GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Spike Lee, a fan of the big-soda ban, said he got a great education at John Dewey High School. (Vulture)
• A reporter considers how to tell his kids that their teacher from P.S. 58 murdered her children. (HuffPo)
• A paean to charter schools notes that soon, half of Britain’s schools will follow the model. (Economist)
• Finland’s latest education policy initiative gives new meaning to “structural change.” (EdWeek)
• The Truth-O-Meter says a New Jersey official is correct to say that tenure still exists there. (Politifact)
• A charter operator thinks a movie could put a positive spin on being held back. (Starting an Ed School)
• A retired teacher says diagnostic tests like the ones at Truman HS aren’t accurate either. (PO’ed Teacher)
• Here’s a primer on the city’s summer school program, which might soon shed the name. (SchoolBook)
• Ed Sec Arne Duncan crashed the court of the local basketball team “Can’t Be Stop.” (DC Sports Bog)
• After one year with paraprofessionals in her classroom, a teacher gives a good review. (SchoolBook)
• Mathews: Investigators don’t seem to be trying to get to the bottom of all those erasures. (Class Struggle)

It’s summer break, so Stuyvesant High School students probably weren’t listening to the radio at 7 a.m. today.

But if they were, 69 of them would have found out from Chancellor Dennis Walcott that they will have to retake the end-of-year Spanish exams they took last month. That’s the number of students that Department of Education investigators concluded had received exam questions in advance via a text message from a classmate.

Walcott announced during an appearance on the John Gambling Show that also touched on the schools thrown into limbo by an arbitrator’s ruling last month and the Department of Education’s new focus on college readiness.

The first phase of the investigation, conducted by the department’s internal Office of Special Investigations, looked only at student behavior and meted out punishments, including some suspensions, according to the city’s discipline code, Walcott said.

The next phase, he said, is to look at whether Stuyvesant’s principal, Stanley Teitel, and his staff followed the appropriate protocol after learning about the cheating on the city exams. “We have to look at the process,” Walcott said. “Once the allegation was made, what happened after that?”

Teitel sent a letter to parents June 20 alerting them to the cheating and informing them that students suspected of cheating would lose some privileges, such as the right to leave campus for lunch. But the city did not find out about the cheating allegations for nearly a week after that letter went home. (more…)

Ninth-graders at PTECH work on algebra problems in May.

On a muggy August afternoon last year, nearly 75 Bronx students could be found playing orchestra instruments to the tune of Duke Ellington’s C Jam Blues in the auditorium of M.S. 223.

They were gathered to mark the close of three weeks of arts, music, and math instruction they received through the school’s first summer “bridge” program. M.S. 223 is one of dozens of city middle and high schools to invite to incoming students for summer classes meant to immerse them in school culture and prevent them from forgetting what they learned the previous year.

“Summer bridge is important because we think of our model as a year-round school,” said Rashid Davis, principal of Brooklyn’s nascent Pathways in Technology Early College High School. “That way we’re not dealing with that summer learning loss than can go from two to four months of material, especially for high-poverty students. We can’t expect them to magically come in here with the skills they need.”

Indeed, researchers have pegged students’ regression — known as the “summer slide” — at the equivalent of two months of school or more. City officials recognize the challenge: This summer, the Department of Education is piloting a small program in the South Bronx for students who are struggling but not failing.

But the funding for that program, Summer Quest, comes from private donors. Public funds, for the most part, are earmarked only for the thousands of students across the city who are required to attend summer school because of low test scores or poor grades.

That means schools that develop programs for incoming students who aren’t already in trouble are on their own to scrounge up funding. (more…)

• Summer school kicks off today, and about 33,000 city students should be in attendance. (NY1)
• A lawyer who says his life was changed by Chess-in-the-Schools has now joined its board. (WSJ)
• The unemployment rate for New York City teens is higher than the national rate for teens. (Post)
• The city’s costs for transporting students with disabilities include $100,000 a year for one student. (Post)
• Michael Powell: A teacher run out for speaking up for students with disabilities was vindicated. (Times)
• De la Salle Academy, a private school for poor students, gives explicit lessons on media literacy. (NY1)
• The man behind a junior high-college partnership’s start 30 years ago says it has worked. (Daily News)
• Across the country, 500 public schools offer single-sex education, and the ACLU isn’t happy. (CSM)
• More states are enacting laws that tie third-grade promotion to passing a reading test. (USA Today)

Last week on GothamSchools:

• The arbitrator who reversed “turnaround” hiring explained his logic in a withering ruling. (Friday)
• The principal of Truman High issues diagnostic exams because she doesn’t trust test scores. (Friday)
• A student’s efforts to rally against Grover Cleveland high’s closure won her an internship. (Friday)
• For now, confusion is reigning at the 24 schools that had been set to undergo turnaround. (Thursday)
• The city’s summer youth jobs program, seen to boost school-year achievement, kicked off. (Thursday)
• Students who overcame obstacles to graduate describe the support they got on the way. (Tuesday)
• The city argued that the turnaround hiring issues shouldn’t have been arbitrated at all. (Tuesday)