GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The head of Park Slope’s new elementary school calmed rezoned families’ fears with details. (DNA Info)
• A city parents group has launched a campaign to urge a teacher evaluation deal. (NYC Parents Union)
• Ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools in Brooklyn tend to teach girls things they won’t teach boys. (DNA Info)
• It bears repeating: City charter schools are held to different standards for school closures. (SchoolBook)
• A blow-by-blow of Chicago’s school closures and changes suggests little in the way of strategy. (Reader)
• A teacher says we unfortunately can’t assume the best about rising graduation rates. (Assailed Teacher)
• A city teacher says he wants specifics about Gov. Cuomo’s plan for longer school days. (NYC Educator)
• By replacing “or” with “and,” a literacy teacher got excited about the Common Core. (EdNews Colorado)
• Attention is turning to the puzzle of why there are too many elementary school teachers. (Teacher Beat)
• A second “reformer,” TFA founder Wendy Kopp, writes back to a critic’s open letter. (Gary Rubinstein)
• A 99-year-old home economics teacher in New Jersey says she isn’t quite ready to retire yet. (HuffPo)

After protesting in New York City for years, critics of school closures and co-locations are taking their fight to Albany.

Three mayoral candidates joined parents, advocates, and union representatives on the steps of City Hall today in calling for a moratorium on school closures and co-locations,  centerpieces of the Bloomberg administration’s education policy.

The press conference was organized by New Yorkers for Great Public Schools, a group formed to oppose Mayor Bloomberg’s education policies in the lead-up to the mayoral election.

Earlier this month, State Sen. Tony Avella introduced a bill that would impose halt school closures until a state committee determines whether they benefit students.

Now advocates are looking for a sponsor in the Assembly as well, UFT President Michael Mulgrew said today. Hakeem Jeffries, the politician who sponsored a similar bill last year, has left the Assembly for the U.S. Congress. Asked who would sponsor a bill now, Mulgrew said, “There’s quite a few people who are looking at doing it.” (more…)

The city is taking new steps to get students to school after a full week without regular school bus service.

With attendance in schools for students with disabilities below two-thirds for the fifth straight day, the Department of Education is moving both to help families with transportation and to get new bus drivers on the road faster.

Department officials announced today that they had revised the terms of the contracts that they plan to offer bus companies so that the companies can begin transporting students sooner than Sept. 1, the original date the new contracts were supposed to begin. It was the department’s omission of seniority protections from the contract terms that led the school bus drivers union, Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181, to call a strike last week.

The department also unveiled details of a new initiative, first announced at a meeting about special education last week, to assist families with transportation costs. (more…)

A Department of Education official broke ethics rules when he told the principals he worked with that he planned to join a different organization that also supports city schools, according to a ruling out today from the city’s Conflicts of Interests Board.

The ruling highlights a fundamental tension in the Department of Education’s controversial “network” structure for providing support to schools.

Under the five-year-old structure, dozens of networks compete against each other for schools to hire them to provide instructional and operational support. Nonprofit groups outside of the Department of Education are allowed to compete, in an arrangement that is meant to keep networks mean and lean — and also lays a minefield of potential ethical violations.

Robert Cohen was leading a department-run network, Children First Network 104, last year when he got a job offer from CEI-PEA, a nonprofit group that works with dozens of schools through five networks of its own, according to the report. After he told the principals he supervised about the offer, they all applied to switch from the department-run network to CEI-PEA’s. That meant they would give their schools’ network fees to CEI-PEA, instead of keeping the funding within the department. (more…)

The collapse of teacher evaluation talks comes with many costs, but teacher layoffs won’t be among them, Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced today.

The Department of Education is set to forgo $240 million in increased state school aid after it failed to agree on a new evaluation system with the teachers union by a state deadline last week. State officials have since said the city will have to go without far more funding until it adopts a new evaluation system.

Last week, Mayor Bloomberg said it was “much too early to tell” whether the losses would require teacher layoffs, which he has threatened but never carried out in the past.

But during a radio appearance today, Walcott said teacher layoffs are not on the table. ”We’re not looking at layoffs,” he told host John Gambling, whose show has been a forum for city, union, and state officials to stake their positions in the conflict. (more…)

• A Princeton Review division censured for defrauding New York City has filed for bankruptcy. (Bloomberg)
• Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s budget proposal included several education plans. (GothamSchools, Daily News)
• The Archdiocese of New York City said it will close 24 Catholic schools. (Times, WSJ, NY1, Daily News)
• A Queens Catholic school flooded by Hurricane Sandy returned to its home building on Tuesday. (Times)
• Across the country, private religious schools are enrolling more foreign students to stay solvent. (WSJ)
• Chancellor Walcott says the city is doing everything it can to help families during the bus strike. (Post)
• The Times says the city’s position is justified, but it needs to help students get to school more thoroughly.
• The city and UFT continued fighting over teacher evaluation talks. (GothamSchools, Daily News, NY1)
• A columnist blames the evals debacle on Bloomberg’s weak leadership and a deputy’s ideology. (Post)
• City officials reassured parents after a light fixture with PCBs exploded at Staten Island’s P.S. 50. (NY1)