GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• A new report by Scholastic and the Gates Foundation details how hard teachers work. (Hechinger)
• The author of “Hip-Hop Education” contrasts a jail school and an arts school. (Providence Phoenix)
• Pittsburgh’s teacher residency collapsed after the union withdrew its support. (Education Sector)
• An Upper West Side magnet school emphasizes tech-driven project-based learning. (DNA Info)
• Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch visited a Staten Island charter school Thursday. (S.I. Advance)
• An elected parent council in Queens passed a resolution against high-stakes testing. (NYC P.S. Parents)
• A teacher at a selective school says the TDRs might finally start dialogue on pressure. (GS Community)
• Randi Weingarten reflects on what the United States can learn from school reform abroad. (The Nation)
• The latest installment in a series by a mother who wound up producing the school play. (SchoolBook)
• Those who student-taught in top city schools stayed in teaching longer. (Inside School Research)
• A school librarian in Connecticut reenacted “The Hunger Games” in a YouTube video. (Russo)

When revisions to the state’s teacher evaluation law came before the State Senate late Wednesday night, not a single senator cast a “no” vote.

That’s because nearly all of the Senate Democrats had walked out of the Senate chambers to protest a controversial redistricting deal. While they were out, Senate Republicans made quick work of bills that had already been approved by the Assembly. That included the teacher and principal evaluation bill.

The situation meant that the evaluations bill garnered just 36 “yes” votes. Just four of those votes came from senators who represent the city. Two were from the city’s two Republican state senators and two were from two Democrats who are part of an independent caucus.

In the Assembly, the bill passed 91 to 49 and found only scarce opposition from city representatives. About half of the Assembly members from outside of New York City voted against the bill, but just six of the city’s 64 Assembly representatives voted against the bill. (more…)

Barry Fried, the longtime principal of John Dewey High School, was removed from the Brooklyn school suddenly this morning, according to several teachers at the school.

It was not immediately clear whether Fried’s removal was related to “turnaround,” the federally prescribed reform process that the city has proposed for Dewey and 32 other struggling schools. Turnaround requires principals who have been in place for more than a few years to be replaced, and the city has started informing principals at some of the schools that they would be removed at the end of the year.

But Fried’s departure happened abruptly, suggesting that the city might have had more immediate concerns. Department of Education officials did not respond to requests for details about Fried’s departure today.

At a faculty meeting this afternoon, Kathleen Elvin was introduced as the school’s interim acting principal. Elvin was the founding principal of a successful small high school, Williamsburg Prep, and most recently trained teachers assigned to schools undergoing less agressive overhaul strategies. She is likely to help engineer staffing and programming changes at the school through the turnaround process.

The change, according to people familiar with the school, was sorely needed — but comes after too long with subpar leadership.

“Principal Fried sits in his office all day and can’t control the students,” City Councilman Dominic Recchia, a 1977 Dewey graduate, said at a public meeting earlier this year, according to the Brooklyn Daily. “This principal should have been gone years ago. The school could prosper but it needs new leadership.” (more…)

City and state officials have promised that new curriculum standards, known as the Common Core, would de-emphasize rote learning in favor of critical thinking. But exactly what that would look like wasn’t clear when the Common Core first entered the conversation.

Now the picture is growing clearer. Earlier this winter, Department of Education officials testifying before members of the City Council during a hearing on college readiness aired a slideshow presentation that showed how the same skills are tested now and how they would be tested once the Common Core is fully rolled out.

For example, the high school English Regents exam currently asks students to answer a series of multiple-choice questions that require them to locate pieces of information in texts. On a Common Core-aligned test, they would have to read several different passages and write an essay analyzing their arguments, bringing in information from other sources to bolster the analysis.

The Common Core would reshape math tests, too. A sample fifth-grade question asks students to read a paragraph and draw out the relevant information to adjudicate a dispute about three friends’ pizza consumption. In contrast, a current exam question simply asks students to add fractions that represent the sizes of two people’s meals.

The state is scheduled to roll out Common Core-aligned tests in grades 3 through 8 next year. (more…)

Last week, I reported that the city’s charter school sector was on the verge of releasing a trove of data about its schools. I began my reporting after I learned about the plan in February, and a week ago, I learned that the organization in charge of the report had big plans for the report’s release.

The organization, the New York City Charter School Center, sent an advisory a week ago announcing Monday as the big day and inviting reporters to an 11 a.m. press conference to learn about the report, which would compile data about the schools’ performance and their students. But those plans were scrapped over the weekend.

On Sunday afternoon a spokeswoman for the charter school center emailed to say that the “State of the Sector” report was being delayed because all of the data had not been verified.

Now, four days after the promised release, the report is still not out. The spokeswoman, Kerri Lyon, said the report would now come “within a few weeks” and that the center would release the overview report at the same time as it publishes individual school-level data online.

The delay is a surprise because a 12-person committee made up of charter school operators led by the center’s policy director, Michael Regnier, was already charged with verifying the data in the report. Lyon said Thursday that charter schools were now validating some of the data about their own schools before the report’s release. (more…)

If there were value-added evaluations for education journalism, GothamSchools would be in for a fall.

Fortunately, we learned recently that small year-to-year changes among top performers can sometimes cause outsized variation in value-added scores. That’s why we’re thrilled and not disappointed to be a second-place winner in a national competition for education journalism.

The Education Writers Association announced the winners of its 2011 contest on Thursday, and GothamSchools won second prize in the journalism blogging category. We had taken home the first-place prize in each of the first two years that the association awarded prizes for online journalism.

This year’s first-place blog winner was StateImpact Florida, a nonprofit news site about education that is produced by National Public Radio and three affiliate stations in Florida. The association also awarded a special citation to the staff of the Philadelphia Public School Notebook for their coverage of Philadelphia’s cheating scandal.

GothamSchools thrives because it operates as a team, and nine people helped make us great in 2011. (more…)

• The state will beef up its test integrity team after neglect. (GothamSchools, WSJ, Post, SchoolBook)
• The city said some school workers were inadequately disciplined. (GS, City Room, Post, DN, WSJ, NY1)
• Regents head Merryl Tisch defended a school set for turnaround and decried the plan. (GothamSchools)
• State legislators okayed a teacher evaluation framework that Gov. Cuomo engineered. (GothamSchools)
• In Texas, the number of elementary classes with more than 22 students quadrupled last year. (Times)
• The federal government says schools can opt out of getting ammonia-treated beef next year. (WSJ, AP)
• Chicago’s seven-month, first-ever parent engagement liaison is leaving amid complaints. (Tribune)
• Buffalo has less than a week to solve its dispute over attendance or lose federal aid. (Buffalo News)