GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• City schools revisited safety procedures today after Friday’s mass shooting in Connecticut. (SchoolBook)
• A city teacher describes his school’s lockdown protocol, which he says sounds like Newtown’s. (B Niche)
• Pedro Noguera says schools help in curbing violence because they bind society together. (New Visions)
• Both national teachers unions got $11 million to make Common Core-aligned materials. (Teacher Beat)
• The first-ever Congressional hearing on the “school-to-prison pipeline” drew hundreds last week. (JJIE)
• Florida’s new schools chief says he could’ve moved slower and made friends at his old job. (Rick Hess)
• A list of 30 impressive people under 30 in education includes app makers and organizers. (Forbes)
• A charter school advocate ponders whether it matters what charter school leaders earn. (Flypaper)
• A teacher who didn’t love an evaluation resolution argues that it should have been voted on. (JD2718)

UFT Secretary Michael Mendel, at right, told Department of Education officials in an angry email that the union is unhappy about the way some schools are preparing for the likelihood of new evaluations.

Intimidating and inappropriate practices in some city schools that are preparing for a new teacher rating system could undermine the system before it goes into effect, a top union official has warned.

In an email sent Friday to Chancellor Dennis Walcott and his top deputies at the Department of Education, UFT Secretary Michael Mendel wrote that the union had recently received a spate of complaints about surprise observations by teams of administrators that seemed designed to make teachers uncomfortable.

“We have been told, increasingly over the last couple of days by our members from all parts of the city, that the DOE’s roll out of a new evaluation system has been a disaster and that it  has created a terrible atmosphere of fear around both the new evaluation system and the Danielson protocols,” Mendel wrote in the email, whose subject line was “I’m very Frustrated.”

Walcott’s email address was misspelled, so he did not get the message, according to a department spokeswoman. But the email came through for other top deputy chancellors. This afternoon, Mendel said he had not yet received any response. (more…)

Families lined up outside Brooklyn Technical High School in October to enter the city's annual high school fair. Concerned that there are not enough high-quality choices, many charter school networks are opening high schools of their own.

If all goes according to Success Academy Charter Schools’ plan, this year’s seventh-graders at the network’s first school won’t have to hunt for a high school.

The network is asking the state for permission to expand the school to ninth grade in 2014, the year that its first cohort will hit high school. SUNY’s Charter Schools Institute, which authorizes the school, is holding a hearing about the proposal on Tuesday and will decide whether to approve it as early as January.

The proposal does not represent a commitment to add high school grades to all of the network’s schools, according to a spokeswoman. But it does reflect the charter sector’s growing realization that ending after eighth grade would mean sending thousands of students a year into a high school admissions process that can be difficult to navigate and can result in assignment to a low-performing school.

In the past, many high-performing charter schools have sought to place their graduates in selective high schools or get them scholarships to private schools in the city and beyond. But with more students graduating from charter middle schools each year, there are not enough seats to go around, and the schools are creating their own. (more…)

Dear readers,

All year, you have sent us tips, comments, and helped spread the word about our reporting. We have appreciated every single Tweet.

Now, as the year comes to a close, we have one more request — this time for a donation. Your tax-deductible contribution will ensure that in 2013, we can keep delivering the great stories you’ve come to expect, plus more and better of them, without sacrificing any of our independence.

We are about $100,000 away from meeting our 2013 goals of:

• adding two new reporters to expand coverage in the city as well as the state legislature; (more…)

Senior Kristine Supple hands off a stack of college applications to a postal worker parked at the Franklin K. Lane high school campus. Behind her is Folorunso Fatukasi, a University of Connecticut-bound football star.

It was one thing for college-bound seniors at the Channel View School for Research to lose internet access and have to attend classes in a new location after Hurricane Sandy knocked their homes and school building out of commission.

But it was quite another to lose access to Jennifer Walter, the do-it-all school staff member whose job it is to help them get their college applications across the finish line. Walter’s home was flooded, along with the computers and printers she used to put together the finishing touches for students’ applications.

“She is a guidance counselor, a senior advisor. She’s everything. She’s a friend. She’s like an aunt,” Ivonne Aguiar said on Friday as she prepared to mail applications to a slew of colleges, including her top choice, Vanderbilt University.

Channel View is one of eight city high schools operated by NYC Outward Bound Schools where students send off their college applications with collective pomp and circumstance in a tradition that began last year at Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School. A top Department of Education official has held up the ritual as a low-cost strategy for preparing students for college, and Chancellor Dennis Walcott joined students at WHEELS on Friday for his second college application-mailing ceremony as seven other schools, including Channel View, held marches of their own. (more…)

• Schools across the country prepare to reopen after Friday’s school shooting. (Times, WSJ, USA Today)
• A former education secretary called for school officials to be armed; many disagreed with him. (HuffPo)
• Nationally, the murder rate of students at schools is about half of what it was in the 1990s. (Bloomberg)
• Teachers at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary made heroic efforts to protect students. (Post, CNN)
• Winerip lists 25 things to know about first-graders besides that they were targeted in Newtown. (Times)

• State officials fear that scores could fall as far as Kentucky’s did with tougher tests, by 30 percent. (Post)
• A special ed teacher at Brooklyn’s P.S. 371 has netted $20,000 in small donations since 2007. (Post)
• New data released by the city show class size increases in all grades. (GothamSchools, SchoolBook)
• A program at a Bronx Boys and Girls Club highlights the possibilities of strong sex education. (Times)
• Final recommendations from Gov. Cuomo’s education reform commission are late. (GothamSchools)
• The Post says people who fail an exam that’s the subject of a lawsuit shouldn’t be allowed to teach.
• Plans to close a sixth of Philadelphia’s schools for budget reasons are drawing protests. (Notebook)