GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• The city has opened its registration centers for new students. (NY1, Insideschools)
• The city is shuffling principals to meet federal requirements. (GothamSchools, Post, NY1, Daily News)
• Community activists want the city to test all school buildings for toxins right away. (Daily News, NY1)
• Pedro Noguera says it’s time to stop pretending that poverty isn’t an obstacle to learning. (Daily News)
• Fifteen new school buildings and 17,000 new seats are opening this year. (GothamSchools, NY1, Post)
• Charter schools came up in a debate between State Sen. Bill Perkins and challenger Basil Smikle. (Post)
• New Jersey’s fired ed chief says Gov. Christie defamed him over the state’s Race to the Top loss. (Times)
• The schools chief in Newark won’t be coming back next year, N.J. officials announced. (WSJ)
• Newark’s school board president, Shavar Jeffries, wants tenure reform and school choice. (Star-Ledger)
• Scholastic Book Clubs is turning to social networking to sell titles. (Times)

• A new study finds that students fare better in K-8 schools than in traditional middle schools. (Post, WSJ)
• Value-added models to assess performance are already in use widely, including in NYC. (Times)
• A new state law mandates that schools tell parents if bedbugs appear in the building. (Daily News)
• A judge ruled that the city can cut school bus service to some middle-school students. (WSJ, NY1)
• Teachers union head Michael Mulgrew says city schools should drop test prep this year. (Daily News)
• The state has advised school districts not to ask enrollees about their immigration status. (Times)
• Parents at the private Horace Mann School are suing over their son’s 3-day suspension. (Times)
• Texas is encouraging schools to pool their resources to pay for bureaucratic help. (Reuters)

• The Yankees briefly offered a back-to-school promotion for a game on the first day of school. (Post)
• Ed Sec Arne Duncan praised New York’s reforms in Albany. (GothamSchools, Daily News, Post, WNYC)
• Last night’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting reprised conflict over test scores. (NY1)
• An all-girls charter high school opened in Albany yesterday, the state’s first. (WNYC)
• New Orleans parents want to see more racial diversity now that there is more school choice. (NPR)
• Seattle and its teachers might have agreed about using test scores in evaluations. (Seattle Times)

• Tracking down South Bronx students eight years later, with disappointing results. (Robert Pondiscio)
• A kindergarten teacher’s son was murdered by one of her former students. (Baltimore Sun)
• An inspiring story about a student who tried, failed, and tried again. (Pissed Off Teacher)
• A historical argument for why translating memos to parents is a really good idea. (Tablet)
• Unpacking the New York Post’s high school rankings. (Leonie Haimson)
• Budget documents suggest the city is cutting funds to lower class size. (Norm’s Notes)
• The Economic Policy Institute finds issues with score-based value-added evaluations. (Answer Sheet)
• Race to the Top and the problem of trying to do too much at once. (Sara Mead)
• Why D.C.’s mayoral primary is “a caution for overcaffeinated fans of mayoral control.” (Rick Hess)
• What teachers really want: Well-rested students. (Dan Willingham)
• D.C.-area schools are growing more diverse, maybe because of the recession. (Washington Examiner)
• Or maybe because schools are actively recruiting white families. (Washington City Paper)
• And congratulations to Elizabeth! She’s writing a book based on “Building a Better Teacher.” (Russo)

• Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s back-to-school bus tour visits Albany today. (Washington Post)
• Duncan makes his argument for why states should release data on individual teachers. (Daily News)
• Teachers aren’t happy about the release of value-added rankings for 6,000 of them. (L.A. Times)
• Teachers whose students score high are rarely recognized or emulated. (L.A. Times)
• New Jersey’s fired education chief says he isn’t to blame for losing Race to the Top. (WSJ)
• The Times says states shouldn’t stop reforming education now that Race to the Top is over.
• Twelve of the state’s 16 persistently dangerous schools are in New York City. (Post, Daily News)
• Teachers flock to back-to-school shopping at Barclay School Supplies in Brooklyn. (Times)
• The new principal of the largest high school in Portland, Ore., is from New York City. (Oregonian)
• Five years after Katrina, charter schools dominate New Orleans. (Christian Science Monitor, WSJ)
• Online credit recovery is attractive because it’s fast and inexpensive. (Chicago Tribune)
• D.C. schools closed the achievement gap less this year than in recent years. (Washington Post)

Race to the Top:

• Eastern U.S. states dominated Race to the Top’s winners. (Times)
• New York was one of them, receiving $696 million. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News)
• New York City could see as much as $300 million of that. (Daily News, Post)
• The state would have placed third even if it hadn’t raised the charter cap. (Daily News)
• State education officials have ambitious plans for using the funds. (GothamSchools, WNYC)
• Actually seeing all the money depends on serious follow-through. (Wall Street Journal)
• New Jersey missed out on funding because of a data goof, and officials are angry. (AP, Post)
• The Post says the real Race to the Top win came in May when the charter cap was lifted.
• The Daily News says the hard work of making sure the reforms are successful is yet to come.
• Josh Greenman: Teachers unions were the only losers in Race to the Top. (Daily News)

News from New York City:

• City unions want the city to use a federal education job fund to rehire laid-off school aides. (Daily News)
• City teachers spend even more of their own money on their classrooms since funding was cut. (CNN)
• Principal Mark Federman is sleeping in a tent to raise money for his Manhattan high school. (Daily News)
• A Queens secretary spent $10,000 of school funds on her own expenses. (Post, Daily News)
• Employees at Manhattan’s PS 149 misused $30,000 and kept $10,000 in a cabinet. (Post, Daily News)
• After a fight, Girls Prep Charter School will open its middle school in a private space. (WSJ, Times)
• The city has launched a campaign to increase GED test-taking. (NY1)
• A teacher at a Brooklyn charter school was arrested for sexually assaulting a student. (Post)
• Two recent reports undercut the idea that Mayor Bloomberg is a good manager. (Gotham Gazette)
• Some say a state test given this summer glorified Islam and criticized Christianity. (Post)

And beyond:

• Ed Sec Arne Duncan’s goal of overhauling 1,000 schools is foundering because of logistics. (Times)
• Duncan also wants more states to release individual teacher data. (L.A. Times, Washington Post)
• White voters in New York State let school budgets take bigger hits than non-white voters. (Times)
• Thomas Friedman wants readers to see the edu-reform documentary “Waiting for Superman.” (Times)
• Stuart Buck argues that history shows segregated schools are superior. (Daily News)
• Jerry Weast, the longtime schools chief in Montgomery County, Md., is retiring. (Washington Post)
• Two students from New Orleans highlight the wide range in school quality post-Katrina. (NPR)
• Louisiana is getting $1.8 billion for schools that were destroyed in Katrina. (Times)
• Debate is raging over whether chocolate milk should be served in school cafeterias. (Times)

On Race to the Top:

• Nine of the 10 winners are in the middle of competitive executive races. (Eduwonk)
• Could the winning states have been chosen for political reasons? (Center for Education Reform)
• Surprisingly, California, Colorado, Arizona, and Louisiana went home empty-handed. (Politics K-12)
• With all the leadership change possible, how can we know states will follow through? (Rick Hess)
• Mike Petrilli calls the results “a disastrous outcome for the Administration.” (Flypaper)
• What Governor Paterson really said, with video. (WNYC’s The Empire)

And in other news:

• How to use parent volunteers to fill the gaps left by budget cuts. (Insideschools)
• On the many ways schools juke their test score stats. (NY Mag)
• John Merrow’s fans aren’t happy that he’s okay with L.A.’s value-added score release. (Taking Note)
• A new study rates NYC as a top school reform city. Albany is near the bottom. (Fordham Institute)
• A California charter school advocate says Los Angeles gives charters second-tier space. (L.A. Times)
• Three of the nation’s five most expensive public school buildings are in Los Angeles. (HuffPo)

News from New York City:

• Investigators found and fined 13 DOE staffers for taking sick days when they weren’t sick. (Daily News)
• One of them, a school aide at PS 55, even lied that her mother had died. (Post)
• Parents at some of the affected schools aren’t happy about absentee teachers. (Daily News)
• Changes at Rikers Island’s school are meant to consolidate the city’s authority there. (NY1)
• One change will have student-inmates start planning for their release from day one. (NY1)
• New York City’s public schools are an outlier in the trend toward older kindergarten students. (Times)
• Despite test score declines, charter school students still outperformed students in district schools. (Post)
• The Daily News says UFT president Michael Mulgrew can learn from L.A.’s teacher data dump.
• Two former city teachers are among readers weighing in on the racial test score gap. (Times)

From beyond:

• New York school districts still don’t know exactly how much state aid they’ll get. (Albany Times-Union)
• The trend in South Korea is toward Western-style schools, complete with creativity. (Times)
• Los Angeles is opening a $578 million school on the site of the Ambassador Hotel. (AP)
• Spending on private tutoring is up nationally, and parents want results. (Times)
• Los Angeles’s teachers union will restart evaluation talks, but value-added’s role is unclear. (L.A. Times)
• Michelle Rhee’s tenure in D.C. could be decided by the mayoral primary next month. (Washington Post)
• Teach for America’s green recruits are playing an expanded role in many places. (Washington Post)

And from GothamSchools:

• We’re going to lie low this week and plan for the new school year (just two weeks away!). We’ll be right here if anything big happens. In the meantime, please take your last chance to fill out our reader survey if you haven’t already. And don’t hesitate to send along your news tips. We’ll be back in full force Aug. 30.

• A judge told the state teachers union it can’t spend more on the Basil Smikle-Bill Perkins race. (WSJ)
• The city is piloting a new anti-truancy initiative. (GothamSchools, Daily News, Post, NY1)
• A Westchester County serves city students incarcerated over addiction and does a good job. (NY1)
• For the third year, Manhattan’s Millennium HS will hold classes in hallways. (Downtown Express)
• A state labor board is trying to halt Merrick Academy’s move to fire teachers. (GothamSchools)
• A problematic study found that a quarter of teens say gangs are present in their schools. (L.A. Times)
• Chancellor Klein tells parents that despite lower scores, the achievement gap is still closing. (Post)
• Paul Tough says Promise Neighborhoods should get funding even without strong evidence. (Times)
• San Francisco’s school choice system frequently shuts middle-class families out entirely. (S.F. Chronicle)
• Detroit is fighting against a judge’s orders to spend more on school security. (Detroit Free Press)

• Gov. Paterson formally applied for New York’s share of federal “edujobs” money. (Office of the Governor)
• Lessons on parents and schools from last week’s parent-led PEP meeting shut-down. (Quick and the Ed)
• How one elementary school teacher learned to stop worrying and love the fun. (GothamSchools)
• Rep. George Miller has called a congressional hearing on school turnaround companies. (Politics K-12)
• Mark your calendar for new student registration, which starts Sept. 1. (Insideschools)
• How the two national teachers unions are run has affected their stands on Obama’s agenda. (EdWeek)
• City schools could help slow the spread of HIV with better sex ed, advocates say. (Chelsea Now)
• The writers behind the L.A. Times’ controversial story on value-added answer readers’ questions. (LAT)
• Fewer than one in four ACT-takers are ready for college-level work, the test-makers said. (Flypaper)