GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Across the state, hundreds of principals have signed onto a petition urging the state to proceed cautiously with new teacher evaluations.

Only two of them currently run New York City schools.

The petition is attached to a position paper arguing that the state’s evaluation regulations — which require a portion of teachers’ ratings to be based on their students’ test scores —  are unsupported by research, prone to errors, and too expensive at a time of budget cuts. Nearly three quarters of principals on Long Island, where the paper originated, have signed on, as well as hundreds of principals from districts across the state and even the country.

Sean Feeney, a Long Island principal who helped write the position paper earlier this month in his capacity as president of the Nassau County High School Principals Association, said toughening teacher evaluations is a worthy goal, but the state’s requirements aren’t the best way to accomplish it.

“We’ve got a ship that’s sailed on a dangerous course through uncharted waters and we’re not prepared — and somehow that’s okay and we have to go full-steam ahead,” he said. “We’re betting people’s careers on something that does not work. It’s unconscionable.”

Feeney speculated that city principals are less shocked by the state’s evaluation requirements because the city has already tried to develop “value-added” evaluations of some teachers using student test scores.

“The city’s been living with this for a while,” he said.

Plus, he said about city principals, “I think they’re a little more nervous” about jeopardizing their jobs by speaking out. (more…)

Eva Moskowitz says that each of the charter schools she runs will always look exactly the same, from their robotics labs to their chess rooms to their classrooms filled with wooden blocks.

There’s just one significant difference at Upper West Success Academy, which opened this year on Manhattan’s Upper West Side under a steady drumbeat of opposition from community members.

“Our schools in Harlem and the Bronx are far less diverse,” Moskowitz said today, speaking to reporters on a tour of the first-year charter school.

Enrollment at Upper West Success mirrors that of District 3, according to data provided by the school: The kindergarten and first grade student body is 35 percent white or Asian, 49 percent are black or Latino and 16 percent multiracial. About 40 percent qualify for free or reduced lunch. English language learners make up 5 percent of students and 12 percent of students receive special education services, officials said.

The racial and socioeconomic diversity of students at Upper West provides a stark contrast to the student bodies at other school in the Success Network in Harlem, the South Bronx, and Bedford-Stuyvesant, neighborhoods that have high concentrations of poor black and Latino residents.

Moskowitz is hoping the diversity will attract parents in District 15, a similarly diverse district, to enroll at her network’s new school next year. Seated in a kindergarten-sized chair in an empty classroom today, Moskowitz told reporters that she has been giving tours of Upper West Success to hundreds of parents from Brooklyn’s District 15. (more…)

Innovate Manhattan Charter School students at recess outside Tweed Courthouse

The three-month-old charter school that ex-Chancellor Joel Klein invited into the Department of Education’s headquarters is without a principal after Eileen Coppola resigned abruptly last week.

“I was very surprised,” said Miles Merwin, the vice chair of the school’s board of trustees who accepted Coppola’s resignation.

In a letter sent home with students yesterday, Coppola is quoted as saying that the job had proved harder than she anticipated. “As the mother of two young children I found the job to be too demanding on my time and it began to interfere with my ability to take care of my children,” the letter quoted her as saying.

Peg Hoey, the director of the nonprofit that operates Innovate Manhattan, will serve as the school’s head until a replacement for Coppola is found, Merwin said. Before working to open Innovate Manhattan, Hoey was the special education director at New Heights Academy Charter School and was on the founding teams at Opportunity and Equality charter schools.

Coppola, who had traveled to Sweden earlier this year to receive training about the school’s student-directed curriculum, did not respond to requests for an interview today.

But Merwin said the school year had shaped up to be full of surprises — for board members, students, and Coppola. (more…)

Parents from schools the city has deemed failing issued their own grade to the Department of Education today: an F.

About three dozen parents from schools the department might close gathered on the steps of Tweed Courthouse to decry the department’s policy of shuttering schools instead of offering them additional aid. They said the department has failed at everything from providing resources to struggling schools to engaging parents — even to showing compassion to schools and families working under difficult conditions to help children. (more…)

United Federation of Teachers Vice President Leo Casey at a public hearing about Opportunity Charter School's charter renewal

For months, Opportunity Charter School CEO Leonard Goldberg fought to keep the teachers union out of his school. On Monday, he welcomed them into his auditorium with open arms.

At a public hearing to discuss the school’s future Monday evening, United Federation of Teachers Vice President Leo Casey and other UFT officials joined Goldberg and his newly unionized staff to push back against the possibility that Opportunity could be closed. The school’s charter is up for renewal this year and the city has cited it as one of six charter schools whose performance is so weak that they could lose their right to operate.

The partnership between the school’s leadership and the union would have seemed inconceivable just a couple of months ago when the two sides were locked in a legal battle over whether the school’s teachers should be able to join the UFT.

Union officials and teachers accused Goldberg of retaliation after he fired more than a dozen teachers shortly after they voted to unionize at the school in March. Goldberg refused to acknowledge the teachers’ union vote, prompting a hearing with the state’s Public Employee Relations Board, which eventually ruled that the teachers could use the UFT as their bargaining agent. The union has also filed a grievance over the firings.

All of that was apparently water under the bridge during Monday night’s meeting, which two officials from the DOE’s charter schools office attended. Goldberg said he was happy to have the union’s support and UFT officials said the school should stay open. (more…)

• A Forest Hills mother is complaining that a teacher gave an anti-Arab, pro-Israel lesson. (SchoolBook)
• A protest by Baruch College students over tuition costs ended in a clash with police. (Times, WSJ)
• In the Bronx, Harry Truman High School has gotten a swimming pool and a planetarium. (Daily News)
• Another look at the DOE’s response to scheduling woes at Queens Metropolitan High School. (NY1)
• The city says it won’t force an evaluation deal, leading to federal funding questions. (GothamSchools)
• A legislator says the city should turn Tweed Courthouse into a school. (GothamSchools, DNAInfo)
• Staten Island parents see roadbumps in the borough schools’ special education changes. (S.I. Advance)
• Falling enrollment and federal stimulus money led Detroit to a rare budget surplus. (Detroit News)
• A top school in Dallas taught only math and reading, faking grades in other subjects. (Morning News)
• Louisiana school board elections set ex-DOE deputy John White up to head schools. (Times-Picayune)

• Eight of the 21 high schools the city could close are new and all have many needy students. (Edwize)
• Mazal tov to Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch on the marriage of her son on Sunday. (NYT Weddings)
• Mayoral hopeful Tom Allon proposes a Peace Corps-style program to coach parents. (WestView News)
• Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said he wants schools to be able to use students as janitors. (TPM)
• A nonprofit is looking for city high school teachers to coach girls on technology. (Iridescent Learning)
• Creating awards for all students leads one teacher to get creative with the categories. (Mr. Foteah)
• A dad explains why he took on the thankless job of editing his school’s PTA newsletter. (Insideschools)
• Experts weigh in on which American president was the “best” for education. (Answer Sheet)
• Some insights into the perpetual question of whether charter schools can scale up. (Shanker Blog)
• A call to reform the city’s “dense, unfriendly system” of high school admissions. (Ed in the Apple)
• A profile of Kaya Henderson, the woman trying to move D.C. past the Michelle Rhee era. (Salon)

Students and parents rally outside Cypress Hills Collegiate Preparatory Academy today. Photo by Emma Hulse.

Less than six years old, Cypress Hills Collegiate Preparatory School is the small-schools dinosaur on its campus — and it could be on the verge of extinction.

After just barely escaping an F on its latest report card, the DOE placed Cypress Hills Collegiate on a shortlist of schools that could be shuttered due to poor performance. The school had gotten an F on its first progress report grade in 2010.

Today, students rallied in front of the Franklin K. Lane building, where Cypress Hills Collegiate shares space with three other schools, to defend their school. The protest was the latest in a series of events supported by the Coalition for Educational Justice, which has helped community members at a number of schools at risk of being closed push back against the DOE’s characterization that the schools are low-performing. On Tuesday, parents and elected officials representing 15 of the 47 schools will bring that message to the DOE’s Manhattan headquarters.

Before the rally, student organizers told me that Cypress Hills Collegiate would be more successful if there were more computers and elective courses and if students could use the building’s library.

“It’s not being used at all,” said sophomore Odalis Rojas about the library. Rojas belongs to the Future of Tomorrow youth organization run by the Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation, which founded Cypress Hills Collegiate. “It is there for no reason.”

Gabriel Cano, a senior on Cypress Hills Collegiate’s student government, said instruction had grown more challenging during his time at the school. But it had also become less interesting, he said, with budget cuts causing the school to cancel cooking and sign language classes and reduce extracurricular activities. (more…)

School buses at Coney Island in 2008.

For Simon Jean-Baptiste, a veteran school bus driver who belongs to Local 1181, the city’s announcement Friday that his union could go on strike at any moment was news to him.

“It’s the city that we heard that from,” Jean-Baptiste said today.

Jean-Baptiste, a former vice president in the union, said he had no idea there was any kind of citywide strike threat until he first heard about it from media reports prompted by a last-minute press conference called by Mayor Bloomberg on Friday. Bloomberg warned that Local 1181′s leadership opposed the city’s plans for a new contract for pre-kindergarten bus drivers because the city would not guarantee job security for experienced drivers. As a result, he said, an “immediate” strike was possible.

At the same time, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott sent a comprehensive plan to principals for how they should handle a strike should it occur.

Hours later, Local 1181 President Michael Cordiello said in a statement that a strike over seniority rights was “likely” but not imminent. Today, Cordiello said in a statement that the union was beginning to weigh its options.

“We do not want to strike, but we have been forced to keep our options open by cost-cutting proposals by Mayor Bloomberg,” he said.

As buses rolled up to schools on time this morning, and with no strike imminent, some are questioning the urgency with with Bloomberg and Walcott presented the threat. (more…)

Tweed Courthouse, the Department of Education's headquarters, regularly houses just-starting-out schools in its basement.

To ease crowding in Lower Manhattan, the Department of Education could move offices out of its headquarters.

That’s the suggestion of State Sen. Daniel Squadron, who argues in a letter to Chancellor Dennis Walcott that DOE officials would do well to clear out to make space for children.

The letter comes days after the elected parent council for Manhattan’s District 2 rejected a DOE plan that would have tweaked zones for some overcrowded schools and created a zone for a new school set to open next year.

That school, Peck Slip School, is set to spend its first year in the basement of Tweed Courthouse, the DOE’s headquarters ever since Mayor Bloomberg relocated the education department’s offices from Brooklyn when he first gained control of the schools. The ornate building mostly contains administrative offices, but for the last several years, its basement has housed just-starting-out schools. Ross Global Charter School and the Spruce Street School have occupied the space while waiting for permanent sites, and Innovate Manhattan Charter School opened there this year.

Since the space is certified for public school occupancy — an obstacle the city has run up against when surveying other vacant buildings in Manhattan — Squadron says the DOE should convert more offices into classrooms and send the adults elsewhere. (more…)