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Teachers at Green Dot New York Charter School are getting a raise, a bonus, and a little less job security.

These are some of the modifications that are set to appear in a two-year renewal of Green Dot’s landmark contract with the United Federation of Teachers. Green Dot offered its teachers a 28-page “thin contract” a year after the school opened in 2008, leaving out many of the work rules and policies – including tenure and seniority-based layoffs – that are found in the bulky union deal with the Department of Education.

That contract expired in August and Green Dot and union officials have spent the last few months hammering out a new version. It was tentatively approved by board members on Sept. 26, but details of the contract had not been shared with teachers until this week.

In a statement issued today, the chief negotiators, Leo Casey, a UFT vice president, and Gideon Stein, who serves on the school’s Board of Trustees, shared details of the contract.

Under the new terms, the staff will receive a 3 percent raise each of the next two years, amounting to what will be 20 percent above the current salaries in the Department of Education. Last year’s teachers will also receive a $2000 bonus because of the school’s high performance. The school’s first students are now seniors so graduation data isn’t available, but 95 percent of students have passed the Regents exams they have taken, according to the Green Dot web site.

“The teachers and other staff are being paid more in recognition of being part of a very successful school,” Stein said.

In one concession, teachers will no longer be able to use an independent grievance process in their first year. Instead, they can be fired any time during their first year for any reason. Once the first year is complete, any grievance would return to being handled by an independent arbiter. (more…)

“We’re going to hear from Rossemary about a special opportunity for a social justice field trip.”

This is how I started my class during the second week of school. One of our 11th-grade students had already organized a social justice event. She informed us about Barnard College’s Activism and the Academy conference. She urged us all to get registered. And so we did.

Elsewhere in the building, my colleague was signing select students up to work with Rocking the Boat, one of our community partners in Hunts Point who fight for environmental justice. That same day after school at least 15 of our students rushed down to The Point, another ally, to sign up to be a part of A.C.T.I.O.N. (Activists Coming to Inform Our Neighborhood), a group of young people who are paid to advocate for the improvement of the South Bronx.

The year had just started and I thought to myself, “This is what social justice education looks like.”

Over the past few years I have heard a lot of educators talk about social justice. I actually did my student teaching at a now-closed school called Social Justice Academy in Boston. Their mission statement was beautiful, with nods to Paolo Freire, Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi. This was high-handed material that a young, very liberal educator like me salivates over — but it wasn’t so great for students who were already disenchanted by the generally negative atmosphere of their school.

I found that only a handful of the teachers believed in the mission. Consequently, the ones who were did often struggled to make community partnerships and actually motivate the students to engage in any kind of activism. The biggest symbolic defeat came midway through the year when we asked students in our class what social justice was and none of them had an answer. Though I do not think the school should have been closed, it had certainly not met its lofty visions and did not deserve to wear the banner of social justice.

Not long after that, I saw another kind of half-baked vision of social justice education. (more…)

A week after hundreds of its members who worked in schools were laid off, the DC-37 union is hosting a trial of the Department of Education.

The Coalition for Public Education, a local activist group, organized the trial, to be held Saturday at DC 37′s downtown headquarters, to air concerns about public education under mayoral control. Already more than 100 parents, teachers, students, and community members have signed up to testify, according to Akinlabi Mackall.

The event is meant to resemble Panel for Educational Policy meetings’ public comments segment, which frequently attract many people but rarely influence the panel’s decisions, said Mackall, the father of a public school graduate.

“The PEP and the mayor have pretty much turned a deaf ear to the voices of teachers and students,” he said. “We’ve seen people be very eloquent and very passionate, but then there’s just a rubber-stamp response.”

He said CPE would record the testimonies and present them to state lawmakers. The group will also use the complaints as a blueprint for organizing future meetings around issues that trial participants raise, he said.

Some of the same criticisms are likely to arise at a second education event being held Saturday 12 miles north, at Lehman College, where Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. is convening a borough-wide education summit. (more…)

• School bus companies that get pricey city contracts have little incentive to improve services. (Daily News)
• Comptroller John Liu: The city is wasting pre-K funding. (GothamSchools, Post, Daily News, NY1, WSJ)
• Investigators: A Bronx man cashed a teacher’s pension checks after her death. (GothamSchools, Post)
• Millennium High School plan to build a gym has run into space and money woes. (Downtown Express)
• A mom said she spent $20,000 to keep her disabled son from having a two-hour commute. (Daily News)
• Ongoing investigations at Shuang Wen Academy have the community in crisis. (The Villager)
• Teachers lost licenses in the first punishments meted out in Atlanta’s cheating scandal. (AJC, AP)
• In Texas, online courses are being used to open doors for students with special needs. (Times)
• A New Jersey teacher is under fire after bashing homosexuality on Facebook. (Times)

• An interactive, visual map of the K-12 education technology market. (New Schools Venture Fund)
• A teacher at P.S. 149 says the irresponsible teacher Steven Brill described doesn’t exist. (Ed Notes)
• The DOE is hiring a Director of State Legislative Affairs, budget permitting. (City Limits Jobs)
• New York is one of just 13 states that have not signaled they want an NCLB waiver. (Politics K-12)
• The former CEO of the Innovation Zone joined a for-profit education company. (PR Newswire)
• An overview of the Gates Foundation’s $200 million NYC schools investments. (Gotham Gazette)
• The UFT is holding a conference for charter school teachers this weekend. (Edwize)
• A list of education wonks who can offer reporters a conservative perspective. (Rick Hess)
• A snapshot of how two teachers juggle the demands of differentiation. (Sam Chaltain)
• “School avoidance” is a medical malady that keeps many kids home on weekdays. (U.S. News)
• Scrutiny of Comptroller John Liu’s mayoral campaign contributions found improprieties. (Times)

The city isn’t sending as many 4-year-olds to pre-kindergarten as it could, according to an audit by Comptroller John Liu.

Liu’s latest Department of Education audit looks at the way the city uses state funding for “universal pre-kindergarten” programs. The funds can be used to pay for half-day pre-K classes at public schools or through city or community-based preschool programs.

Even though many public schools maintain waiting lists for pre-kindergarten classes, especially where space is tight, many 4-year-olds are not enrolled in pre-K classes that could help prepare them for school. Every year, the audit calculates, the city returns an average of about $30 million in unused pre-K funding to the state.

“DOE’s failure to fully allocate all UPK funds means that children who could have received pre-kindergarten classes are not being served,” concludes the audit, which radiates evidence of tension between Liu’s office and the DOE.

The department submitted its response to the audit “under protest” and calling the audit’s focus “deliberately and stubbornly myopic, thereby rendering it of little, if any, worth.” If Liu’s office had looked at efforts to expand pre-K enrollment, the DOE argues, it would have found that the problem lies not with the department but in constricting state regulations.

An enormous challenge, the DOE and Liu’s office agree, is that the state will only pay for two and a half hours of pre-K per day for each child. (more…)

The city’s teacher pension system is being taxed by more than just unrealistic expectations. It has also handed out hundreds of thousands of dollars to a retiree who died in 2000.

That’s the conclusion of a report issued today by the Special Commissioner of Investigation, which is charged with looking into allegations of fraud and malfeasance in the school system.

Last year, the state’s Teachers Retirement System tipped off city investigators that checks issued to Maria Sicardo, a Bronx teacher who retired in 1993, were being cashed by someone else. Investigators discovered that not only had Victor Rosa begun cashing Sicardo’s checks after her death in April 2000 but that he had repeatedly submitted paperwork to the state and teachers union certifying that she was still alive. Employees at a check-cashing company in the Bronx told investigators that after they challenged Rosa, he took the checks elsewhere.

In total, Rosa pocketed about $241,000 over a decade from the state and from the UFT’s Welfare Fund, the union’s health fund for current and retired teachers. SCI is recommending that the pension system move to recoup the funds and has referred the case to the U.S. Attorney’s office.

The full report is below. (more…)

I.S. 171 Parents at an "early engagement" meeting.

Parents at a school they say was left to fail by a former principal are hoping that a new administration can keep the school doors open.

After receiving a failing grade on its progress report this year, I.S. 171 in Cypress Hills is one of 20 schools the Department of Education is publicly considering for closure. But at a meeting to discuss the school’s future Wednesday evening, parents, students and alumni said the school shouldn’t be judged based on its past performance because new school leadership has already begun to turn things around.

First-year principal Barbara Kendall was hired a week before the year began after former principal Yolanda Fustanio resigned at the end of the last school year. Parents and students complained that under Fustanio’s leadership, enforcement of the school’s discipline code eroded so badly that the school had become unsafe.

“The hallways were like traffic in Times Square,” a sixth-grade girl said at the meeting.

Shamona Kirkland, a District 19 Community Education Council member whose son is in seventh grade at I.S. 171, said Fustanio had turned into an absentee principal by the end of her tenure.

District 19 Superintendent Rosemary Mills gives opening remarks at I.S. 171

“I saw her maybe once or twice the whole school year,” Kirkland said. “I had to keep reminding myself what her name was every time I saw her.”

The comments came at an “early engagement” meeting with Rosemary Mills, District 19′s superintendent, in the school’s auditorium. It was part of a series of meetings that the DOE is organizing for each of the low-performing schools before it decides whether to shutter them. Two other meetings at I.S. 171 included officials from the United Federation of Teachers and the school’s internal leadership team. (more…)

Alan Gary criticizes how the Department of Education response to the discovery of toxins at P.S. 51 while son Nathanial, 11, left, an alumnus of the school, holds a sign that reads "Toxic, Keep Out"

Renewing criticism of how the Department of Education handled safety concerns at their former building, parents from P.S. 51 in the Bronx say their new site isn’t up to par, either.

That was the message that parents and community activists brought to Wednesday night’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting at the Bronx High School for Business. At a press conference outside the meeting and during the shorter-than-usual meeting itself, they charged that the city still has not done enough to ensure safety for P.S. 51′s students and teachers.

The city relocated P.S. 51 in August after detecting dangerous levels of a cancer-causing chemical at the original school building. The city detected the toxic chemical in February but did not disclose the discovery to families until this summer.

“We demand that protocol be put in place to remove students from toxic sites immediately, not five or six months after a problem is discovered,” said Alan Gary, whose son, Nathanial, is a former P.S. 51 student. “We believe it’s the parents’ decision to decide whether or not to send their kids to a school. Dennis Walcott, how dare you? You took away the rights of parents to protect their children by not informing us.”

Parents at the press conference called on the DOE to register each student who was exposed to the chemical, called trichloroethylene or TCE, and monitor their medical conditions over time — something the teachers union has said it will do for teachers who worked in the building. (more…)

• Under a reform plan, the city will open 125 bilingual programs. (GS, WSJ, NY1, Times, Post, Daily News)
• One school in Washington Heights lost all of its school aides in last week’s layoffs. (The Uptowner)
• Other schools are having difficulty figuring out who can take on the work of laid-off aides. (Daily News)
• Graduation is in jeopardy for seniors at a H.S. who are taking classes they already passed. (Daily News)
• Fears reawaken at P.S. 51′s new building after it tests positive for another toxin. (GS, NBC New York)
• Principals affected by a downtown school rezoning said the plan would add stability. (SchoolBook)
• A drawn-out grievance at Bronx Science illuminates principal’s teacher evaluations. (Riverdale Press)
• A week after he urged more private money, Walcott named a new fund-raising chief. (SchoolBook)