GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Three bright city students who attended three different schools are now on three trajectories. (HuffPo)
• A city reading teacher recommends non-fiction summer reading to engage and move students. (Times)
• Harlem Village Academies’ founder Deborah Kenny answers queries about starting the schools. (TIME)
• A Delaware charter school principal said she had a PhD from a school that doesn’t exist. (News Journal)
• In the first year that StudentsFirst existed, 2010-2011, the group raised $7.6 million. (Teacher Beat)
• The directory that next year’s eighth-graders will use to pick high schools is out now. (Insideschools)
• A study found that daily report cards helped students with ADHD stay on track. (Inside Special Ed)
• An analogy: Giving teacher ratings just to parents is like giving health grades only to diners. (Flypaper)
• Overlooked in talk about segregated schools is that there are few “average” schools. (EdNews Colorado)
• A Teach for America vet and critic finds the same unsettling ideas in this year’s recruits. (Gary Rubinstein)
• A test expert doubts Pearson and the state have enough good test questions for next year. (SchoolBook)

Not a single child-care slot will be lost or school aide laid off as a result of this year’s budget deal between Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council.

The deal, announced late today, rolls back millions of dollars of cuts that Bloomberg proposed in his executive budget last month. Instead of losing 6,500 child-care spots and 30,000 after-school spots, the city will actually have more spots next year than this year. And although Bloomberg had slashing about 400 school aides from the city payroll — more than half as many as were laid off last year — no layoffs will take place.

DC-37, the union that represents school aides and other non-teaching school personnel, agreed to trim employees’ workdays by about half an hour in order to avert the cuts, city officials said.

The budget is “not just a plan on how to spend but also a statement about who we are as a city,” said Council Speaker Christine Quinn during a celebratory press conference at City Hall. “And we are a city where every child is given the opportunity and resources to learn.”

Quinn said the city had also agreed to make changes to its EarlyLearn initiative, which aims to streamline and improve early childhood education. (more…)

Students listened to their valedictorian in the rain, before lightning caused the ceremony to be moved inside.

Faculty and students at the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School believe in the Scandinavian saying: There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.

For four years, members of the class of 2012 endured classes in the rain, snow, and sleet as they learned the ins and outs of marine biology and ship engineering through sailing and diving in the New York Harbor.

But that didn’t stop a severe thunderstorm from interrupting their graduation Friday, which was held outside the small public high school’s campus on Governors Island.

When lightning struck yards from where the ceremony was being held, Principal Nate Dudley helped direct an evacuation of the area. Students, teachers, and families fled to shelter in a tunnel in a nearby building, crying young siblings in tow, then waded through ankle-deep puddles to the school’s dining hall. They quickly dismantled tables that had been set for a senior banquet, and the ceremony resumed where it left off, in the middle of the valedictorian Cesar Gutierrez’s speech.

Dudley said that efficiency and resiliency represents the Harbor School. ”We roll with whatever happens to make our programs work,” he said.

Dudley, too, was graduating, after overseeing the school since it opened in Bushwick in 2003. This summer he is leaving Harbor School to become a deputy leader in one of the networks that the Department of Education runs to support schools. He’ll also continue working toward a doctorate in education leadership at Seton Hall University. (more…)

P.S. 9, a Prospect Heights elementary school, faces a sudden budget shortfall.

The city’s annual calculation of schools’ enrollment of poor students has at least one Brooklyn elementary school on the wrong side of an unyielding line.

The city gives extra federal funds to schools where 60 percent of students are eligible for free lunch. P.S. 9, which hosts a gifted program in gentrifying Prospect Heights, has received the funds in the past, but now its enrollment of poor students has dropped — to 59.1 percent.

That means the school won’t get the Title I funds, even though it has virtually the same proportion of eligible students as many other schools that will receive them.

“It’s sounds great that we’re coming out of a Title I position but we still don’t have enough resources,” said Christine Scalon, secretary of the school’s parent-teacher organization.

Scanlon and other parents are leading a frantic push to raise $160,000 by the end of the school year, the amount they have calculated the school is losing. (more…)

It’s a good thing parents at Park Slope’s P.S. 10 picked last Tuesday to surprise their children with a schoolyard flash mob — today’s stormy weather would have dampened the crowd’s enthusiasm.

The routine was choreographed by Kristi Spessard, a parent who also heads an experimental dance troupe. According to Lauren Elvers Collins, a P.S. 10 parent who posted on the blog Park Slope Stoop about the experience, the parents spent months rehearsing their routine and even roped school administrators into donning boas and participating.

And while the performance didn’t have any overt political messages, a more subtle one might have been expressed. Responding to a commenter on Gothamist who asked, “Who has time to do this?” a commenter named crocodile eyes wrote, “People who want to teach their kids that life is not all about standardized testing & quantitative statistics!” According to the school’s website, P.S. 10 families were among those who traveled to Pearson’s headquarters earlier this month to protest against the test-maker.

• Albany Republicans say they’re fed up with Mayor Bloomberg’s “do-or-die” policy appeals. (Daily News)
• Gov. Cuomo’s education policy path seems to straddle the line between two competing ideologies. (WSJ)
• A teacher at Sheepshead Bay High School says the new principal made her change grades. (Post)
• Aspire Prep teachers say they had to “teach” Regents science classes to boost the school’s score. (Post)
• Juan Gonzalez: Eva Moskowitz says she is overspending, but her network has a surplus. (Daily News)
• A first set of state audits of preschool special education spending found evidence of fraud. (Times)
• The state approved the city’s turnaround plans with conditions. (GothamSchools, WSJ, NY1, Post)
• Districts across the state will spend the summer working to comply with new teacher eval rules. (Lo-Hud)
• State lawmakers voted to require kindergarten but left other bills on the table. (GothamSchools, Times)
• The city is still declining to implement a free cell-phone storage system at city schools. (Post)
• Bloomberg said principals will push teacher ratings on parents. (GothamSchools, NY1, Daily News)
• A Bronx school bus driver was beaten to death after side-swiping a mirror. (NY1, Post)
• A collection of P.S. 99 class photos from 1929 to the present reflects changes in Kew Gardens. (Times)
• The teen caught in crossfire outside Bronx Latin School in 2009 graduated last week. (Daily News)
• Students from Brooklyn’s J.H.S 292 were thrown out of the 9/11 memorial after defacing it. (Daily News)
• The first graduating class of a Queens magnet school, from 1982, is reuniting this week. (Daily News)
• The Daily News says the software-themed school opening this fall augurs a bright future for the city.
• Michael Goodwin: Catholic schools succeed because their families are committed to education. (Post)
• Deborah Kenny: The mixture of accountability and freedom explains why charter schools thrive. (WSJ)
• Budget cuts and scandal are roiling Philadelphia’s longstanding Catholic school community. (Times)
• Online fundraising for an upstate bus monitor bullied by students has brought in over $550,000. (Times)
• Students at three Las Vegas high schools capped their “turnaround” year by graduating. (Las Vegas Sun)

Last week on GothamSchools:

• The newest entrant into Harlem’s fraught charter school political scene has a checkered past. (Friday)
• The state will carry out erasure analysis to detect cheating on state tests despite a budget cut. (Thursday)
• Albany lawmakers passed a bill to limit access to teacher evaluations, despite reservations. (Thursday)
• Lobbying by the tutoring industry got a bill to preserve its market onto Albany’s agenda. (Wednesday)
• Common Core-aligned test items from the state hit teachers’ inboxes for the first time. (Wednesday)
• Parent advocates announced a civil-rights complaint about the DOE’s language services. (Wednesday)
• Several city-produced foreign language exams administered in high schools contained errors. (Tuesday)
• The city welcomed its latest crop of Teaching Fellows, which is twice the size of last year’s. (Tuesday)
• Teachers at “turnaround” schools criticized the path that the rehiring process has taken. (Tuesday)
• The state teachers union opposed a bill meant to help charter schools serve needy students. (Monday)
• More than 3,500 workers at 24 “turnaround” schools got notice that they had been excessed. (Monday)
• The state’s top court said public school students are not protected by N.Y.’s human rights law. (Monday)