GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• A set of if/then rules for the end of the year, by a teacher who has experienced them. (NYCDOENuts)
• Marcia Lyles, who left the DOE for Delaware, is now up for the chief job in Jersey City. (Hudson Reporter)
• Students from six city public schools got a chance to compose for the New York Philharmonic. (NPR)
• Several stories outline the promise and pitfalls of national standards and tests. (Washington Monthly)
• A 10-year-old video of a day in the life of a Teach for America trainee emerges. (Gary Rubinstein)
• A city lawyer says Romney’s education plan would cut down on “shadow vouchers” for the rich. (Atlantic)
• A Stanford professor discusses his study on the widening class divide among students. (CEAP)
• A teacher: “As bad as things are in … New York, they’re looking even worse in Chicago.” (NYC Educator)
• The head of a tutoring company draws a line between ethical and unethical business. (SchoolBook)
• A parent satirizes the pitches for gifted test tutoring that are sent to 3-year-olds. (Insideschools)
• Why StudentsFirst lacks a space and other tidbits about education advocacy groups. (Teacher Beat)

Hundreds of child care providers like Iraida Tkacheva are affected by the EarlyLearn initiative.

On a cool Friday afternoon, 10 bright-eyed toddlers played outdoors, giggling and speaking Russian, before heading inside for a homemade lunch. During the week, they spend more time with Iraida Tkacheva, their child-care provider, than they do with their working parents.

Tkacheva has transformed nearly every room in her Bensonhurst house to cater to the children’s needs: an area with tables and chairs where the toddlers eat, a library full of children’s books, a nap area surrounded by walls plastered with educational posters, and a backyard that accommodates toys for playtime with security gates and enclosed circuit cameras to ensure the children’s safety at all times.

Yet once the mayor’s ambitious overhaul of the city’s child-care system takes place on October 1, through a program called EarlyLearn, Tkacheva and hundreds of people who offer subsidized child-care in their homes are set to lose their jobs if funding falls through.

EarlyLearn – one of Bloomberg’s latest education reforms before he leaves office next year – sets out to increase the quality of publicly funded early childhood education while distributing child-care slots to the neediest neighborhoods. It is, according to some advocates, the biggest change to the city’s child-care services in 40 years.

Criticism of EarlyLearn has focused on the fact that it reduces the overall number of early childhood seats. But another major change — about who the city is hiring to provide child care in private homes — has some child-care advocates concerned. (more…)

Grady Principal Geraldine Maione stands in front of a mural painted by students in a "transformation"-funded arts program.

In a normal year, William E. Grady Career and Technical Education High School would be preparing to enroll a ninth-grade class of about 350 students. But this hasn’t been a normal year.

The high school directory distributed to eighth-graders in September listed the school as having a “D” on its city progress report, even though Grady’s 2010 grade would be updated to a B in October. In December, the school’s federal funding was cut off after the city and teachers union failed to agree on new teacher evaluations. The next month, Mayor Bloomberg surprised school staff by announcing that Grady would be one of 33 schools to close and reopen under an overhaul program known as “turnaround.”

Then, in April, after months of raucous protests and appeals to the state’s top education leaders, Grady was yanked from the turnaround list, along with six other schools that had top grades on their city progress reports. The school would open this fall as usual.

Except that it won’t. Grady has just 150 students on its ninth-grade roster for the fall, and fewer students means fewer dollars to spend — in Grady’s case, about $3.5 million. Officials at Grady are planning to cut teachers loose, cancel after-school programs, and dismantle some of the supports that Principal Geraldine Maione said helped the school improve enough to stay open.

No longer will there be after-school clubs in robotics and chess, and teachers won’t be able to be paid to work an extended-day program for students who want to take additional courses in music and dance. With a career and technical education focus, Grady has never been able to offer a full complement of arts courses, so the clubs offered students a rare chance for a rounded education, Maione said. (more…)

• StudentsFirst is backing Hakeem Jeffries in a congressional race the UFT is sitting out. (Daily News)
• Poker can be transformative for students at the Henry Street School for International Studies. (WSJ)
• A bill percolating in Albany would let charter schools form services collaboratives. (GothamSchools)
• Michael Winerip: National lists of best high schools ignore selectivity and demographics. (Times)
• The second lawsuit against a Success Academy, in Williamsburg, was dismissed last week. (NY1)
• The city is rolling back longstanding social promotion rules. (GothamSchools, NY1, Daily News, WSJ)
• After watching a TV show about healthy eating, a P.S. 8 student launched a school food mission. (Post)
• Police are looking for a man who tried to abduct a student outside P.S. 92 in Queens. (Post, NY1)
• A new course at the private Fieldston School aims to expose sheltered students to New York City. (Times)
• A national pilot program to curb domestic violence starts early with middle school students. (Times)
• In a new book, Harlem Village Academies operator Deborah Kenny explains her motivation. (Post)
• A Virginia teacher’s discipline trial shows the complexity of incompetence charges. (Washington Post)
• Speaking on Sunday, Chancellor Walcott reiterated his wish to fire teachers guilty of sex abuse. (Post)
• Andrea Peyser: The spate of teachers accused of sex misconduct means the arbitrators should go. (Post)

Last week on GothamSchools:

• A second set of redacted Joel Klein emails from 2009 includes one from Eva Moskowitz. (Friday)
• Long-troubled Opportunity Charter School won a five-year renewal recommendation. (Thursday)
• Bills that would shield teacher ratings from the public are still on the table in Albany. (Thursday)
• A judge dismissed a lawsuit against Cobble Hill Success Academy but found merit in it. (Wednesday)
• Authorities are devising a way to let charter schools take “over-the-counter” students. (Tuesday)
• New York was one of eight states to receive a No Child Left Behind waiver last week. (Tuesday)