GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• A dairy industry lobbying group has masterminded a Super Bowl bet between schools. (SchoolBook)
• Educators receive some love from a teacher-themed spin-off of the “Hey Girl” Tumblr trend. (Tumblr)
• The Common Core’s approach to “pre-reading” conflicts with Doug Lemov’s. (Common Core Watch)
• The P.S. 22 chorus joined Mayor Bloomberg at yesterday’s Groundhog Day ceremonies. (Chorus Blog)
• High school students share reasons they are protesting plans to close their schools. (NY P.S. Parent)
• Former schools chancellor Joel Klein describes his vision for classroom technology. (Huffington Post)
• The city teachers union, like Mayor Bloomberg and many others, donated to Planned Parenthood. (UFT)
• Advocates call for state’s NCLB waiver application to include ELL supports. (Learning the Language)
• A New Hampshire middle school teacher and parent probes the value of homework. (Motherlode)
• An association of governors tells Congress to give states more leway in renewed NCLB. (Politics K-12)

Allison Gaines Pell sees herself as a builder, and now that she’s completed her latest project it’s time to move on to a new one.

Pell, who founded Urban Assembly Academy of Arts & Letters in 2005 and steered its growth into one of Brooklyn’s most popular middle schools, announced this week that she was resigning at the end of the year. The announcement comes roughly a year after Pell also oversaw Arts & Letters’ bumpy expansion into an elementary school.

John O’Reilly, who has been a co-director since the beginning of the school year, will take over the helm.

Pell said today that she would be moving on to the Blue School, a growing private elementary school on the Lower East Side that is so far best known as a school started by members from The Blue Man Group. But the school is also steeped in progressive education, a model that Pell is familiar with. Pell attended Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn Heights, one of the city’s most progressive schools, then taught there for three years after graduating from Brown. Pell, a graduate of the city’s Leadership Academy, was a favorite at Tweed and praised as a model candidate from the new brand of young principals in the public school system.

In an interview, Pell said her reasons for leaving had more to do with where she is headed than any difficulties she faced in navigating the bureaucracies of the DOE.

“There is no part of me that’s leaving because I’m not happy,” Pell said. “I enjoy building things and this is an exciting prospect for me.” (more…)

Brooklyn Prospect students listen to sports writer John Walters talk about his career path and professional life.

When Brooklyn Prospect Charter School students next sit down to work on their school newspaper, they shouldn’t have any trouble coming up with stories to cover.

As one of more than 20 speakers at Brooklyn Prospect’s Career Day, I spent the morning talking with eighth-graders about what it’s like to work as a journalist. Newly armed with knowledge about the distinctions among news, features, and opinion writing, the students broke into small groups to brainstorm article ideas about their school.

One big piece of news, the students said, is that Brooklyn Prospect has hired a principal for its high school, which will open in September. A feature story might take an in-depth look at how the school has changed now that it is located inside Bishop Ford High School after leaving the Sunset Park High School building. And opinion columns could make the case for or against the required uniform, a green or white polo shirt with black or khaki pants.

The students pointed to one story that could easily be tackled in any of the categories: a new “no hugging” rule. (more…)

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top education aide took his boss’s message on the road Thursday night for a speaking event with city teachers.

Speaking at a Midtown hotel on a one-man panel moderated by three teachers from the group Educators 4 Excellence, Deputy Secretary for Education David Wakelyn primarily discussed teacher evaluations and why, nearly two years after a state law was signed requiring that they be toughened, nothing had changed.

The meeting was notable not for what Wakelyn said — his comments hewed closely to what the governor has said about evaluations in recent weeks — but because it happened at all. Wakelyn has been relatively quiet since becoming Cuomo’s education deputy in September. But now Cuomo has made his education agenda a priority for 2012 and has increasingly sought to exert greater influence over policy.

The event began with a question from Dan Mejias, a teacher at JHS 22 Jordan L. Mott, one of the 33 low-performing schools slated to close and reopen with new teachers under Mayor Bloomberg’s “turnaround” plan. Bloomberg devised the turnaround plan to sidestep a requirement under a previous plan for the schools that the city and its teachers union agree on new evaluations.

Mejias said his school had shown progress with federal money it received under the previous model, known as “transformation,” and wanted to know what the governor planned to do to force both sides to drop what he saw as pure political gamesmanship.

“The NYC DOE is threatening to fire half of our staff, the UFT is willing to protect every single teacher at all costs, and none of this is beneficial for our students,” Mejias said. (more…)

We’re counting down the days until the “After-School Special” happy hour that some of our dedicated readers have organized for next week — and we hope you are, too.

In case you’ve missed them, here are the details:

Gregorio Luperon High School serves newcomer students, most of whom come from the Dominican Republic.

It begins in early December. Students pop into the attendance office at Gregorio Luperon High School for Science and Mathematics brandishing plane tickets like doctor’s notes. Then the absences start, weeks before the winter break begins. And then comes the rolling return of students, stretching to the waning days of January.

The annual ritual that takes place at Gregorio Luperon also plays out in other pockets of the city that, like Washington Heights, have many students from the Dominican Republic.

Extended mid-year absences are by no means limited to Dominican students: The New York Times reported this week about post-vacation enrollment flux at Chinatown schools. But educators and community organizations say the phenomenon is especially pronounced at schools with many families from the Dominican Republic — and that the impact can be significant.

About 15 Luperon students missed some amount of school this December and January because they were in the Dominican Republic, according to Luperon’s attendance teacher, and two still hadn’t returned last week.

“They want to see their families back home, especially if they haven’t seen them in a long time,” said Mireya De La Rosa, an assistant principal at Gregorio Luperon who immigrated from the Dominican Republic herself. (more…)

Brandishing whistles and hand-written signs, dozens of Samuel Gompers High School students protested at the school closure hearing Thursday.

The regular English classes that Carla LaChapelle teaches all have at least 30 students this year.

Last year, Miguel Estrella said he studied for the United States History Regents exam using a textbook that stopped at the Cold War.

LaChapelle and Estrella were among nearly 100 students, alumni, teachers, and activists at Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education High School Thursday evening to challenge the city’s plan to close the school. They said inadequate resources and a flood of high-needs students led to a failing grade on the progress report that the city uses to assess schools.

Dozens of student speakers organized by two groups, Sistas and Brothas United and the Urban Youth Collaborative, steered the rowdy, three-and-a-half hour long hearing at the South Bronx campus. Many speakers refused to follow protocol the Department of Education has set for the closure hearings that would cut public comments off at two minutes each.

Along with a smaller handful of alumni and teachers, they painted a picture of Gompers as a warehouse for special education and high-needs students that has long suffered from inadequate funding. (more…)

• Facebook’s public IPO offering won’t increase the size of Newark’s gift from the site’s founder. (WSJ)
• The city’s budget plan insulates schools, but questions remain. (GothamSchools, NY1, SchoolBook)
• The city says it is planning again not to replace teaching positions lost through attrition. (WNYC)
• A charter school’s bid to change its kindergarten age cutoff was reversed under fire. (Queens Chronicle)
• Harbor School students were affected by a Civil War cannonball’s discovery on Governor’s Island. (Post)
• Some churches and others are seeking legislation to let churches continue to meet in schools. (Times)
• Parents at Brooklyn’s P.S. 161 are planning a one-day boycott to protest closure plans. (GothamSchools)
• The principal of Wadleigh Secondary School is leaving amid the school’s closure fight. (GothamSchools)