GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• After getting a $900,000 buyout, Philadelphia’s ex-schools chief is seeking unemployment. (Daily News)
• The U.S. Department of Education found that schools with poor students get less money. (Politics K-12)
• Pedro Noguera describes the Broader, Bolder Approach’s impact on Newark’s schools. (Answer Sheet)
• A student from Murrow High School reports on the increasing difficulty of getting free lunch. (SchoolBook)
• The Hoover Institution lays out the best (choice) and worst (cheating) education events of 2011. (Hoover)
• A college counselor weighs in on whether one’s high school choice matters to colleges. (Insideschools)
• A theory about why the Department of Education moved December’s PEP meeting to Queens. (Ed Notes)
• A principal says 171,348 data points can’t equal one grade on a city progress report. (SchoolBook)
• In an era of transformation schools, looking around the world for transformational ones. (Sam Chaltain)

The State Education Department official who has supervised the state’s testing program since 2004 — through skyrocketing scores, a brutal crash, and the dawn of an overhaul — has resigned.

David Abrams, the State Education Department’s assistant commissioner for standards, assessment, and reporting since 2004, announced his resignation today. His resignation is effective immediately, shocking some people who had expected to participate in meetings with him this week.

Abrams’s departure comes at a time of robust efforts to overhaul both state tests and how their scores are used — and of robust criticism of those efforts. Most recently, principals across the state have launched a rebellion against the state’s plan to use student test scores in teacher evaluations. This week, a plan to lengthen reading tests to four hours was released prematurely, then rescinded the next day amid backlash.

The department has yet to find a replacement for Abrams, according to SED spokesman Dennis Tompkins. He said other department officials would fill in for Abrams for now, as would members of a privately funded group that has been advising SED on implementing Race to the Top commitments, which include redesigning student assessments and teacher evaluations.

“Obviously [Abrams] will be missed, but we do have a really strong team that can fill in,” Tompkins said. He declined to comment on the reasons for Abrams’s departure.

Abrams supervised the state’s testing program during a period of controversy and change. (more…)

If the people on a panel Tuesday about teacher preparation didn’t convey the urgency they felt about improving teacher training, then a flash poll of the audience surely did.

More than two-thirds of the audience, made up primarily of young teachers, said they didn’t think their masters degrees had made them better at their jobs, according to electronic votes that were tallied in real time.

With that context, a five-member panel of advocates for alternative certification and training dove into a 90-minute discussion about how traditional theory-driven teacher training had failed the profession, particularly in high-needs urban schools. Research has shown that having a masters degree does not make teachers more effective, and local, state, and federal efforts are underway to re-imagine how teachers are trained.

Panelists largely agreed that many traditional education schools lack accountability, aren’t willing to share performance data for their graduates, and have a detached relationship with the public schools where their graduates eventually work.

“For too long schools of [education] have sat back and spun out academic theories of what should work in the ideal school with the ideal conditions,” said a panelist, Bob Hughes, president of the nonprofit New Visions for Public Schools, which trains and certifies teachers and operates 99 schools in New York City. “And they’ve been divorced from the reality of what happens in schools .” (more…)

A Chinatown school that has been mired in allegations has been cleared of at least one of them, but it’s still under scrutiny.

A report released today by the Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon says investigators did not find proof of large-scale theft, which some at the school had alleged. But investigators did unearth some unorthodox financial practices that Condon has reported to the Department of Education, with the advice that the city offer accounting training to parents and administrators at the school.

The DOE’s Office of Special Investigations is still looking into different allegations against Shuang Wen, according to the report.

UPDATE: DOE officials said the SCI report identified five different ways in which school administrators violated department rules and regulations about fund-raising and financial management.

“We are deeply troubled by Commissioner Condon’s findings, which show that standard operating procedures, Chancellor’s regulations, and City Conflicts of Interest Law were repeatedly violated — specifically with regard to financial management of the school,” said DOE spokesman Matthew Mittenthal in a statement. (more…)

The same admissions processes that leave city parents scratching their heads or, worse, pulling their hair out have put New York City at the head of the pack in a new study ranking districts’ school choice policies.

The report, by the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, which has long pushed for expanded school choice, compares choice policies in place in 25 urban school districts and how families took advantage of them.

New York City came in first, in part because students here are never assigned to schools based simply on where they live. Of the 25 districts, New York was the only one where students are assigned to schools based on applications that asked for families’ preferences, not just their address.

The city has a labyrinthine citywide high school matching process and district-based middle and elementary school admissions processes that many believe could be improved. In a district with more than 1,600 schools (the Brookings report tallies 1,474), the processes are seen as bringing order but also as sometimes pitting schools against each other and limiting options, particularly in high school, for students who aren’t happy with what they’ve chosen.

The Brookings report also gave New York credit for making data about school performance public and closing or restructuring low-performing schools. But its B grade would have been higher if it had more virtual school options and provided transportation when students enroll in schools outside their districts.

To tie in with the report, former city schools chancellor Joel Klein, who bolstered and expanded the city’s school choice policies, is speaking at Brookings’ Washington, D.C., offices today. (more…)

Judy O'Brien, the librarian at two schools in the building the city has proposed for a new charter school, speaks against the co-location plan. (Video below.)

Tensions ran high at the city’s first charter school co-location hearing of the year Tuesday night as advocates and opponents of the city’s plan to open a new Success Academy school in Brownstone Brooklyn packed the proposed site.

Officials from the Department of Education and SUNY’s Charter School Institute defended plans to add Brooklyn’s third Success Charter Network school to a four-story Cobble Hill building that already houses three other schools, saying that the building has space for all four schools.

The charter school would admit 80 to 90 kindergarten and first-grade students in 2012 and grow by one grade per year until becoming a kindergarten through 5th-grade school.

According to the DOE official in charge of new schools, Deputy Chancellor Marc Sternberg, enrollment at the charter school would ultimately increase to somewhere between 500 and 640 students, and the total number of students in the building would climb to 1,400 or more.

“That would bring the school to 108 percent occupancy,” he said.

In response, a member of the sometimes-rowdy audience who said he was a teacher and was later ejected by police after he shouted inappropriate words called out, “Where do you want the kids to learn, the bathrooms? Where do the other 8 percent go to class?” (more…)

• The Daily News endorses Success Charter Network CEO Eva Moskowitz for mayor in 2013, if she runs.
• Protests took place before and during a hearing on Cobble Hill Success’s siting. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• A new report says New York City’s school choice system is the best, but still not excellent. (Times)
• A student caused a crisis by releasing pepper spray at the Academy for Social Action. (Daily News, Post)
• State officials are backing away from a proposal to extend state exams to 250 minutes. (Daily News)
• Nationally, the number of students poor enough for free lunch has risen 17 percent in four years. (Times)
• More details about the legal ruling that the city must release Cathie Black emails. (Daily News, Post)
• John Merrow: Teachers have low and stagnant salaries, putting them in the 99 percent. (Daily News)
• Individual Los Angeles schools would gain charter school-like autonomy under a new plan. (L.A. Times)

• P.S. 24 in the Bronx told families to stop telling the school’s troubles to the press. (Bronx Press Politics)
• A teacher discovers an error in an automatically graded Regents grade from last year. (NYCDOENuts)
• A teacher reports with glee that social studies exams might be resurrected. (Mr. D’s Neighborhood)
• Mike Petrilli: Though sometimes wrong, Diane Ravitch’s arguments are not personal. (Flypaper)
• First-year students at Broome Street Academy Charter High School talk about their school. (YouTube)
• A look at the three schools in Harlem that are on the DOE’s chopping block this year. (Insideschools)
• A teacher explains how he differentiates by grouping without groups. (Mr. Foteah)
• Analysis of the evidence — there isn’t much — that teachers have worsened over time. (Shanker Blog)
• Parents at a citywide gifted school are worried about the co-located school’s expansion. (SchoolBook)

Many of the attendees who lined up outside Brooklyn Tech for last February's Panel for Educational Policy meeting came to protest the creation of a Success Academy Charter School on the Upper West Side.

Back-to-back rallies set for this afternoon augur a contentious co-location hearing for the newest outpost in the Success Charter Network.

The creation of Cobble Hill Success Academy, which won approval earlier this year to open next fall in Brooklyn’s District 13, has sparked conflict in District 15, the location of the school’s proposed site. Advocates and critics of the city’s plan to co-locate the charter school with two secondary schools and a special education program will lay out their cases during tonight’s public hearing — and beforehand, in rallies set for outside the Baltic Street building.

The public hearing is the first of the year and ushers in a season of rancorous co-location hearings.

Some families have lamented crowding in high-performing local elementary schools and said they would appreciate new options. But others say they are worried that the new school would strain resources at the proposed site without effectively serving the high-needs populations it was originally intended to serve.

Cobble Hill Success’s promise to serve low-income, immigrant families in District 13 was a boon to its application, according to Pedro Noguera, an education professor who green-lighted the school’s original application as a member of the State University of New York’s Charter Schools Institute.

“We have tried to take the position recently that we can put charter schools where there is clearly a need for better schools for kids, so targeting the more disadvantaged communities. We have also seen the areas that are a saturation of charter schools, so we want to encourage them to open in areas that have a high need and aren’t being served,” said Noguera, who will be participating in an education debate this evening in the West Village. ”A school in Cobble Hill clearly does not meet that criteria.”  (more…)

The special education data system that has teachers and parents frustrated carries a $79 million price tag — and wasn’t even tailor-made for the city schools.

That’s according to a report by Ruth Ford and Adrienne Day about the Department of Education’s contracting practices in the current issue of City Limits, the magazine of the nonprofit Community Service Society of New York.

The year-old Special Education Student Information System, or SESIS, was meant to make information about students with disabilities more accessible. But its rollout has been bumpy, with school staff and union officials complaining that using the system is burdensome.

Tracing SESIS’s origins, the City Limits report characterizes the system as “neither an unbridled success nor a total failure” but rather a symptom of the DOE’s reliance on private contractors to solve local problems — a practice that DOE officials said could soon see greater quality control.

From the article:

The DOE put out a request for proposals for a new system and got several bids. The Virginia-based consulting company Maximus won the contract. (more…)