GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Gov. Cuomo said he’s still optimistic about a teacher evaluation deal by Thursday. (State Ed Watch)
• Jodi Rudoren, the New York Times’ education editor, will head the paper’s Jerusalem bureau. (Politico)
• Principal Bernard Gassaway explains his strategy to improve Boys & Girls High School. (Insideschools)
• A look at the teacher quality initiatives in President Obama’s proposed budget. (Teacher Beat)
• A teacher outlines what would help his school improve instead of “turnaround.” (GS Community)
• One woman’s suggestions for the state education commission that doesn’t yet exist. (SchoolBook)
• A nerdy group of edu-Twitterers have been posting 140-character “eduvalentines.” (Twitter) Here’s a few:

More than a month after Mayor Bloomberg announced that he would fulfill a state requirement by overhauling 33 struggling schools, the city still has not officially informed the state of its plans.

The announcement, which came during Bloomberg’s State of the City address Jan. 12, was an attempt to circumvent a requirement that the city and teachers union agree on new teacher evaluations. New evaluations were a condition of the previous improvement processes the schools were undergoing with funding from federal School Improvement Grants. But turnaround, which requires schools to replace at least half of their teachers, does not call for new evaluations.

The turnaround switch isn’t up to the city alone. State Education Commissioner John King must sign off on the plans if they are to get the federal funds. King has said the turnaround model Bloomberg described is “approvable.” But he still hasn’t seen any details.

That’s because the city hasn’t supplied them. For weeks, city officials — including Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott — had cited Feb. 10 as the deadline to complete applications detailing the turnaround plans, but the day came and went with no completed applications in sight.

Department officials now say the deadline was only internal, and now the city is aiming to finish them up by the end of this week. That way, the officials said, the applications can be on the table next week when the city has its hearing about the SIG grants with state education officials. (more…)

The city will release years-old ratings for more than 12,000 teachers after the state’s top court declined to consider the UFT’s plea to keep the ratings private.

In August, the state’s second-highest court ruled that the scores are a matter of public interest and should be released, confirming a lower-court judge’s ruling. The union immediately asked the highest court, the Court of Appeals, to hear the case and was rejected for the first time in November. Today’s second rejection means the union is out of options and the city will release the ratings alongside the names of the teachers who received them.

The protracted legal battle began when several city news organizations filed a Freedom of Information Law request to release the city’s Teacher Data Reports, which calculated “value-added” scores for some teachers. The union charged that the scores should stay under wraps because they were rife with errors and statistically unreliable — a charge that an independent analysis supported. But the courts ruled that the ratings are a matter of public interest.

A spokesman for the Department of Education, Matthew Mittenthal, said the FOIL requests would be fulfilled within weeks — but he indicated that the department was not completely happy about it. Ex-Chancellor Joel Klein, who created the reports in 2008, supported their release. But Chancellor Dennis Walcott had expressed concern about seeing teachers’ names and ratings in print. (more…)

Brooklyn Technical High School students buy snacks before school today at Rocky's Deli and Grill on Fort Greene Place.

If students at Brooklyn Technical High School want to eat a homemade brownie with their lunch, they now have to do it surreptitiously.

The elite high school instituted a new policy last week banning all homemade baked goods from the building. Students are speculating that the policy is a response to drug-laced baked goods that are sometimes brought to the school.

The announcement came in Tech’s morning announcements Feb. 9, sandwiched between the Pledge of Allegiance and a notice about healthy relationships:

Attention students: Homemade baked goods are no longer allowed in Brooklyn Tech. Students found with baked goods will have them confiscated. Be advised that store brought baked goods in a sealed package are still allowed in school.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Principal Randy Asher declined to comment on the new policy, citing an ongoing investigation. A spokeswoman for the Department of Education, Marge Feinberg, said the investigation was internal to the school. (more…)

Eszter Weiss and Faye Chiu, Millenium High School math teachers, exploring Archimedes Garden in Florence, Italy on a 2011 Fund for Teachers trip

Faye Chiu and Eszter Weiss, veteran math teachers, spent last summer in Italy and Greece — not bathing on the Riviera or hopping the isles, but retracing the steps of the ancient mathematicians in search of inspiration to energize their curriculum at Manhattan’s Millennium High School.

And while they were soaking up information about Archimedes, other city teachers were going to the far corners of the earth for their students, too: to Sweden to learn about individualized learning plans; to Iran and Turkey to collect information for helping non-Muslim students understand their school’s growing Muslim population; to Brazil to gather tips on getting girls interested in physical activity.

If the trips don’t sound like the average professional development sessions, it’s because they’re not. Instead, enabled by the national organization Fund for Teachers and its local partner, New Visions for Public Schools, are fueled entirely by teachers’ own curiosities.

In the past, New Visions offered the grants only to teachers affiliated with the schools it manages and supports. But this year, the nonprofit added supplementary grants of up to $10,000 that are open to teachers in all city high schools — provided that they teach courses that culminate in a Regents exam, have been teaching for at least three years, and plan to return to the classroom in September. Applications for this summer’s YouPD Challenge Grants are due Feb. 29.

The concept behind the grant is simple, according to Robert Hughes, New Visions’ president.

“The best professional development is the professional development that teachers create and define for themselves,” he said.

Hughes said the program’s expansion is meant to recognize stellar educators throughout the city.

“With all of the controversy flowing around teachers it’s important that we don’t lose sight of the extensive commitment that the vast majority of teachers make,” he said. “Despite the rhetoric, we have some of the strongest teachers in the country.” (more…)

Queens Borough President Helen Marshall and Dmytro Fedkowskyj, her appointee to the Panel for Educational Policy, held a hearing Monday night for families and teachers at the eight would-be turnaround schools in Queens.

Dozens of teachers, parents, students, and at least one principal from the eight Queens schools facing “turnaround” say they have brought their concerns to district superintendents and other Department of Education officials this month to no effect.

On Monday evening, they found a more sympathetic audience: Queens Borough President Helen Marshall, who vowed to push back against the city’s plans to close the schools.

Marshall’s uncharacteristically aggressive promise came at a meeting at Queens Borough Hall that her office organized about the city’s plan to “turn around” 33 struggling schools. Under the plan, which Mayor Bloomberg announced last month as a way to secure federal funding, the schools would close and reopen this summer with new names and at least half their staffs replaced.

Marshall sat before a standing-room-only crowd with Dmytro Fedkowskyj, her appointee to the Panel for Educational Policy, the citywide school board that decides the fate of schools proposed for closure. As a panel member, Fedkowskyj has emerged as a frequent critic of the mayor’s school policies, signaling Marshall’s endorsement, but she has typically been soft-spoken on education issues.

That was not the case on Monday. Marshall often clapped and cheered as she listened to dozens of teachers and families defend their schools. Occasionally she even interjected to describe how her respect for teachers developed over years of working as an early childhood educator. (more…)

• Some charter schools set earlier kindergarten cutoff dates, keeping some struggling students out. (Post)
• The Board of Regents signed off on the state’s No Child Left Behind waiver application plan. (Post, NY1)
• The Regents also said they would look for alternatives to the GED, which is becoming too costly. (WSJ)
• Students at Grady High School staged a walkout to oppose the city’s “turnaround” plan. (GothamSchools)
• Gov. Cuomo said he’s hopeful that districts will meet his teacher evaluation deadline. (Post, Daily News)
• The Daily News outlines a teacher evaluation system Cuomo should establish if the deadline is missed.
• Nearly 500 parents attended a meeting about the P.S. 87 aide charged with abuse. (NY1, Daily News)
• Chancellor Dennis Walcott said he would review the process by which aides are screened. (Times, Post)
• Los Angeles students are protesting a policy that lets police cite and fine truant students. (L.A. Times)