GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Graphic Communication Arts juniors Lissy Alcantara and Kianne Martinez and senior Aziza Ramsay show off the video on HIV awareness they shot and produced at FACES NY.

Just days after their school was spared from closure, students from Manhattan’s High School of Graphic Communication Arts showcased fruits of the school’s longstanding Career and Technical Education program.

Founded as the High School of Printing in 1925, Graphic Communication Arts has offered students hands-on training in photography and visual arts since a time when CTE programs were called vocational schools.

Now, through a workplace learning program funded by the city’s Department of Education and the federal government, dozens of students at the Hell’s Kitchen school are working as interns at private and public sector companies — 16 businesses this fall. More than 50 students also participated in summer internships that ran the gamut from print-production to photography to legal services.

Four of the students are putting their academic-year training in photo and film editing to use at FACES NY, a social services agency that helps at-risk populations with HIV/AIDS prevention. Earlier this year the interns shot and produced a video about HIV awareness, which they are promoting via a Facebook page and a Tumblr blog they maintain for the agency.

The mini-documentary they produced was as much a lesson in professionalism as film editing, according to the three students I met Tuesday, because it required them to talk to peers about sexuality and other difficult subjects. (more…)

• Few seniors at Jane Addams HS are at risk of not graduating, but concerns persist. (SchoolBook, NY1)
• A vetoed vendor is involved again as the state restarts plans to build a promised student database. (WSJ)
• At a struggling charter school in Harlem, parents pushed for board members’ ouster. (GothamSchools)
• Co-location plans for two Success Academy charter schools will be voted on tonight. (Daily News)
• A pro-Cobble Hill charter school mom explains why the neighborhood needs the school. (Daily News)
• A mother at one of the schools that would be affected makes the case against co-location. (Daily News)
• The Bronx Borough President filled his slot on the PEP the day before the meeting. (GothamSchools)
• The UFT is supplying four buses so protesters can get to Queens for the PEP meeting. (Daily News)
• An audit by the comptroller found the DOE overspent on school food. (GothamSchools, Daily News)
• A mother says P.S. 327 sent her son home with an aide, against city rules, after suspending him. (NY1)
• The city’s plan to replace a Staten Island school raises questions about what will change. (S.I. Advance)
• The DOE’s annual arts report shows little impact from budget cuts. (GothamSchools, SchoolBook)
• Two-thirds of New Orleans parents say the city’s schools are better than before Katrina. (Times-Picayune)
• A Long Island principal who says he was fired for not changing an athlete’s grades is suing. (Post)

• Chicago teachers weigh in on the school-time debate with 49 ways to use their time better. (Viva Project)
• A Detroit ed official says creating a parent leadership network was one of his best decisions. (HuffPo)
• John Merrow: If teachers come from the bottom third, it’s of the top third: college graduates. (HuffPo)
• About the essay “If I Were A Poor Black Kid”: It wasn’t written by a poor black kid. (Forbes)
• Now you too can be like the Florida school board member and take standardized tests. (Answer Sheet)
• Mark Fusco: Students lose out when there is high teacher turnover, as at some schools. (GS Community)
• A conference in D.C. today tackled how to train teachers on formative assessment. (Teacher Beat)
• An exploration of the Times’ online-school parent’s other, less good options. (Starting an Ed School)
• Mike Petrilli: Now we need policies that guarantee high quality among online schools. (Flypaper)
• Alliance for Quality Education: Suggestions for how to move forward after the state’s tax deal. (EdVox)
• The recently disem-voweled TNTP is launching a $15,000 prize for great teachers. (TNTP)
• A parent explains how school choice led to racial segregation in her neighborhood. (NYC P.S. Parents)

Chris Cerf, Evan Stone and Seth Andrew at a Manhattan Institute panel this morning.

Even though he received 6,000 applications to fill 60 teacher positions last years, charter school operator Seth Andrew said he still has trouble hiring the right people for the job.

Andrew, who runs four Democracy Prep Charter Schools in Harlem said even the promise of a $65,000 starting salary – 50 percent above that of a city teacher’s – did not attract the kind of teaching talent he wants for his schools.

The reason, he said this morning, was that state laws — he called them “barriers” — require most prospective teachers to earn an education degree before they can to teach in a classroom. He said those degrees did not assure that a teacher would be effective, echoing an argument frequently made by advocates of non-traditional teacher training programs.

“It doesn’t matter how you enter the classroom,” Andrew said.

Andrew was one of four panelists at a breakfast sponsored by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, that was held to celebrate the release of “Teachers Matter,” a new book authored by senior fellow Marcus Winters. Ex-Schools Chancellor Joel Klein delivered a keynote address lauding the role school choice plays in school reform. (more…)

Parents at the Harlem charter school placed on probation last week are staging a revolt against members of the school’s board of trustees.

About a quarter of parents at the year-old New York French American Charter School have signed on to a letter demanding that board chair Johnny Celestin resign, according to a parent who has been active in organized the protest. The parents plan to present the letter to Celestin at a board meeting tonight and have already alerted him to their plans, according to the parent, Jenna Chrisphonte.

The letter accuses Celestin and a second board member, Sochenda Samreth, of neglecting board duties and failing to support the school’s finances and operations. Parents told GothamSchools that the board members rarely visited the school, did not communicate with parents, blocked new members from joining, and made some decisions privately, in violation of open meeting laws.

When it placed the school on probation last week, the city Department of Education cited the board’s approach to informing the community about approaching meetings as one of several “serious violations” of state law and the school’s own charter.

Claire Zaglauer, a parent who is set to join the board after being elected last week to lead the school’s parent-teacher organization, said she thought some of the problems cited in the probation report had been resolved since the city’s May visit but the board did not inform DOE officials. For example, she said, the school actually asked parents to sign off on the city’s own discipline policy in September, yet the DOE was not told that a discipline policy was in place.

“I believe that the main reason the DOE has gotten an unclear picture is because of the lack of communication from the board,” said Zaglauer, who teaches kindergarten in bilingual French class at another public school.

The conflict illuminates a tension in charter school governance: Unless board members have broken the law, the only tool authorizers have to address their activity — or lack thereof — involves putting the school’s very existence in jeopardy. (more…)

Principals allocated slightly more funding to the arts last year, according to a new report from the Department of Education. But arts spending is still much lower than it was before citywide budget cuts two years ago.

The total school-based spending on arts last year was $316 million, up from $312 million in the 2009-2010 school year but down from $326 in 2008-2009. The tally is contained in the city’s 2010-2011 Arts in Schools Report, an annual collection of facts and figures that the DOE released today.

“This year’s report shows that thanks to the hard work and resourcefulness of our schools and cultural partners, we continue to make steady progress in offering arts instruction to more students,” Chancellor Dennis Walcott said in a statement.

Other notable data points:

• Fifty-four percent of elementary schools provided instruction to all grades in four arts disciplines — theater, music, visual arts, and dance — up from 51 percent in 2010 and just 40 percent in 2009. (more…)

An audit by Comptroller John Liu’s office found that the Department of Education overpaid for food about .003 percent of the time two years ago.

Liu’s latest DOE audit looked at the way the Office of SchoolFood contracts and pays vendors for food that is served in schools — at about 850,000 meals annually, according to the city. It concludes that of the $113.9 million spent on school food in the 2009-2010 school year, more than $400,000 could be recouped because records showed the city had paid too much or because there was no record that the city had received any food at all.

The DOE is paying an 862 percent markup for fresh parsley and more than 400 percent the real cost of several other vegetables and herbs, according to a spreadsheet that Liu’s office compiled. The department is paying more than the real value for 76 kinds of food, according to the spreadsheet.

An even broader issue, according to the audit, is that department doesn’t always check when contractors says they require payment or have made deliveries.

“The DOE paid $113 million for which it got receipts, but never looked inside the bags to see if the groceries were there,” said Matthew Sweeney, a Liu spokesman, in a statement.

The audit urges the city to tighten controls over school food spending.

Last time Liu’s office released the results of a DOE audit, about the use of pre-kindergarten funds, department officials said they were submitting their response “under protest.” But Eric Goldstein, head of the Office of SchoolFood, signaled no such resistance in a letter accompanying the DOE’s response to today’s audit. (more…)

Wilfredo Pagan has been appointed to represent the Bronx on the Panel for Educational Policy

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr.’s office announced today that it has appointed Wilfredo Pagan to the Panel for Education Policy, just in time to represent the borough at tomorrow’s meeting.

Pagan, a lifelong Bronx resident, went to city schools himself and has sent six children to them. The parent association president at P.S. 50, he has belonged to the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council and the Citywide Council on High Schools. He said he has also attended past PEP meetings in his capacity as an involved public school parent.

“It’s a new experience as far as the role, but as far as how the Department of Education operates in certain areas, I have good experience with it,” Pagan said.

He is replacing Monica Major, who has served on the panel since October 2010 and has recently been tapped as Diaz’s director of education and youth services. (more…)

Nearly every morning after I groggily grope for the kitchen light to grab my pre-packed lunch, I notice the drawings made by my fiancée’s former students still hanging on the fridge. Stick figures grin and hearts frame students’ last messages to a teacher that had positively affected them: “Where did you go?” “When are you coming back? I want to learn more about dinosaurs.” “Ms. D I love you. What happened? Where do you live now?”

My fiancée worked at Harlem Success Academy 3, which lost more than a third of its staff over this summer alone. This figure did not count those who were fired or who left of their own volition during the school year. Ms. D is just one of the many dedicated young educators who were incompatible with the school’s structure and model for teachers and students. One popular defense of high turnover rates is that teacher firings are always done for the good of the students. Yet the refrigerator art in our apartment stands as just one compelling example that hasty dismissals can have a profoundly negative effect on students.

At non-union schools, top-tier administrators can now dispose of any teacher at any time, with or without cause. In my fiancée’s case, just a few months into her first year teaching she was given 10 days to get “98 percent compliance” in all her classes, whatever that means, or be terminated. She had no choice in the matter and was ordered not to tell any of her 150 students that she would not be back the next day. This explains the students’ questions (“What happened?” “When are you coming back?”) included in personal notes written after they realized she was gone.

None of this was a surprise to me. I had seen similar scenarios play out three years earlier, when I worked as an after-school tutor at Promise Academy charter school. A teacher would be working on grades and conferencing with students one day, and then all but disappear the next. No staff member spoke his or her name, acting as if that teacher had never been there. But the students could not forget so easily. I remember kids expressing to me that they felt like the entire year was starting over in March. Not a good time to completely turn the page, but that was the students’ problem.

Though Hyde Leadership Charter School, where I work, retains teachers well, we have had faculty members resign for one reason or another (they were moving or going to graduate school). I have seen how the loss of a trusted adult has set some students back emotionally, if not academically. (more…)

• The state Board of Regents could change the school aid formula to favor poor districts. (Times-Union)
• Even when online education ventures fail academically, they do well on the stock market. (Times)
• A judge overturned an ex-Bronx Science teacher’s unsatisfactory rating. (GothamSchools, Daily News)
• Fred Smith: Without an investigation of the state’s old testing program, we shouldn’t trust changes. (Post)
• A Success Charter school is being proposed for Williamsburg’s I.S. 50. (GothamSchools, Brooklyn Paper)
• Los Angeles is weighing reform after two charter schools were found to rig their lotteries. (L.A. Times)
• Speaking at a private school, a Finnish education expert explained that country’s school system. (Times)
• A Brooklyn teacher cleared of threatening to attack her school has resigned. (Daily News, Post)
• A teacher at Queens’ John Bowne High School asked students to help an evangelical charity. (Post)