GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Chancellor Walcott told all schools they’ll have to follow new special ed rules next year. (Insideschools)
• Virginia’s school calendars are set according to amusement park season. (Slate)
• A former teacher says school policies, not poor compensation, influenced her decision to leave. (Slate)
• Five views on the Common Core, ranging from ecstatic to skeptical to critical. (Learning Matters)
• Brian Lehrer will talk school choice with Walcott and other school community members. (SchoolBook)
• Safety officials are using “surprise screenings” to catch kids who bring phones to school. (CBS Radio)
• NYPD cops aren’t the only public employees getting in trouble for Facebook postings. (WNYC)
• The first of five blog posts about public education and Occupy Wall Street. (Democracy and Education)
• Oakland’s head of schools is pushing Geoffrey Canada’s vision for public education. (WSJ)
• College readiness at newer city schools are lagging behind older school counterparts. (EdWize)

Final decisions about the futures of 47 schools under consideration for closure will be announced over the next two days.

Over the past three months, the Department of Education compiled the list of schools based on their poor performances on the city’s annual progress reports. Of the 47 schools, 20 are elementary and middle schools, 21 are high schools — including middle school grades of four secondary schools — and six are charter schools.

Last year during a similar two-day period, the city announced it would shutter 26 schools, a total that was whittled down from 55 schools. The city’s Panel for Educational Policy eventually approved all but one closure. (more…)

Teachers and staff members of Fahari Academy Charter School officially belong to the United Federation of Teachers now.

In October, the staff of the two-year-old middle school, which has posted lackluster test scores and struggled to retain teachers, voted to join the union. But before they could become card-carrying members, either the school’s board or a state labor relations committee had to sign off on the arrangement.

This week, the school’s board gave the union effort the go-ahead, hashing out a brief agreement with the UFT that endorses the union as teachers’ sole bargaining agent. The outcome wasn’t unexpected: When the staff voted to unionize, members of the school’s board signaled that they were open to discussing the teachers’ desire to organize.

Today, the board’s director, Dirk Tillotson, told me that the board saw that the teachers had met the requirements for unionization and that the most prudent path forward included recognition. Tillotson is a lawyer who runs a charter school incubation program for the state’s charter schools association.

“We could have dragged it out in the way that many of these other campaigns had been dragged out,” Tillotson said. “We’d rather to move past the fight about unionization and make it about student achievement. … Looking at student progress on the report card, we didn’t do well. I don’t think anyone can be happy if we have another year like that.” (more…)

A $35 business proposition — among other offenses — cost a city teacher $10,000.

Fay Inovlotska paid two students $35 earlier this year to hand out flyers promoting a daycare center with which she was associated, according to a report today from the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board. That behavior violated rules prohibiting city employees from using their positions for personal gain, COIB concluded.

Inovlotska — who earned just over $80,000 from the city last year, according to payroll data collected by the transparency website SeeThroughNY — agreed to pay a $10,000 fine to the Department of Education for the behavior “and other conduct,” according to COIB’s press release.

Exactly what the other conduct was isn’t specified in COIB’s announcement. But Inovlotska’s case came to COIB from the office of Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon, who looks into allegations of fraud and corruption in the DOE. Condon publicizes only a fraction of SCI’s reports, even when allegations are substantiated.

The only way to see unpublicized reports that Condon has forwarded to the DOE or to the ethics board is to file a Freedom of Information Law request, which we have done.

SCI has published just seven investigation reports this year, down from 15 in 2010, 12 in 2009, 19 in 2008, and a high of 26 in 2007. (more…)

Nine months after the city announced a 10-year plan to find and remove fluorescent light fixtures in schools that may contain hazardous chemicals, the city’s School Construction Authority has released a list of 754 school buildings that have been flagged for follow-up.

The list is the product of a survey of buildings the city completed last year, but it has never before been released, according to a legal group that has been pushing for faster cleanup. The document was released last month, shortly after NYLPI filed a Freedom of Information Law request. That request yielded a more complete accounting of schools with suspect lights, which NYPLI has published on its website.

The chemicals in question, referred to as polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, were present inside of some florescent lights installed in schools before 1979, when the federal government banned their use.

City officials have said the lights pose no immediate health risk to students. But many elected officials and public health advocates charge that the department is not moving quickly enough to remove the chemicals.

On Monday, the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest will hold a press conference at City Hall, as it has done several times in the past year, calling for the DOE to immediately remove all potentially dangerous light fixtures from its buildings.  (more…)

A slide from a Department of Education presentation about the city's NAEP scores

New York City students posted essentially flat scores on a national exam considered the most accurate measure of student progress.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, commonly known as NAEP, or the nation’s report card, is given every two years to fourth- and eighth-graders across the country. Statewide results, which came out last month, showed that New York was one of just two states to post significant score drops.

In local results released today, city students bucked that trend. Their scores stayed flat or rose or fell by degrees that are not statistically significant.

District-level results were released today for 21 districts across the country that participate in a more detailed study. Only one of the districts, North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg, posted significant gains in reading, and nine districts showed significant gains in math.

Still, only about a third of city fourth-graders met or exceeded NAEP’s benchmark for proficiency in reading and math, about half as many as who met proficiency standards on this year’s state tests. It was the discrepancy between state test scores and NAEP results that triggered state officials to acknowledge last year that the state’s test scores were inflated.

On this year’s NAEP exam, New York City students’ reading scores dropped by three points, the same as statewide. Eighth-graders’ math scores fell by one point, less than the three points that scores across the state declined this year.

Fourth-graders’ reading scores didn’t change, while eighth-graders’ reading scores increased by two points, more than the single point gain experienced statewide and nationally.

None of the city’s shifts since 2009 were considered statistically significant. But gains in fourth- and eighth-grade math scores and fourth-grade reading scores since 2002, when the district’s performance was first measured, are still up significantly. (more…)

• Some high-performing schools have replaced recess with academic and arts enrichment. (Times)
• The relationship between City Hall and Albany, especially Regents chief Merryl Tisch, is tense. (Times)
• Parents at an East Harlem gifted school protested plans to grow another school in the building. (NY1)
• Jane Addams HS’s principal would not apologize to parents for the crediting scandal. (Daily News)
• Recent graduates have launched a new foundation to help city students get funding. (GothamSchools)
• The DOE’s former chief financial officer was fined for a conflict of interest. (Times, WSJ, Daily News)
• A student has been arrested for releasing pepper spray at Banana Kelly HS on Monday. (NY1)
• The school bus drivers union rallied in the face of strike threats. (GothamSchools, NY1, SchoolBook)
• A Long Island superintendent is being asked to resign over an athlete’s grade inflation. (Post)
• In New Orleans, protest is growing against charter school rules that keep locals out. (Times-Picayune)

• Jane Addams High School teachers say the city is to blame for the crediting scandal there. (SchoolBook)
• Chicago is considering joining the Gates charter-district compact that New York is already in. (Catalyst)
• About that rampant cheating on the SAT? Students and educators actually say it’s rare. (NPR)
• Also rare: sexting. Just 1 percent of students ages 10-17 have ever sent racy pictures by cell phone. (AP)
• The New York State Labor History Association honored UFT President Michael Mulgrew. (Labor Notes)
• The Florida school board member who took — and bombed — a state test speaks out. (Answer Sheet)
• A Queens Republican is the first to say Mayor Bloomberg’s class size math makes total sense. (Courier)
• Says Judy: Sometimes questions about school rules aren’t about rules but about ethics. (Insideschools)
• Like much of his beliefs, Newt Gingrich’s education platform has been all over the map. (Politics K-12)
• Rick Hess on why education innovation tends to “crash and burn” and what can be done. (Straight Up)

It’s not the millionaire’s tax that some parents have pushed for, but it’s something.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced today that he would overhaul the state’s tax code to reduce the tax rate on middle-income earners and increase taxes on the highest earners. Cuomo estimates that the changes will add $2 billion a year to the state’s coffers — funds that can go to schools and other public services.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew was among the chorus of people who quickly signaled their support for the proposal. He called the plan “a wide-ranging solution to the state’s budget problems” and said it would “help ensure that children in our public schools will begin to see restorations from the devastating education cuts of recent years.”

But a separate tax on high earners known as the millionaire’s tax, which Cuomo has vowed not to renew when it expires at the end of the month, has generated significantly more, about $4 billion a year. That means the state is still facing a funding shortfall of as much as $1.5 billion, and schools are likely to feel continued budget pressure. (more…)

A screenshot of GrayMatter's website.

As a student at Staten Island Technical High School, Jeremy Meyers couldn’t always get the gear he needed as a member of the fencing team. The Model United Nations team he had helped start was scrambling for funds to attend conferences. And he saw that computer programming classes were cut alongside the school’s budget.

Instead of making do with less, Meyers, now a freshman at Columbia University, teamed up with classmates to develop a strategy to fill the budget gaps.

The result is GrayMatter, a foundation that aims to make it easier for students to raise money for their schools.

Modeled off of DonorsChoose, the website that many teachers use to solicit donations for school supplies, GrayMatter allows students in city schools to list projects in need of support, then collects and disburses funds on the students’ behalf after verifying with school officials that the need is real.

Right now, Jim, a senior at a Brooklyn school, still needs $282.72 to allow two members of a community service group to attend a leadership conference. The final bill comes to $612.72, and 17 people have already pitched in $330. (more…)