GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Selective middle schools are also being told to take more students with special needs. (Insideschools)
• A crib sheet of flaws in first-round NCLB waiver apps that could be helpful for New York. (Politics K-12)
• Charlotte Danielson dishes on good teaching, evaluations, and New York City’s missteps. (SchoolBook)
• A teacher rounds up top Tweets from a Long Island principals’ forum on evaluations. (NYCDOEnuts)
• A Christian school that all four of Chancellor Dennis Walcott’s children attended is closing. (AP)
• A look at the Posse Foundation, which helps city students get in to selective colleges. (Opinionator)
• It turns out that Bad Teacher day is a day when students wear Led Zeppelin t-shirts. (NYC Educator)
• A charter school proposed for the Bronx will offer a gifted model and fencing classes. (Riverdale Review)
• A teacher describes the blatant, uncreative plagiarism among her Spanish students. (Edwize)
• Eric Nadelstern: The state should adopt teacher peer review, like my high school had. (SchoolBook)
• A critic of credit recovery suggests a good way to let overage students graduate faster. (GS Community)
• The new principal of Columbia Secondary School came from a school on the MLK campus. (Spectator)
• The Observer says Gov. Cuomo’s leadership on teacher evaluations is a good first step to merit pay.
• Mike Petrilli reviews three years of President Obama’s education policy leadership. (Education Next)

Michelle Robertson, an assistant principal and English teacher at Grover Cleveland High School, defends the school at a hearing about the city's "turnaround" plans in Queens.

Rather than filing through metal detectors when they arrive at school Thursday morning, students from Grover Cleveland High School plan to line up around the school’s perimeter, locking hands in a “human chain.”

They are hoping the display of unity will do what weeks of hearings and meetings have not — convince city officials to reverse plans to overhaul their school.

The purpose of the 7 a.m. march, according to senior class president Diana Rodriguez, is for students to demonstrate their passion for Grover Cleveland in the face of the city’s plans to close the school, change its name, and remove some teachers via a federal reform model called “turnaround.”

“There are teachers here I love so much, they’ve been teaching for 10, 20, 30 years, one for over 40 years,” Rodriguez said. City officials “think they’re saving money, but it’s just going to worsen the problem. Getting rid of 50 percent of our staff and turning around and swapping principals and teachers from school to school doesn’t solve the problem itself, it just extends it even more.”

Students will hold hands and form a chain around the perimeter of the school, then march in a circle holding signs they’ve made for the occasion or saved from last year, when they held a similar protest, she said. (more…)

The principals of top-ranking city schools got their annual bonuses today, adding as much as $25,000 to some school leaders’ pay.

The bonuses, guaranteed under a city agreement with the principals union, went to administrators at schools with the highest scores on the city’s progress reports. A total of 275 principals and their assistant principals received bonuses totaling more than $5 million.

The bonuses went to the principals of some of the city’s most selective schools, such as the Anderson School for gifted students and Staten Island Technical High School, one of the city’s specialized high schools. But they also went to administrators at schools that serve low-performing students, including eight transfer high schools, which had their own bonus division.

In at least a couple of cases, the bonuses went to principals who have gotten into hot water. Darlene Miller, the principal of the NYC Museum School, received a bonus despite being arrested for driving drunk over winter break, as did Ling Ling Chou, who was removed as the Shuang Wen School’s principal last summer amid multiple investigations. (more…)

Pace High School's Chinatown school building

Until last week, Tejiana Lee, a senior at Pace High School, didn’t have to start her day until 10 a.m. After three years with a heavy course load, she was enjoying the late start her two consecutive free periods were giving her.

But now she must arrive at the school 45 minutes before the regular day begins to log time in the weight room.

Lee is one of dozens of second-semester seniors whose schedules were jolted last week when they found out the school had not required them to take the correct number of gym courses. State and city regulations require high school students to be enrolled in physical education classes for seven semesters, but Pace had scheduled them for only four semesters and still counted the requirement as complete.

Simply put, “the school granted students more credit than allowed,” said Marge Feinberg, a Department of Education spokeswoman.

So until the recent schedule change, most seniors were not actually on track to graduate in June. Now, they are scrambling to enroll in a variety of P.E. classes – and creative alternatives – that began this week.

Some, such as Lee, are enrolled in P.E. classes before and after the school day. One student, Chrystal, said she’s making up one P.E. credit through her part-time job as a dance instructor and plans to earn another by joining Pace’s flag football league in March. Another senior, Michael Thompson, said he’s getting credit by going to his local gym and showing up to school on Saturdays.

“We’re mad, but there’s nothing we can do about it. I just have to put on my tough face,” Lee said. (more…)

A city teacher is in trouble after she required her students to craft holiday cards for a prisoner in an upstate jail.

Melissa Dean had her fifth-grade class at P.S. 143 in Queens decorate cards for people who were lonely during the holiday season, then mailed the cards to a friend imprisoned after convictions on weapons charges, according to a report out today from the office of Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon.

Hoping to get a response, some of the students shared their names and addresses with the prisoner, according to the report, which comes as the city is reeling from the arrests of aides at two different schools on sex abuse charges.

Condon is recommending that Dean, who started at P.S. 143 in 2004 and was reassigned to an office during the investigation, be fired and prohibited from ever working in the city schools again. Department of Education officials said they would indeed seek Dean’s termination.

As with many reports from SCI, some of the details about the investigation are more interesting than the allegations themselves. Today’s report shows that Principal Sheila Gorski quickly informed the city after an upstate corrections officer alerted her to the package of letters, even though she could conceivably have hidden them and avoided an investigation. It also shows that the investigation proceeded swiftly, which is not always the case: Investigators learned about the letters when they returned to the office after Christmas. In the intervening month and a half, investigators talked to virtually every student in the class, even as they heard the same story over and over again.

The full report is below. (more…)

On teacher evaluations:

• Gov. Cuomo has held summits between the city and UFT in their teacher evaluation talks. (Daily News)
• Cuomo says he’s confident that an evaluations deal will be struck statewide before Thursday. (AP)
• Two days before that statewide deadline, Cuomo explained his next steps if it is missed. (NY1)
• The Post says even new evaluations are unlikely to overcome union opposition to firing more teachers.

On everything else:

• A large majority of affluent foreign-born parents living in the city send their kids to public school. (Times)
• The city still has not finalized details about how it plans to “turn around” 33 schools. (GothamSchools)
• The UFT lost a fight to keep teachers’ ratings secret. (GothamSchools, NY1, Post, DN, WSJ, SchoolBook)
• A community uprising is underway against the principal of Queens’ Martin Van Buren HS. (Daily News)
• A judge ruled that a city teacher was unlawfully removed because of her union activity. (Daily News)
• City students lobbied in Albany for the DREAM Act to aid undocumented students. (Daily News, NY1)
• Actress Susan Sarandon is leading an initiative to bring table tennis to city middle schools. (WSJ)
• Brooklyn Technical High School barred all homemade baked goods from the building. (GothamSchools)
• A parent who has entered the lottery for Williamsburg Success charter academy explains why. (Post)
• The private Brearley School is ending a yearly tradition after “unruly behavior” left a girl injured. (Times)
• The Obama administration is proposing $5 billion in competitive grants to boost teaching. (Times, WSJ)