GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• A film about a school’s move from Bushwick to Governor’s Island won an Emmy. (Harbor School)
• A teacher stresses greater urgency to quickly align Core standards to state assessments. (SchoolBook)
• A childhood accident and early union jobs informed Steve Barr’s approach to charters. (Hechinger)
• Alterman is “baffled” by Joel Klein and Condi Rice’s national security education report. (The Nation)
• Tennessee wants to ban teacher evaluations not just to the public, but parents, too. (Teacher Beat)
• Late graduates smoke less and vote more than those who obtain GEDs, a study shows. (Jacobs)
• Trayvon Martin’s death sparked an unlikely civic engagement from a Bronx class. (SchoolBook)
• And hooded students in Crown Heights took to the web to speak about racial injustice. (YouTube)
• SED awarded $12.9 million in contracts to develop K-5 curriculum tied to Common Core (NYSED)
• Our rockstar public hearing reporter is once again tweeting from turnaround schools. (GS Twitter)

Efforts to improve the city’s middle schools have come a long way since they were announced six months ago, Chancellor Dennis Walcott said today in a policy speech delivered days before his one-year anniversary of his sudden appointment.

Walcott returned to the same venue where he first announced the middle school reforms — New York University’s Kimmel Center – to deliver the keynote speech at a middle school colloquium hosted by NYU Steinhardt’s Research Alliance for New York City Schools. In his speech, Walcott said the city was in the process of rolling out a host of initiatives that the the Department of Education had either created or expanded since September, all in the interest of improving middle schools, which he said had become his main priority during his tenure.

“If we truly care about preparing our students for success in college and careers, middle school needs to be a central focus of our policies,” Walcott said.

Walcott announced that the DOE had allocated about $500,000 to develop new training programs for 150 teachers and 10 principals who he hoped would work specifically in middle schools. And he said the city would exceed his goal of creating 50 new middle schools in the next two years. Twenty-six new middle schools, including 14 charter schools, will open next fall and 28 more schools — including another 14 charters — are set to open in 2013. (more…)

A last-ditch effort to shed poor leadership in order to stay open did not pan out for a Brooklyn charter school that is millions of dollars in debt.

The school, Williamsburg Charter High School, would be the largest charter school to shut its doors. About 900 students will have to find spots in different high schools for the fall.

Department of Education officials cited deep financial and management troubles when they announced in January that Williamsburg Charter would close at the end of the school year. Last month, a lawyer hired by the school argued that the department’s concerns had been assuaged.

“I feel that we’ve met every issue they’ve raised,” Ellen Kimatian Eagan said at the time, noting that the school had severed relations with its controversial leader, who is under state investigation for financial improprieties. “We’ve made a lot of changes and we should remain open.”

But department officials determined that the changes had come too late to instill confidence that the school really had severed ties with its management organization, Believe Charter Schools, which is also under state investigation. The school is about $5 million in debt, city officials concluded. (more…)

Walcott answers questions about the city's decision to remove schools from its 'turnaround' list.

The morning after abruptly withdrawing “turnaround” proposals for seven schools, Chancellor Dennis Walcott defended the Department of Education’s strategies for determining which schools to close.

The seven schools were among 33 slated for turnaround, which would require them to close and reopen, even though they had A’s and B’s on their city progress reports and thus did not meet the city’s closure criteria.

Speaking to reporters after delivering a speech about his middle school reforms, Walcott said the fact that the seven schools had received top scores from the city did work in their favor. But he said visits from top department officials had really made the difference.

“It’s not just the progress report, while the progress reports are extremely important. It’s also what’s happening within the four walls of the building, and that to me is something that’s extremely important,” he said. “A lot of us can tell when an institution is doing well or doing better and when an institution is not. You have educators … who know the questions to ask and see what’s happening in the classroom.”

He added, “With these schools, they were one A and six B’s, and that played into it.” (more…)

After months of relative quiet, students and staff of Newtown High School are joining the chorus of opposition to the city’s “turnaround” plans — with a heartfelt video produced by four engineering students. (more…)

Grover Cleveland High School students march around the Ridgewood, Queens school's perimeter before the closure hearing.

When public hearings about the city’s plans to “turn around” two large high schools began last night, few of their supporters had heard that other schools had been spared the aggressive reform process.

Herbert H. Lehman High School and Grover Cleveland High School were not among seven top-rated schools that the city announced yesterday would not undergo turnaround after all. The controversial process requires schools to close and reopen with new names and many new teachers.

A third school slated for a public hearing Monday night, Brooklyn’s School for Global Studies, had its turnaround plans withdrawn. But at Lehman and Cleveland, the hearings went on without interruption — with students, teachers, and graduates at each offering more than three hours of testimony about their schools.

Cleveland

Diana Rodriguez, the senior class president at Cleveland, saw the surprising news about changes to the turnaround list on her phone during a pre-hearing rally organized by students.

“Obviously Cleveland is not on the list. This is very disappointing for us but we will not give up,” she said. “Tonight we will show that we have a voice and will not give in.”

That voice grew strained over the course of the afternoon and evening from loud chants and cheers. Before the closure hearing, Rodriguez led a band of students — including one dressed in a tiger costume — on a march around the neighborhood. As they passed the Q54 bus on Metropolitan Avenue, the driver honked repeatedly at the procession and other cars joined the chorus. More students joined when the group returned to the school’s entrance on Himrod Street, until the rally swelled to nearly 50. (more…)

Revisiting the topic of his first policy speech, delivered in September, Chancellor Dennis Walcott today said efforts to reform the city’s middle schools are well underway.

In a speech this morning, Walcott outlined efforts that the Department of Education has already made, such as opening new schools and recruiting 150 new teachers to get extra training before starting in middle school classrooms this fall.

He also announced additional new initiatives, including a summer program to give extra help to middle school students who score just below proficient on state tests and a training program for prospective middle school leaders that will be run in part by Teach For America.

We’ll have more about Walcott’s speech and the initiatives he discussed later today. For now, here’s the complete speech as prepared for delivery at New York University this morning. The university is hosting an all-day symposium about research about what works in middle schools organized by the Research Alliance, the independent body of academics given access to city schools data.

• The city is doing away with its controversial list of banned test topics. (Post, NY1, SchoolBook)
• The city withdrew seven turnaround plans. (GothamSchools, SchoolBook, Daily News, Post, NY1, WSJ)
• None of the schools was in Queens, where officials have been protesting. (GothamSchools, Daily News)
• A credit rating agency, Moody’s, praised the state’s disbursal of school aid to needy districts. (Post)
• A school safety agent was removed after he was arrested on charges of rape. (Post, NY1, Daily News)
• A Queens program for students with autism is modeled after a renowned program at Princeton. (NY1)
• Thousands of state workers, including school workers, rushed to lock in retirement benefits. (Times)
• Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School students base year-end projects on their lives. (Daily News)
• A report shows that a link between college education and lifespan has grown stronger over time. (Times)