GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Chancellor Dennis Walcott prepares to read to a group of 4-year-olds at the Bank Street Head Start center in November. (GothamSchools)

New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) is at risk of losing a $190 million grant, after the federal government included it on a list of 132 substandard Head Start agencies across the country this week.

Head Start is the half-century-old federal preschool program for low-income children. ACS, among the oldest and largest Head Start agencies in the country, did not meet the “quality thresholds” set by the federal Office of Head Start, according to a list made public Tuesday by the Administration for Children & Families, which oversees the program.

Educators and advocates said the announcement could mean major upheaval for ACS, which serves 120,000 children and families in New York City and oversees contracts for 250 Head Start centers.

“It would have a huge impact,” said Nina Piros, director of early childhood programs for University Settlement, which runs two Head Start centers on the Lower East Side under a contract with ACS. “If ACS does lose its grant, then delegate agencies will be out of business, to put it mildly,” she added, referring to the centers that contract with ACS.

“There’s a lot of jaws that dropped,” said Steven Antonelli, administrative director of the Head Start program at the Bank Street College of Education. (more…)

The Department of Education will start 2012 without a longtime official who has supervised number-crunching about test scores.

Jennifer Bell-Ellwanger, a two-decade veteran of the city schools who is currently a senior advisor to Chancellor Dennis Walcott, was picked last week to be Baltimore’s first schools “achievement and accountability officer.” Starting Jan. 3, she will head data efforts for Superintendent Andres Alonso, himself a product of New York City’s central schools administration. (She is already listed as chief accountability officer on Baltimore Public Schools’ website.)

The city will select a replacement within a month to take over Bell-Ellwanger’s responsibilities, which include managing research and analysis about the city schools and working with the state to align the two education departments’ policy agendas.

“She has built a strong and effective team, and I’m confident the DOE will remain in good hands,” Walcott said in a statement. “I thank Jennifer for her contributions and look forward to seeing all the great work that comes out of Baltimore.”

Bell-Ellwanger’s departure comes just weeks after the state’s seven-year data chief, David Abrams, resigned abruptly. His resignation followed the leak of a memo about much longer state tests. The two departures leave the city and state with key vacancies at a time when efforts to revamp assessment programs are ramping up. (more…)

Supporters of Washington Irving High School protested the school's planned closure this morning.

It was still dark this morning when Steve Morris rolled up in front of Washington Irving High School on his bike.

Morris had been the school’s librarian until last summer, when the struggling school cut him from its staff roster and shuttered the library. Now he was on his way to the Brandeis High School building as a member of the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of position-less teachers who are shuffled to a different school each week.

But first he wanted to offer silent support to his former students and colleagues who, along with parents and union officials, had filled Irving’s front steps to protest the Department of Education’s plan to close the school.

“I’ll be the last librarian this school ever has,” Morris told me wistfully before pedaling north on Irving Place.

Irving is one of 25 schools the city has proposed closing or shrinking this year. The century-old high school near Union Square got an F on its most recent progress report, down from C’s in the previous two years.

In a series of spirited chats and statements, the protesters argued that the deck had long been stacked against the school. (more…)

In my last post, I made the case for why educators should collaboratively develop and share curriculum materials. Now I’ll offer some ideas about just how that can be done in a world that seems set up to keep teachers working in isolation.

The opportunity presented by the widespread adoption of the Common Core Standards can be harnessed by a collaborative design model that has proven extremely effective in the field of software development. This model is known as “open source.” When you hear that term, you most likely think of “free software,” and much of the open source movement has been oriented around concepts of equity in access that lends itself to that conception. But what has been most revolutionary in the open source approach is not simply that the products created are sometimes free, but rather that the process of production is entirely transparent and accessible to anyone based on a GNU-style license of software code. This license turns the traditional notion of property on its head by basing ownership upon the right of distribution, rather than exclusion (for more about this concept and the success of the open source model, read Steven Weber’s provocative and insightful book).

If we agree that public education is indeed “public,” and therefore part of the commons, then it is no great stretch to suggest that the content we teach to our students should also be purveyed with transparent and accountable public access. The fact that most of our curriculum — when it is even acknowledged — is developed under proprietary license speaks to the fundamentally flawed priorities of our society. Do we consider it more important to protect the rights of corporations than that of children? In the field of education, unfortunately, this question is far more than rhetorical.

I strongly believe that the curriculum we design and implement, as in open-source software, should be produced and distributed under a non-proprietary license, such as the now well established Creative Commons license. This will open access to curriculum to anyone who finds it useful and applicable, whether a home-schooler, a private school, charter school, or public school teacher. It allows anyone to take that content and modify it as they see necessary, so long as they give credit to the makers of the content they used. And when they modify it, they can then present their modifications back to the community, to be embraced and modified yet further. (more…)

• Cornell’s tech campus plan promised programs for 10,000 public school students a year. (Crain’s NY)
• State tests are growing longer this year. (GothamSchools, Post, Times, WSJ, Daily News)
• City Council: The city must tell parents about school PCBs. (Daily News, SchoolBook, Gotham Gazette)
• The city is planning to add a middle school to Brooklyn Heights’ popular P.S. 8. (Brooklyn Paper)
• A dispute over legal liability is holding up city contracts for federally funded “restart.” (GothamSchools)
• Delaware is the first to threaten rescinding Race to the Top funds for non-compliance. (News Journal)
• In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to match school offerings to available jobs. (WSJ)
• A push is underway to include student voice in teacher evaluations under Chicago’s next contract. (CNC)
• All Newark students will start taking the ACT this year to test their college readiness. (N.J. Spotlight)

• A dad says the city’s school policies are the best — when it comes to winter holidays. (Insideschools)
• In which the process of educating students is compared to baking a coconut cake. (Boston Globe)
• In South Korea’s much lauded schools, a single exam determines students’ entire future. (Economist)
• A look back at one year as a school librarian, and forward to the next year. (Education on the Plate)
• Crowd-sourced nominees for “transformational” schools in New York and elsewhere. (Sam Chaltain)
• Among 26 facts about Finland’s schools: many students go to vocational schools. (Business Insider)
• The college counselor at Abraham Lincoln High School serves 2,600 students. (SchoolBook)
• A city teacher argues for open-source curriculum to help educators feel less isolated. (GS Community)
• Advancing the idea that not all teachers have to devote themselves to poor children. (Mike Goldstein)
• Following up with a class of children promised college tuition, 23 years later. (Washington Post)
• An ethnic achievement gap is detected within a racial achievement gap in Seattle. (Ed Week)
• The president of Stuyvesant’s Board Games Club, a senior, was struck and killed by a car. (Daily News)
• A look at what’s keeping Chris Cerf “acting” as New Jersey’s schools chief after a year. (N.J. Spotlight)
• Behind Justin Bieber’s music and $100,000 donation is a scrappy Las Vegas principal. (Answer Sheet)
• Two Los Angeles teachers issued a Christmas rap against looming school busing cuts. (GOOD)
• Thanks to all the readers making end-of-year donations! Support local education journalism by Dec. 31.

Elementary and middle school students across the state will sit for more than four hours of math and reading tests this spring.

The total number of testing minutes has more than doubled in the last two years for third- and fifth-graders and is higher than last year in all grades, according to the state’s assessment schedule, which it released today. On average, students will spend an hour longer taking tests in 2012 than they did last April.

The total testing time is far lower than threatened in an SED memo that was leaked last month, which suggested that students might spend more than two hours in a single day taking tests. (The state’s seven-year testing chief resigned abruptly days after the leak.) But it still reflects a sharp increase as the state works to toughen tests following a 2010 revelation that previous scores had been vastly inflated.

In April, all students in elementary and middle school will spend three days each on reading and math exams. Last year, each test lasted only two days, with the exception of elementary-grade reading tests. (more…)

A dispute over who would take the fall if something goes wrong inside struggling schools is delaying a federally funded turnaround effort that had already gotten off to a slow start.

As part of its application to secure school improvement grants, the city agreed to hand over operations to independent education organizations at 14 of its lowest-performing schools through a process called “restart.” The Department of Education selected six nonprofits to take over the reins at those schools, awarding them more than $17 million altogether.

But four months after the groups started working in the schools, the money remains in the city coffers.

The sticking point is that city lawyers want the groups, known as educational partnership organizations, to cover their own legal costs for any litigation brought by teachers, principals, staff or students in the schools they’re working in.

The proposition is controversial because the groups are replacing an authority figure — the superintendent — who does not actually carry any of the liability costs. The DOE is effectively an insurance carrier for superintendents, so when a lawsuit challenges, for example, a teacher rating that the superintendent signed off on, the DOE bears the legal costs.

The EPOs said they assumed they would have the same protection against legal liability, known as indemnification, because the state’s regulations mandate that they adopt all of the roles and responsibilities of each school’s superintendent. But according to several EPO directors, the city’s initial contract language treats them like vendors providing services to the schools, not managing everything from hiring to budgeting to discipline.

“It’s been several months of frustration over what we see as a fairly straightforward issue,” said a program director from one of the EPOs. “We feel we should be covered to the same extent that a superintendent would be covered in the case of a lawsuit.” (more…)

In my last post on the necessity for a coherent, ground-level consensus on the content that we deliver to our nation’s children, I concluded with a reference to the disturbing reality of teachers planning lessons alone. Picture a teacher sitting alone at his desk, planning lessons for his students. It’s after a long day of teaching. That teacher may not be a content expert in the subject he is planning, given that teachers are generally managed as public employee widgets (described well in The New Teacher Project’s 2009 policy paper, “The Widget Effect”) and thrown into different grades and different subject areas each year, nor trained specifically in a given content area.

Why is this proverbial teacher alone? Why doesn’t he have the guidance of other experts in that content area to guide his task analysis, aside from some glossy multi-colored binders of biblical proportions with large fonts and tons of sidebars (“teacher-friendly”) that came along with his district’s purchased curriculum? Why isn’t this teacher sitting with other educators during a scheduled, paid time of his day?

Herein, I believe, lies the rotten core of our educational woes: Teachers working in isolation from each other and from content experts, with only the curriculum purchased by their district — and manufactured by a major corporation or educational institution — to reference their work. Some may think that a well developed textbook and resources (we’ll pretend for a moment it’s “well developed”) should be reference enough for a teacher, but that material tends to be distant from the actual needs of the students that a teacher has before them. Most teachers — especially teachers of children with exceptional learning needs, English language learners, and/or students living in poverty — must adapt, jerryrig, recreate, or otherwise MacGuyver whatsoever material that can be scrounged on-line, bought on their own dime, or obtained from other teachers. This necessary process of drastically modifying curriculum is what is known as “differentiation” (and thus is generally reviled by practitioners).

But teachers shouldn’t have to desperately reinvent authentic, meaningful, and cognitively challenging (better than “rigorous,” ain’t it?) lessons out of blood, sweat, and duct tape. (more…)

• The city is investigating outsized Regents pass rate gains at Metropolitan Diploma Plus HS. (Daily News)
• Students at Lower Manhattan’s Marta Valle High School say discipline issues are out of control. (Post)
• With pre-kindergarten slots scarce, some middle-class families are setting up pre-K coops. (Times)
• New York did not win Race to the Top funds for early childhood education. (GothamSchools, Post, WSJ)
• Students and parents at Legacy High School say their school shouldn’t be closed. (GothamSchools)
• Michael Winerip: New York State’s 10-year path to the current accountability moment is tortuous. (Times)
• More students went to summer school this year and more were promoted. (GothamSchools, SchoolBook)
• The basketball coach at Campus Magnet HS is the first in the city to win 700 games. (Times, Daily News)
• A Bensonhurst middle school set a city record last year by suspending 32 students for sexting. (Post)
• A 9-year-old boy died after choking on his lunch at P.S. 47 earlier this month. (Post, NY1, Daily News)
• At Astoria’s P.S 234, a damaged gym means P.E. class includes movie-watching. (Daily News)
• The Staten Island Advance questions what can be gained by replacing one zoned school with another.
• The founder of Turnaround for Children explains how her group helps struggling schools. (Daily News)
• A BMCC student describes how the city’s stop-and-frisk policies have constrained his behavior. (Times)
• The health department is investigating reports of possible food poisoning at Canarsie’s P.S. 112. (NY1)
• A look at P.S. 215 and Peninsula Prep, two Rockaway schools that the city could close. (Daily News)
• “Babby,” the admissions director at the private Dalton School is seen as a gatekeeper to success. (Times)
• Across the country, school districts are making rules about teacher-student online interaction. (Times)
• Los Angeles’s new teachers contract rolls back an innovative policy that let outsiders run schools. (AP)
• Florida officials are set to okay new standards that would make state tests harder to pass. (Sun-Sentinel)
• A description of a protest-filled Chicago school board meeting and how the chair handled things. (Times)