GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Two of the three consortia competing for Race to the Top test grants won. (Edweek)
• The two groups won a combined $330 million to revamp states’ K-12 tests. (WaPo)
• Wendy Kopp reflects on Teach for America’s 20th anniversary. (WSJ)
• Debunking some claims on the virtues of small schools using statistics. (The Atlantic)
• D.C. banned chocolate milk in schools, NYC should do the same say parents. (GS)
• Seattle got a new teachers contract that ties test scores to teacher evaluation. (Seattle Times)
• Mike Petrilli argues against obsessing over the achievement gap. (Flypaper)
• D.C. high school students put their schools questions to Arne Duncan. (NPR)
• Should other states adopt Texas’ top 10 percent rule for college? (GOOD)
• And a made-up study finds that tests are biased against students who don’t care. (Onion)

Rhetoric around the city’s excessed teachers has cooled off since last year, but the issue hasn’t disappeared. More than 1,700 teachers remain on the city’s payroll without full-time teaching positions, officials said today.

Teachers enter the so-called Absent Teacher Reserve pool when when they lose their jobs to budget cuts or school closures. At the ATR pool’s height this summer, nearly 3,000 teachers were in excess. Just over 40 percent of those teachers either found jobs, retired, resigned or went on leave, leaving 1,779 still without positions.

That’s roughly the same number who lacked teaching jobs at this time last year. DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte said that there are currently just over 1,200 vacancies in the city’s schools, around 100 fewer open positions than there were just after the start of school last year.

Principals are currently only allowed to hire teachers already on the city’s payroll, except in certain areas like special education, science and some foreign languages. Earlier this summer, the city also relaxed its hiring restrictions for schools in the Bronx that were having trouble filling their open positions. (more…)

With the Democratic primary a few weeks away, the battle over a West Harlem senate seat — turned charter school proxy war — is heating up.

On NY1 last night, Senator Bill Perkins and challenger Basil Smikle debated Perkins’ support for charter schools. Perkins accused Smikle of being too cozy with charter school supporters (”We all know that it’s the hedge fund charter movement that has initiated his candidacy, with the support of course of the New York Post,” he said). And Smikle fought back, charging Perkins with intentionally pitting charter school parents against district school parents.

More interesting than the back and forth is how Perkins is now describing his relationship to charter schools. Months ago, Perkins’ line was that he had been an early supporter of charter schools — he spoke on NBC’s Morning Joe about founding a charter school — but that the reality had not lived up to his expectations. Rather than acting as incubators for new teaching methods traditional public schools could adopt, charter schools had become rouge, unregulated agents, he maintained.

Now, Perkins’ explanation for his position has evolved. Replacing the narrative of charter schools not doing what they were intended to do is one about how his April hearing on charter schools directly impacted and improved the state’s charter school law. (more…)

• 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 mother’s poem about how her daughter got 90’s and 3’s, then bombed the PSAT. (EdNotes)
• Last-minute registration centers opened today to place the unplaced. (Insideschools)
• The charter cap lift was big but not “mathematically” key for NY’s RTTT win. (EdVANTAGE)
• Los Angeles teachers aren’t too happy with the LA Times’ value-added project. (LA Times)
• A study finds “mutual consent” policies against forced teacher placement don’t pay off. (Ed Week)
• “Value-added data is not gospel,” writes David Leonhardt, summing up the LAT drama. (NYTM)
• A 29-page chronicle of reasons to be skeptical of value-added. (Economic Policy Institute, PDF)
• Poll: Michelle Rhee is so divisive that she is a “political wash” for DC’s mayor. (WashPost)
• A lack of training to teach special ed is deemed a “national crisis.” (Hechinger Report)
• Nationwide, charter schools are being urged to serve more English language learners. (Ed Week)
• Preschoolers use statistics when they interact with each other, a researcher finds. (Ed Week)

The city is removing some principals, but letting others keep their jobs or take on mentorship roles, at a handful of low-performing schools that are being overhauled this year with federal funds.

The eleven schools are part of a select group about to begin the federal government’s “transformation” model intended to improve some of the state’s lowest-performing schools. Though it is the least invasive of the four models offered — it doesn’t require firing teachers — it does call for the removal of principals.

City school officials have decided to entirely replace principals at four of the schools. Another four will get brand new principals, but their current principals will remain in the schools under a new job title. Department of Education officials believe these administrators, who will be called “transformation mentor principals,” should remain in leadership roles because the schools have shown improvement on their watch.

“This is a creative solution for select schools that will mean new teachers, more resources and needed reforms — all while making sure to keep recent positive trends in place,” said Department of Education spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld. (more…)

A stitched-together panorama of the Mott Haven Educational Campus, which will house five schools this year and is the largest school building project completed by the School Construction Authority.

The city’s largest new school building since the founding of the School Construction Authority will open for classes next week, creating room for more than 2,000 students in the Bronx.

The seats at the Mott Haven Educational Complex are among more than 17,000 new classroom seats that will become available when school starts next week, city officials announced today.

Of the 26 new school sites opening this year, 15 are completely new school buildings. Three projects add annexes to existing buildings, and eight sites are opening in newly-leased space. Nearly 700 of the new seats will be set aside for students in the city’s District 75 program for special education students.

Not all of the new seats will be filled with students when schools open next week. I’ve asked the DOE for estimates about how many of the seats they expect will be filled this year, and will update when I hear back. A map showing where the new seats added this year are located is below the jump. (more…)

To save her school from closure, the principal of a large Bronx high school took a drastic step and applied to become a charter school. But her application, along with nearly a dozen others, was rejected by the state today.

New York State’s Education Department announced today that of the 24 New York City charter school applications it received earlier this month, 12 schools have been green-lighted for the next step of the approval process.

Christopher Columbus High School, which applied to become a conversion charter, is not among them. Columbus is one of nearly two dozen low-performing schools selected to be “turned around” with federal money, meaning that in the next year it will be closed and replaced by a new school or it will lose half its staff and its principal.

A Columbus teacher who helped write the application said she was disappointed and felt the school’s application had been strong. (more…)

• 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 tent-sleeping principal of East Side Community HS explains why he moved outdoors. (YouTube)
• Ross Global Academy’s former principal was de facto cleared of test-tampering charges. (NY Sun)
• Kate Walsh says releasing teacher value-added data won’t serve all children. (Talk of the Nation)
• Why not publish only the names of the top 25% of teachers?, suggests Doug Lemov. (TOTN)
• Can the charter school founded by John King, now of NYSED, scale its success? (Boston Mag)
• A push to consider cutting high school sports spending. (Reason via Flypaper)
• A case that “blame the teacher” and “anti-teacher” aren’t the same, and that one is real. (Corey)
• The president of D.C.’s teacher union calls the IMPACT evaluation “dangerous.” (Learning Matters)
• India now has schools on wheels, so that teachers travel to students. (City Fix via Flypaper)
• Reminiscing on NYSUT’s “rather breathtaking 180-degree turnaround” on RTTT. (NYFERA)