GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• A teacher outlines what he likes and doesn’t like about the state’s teacher evaluation law. (DOENuts)
• Pallas: The evaluations pose deep tension between fairness and efficiency. (GS Community/Hechinger)
• The AFT, Randi Weingarten’s national union, endorsed President Obama for reelection. (Teacher Beat)
• But Norm Scott predicts rank-and-file members will be less likely to hit Allentown in 2012. (Ed Notes)
• A Washington Irving HS teacher offers a deeply personal argument against school closures. (Edwize)
• Legacy HS students’ organized closure protests were seeded in an after-school program. (SchoolBook)
• The vice president of P.S. 161′s PTA reiterates the school’s recent history as it faces truncation. (EdVox)
• An teacher finds many students with long commutes at a school facing turnaround. (Chaz’s School Daze)
• A list of schools in all four outer boroughs that might still have space. (Insideschools 1, 2, 3)
• The principal of Arts Media Prep describes how his school uses technology. (Learning Matters)
• The Chicago Tribune yanked a comic touting the funding site DonorsChoose. (Romenesko via Russo)
• D.C. is launching a gifted and talented program, but not for the first time. (D.C. Schools Insider)

Charter Parent Action Network Director Valerie Babb addresses charter school parents and students in Albany. (Photo courtesy of the New York City Charter School Center)

An annual caravan of charter school parents to Albany took place today with a specific mission: convince legislators to approve a bill allowing charter parents to run for the city’s local parent councils.

It’s a battle that charter advocates will have to fight without the Department of Education’s help. The city has never supported allowing charter parents to run for parent councils, even as it has encouraged the proliferation of charter schools and allowed them to operate in district space.

State law requires that each school district in the city field an elected parent council, known as a Community Education Council, to provide an avenue for parents to weigh in on schools policy. Some of the council’s duties, such as presiding over public hearings about co-locations, involve charter school issues. But the Bloomberg administration has constrained the councils’ authority and their only statutory function is to redraw school zone lines, which do not affect charter schools. They do not actually approve or reject co-locations.

Still, the CECs are seen as one of the few formal venues for parents to voice opinions about department policies, and charter school parents see the exclusion as an equity issue. They have convinced two legislators — Assemblyman Peter Rivera, a Bronx Democrat, and State Sen. Marty Golden, a Republican from Brooklyn — to introduce a bill that would reserve one of the 11 seats on each council for a charter parent.

“In order to protect our children and their continued access to a great public education, charter parents need and deserve a seat at the table to help inform the decisions about the schools in their neighborhoods,” said Valerie Babb, director of the Charter Parents Action Network, in a statement. “By supporting this legislation, our lawmakers will send a strong signal to families that their voices carry just as much weight as other public school parents in their districts.” (more…)

A father and son walk uptown after joining crowds to celebrate the New York Giants' Super Bowl victory.

City students were among the hundreds of thousands of New York Giants fans who flooded the streets around City Hall today to celebrate the team’s Super Bowl victory.

I took a lunchtime walk near our Lafayette Street office to soak in the spectacle and encountered, amid the crowds, families who had pulled their children from school today for the ticker-tape parade along Broadway’s Canyon of Heroes.

It’s a practice that is not officially sanctioned but got encouragement from former Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 2000, when he said students should be allowed to skip school for the Yankees’ World Series parade, as long as they read a book about baseball as well. After the Yankees’ 1998 World Series victory, high school attendance was 72 percent on the day of the parade, down from about 85 percent on typical days.

The Giants have been less of a draw in the past. In 2008, the last time the Giants won the Super Bowl, school attendance fell by about 4 percentage points on parade day across all grade levels.

About 20 seniors from Queens’ Bayside High School had gathered at the corner of Howard and Lafayette streets after the festivities. (more…)

• Rochester wants to speed schools’ closures because students are foundering. (Democrat & Chronicle)
• The city will appeal a judge’s order that it rehire a teacher who complained about students. (Daily News)
• After school programs that provide child care and GED classes are on the chopping block. (Daily News)
• A poll found wide support for Gov. Cuomo’s approach to new teacher evaluations. (GothamSchools)
• Another look at Manhattan Theatre Lab, an arts school that is facing a closure vote on Thursday. (NY1)
• Latinos worry that if P.S. 19 vanishes, so will Roberto Clemente’s name. (GothamSchools/El Diario)
• Every teacher is being removed from an L.A. school roiled by sex abuse charges. (L.A. Times, Times, AP)
• Detroit is set to name 10 schools it will turn over to state management in a new district. (Free Press)

• Leonie Haimson recaps the backstory of and objections to Joel Rose’s DOE contract. (NYC P.S. Parents)
• Advocates for the homeless are supporting a bill to change the definition of homelessness. (NAEHCY)
• Pedro Noguera explains why he resigned from SUNY’s Charter Schools Institute. (SchoolBook)
• The principal of P.S. 55 in the Bronx says he hustles for partnerships to help his students. (LinkEd)
• Unusually, D.C. schools are adding lessons about family diversity in the earliest grades. (WaPo)
• A father compares the homework help he offers to the kind his parents offered him. (Insideschools)
• A survey of Los Angeles students shows the impact of school budget cuts there. (L.A. Youth via GOOD)
• Satire alert: The lowest-performing 5 percent of economists, like teachers, face dismissal. (Answer Sheet)
• A new paper by an economist who found that teachers matter finds that principals do, too. (HuffPo)
• Mike Petrilli: Micromanagement, not flexibility, still rules at the U.S. Department of Education. (Flypaper)
• Some charter supporters are worried new federal rules would bar them from pension plans. (Politics K12)

Nearly three-quarters of New Yorkers approve of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s carrot-and-stick approach to getting new teacher evaluations in place, according to poll results released today.

Last month, Cuomo vowed to withhold increases in state school aid to districts that do not settle in short order on new teacher evaluations that take test scores into account.

The poll, conducted last week by the Siena Research Institute, asked respondents, “Do you support or oppose the
Governor’s plan to link school aid increases to the implementation of an enhanced teacher evaluation process?” Seventy-one percent said they support that plan. (The poll of 807 registered voters had a margin of error of 3.4 percent.)

The support was evenly split between respondents in New York City and the rest of the state and was especially high among black New Yorkers (77 percent) and young people between 18 and 34 (78 percent). Households with union members (61 percent) and Jews (63 percent) supported Cuomo’s plan least often, but even they stood by it in large numbers. (more…)

Mark Anderson and William Johnson are trying to change the conversation about school reform.

Independently, the two special education teachers have been contributing to the GothamSchools Community section for some time, Anderson writing about teaching elementary in the Bronx and Johnson about teaching high school in Brooklyn. Now they’re working together to rethink the very philosophy has driven many recent efforts to improve schools.

In a joint Community section dispatch, they argue for a new way of thinking to replace the idea that schools should be judged by their students’ test scores. They write:

We propose a fundamental shift in the framework and language we use to discuss educational reform. Instead of a framework that views students as products, we propose a framework in which the products of education are viewed as the contexts and content of schools themselves. The schools we produce should be positive and nurturing learning environments where students are engaged in a rich, coherent curriculum. Rather than view our students as widgets, we’d do better to view them as vibrant, dynamic organisms, and view the school, by extension, as an ecosystem. While such a model would make it harder to quantify school quality based on a simple numerical scale, it would enable us to have more productive conversations about systemic education reform, and to take action in targeted ways that will have a sustainable impact.

Read Anderson and Johnson’s full argument — and how it relates to the city’s controversial plan to “turn around” 33 struggling schools — in the Community section.

News from New York City:

• Michael Winerip: Sub-literate essays can earn passing scores on the state’s Regents exams. (Times)
• A DOE contract with a company started by a former employee is raising eyebrows. (Daily News)
• The city is still trying to fire a teacher who retired last year after being found guilty of sex talk. (Post)
• Parents at P.S. 189 say kindergarteners were allowed to engage in sexual touching in class. (Post)
• Students from 45 public and private schools participated in a science fair at Grover Cleveland HS. (NY1)
• Educators and experts say Dominican students’ long absences are culturally bound. (GothamSchools)
• Parents, students, and activists say they will protest Thursday’s vote on school closures. (Daily News)
• One of the schools, Samuel Gompers High School, offers vocational training. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• Another school, P.S. 14, would be Staten Island’s first school closure under Mayor Bloomberg. (NY1)
• The Post blames potential disruptions at Thursday’s PEP meeting on the UFT and Occupy Wall Street.
• Students earned $250 selling pot-laced brownies to classmates at I.S. 208 in Queens. (Daily News)
• A columnist notes that Gov. Cuomo first derailed a state deal on teacher evaluations. (Times-Union)
• The Daily News says Cuomo must insist on a slate of evaluations conditions as his deadline nears.

And elsewhere:

• Cami Anderson proposal for a New York City-inspired reform plan in Newark is drawing fire. (WSJ)
• The governor of Connecticut is set to propose more charter schools and more money for them. (WSJ)
• A Pennsylvania district says it is being put out of business by a “charter school on steroids.” (Times)
• A reform group that has done “turnarounds” in 19 Chicago schools is earning mixed grades. (Tribune)
• The backlash against Texas’s high-stakes accountability system appears to be growing steam. (Times)
• No data support La. Gov. Bobby Jindal’s plan to expand a school voucher program. (Times-Picayune)
• More on the controversial pro-charter school video that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is in. (Times)

Brooklyn Prospect students listen to sports writer John Walters talk about his career path and professional life.

When Brooklyn Prospect Charter School students next sit down to work on their school newspaper, they shouldn’t have any trouble coming up with stories to cover.

As one of more than 20 speakers at Brooklyn Prospect’s Career Day, I spent the morning talking with eighth-graders about what it’s like to work as a journalist. Newly armed with knowledge about the distinctions among news, features, and opinion writing, the students broke into small groups to brainstorm article ideas about their school.

One big piece of news, the students said, is that Brooklyn Prospect has hired a principal for its high school, which will open in September. A feature story might take an in-depth look at how the school has changed now that it is located inside Bishop Ford High School after leaving the Sunset Park High School building. And opinion columns could make the case for or against the required uniform, a green or white polo shirt with black or khaki pants.

The students pointed to one story that could easily be tackled in any of the categories: a new “no hugging” rule. (more…)

We’re counting down the days until the “After-School Special” happy hour that some of our dedicated readers have organized for next week — and we hope you are, too.

In case you’ve missed them, here are the details: