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The radical “restart” plans for 14 struggling schools seem likely to get off to a slow start.

In exchange for millions of dollars in federal School Improvement Grants, the city announced this week that it would turn over the reins of 14 schools to nonprofit Education Partnership Organizations. But with the start of the school year just weeks away, those groups say that much of their first year will be spent assessing needs and adding support, not making drastic changes.

“Whenever you’re in a position of partnering, you’re always balancing the need of that sense of urgency with the idea that there is a certain risk or downside to, say, overhauling the master schedule two weeks before school starts,” said Doug Elmer, the director of Diplomas Now, which will manage Sheepshead Bay High School in Brooklyn and Newtown High School in Queens.

The nonprofits put in their bids to take over schools — where they’ll control everything from curriculum to hiring to budgeting — in May. But after a delay while the city and teachers union hammered out a deal over teacher evaluations in the struggling schools, the groups learned only in the last two weeks that the city wanted them to become EPOs. And they found only just this week which schools they would take over. The city had asked the schools and organizations to rank each other, then paired them off.

“It was a little bit of a flurry,” said Sheepshead Bay Principal Reesa Levy of the matching process. But she said she was excited to work with Diplomas Now. ”We’re actually thrilled. I think maybe this will give us that extra push.”

The federal government has promised up to $2 million a year for three years for the restart schools. (more…)

More than 50 schools have signed up for a new matchmaking program to help them pool positions.

The Department of Education has created a centralized process for principals looking to share teachers with another school —having a teacher work a few days a week at one school, and the rest of the week at another. In a notice to principals, the city said sharing teachers “may be a particularly efficient way to provide arts instruction.”

In the process’s first month, 38 schools have indicated interest in gaining a shared teacher. Eighteen of the schools are looking for an art, music, or dance teacher. Another 28 schools have indicated that they have someone to share, including nine arts teachers, according to DOE spokeswoman Barbara Morgan.

It’s a positive step toward providing more students with access to the arts, according to Richard Kessler, director of the nonprofit Center for Arts Education. But he’s not convinced principals have the support they need to share teachers effectively.

Splitting teacher schedules presents a logistical challenge for the principals who pay their salaries and teachers who might have to travel. Kessler said those logistical difficulties are one reason why the practice has become rare after being relatively common in the 1980s.

“The majority of principals just don’t know how you share faculty from school to school,” Kessler said, adding that he did not know of any schools currently sharing arts teachers. “There was a reason why it disappeared — it gets tricky traveling from one school to another. But in tough times, this is certainly better than nothing.” (more…)

Clemente Lopes is trying to keep his head above water.

As the principal of I.S. 10 in Long Island City for the last six years, Lopes is now in a situation familiar to principals across the city: trying to increase scores with fewer teachers, less money, and more students.

“As budget cuts increase and I have to make my classrooms bigger, I’m not so sure how my scores are going to reflect all those cuts,” Lopes said. “It’s getting to the point when I’m running out of options.”

Since the 2005-2006 school year, he’s eliminated 11 positions, even though he’s gone from a low of 849 students in the 2006-2007 school year to 957 students last year.

Facing the third straight year of citywide budget cuts, I.S. 10′s budget for this coming year is $6.49 million, down from a peak of $7.26 million for the 2008-2009 school year.

Lopes’ solutions to the budget crunch have been common ones: cutting instructional coaches, deans, after-school activities, tutoring, and textbook purchases. Now he’s worried that the trimming will cut into academic performance, too. (more…)

Schools are still waiting for the results of state ELA and math tests, exactly one year after the 2010 scores were announced.

The July 26 Principals’ Weekly newsletter said that the state had “postponed the release” of the grade 3-8 scores, though the New York State Education Department said today that results were right around the corner.

“The release this year is imminent and will be announced shortly,” NYSED spokesman Tom Dunn said.

The Principals’ Weekly item told principals that after the scores are released, they will need to send “July promotion update letters” to students who had been held back, and to students who failed the tests but had been promoted to the next grade on the expectation that they would pass.

Now, it looks like those July updates may not come until August.

Clemente Lopes, principal of Horace Greeley Middle School in Long Island City, said that he was anxious to see his school’s scores—for planning, but also out of curiosity.

“I’d like to see how my students perform. I’m like a parent—I want to know how my kids did,” he said. (more…)

James Horan is used to being creative, after spending years teaching physical education at an elementary school without a gym or outdoor space of its own.

Now, like many other city teachers, he’s going to need to use that creativity to find another position.

Horan was recently excessed after teaching for four and a half years at PS 68 in Ridgewood, Queens. Even though the school’s population has been shrinking for years, Horan thought his job was safe because it wasn’t included in the list of projected layoffs that the city circulated in February.

When layoffs were averted, he joined the cheers — only to be told one month later that budget reductions made his position too expensive for the school to maintain. The city has not yet released details about how many teachers shared Horan’s fate this year, but after three straight years of cuts, the number is sure to be significant. Principals eliminated nearly 2,000 positions last year.

“I just find it very frustrating,” Horan said. “Now that I’m excessed, it’s just very unexpected. Until June, everything’s great. I would have planned differently.”

Horan came to PS 68 as a first-year teacher in the spring of 2007, teaching 30 to 50 students at a time in an empty classroom that served as the school’s gym. The school hadn’t offered physical education in at least three years, he said, and he bought the program’s only supplies himself using Teacher’s Choice funds. (Those funds were also eliminated this year.) (more…)

Percentage of Teachers Who Had Tenure Denied or Extended

In a stark departure from tradition, more than 40 percent of city teachers up for tenure this year did not get it.

Just over 5,200 teachers were up for tenure this year. Of them, 58 percent received tenure and 3 percent were denied it, effectively barring them from working in city schools. The remaining portion — 39 percent — had their probationary periods extended for another year.

The number of extensions inched up in 2010 to 8 percent, but skyrocketed this year after the Department of Education revamped the tenure evaluation process in an effort to make the protection tougher to receive.

Yet the rate of tenure denials actually fell slightly from last year, from about 3.3 percent in 2010 to 2.7 percent in 2011, or 151 teachers, despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s insistence that the figures were the first step toward “ending tenure as we know it.”

The numbers, which Bloomberg touted at a press conference today, confirm anecdotal reports pointing to a sharp rise in the number of probation extensions under the new system. Before last year, that option was rarely used and the vast majority of teachers received tenure almost as a formality.

But last fall, Bloomberg vowed to make tenure a reward not for time served but for pushing students forward. In December, the city unveiled a new evaluation rubric for teachers up for tenure and said that teachers falling in the bottom two categories of four should not receive tenure.

“Tenure ought to be reserved for only the best teachers, and unfortunately, as we all know, for far too long it has been awarded primarily on the basis on longevity, not performance,” Bloomberg said today.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said today that he expects the number of tenure denials to rise next year. (more…)

Being able to move forward with plans to close and co-locate schools isn’t enough for Mayor Michael Bloomberg — he said this morning that the UFT and NAACP should feel ashamed for trying to stop the changes.

Bloomberg used his weekly appearance on “The John Gambling Show” to celebrate yesterday’s late-night decision by Judge Paul Feinman to allow the city to move ahead with 22 school closures and 15 charter school co-locations. The UFT and NAACP sued in May to stop the closure and co-locations.

“There are thousands of families whose children have been in limbo because of this lawsuit, and now we can give them a clear direction. This is a big victory for the kids, and I think those that brought the suit should be ashamed of themselves. There’s no other way to phrase it,” Bloomberg said.

UFT officials bristled at the suggestion, saying that the lawsuit — which will now move into a new phase — was meant to address inequities introduced by Bloomberg’s school policies.

“If there is any shame in this matter, it belongs to the mayor and the administration that sat back and made no attempt to help schools and students that were struggling, an administration that favored charter schools while it ignored the needs of public school students,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said in a statement.

The radio show’s segment on education began this way: (more…)

Advocates are worried that the city’s new evaluation system could penalize teachers of students with special needs.

The nonprofit organization Advocates for Children of New York recently released a fact sheet calling on parents to ask how the new system, which will be piloted in more schools next year, will affect those teachers.

Sixty percent of the new evaluations is based on subjective measures like principal observations, and the other 40 percent is based on student test scores. AFC’s concern is that teachers who work with high-needs students will be at a disadvantage because they likely won’t see the gains in test scores that other teachers will.

That will make it more difficult to earn a high evaluation score, lowering the incentive for teachers to take on students with disabilities and English Language Learners.

“Teachers are basically going to be looking at lower test scores, and lower evaluations because they’re so heavily reliant on test scores,” said Maggie Moroff, special education policy coordinator for AFC. “We’re worried that they will be teaching more to the test in those classes.” (more…)

When the first graduates of Green Dot Charter High School move on to college next year, the school’s founder is hoping to manage two more schools in the Bronx.

Steve Barr’s renamed organization, Future is Now Schools, is planning to take over a middle school and a high school in the South Bronx in fall 2012. But unlike in Green Dot’s model, Future is Now wants the two schools to remain district schools, not become charter schools.

That model, which the group announced in March, still requires complicated negotiations over teacher contracts, and especially teacher evaluations, where the city and Future is Now differ greatly. For now, FIN is growing its staff, developing curriculum, and continuing its three-way negotiations with the UFT and the city.

“We’ve made good progress and have come to a general agreement on the form of an evaluation system that is based on Green Dot’s,” said Gideon Stein, FIN’s president. “The difficulty has been all of the other priorities that the DOE and the city have.”

FIN’s most recent hire strengthens the group’s alignment with one of the DOE’s top priorities: Pushing models that blend online and in-person instruction through the two-year-old Innovation Zone. This week, Barr brought on Daniel Gohl, who was previously in charge of innovation efforts in Newark’s public school system, as the company’s chief academic officer. (more…)