GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• A Chicago teacher says his school spent more than 12 hours on testing in three weeks. (Answer Sheet)
• A comprehensive series examines Chicago’s high absenteeism rate in elementary schools. (Tribune)
• In honor of Veterans Day, Teach For America is ramping up veteran recruitment. (TFA via Eduwonk)
• The UFT’s activities for retired teachers include a trip to Good Housekeeping’s headquarters. (POed)
• A school choice advocacy group wants New York State to adopt statewide open enrollment. (NYFERA)
• Parents push back against the idea that opting out of testing is somehow elitist. (Parent Voices NY)
• A new film about the fight over Khalil Gibran Academy is being screened tomorrow. (GS Calendar)
• The winners of an essay contest for Japanese students describe the healing power of sports. (Times)
• Harbor School students explain why building oyster reefs could stop the next Sandy. (Dot Earth)
• A TNTP study of teacher retention in D.C. says performance pay helps, but not principals. (TNTP)
• The president of Denver’s school board says voters clearly support its reforms. (EdNews Colorado)
• Indiana’s new schools chief’s platform included opposition to the Common Core. (Curriculum Matters)

Chancellor Walcott talks to parents at P.S. 207, which will remain closed until at least 2013 and could be much longer. Red trailers parked outside the school contain 35,000 gallons of water and oil that leaked into the school during Sandy, Walcott said.

Six city schools that were damaged by Hurricane Sandy won’t reopen until 2013, according to the Department of Education’s latest update on its recovery from the storm.

But the rest of the schools displaced by the storm, which on Tuesday will number 37, will likely be able to move back to their buildings by the end of November.

To keep pace with the timeline, Mayor Bloomberg today announced an emergency plan to add $500 million in capital funds, $200 million of which will go directly toward paying for repairs at the remaining schools. The other $300 million will help repair damages sustained to hospital buildings. Bloomberg made the announcement at P.S. 207, a school in Queens that was damaged so severely that officials aren’t able to pinpoint a reopening date.

“To our knowledge, New York City government has never before made such an emergency provision for additional capital spending because of a natural disaster and certainly not one of this size,” he said.

(more…)

Much like the rest of New York City, for the last two weeks, we’ve been focused almost exclusively on Hurricane Sandy‘s effects on the city’s schools. Now, while Sandy’s aftermath will continue to be an education story for a long time, we’re also getting back to work on other stories that we’ve been following.

It feels like it was far more than three weeks ago that we were publishing stories about college-readiness rates, a city middle school initiative, and how the Department of Education does — or does not — use test scores.

If we needed a refresher, our guess is that our readers need one, too. So we created GothamSchools’ first-ever news quiz:

Answers: (more…)

• Raising school lunch fees is one of the city’s proposed strategies for closing a budget gap. (Times, Post)
• One Far Rockaway family’s story shows how hard it is for storm-affected families to get to school. (NY1)
• More city schools will reopen in their own buildings on Tuesday. (GothamSchools, Daily News, NY1)
• Mayor Bloomberg is planning to dock the pay of city workers who didn’t report during Sandy. (WSJ)
• Families in some schools have had to weigh the value of school against a lack of heat inside. (Times)
• Among teachers that arbitrators declined to fire is one who let a second-grader get lost for hours. (Post)
• After cutting its test monitoring program, the city now seems poised to bulk it back up. (GothamSchools)
• The Times praises federal authorities for taking up the complaint against the city’s elite high school test.
• Nationally, school closures are up 60 percent in the last decade, angering some communities. (Reuters)

Last week on GothamSchools: (more…)