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 This week, a plan to lengthen reading tests to four hours was released prematurely, then rescinded the next day amid backlash.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.

For the first several years of his tenure, test scores skyrocketed, even as experts warned that the tests were not accurate gauges of student performance. In 2010, ex-Commissioner David Steiner, then in his first year as state education chief, acknowledged that the scores were inflated and promised to toughen exams, first in a series of incremental changes and then with entirely new tests in coming years.

Some argued that fundamental improvements to state tests could not happen as long as Abrams remained at the department. Last year, a New York Post editorial pegged Abrams with responsibility for grade inflation on state tests, and Manhattan Institute fellow Sol Stern wrote in the conservative National Review, “It is dismaying to discover that David Abrams, the Albany bureaucrat who was squarely in the middle of the test-inflation scandals of the past few years, is still New York’s state testing director.”

But others saw Abrams as having a role to play in improving the testing program. In the same Post editorial that criticized him, In the editorial, Steiner and Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch described Abrams as “a valued member of New York’s assessment team.” And an educator who has worked with Abrams on student assessment issues but does not work for the state said today that Abrams is ”very passionate about testing and getting it right.”

Abrams did not respond to requests for comment today.

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 .”

Joining Hughes on the panel were representatives of alternative training programs that are being pioneered in New York City: Maritza Macdonald, head of the soon-to-be-launched urban residency program for science teachers at the American Museum of Natural History; Mayme Hostetter, dean of Relay Graduate School of Education, the brand-new certification program created by three charter networks; and Kat Hayes, of The New Teacher Project, which handles recruitment and training for the New York City Teaching Fellows.

The panel was held at the American Museum of Natural History and hosted by Educators 4 Excellence, an organization of young teachers that advocates for reform in the teaching profession, including an evaluation system that takes test scores into account and an end to seniority-based layoffs. NY1 education reporter Lindsay Christ moderated.

Also on the panel was David Steiner, dean of Hunter College’s school of education and the former New York State education commissioner. As commissioner, Steiner expanded the role of alternative training programs to allow them to certify teachers, a policy that two of his co-panelists — Hostetter and Macdonald — are now making the most of with their certification programs.

Steiner said the culture of teacher preparation programs supported ”a huge divide between content and method” that was not producing highly-effective classroom educators. He equated the programs to a hospital that provides only a bare minimum of care.

“They’ll help make sure the patient doesn’t die, but it wont actually make the patient much better,” Steiner said.

The panel didn’t just harp on what was wrong with current teacher preparation programs — members also suggested ways to improve them.

Steiner, who complained about gridlock in Albany after resigning as commissioner, said “one of the easiest things to do” in New York would be to make licensing exams harder to pass, something that has been done successfully in Massachusetts. Currently, less than 1 percent of test-takers fail New York’s exam.

Hostetter’s Relay program is known for its performance requirements to be eligible for graduation. Teachers in that program can’t graduate unless they have helped their students grow at least one year in one year’s time, according to specific assessment standards.

To an extent, the panelists were actually preaching to the choir. The majority – about two-thirds – of the audience had taken alternate routes to certification, meaning they had enrolled in many of the same programs supported by the panelists.

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.

Mittenthal said the department aimed to conclude its investigations after speaking Ling Ling Chou, Shuang Wen’s former principal who was removed from the school this summer. Chou has “tentatively agreed” to an interview with DOE officials next week and could potentially be reinstated after the investigations are closed, he said.

SCI investigators concluded that the school’s parent association did not violate any rules by voting to transfer $81,000 to SWAN, the nonprofit that helped found the school and administered its after-school program.

Last year, NY1 revealed that the dual-language school was illegally charging families for mandatory Chinese instruction during the after-school program.

What investigators did find, according to the report, were warring factions of parents. The report notes that “a constant stream of complaints” had led to many investigations at the school — as many as nine were were open when Chou was removed.

From the report:

From 1998 until 2008, no one — neither the parents nor anyone from the DOE — complained to SCI about alleged misconduct by the principal at PS 184 or questioned the propriety of the operation of the dual language and after school programs. Starting in 2008, and continuing throughout the course of this investigation, SCI received a constant stream of complaints about the Shuang Wen School. One faction of vocal parents made steady complaints about SWAN — the community based organization which helped found the school — the PA, and Ling ling Chou, the former principal. Another faction countered with other complaints. Chou also reported allegations as she was required to do so. This caused overlapping investigations. Additionally, a federal lawsuit was filed by one faction against the other faction and the DOE. That action is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The full SCI report is below:

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. Klein frequently said, as in an interview below with the libertarian news group Reason, that he wanted to give poor families the kind of school choice that middle-class families have long exercised.

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?”

Sternberg acknowledged that the charter school would grow too large for the building in 2016, when it would add fifth grade for the first time. He said the department had plans for the fifth grade to open at a separate site but emphasized that the Baltic Street building “is being contemplated as a long-term siting” for Cobble Hill Success. A second site could allow the school to grow should it choose to apply for an expanded charter to serve middle school grades.

“That is not unusual,” Sternberg said of the plan.

Educators and community leaders lobbed questions about the complications that co-locations raise and questioned whether the school would be better off in another Brooklyn district.

Members of District 15′s Community Education Council who led the first half of the meeting pressed the SUNY Charter Institute’s staff attorney, Tom Franta, to explain whether the school, which was approved for District 13, could legally open in District 15 instead as is now planned. Franta said it would be acceptable for the school to change locations within the borough without gaining new approval from SUNY.

But he said the school would need to seek approval from SUNY if it choses to eliminate the “at-risk design factors” in its charter, which features a lottery system that privileges low-income students and English Language Learners from Districts 13 and 14. The school has indicated to SUNY that it would seek those changes to its admissions system “at a later date,” Franta said.

Opposition to the co-location came throughout the four-hour-long meeting from teachers and families that attend the two secondary schools that inhabit the building, regular activists, and District 15 CEC members. The building also houses a small school for students with severe disabilities.

“I’m actually very much in favor of charter schools,” said Eddie Rodriguez, a member of CEC 15. “The charter that was authorized was to serve high-needs kids. Placing this particular charter here will not serve that need.”

Sternberg disputed the claim, voiced throughout the evening, that District 15 does not have high-needs students for the charter school to serve.

“We are geographically located near Red Hook; we are geographically located near a set of housing projects,” he said. “We believe this charter school has a record and a real commitment of serving high needs.”

A Success Charter Network school that opened this year in another neighborhood with many middle-class families and high-performing schools, the Upper West Side, 40 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

Sternberg emphasized that District 15 students will have preference to gain seats at the new charter school, even though its current charter does not include this focus in its admissions process.

“This is going to be a district school of choice. It will attract families from across the district,” he said. “Upper West Side Success has 96 percent of families from District 3. Based on that track record we are quite certain that this organization will recruit District 15 and serve District 15.”

Teachers and families from the two schools said they are afraid splitting shared spaces three ways would squeeze instructional and lunch time.

“Our gym, our library, our cafeteria — these are spaces that within the building are already maxed out,” said Clare Daley, the technology teacher at the School for Global Studies, which jumped from an F report card grade to a B this year after low-performance brought federal “transformation” funds. “We are looking forward to expanding enrollment. … With this progress, why then would the DOE want to put another school in this building?”

Sternberg promised that the co-location would not negatively impact programs at the schools, which together offer special instruction in music, culinary arts, and creative writing.

Several students commended the small schools’ more intimate tone during the public comments portion of the hearing.

“Do you guys ever double check?” School for International Studies sophomore Alex Alvarez asked DOE officials. “Do you understand how hard it is to have a classroom of 30-35 students?”

Before the hearing, a half-dozen parents who said they live in District 15 rallied in the rain outside the Baltic Street building to support the charter school plan.

Jenna Sternbach, who lives nearby and has three children under the age of 5, said she prefers the creation of a Success Academy to the alternative proposal that has been floated by some community members in recent weeks, which would have an early childhood center open in the building to alleviate some of the demand for kindergarten options in the school.

“Success isn’t just a K through 1 option,” she said. “You’re not going to be scrambling to find a good middle school. You’re secure from kindergarten through eighth.”

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.” 

At 5 p.m. parents from District 15 will hold a press conference outside of the Cobble Hill school, “to demand the City’s Department of Education award public space to Success Academy Cobble Hill,” according to a press release sent out by a communications firm that works with the Success Academy Charter Network.

The network’s CEO, Eva Moskowitz, has seemed to court controversy when seeking spacefor her schools. Co-location battles have followed her forays into schools in Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Upper West Side, and the network has in the past bused groups of parents from its schools, often wearing signature orange T-shirts, to co-location hearings.

At 5:30 p.m., opponents of the co-location are planning to rally in front of the school to renew calls for an alternative proposal: to open an early childhood center in the building instead of a charter school. Yesterday a vocal group of parents, state and union officials rallied at the building’s Baltic Street entrance in support of that proposal, arguing that the local elementary schools are turning away families who apply for preschool.

Organizers of the protest say they will argue that the charter school would not address crowding issues in Brownstone Brooklyn’s elementary schools because its lottery admissions would allow students from other parts of the city to apply, and it also would not address the demand for more preschool programs.

Community members and educators from the two secondary schools that currently share space in the four-story building, along with a District 75 special education program, have also said that an additional charter school could overcrowd the high schools’ shared facilities.

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.

Maximus’ motto is “Helping government serve the people,” but, as with all corporations, its bottom line is to help its shareholders. A February 2009 earnings conference call made clear that where others see policy or politics, Maximus (and probably other consultants) sees profit.

“Our business today stands well-positioned to benefit in the long run from greater demand for our services due to the economic slowdown and new legislation that calls for expansion of existing programs. This includes increased funding through the proposed $800 billion-plus stimulus plan,” Richard Montoni, Maximus’ CEO, said on the call.  …

Montoni’s monologue revealed a company in mid-pivot, shifting from a “revmax” business model—identifying and claiming reimbursable federal dollars for state and local governments—to a provider of IT services like SESIS. And SESIS, as the conference call revealed, is simply a repurposing of an existing software package called TIENET—a system that Maximus had already implemented in the Chicago school system. Montoni reassured an anxious analyst: “Naturally, we’ll have to interface it with the systems of New York City, and we’ll have to train the users in New York City on how to use it. But it should not be viewed as a custom-build situation.” Just as when [Alvarez & Marsal, the firm involved in a midyear busing debacle in 2007] came into town riding high on projects in St. Louis and New Orleans, SESIS was a case of a consultant getting big bucks to map a product created for a different (smaller) school system onto New York’s unique education superstructure.

The article also notes that a former special education executive at the DOE got special permission, and a hefty consulting fee, to help the city get SESIS online:

One of the early champions of SESIS was Linda Wernikoff, who in June 2009 retired from her job as the city’s top special-ed official, only to be rehired by the Fund for Public Schools as a DOE consultant on SESIS less than a year later. New York City’s Conflict of Interest Board signed off on a wavier for her rehire at $1,000 per day—on top of her DOE pension. (Wernikoff declined to comment for this story.)

And City Limits also reports that SESIS’s $79 million price tag could balloon because of clauses in its contract, and the city would be without recourse because has not rolled out a required “Electronic Performance Evaluation Process” for its private vendors:

Chances are that SESIS, along with many other IT contracts the city is currently engaged in, will end up costing taxpayers more than its originally stated “base” rate. City Limits obtained a copy of the SESIS contract — which, at about the thickness of The Collected Dialogues of Plato and similarly dense, is a pamphlet compared with many other such contracts — and there are several places in which it is clear that Maximus can bill the city many million dollars more under a so-called renewal of contract and also under something called a change order — which effectively renders the originally agreed-upon price of the contract obsolete. …

Meanwhile, major oversight and accountability issues loom. According to the DOE’s Procurement Policy and Procedures Manual, approved by the Panel for Education Policy, the board that oversees the DOE, in January 2010, the DOE is required to establish a process for evaluating and documenting the performance of its vendors. But no such system exists yet. Barbara Morgan, a spokeswoman for the DOE, says, “A prototype system has been developed and will be rolled out in the near future to capture this data.”

Deputy Chancellors Kathleen Grimm and Marc Sternberg hear feedback from parents on plans to rezone schools in District 2.

The Department of Education’s third — and likely final — proposal for rezoning in Manhattan’s District 2 received a lukewarm reception from Lower Manhattan parents at a public hearing Monday night.

DOE officials retracted some of the more controversial elements of the department’s rezoning proposal but warned that some overcrowded schools would not see relief, prompting grumbling from parents who had come to urge the officials to build more schools in the district.

In the revised plan, unveiled this week, Tribeca’s popular P.S. 234 and the Greenwich Village’s P.S. 41 and P.S. 3 will not be rezoned. Two of the original proposals, which called for the rezoning of schools in Lower Manhattan, Chelsea, and Greenwich Village, were unanimously rejected by the District 2 CEC earlier this month.

Now, the rezoning’s only major effect would be to trim some Lower Manhattan school zones to create a zone for the Peck Slip School, a new elementary school that is set to open in Tweed Courthouse next fall.

City officials, including deputy chancellors Marc Sternberg and Kathleen Grimm, said the change in plans was a response to vocal opposition from parents at P.S. 234, who argued that altering the school’s zone would change its character. But Sternberg and Grimm stressed that the tradeoff is that their latest proposal would not meet demand for school seats in the neighborhood. The parents had urged the officials to build more schools rather than shifting students among existing ones.

“You’re right to ask for more, but we don’t know if we can give you more,” Sternberg said. “We are looking for solutions where the money falls short, as it most certainly will.” 

“I consider it much better than the previous proposal,” Tribeca parent Einar Westerland told the audience. But Westerland, whose 10-year-old son attends P.S. 234 and whose 3-year-old will enter kindergarten next fall, said he recognizes that the new plan for his school, which has a long wait list for admissions, will not change the demand on seats.

“I support the CEC suggestion that parents who are wait-listed be given some preference — to be put through a lottery system and sent to some arbitrary section of the city is not acceptable,” he added, referring to a part of the CEC’s proposal that would call for students who are zoned for the overcrowded schools but cannot finds seats to be given preference in the general lottery for schools.

CEC officials said the addition of the as-yet unzoned Peck Slip elementary school, which would incubate in Tweed Courthouse, the DOE headquarters, before being placed somewhere in Downtown Manhattan, would do too little to alleviate the district’s endemic overcrowding.

“We’re growing faster than we can build our way out of the problem,” council member Michael Markowitz said. “Peck Slip alone is not enough.”

The Department of Education presented this revised proposal for rezoning several schools in Lower Manhattan. Click image to expand it.

Kelly Shannon, principal of P.S. 41, and Lisa Siegman, principal of P.S. 3,  told officials at the meeting that they are happy preserve the schools’ shared zone in Chelsea and Greenwich Village. help both those schools managed enrollment in equitable ways so that every zoned family is given a spot in one of the two schools. Currently families in those areas can chose which school to attend, but the DOE’s original proposal would have split up the two schools.

About 30 of the parents at the packed meeting came from P.S. 116 in Murray Hill, which had not been affected by any of the rezoning plans but is also facing overcrowding. A new school set to open in 2013 is meant to siphon off over-enrollment there, but P.S. 116 parents have been waging a campaign to find relief sooner. Last night, they urged the department to open a new elementary school, for the area earlier than planned as an alternative to adding more kindergarten seats to their school.

Meera Wagman, whose son is in kindergarten at P.S. 116, urged officials to allow the new school, P.S. 281, to incubate in a satellite location while its building is under construction. P.S. 281 is scheduled to open in 2014.

Crowding at the school has put a strain on space, she said. “It’s unsafe, and it’s a bad environment for learning.”

“We have serious concerns about the incubation you’ve proposed,” Sternberg said, responding to a proposal the CEC put forth two weeks ago when it vetoed the rezoning plan. “But we are not ready to foreclose on it. We hope to find a solution that’s good for everybody. We may not.”

The statistic comes from New York Police Department data released today under the terms of a new city law that requires the Department of Education and NYPD to disclose information about arrests and suspensions that take place in schools.

A total of 63 arrests – one fifth of them for felonies – were made and 182 summonses issued in city schools over a span of 50 school days between July and September, according to the data, which the New York Civil Liberties Union published on its website. Most of the quarterly reporting period took place during the summer session, when enrollment is just 10 percent of the school-year total. Arrest totals are likely to be much higher when school is in session full time.

More than a third of the students arrested — 22 — were charged with assault, and more than half of summonses issued were for disorderly conduct. Riding a bike on the sidewalk was the second most common reason cited when issuing a summons, which typically requires a student to take time off of school to appear in court.

More than 80 percent of students arrested were male and 44 percent were younger than 16. All but four of the students arrested were black or Latino.

“The data raise concerns about black students being disproportionally arrested in the city’s schools,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

DOE data released earlier this month showed that 83 percent of suspensions last year were issued to black and Hispanic students, who make up about 70 percent of students in the city schools.

Both the suspension and arrest data were released under the terms of the Student Safety Act, a law the City Council passed last year to require transparency about discipline in city schools. Since 1998, NYPD has been authorized to provide law enforcement inside city schools, but the department’s repeatedly refusals to release arrest information to the public led civil rights groups, including the NYCLU, to push for the Student Safety Act.

Earlier this month, the DOE held up its end of the act’s compliance requirements by releasing the suspension data, but the NYCLU accused the NYPD of stonewalling. Today, the group questioned whether the new data represented a complete accounting of arrests since the statistics account only for arrests made by school safety officers and omit arrests made by other police officers who are called in to schools. In addition, the NYPD did not release a required race breakdown for the summonses issued.

Udi Ofer, the NYCLU’s advocacy director, said the new data renewed questions about the city’s approach to student discipline.

“Instead of arresting students who need the most help, the Bloomberg administration should redirect resources from police to services that support student achievement,” Ofer said in a statement. “Why are we employing 5,400 police personnel [in schools] and only 3,000 guidance counselors?”

Parents and elected officials speak out in favor of a plan to open an early childhood center instead of a charter school.

A day before a public hearing about a space-sharing proposal that would bring the Success Charter Network to Brownstone Brooklyn, advocates of an alternative plan took to the street to promote their idea.

The counter-proposal, made after the Department of Education announced it had chosen a Baltic Street school building for the charter school chain’s newest outpost, would use the space instead for a preschool.

Success Charter operator Eva Moskowitz suggested in the New York Post today that the counter-proposal came from the teachers union in an attempt to block her school from getting space in the building.

That’s “absolutely not true,” said Jeffrey Tripp, the UFT chapter leader at the School for International Studies, one of the schools in the building, at a press conference today. He said the preschool proposal is supported by a “grassroots movement.”

“I’m proud to be a member of the UFT but this [alternate proposal] is not something the UFT was behind,” he said.

The plan — for which DOE officials say no application has yet been received — was first floated by a retired DOE official and a local politician in response to the DOE’s plan to site Cobble Hill Success Academy in the building that International Studies shares with the School for Global Studies and a special education program. It’s also being supported by the Alliance for Quality Education, an advocacy group.

The dust-up has AQE, which typically advocates against school closures and co-locations on the grounds that they are unfair to poor and minority students, in the position of supporting a preschool program that would likely serve many affluent families.

Today, Assemblywoman Joan Millman explained that an early childhood center would serve children zoned for P.S. 261, P.S. 29, and P.S. 58, three popular neighborhood schools whose pre-K classes cannot accommodate every family that seeks a spot.

“I have noticed increasing numbers of parents who come to me and say they can’t get into local schools,” Millman told me.

Parents from some of those schools and others spoke at the press conference today, saying that the neighborhood needs both pre-K and middle school options. Putting pressure on the two secondary schools in the Baltic Street building would make them unlikely middle school destinations for local families in the future, they said. (The schools currently struggle to attract students from the immediate vicinity.)

Under the DOE’s space-sharing proposal, International Studies would go from 36 full-size and nine half-size classrooms to 21 full-size and four half-size classrooms. Global Studies would lose an even higher proportion of its classrooms, dropping to 15 full-size and five half-size classrooms from 32 and 11, respectively.

In contrast, parents and officials said today, an early childhood center would require just five classrooms and put little strain on shared spaces, meaning that International Studies’ culinary arts space and Global Studies’ new computer lab would not be in jeopardy.

Plus, students from the middle and high schools could volunteer in the preschool classes, suggested Melinda Martinez, the mother of four International Studies students. She said her oldest son selected the school because of its culinary arts program.

Several parents from the School for International Studies joined the press conference. No one from the School for Global Studies participated.

Millman told me that the controversy over Cobble Hill Success suggests that she and other legislators erred when writing the state’s charter school law in the 1990s. They should have allocated funding for charter schools to find space so they wouldn’t have to compete with traditional public schools, she said.

In District 15, where Cobble Hill is located, three of the four charter schools already open are either housed in private space or are in the process of constructing their own buildings.

A public hearing about the co-location will take place tomorrow at the Baltic Street building. The Panel for Educational Policy, the city’s school board, is scheduled to vote on the proposal next month. It has never rejected a DOE proposal.

Officials from the DOE and Children’s First Network have visited the school multiple times in the past week, observing classes and meeting with parents and administrators. They will also sit in on future Parent-Teacher Association meetings, according to a list of promises that officials outlined in a meeting with PTA members at Queens Metropolitan High School last week.

Since early in the school year, parents at the year-old school have complained of missing textbooks, incompetent substitute teachers, and multiple schedule changes that forced students to miss gym class, electives, and some core subjects.

After he discussed the problems by phone with one parent, the city’s Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky, told the audience at November’s regular Panel for Education Policy meeting that the DOE would act quickly and aggressively to fix the problems.

He was not among the officials who met with parents last week at an open meeting in the school’s auditorium. The officials said they had worked late into the evenings and through the previous weekend to address the issues and create new schedules, which took effect today.

According to John Sadowski, the parent who originally contacted Polakow-Suransky and has a son in tenth grade at the school, the officials a detailed a shortlist of promises for improving the school:

• As of today, students will have new schedules which include time for gym instruction and more opportunities to take a foreign language, but fewer electives.
• A DOE representative will attend all future PTA meetings.
• A substitute teacher with a license to teach chemistry from the city’s Absent Teacher Reserve pool will teach the 10th-grade class until the end of November. The school will hire a permanent replacement by December 1st.
• The school will order more chemistry textbooks to make up for the shortfall—administrators said they anticipated enrolling fewer students and did not order enough books last year.
• The DOE will schedule a follow-up meeting with parents at the school to check the progress of these changes in the next three weeks.

Sadowski said several of the two dozen parents and three students who attended the meeting voiced concerns about the administrative problems. Some also criticized the leadership decisions their principal, Marci Levy-Maguire, made early in the year as issues began snowballing, but said they were willing to give her “another chance,” he said.

“Most people are optimistic,” Sadowski told me. “We feel like giving it a chance to see what happens.”

On Nov. 17, I marched with the Wall Street occupiers and thousands of other New Yorkers. We were protesting the occupation’s eviction from Zuccoti Park and proclaiming that the movement was as alive as ever. I cannot claim any deep involvement with the occupation movement, but it has inspired me. Marching the streets of New York with tens of thousands of students, teachers, nurses, janitors, and other occupiers inspired me even more.

Like many teachers, I often get pessimistic. Budget cuts, attacks from the media, and an ever-growing pile of ungraded assignments make the idea of progress seem like a fantasy. Watching the Occupy Wall Street forces build a movement over the past couple of months has reminded that cynicism is not only unproductive, but it is always rooted in illusion.

Day after day, we teachers grade our papers, teach our lessons, create predictable routines for our students, and so it’s natural that the world would start to look stale and stagnant. Yet all teachers know that stagnation is an illusion. Month after month and year after year, we see new life emerge from these repetitive routines. Behind their tired eyes, our students learn until one day, seemingly out of the blue, those tired, distracted children have become writers, scientists, and actors. It’s why we chose this occupation.

Growth is real; movement is real. As teachers, we are responsible for directing that growth in small, but significant ways. A student who three months ago claimed to hate reading is now frustrated because we’re reading The Odyssey too slowly. Two other students are gossiping in terrible, ninth-grade Spanish. Small moments, but the Occupy movement has shown us that small moments can turn into big things.

No matter how lazy or unmotivated they seem, our students (like all people) are curious and enthusiastic. They’re excited about learning and frustrated when they don’t learn enough. They hate being bored; they hate thinking there’s more to life and they can’t figure out how to find it. Like the occupiers from Wall Street and Oakland and Tahrir Square, our students (in their best moments) have had enough of sitting at desks and filling in scantron sheets. They want to build something new.

A teacher in struggle is also teaching — this phrase comes from the Spanish, “El maestro luchando también está enseñando.” This was the chant of Mexican teachers in the state of Oaxaca who fought corrupt government officials and union leaders who went along with these officials. They occupied the main plaza in Oaxaca City, setting up tents and camping for weeks at a time. They marched with electrical workers, parents, students and other Oaxacans who believed that their democracy was failing — that it was, in fact, an illusion. I thought about these teachers when I was marching towards the Brooklyn Bridge two weeks ago.

On Nov. 30, I will be marching again as part of the “Budget Cuts Hurt Our Schools” coalition of teachers, students, and parents from Leon M. Goldstein High School for the Sciences. We are opposing Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s budget cuts and the ongoing lack of advocacy for city schools from the mayor’s office that together threaten once again to slash funding from hospitals, transportation, firehouses, libraries, and especially schools. Teachers, students, and parents from schools across Brooklyn will be marching to save our schools, but also to save our city. Transit workers (whose union has endorsed the rally) will be joining us, as will firefighters, health care professionals, and other concerned New Yorkers.

As teachers, our job is to care for students. Sometimes that means planning lessons; sometimes that means grading papers. Sometimes it means struggling through a lesson while the students stare at us like zombies. We know how to struggle. This is our occupation.

Right now, caring for our students means more than simply planning lessons. It also means making sure the world into which they graduate has something to offer them. It means making sure their horizons aren’t limited by city and state officials who cut school funding. It means showing our students that the democracy we advertise to them, from their first day of kindergarten through their senior year, is not merely an illusion.

Please join us on Nov. 30. We plan to meet at 4 p.m. outside the Coney Island/Stillwell subway station and march to Abraham Lincoln High School, a mile away. A teacher in struggle is also teaching.

The logo of SED's new website for educators

State education officials are pushing their reform agenda with editorial boards, on television and the radio — and now, in teachers’ email inboxes, too.

Last week, Education Commissioner John King sent an email to teachers across the state explaining the State Education Department’s plans to boost student achievement. Under the subject line “We Must Do Better,” the email acknowledges that many teachers are frustrated by changing expectations and curriculum standards and asks educators for advice about what the state can do to help them.

The email was the first of its kind and is part of a stepped-up campaign to fill educators in on the policy changes taking place in Albany, officials say.

“When I became Commissioner last June, I set two goals: one, to help make sure every student graduates from high school college- and career-ready; and two, to make the State Education Department a model government agency focused on customer service,” King wrote in the email. “As part of that effort, I’ll be reaching out as often as possible — through e-mail, Twitter, and other communication tools — directly with educators in the field.”

Other elements of the department’s ramped up communications strategy are already online. Earlier this year, SED launched a new website, EngageNY, that offers resources for teachers and principals and is more user-friendly than most SED sites. And King joined Twitter in September, posting dozens of times since with public service announcements and pictures from school visits.

Last week’s email went out on the state’s TEACH listserve, which includes the email addresses that teachers across the state listed when they applied for certification, as well as to superintendents and principals. State officials are working on bringing the teacher database up to date, according to an SED spokesman, Dennis Tompkins, who said the department planned to send similar messages “at least once every quarter — more often if issues dictate.”

Here’s the complete email that King sent to teachers across the state last week:

From: NYSED Commissioner
Date: November 22, 2011 7:18:18 PM EST
To: TEACH@listserv.nysed.gov
Subject: Message from Commissioner King: We Must Do Better
Reply-To: NYSED Commissioner

Hello. I hope your students are enjoying a safe, productive school year. When I became Commissioner last June, I set two goals: one, to help make sure every student graduates from high school college- and career-ready; and two, to make the State Education Department a model government agency focused on customer service. As part of that effort, I’ll be reaching out as often as possible — through e-mail, Twitter, and other communication tools — directly with educators in the field. I hope we can build an ongoing dialogue about our schools and our students.

There’s a great new SED website for educators, EngageNY.org, with great teaching and learning tools including professional development guides, lesson plans, and other teaching resources tied to the new Common Core standards. If you haven’t checked it out yet, you should. 100,000 educators already have. It’s really worth a look.

There’s been a lot of discussion about education in New York recently, but one thing that’s not open for debate is the need to get better. We have many excellent schools and school districts around the state delivering outstanding results for students. Our high school graduation rates have increased consistently and we are a leading state in terms of students taking and passing Advanced Placement exams. However, too many of our students are not graduating from high school, and too many students who do graduate aren’t ready for college or careers. We’re seeing increasing numbers of students who graduate and matriculate at our colleges, only to find they need extensive remediation. They’re being taught things in college they should have learned in high school.

The result? A high school diploma isn’t worth as much as it should be, and college students are wracking up ever increasing debt to pay for courses they should have received in high school. College freshmen are paying college prices for high school courses.

This is not good for students and parents, and, if we want New York to be competitive in the global marketplace, it’s not good for our state. We have to do better.

That’s why the Board of Regents adopted the Common Core standards. The Common Core State Standards, which have been adopted by 47 states and the District of Columbia, provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them.

I know a lot of educators are frustrated; they feel like they’ve seen all this before.

In the past, there have been calls for high accountability, but with little support to reach that level. That’s not a formula for success. If we want our students to meet the goals we set for them, we have to provide students and teachers with the level of support they need to reach those goals. High accountability and a high level of support are the formula for success.

That’s why the State Education Department is implementing the Common Core through 12 shifts in instruction, and we’re aligning assessments beginning in 2012-13 to make sure students are meeting the new standards.

We’re also working to implement a Data Driven Instruction model to improve instruction in real time, and we’ll be implementing Evidence Based Observation to drive targeted professional development. The goal is to create a continuous cycle of improvement and professional growth and help every student graduate high school college- and career-ready.

EngageNY.org is just one tool we’re using to help move our students forward. We’re developing more curriculum models. Using federal Race to the Top funding, we’ve created the Network Team Institute to bring educators from around the state together for training sessions led by national experts to help plant the Common Core seed around the state.

We’re working with teacher preparation programs across the state to provide clinically rich experiences at the undergraduate and graduate levels, so the next generation of teachers is ready to step up to this new paradigm in P-12 instruction. And we’re pursuing new pathways to graduation and career, including an expansion of Career and Technical Education and the use of the No Child Left Behind waiver. We’ll be backing the demand for accountability with real support.

There’s much more to come, but we’ve taken some major steps forward.

I know the arguments against being bold. Money is tight and getting tighter. The shifts in instruction should be phased in more gradually. Students aren’t ready for all this.

But the longer we delay, the more students we deny the opportunity for success. Tough times demand hard work. The best way out of these tough times is to build a workforce ready to take on the economic challenges of the global economy. If we slow down reform, we’ll shut down opportunity for millions of our students.

We must start now, in every school. Our tomorrow is being built today, in classrooms across the state. We cannot allow frustration to limit our vision. We cannot allow budget constraints to close the door on our students’ future. I know resources are scarce; I understand the limits the economy is forcing us all to endure. But for the sake of our students, we must do better.

Please visit EngageNY.org. Let us know what’s good, and let us know what should be better. This is the work that will build a better future for our students and our state. Let’s do that work together.

John B. King, Jr.
Visit EngageNY.org
Follow me Twitter: @JohnKingNYSED

• Among Mexican immigrants in New York City ages 16-19, more than 40 percent are dropouts. (Times)
• Hundreds of students at Grace Dodge High School went without English classes for weeks. (Daily News)
• Michael Winerip: Long Island principals are in rare revolt over the state’s teacher evaluations. (Times)
• But very few city principals have so far signed on to the effort to slow the evaluations. (GothamSchools)
• City public and private schools are bringing back wooden blocks as an instructional tool. (Times)
• High school principals scramble to get students into the building to preserve city funding. (SchoolBook)
• More than 100 students commute from outside Staten Island to high-achieving Staten Island Tech. (Post)
• A judge ruled that the city must release emails between mayoral officials and Cathie Black. (Reuters)
• Parents at the Special Music School say the school has added too much test prep. (Insideschools)
• No Child Left Behind waivers are raising questions about NCLB’s private tutoring. (WNYC/SchoolBook)
• This year, a Bronx Science counselor is advising students on NCAA eligibility requirements. (Daily News)
• Students at the Hudson High School of Learning Technologies got a visit from a real-life scientist. (NY1)
• The Post says CUNY colleges’ low completion rate shows high school requirements should be tougher.
• Eva Moskowitz: There’s no reason to oppose my school in Cobble Hill to get a pre-K program. (Post)
• The Daily News says the situation at Grace Dodge supports the theory that city schools are warehouses.
• A Democracy Prep Charter School student says teacher Sarah Benko has pushed her to succeed. (NPR)
• An M.S. 35 teacher was arrested for having a sexual relationship with a student. (Daily News, Post, NY1)
• A Staten Island teacher convicted of manslaughter was fired for threatening an ex-boyfriend. (Post)