GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Diversity in American teachers isn’t keeping up with student populations, a study shows. (HuffPo)
• Debating the facts and fiction of a new white sheet on value-added analysis. (Shanker Blog)
• Accounts of  the UFT’s monthly delegate meeting show deep rifts on ATR issue. (NYC ATR)
• Two bills seek to give parents more notice when PCBs are found in their schools. (Insideschools)
• An Ivy League college president wins over first-generation American students. (The Choice)
• In a report, New Orleans students say their experience hasn’t matched the city’s claims. (Colorlines)
• Poor college-readiness rates are latest example of Bloomberg’s failed policies. (Village Voice)
• A Washington Square Park protest birthed from OWS will take on education. (People’s University)
• Happy 11-11-11! Today’s date is once-in-a-century) (New York Times Archives, via The Atlantic)

The State Education Department is considering relaxing some requirements for how students with special needs are served, a cost-cutting bid that has advocates worried.

The state has asked the Board of Regents to approve a slate of “mandate relief” measures at its monthly meeting next week. The measures that SED wants lifted include the requirement that a psychologist weigh in every time disabled students’ individualized education plans are changed and the prescription of specific tests when a student who is suspected of having a disability is first evaluated.

Currently, school psychologists are full-time members of special education committees that make all decisions related to a student’s IEP, but the new regulation would only require them to consult on initial IEP meetings.

In addition, the new regulations would no longer require psychological evaluations, speech and language tests and assessments from therapists, all of which are currently conducted when a student is first diagnosed.

Such services are costly and districts complain that the mandates go above and beyond what is required for many of their students. New York, the country’s top-spending state in per-pupil special education services, has about 200 more special education mandates in place than the federal government requires, and SED argues that the extra requirements are restrictive for local districts.  (more…)

With their discretionary funds eliminated and their schools’ budgets deflated, city teachers are supplicating strangers to fill in the gaps.

There are 1,793 projects posted by city teachers – mostly from high poverty schools – on DonorsChoose, a website that allows teachers across the country to describe small-scale projects that need funding. The requests paint a depressing picture of what many classrooms are lacking.

There are the occasional requests for cutting edge technology, such as iPads, tablets and digital cameras. And many of the more ambitious projects range from the creative (violins, costumes, wireless microphones) to the healthy (soccer balls, juicers, pedometers) to the icky (fetal pigs, butterfly larvae, composting worms). But most teachers seem to be asking for classroom staples such as pens, paper, and glue.

Here’s what we saw when we checked out DonorsChoose today:

• More than half of all NYC projects relate to literacy and language, a focus of the Department of Education’s this year. Many teachers, hoping to make their reading areas more appealing, are asking for beanbag chairs, rugs, library shelves and books. Ms. Coneys, from Thurgood Marshall Academy in Manhattan, is requesting a class set of “Things Fall Apart”  for her students. She writes: “School supplies have become less of a priority, and asking students to go out and buy a book they have never heard of is even more difficult. That being said, it’s apparent that my students have the desire to learn something new.” (more…)

Designer John Murphy uses the SMALLab at ChicagoQuest school.

What does a digital classroom look like? Some schools roll smartboards and carts of computers into each classroom. At others, students plug into iPads at every desk to play interactive learning games.

The Institute of Play envisions a different picture: A dark, empty classroom with the window shades pulled shut, where a life-size computer game board is projected onto the linoleum floor, and students act as both the players and joysticks to accomplish problem-solving tasks.

There are only a handful classroom “labs” like this in the country that serve as a testing ground for “embedded learning environment” games, and a New York City middle school houses one of them.

The Institute of Play is a non-profit research group that studies the relationship between game-playing, learning and engagement. It is also one arm of the team behind the NYC Quest to Learn School, which opened in 2009 in Manhattan.

I will be visiting the school later this month to see how these classroom innovations are changing the way students learn now that the school is well into its third year. But last week I stopped at the school’s recently opened sister school, ChicagoQuest, while in Chicago for a Hechinger Institute conference about reporting on digital learning.

At ChicagoQuest, which is as a charter school and receives funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, each of its 234 sixth- and seventh-graders have an iPad. They use it to take notes, search the internet, and play games themed around concepts such as fractions and geography.

Though they are only a few weeks into the school year, students at the new school said they have very positive first impressions of the iPad-based lesson plans. One said she prefers taking notes on the iPad over traditional pen-and-paper methods because, “Even though it’s not as fast, we can do a lot more with it,” by changing up the formatting of the text and linking certain notes or phrases to each other.

Though students can be more prone to distraction when the internet (and, in this case, the popular portrait-taking program PhotoBooth) are readily available, Patrick Hoover, the curriculum specialist, said teaches have a simple but district disciplinary policy has kept goofing-off at bay: use the iPad improperly once, and it is taken away for the rest of the class period.  (more…)

The Department of Education’s Innovation Zone is poised to bring home millions of dollars in federal innovation funding for the second year in a row.

The Obama administration yesterday released a list of 23 Investing in Innovation grant applicants that it wants to fund. The groups, culled from nearly 600 applicants, will share a $150 million pool of funding. The groups have until next month to line up matching funds from other sources to secure their grants.

The DOE’s InnovateNYC program landed high on the list of applicants aiming to bolster science and technology education, putting it in line to receive $3 million in federal funding. The department will use the funding to connect its Office of Innovation with private partners and other school districts as it designs technologies for schools, according to Chancellor Dennis Walcott.

“There is so much potential for technology as a tool that helps students get on track for college and careers — but right now, engineers and developers need a better understanding of the challenges facing New York City and other urban school districts,” he said in a statement.

Last year, when the Obama administration made $650 million available, another city Innovation Zone program, School of One, won $5 million to develop its computerized math teaching program. (School of One is part of InnovateNYC.) But the city’s request for innovation funding for other purposes, such as to open new small schools, was turned down. (more…)

• After a shooting near his school, Geoffrey Canada is helping police combat gun violence. (Daily News)
• More New York schools are now failing under NCLB. (GothamSchools, Post, NY1, Daily News, AP)
• The School for International Studies is struggling to make itself a destination school. (GothamSchools)
• P.S. 361 in Flatbush is dealing with bedbugs for the 31st time in a year. (Daily News)
• The DOE has dropped an investigation into corporal punishment at In-Tech Academy. (Riverdale Press)
• The city’s top specialized high schools have recently become cross-country powerhouses. (Times)
• The Regents’ support for a state DREAM Act is sparking hope for undocumented students’ options. (NY1)
• Small schools in rural Texas are benefiting from wind energy generated on their grounds. (Times)

• Long Island principals are deepening their opposition to new teacher evaluations. (Norm’s Notes)
• “I want my students to ignore me,” an elementary school ESL teacher writes. (D Mac Teaches)
• Andy Rotherham: Questions about teacher compensation are not easy. (School of Thought)
• One of the groups fleshing out curriculum standards released final frameworks. (Curriculum Matters)
• The average Mexican only attends eight years of school, but officials aren’t too worried. (The Nation)
• The USDOE announced top-scoring applicants in its Investing in Innovation competition. (Politics K-12)
• A Miami teacher lists five things school reformers say that teachers aren’t into. (Rick Hess Straight Up)
• A look into a dual-language program at Brooklyn’s P.S. 24. (Feet in Two Worlds)

Last month, state education officials warned the Board of Regents in their monthly meeting that New York State was facing a “tsunami” of new schools that would be out of compliance with federal guidelines.

Today, the first wave hit.

The number of new schools that failed to show sufficient progress skyrocketed by more than 700 percent this year, state officials announced today. They identified 847 new schools statewide – compared with just 102 new schools last year – that need to improve in order to meet the state’s proficiency standards. The total number of schools on the list is now at 1325, up from 501 a year ago.

Just 23 schools showed enough progress to be removed from the list.

Schools that need more improvement won’t face immediate penalties. The list is considered a way to measure adequate yearly progress (AYP) as part of the federal No Child Left Behind law, which has a requirement of achieving 100 percent proficiency in 2014.

Those expectations have widely been acknowledged to be unreasonable, however. In October, President Obama announced that states could apply for a waiver from the 2014 proficiency goals as long as they agree to comply with new standards that are more in line with his reform agenda. New York State officials have quickly moved to apply for the waiver and plans to submit to the federal government next year. (more…)

A District 6 town hall meeting with Chancellor Dennis Walcott got a little unruly last night in the auditorium of Washington Heights’ P.S.48, to the point where both Walcott and Judith Amaro, president of District 6’s Community Education Council, had to ask audience members to be respectful.

Washington Heights parents use posters to help get their message across at last night's town hall

High school junior Brandon Alexander, 16, passes a mixing bowl to School for International Studies culinary arts teacher Mayra Valdes in the school's basement kitchen.

For Principal Fred Walsh, every student counts.

That’s because his school enrolls fewer students than the Department of Education says it should.

With this in mind, Walsh tries to begin each school day by shaking hands with each student who walks through the doors of the Brooklyn School for International Studies, and, ideally, end them shaking hands with prospective parents from Cobble Hill’s elementary schools. In addition to handshakes, Walsh shares with local parents promises of the school’s growing elective programs in journalism and culinary arts and, for the first time this fall, polished brochures touting those programs.

Walsh says his dogged efforts to sell International Studies to Brooklyn families are necessary but also distracting from the task of running a school for fewer than 500 students. They highlight an unintended side effect of the Bloomberg administration’s “system of schools” in which high school and many middle school students select their schools: Few schools are many students’ first choice. And when too few students enroll, schools end up being saddled with students who made no choice at all.

That’s the situation that Walsh is trying to head off. At a time when most local parents are choosing to send their children elsewhere, Walsh is working hard to bring attention to his mid-performing neighborhood school. His attempts have ranged from the ambitious (building a state-of-the-art kitchen) to the bluntly pragmatic (hiring a public relations consultant).

But competition over students and Walsh’s old under-the-radar approach has caused the school’s enrollment to yo-yo and, over time, decline by nearly 10 percent since it opened with 512 students in 2004. The decline signalled trouble to the DOE, and opened the doors to increasing numbers of high-needs students.

And the small boost in enrollment the school saw last year—from a low of 445 to 481—might be too little too late: Next year the school is likely to be joined by a new Success Academy charter school in the squat, four-story building on Baltic Street it already shares with two other schools.

Last month the Department of Education identified the Brownstone Brooklyn building as the prime site for the charter school because both International Studies and the School for Global Studies, the school upstairs, have many more open seats than students in grades 6 through 12 to fill them. That means, the DOE says, that there is room in the building to spare.

Before the announcement, Walsh said he worried that both schools would have to increase class sizes and cut programs once they start sharing space with the charter school, which would open with 190 kindergarteners and first-graders next fall and slowly grow into a full-sized elementary school after that.

And even though International did not make the city’s list of potential closures this year, community members say they are worried that the DOE could close or move it in the future.

The only way to escape the pressure, Walsh said, is to raise International Studies’ profile. (more…)