GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Gregg Breinberg, P.S. 22′s chorus director, talks about being named sexiest man of the year. (Salon)
• An investigation finds skyrocketing levels of high-priced lobbying for K-12 virtual education. (The Nation)
• A teacher weighs celebrating multiple cultures in a class dominated by one. (No Sleep ‘Til Summer)
• Scholarship reports are the new Teacher Data Reports: Flawed, but useful to an extent. (NYC Educator)
• A teacher describes her sudden move from fourth and fifth grade to kindergarten classes. (Edwize)
• New York City is among 12 winners of grants to create public “learning labs.” (Curriculum Matters)
• Some officials have a different idea for the Cobble Hill building slated for a charter school. (SchoolBook)
• An Ohio parent who works for a reform group says she plans to “walk the walk” on choice. (Flypaper)
• Deborah Meier on what is meant when people talk about the “public” in education. (Bridging Differences)

The agenda for tonight’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting, held in Queens, contained just two topics: School locations and the Department of Education’s financial contracts.

But it was scheduling crises at two Queens high schools that dominated most of the meeting at Astoria’s Frank Sinatra High School of the Arts, drew just a few dozen parents.

We reported this week that Queens Metropolitan High School had revised students’ schedules as many as 10 times this year amid an organizational crisis. Last month, NY1 reported that thousands of students at Long Island City High School were enraged after the school changed their schedules midyear.

Tonight, Department of Education officials vowed to repair the damages. Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky, who stepped in at Queens Metropolitan on Wednesday, called the debacles “rare” and vowed that they “will not be repeated.”

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, whose daughter is a physical education teacher at the school, echoed Polakow-Suransky’s promise, saying, “We pledge our support to make sure we do not repeat this at all.” (more…)

It’s been two months since anti-inequality protesters first settled in at Zuccotti Park in a movement that became known as “Occupy Wall Street.” To commemorate education’s unique role in the activism, protesters chose the Department of Education’s headquarters, Tweed Courthouse, as a meeting point for a much larger rally taking place tonight in Lower Manhattan.

Just as many of the DOE’s top officials were leaving Tweed to head to the department’s monthly Panel for Educational Policy meeting in Queens, a small and quiet group of 25 protesters milled about outside. Behind a heavy backdrop of police security that kept people away from the building and off the steps — which an “Occupy the DOE” rally filled 10 days ago — the group created signs, spoke through the echoing and iconic “people’s mic,” and eventually swelled to more than 50. But in the cold, wet evening, there was little of the festival-like atmosphere that organizers advertised.

“There’s less people than there were supposed to be,” said one of the teachers who attended. Then the group joined thousands of other protesters in converging on to Foley Square.

The Department of Education’s second-in-command has stepped in to hear complaints from parents at a Queens school plagued with organizational problems.

Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky spoke with a parent from Queens Metropolitan High School Wednesday, according to DOE officials and the parent’s wife. Polakow-Suransky promised John Sadowski that the department would give the school the “help you need,” according to Sadowski’s wife, Kelly.

The call happened the same day that I reported that the year-old school was suffering from ongoing scheduling conflicts and unexpected staffing changes that left some students without regular instruction:

Because of staff changes, space issues, and poor planning, Queens Metropolitan students have gotten new schedules as many as 10 times since September.

On Monday, up to three periods of classes were canceled for many 10th-grade students, who sat in the auditorium and cafeteria as administrators feverishly worked to hash out new schedules, according to accounts from parents, students, and staff.

At a PTA meeting Tuesday night, parents also complained that some classes are without teachers, physical education instruction isn’t happening, and that their students aren’t receiving grades for some coursework.

An ad for today's Occupy movement protests

The city stepped in this afternoon to stop Occupy Wall Street protests from derailing the school day.

Fueled by a message posted on the protest movement’s website, rumors spread earlier today that the schools would be dismissing students early. “National Day of Action” protests in Lower Manhattan, which have grown increasingly tense over the course of the day are timed to the movement’s two-month anniversary and come soon after a city crackdown. The protests are set to spread to subway stations across the city at 3 p.m. and to the steps of the Department of Education’s headquarters at 4:30 p.m.

City officials quickly acted to quash the early-dismissal rumors. On Twitter, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson and the DOE’s official account both sent messages assuring followers that the school day would proceed as planned. Wolfson said early dismissal was “never discussed.” And Chancellor Dennis Walcott emailed principals to tell them not to dismiss students early “as a result of any protests.”

“Rumors indicating that school will be closed early are false,” Walcott wrote in an email with the subject line “Today is a full school day.”

Middle schools, which have long been scheduled to dismiss students early because of parent-teacher conferences, did end classes early as planned.

Later this afternoon, two Occupy-affiliated protests are scheduled to converge at the DOE’s Tweed Headquarters, where a protest 10 days ago attracted a large crowd. (more…)

The start of the city’s eight-month kindergarten admissions season isn’t until January, but Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer already has kindergarten on his mind.

Today, Stringer is sending a letter to Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott with suggestions for making the anxiety-producing admissions process easier on families and schools.

The current kindergarten admissions process has families registering for their local schools starting in January. By March, many schools are already maintaining wait lists. Between then and the first day of school, the lists thin out as families move, choose private school, or win admission to charter schools or specialized programs at other schools, which have different application deadlines. Most of the time, families that stay on the wait lists end up being able to attend their zoned schools — but only after months of worry and searching for back-up options.

“This is particularly problematic in school zones that are historically overcrowded because parents can experience months of unnecessary anxiety as their children sit on waitlists that often turn out to be, for lack of a better term, ‘fictional,’ Stringer writes in the letter.

The letter outlines steps the city could take to streamline the admissions process, for many families a first contact with the DOE’s bureaucracy. (more…)

• District 2′s parent council rejected a rezoning plan that it had questioned. (SchoolBook, Tribeca Trib)
• The principal of P.S. 1 also questioned the plan to send Tribeca students to Chinatown. (Tribeca Trib)
• Queens Metropolitan High School is in disarray after months of scheduling problems. (GothamSchools)
• Downtown parents and officials are fighting to save P.S. 137 from possible closure. (Downtown Express)
• A Bronx principal is under investigation after being accused of making lewd comments to teachers. (Post)
• Math and science teachers were honored for their teaching. (GothamSchools, SchoolBook, Daily News)
• The DOE’s “chief parent,” Jesse Mojica, outlined plans for the DOE’s Parent Academy. (Queens Gazette)
• An affordable housing project in Hunters Point, Queens, will include an 1,100-seat school. (Crain’s NY)
• New Jersey’s NCLB waiver bid promises to make getting federal aid contingent on school change. (WSJ)

• Mayoral candidate Tom Allon has offered to take the UFT’s Michael Mulgrew to Finland. (Crain’s NY)
• Actor Cynthia Nixon, a longtime city schools activist, likes Bill de Blasio for mayor. (Capital Tonight)
• A look at what protesting city parents could teach “the 1-percent education reformers.” (The Awl)
• Local groups are in on a national effort to ask the feds to give more money to needy schools. (EdVox)
• An explainer on the Common Core curriculum standards for New York City parents. (Insideschools)
• A principal says the city should grade middle schools on students’ high school readiness. (SchoolBook)
• Without mentioning Rochester, Chicago’s schools chief discusses his own school search. (Big City Belly)
• Part II of another interview with Chicago’s schools chief touches on unions. (Charting My Own Course)
• An Illinois teacher was suspended for showing students Jon Stewart clips about Herman Cain. (HuffPo)
• A charter advocate recaps what Steve Brill said when our Geoff Decker interviewed him. (Chalkboard)
• A mom chronicles the difficulties in advocating for her son, who has autism. (Insideschools)
• Education Week has launched a set of news stories about labor-district collaboration. (Teacher Beat)
• Another Race to the Top round (the third) focuses on science education; N.Y. can’t enter. (Politics K-12)
• Jimmy Fallon channels Jim Morrison channeling the “Reading Rainbow” theme song. (YouTube)

The cover of NYSUT's evaluation handbook

This school year, New York State school districts and their teachers unions are spending a lot of time hammering out local agreements about adopting the state’s new mandated teacher evaluation system, required by June. While 40 percent of that system is predetermined by student test scores, myriad unanswered questions surround the remaining “subjective” 60 percent:

Should formal observations be announced in advance? Should teachers be entitled to discuss their own observations with administrators afterwards? Should student surveys have weight in evaluations?

Today, the state teachers union unveiled what it’s calling a “groundbreaking” roadmap to answering those questions that it hopes local unions will use as they sit down to negotiate. Based on work that was piloted last year in six districts across the state with funding from the AFT and the Obama administration’s Investing in Innovation competition, New York State United Teachers’ “Teacher Evaluation and Development” system carves out a role for teachers to participate in their own evaluations.

TED represents a shift from defense to offense for NYSUT, which sued this summer to stop the state from allowing districts to increase the weight of test scores in teacher evaluations.

The roadmap is broken down into four phases, each involving teachers in the evaluation process, that are outlined in a 95-page guidance handbook available on the union’s website. (more…)

A screenshot from the Facebook event advertising a rally to support Juan Morel Campos Secondary School

Community meetings at schools that the Department of Education is considering closing have started attracting a new constituency: students.

That’s because the meetings, which the DOE calls “early engagement conversations,” are now being held at high schools. Until this week, all of the meetings had happened at elementary and middle schools, for which the city released a shortlist of potential closures in September.

One meeting took place Monday evening at Wadleigh Secondary School for Performing Arts, where some members of the school community are arguing that its progress report data aren’t bad enough to warrant closure. Last night, students made the case for keeping Manhattan’s High School of Graphic Communications Arts open. And today, students have recruited crowds to defend Juan Morel Campos Secondary School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Tiffany Munoz, a Juan Morel Campos junior who was student body president last year, said students were alarmed when they heard that the school could close and quickly invited hundreds of current and former students to a Facebook event, “Save Juan Morel Campos Secondary School (I.S. 71) From Being Closed.” Tonight, when the school’s superintendent meets with community members, 150 students who RSVPed yes plan to let her know that the school is a tight-knit community with a thriving arts and music program where teachers push students to do their very best. (more…)