GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The “imminent” strike that Mayor Bloomberg warned New Yorkers about three weeks ago won’t happen ― for now.

Michael Cordiello, president of Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, said today at a rally in front of City Hall that while a strike remains on the table as a bargaining tactic, school bus drivers will continue to come to work until at least the holidays are over.

After that, Cordiello said, “we will explore all options” toward having their work demands met.

Cordiello’s union, which includes 9,000 bus drivers, first threatened a strike three weeks ago after Chancellor Dennis Walcott informed them that a new busing contract bid would not include a job security provision for current drivers. In response, Walcott and Bloomberg held a joint press conference detailing the Department of Education’s contingency plan, a move that some observers criticized as unnecessarily showy. (more…)

The roots of simmering conflict between teachers and administrators at the Bronx High School of Science are in pedagogy, not personnel, according to a new article in New York Magazine.

The article offers a case study in the pitfalls of principal autonomy without teacher support — and of increasing scrutiny on teachers at schools where almost all students are high-performing.

For years, teachers at Bronx Science, one of the city’s most selective high schools, have accused Principal Valerie Reidy of micromanagement and vindictiveness. They have filed mass union complaints, resigned in droves, and gone public with stories of unsatisfactory ratings they said were not justified.

Now, Reidy is telling her side of the story, and she says she just wanted to impose a pedagogical approach called “guided discovery,” in which teachers ask students a series of questions to help them arrive at answers themselves, to help Bronx Science’s high-performing students to do even better.

Guided discovery is used to some degree at many city schools, but Reidy wanted teachers to adopt it wholesale, and right away. From the article:

Reidy lights up when she talks about guided discovery; she believes it links back to the laboratory or “inquiry”-based learning encouraged by Bronx Science’s founders. But the method is highly scripted and can make teachers used to lecturing feel more like robots than educators. “What I find is when you have teachers with a lot of alphabet soup after their name, they take the college approach: ‘I’m going to come in and expose you to my brilliance,’ ” she says. (more…)

• The principal of P.S. 198 in the Bronx resigned after investigators found she misused school funds. (Post)
• Cornel West visited Wadleigh Secondary School yesterday. (GothamSchools, SchoolBook, DNAInfo)
• Michael Powell: Mayor Bloomberg’s dismissal of class size is out of touch and not pragmatic. (Times)
• Marty Markowitz is trying and failing to get next week’s PEP meeting moved to Brooklyn. (Patch)
• An overview of Eva Moskowitz’s charter school expansion plans and motivations. (Crain’s NY)
• The city’s anti-truancy initiative is bringing peer mentoring programs to high schools. (GothamSchools)
• Pepper spray forced the evacuation of Banana Kelly High School. (Daily News, City Room, NY1)
• The city can evict churches in school space after their legal appeal failed. (Times, Daily News, NY1, WSJ)
• Rick Hess and Linda Darling-Hammond: We disagree on much but not on the role of the feds. (Times)

• A pepper spray incident at Banana Kelly High School affected the principal and 15 students. (GS Twitter)
• Brooklyn Beep Marty Markowitz asked for the PEP meeting to be moved; the DOE said no. (GS Twitter)
• Insight into the Supreme Court’s decision not to rule on church services in city schools. (GS Community)
• All 67 epithets for schoolchildren used by Headmistress Trunchbull, of “Matilda.” (The Awl via Russo)
• The DOE is launching a series of college prep talks for parents of preschoolers. (WNYC/SchoolBook)
• Students from Flushing International HS get science help from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. (Lab Dish)
• A tongue-in-cheek list of gift ideas for city teachers, from humane mousetraps to Tasers. (Insideschools)
• A Chicago teacher is producing an album of curriculum-themed pop songs. (Huffington Post)
• A leading English teacher says the Common Core is like taxes — good for adults only. (Answer Sheet)
• Faculty at Medgar Evers College are divided over how to boost graduation numbers. (Brooklyn Bureau)
• Sara Mead: President Obama’s early childhood reform efforts are “too little, too late.” (New Republic)
• On the not-quite-backed-up-by-data claim that most teachers were lackluster in school. (Shanker Blog)
• On the sticky use of stickers as a classroom management tool. (Mr. Foteah)
• An argument in favor of Newt Gingrich’s education platform, “apprenticeships” and all. (Flypaper)
• Missouri’s ed chief says she just doesn’t know yet how to help Kansas City’s schools. (District Dossier)

Students at a Harlem school that could be closed got an unlikely ally today: famed philosopher Cornel West.

West spoked to students this morning at Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing Arts as part of librarian Paul McIntosh’s long-running speaker series meant to inspire students to stay on the right track.

Wadleigh and another school in the building, Frederick Douglass Academy II, are on the Department of Education’s shortlist of schools whose performance is so weak that they could be closed.

“I think it’s unfair and unjust and I intend to fight to make sure the school’s history and legacy is preserved,” West said after the speech. “We’re not going to allow this to happen.” (more…)

By refusing the church’s latest appeal in Bronx Household of Faith v. New York City Board of Education, 11-386, the United States Supreme Court today gave a final judicial green light to the Department of Education’s controversial ban on renting schools for religious services.

While only persuasive nationally, the now-final Second Circuit ruling settles matters for multiple states within this judicial circuit (New York, Vermont, and Connecticut) but only affects those districts that want to start prohibiting services (probably few, but includes New York City).

Haven’t we been here before? In 1998, the high court declined review of a similar Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruling. And, despite these decisions and others along the way, since 2002 Bronx Household of Faith has been holding services in P.S. 15 in the Bronx. The DOE estimates that dozens of churches now rent space for Sunday services, despite courts approving Chancellor’s Regulation D-180, Section 1(Q), prohibiting the practice. Can this really be the end?

The DOE says so, releasing a statement from a senior city lawyer within hours of today’s decision that declares “Sunday, Feb. 12, 2012, is the last day that churches and other groups can use the schools for worship.”

I am taking that with a grain of salt. This controversy has raged for over a decade and most legal observers thought Bronx Household of Faith had a good chance of winning this latest round. Since the Supreme Court upheld the federal Equal Access Act in Good News Club v. Milford, 533 U.S. 98 (2001), public schools have had to treat secular and religious groups similarly in renting their facilities. As an extracurricular organization, the Good News Club was clearly conducting worship, much as a chess club would pursue its core activity, theorized the court, and, under the First Amendment, schools could not discriminate on the basis of this content.

The Second Circuit, which had sided with the district in Good News Club, clearly again fought against the tide in Bronx Household of Faith, arguing that the DOE could still decide against a church’s regular conduct of services on Sundays. Not that the DOE was required to bar the church, but it could if, in its judgment, the arrangement blurred the distinction between church and state: (more…)

Geraldine Maione, principal of William E. Grady High School, has signed onto a petition opposing the state's new teacher evaluations.

The newest signatories to a petition against the state’s new teacher evaluation system include one of the few principals who actually has experience with the new evaluations.

Geraldine Maione heads Brooklyn’s William E. Grady High School, which is among 33 “persistently low-achieving” city schools that are using the new evaluations in exchange for additional federal funds.

She told me that she opposes the new evaluations because they are so formulaic that they leave little room for principals to exercise discretion.

“When I walk in a classroom, I know when children are learning and teachers are teaching,” she said, adding that tougher evaluations aren’t necessary if principals push struggling teachers either to improve or move on.

“No teacher has a forever job if the principal is doing her job,” Maione said.

Maione is among about 30 city principals who have signed onto a position paper arguing that the state’s evaluation requirements — 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. That’s a sharp rise from last month, when hundreds of principals statewide had signed on but only two active city principals were on the list. (more…)

Marta Valle High School seniors and freshmen participating in Peer Group Connection last week

When Andy Rodriguez and Shanique Josephs told 15 Marta Valle High School freshmen last week that only half of all black and Hispanic students graduate from high school, the room grew quiet.

“That means half of you guys probably won’t graduate — according to statistics,” Josephs said. “How does that make you feel?”

Rodriguez and Josephs were very much trying to teach the freshmen in front of them, but they are not teachers. They are two of 24 Marta Valle seniors participating in Peer Group Connection, a mentoring program run by the Princeton Center for Leadership Training.

Used by more than 150 schools across the country, the program has so far been used in New York City only by elite private schools, such as Spence and Dalton. The program came to Marta Valle, the first city public school to adopt it, through Mayor Bloomberg’s year-old Interagency Task Force on Truancy, Chronic Absenteeism and School Engagement. (Washington Irving High School will start using Peer Group Connection next semester.)

“We’ve been doing this program for so long in elite private schools so we love being able to mirror that experience for students in more high-need communities,” said Margo Ross, PCLT’s senior director of development.

While the range of schools have different needs — and adjust their mentoring curriculum accordingly — the essence of the model remains the same. PGC calls for select seniors to enroll in a full-year, credit-bearing course which meets daily and trains them to be peer leaders. The course is co-taught by two teachers who have gotten special training. Once a week the seniors visit freshmen advisories for an “outreach class” in which they lead activities and discussions about relevant topics such as graduation, goal-setting, and decision-making.

Seniors get credits towards graduation and a sense of responsibility. Freshmen get peer role models and help making the tough transition into high school — something that experts say is essential to keep them from dropping out. (more…)

• A probe into transcript-tampering at John F. Kennedy HS took more than five years to complete. (Post)
• Principal Sharron Smalls of Jane Addams HS is drawing fire for her Facebook picture, too. (Daily News)
• After press coverage, a Brooklyn power company gave $25,000 to I.S. 318′s chess team. (Daily News)
• The Times says the city should better prepare students for college but notes it is not alone in falling short.
• A bus driver was suspended after getting lost while transporting special education students. (Daily News)
• Two academics says improving curriculum is more important than boosting teacher quality. (Daily News)
• A Park Slope mom says she finds the middle school choice process is good for her son. (Brooklyn Paper)
• The Supreme Court could soon rule on whether a Bronx church can use a public school for services. (AP)

And beyond:

• Dozens of schools across the country are using Khan Academy’s free digital learning tools. (Times)
• A D.C. mom argues that school choice has deprived many urban students of community schools. (Times)
• The Obama administration advised schools on how to use race in admissions to built diversity. (WSJ)
• Michael Winerip: The Marines have built resources to help children whose parents are deployed. (Times)
• Even in suburban high schools, the impact of economic recession on students’ lives is evident. (Times)
• Response to Chicago’s plan to close or overhaul 21 schools, which vary in quality, was swift. (Times)
• An alternative school in San Francisco tries everything to get truant students to come to classes. (Times)
• The proportion of Israeli public religious schools that are gender-segregated has risen sharply. (Haaretz)
• An investigative reporter says the food lobby is unduly influencing the quality of school lunches. (Times)

• USDOE and the Department of Justice released advice for how schools can legally integrate. (Ed.gov)
• A task force of state legislators is backing a resolution opposing the Common Core standards. (Ed Week)
• Chicago is joining a privately-funded initiative for district-charter collaborations. (Catalyst Chicago)
• Japanese double dutch jump-rope teams performed at P.S. 75 to promote exercise. (Schoolbook)
• A New York Times blog has a fill-in-the-blank quiz on historical December events. (Learning Network)
• Analysis of No Child Left Behind waiver proposals from 11 states show “vastly different” foci. (Ed Week)
• In Georgia, professors are teaching undocumented students barred from traditional universities. (CNN)