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Friday was the last day of school for Henry Rubio, the principal of A. Philip Randolph High School, but he’s leaving behind more than just memories.

Two weeks ago, Rubio announced to his staff that he was resigning as principal after five years at the school to take a job with the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators. We reported that an open investigation into fraudulent credit accumulation at Randolph under his watch was closed. But it turns out that the information came to us - inaccurately - from a spokeswoman for the principal’s union.

An investigation into Rubio concluded on Thursday and found no evidence of wrongdoing on his part, according to Chiara Coletti, a CSA spokeswoman. She said the union had waited until Rubio was cleared of suspicions before giving him the job, as a member of the union’s “supervisory support panel” that helps the Department of Education mentor principals. A prerequisite for that job, Coletti said, is that candidates must be “standing principals,” and the investigation had put Rubio’s status temporarily in jeopardy.

Since then, we’ve confirmed that no investigations have been closed with the office that is probing the school, the Special Commissioner of Investigation. Today a SCI spokeswoman confirmed that an investigation is still very much open at the school, but declined to comment further on the case. (more…)

“I was raised on TV / Movies and magazines / Mama told me to believe/ I could be everything …”

That’s the opening verse to “Where Does the Time Go?,” a song co-written by 10 students at East Fordham Academy for the Arts in the Bronx. Fueled by coffee and nerves, the students, all middle school girls, took turns crooning into microphones at a recording studio in SoHo this afternoon.

According to sixth-grader Katherine Ocasio, the song is about their expectations for the future.

“It’s about how we feel and what we want to do,” she said. Each student was paired with a lyric about how they might envision a satisfying life to sing for the recording. “What I said was, ‘maybe I’d live in Paris.’”

When it was her turn to step into the recording booth and sing that line, Ocasio’s heart started to beat a little faster. She remembered her music teacher Zach Rifkind’s advice — keep your shoulders pulled back, and breathe from the diaphragm. (more…)

The city Department of Education is one of five large urban districts that have opened up their email Rolodexes to The New Teacher Project for a study about teacher recruitment and retention. The nonprofit group, which runs the city’s Teaching Fellows programs and studies teacher job markets around the country, sent the voluntary, 30-minute survey to about 68,000 of the city’s 80,000 teachers and one large charter school network.

The 50-question survey — which one teacher sent us in a series of screenshots, above — asks teachers what would make them want to work in, or remain in, a high-needs school.

The survey is a first step in TNTP’s efforts to produce a followup to “The Widget Effect,” according Dan Weisberg, a TNTP vice president who used to be the DOE’s chief labor negotiator. The influential 2009 report urged school districts to revamp teacher evaluations based on survey responses of 15,000 teachers from 12 districts across five states (New York City was not among them).

Now, dozens of states, including New York, are in the process of overhauling teacher evaluations. Weisberg said this year’s survey is the next step toward figuring out how to place the most effective teachers in classrooms with the neediest students. (more…)

The Department of Education is looking within itself for help creating instructional materials to go along with new curriculum standards.

The city is hiring 30 to 40 teachers and administrators with experience in curriculum development to devise literacy and math lessons that are aligned with the Common Core, the curriculum standards the state adopted this year. The “Common Core fellows” will serve as “a class of leaders,” evaluating current teaching methods and writing new instructional materials for schools to use, according to DOE spokesman Matthew Mittenthal.

The teachers who are selected will also get authorship credit when they produce new materials and overtime pay for attending workshops twice a month and during school breaks, according to a brochure soliciting applications. The program’s quarter-million-dollar price tag is being footed privately, Mittenthal said.

The department will also invite local and national curriculum experts who devised and studied the Common Core, which begins in preschool, to train the teachers on how to evaluate student work and devise good instructional practices, he said.

“The final product will be a portfolio of resources for all New York City public schools: tasks for students, best teaching practices, guidelines for evaluating a classroom, and sample student work,” Mittenthal said in an email.

Bernard Gassaway, the principal of Boys and Girls High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, said he is not sure how useful those materials would be for his teachers. The main resource he needs to align instruction to the Common Core, he said, is on-the-ground assistance and time to integrate the standards slowly. (more…)

If Mayor Bloomberg had his druthers, he would fire half the city’s teachers and pay the remaining half more to supervise twice-as-large classes.

That’s what he said during a wide-ranging speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Tuesday in which he argued that weak training, social change, and the teachers union have conspired to fill New York City’s schools with less-than-ideal teachers.

“If I had the ability, which nobody does really, to just design the system and say, ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do, you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers, and double class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students,” Bloomberg said.

Listen to the portion of the speech where Bloomberg talks schools (starting at about 5:00): 

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The comments have drawn fire from UFT President Michael Mulgrew, elected officials, and many others. But while they were provocative and unusually specific, the speech tread familiar territory for the mayor. (more…)

• To make ends meet, Brooklyn’s Ditmas Junior High School is competing for corporate prizes. (NY1)
• More on crediting issues, and efforts to solve them, at Jane Addams High School. (Daily News, Times)
• The librarian at a Harlem school that could close has recruited Cornel West to visit. (GothamSchools)
• SAT cheating was well known in a town where 20 students were arrested in a cheating ring. (Times)
• Stand for Children’s Illinois chapter is trying to remake itself after an embarrassing episode. (Times)
• Once contentious, Texas’s policy of moving money from wealthy to poor districts is now settled. (Times)

• A consulting firm has created a card game to help school leaders decide what to cut. (District Dossier)
• Circling back to “miracle schools” and finding that low scores have fallen further. (Gary Rubinstein)
• From schedules to staff lists, what to attach when submitting a charter application. (Charter Notebook)
• An inquiry into the psychology and motivations of the internet’s “angry commenters.” (Slate)
• Two-thirds of British schools were closed yesterday as teachers struck over pension changes. (BBC)
• Does the education reform movement have a persistent problem with sexism? (Alexander Russo)
• A report (by a former professor of mine!) explores improving evaluations for high school teachers. (CAP)
• A principals union official calls new evaluations “nightmares waiting to haunt” the city. (SchoolBook)
• Midway through an ed policy program, Ruben Brosbe refocuses on the classroom. (GS Community)
• Congrats to Liz Willen, the new director of Columbia’s Hechinger Institute on education reporting. (TC)
• An ATR who has been to eight schools offers sartorial observations from the road. (Chaz’s School Daze)
• A roundup of research conclusions and open questions relating to “value-added” data. (Shanker Blog)
• The Common Core has been around for a while, but associated assessments are still far off. (Flypaper)

Two weeks before the city’s school board is set to vote on a slate of controversial school changes, the Department of Education has relocated the meeting from Midtown Manhattan to central Queens.

Instead of taking place at the High School of Fashion Industries, the Dec. 14 Panel for Educational Policy meeting is now set for Newtown High School in Elmhurst, Queens, about eight miles away. On the agenda: proposals to expand schools in the Bronx and Manhattan and to co-locate charter schools in three different Brooklyn buildings.

A public hearing this week for one of those co-locations, the siting of a new Success Academy charter school in Cobble Hill, drew nearly five hours of heated testimony.

Critics of the department charge that the move was intended to squelch public comment. They’re asking the city to move the meeting again, to a location nearer to schools that would be affected by the panel’s votes.

But DOE officials said the change happened learned that construction underway on Fashion Industries’ auditorium would not be complete before Dec. 14. They said they picked Newtown as a replacement because it is near public transportation and has an adequate auditorium that was not already booked.

They also said the department tries to distribute panel meetings across the city throughout the year, and the previous schedule had four meetings in Manhattan, five in Brooklyn, two in the Bronx, and only one each in Queens and Staten Island. (more…)

McIntosh with Muriel Petioni after she spoke at Wadleigh about being one of the first black, female doctors in America

A dogged school librarian who runs a speaker series at his struggling Harlem school has recruited the provocative scholar Cornel West to be his next guest.

On Monday, West will visit Wadleigh Secondary School for The Performing and Visual Arts, which is on the city’s shortlist of schools that could be closed this year, as part of a series of initiatives led by the school’s longtime librarian, Paul McIntosh.

Over the years, McIntosh has been a bright spot amid Wadleigh’s challenges, maintaining a welcoming library that is a haven for students and attracting a diverse roster of luminaries to speak. Past visitors have included Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, “American Idol” winner Ruben Studdard, and local physicians and poets. The aim of the speaker series, McIntosh said, is to expose students to future possibilities and hook them on literature.

“We’ve tried to put young men and women in contact with people of substance from a number of disciplines,” McIntosh told me. He noted that many of the students he works with are “on the precipice of bad behavior.” He hopes that by connecting them to a variety of inspiring individuals, they can be redirected.

“If they just get a little bit of support they’ll be able to see the light and aim for their higher selves,” he said. (more…)

Last week, during a break from my graduate school education policy classes, I had the opportunity to visit my old school and spend some time with my students from the last two years of my teaching. It was a great day. The excitement and joy of the kids were truly overwhelming.

At the end of the day one of my students, a heartbreakingly adorable girl whose thick Spanish accent is slowly lightening up, told me that one of her former classmates is “mean now.” We talked briefly about this before we had to go our separate ways. Although it was a small moment in the course of the day, it sticks out in my mind now as a reminder of the profoundly multifaceted world of children.

It stands out now in stark contrast to the relatively simple, safe environment of my college classrooms. This week in my class on teacher quality we simulated a panel on teacher pay structure for the Rochester City School District. We grappled with the intricacies of teacher pay and the concerns of different stakeholders as we weighed different benefits and costs. And yet the exercise felt incredibly uncomplicated compared to the ecosystem I used to share with 25-30 children. This disconnect is one I am constantly aware of and working to bridge as I prepare for my transition from the theory of education reform to its practice. (more…)