GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Two companies that are bidding for school food delivery contracts have a checkered past. (City Limits)
• A national reform group rates Chicago’s contract by “clear wins” and “missed opportunities.” (NCTQ)
• A news story about a working teacher who was homeless ignored his gambling losses. (Romenesko)
• Here’s a district-by-district map of school spending in New York State. (Citizens Budget Commission)
• A former activist charter school parent explains why he supported Chicago teachers. (Schoolbook)
• In a first, Mississippi is making schools teach versions of sex ed to lower teen pregnancy. (Hechinger)
• A note from a college student and ex-ELL reminds a teacher why she started teaching. (NYC Educator)
• A teacher and parent’s “real-life ‘Won’t Back Down’ story” isn’t like Hollywood’s. (NYC PS Parents)
• A second-year teacher credits students for how far much she has developed in just a year. (EdWize)

This week on GothamSchools, stories of controversial principals generated the most comment activity.

On Tuesday, we reported on the departure of longtime Fort Hamilton High School Principal Jo Ann Chester, who retired this week amidst an investigation into a payroll scheme that underpaid teachers for more than a year. Her exit prompted many people — some posting anonymously who identified themselves as Fort Hamilton teachers — to air their grievances about the school, their former boss and the larger systematic conditions that created:

Jennifer Rivera, a teacher at Fort Hamilton defended Chester and her actions:

The choice that Mrs. Chester made seems to have been one that was in the best interest of a.) her students–they need teachers.  And b.) these teachers–they certainly weren’t “victims” forced to work for some tyrannical cheater; they were teachers who needed experience and had an excellent place to get it.

Additionally, it seems the system with it’s “hiring freeze” left no other option for this woman who exudes nothing but class, professionalism and pride in her school.

Many teachers who were withheld pay are getting backpay that could eventually total up to $300,000 and some commenters fretted about what that could mean for the school moving forward. An anonymous commenter wrote: (more…)

For the last six months, teachers whose permanent positions were eliminated have known that the city might offer to pay them to leave the city’s payroll. But they haven’t known how much the option could yield, complicating their job-hunting calculus.

Now, we know, sort of — a day after UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the Wall Street Journal that the option was “dead in the water.”

The option might have been $14,000, or $25,000, or 25 percent of a teacher’s annual salary, or 20 percent, according to conflicting information the union and city released today. But both sides agreed that the deal stalled after the city made the buyout offer contingent on a different city proposal to give raises to top-rated teachers, a plan that the union had rejected back in January.

In dueling press releases, city and union officials sparred over what terms they had discussed for the buyout. City officials said they had offered to pay $25,000 to teachers who had spent more than one year in the Absent Teacher Reserve if the teachers would resign from the Department of Education.

But union officials said the city’s numbers were misleading. The $25,000 option, they said, would only have applied to ATRs with enough education and experience to put them at the top of the city’s salary scale. Other teachers who had spent more than a decade working in city schools would have netted much less, they said, because the city wanted to cap the offer at 20 percent of each teacher’s annual salary. (The city said the cap was 25 percent of the annual salary.) One-fifth of the average salary of mid-career teachers in the ATR pool, union officials said, would have amounted to just a $14,000 payout.

The city-union dispute over numbers reflected far more significant ideological differences over how to reward excellent teaching and urge weak teachers out of the system. (more…)

From left, Christine Quinn, Kelly Shannon, Scott Stringer and Vicki Sando, founder of the Greenroon Environmental Literacy Laboratory, and state Senator Tom Duane.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn are likely in for a year of confrontation as they prepare for their prospective mayoral bids.

But on Friday morning at the opening of P.S. 41′s new 7,000 square foot rooftop garden, they were happy to agree on one thing.

“We agree that you’d be on any mayor’s short list for chancellor,” Stringer said to P.S. 41′s principal Kelly Shannon during a speech in the Greenwich Village elementary school’s gymnasium.

The Democratic primary is still a year away, making serious contenders unlikely to make any declarative statements on education or anything else. But who a mayor considers — and eventually selects — to be his or her chancellor is one of the most telling hints for how a candidate plans to guide education policy, which is shaping up to be a defining issue in the race.

“There are two major decisions the next mayor’s going to make in this town. The first is, who’s gonna be the police commissioner? And then who’s gonna be the schools chancellor?” Stringer said. (more…)

Principal Worrell-Breeden looked on as first graders from the Teachers College Community School sang "What a Wonderful World" and recited the song in sign language.

West Harlem community leaders heralded the coming of the year-old Teachers College Community School yesterday as a new district school option for a neighborhood packed with charter schools.

The elementary school, which opened in East Harlem last year and moved to Manhattanville this fall, is managed by Columbia University’s school of education.

In recent years, many new schools have come to West Harlem in the form of high-profile charter school networks that have brought both educational opportunities and controversy to the neighborhood. Like those schools, the fledgling elementary school admits students randomly through a lottery process, and it relies on a mix of public and private funding to operate.

But it also has the widespread support of political leaders who have served as some of the most vocal critics of the city’s charter school policies, among them State Assemblyman Keith Wright. Wright has proposed legislation to give parent councils veto power over city plans to require district and charter schools to share space.

A range of Harlem community leaders, including City Councilman Robert Jackson and Donald Notice, president of the West Harlem Development Corporation, turned out to the school’s opening ceremony yesterday to laud the effort Columbia has made to support the school and help renovate its new, permanent home on Manhattanville’s Morningside Avenue. (more…)

Deputy Chancellor Corinne Rello-Anselmi talks to families from District 6 at a Citywide Council on Special Education's monthly meeting.

Two weeks into the school year, fears about the rollout of special education reforms are turning into reality at some schools, according to parents and teachers from Upper Manhattan who met with the Department of Education’s top special education official Thursday evening.

But the official, Corinne Rello-Anselmi, said she has “been holding feet to the fire” to make sure that students are getting what they need despite the changes, which are bringing more students with disabilities to neighborhood schools that have served few students with special needs in the past.

The sweeping reforms have been underway for two years now, but most schools are only seeing the changes take effect this year. They were designed help schools integrate more students with learning disabilities into general education classrooms, and in the process bring the city up to speed with research that shows that special education students are more successful when they learn alongside students without disabilities.

Parents, educators, and advocates have warned that the department might be moving too fast and giving schools too little help to make the seismic changes. And at a meeting on Thursday of the Citywide Council on Special Education, a parent group that the city is required to support, some parents and educators said their experiences so far suggested that the warnings were well founded.

Yadira Cruz, a public school teacher and the mother of a sixth grader who has Asperger syndrome, said she sent her daughter to middle school at P.S. 187 in Washington Heights this year expecting the school to meet her daughter’s needs. Her daughter’s Individualized Education Plan calls for her to be in a small class composed exclusively of students with special needs.

But Cruz said her daughter was placed instead into a larger class that contains both students with disabilities and students without special needs. And a week into the school year, P.S. 187 started asking her to find another school, Cruz told Rello-Anselmi, even though she said the options for transferring at this stage in the year are limited. (more…)

• City data shows parents are less involved in programs that are supposed to keep them engaged. (WSJ)
• Union officials said the city was also balking on another touted plan: teacher buyouts. (NY1, WSJ)
• Teachers at an elite public school boycotted a parent event to protest their principal. (GothamSchools)
• A 19-year-old student was killed in a stabbing outside of a high school in Hell’s Kitchen. (Daily News)
• Walcott visited another turnaround school, this time for good news. (GothamSchools, Schoolbook)
• Rahm Emanuel is running an ad blitz to portray the strike’s outcome as a win for him. (Chicago Tribune)
• The latest lawsuit against Mayor Bloomberg is over withheld student data about hospital visits. (Times)
• Touchscreen devices could usher in a renaissance for cursive writing in the classroom. (Schoolbook)
• Michael Benjamin: If the UFT is any guide, Chicago could be in for widening union power. (Power)
• A teacher was fired last school year for threatening her principal during a staff meeting. (DNAInfo)
• A teacher who alleged that students tormented her won a $450,000 settlement from the city. (News)
• Obama’s ambitious first-term education agenda has gone through without much oversight. (WaPo)