GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Citing philosophical differences, Pedro Noguera has resigned from SUNY’s charter board. (Metropolis)
• As a reminder, Noguera had taken heat for his position as a charter authorizer. (GothamSchools)
• The GE Foundation is putting $18 million into supporting the Common Core. (Curriculum Matters)
• Andy Rotherham: The GE donation is notable because the Common Core is divisive. (School of Thought)
• SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher: The state needs to start college prep in early childhood. (SUNY Blog)
• An Alabama politician says increasing teacher pay would violate biblical principals. (Think Progress)
• Chicago is releasing 15 years of notes from closed-to-the-public school board meetings. (WBEZ)
• Also in Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is in hot water after appearing in a pro-charter film. (Russo)
• A draft bill to overhaul No Child Left Behind could cost New York State school funding. (Politics K-12)
• Philadelphia rejected disgraced superintendent Arlene Ackerman’s request for unemployment. (Inquirer)
• A D.C. principal who ran into trouble was fired from her old job in Texas; here’s why. (Answer Sheet)
• Less than 40 percent of city students eligible for free breakfast take advantage of that. (SchoolBook)

Of nearly 600 students who were enrolled in four high schools that closed their doors last year, less than half graduated and at least 22 percent left the school system without a diploma.

The information is contained in trove of data the Department of Education released today, in accordance with a recent City Council mandate, about the students who remained in 15 schools during their final year of operation last year. In addition to the four high schools, the city closed six middle schools, three elementary schools, and two primary schools last year. Together, those schools enrolled 1,994 students, ranging from just 54 at a Manhattan middle school to 358 at Canarsie High School in Brooklyn.

The council imposed the reporting requirement amid criticism that students affected by school closures drop out at a disproportionately higher rate as a result. At the high schools that closed last year, the dropout rate was indeed high, at 22.1 percent. A state audit last year put the city’s dropout rate at 10 percent.

But a high dropout rate could be expected — after all, the remaining students were those who had straggled at some of the lowest-performing schools in the city and had stayed there after other students had sought transfer to other schools. The students might well have dropped out even if their school stayed open.

More interesting, some say, are questions the data do not answer. (more…)

Student protesters unfurled a banner listing names of the schools that could close this year.

Students from at least five city high schools walked out of classes this afternoon in opposition to the city’s school closure proposals. (more…)

Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew is lodging a formal complaint about the city’s plans to overhaul 33 struggling schools, a day after the head of the city’s principals union did the same thing.

When Mayor Bloomberg announced last month that the schools would undergo a federally prescribed process known as “turnaround,” which requires half of teachers to be removed, Mulgrew was immediately dismissive.

In a letter sent today to State Education Commissioner John King, Mulgrew fleshes out those objections, arguing that the plan as the city has explained it would violate state and federal regulations and the city’s contract with the UFT.

The city has leaned on that contract when touting the plan, saying that a clause known as 18-D represents union sign-off on the turnaround bid and allows for rehiring at schools that are closed and reopened, as would be the case under turnaround. But Mulgrew contends in his letter that 18-D applies only when schools are truly closed.

“What the DOE proposes is a classic sleight of hand,” he writes. “While it tells the public and the UFT it will technically ‘close’ these schools and ‘reopen’ them as new schools, what it really intends and seeks your permission for is a turnaround where the same students continue to be served in the same school with a portion of the same staff. … This is not a closure and does not trigger application of 18-D.” (more…)

A small but raucous crowd turned out for a closure hearing at Academy of Business Community and Development Tuesday.

When senior Omar Herara ranked Academy of Business and Community Development as one of his top high school choices four years ago, he admits he didn’t know it was an all-boys school or much else about it either.

“At first, it was an accident,” Herara said. “I chose it because it had ‘business’ in the name.”

Herara, who wants to become an entrepreneur, said the decision turned out to be serendipitous. At a hearing on the school’s future Tuesday evening, he said he now viewed the school with a sense of pride.

“I hope to come back and visit ABCD when I graduate,” said Herara, who will study business management at Monroe College in New Rochelle in the fall.

That prospect looks increasingly bleak. Herara is the only senior who is on pace to graduate this year, one of several reasons that the Department of Education is taking the unusual step to completely shutter the ABCD middle and high schools at the end of the school year. Most schools are phased out, one year at a time, but officials said that low enrollment — coupled with poor academic performance — made it virtually impossible to survive on the system’s funding formula, which allocates money on a per-pupil basis. (more…)

The city’s bid to “turn around” 33 struggling schools is politically motivated and should be quashed, according to the head of the city’s principals union.

The city is days away from submitting a formal request for State Education Commissioner John King to release millions of dollars in federal funding for the 33 schools even though the city has not yet negotiated new evaluations with the teachers union.

Ernest Logan, president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, sent a letter to King Tuesday urging him to reject the city’s request. Logan charges that the city’s announcement last month that it would abandon two in-process school improvement strategies, “transformation” and “restart,” was meant only to sidestep a requirement that the city negotiate with CSA and the United Federation of Teachers. Without an agreement, King froze federal funds to the schools last month.

“Simply stated, if the Turnaround model were the most educationally sound plan of intervention for the 33 schools, it would have been selected for any or all of them in 2010 and 2011,” Logan writes. “It was not. It is being proposed now only as a means of evading the … evaluation requirements.”

The city is required to negotiate new evaluations in order to receive federal funds and, in a plan Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced last month, additional state school aid. But Cuomo also said he would push changes to the state’s 2010 evaluation law if districts do not adopt new evaluations by mid-month. City officials are lobbying legislators to take that route, even though a statewide teachers union, NYSUT, has said it is on the verge of agreement for nearly all districts other than New York City. (more…)

Principals union president Ernest Logan with Diane Ravitch after Ravitch's speech to union members on Tuesday

City principals should overcome their fear and join with more than a thousand of their colleagues from across the state who oppose New York’s teacher evaluation rules, Diane Ravitch urged during a speech to the principals union Tuesday.

A group of Long Island principals launched a petition in November arguing that the state’s evaluation regulations — which require a portion of teachers’ ratings to be based on their students’ test scores — are unsupported by research, prone to errors, and too expensive at a time of budget cuts.

The petition has attracted nearly 1,300 principals from across the state, but relatively few — just over 100 — work in New York City, in a trend that has persisted since the petition’s earliest days. Sean Feeney, a Nassau County principal who drafted the petition, said in November that city principals seemed to be more afraid of jeopardizing their jobs by speaking out.

Ravitch, a frequent and outspoken critic of the Bloomberg administration’s education policies, took aim at those concerns during the kickoff event in the union’s 50th anniversary celebration. She concluded her speech by exhorting city principals to sign on to the evaluations petition.

“There is strength in numbers,” she said to the roughly 150 current and retired principals in the audience. ”The DOE can’t fire you all.” (more…)

Parent Gail Wright speaks at Washington Irving High School's closure hearing.

Elected officials who turned out in droves to defend a Harlem school against closure last week stayed home Tuesday night from another century-old Manhattan school also facing the ax.

The city spared Wadleigh Secondary School for Performing Arts from closure in favor of a plan to scrap just its middle school grades, but droves of elected local and state officials and advocacy groups packed the school auditorium in protest anyway during its hearing last week.

There was no such fanfare at Irving, which would phase out completely under the city’s plan, during its closure hearing Tuesday. Instead, just one city councilwoman, Rosie Mendez, joined dozens of Irving teachers, parents, and students in criticizing the Department of Education’s closure proposal.

Over the course of the four-hour-long closure hearing, speaker after speaker explained — as they did during a December rally — that Irving enrolls high-needs, low-income students who are the toughest in the system to serve.

They also said the school’s veteran staff and Principal Bernardo Ascona have remained dedicated to their students despite the school’s uncertain future. This fall, the city reassigned the school from one federally funded improvement model to another, known as “transformation,” then abandoned the plans altogether in December. (more…)

• Chancellor Walcott cut short a town hall meeting in the Bronx after students protested. (Daily News)
• Mayoral candidates took aim at school closure policies. (GothamSchools, SchoolBook, Daily News)
• The advocacy group NYCAN said not settling on new evaluations would cost the state $1.7 billion. (AP)
• A campaign against a teacher who is being paid without working calculates his property holdings. (Post)
• A bid to fire the teacher ended because the city didn’t produce sufficient evidence against him. (Post)
• The case of George Washington HS’s baseball coach shows that the appeals process has merit. (Times)
• Students at Alfred E. Smith High School were arrested for trying to bring a gun inside. (Post, Daily News)
• Frank Jump, a teacher at Brooklyn’s P.S. 119, is an author, archaeologist, and AIDS activist. (Daily News)
• More on Cambria Heights Academy parents’ fight to prevent the school’s relocation. (Daily News)
• Lehman High School is one of 33 schools that could close and reopen under “turnaround.” (Daily News)
• Former Assemblyman Michael Benjamin: What the city needs is a voucher program for special ed. (Post)
• Connecticut’s education chief is trying to use the state’s NCLB waiver to force policy changes. (WSJ)
• The Obama administration wants schools to transition to using e-textbooks by 2017. (USA Today)