GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• If you have an hour, this video shows all of Monday’s mayoral hopefuls’ education forum. (Politicker)
• The state finally released guides for educators to this year’s Common Core-aligned tests. (EngageNY)
• California officials have okayed Common Core-aligned English standards. (Learning the Language)
• Florida’s education department is embroiled in a Common Core contract dispute. (Answer Sheet)
• Oh, hey! Speaking of the Common Core, don’t forget our event Monday on the standards. Details here.
• Here’s a primer on the Common Core critic we’re importing to the city for the event. (NYC P.S. Parents)
• A former top city schools official says many of Mayor Bloomberg’s policies should end. (GS Community)
• A student educated fully under Bloomberg says she got lucky to attend a midsize school. (City Limits)
• One in four schools that got federal improvement grants last year saw progress reversed. (Politics K-12)
• A pilot of new evaluations in Los Angeles means new tasks for teachers and principals. (Hechinger)
• Twinkies, whose producer just announced its demise, are a mainstay of science experiments. (Well)
• Teachers and parents have mixed feelings about the plan for making up Sandy days. (SchoolBook)
• Barring breaking news, we’ll be taking the rest of the week off. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Students at Brooklyn's Olympus Academy, a transfer high school, use online learning to move ahead at their own pace.

To help students whose homes and schools were damaged in Hurricane Sandy make up for the days of learning time they lost, the Department of Education is expanding its online course offerings to them.

Most schools have returned to working order since Sandy left dozens of them flooded or without power, and attendance is slowly rising. But department officials say they are concerned that students who missed many days of school, or continue to miss school because their home situations prevent them from getting to school, will fall behind.

The solution they’ve devised is to expand online courses that some schools are already offering to more students. The courses will be open to most students whose homes or schools were affected by the hurricane, and will count for credit towards graduation. The opportunity has the potential to reach students who otherwise might not be able to make up classwork they have missed during the school day. But it requires internet access, which many still lack.

“The goal is to help kids get as much instruction as possible,” said department spokeswoman Connie Pankratz. “We were able to build this up really quickly beause we had this platform already existing.” (more…)

Mayoral hopefuls, from left to right, Christine Quinn, Bill Thompson, John Liu, Tom Allon and Bill De Blasio, discuss city education policies.

When the five leading mayoral candidates were asked on Monday how they would select the next schools chancellor at a forum on city education policy, the presumed longshot had the most specific answer.

Newspaper publisher Tom Allon, who recently switched his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican, was the only candidate to name names — and his shortlist contained an eclectic mix of people.

He started with Eric Nadelstern, a former Department of Education deputy who is bullish on school closures and other Bloomberg administration policies, then moved to Hunter College President Jennifer Raab before naming Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University education professor who has been critical of policies favored by the Bloomberg administration. To round out his list, he named John White, who became Louisiana’s school superintendent not long after leaving the city Department of Education in 2011.

Allon’s list elicited laugher and whoops of surprise from the audience, as well as a disapproving remark from Comptroller John Liu, who was sitting beside Allon on the stage.  The forum was hosted by Manhattan Media, the company that Allon owns, with help from GothamSchools. (View the entire event.)

The one thing all of people on Allon’s list have in common is that they have experience working with schools and educators, which Mayor Bloomberg’s three chancellors have not had. Bloomberg’s first and longest-serving chancellor, Joel Klein, drew criticism because he had come from the corporate world, and most of the candidates were eager to say they would not make the same decision. Liu, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, and former comptroller Bill Thompson all promised to choose an educator to lead the schools.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn was the only outlier. She said she did not think the next schools chancellor should necessarily have an education background. (more…)

Debris and packed sand fills a street near the the beach in Belle Harbor a week after the storm hit. Three weeks after the storm, concerns are setting in about how poor air quality could affect students.

Parents at schools just beginning to recover from Hurricane Sandy are concerned that worsening air quality on the Rockaway peninsula could pose a health concern for students who return.

At a meeting Monday night for families in District 27, which includes many hard-hit neighborhoods, a parent leader said children at her newly reopened school arrived with masks to protect them from pollution caused by the storm.

The parent leader, Alexandra Siler, said she sent her daughter to P.S. 317 with a protective mask on Monday, the school’s first day back after two weeks in a temporary location, even before two students there experienced respiratory distress after coming in from recess.

One P.S. 317 student was hospitalized Monday, a Department of Education spokeswoman said. Siler said the school also called an ambulance for a second child but that a parent arrived to pick the student up first.

The hospitalized child, who Siler said was in pre-kindergarten, is feeling better and is now in stable condition, according to the department spokeswoman.

Propelled by $200 million in emergency funding, the department has reopened 20 severely damaged schools on the Rockaway peninsula in the past week. The rapid restoration has meant that thousands of students no longer have to travel long distances to get to cramped temporary sites that sometimes lacked even basic classroom resources.

But it also means that students are returning to school buildings that are surrounded by blocks of waste and sandy debris. (more…)

• At a forum we co-moderated, likely mayoral candidates said they would keep mayoral control. (Times)
• Many of them also said mayoral control’ promise has not been realized under Bloomberg. (SchoolBook)
• City Council Speaker Christine Quinn emphasized that she would improve the tone on teachers. (Post)
• The city announced Sandy makeup days. (GothamSchools, WSJ, NY1, Times, Daily News, SchoolBook)
• As more city schools reopen in their own buildings, new issues emerge. (GothamSchools, Post)
• Families were happy to return to P.S. 15 in Red Hook but said home life was still not normal. (NY1)
• An appeals court was cool to arguments that churches should be allowed to use city school space. (AP)
• The debate over rezoning in Upper Manhattan is continuing to divide the community. (Daily News)
• Charter school operators are increasingly targeting middle-class areas of Brooklyn. (City Limits)
• On Saturday, parents organized by StudentsFirstNY rallied for teacher evaluations. (GothamSchools)

This year’s midwinter vacation will shrink from five days to two to make up for school days cancelled because of Hurricane Sandy, city and union officials announced today.

The city closed schools for five days because of the storm, and some particularly hard-hit schools were closed even longer. In addition to interrupting students’ schooling, the lost time dropped the city below the 180 instructional days required to receive state school aid.

Now, according to a city-union deal, students will attend school on four days they were supposed to have off: Feb. 20-22 and June 4. The February days had been part of a weeklong break that has been part of the calendar since 1990, and the June date had been scheduled as a “clerical day” for teachers and school staff.

With four days added back to the calendar, the school year is now set to be 181 or 182 days, depending on what grade students are in. That leaves a slight cushion for snow days, but if more than one day is cancelled, additional makeup days will have to be identified. (more…)