GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Students and teachers from two high schools on the city’s chopping block are planning to join in protest on Wednesday — and they’re asking their allies from across the city to join in.

The Union Square rally comes during the final week of hearings before the Panel for Educational Policy, which has never rejected a city proposal, votes on 25 school closure proposals Feb. 9.

Students at Manhattan’s Legacy School for Integrated Studies are planning to walk out of their classes and head for Union Square just four hours before their school’s closure hearing. The walkout is the latest in a series of high-profile protest actions that have included a phone-banking session and a guerrilla appearance on “The Today Show” — activities chronicled in a video posted to YouTube over the weekend by the Save Legacy Coalition.  (more…)

I remember the moment I stopped resenting the deduction in my paychecks that went to my union. It took me three years, and happened suddenly.

Halfway through my third year of teaching music, in 2007, administrators in my St. Louis district decided to cut student time in the arts by 64 percent at the middle-school level as part of a plan to improve student test-scores. Appalled, I sent an email to my fellow arts teachers across the district asking what we were going to do.

The response from my colleagues? There is nothing you can do; this has been happening for the past 20 years. Nonetheless, unwilling to let the arts programs go quietly, I circulated petitions among staff, acquiring signatures from several hundred teachers—arts and non-arts teachers alike. It didn’t do anything.

Out of ideas, and with no sense of what it might accomplish, I called my union. The response was immediate: The union would help mobilize teachers and parents opposed to the planned cuts.

In the end, the union’s role in the struggle was minimal. But at that moment when I felt ready to give up, its contribution was decisive: It rejected the powerlessness that my colleagues had articulated, and affirmed my professional convictions about the centrality of the arts in public education. With renewed confidence, several of my colleagues and I began to organize, and following a large outcry from parents and teachers, the administration ultimately reversed its decision.

Flash forward to today. I am in my sixth year of teaching, now in New York City, and what bothered me then in St. Louis bothers me even more now. (more…)

• Chancellor Dennis Walcott has told selective schools to take more students with disabilities. (Daily News)
• A report by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio outlines problems with the city’s vocational schools. (WSJ)
• The percentage of freshmen at CUNY’s community colleges who needed remediation rose to 82.7. (Post)
• The city is eyeing a loophole to let it replace fewer teachers at turnaround schools. (GothamSchools)
• The number of schools the city is trying to close this year, 62, is far more than in past years. (NY1)
• Parents at Queens’ P.S. 118 want their principal fired for shutting them out. (Daily News, Post)
• A large march this weekend protested the city’s eviction of churches from schools. (Daily News, NY1)
• A 66-year-old teacher who went from the rubber room to an administrative job is refusing to retire. (Post)
• Teachers at I.S. 49 used tech tricks to find an iPhone a student had picked off a teacher’s desk. (Post)
• A Bronx principal is being sued over unwanted advances she made against one of her teachers. (Post)
• A Sheepshead Bay High School teacher resigned after allegedly making lewd comments. (Daily News)
• A school aide at Beach Channel High School was charged with statutory rape of a student. (Daily News)
• The founders of Educators 4 Excellence argue that Gov. Cuomo is working on teachers’ behalf. (Post)
• The Staten Island Advance says the planned closure of P.S. 14 shouldn’t be blamed on the community.
• The Daily News says last week’s report proves that restarting struggling schools from scratch is ideal.
• Many elite city private schools are approaching $40,000 a year in tuition and fees. (Times)
• One of the country’s few remaining one-room schools, in Montana, enrolls just one student. (Times)
• Michael Winerip visits the inspiration for a classic of children’s lit, Dr. Seuss’s “Mulberry Street.” (Times)
• Los Angeles’s proposed school budget would eliminate all funding for adult education. (L.A. Times)

• Arnie Duncan matches Bloomberg’s $20K teacher bump plan, then raises it another S100K. (Daily News)
• Union blog suggests insider trading at charter school donor’s hedge fund raises questions. (EdWize)
• A tale about the sweltering heat, a pigeon, and an uninspiring test-prep lesson. (GS Community)
• The ultimate source on education reform policies over the last decade is retiring. (Politics K-12)
• A look at Common Core’s reading standards beyond David Coleman’s bluntness. (Common Core Watch)
• After Feb. 17, only certain Title I students will receive free tutoring from the city. (SchoolBook)
• DOE’s School of One creator started a non-profit and is back working with the city. (Digital Education)
• Scorecard for closing schools attempts to keep track of all 62 NYC schools that could close. (SchoolBook)
• A librarian at Jane Addams H.S. shares a slideshow of the school’s 89-year history. (Tina Chrismore)

A group of elected officials are touting a policy brief that they say throws cold water on Mayor Bloomberg’s small schools movement just a day after a comprehensive study gave it a ringing endorsement.

The six-page brief, compiled by the Coalition for Educational Justice, focuses on how the new small schools serve students with special needs and concludes that they tend to under-enroll students whose disabilities are severe. It cited eight closed large high schools where the small schools opened up in their buildings that served significantly fewer self-contained students. A complete copy of the brief is below.

The six-page paper comes a day after MDRC published a study that found that all kinds of students at more than 100 small high schools graduated at higher rates statistically identical students who attended larger schools.

The brief’s focus didn’t necessarily debunk the MDRC findings, but attempted to raise additional issues about school closures.

“While it is commendable that the new small schools are producing higher graduations rates, it is not clear that these schools serve the same population,” the paper says. “The MDRC study does not include students in self-contained special education or collaborative team teaching; the omission of those high-needs students increases graduation rates in the new small schools.” (more…)

Two weeks after Mayor Bloomberg announced a plan to to replace half of all teachers at 33 struggling schools, efforts are underway to soften the threat.

Department of Education officials said today that the city is exploring the option of replacing fewer teachers at the schools under an allowance included in federal guidelines for the school improvement strategy known as “turnaround.”

The turnaround process, which Bloomberg announced two weeks ago to sidestep a requirement of other school improvement strategies to negotiate new teacher evaluations with the teachers union, mandates that 50 percent of teachers be replaced. But the U.S. Department of Education makes special allowances for some teachers who have been hired in the last two years.

Now the city is looking to take advantage of that flexibility when it files formal turnaround applications with the state next month.

The catch is that not every teacher hired in the last two years is automatically eligible for the exemption.The federal guidelines make an allowance only for teachers who were selected “according to locally adopted competencies as part of a school reform effort” headed by a principal handpicked to lead it. That means, according to the guidelines, the teachers should have been screened for an ability to “be effective in a turnaround situation.”

It’s not clear how many of the roughly 3,400 teachers at the 33 schools would fall into this category. As recently as Monday, Chancellor Dennis Walcott told state legislators that there would be “possibly up to 1,500, 1,700 teachers” cut loose from the schools. (more…)

Students criticized the city’s plan to relocate Cambria Heights Academy in a video published Thursday, saying “We are very comfortable to continue to grow our school here, in our home district.”

Under the plan, the high school would move from its spot on 91st Avenue in Queens’s District 29 to Junior High School 72 in District 28 in June. The schools are roughly three miles apart, and some students say the change would double or triple their commute times.

At a Parents Advisory Board meeting last week, parents and students said they worried the new location, which CHA would share with a middle school, would be unsafe, too far to travel to, and too crowded. DOE officials said the school may have no choice but to move because the city’s lease is up at the current building, which once housed a Catholic school.

Classroom management is usually at the top of the new teacher’s list of concerns. Excellent classroom management often takes years to master, and the only way to get there is through experience, largely because it’s nuanced. The things that disrupt your instruction in one classroom aren’t always the things that will disrupt it in another. Sometimes it’s the students’ attitudes; sometimes it’s a poorly planned lesson; sometimes it’s a fire drill; and sometimes it’s a pigeon flying around your classroom, pooping on desks.

It was a day in late March and I had planned a lesson to prepare my students for the Regents exam in USand Global History. The lesson involved a simple strategy for teaching students to find success on the document-based question (DBQ) essay. With pressure to prepare students for the exams increasing, I accepted teaching test-prep lessons, but my heart wasn’t entirely in it. This would not be a “Stand and Deliver”-style lesson.

I arrived to school sweaty and frustrated after having stood for over an hour on two trains and a bus to get to the school in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx from my apartment in Washington Heights. After passing students waiting in line to go through the metal detector, I turned the corner of the building and was blasted by a wave of hot air upon opening the door. I immediately took off my backpack, jacket, and hat.

“Why do they keep running the heat when it’s warm outside,” I had once asked.

“The budget for next year’s heat is based on the amount of fuel used this year,” another teacher had told me. Of course.

After gathering attendance and making copies, I pushed through the heaviest door in the building to enter the first of four classrooms I would teach in that day. (more…)

Ninth-grader Geronimo Miranda joins sixth-graders Ariyelle Ceasar, Tiane Jackson, Cheyanne Young and Nia Manerville in describing Wadleigh Middle School's positive qualities at a school truncation hearing Jan. 26.

A who’s who of elected officials and Harlem leaders turned out Thursday to defend the Wadleigh Secondary School of Performing Arts against the Department of Education’s plan to close its middle school.

About 200 parents, students, activists, and staff packed the school’s auditorium Thursday evening for a public hearing on the proposal. Just before, officials who included City Councilman Robert Jackson, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, State Sen. Bill Perkins, and Comptroller John Liu all held court in the packed lobby of the Harlem campus. Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and the city’s NAACP chief, Hazel Dukes, also spoke at the hearing.

They said the city was giving up on a neighborhood institution by moving to close Wadleigh’s middle school. Jackson promised to call Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Dennis Walcott today to air his opposition to the plan.

Wadleigh’s 440-student high school would remain open under the plan, as would another middle school in the building, Frederick Douglass Academy II, which narrowly escaped closure this year after earning an even lower progress report score than Wadleigh’s middle school. A charter school, Harlem Success Academy I, is set to move its middle school grades into the building, according to a plan the city set last year. (more…)

• Chelsea High School, left out of “turnaround” plans, is worrying about losing federal funds. (Times)
• The principal of Jane Addams High School has resigned. (GothamSchools, Daily News, SchoolBook)
• A hearing about the city’s plan to close a Harlem middle school drew fire. (GothamSchools, SchoolBook)
• A requirement that the city try to help teachers before firing them ended some termination bids. (Post)
• One of the teachers the city tried but failed to fire left students unattended in darkened classroom. (Post)
• An English teacher at James Madison High School was suspended for misspelling words. (Post)
• The Post says the teachers’ cases all show that arbitrators shouldn’t weigh in on poor evaluations. (Post)
• This spring, Pace University education students will practice instruction on avatars. (Downtown Express)
• Some families remain upset about the city’s rezoning plans for Lower Manhattan. (Downtown Express)
• Townspeople aren’t happy about a student’s push to have a prayer removed from her R.I. school. (Times)
• President Obama is set to propose tying colleges’ federal aid to whether they help students. (Times)