GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

News from New York City:

• The high schools with the lowest progress report grades had the highest rates of needy students. (Post)
• Teachers at Long Island City High School say federal “transformation” has induced problems. (NY1)
• Students at a high school under investigation describe how cheating took place. (GothamSchools)
• Analysis of city schools’ SAT scores found vast disparities between high- and low-scoring schools. (Post)
• Charter school advocates are supporting the city’s bid to close low-performing charter schools. (Post)
• A Brooklyn middle school’s 48-year principal, Madeline Brennan, draws lessons from her tenure. (Times)
• A new partnership with the New York Public Library is letting teachers borrow class sets of books. (WSJ)
• Richmond Hill High School was locked down on Friday after a student brought a BB gun. (NY1)
• The Daily News: Gov. Cuomo should set a drop-dead date for districts to set teacher evaluation rules.

And beyond:

• Winerip: Tennessee’s new teacher evaluations demoralized teachers and burdened principals. (Times)
• Under a union deal, Chicago will stop offering incentives for schools to extend their days. (Tribune)
• Technology companies give educators free trips to try to convince them to use their products. (Times)
• The merger of Memphis’s urban and suburban schools is reviving race and class tensions. (Times)
• A study found nearly half of students in grades 7 through 12 have been sexually harassed. (Times)
• Teachers accused of cheating in California blame an increased emphasis on test scores. (L.A. Times)

• Montana becomes the 45th state to adopt Common Core Standards. (Curriculum Matters)
• For student journalists, conflicted editors double as school administrators. (SchoolBook)
• Outside NYC, educators around the state are getting raises; one made $500K. (Times Union)
• The most stressful and frustrating students can also be the most rewarding. (GS Community)
• Chicago Public Schools’ eased an aggressive campaign to lengthen its school day. (Sun-Times)
• Forbes named and ranked the “world’s 7 most powerful educators.” (Forbes)
• New Orleans board member to Bloomberg: “Leave us alone.” (New Orleans Tribune)
• Skeptical DFER director says she’ll donate to union charities on one condition. (DFER Blog)
• Patrick Sullivan will be honored at a fundraiser for start-up pro-bono law firm. (Advocates for Justice)

More than half of teachers in city middle schools left their schools within three years, and most left teaching altogether, according to a new study that offers little insight about how to stem the exodus.

The study was presented yesterday at the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management’s fall meeting, as part of a panel on teacher turnover. Will Marinell, a member of the Research Alliance, the independent body of researchers given access to city Department of Education data, and Teachers College professor Aaron Pallas conducted the analysis.

Mining data about teachers and their paths within the school system, the researchers found that 55 percent of middle school teachers leave their school within three years, higher than in elementary and high schools. They also found that their decision to leave was likely influenced more by their individual characteristics, such as their commute time and race, than by anything about their school.

According to the analysis, teachers are more likely to stay in their schools when students disproportionately share their race. In Manhattan, two-thirds of middle school teachers left within three years, the highest exit rate of any borough. Middle school teachers are more likely to consider leaving their school when they have a long commute or are required to teach a new subject. And teachers in schools that suspend many students are more likely to consider finding a new job.

“These rates of turnover are likely to make it challenging for middle school principals, and the teachers who remain in their schools, to establish organizational norms and a shared vision for their schools’ teaching and learning environment,” the study concludes. (more…)

The test was a joke.

That’s how several graduates of a Bronx high school under investigation for inflating test and graduation rates have characterized a Regents exam they took nearly two years ago.

During the 2010 Algebra 2/Trigonometry Regents exam at the Theatre Arts Production Company School, the students said they were the beneficiaries of a rogue proctor who repeatedly broke rules during the duration of their testing period. The proctor, their teacher during the school year, roamed the room quietly and alerted students to questions they had answered incorrectly. When students asked for help, she responded with individualized attention. Students said they were allowed to talk openly and compare answer sheets.

In at least one case, the proctor even helped a top-performing student cheat when he hadn’t asked for help.

“I handed it in and she handed it right back to me,” the student said. “She told me, ‘These four questions are wrong. You should change them.’”

The exam experience was so well known around the school that it became an inside joke because almost everyone passed and moved onto calculus for their senior years.

“The students joked about it because everyone knew it was going on,” said another student who took the test. “She would pass by, look at our papers, and if we had the wrong answer down, she would point to the right answer and then quickly walk away.”

Eventually the exam became an open secret among students and even other teachers, the students said. It even became fodder on a Facebook group for the school. (more…)

It’s the most challenging students I carry with me long after they’ve moved onto the next grade. The student who threw a desk at me, the one who cursed me out every day, the one who experienced schizophrenic hallucinations in the afternoon, the one who punched a hole in my wall, the one who cried and went into hysterics whenever I asked her to complete a task, the one who ripped up every single piece of writing before he could finish, the one who used a laptop as a weapon on another student and made sure I never left the room during my prep period again …

These are the ones who keep me up at night, the ones who often have undergone childhood experiences so unfathomable that even to speak of the students out loud makes tears spring to my eyes and my voice so thick I don’t try to speak, even with loved ones.

Such students drive us teachers nuts while they are in our classrooms (and all too often, in our hallways). They are the ones rarely absent, the ones that disrupt the entire class dynamic and rivet everyone’s attention. They always demand immediate answers, they do not accept authority unless it stands up to their own notions of justice, and they make fun of pretty much everything that crosses their radar, which usually includes students unable to stand up for themselves.

But it is these students who come back to me. These are the students that teach me how to be a better teacher, and a better person. They have been teaching me what they had been put through, from their earliest days. They were sharing — in the only way they knew how to communicate it — something deep, and fundamental, and raw. And as I have grown to recognize those lessons, I have learned how to better love all of my students, and even — at the risk of sounding cheesy — how to better love humanity. Sometimes, anyway. (more…)

• The Mount Vernon, N.Y., school district is trying to prevent a charter school from opening there. (Times)
• Long Island City High School wants to fix schedule issues with before- and after-school classes. (Times)
• Advocates say they haven’t heard from the city’s family head, Jesse Mojica. (El Diario/GothamSchools)
• A man arrested for assault at Occupy Wall Street is a Bronx teacher with attendance issues. (Post)
• A former Catholic school building on Staten Island will have a public school move in. (S.I. Advance)
• A sympathetic Times column helped the embezzling ex-PTA treasurer raise restitution. (Brooklyn Paper)
• Many San Francisco schools include “wellness centers” to help students deal with health issues. (Times)
• Chicago’s teachers union is set to announce a deal with the city on extending the school day. (Tribune)
• In D.C., teachers whose positions are cut get a buyout or a year to find new a job. (Washington Post)

• The rise of concentrated poverty in major cities could pose a problem for school reform. (Hechinger)
• Chancellor Walcott said the city schools’ official cell phone ban is here to stay. (SchoolBook)
• A teacher lists the realistic, yet major, victories he has elicited from his students. (Mr. Foteah)
• A new report looks at what districts think about federal school turnaround mandates. (CEP)
• Half of Long Island principals signed a request to slow down teacher evaluation changes. (Newsday)
• A new study finds that charter school quality varies widely across networks. (Inside School Research)
• Andy Rotherham: We must accept some lemons to create strong charter schools. (School of Thought)
• An argument that if conservatives think teachers are overpaid, they must not value teachers. (TIME)
• On the Hawthorne Effect: People tend to change their behavior when someone’s watching. (Shanker)
• A look back at “Another Look at Lesson Planning,” before SWBAT entered the dictionary. (ASCD)
• A backer of a losing school board candidate told a reporter he should lynched. (Ed News Colorado)
• A charter school leader-hopeful gives a view into writing her school’s prospectus. (Charter Notebook)

Chancellor Dennis Walcott took a break from parent town hall meetings, protests and policy speeches this morning to visit Central Park and greet more than a thousand public school students for a citywide running event.

Walcott is three days away from running a race of his own – the New York City Marathon – and took the chance to hype healthy lifestyle habits as one way to boost student performance in the classroom.

“As far as wellness is concerned, that’s what makes for a student to be able to perform in the classroom,” Walcott said. “And that’s our goal.”

The event was one of dozens hosted annually by the New York Road Runners in partnership with the Department of Education as a way to encourage running in the public school system. For more than six years, NYRR’s Mighty Milers program has provided equipment and training resources to teachers who want to start running programs in their school. It now counts more than 50,000 students, including ones from The Active Learning Elementary School, which we wrote about in June after it won a national award for its health-conscious curriculum.

“Running is becoming the sport of choice for New York City schools,” said NYRR President Mary Wittenberg. “It’s easy, it’s accessible, it’s affordable. That’s what we’re teaching, even when there’s limited resources.” (more…)

The release of school-by-school suspension tallies earlier this week was a triumph to advocates who spent years pushing the city to make school safety data transparent.

But it was only a partial win. That’s because the New York Police Department is also required to release school safety numbers under the terms of the Student Safety Act, which the City Council passed nearly a year ago.

The NYPD was supposed to report data about summons and arrests made by school safety agents and about non-criminal incidents in school buildings twice already, in August and again this week. But so far it has released no data.

When the police department missed the first deadline, officials said they were moving slowly to ensure accuracy with the complicated data, the Daily News reported at the time. Today, Paul Browne, an NYPD spokesman, said the department would release the data “after the [computer] programming is completed and the data is carefully tabulated and checked in such a way  to insure complete, accurate and reliable reporting to the City Council.”

The New York Civil Liberties Union, which was instrumental in convincing council members to pass the Student Safety Act, is pushing NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly to pick up the pace. Today, the NYCLU sent Kelly a letter today expressing concern about the “unreasonable delay” in releasing the data, noting that the DOE met its reporting deadline despite having to collect similarly complex numbers. (more…)

This story originally appeared in Spanish in El Diario, which supplied the translation.

The city’s school system has a new person in charge of helping the parents of the 1.1 million children in public schools. The problem is that many have not heard of him since he was appointed last July.

After three months in his role as “chief parent” of the New York City Department of Education, organizations that defend parents’ interests said they have not yet heard from Jesse Mojica and do not have knowledge of his plans to improve the troublesome relationship between the department and families throughout the city.

Mojica was recruited in July by new Chancellor Dennis Walcott to occupy the $138,000 a year position as executive director of the office of Family and Community Engagement.

Placida Rodriguez, from the parent action group Make the Road New York, an organization based in Queens and Brooklyn, expressed her dissatisfaction at the little attention Mojica has paid so far.

“Basically I have had no contact with Jesse Mojica,” said Rodriguez. (more…)