GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Students at the Taft Campus’s seven small high schools discuss their readiness for college. (City Limits)
• During winter teachers get a break from the duty of enforcing dress codes, a teacher writes. (Atlantic)
• A city school librarian says he is underused, but it doesn’t have to be that way. (Ed on the Plate)
• “I am a victim of the A.P. test,” says a Queens high school senior who has taken eight. (SchoolBook)
• Private school hopefuls are learning if they’re in, out, on a real wait list, or being humored. (Daily Beast)
• What’s the issue with tablets? Content, monitoring, and getting student answers. (Digital Book World)
• Early childhood experts analyze Obama’s pre-K proposal and handicap its chances. (Early Ed Watch)
• Anticipating opposition to the proposal, a pre-K advocate tears down common critiques. (Sara Mead)
• Weingarten, Bloomberg, Ravitch, and Klein have one thing in common: They’re all Jewish. (Forward)
• A teacher says the city’s current teaching corps could learn from its predecessors’ 1968 strike. (Assailed)

Listening to Mayor Bloomberg’s final State of the City address, delivered today, one would not know the mayor has spent the last decade closing schools, fighting with the teachers union, and touting high test scores.

Although Bloomberg opened the shorter-than-usual education portion of the speech by noting that the city’s high school graduation rate has risen faster than the state’s, he did not utter the words “failing schools,” “the United Federation of Teachers,” or “test scores.”

He also did not bring any new education ideas to the Barclay’s Center, the Brooklyn stadium where he delivered the speech.

Instead, he focused on the new schools he plans to create during his last year in office — including eight designed expressly to boost college readiness among low-income black and Latino students —  and tougher standards that the state has already adopted.

Bloomberg worked to manage expectations about this year’s state test scores, the first based on exams aligned to the new standards, known as the Common Core. State officials have warned that proficiency rates are likely to fall, but Bloomberg had not until today acknowledged that his final test scores are likely to drop in his final year in office. (more…)

Teacher Laura Morel read statements by students to oppose Bread and Roses High School's proposed closure at a public hearing on Wednesday. (Joanna Seow)

As the city’s first night of school closing hearings began on Wednesday, supporters of Harlem’s Bread and Roses Integrated Arts High School were back in a familiar situation. Just one year after trying to convince the Department of Education not to close and reopen the school with a new staff under the “turnaround” model, they were back in the same auditorium, making the same arguments.

Bread and Roses – along with other schools set for “turnaround” – eventually won in labor arbitration. But this year, the department proposed that Bread and Roses be phased out. Under the plan, the school would not enroll new students and would decrease in size as students graduate until it closes in 2016.

The school received an “F” on its last city report card, with only 41 percent of students graduating in four years compared to a citywide four-year graduation rate of more than 65 percent.

About 100 students, teachers and parents protested the phase-out plan in a two-hour hearing Wednesday night in the school auditorium, with many arguing that Bread and Roses was never given the opportunity to follow through or finish an improvement process before starting a new one. (more…)

• Advocates are thrilled with Obama’s universal pre-K promise, but critics anticipate waste. (Times)
• And existing early education programs are at grave risk in the country’s budget fight. (Washington Post)
• In a shift, students at phaseout schools can apply to leave. (GothamSchools, SchoolBook, Post, NY1)
• Students and staff at P-TECH describe how it felt to hear Obama mention their school. (Daily News)
• The U.S. Department of Education’s new college cost scorecard is not that useful, some say. (Times)