GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Andy Rotherham: Much of ed technology amounts to distracting bells and whistles. (School of Thought)
• Leonie Haimson lists seven reasons to be skeptical of MDRC’s small-schools report. (NYC P.S. Parents)
• The founders of the city’s School of One launched a new nonprofit to keep it going. (Digital Education)
• The nonprofit Advocates for Children of New York relaunched its website with a slick new look. (AFC.org)
• If most students aren’t taking Regents exams this week, why do all high schools have off? (Insideschools)
• A report from John Dewey High School’s early engagement meeting Wednesday night. (Ed Notes)
• Mayor Bloomberg rejected calls, again, to make Lunar New Year a school holiday. (Politicker NY)
• A parent wonders how his child can learn critical thinking when policymakers don’t do it. (GS Community)
• The group Educators 4 Excellence asked city and union officials to settle on evaluations. (SchoolBook)
• Teachers are floating ideas for educational innovation at EdCamp “unconferences.” (GOOD)
• Photos prove that lots of Republican presidential campaign action is taking place in schools. (EdWeek)
• Bill Gates endorses teacher peer review in his 2012 letter on his philanthropic activities. (Dana Goldstein)

Click on the chart for an expanded view.

A handful of the high schools the city wants to “turn around” are already doing a better-than-average job at preparing students for college. (more…)

Parents from Peninsula Preparatory Academy get in one last chant before jumping on a chartered bus.

Parents of Peninsula Preparatory Academy believe politics is what doomed their school to closure in the first place. Now, they’re hoping the very same forces will keep it open.

With the support of State Sen. Malcolm Smith and City Councilman James Sanders, Jr., more than 100 PPA parents and supporters made the 23-mile trek from Far Rockaway, Queens to lower Manhattan to protest at the Department of Education against its decision to close the school.

Smith didn’t attend the rally, but a spokeswoman said he donated $600 to pay for one of the buses. Smith’s support for the school is well-documented. He served on the founding board of Victory Schools, Inc., a for-profit charter school management company until 2006 and sponsored a $100,000 member item for Peninsula Prep to buy computers in 2010, a move that raised eyebrows at the time from good government advocates. Smith did not respond to requests for comment.

Sanders, Jr. attended, but admitted he previously didn’t know much about school’s plight. He said he threw his support behind it once he saw how much his constituents cared about the issue.

“Was it Gandhi who said, ‘there go the people. I must follow them because I am their leader’?” said Sanders, Jr. “When my bosses are going to a place where they feel strongly about something, ten to one, that’s a place I should be.”

(more…)

Teacher Damaris Mercado speaks at the closure hearing for Jane Addams High School Jan. 25.

The city’s bid to close Jane Addams High School for Academic Careers will proceed without the principal who helmed the school during its recent slide.

Department of Education officials said Wednesday, moments after a public hearing about the closure plan, that this is Sharon Smalls’ last week as principal at Jane Addams.

Smalls’ resignation comes as city investigators are scrutinizing how her administration handed out course credits after teachers reported that she had been giving students math and history credits for classes such as cosmetology and tourism.

Smalls was present at the closure hearing but declined to comment on the investigation or her resignation.

Stephen Tavano, the United Federation of Teachers chapter leader at Jane Addams, told reporters that morale among teachers has been down since the news broke three months ago that the crediting problems had put some students at risk of not graduating and that an investigation would begin.

“The staff is down in the dumps. We’ve been stressed under her so-called leadership,” Tavano said. “It’s emotional for the teachers and guidance counselors.”

But of the dozens of teachers and parents who took the microphone at Wednesday evening’s hearing to defend the school’s career training programs, few mentioned Smalls. Two of the teachers told me during the hearing that they were not aware of her resignation.

Through tears, several teachers and graduates told Department of Education officials that the school deserved to stay open because of its 82-year legacy in the Morrisania, Bronx, community and its state-certified Career and Technical Education programs in nursing, cosmetology, and tourism. (more…)

The Bloomberg administration has long touted the small high schools it created as outperforming large schools closed to make way for them. But a new report finds, for the second time, that the schools also post higher graduation rates than other city schools that stayed open.

Being randomly selected to attend small high schools opened under the Bloomberg administration made students significantly more likely to graduate, even as the schools got older, according to the report, conducted by researchers at the nonprofit firm MDRC.

The researchers updated a 2010 study that examined “small schools of choice” that opened between 2002 and 2008 and did not select students based on their academic performance. Of the 123 schools that fit that bill, 105 had so many applicants that the schools selected among them randomly, through a lottery.

The lottery process enabled the researchers to compare what happened to two groups of students that started out statistically identical: those who were admitted to the small schools and those who lost the lotteries and wound up in older, larger schools. That type of comparison is considered the “gold standard” in education research.

The original study found that the small high schools had positive effects on their students — but it looked only at the schools’ very first enrollees. The new report looks at those students in the fifth year after they enrolled and also at the second set of students who enrolled at the schools.

It finds that the higher graduation rate — 67.9 percent, compared to 59.3 percent for students who were not admitted — continued for the second group of students who enrolled and cut across all groups of students, regardless of their race, gender, family income, or academic skills upon enrollment. Students at the small schools were also more likely to meet the state’s college readiness standards in English, though not in math.

“Small schools for a variety of reasons, I always felt, were going to succeed in certain ways,” said Richard Kahan, the head of Urban Assembly, a nonprofit that started a handful of schools included in the study. “But I would not have predicted the impact.” (more…)

• The UFT is donating office space to the campaign wing of Democrats in the State Senate. (Daily News)
• A report finds lasting benefits for students picked by small high schools. (GothamSchools, Times, Post)
• The Post says the report makes it baffling that the teachers union would sue to stop school closures.
• DFER’s Joe Williams says the report proves that tough fights over school reform are worth it. (Post)
• The UFT and city have reopened dormant teacher evaluation talks. (GothamSchools, Daily News, WSJ)
• Recent records show the city often does not get its way when it tries to fire misbehaving teachers. (Post)
• One teacher who was fired had affairs with two students and gave them drugs and alcohol. (Post)
• Three students from two elite schools were named finalists in a national science fair. (Post, Daily News)
• SUNY’s charter school board concluded it cannot block schools because of location concerns. (NY1)
• SUNY trustees voted to support the DREAM Act to provide financial aid to undocumented students. (NY1)
• A proposal by a PEP member would make it possible for more students to get bus service. (Daily News)
• Concerns about a charter school’s planned expansion are percolating in Riverdale. (Riverdale Press)
• President Obama wants states to make it illegal for students to drop out before they turn 18. (Times)
• Researchers argue that the cost of enacting that proposal would be borne out by later savings. (Times)

• A teacher at John Dewey High School put together a lesson plan about his school’s turnaround. (Edwize)
• A teacher who attended the State of the Union address says she was representing all teachers. (HuffPo)
• Friday night lights are out in one Texas district that is putting academics first. (AP via Educated Reporter)
• In his State of the Union address, President Obama said he want to raise the dropout age. (Politics K-12)
• P.S. 14, the city’s first proposed closure on Staten Island, says the city is playing politics. (SchoolBook)
• An ATR reports that he got a job for the rest of the year and he’ll take it seriously. (Chaz’s School Daze)
• Newark’s teachers are starting contract talks under less-than-favorable conditions. (N.J. Spotlight)
• Upstate advocacy groups are supporting Cuomo’s competitive education grants. (School Zone Blog)
• A teacher who tests English language learners in English imagines the tables turned. (NYC Educator)
• Proposed new federal school lunch rules would limit salt and calories but not potatoes. (Politics K-12)

The tense standoff between the city and the teachers union appears to be thawing in response to pressure from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has stepped forward in recent days to demand resolution to the conflict.

A United Federation of Teachers spokesman confirmed today that “informal talks” with the city have started up after nearly a month away from the negotiating table. Talks broke down in late December over whether a third party should judge the appeals of poorly rated teachers. As a result, the state cut the city off from $58 million in federal funds for struggling schools.

Last week, Cuomo issued an ultimatum to local school districts to settle their teacher evaluation issues within 30 days. “If they can’t do that then we’ll do it for them,” he said at the time.

Today, UFT President Michael Mulgrew — who along with other top city education officials met with Cuomo in Albany on Monday — lauded the governor’s “intervention.”

“We are happy that the governor’s intervention over teacher evaluations has led to communication between New York City and the UFT,” Mulgrew said in a statement. (more…)

Two weeks after receiving the surprise news that their schools could close this June, some teachers are staging protests while others say they are too stunned to respond, for now.

At Herbert H. Lehman High School in the Bronx, Ann Looser is hoping fifty to 100 of her fellow teachers will stay after school tonight to protest city plans to “turn around” Herbert H. Lehman High School. As Lehman’s union chapter leader, Looser has led efforts to raise awareness about the city’s plan to “turn around” the school. Under the plan, which the city devised to keep federal funding despite a breakdown in negotiations over teacher evaluations, 33 low-performing schools would be closed and reopened after having half of their teachers replaced.

At Lehman, Looser and her colleagues have been trying recruit families, local politicians, and journalists to attend tonight’s “early engagement” hearing. The goal, she said, is to convince the city not to upend progress that the school had been making with the help of federal funds.

Under “restart,” Lehman had used the funds to offer credit recovery programs, peer mentoring, and extra training for teachers, Looser said. She said the extra help came at an important juncture, just as a new principal arrived after years of turmoil that included a grade-changing scandal. Purging the school’s teachers would set those efforts back, Looser said. (more…)