GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• An educator proposes seven events, testing stamina and endurance, for a Teacher Olympics. (Miss Eyre)
• A city teacher laments the inflexibility of retention rules based on student test scores. (Jose Vilson)
• Considering the 1966 Coleman Report, a teacher wonders if reform hasn’t backfired. (Gary Rubinstein)
• Rick Hess shares four insights about policymaking with the teachers who are affected by it. (Straight Up)
• The mother of a Stuyvesant student outlines her hopes and fears for the new principal. (Insideschools)
• A defense of Nick, Jr. becomes a call for a knowledge bowl between 4-year-olds. (Starting an Ed School)
• Students for Education Reform has updated its website to reflect its national and local donors. (SFER)
• Georgia’s defense of its teacher evaluation plans hasn’t satisfied the U.S. DOE’s concerns. (Politics K-12)

Some city principals would like to see schools reduce their police presence.

But in 1958, principals couldn’t even get the police to swing by — a policy that might have driven one school leader to suicide.

That’s the story behind a series that appeared that year in the New York World Telegram & Sun. Masquerading as a teacher-hopeful, reporter George Allen landed a job at John Marshall Junior High School in Brooklyn, where violence among students the previous spring had driven Principal George Goldfarb to request a police presence.

Mayor Robert Wagner had for the previous year been resisting placing police around schools — there were 819 at the time — because of the unsavory images of armed officials who had tried to keep black students out of schools that were being integrated, according to the New York Daily News.

According to the Daily News,

George Goldfarb was 55 years old, 33 years in the system, and he was suffering the displeasure of his superiors. Personally, he very much wanted police in his school, where, among other things, a 13-year-old blind girl had recently been assaulted in a stairwell, and he had gone before the grand jury and said so out loud. This was, of course, directly contrary to stated Board of Ed policy, and he had been spoken to. At 10 a.m. Jan. 28, he was due before the jury again. Instead, he wearily climbed to the roof of his six-story Eastern Parkway apartment building and jumped. … (more…)

When a special education teacher at M.S. 302 in the South Bronx found out in late 2009 that, like so many other Americans at the time, she was at risk of losing her house to foreclosure, she went to her assistant principal for help.

The assistant principal, Larry Thornton, offered her a deal: He would buy the house from her, but then he would rent it out to her so she could continue living there. The teacher accepted the offer and had a lawyer hammer out all of the details.

A month later, Thornton needed a helping hand himself. He went to the teacher — now also his tenant — to get a loan of $5,000. He must have seemed like a safe bet: A year earlier, he had borrowed from the teacher and paid back his loan in full. The teacher issued the loan and retired a few weeks later, in January 2010.

Today, the city’s Conflict of Interests Board announced that Thornton would pay a $3,500 fine for the transactions, which violated a city rule that bars employees from doing business with superiors or subordinates. Thornton accepted the ruling and agreed to pay the fine, according to a disposition the board released.

According to a press release, both the board’s investigative arm and a city office that looks into allegations of wrongdoing at schools, the Special Commissioner of Investigation, had worked on determining that the illicit transactions had taken place. (more…)

When we Tweeted on Monday, “Today marks the one-month countdown to the first day of school, Sept. 6,” our readers were swift to respond.

“Why you gotta be like that with all your talk about school starting!” responded FJM718, a Bronx teacher.

Here’s why: We’re using the start of the year as an excuse to open the roof deck at our office space to readers for the second time. Our first happy hour there in June celebrated the “almost start” of summer, and now we’re toasting the almost-end.

The happy hour is on Aug. 15, which means there will still be three weeks and a day until classes begin at most of the city’s public schools. But it will be the summer’s last chance to hobnob with GothamSchools reporters and readers.

Check out the invitation at right for details and RSVP now to join us next week.

• An analysis of 200 schools with many high-need students finds that most have very low scores. (NY1)
• A new coalition of city advocacy groups aims to hand candidates education platforms. (GothamSchools)
• Principals who struggled before are involved in multiple charter school proposals. (GothamSchools)
• The Times calls for an overhaul of the state’s preschool special ed program to prevent fraud and abuse.
• High schools are grappling with the NCAA’s new, tougher rules about high school achievement. (ESPN)
• Nationally, students with disabilities are suspended twice as often as non-disabled students. (Times)
• Online universities are fast becoming one of the most frequent paths to education degrees. (USA Today)
• Naomi Riley: Maggie Gyllenhaal’s latest movie shows school reform is cool and unions are not. (Post)