GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Jacqueline Torres (standing) and other TD Bank employees taught students at the Mott Haven Academy Charter School about money management on Tuesday. (Photo: Melissa Fox) [Send us photos from your school, too!

• A charter school is moving into space where an uptown elementary school wanted to expand. (DNAInfo)
• Schools are realizing perfect attendance awards don’t make sense in this bad flu season. (Today Health)
• Some school districts are allowing families to homeschool gifted students for part of the day. (Scholastic)
• A teacher says his distributed scoring experience doesn’t bode well for students. (Chaz’s School Daze)
• Here’s a detailed rundown and analysis of President Obama’s education proposals. (Politics K-12)
• The principal of P-Tech, the Brooklyn school with a State of the Union shout-out, responds. (SchoolBook)
• The “parent trigger” worked in Los Angeles, the first time the process didn’t cause conflict. (Hechinger)

Students who attend schools the city is shuttering for poor performance will be allowed to leave, under a new policy that the Department of Education is rolling out at school closure hearings that begin tonight.

For the last decade, the Department of Education has closed schools — more than 150 in all — through a phase-out process in which no new students enter but existing students stay on until they graduate, up to three years after the closure decision. By the time the schools finally close their doors, only barebones staff and program offerings remain for the final students.

“The past policy was sort of like saying, ‘We’re going to get divorced in two years but we have to live together until then.’ It was not tenable,” said Clara Hemphill, who has reported about the impact of closures on schools and students as the editor of Insideschools. “It seems only fair that children should not be trapped in a school that the DOE has deemed to be failing.”

Now, the department will give each student in phaseout schools a list of higher-performing schools to which they can apply as part of the regular transfer process. When the department decides which transfer requests to approve, students from phaseout schools will be assigned first, starting with the neediest students who are looking for a new school. (more…)

The outcome in the lawsuit to reclaim lost state aid for New York City schools will hinge largely on the argument of what scale of educational impact that sum could have on students.

If New York County Supreme Court Judge Manuel Mendez sides with attorney Michael Rebell, who is suing the state, he’ll agree that the lack of roughly $250 million will cause “irreparable harm” to students. If he sides with lawyers representing Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state Education Commissioner John King, he’ll concur that the total is just a fraction of what the city spends annually on education, and therefore won’t do much more than put a dent in school budgets.

Rebell filed the lawsuit earlier this month after Cuomo said he would not seek to extend a deadline that awarded increased state aid only to districts that agreed to a teacher evaluation system. New York City was one of six districts that did not meet the deadline, which Cuomo signed into law last year to force districts and their unions to negotiate the controversial plans. (more…)

Teach for America's founding CEO, Wendy Kopp (center), is being replaced by two top executives at the 23-year-old nonprofit. (Photo: Teach for America)

Nearly 24 years after first sketching out Teach for America in her undergraduate thesis, founding CEO Wendy Kopp is stepping down from running the organization, according to a decision that its board approved on Tuesday.

Kopp will instead focus on running Teach for All, the nonprofit she launched in 2007 to support organizations in other countries as they adopt the Teach for America model of recruiting and training strong teachers to work in high-need schools. Two dozen countries currently have Teach for All programs.

Kopp’s departure marks the start of a new phase for Teach for America, which grew from 500 teachers in 1990 to more than 10,000 in 46 regions today, including nearly a thousand in New York City, along the way jumpstarting a paradigm shift in teacher preparation. Nonprofit organizations are notorious for tending to struggle after their charismatic founders move on.

But Kopp’s successors have been steeped in her leadership. (more…)

The Brooklyn Youth Advisory Council, with leaders from the Coro New York Leadership Center, recommended co-location policies to Department of Education officials on Monday.

Sharing space doesn’t have to hurt schools, high school students told Department of Education officials Monday night. Done right, students said, co-location can give schools strength in numbers.

In a hallmark policy, the Bloomberg administration has closed many large high schools and opened multiple smaller schools in the same buildings. Now, hundreds of schools coexist in shared spaces, an arrangement that can be uneasy at times.

After carrying out surveys and focus groups with nearly 400 students on four co-located campuses in Brooklyn, members of the youth council this week made recommendations for how to reduce tension and make the most of the space-sharing to top department officials, including Deputy Chancellor Marc Sternberg.

At the top of their list: youth councils on all co-located campuses to plan joint academic and extracurricular activities, and youth courts to deal with infractions of co-location rules. (more…)

• President Obama set better access to pre-K as a top priority in his State of the Union speech. (HuffPo)
• A single city school, a Staten Island charter school, has a state teacher evaluation plan. (GothamSchools)
• Dozens of new companies submitted bids to take over the city’s school bus routes. (SchoolBook, NY1)
• A special education advocate says the city has ignored students in the contract dispute. (Daily News)
• Schools across the state will get an influx of funds to support technology spending. (GothamSchools)
• In some parts of the city, kids’ quality of life is low and challenges are high. (Daily News, SchoolBook)
• Michigan could allow state leaders to seize control of more low-performing local schools. (WSJ)
• A think-tanker says New Jersey’s teachers union is wrong to oppose “blended learning” schools. (Post)