GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The Common Core shows up in the Democratic Party platform, but not in Republicans’. (Politics K-12)
• A San Francisco high school that got caught in federal overhaul rules is actually thriving. (Mother Jones)
• Former city Department of Education officials are making their mark in districts nationwide. (City Limits)
• A city assistant principal is one of several people debating Teach for America’s merits. (Room for Debate)
• An education insider previews the city schools’ biggest issues for the 2012-2013 year. (Ed in the Apple)
• Author Paul Tough says the Obama administration was wrong to drop its Promise plans. (Hechinger)
• Innovate Manhattan Charter School has reopened in technology-filled private space. (The Lo-Down)
• John Bowne High School’s back-in-captivity peacock is part of the agriculture school’s zoo. (City Room)
• A Labor Day rally of Chicago teachers, on the verge of a strike, attracted 18,000 people. (Substance)
• A public school principal outlines his objections to for-profit public schools. (Practical Theory)
• On Sept. 1 each year, Russian schools celebrate the Day of Knowledge with a host of rituals. (Latitude)

Lynn Passarella lost her position as principal of Theatre Arts Performing Company School in March when an investigation concluded that a host of academic and financial improprieties had taken place under her watch.

This summer, the suspended adminstrator lost some of her savings, as well, when the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board fined her $3,500 for two violations of city ethics rules. The board levied the fine in July after Passarella accepted its ruling, according to a disposition released today.

Both offenses violated city rules that prohibit city employees from using their positions to benefit themselves or people close to them. In one, Passarella paid a school worker $60 to prepare an annual holiday party at her home. In another, she encouraged a community group that worked with TAPCO to hire her sister.

The offenses turned up in the report issued in March by Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon, but they were not the impetus for the investigation or its main findings. We reported at the time:

New York City’s top-ranked high school two years ago achieved its lofty score under a veil of academic improprieties that ranged from fudged student records to inflated test scores, according to a lengthy report released today by the Department of Education. … (more…)

Like educators across the city, Mark Anderson is back in the classroom today. But it’s not the one he left in June.

Anderson chose to look for a new school after two years as a special education teacher at a struggling Bronx elementary school. In the Community section today, he explains what motivated his move — and argues that administrators at schools like the one he left could stem their annual teacher exodus just by being nice.

Anderson writes:

I can’t say that I am an “irreplaceable” teacher. But I do know that some of the teachers that I have worked with are, and that we have chosen to forsake our school.

The education policy group TNTP coined that term this summer in a report that calls for changes to teacher retention policies. The top 20 percent of teachers are “irreplaceables,” TNTP concluded, and yet they must be replaced far too often. Like many educators, I may take issue with some of the flashpoints of TNTP’s report — the aggrandizing term of “irreplaceable,” the focus on firing “low performers,” the notion of merit pay, or the idea that the wheat can even be separated from the chaff given the measures that currently exist.

But … the report got one critical point right: most teachers depart due to a failure in school leadership. As the report further notes (under “low-cost retention strategies”), the remedy for this failure can be heartrendingly easy: All it would often take to retain some effective teachers is a few positive words of recognition.

Not only were words of recognition absent at his old school, but teachers who should have been praised were criticized while teachers who declined to make the extra effort escaped censure, Anderson writes. The dynamic is reversed in his new school, he reports.

A family approaches the entrance to a student registration center at Brooklyn Technical High School. Each summer, the education department opens 10 registration sites around the city for students who are new to the school system.

Patrick Chiriboga sought a public school spot after withdrawing from Catholic school after ninth grade. Brownsville’s Rose Sistrunk wanted to enroll her daughters into new schools as the family prepared to move from a homeless shelter into permanent housing. And Canarsie’s Kathleen Ettienne hoped her daughter would land in a school that was better than the charter school she had left.

Chiraboga, Sistrunk, and Ettienne are among the thousands of parents and students who will pass through New York City’s 10 temporary student registration centers this year. The registration centers opened at the end of August and will stay open well into this month to serve families who are still looking for schools as the new year gets underway.

On the first day that the centers opened this year, Aug. 28, staffers stationed at Prospect Heights’ Clara Barton High School estimated they saw 300 students. At Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus in the Bronx, that number was closer to 450, workers there estimated. Days later, there were again dozens of families lined up along East Fordham Road when the enrollment center opened its doors for the day.

Department officials did not provide total numbers of how many students citywide passed through the doors at the registration centers last week, but site supervisors said they expected an even larger influx this week. Each year, about 50,000 students enroll in city schools “over the counter,” or after the regular enrollment cycle, many of them in the first weeks of the school year.

Many of the families are new to the city’s school system after moving from elsewhere or withdrawing from private schools. They are the intended targets for the registration centers, which also help families who are seeking to transfer schools within the system.

The Department of Education’s welcome mat

“For a lot of these families, it’s their first experience with this bureaucracy and we want to be here and let them know that they’re not alone,” said Henry Eiser, who is working at Brooklyn Technical High School, one of three registration centers in Brooklyn. (more…)