GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

A child at play. Photo by admiretime, via Flickr

An Upper West Side mom and education researcher is arguing that her son and his classmates need an active, outdoor recess — even when it’s very cold outside.

Anne Feighery said she noticed that her second-grade son was coming home grumpy every day from PS 166 this winter. Feighery, who is an education researcher and doctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Teachers College, told me she identified the reason for her son’s bad mood when she realized that he hadn’t been outside to play in days because PS 166 keeps students indoors for recess when the temperature drops below 40 degrees.

Feighery said the indoor recess PS 166 offered instead was inadequate to meet children’s needs. During a 6-week span when he didn’t go outside this winter, her 8-year-old son got hurt during indoor playtime as his fellow students’ pent-up energy turned indoor games violent, she said.

“We began talking about it with other friends who have children in other schools and a lot of people have this problem—it wasn’t unique to us,” Feighery said. (more…)

Test results from Harlem's KIPP STAR College Prep Charter School, where students on average outperformed their district but not always the state. Graph from 2008 KIPP annual report.

Critics of KIPP charter schools have accused the national charter school chain of being opaque about how much money it spends and what kinds of students it serves. But KIPP says it’s committed to transparency, and so every year it releases a comprehensive report about its fundraising and planning efforts, and about how each of its schools is performing. The report about 2008 just went online today.

The report covers some familiar data points about how students at the city’s four KIPP schools are outperforming students at other schools in their districts on state tests. But it also includes the less often publicized fact that not all KIPP schools in New York always beat state test averages.

And while KIPP’s New York City schools have recently been at the center of a renewed battle over teachers unions in charter schools, the report card doesn’t get into politics, instead providing an overview of KIPP’s plans for growth and profiles of each of the organization’s 66 schools across the country. The profiles include pictures of each school leader, the demographic breakdown of students, per-pupil funding figures, and state reading and math test results. The section about the city’s KIPP schools begins on page 84.

Also of interest, particularly if you’ve been following along with Ken Hirsh’s hunt for financial information about charter schools, is the list of foundations and individuals that gave to KIPP during the 2007-2008 school year, broken down by gift size. You can find that at the very end of the report.

School principals and reporters will be briefed on the Department of Education’s financial situation tomorrow — and the outlook is likely to include “huge, gigantic cuts,” according to a City Council source. The briefing will come one day before Mayor Bloomberg is scheduled to release his 2010 budget proposal.

An April 8 memo from the city’s budget director asked the DOE to cut 1.5 percent from its proposed operating budget through layoffs or attrition. The cuts will come on top of $251 million that the mayor proposed slashing from the DOE when he first released a 2010 budget plan, in January. The DOE has already revised its budget down $1.9 billion in the last year, down over 10 percent. This new 1.5 percent cut would chop off about $260 million more.

The city cuts will be much more manageable thanks to an influx of federal stimulus dollars to the city schools. But a City Council source said that, as currently proposed, they will still be dramatic.

“There’s huge, gigantic cuts proposed in the city’s school budget, and unless there’s some miraculous turnaround in the economic forecast, I don’t think anyone expects an increase in city funds going to schools,” the source said. (more…)

Part of the million pennies raised by schools through Penny Harvest. Photo from Insideschools.

City principals will have to submit plans in October explaining how they’ll meet the Mayor Bloomberg’s new service requirement for schools, but it shouldn’t be an onerous task for most of them.

Most schools, particularly at the high school level, already engage in some service, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Kerri Lyon. At Manhattan Bridges High School in Midtown, for example, students have always been required to log 40 hours of service before they graduate, Principal Mirza Sanchez Medina told me yesterday. Other schools announced service initiatives this week that were planned before Bloomberg’s announcement: Students from the Academy of Urban Planning and the Bushwick School for Social Justice planted 16 trees in between their campuses in honor of Earth Day, and kids at Harlem’s PS 57 pitched ideas for community-improvement grants to Scholastic’s Be Big Fund.

For the many schools that already engage in service, the mayor’s initiative should expand the number of volunteer options available to students, Lyon said. And schools that have never participated in service before can start slowly, such as by joining Penny Harvest, the popular program where kids donate pennies to charities of their choice, she said. (more…)

Councilman Bill de Blasio at PS 154, which stopped using Styrofoam trays this spring. Photo from Gowanus Lounge

A year after the Department of Education promised to get its schools recycling, a councilmember complains they are still woefully behind the curve. Bill de Blasio, a council member from Brooklyn, announced today (Earth Day) that the DOE has not followed through on its promise to implement recycling in its schools by naming a “recycling coordinator” to head up each school. Half of the 44 schools de Blasio contacted have yet to name a recycling coordinator.

“Almost one year ago the Department of Education promised us results but now, on Earth Day, they are still behind the curve,” de Blasio said in a statement.

The debate over recycling in public schools has been raging for quite a while. The City Council passed a mandatory recycling law in 1989, and five years later the public school system was found to be in violation of that law. The delay in recycling was attributed to “bureaucratic apathy,” a characterization that critics are echoing 15 years later. The DOE mandates that all schools recycle, but leaves enforcement up to each individual school. In 2007, the Department of Sanitation estimated a 9.5 percent recycling rate for public schools, which lagged behind the citywide rate of 16.5 percent, suggesting that some kids might be recycling at home but not at their school.

City council members have been championing efforts to green schools. This spring, de Blasio led a crusade to ban environmentally loathsome Styrofoam trays from school cafeterias. Fellow City Councilman Lew Fidler has been pushing for schools to use energy-efficient light bulbs.

UPDATE: The Department of Education released a statement saying 1,223 schools have recycling coordinators who will be receiving training this spring from the Department of Sanitation.

Carole Huxley (New York State Department of Education)

A retired education administrator, Carole F. Huxley, will take the helm of the state’s schools while officials search for a permanent leader, state school officials announced today.

The current commissioner, Richard Mills, retires at the end of June, leaving Huxley to steer some big projects, including allocating $2.5 billion in stimulus dollars sent by the federal government and manning an ongoing restructuring of the state’s Education Department. Huxley is coming out of a two-year retirement to take on the post. She served as the state’s deputy commissioner of cultural education for 24 years.

Merryl Tisch, who became education chancellor just last month, said that Huxley will be a “bridge” between Mills and the new commissioner. “Having Carole in place will ensure a seamless transition in leadership as the Board continues a wide and exhaustive search for the next Education Commissioner,” Tisch said in a statement.

A spokeswoman for the State Education Department said they are accepting applications but have no time frame for when a permanent commissioner will be chosen. “I am eager to continue the work underway and to guide the progress ahead until new leadership is ready to take on the task,” Huxley said in a statement.

Mayor Bloomberg today issued a new requirement for public school principals: Add instruction about community service to their schools’ packed programs of reading, writing, and math.

The directive came during an upbeat event today where Bloomberg unveiled a new citywide volunteerism initiative. The event was broadcast on MTV.com, the Web site of the cable network that is trying to remake its image for the civic-minded Obama generation, and included a brief speech by Caroline Kennedy. Under Bloomberg’s plan, every public school principal must integrate service into his or her school’s curriculum.

“We’re going to be asking every city principal to create a service plan — no exceptions,” Bloomberg said at the event, held at the Armory Track and Field Foundation in Washington Heights. “Because from now on, civic service and volunteering will be a core part of what goes on in every single school.”

Bloomberg’s NYC Service initiative is well-timed: Tomorrow, President Obama is set to sign the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which will increase membership in AmeriCorps, a national service program, from 75,000 to 250,000 over five years and encourage volunteerism in other ways. (more…)

Nora Marcano and her son Joel, who attends Harlem Link Charter School at the Armory last night.

Parents at last night’s high-energy charter school rally took time out to tell me a little bit about their (overwhelmingly positive) experience with the schools.

They gave a more personal portrait of schools that are often defined (at least on this site) by their politics, such as Harlem Success Academy, which has been battling for space inside a traditional public school; Harlem Link, whose founder said he favors slower growth than Harlem Success; and Democracy Prep Charter School, whose students have testified at hearings on mayoral control and whose founder entered the debate on “creaming.”

“I think this is something new and not everybody believes yet,” Mayrene Lopez, the mother of a six year-old at Harlem Success Academy told me, explaining why charter schools create controversy.

Lopez said her son Justin has improved tremendously since entering the school in August as a first-grader, and she wants her two-year-old to be able to attend a charter school when she’s old enough, too. Justin didn’t get into the school the first time he entered the lottery. The next time he was put on a waiting list. And then he got in. “He’s reading and writing on his own,” Lopez said proudly. (more…)

The crowd at Harlem Charter Night.

Mayor Bloomberg and Lil Mama cheered charter schools, school choice, and mayoral control of the public schools before a crowd of thousands of parents and students last night.

The mayor and the rapper even shared some tactics. “Do we want more parent choice?” Mayor Bloomberg yelled. “I can’t hear you! Do we want more competition? Do we want better test scores and higher graduation rates?”

Lil Mama was more successful with the call-and-response style. She called “Parent” while the crowd screamed back, “Choice!” “You don’t have to send your child to a regular public school,” the Harlem native said before performing two of her hits, “G-Slide” and “Lip Gloss.” “You can send them to a public charter school.”

While many of the kids seemed most excited to watch Lil Mama perform, a team of volunteers and interns at the pro-mayoral control group Learn NY were on hand to encourage parents to sign a petition supporting mayoral control, and a parade of education officials used the unprecedented crowd size to push their causes. (The legislature will vote on whether to renew the mayor’s control of the public schools in June.) (more…)