement tool” to help them.

The new test will let schools identify a “baseline” for each student who enrolls against which they can measure progress — or lack of progress. But children won’t be barred from enrollment or sent to special education on the basis of poor scores, and the scores won’t be factored into teacher evaluations, according to the state’s press release.

The tool is one promise in New York State’s application to this year’s lower-key Race to the Top competition, which focused on early childhood education. The application also promises that New York will create Common Core-aligned pre-kindergarten standards and introduce a quality rating for early childhood programs.

The rating system named in the state’s application, QUALITYStarsNY, is the same one being used in New York City to rate programs as part of a local bid to improve early childhood education. (more…)