GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he would not support making teacher evaluations fully public. (Daily News)
• The PEP approved turnaround closures at 24 schools after a long hearing. (GothamSchools, Post, NY1)
• The city first withdrew closure plans for two schools. (GothamSchools, Times, WSJ, Daily News, NY1)
• Hugs are banned at Brooklyn Prospect Charter School; students have fretted for months. (Daily News)
• Legislation that would let New York City require kindergarten is now pending in Albany. (SchoolBook)
• Local Head Start programs remain worried about a federal plan to have them reapply for funding. (WSJ)
• An overcrowding task force in Manhattan says the DOE’s efforts are not enough. (Downtown Express)
• An arrested teacher’s aide was freed after being cleared of making lewd comments. (Daily News, NY1)
• A woman whose parents were city teachers targeted in the Red Scare is seeking records. (Daily News)
• An apprenticeship program that began in Boston is being replicated in city middle schools. (WNYC)

We’re stationed right now at the Prospect Heights Campus in Brooklyn, where the Panel for Educational Policy is set to vote tonight on two dozen school closure proposals.

It’s not the usual venue for a contentious panel meeting — the longest meetings have all been held at Brooklyn Technical High School — but the closures are also not the usual type.

Instead of phasing out the schools and slowly opening new ones, the city is proposing to close the schools at the end of the year and reopen them immediately according to a federally prescribed school improvement strategy known as “turnaround.” Under the city’s proposals, which have elicited intense opposition, the schools would get new names, new teachers, and, often, new principals.

For an overview of the controversial policy at the heart of tonight’s meeting, check out our two-part primer. And stay tuned for up-to-the-minute coverage of the panel meeting, which Chancellor Dennis Walcott warned earlier today could go late into the night.

11:58 p.m. And it’s over: All of the turnaround closure votes are done and have passed. Between February and today, the panel has approved 44 school closures to begin or take place this summer — far more than in any previous year.

The panel still has to vote on 17 proposals about school space usage, 10 involving charter schools. They are proceeding quickly through the votes.

11:54 p.m. A teacher from John Dewey High School has broken out in tears behind reporters.

According to the thin crowd of teachers who shout the tally after each vote, those who vote yes are “puppets” and those who cast no votes are “heroes.”

11:48 p.m. Eight to four is the pattern of the night. The seven mayoral appointees who are present tonight are voting for each turnaround plan, as is the Staten Island borough president’s appointee, Diane Peruggia. The four other borough presidents’ appointees are voting against each proposal, in a reprise of the vote count from school closure hearings in February and last year.

One teacher has taken to shouting, “Let’s count … is it eight?” each time a vote is tallied. Other audience members are joining in the chorus.

11:46 p.m. The voting has begun. The panel members dispatch with Queens representative Dmytro Fedkowskyj’s resolution against turnaround quickly, voting 8-4 against it. (more…)

Anaisbely Franjul

Anaisbely Franjul wants to be a writer. The seventh-grader at M.S. 118 said she reads constantly and especially loves fiction and poetry.

But when she opened last week’s state reading test, she was stressed out. She saw words she didn’t know and faced down a reading passage about the thyroid, an organ she hadn’t encountered before. On the second day of testing, she was thrown by the listening passages.

So she wrote a poem about her experience. When she submitted it to GothamSchools, she wrote, “I am a middle school student in the Bronx, who like many others, felt stressed about the state test. Book 2 really hit me like 100 needles in the back and I decided to write a poem about how I felt.”

Here’s an excerpt from “Book 2,” which is published in full in the Community section:

The pale chalk
In my teacher’s hand
Mocking my pain
As she erases the numbers and says
“Two minutes left” (more…)

The crowd at a January PEP meeting at Brooklyn Technical High School

Chancellor Dennis Walcott is so ready for yet another raucous Panel for Educational Policy meeting tonight that he has reserved the Prospect Heights Campus auditorium until 9 a.m. Friday.

“We’re prepared to stay all night and into the morning,” Walcott told Rosanna Scotto and Greg Kelly, the “Good Day New York” crew at Fox 5 during an appearance this morning.

But there’s a chance that tonight could actually be much less heated than some of the panel meetings that have taken place over the past school year.

That’s because two key organizers behind the protests, rallies, and theatrics at those meetings are taking a backseat tonight. The teachers union is largely staying away and Occupy the DOE protesters who have disrupted previous meetings say they plan to keep a low profile. Only a new group, Students Activists United, which grew out of the Alliance for Quality Education and the Coalition for Educational Justice’s efforts against school closures, has plans for an organized protest.

The groups cite political and practical reasons for stepping back, and seasoned activists also say they are suffering from protest fatigue after shouting themselves hoarse at panel meetings whose outcomes seem predetermined.

“After witnessing so many bad PEP meetings, no one has any hope that this will not be another rubber-stamp approval across the board,” said Kevin Kearns, a teacher at Lehman High School in the Bronx. (more…)

Students crowded the auditorium at a public hearing last week at Bushwick Community High School.

When the Panel for Educational Policy meets tonight to consider dozens of proposals for school “turnaround,” two high schools with a host of a heavyweight supporters won’t be on the agenda.

Bushwick Community High School and Grover Cleveland High School were among 26 schools that the department had proposed to close and reopen — with new names and new teachers — in an attempt to win federal school reform funds.

Department officials had said the schools needed radical interventions to help them improve. But today the officials said they had determined after listening to public comment and reviewing performance data that Bushwick and Cleveland didn’t need major changes after all.

The schools “have demonstrated an ability to continue their improvements without the more comprehensive actions that are clearly needed at 24 other schools,” said Chancellor Dennis Walcott in a statement.

The about-face comes weeks after the department yanked seven top-rated schools from the turnaround list and just hours before the panel’s scheduled vote. It also comes after the schools received intense political and community support and, in the case of Bushwick, media attention. (more…)

• This generation will be the first in many not to undergo much more schooling than its parents. (WSJ)
• Preparations are underway for tonight’s Panel for Educational Policy votes on turnaround. (NY1)
• We summed up turnaround’s past, present, and probable future in two parts. (GothamSchools 1, 2)
• Council speaker Christine Quinn was the latest official to support one of the schools. (GothamSchools)
• Principals union chief Ernest Logan says the city needs reforms beyond unwise closures. (Daily News)
• But Chancellor Dennis Walcott defends school closures, saying they induce improvement. (Daily News)
• Bedbugs are down in the city, but parents say they are all over East New York’s P.S. 224. (Daily News)
• Parents are giving three charter middle schools proposed for Queens a warm response. (Daily News)
• P.S. 24 is likely not to be able to accommodate all the gifted qualifiers in its district. (Riverdale Press)

• The nation’s two major teachers unions are both giving big to Super PAC political funds. (Teacher Beat)
• State Chancellor Merryl Tisch said new requirements won’t water down a N.Y. diploma. (SchoolBook)
• New studies suggest major downsides to introducing algebra too early. (Curriculum Matters)
• Dan Brown’s mom describes getting students excited (too briefly) about Shakespeare. (Get in the Fracas)
• Michael Albertson gives a teacher’s take on Flushing High School’s turnaround hearing. (GS Community)
• And Lehman High School student Ubayed Muhith offers another defense of his school. (SchoolBook)
• In D.C., a move is afoot to let charter schools narrow their now-citywide zones. (D.C. Schools Insider)
• Diane Ravitch now says she was too charitable when she said the state forgot a test promise. (DR’s Blog)
• A feature called “Kids Draw The News” starts with a call for art about a sports club brawl. (City Room)
• The UFT says a change to a charter network’s structure effectively creates a new school system. (Edwize)
• A teacher lists 40 strategies for teaching English language skills to diverse learners. (Tween Teacher)
• Math teachers are looking for support to help them create instructional videos. (Kickstarter via Eduwonk)

Council Speaker Christine Quinn at a school event with UFT President Michael Mulgrew and Council member Robert Jackson last year.

City Council Speaker and likely 2013 mayoral candidate Christine Quinn is the latest public official to throw her support behind an effort to keep Bushwick Community High School from closing under the city’s federally-funded turnaround plans.

A Quinn spokesman said today that representatives for her office have been lobbying the Department of Education in the last week to remove the embattled transfer school from the list of 26 schools being voted for closure at tomorrow’s Panel for Educational Policy.

Like the school’s other supporters, Quinn’s office got involved because she “believes in the idea of transfer schools,” said the spokesman, Justin Goodman. “The metrics that are being used to close schools shouldn’t apply to transfer schools because they’re a completely different model.”

Immediately after Mayor Bloomberg announced plans to “turn around” dozens of struggling schools, Department of Education officials began laying the groundwork to implement the complex and politically charged process.

Planning is well underway, and it is likely to ratchet up after Thursday night, when the Panel for Educational Policy is set to vote on the proposals to close and reopen the schools with new names and new teachers. Approval is virtually assured, because the panel — whose majority consists of mayoral appointees — has never rejected a city proposal.

Yesterday, in a first post about turnaround’s past, present, and future, we looked at how the process landed on the panel’s agenda. Today, we are summarizing what we know – and what we don’t — about what is likely to come next.

What will happen to the teachers at the schools?

All teachers will have to reapply for their jobs. Under the 18-D process outlined in the city’s contract with the union, each principal and a team of teachers chosen by the principal and the union will set hiring guidelines and hire back at least 50 percent of the teachers from the old school who apply and are qualified to work in the new one. Federal turnaround requirements call for the schools to replace at least half of teachers who have been on staff for more than two years, suggesting that the rehiring might have to achieve exactly a 50 percent replacement rate. But city officials have said they are not setting a rehiring quota for turnaround principals. (more…)