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Danielle Boone at work in her U.S. History class.

Danielle Boone’s U.S. History class at Olympus Academy High School had just begun, but she didn’t need a teacher to tell her what to do. The glowing screen looking back at her told her everything she needed to know.

Boone typed out the final section of an assignment on immigration – “a FIVE-sentence summary paragraph (including analysis sentence) about immigration and urbanization” – which she emailed to her teacher, sitting nearby, for grading. She then watched a short video online about the Civil War to research her next assignment, an essay on the Transcontinental Railroad.

Boone will continue knocking off these assignments on her school-issued Mac computer at her own blistering pace until, finally, she’s completed what is required to pass the course and earn a credit. The day after she completes the last assignment for the U.S. History class, she’ll start working on another course she needs to pass to graduate.

“I’m a student who works fast and this school helps me get credits,” Boone said during a brief break in her work. “The faster you go, the faster you get credits.”

Boone is the kind of self-starter that city officials envisioned when they tasked Olympus Academy, a transfer school, with creating an online learning model in its school for its over-aged population two years ago.

Olympus is part of the iLearnNYC initiative, a division of the city’s Innovation Zone. Until now, the initiative, which included 124 schools this year, mainly provided technological resources to schools that were devising ways to mix traditional classroom instruction with online curriculum, an approach known as blended learning. (more…)

Eva Moskowitz and her charter school network are objecting to new targets meant to push charter schools to enroll a fair share of students with disabilities and English language learners.

When they revised the state’s charter schools law in 2010, legislators included a requirement that the schools register a “comparable” number of high-needs students. Now the state has proposed a methodology to calculate enrollment targets for charter schools based on how many students attend the school and the overall ratio of high-needs students in each district. Schools that currently enroll too few students with special needs will be required to show at least a “good-faith” effort to enroll more.

But a top official in the Success Academies network said Wednesday that she objected to any such requirement. Setting enrollment targets creates a disincentive for schools to help students get to the point that they no longer need special services, said Emily Kim, general counselor for the Success Academies network.

“For us, our goal is not to hit a number and stay at that number for English language learners,” Kim said. “Our goal is that they learn English, that they perform at the highest levels, and that they graduate from high school college ready and are successful in life.”

“So if our figures go down, we’re proud of that,” she added.

Updated: A state education official said the proposed targets would not penalize schools schools if their students are declassified as special education or ELL. Through what’s being called a “three year lag,” schools would get credit for students who had been classified anytime in the last three years. “With the three-year lag, there is little to no chance that there will be a dinging of schools for declassification of a child,” said Assistant Commissioner Sally Bachofer, who helped developed the targets.

Bachofer also said that declassification rates at individual schools, while not a part of the proposed methodology, could be presented during the charter renewal period as a “good faith effort” to serve these high needs students.

Kim was part of a four-person panel recruited by the New York City Bar Association to discuss charter school co-locations.

(more…)

City lawyers have filed their response to a union lawsuit that seeks to derail plans to move forward on 24 school closures. Both sides are due in court tomorrow to argue their case about whether a temporary restraining order on the closures should be extended.

The lawsuit seeks to prevent the Department of Education from following through on its decision last month to “turn around” 24 schools at the end of the school year. The plans include the replacement of up to 50 percent of the teaching staffs at the schools.

Lawyers for the principals and teachers unions filed the lawsuit last week, and the DOE agreed to halt all hiring until Wednesday’s hearing as part of the restraining order.

As we reported last week – and as the city’s response below argues – one problem the city has with the motion is that further delay to its plans could “cause disruption” to the hiring process. (more…)

Mulgrew and NYU Professor Pedro Noguera discuss the city's education policies in a morning forum.

After more than a decade at war with Mayor Bloomberg, the UFT has increasingly seemed to be looking forward to the day his successor takes office.

But in a 30-minute speech to members at their annual conference on Saturday, UFT President Michael Mulgrew said the union couldn’t sit back until January 2014. Instead, he said he would move forward on new initiatives that he said were central to the union’s values, with or without financial or political support from the city.

“I want to draw a picture of what we know our schools can be and the central role that our union must play in making that happen,” Mulgrew said. “Why do I say ‘we must’? Because more than any other organization, the UFT is positioned to lead the effort to make New York schools the greatest school system in the United States.”

Mulgrew announced in his speech that he would be giving out $300,000 in planning grants to a school that offered the best proposal to transform itself into a one-stop community shop. The “collective impact” grant is meant to help bring in an array of services that would be available to the larger school community and go well beyond the traditional K-12 classroom education.

In announcing the grants, funded by the UFT, the City Council and the Council of Supervisors and Administrators, Mulgrew said he didn’t care if the Department of Education was on board or not. (more…)

Public Advocate Bill De Blasio reads the transcript of a radio show that Bloomberg appeared on Friday.

Critics of Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to slash after-school services to tens of thousands of students are forecasting that the cuts will have a grave effect.

Today, they earned an accidental endorsement from an unusual source: Bloomberg.

“We have a lot of kids who unfortunately don’t have parents at home when they leave in the morning or get home in the afternoon and it’s harder to supervise kids,” Bloomberg said during a radio appearance this morning to promote the city’s anti-truancy campaign.

The comments were convenient fodder for Public Advocate Bill De Blasio, who released a report today that painted a doomsday scenario about how the cuts would contribute to crime and hurt citywide employment rates.

De Blasio called Bloomberg “disconnected” and said the issues he raised on the radio were precisely a reason to preserve the after-school programs. (more…)

• MCA’s teacher remembers him as a likable kid and a mediocre student with a deep soul. (Schoolbook)
• A brief history lesson on the famous names behind the turnaround schools changing names. (EdWize)
• U.S. Department of Education officials spent today with teachers to celebrate the profession. (Ed.Gov)
• 60 Minutes is taking a look at the mysterious founder of the growing Gulen charter chain. (CBS News)
• Teacher says city’s anti-truancy ads won’t be helpful to some struggling parents. (Pissed Off Teacher)
• Colorado educators say mix of online and in-person teaching should be on the rise. (Ed News Colorado)
• Public school advocates are sweating over slated federal budget cuts, despite House bill. (Politics K-12)
• Eric DeGiaimo and his ascent from neglect, which we covered Tues., was also profiled on TV. (ABC 7)
• A cancer group wants a ban on indoor tanning in New York State for teenagers. (Capital New York)

Teachers from New Rochelle wore custom shirts designed to mock a state test question to Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch's breakfast talk today.

Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch fanned interest in a possible mayoral bid by refusing to deny her interest in the position at a breakfast hosted by Crain’s New York today.

Crain’s NY editor Erik Engquist’s first question for Tisch was about the persistent rumors, first aired last fall, that she might be considering running to succeed New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “Everything I have to say on that subject I think I’ve already said,” Tisch told Engquist.

What Tisch has said in the past hasn’t been entirely consistent. When GothamSchools broke the news about the mayoral murmurings in October, Tisch told us, “I am absolutely, positively not going to run.” But appearing on Inside City Hall the next month, she was less definitive.

“I have an obligation that I am fulfilling right now and I am very happy in my work,” she said. “And I know there is a really crowded field out there of very eager people and I am sure they will emerge and one of them will serve the city very well.”

Host Errol Louis pointed out that Tisch hadn’t actually said she wasn’t considering running. ”I’ll take that as a ‘I’m thinking about it,’” he said. She answered, “That’s what you said.” (more…)

An embattled Brooklyn charter school facing closure will be allowed to continue registering new students for the 2012-2013 school year for at least the next couple weeks, a judged ruled this afternoon.

Even though the city wants it closed, Williamsburg Charter High School has already registered 60 students for next year, the school’s lawyer, Ellen Eagen, said at a New York State Supreme Court hearing today. The hearing was to determine whether or not to extend a temporary restraining order against the Department of Education’s plans to close the school.

The temporary restraining order allowed the school to hold a lottery on April 30 and begin formally accepting students who have been selected. Had the restraining order expired, the school would not have been able to register any more of the 200 students who applied.

Eagen argued in court that the extension was crucial to the school’s recruiting and admission efforts for next year in the event that the school receives a favorable ruling and is allowed to stay open. If the school stayed open, it would need to enroll at least 200 students to come close to full capacity compared to previous cohorts.

Last month, Chancellor Dennis Walcott upheld an earlier decision to terminate the charter of Williamsburg Charter High School at the end of the school year. The decision was based on the school’s prolonged affiliation with the Believe network and its former founder and CEO, Eddie Calderon-Melendez. Calderon-Melendez was indicted last month for personal tax evasion, falsifying documents and using company money to finance a personal trip to Europe. The school is $5 million in debt in part because of the network’s financial improprieties. (more…)

Eric Degiaimo at his desk at the Smith School.

For 18 months, Eric Degiaimo could barely leave his apartment, paralyzed by fear of the outside world. Today, he’s a junior in high school who just celebrated his 19th birthday with friends in Times Square and harbors goals of becoming a musical engineer.

He’s also the recipient of a city advocacy groups’s annual award for students who have overcome great obstacles to attend schools that are right for them.

Eric’s path to isolation and back took him through rough terrain. By the time he was 15, he had incurred a lifetime of trauma while being raised by drug addicts, sexual predators, and a sister’s abusive boyfriends. Eric was kicked, spit on, and his apartment raided by drug dealers. He was forced to panhandle and fake Tourette’s Syndrome so people he lived with could collect disability to pay for their next high. Time and again he was hurt and exploited by the same people who were supposed to keep him safe.

His early life, as he puts it, “belongs in a horror film.”

The experiences made him emotionally fragile, unable to complete even the most mundane social interactions. Riding the subway or going to the store frightened him. A psychiatrist diagnosed him with posttraumatic stress disorder and anxiety problems.

Then named Eric Velazquez, he had been removed from his sister’s custody and placed in a group home when he met a social worker, Angela Degiaimo. The pair felt an immediate bond and within months, Eric had moved into Angela’s Flatbush apartment. Last year, she officially adopted him.

“He just has this loveable thing about him that people are charmed by,” Angela Degiaimo said. “I tell him that we were meant to be a family.” (more…)

Students from Generation Citizen's inaugural Civics Day (Wei Yao)

The ninth grade girls at the Urban Assembly School for Criminal Justice weren’t interested in much when Pace University junior Kayla Francis first visited  their classroom in February to discuss civics topics to research. She tossed out a few ideas – poverty, humanitarianism – until one issue finally caught their attention.

“Nothing got them as excited as women’s health,” said Francis.

Led by Francis, a mentor on the project, the group spent the next six weeks researching women’s health issues, including teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, which they said were issues in their own all-girls school.

On Friday they presented their findings – along with a plan to raise awareness  –  to a panel of about 40 judges from around the city community as part of an inaugural “Civics Day” event hosted by  Generation Citizen.

More than 500 middle and high school students from 14 schools participated in the six-week program, which is in its first year in New York City. Generation Citizen, founded by Scott Warren during his senior year at Brown University in 2008, already has similar civics programs in Boston and Providence.

New York City is no stranger to civics education programs, of course. In March, a similar event was held at the Academy for Young Writers. (more…)