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.

Forte said the city anticipates that the number of teachers in the excess pool will drop as the first day of school approaches and during the first few weeks of the school year. Last year, the rate of hiring increased rapidly just after school started, as principals adjusted their teaching staffs to the number of students who ended up enrolling.

When city officials released the ATR figures today, they were critical of the high number of teachers they say remain on the city’s payroll but who have given up looking for work. Nearly 60 percent of the teachers currently in excess have not applied for a new position through the city’s hiring system or attended one of the Department of Education’s recruiting fairs, they said.

But the city could not say today how many of the teachers who did apply for positions were eventually hired. Critics of the administration often charge that the city’s budgeting process, which requires principals to pay for the average salaries of their teaching staffs, harms older teachers with higher salaries when it comes to hiring and excessing.

City teachers union chief Michael Mulgrew said that Chancellor Joel Klein has the authority to unilaterally assign teachers in the pool to vacant positions. ”The fact that he has chosen not to do so indicates that he prefers to have the issue to complain about rather than to resolve the problem,” Mulgrew said.

Last spring, Klein said that the experience level of teachers in the excess pool tends to fall along a bell curve, with most teachers having between five and 15 years of experience. An analysis by researcher Kim Gittleson using ATR numbers at that time showed that older teachers were over-represented in the excess pool.

The average salary of the teachers currently in excess is $82,000, and they have served for an average of 12 years, city officials reported.

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.

Smikle interrogated Perkins about why he voted against lifting the charter school cap and then voted in favor of it. Perkins responded that, between the two votes, more oversight of schools had been added to the legislation, which he approved of. This change came about, Perkins said, because of the hearings he held on charter schools in April. He said:

“We have brought to the attention of the public the need for reform, the kind of issues we believe that were holding back special ed kids, that were holding back English Language Learners, that were discriminating against homeless children as per the charter school movement at the time. We fixed that. Those hearings were very instrumental in making that happen and so I think that we are all moving forward in a more positive direction.”

Smikle: “But my point is though, as a legislator your responsibility is to fix the bill, first and foremost.”

Perkins: “Yeah we did. We fixed the bill by having charter reform and by having hearings.”

]]> http://gothamschools.org/2010/09/02/as-primary-nears-a-charter-school-opponents-story-evolves/feed/ http://gothamschools.org/2010/09/02/dc-said-no-to-chocolate-milk-why-not-nyc/ http://gothamschools.org/2010/09/02/dc-said-no-to-chocolate-milk-why-not-nyc/#comments Thu, 02 Sep 2010 14:07:04 +0000 Elizabeth Puccini http://gothamschools.org/?p=45416 Earlier this summer District of Columbia school officials decided to ban chocolate milk from their schools. Proponents of flavored milk argue it’s the only way to get students to drink milk, which provides the calcium, protein and vitamin D that children need. But as Colorado school chef Ann Cooper has pointed out, “Saying we need to add sugar and flavoring to milk to get kids to drink it is like saying we need to feed kids apple pie if they don’t like apples.”

NYC Green Schools has proposed that New York City schools also get rid of chocolate milk as the daily consumption of sweetened drinks has no place in a child’s diet. Here’s the truth about the chocolate milk served daily to New York City’s schoolchildren: It contains 22 grams of sugar, which is more sugar than half a can of coke, and it is sweetened with high-fructose corn-syrup, which is listed as the second ingredient.

With 40 percent of city children either overweight or obese, why does the Department of Education’s Office of SchoolFood still insist on chocolate milk? The question is especially vexing because the city decided recently to eliminate sugary drinks from school vending machines, citing irrefutable evidence linking the increased consumption of sugary drinks with the rising rates of childhood obesity.

One SchoolFood official told us that the SchoolFood office is “in the business of food” and that chocolate milk sells. We can only assume this is the same rationale of the dairy industry for continuing to produce chocolate milk. Milk sold in schools makes up 7 percent of all milk sales in the country, and flavored milk constitutes 71 percent of the milk served in our nation’s schools. Neither the city nor the industry wants to risk losing “business” by serving only plain white milk, even though this is clearly the healthier option for our children.

The high-fructose corn syrup in the chocolate milk also poses a health risk to students.  The Washington Post reported last year that new studies had found that “almost half of tested samples of commercial high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contained mercury, which was also found in nearly a third of 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient.” In a prepared statement, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy’s David Wallinga, a co-author of both studies, said, “Mercury is toxic in all its forms. Given how much high fructose corn syrup is consumed by children, it could be a significant additional source of mercury never before considered.”

In The Nutrition Deficit Disorder Book, renowned pediatrician William Sears explains that because high-fructose corn syrup does not occur in nature, the body might not know how to process it. Some researchers have expressed concern that the extra fructose in HFCS might be metabolized in the liver, causing damage there. Because the research is mixed, Dr. Sears, like many doctors, advises erring on the side of caution and eliminating high-fructose corn syrup from children’s diets.

As parents, we consider chocolate milk a treat, not a beverage our children should be drinking every day. We also believe that if only plain white milk and water were served in school, children would drink one or the other with their lunch. The daily consumption of sweetened drinks, whether in the form of soda or flavored milk, is harmful to our children’s health. It’s time for the city’s Office of SchoolFood to put our children’s health before “business.” No more excuses. If the District of Columbia can do it, so can New York.

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.

The DOE is calling the new job title a promotion for these principals, but it is unclear whether they will get raises. The city is negotiating an agreement with the principals’ union.

Transformation mentor principals will essentially be a second principal in these schools, but they will focus on carrying out the changes that accompany the transformation model, such as a longer school day and improved curriculum.

Three new principals who’ve had their jobs for three years or fewer are being allowed to remain in their posts.

List of new principals:
(These are all interim acting principals because they have yet to go through the full approval process.)

FDR

• Steven DeMarco will be interim acting principal.

Flushing

• Carl Hudson will be interim acting principal

Grady

• Geraldine Maione will be interim acting principal

Long Island City

• Vladimir Hurych will be interim acting principal

Cobble Hill

• Anna Maria Mule will be interim acting principal.

Queens Voc

• Melissa Burg will be the interim acting principal

Brooklyn School for Global Studies

• Joe O’Brien was appointed principal a few months ago

Bread and Roses

• We are in the process of identifying a new principal.

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.

Sweating on a blacktop next to Mott Haven’s new football field as construction workers put finishing touches on the building behind them, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Chancellor Joel Klein and other city officials said that this year’s new seats put the Department of Education on track to add 100,000 school seats by 2013.

Bloomberg and Klein contend that their school construction efforts are the largest in the city’s history. But critics of the administration argue that the city needs to accelerate new construction even more dramatically to ease the burden of overcrowding.  The new seats that will be created this year were funded almost entirely by the city’s 2005-2009 capital plan, which spent $13.1 billion on new schools. In the next five years, the city plans to spend about $2 billion less to create new seats.

Bronx officials today hailed the opening of the Mott Haven campus, which comes after years of controversy over the site’s environmental quality. Adolfo Carrion, Jr., who was Bronx borough president when plans for the new campus began and who is now regional administrator at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, praised the city’s persistence in cleaning up the site to create badly-needed classroom seats in the Bronx.

“This is one of the sites that because of the toxicity, because of the controversy, it was probably easy to walk away from,” Carrion said.

Located on land that once contained a railyard, laundry and plant that made gas from coal, the 6-acre site required $30 million in clean-up. In 2008, a state judge ruled that the city violated environmental law when it began construction on the building before developing a plan to ensure that future students would not be exposed to pollutants.

In the end, the construction and clean-up will cost between $230 and $250 million, School Construction Authority chief Lorraine Grillo estimated today.

View NYC DOE new school buildings opening 2010 in a larger map

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.

“We had hoped we could really focus on positive things this year,” said Christine Rowland. “We were looking forward to making plans, moving forward, having it be a positive start to the year. It makes that more difficult.”

The state also rejected applications from four Arrow Academy schools that might have tested the state’s new law barring for-profit charter school managers from running schools.

SUNY’s Charter School Institute has also seen its list of pending applications shorten as schools have withdrawn their applications. Superintendent of District 79 schools, Cami Anderson, applied to open three charter schools in 2011 for kids at-risk of not graduating. Anderson has withdrawn all of the applications, but intends to reapply in January, said Jonas Chartock, executive director of SUNY’s Charter School Institute.

Active applications for New York City:

State Education Department applicants:

• Bronx Charter School for Health and Wellness (Bronx)
• Democracy Preparatory 3 (Manhattan)
• Dr. Muriel Petioni Charter School for Scholarship, Health, and Leadership (Manhattan)
• The Joint Services Military and Maritime Charter High School (9-12; Brooklyn)
• Lamad Academy Charter School (Brooklyn)
• Launch Expeditionary Learning Charter School (Brooklyn)
• Mott Hall Charter School (Bronx)
• Neighborhood Charter School of Harlem (Manhattan)
• New York Academy for Student Success Charter School (9-12; Brooklyn)
• New York City Montessori Charter School (Bronx)
• New York Flex Charter School (9-12; Manhattan)
• Urban Dove Charter School (Brooklyn)

SUNY applicants:

• Bronx Success Academy Charter School 3 (K-5; Bronx)
• Success Academy Charter School (K-5; Manhattan)

• Previously announced applicants:

• Broome Academy Charter High School (9-12; Manhattan)
• Our World Neighborhood Charter School II (K-5; Queens)
• Heketi Community Charter School (K-5; Bronx)
• New Visions Charter High School for the Humanities (9-12; Bronx)
• New Visions Charter High School for Science and Math (9-12; Bronx)
• KED Manhattan Charter School (6-8; Manhattan)

New York City public schools can re-name themselves only by jumping through a series of bureaucratic hoops that ultimately lead to Chancellor Joel Klein’s final approval.

Once a principal approves or initiates a change, it’s voted on by the parent association, which then passes it on to the school’s superintendent. In cases where a school is part of a community school district, the superintendent makes a recommendation to the community education council, which holds a public meeting and then votes on the change. But for most high schools and other schools that are not zoned for a district, the decision goes straight from the superintendent to Chancellor Klein.

Unlike schools that change buildings or expand, schools that give themselves new names do not need the citywide school board’s approval.

There are a few rules: you can’t name a school after someone who’s still alive, and if your school is already named after someone and you decide to change it, you have to tell their relatives first. Once a school is given a new name, it can’t be changed for ten years, though there are exceptions to this.

Nationally, it’s becoming increasingly rare to name a school after a person.

Two other schools changed their names this summer. Bard High School Early College II, which opened in 2008 and is modeled on the Bard High School in Lower Manhattan, is now Bard High School Early College Queens. And the Bronx Studio School for Writers and Artists, which opened in 2009, is now the Urban Assembly Bronx Studio for Writers and Artists.

It’s unclear why the High School for International Business and Finance’s principal, Juan Alvarez, chose to change the school’s name to College Academy. Still on summer break, no one at the school returned calls. DOE officials did not respond to a request for information.

Duncan’s approach, which inspired his signature Race to the Top grant program, has drawn criticism from advocates like the NAACP, some state leaders and even members of Congress. His critics say that a policy that awards funds based on anything other than student need will inevitably leave some districts behind.

During Duncan’s visit to the state teachers union headquarters in Albany yesterday, those concerns surfaced again, this time from a teacher from Newburgh. Patricia Van Duser told Duncan that school districts like hers depend on the reliable funding that the federal education department doles out to schools based on need.

Van Duser worried that her district’s finances could be jeopardized if the federal government moves towards a more competitive model as the Obama administration plans its overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

“You really need that to be formula-driven, not competitive-driven,” she said.

Duncan responded that under his proposal, the Department of Education would still hand out 80 percent of federal education funds based on need. And Race to the Top has proven that the federal government can use competition to leverage widespread policy change with a small amount of money, he argued.

Less than one percent of current federal education funds have been spent on competitive grant programs, Duncan said. That contest, which in the end awarded funds to a total of 11 states and the District of Columbia, prompted policy changes in 34 states.

“It’s not either-or,” Duncan said. “The vast majority will be formula-driven…but we still have a chance to reward excellence through competitive grants. I think we need to do that.”

For next year, Obama and Duncan have asked Congress for nearly $50 billion in education funds, a 7.5 percent increase from the year before. Most of that increase — about $3.5 billion — would go to new competitive programs, including continuations of the Race to the Top and Investing in Innovation grant programs.

My school’s History Day is the accomplishment in which I take the most pride in my teaching career. It is the only event in the year that’s attended by the entire school and the only event at my school where parents and community members are invited to view the products of students’ learning. My former principal (Marc Sternberg, now a deputy chancellor) always told me that History Day was his favorite day of the school year.

Most significantly, it yields the greatest buy-in, interest, and growth in my students of anything I do. Students look forward to having the opportunity to learn about a topic in which they have interest and show off to the community. It has become a rite of passage. Over the past four years, I have had students complete research on a range of topics from the Missouri Compromise to the Spanish Civil War to Septima Clark, often yielding insights and understandings new even to me. It is the only time in our curriculum where students have the opportunity to complete in-depth, college-level research.

The students who go on to the city and even state levels of the competition have the opportunity to compete with and learn from the best students New York has to offer. It has been a transformative experience for my public school students, nearly all of whom are black or Latino, to see that their work is just as strong as that from the mostly white, private school students who enter our city’s competition.

I am very proud that in two of the past four years my students have won awards at the city level. But I am even more proud that four of my students have used their History Day papers as the writing samples that helped earn them full-tuition Posse Scholarships to elite private colleges. It meant the world to me, and their future to them, that they all felt that the best piece of writing they did in four years of high school was their work on the History Day project.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan (right, blue shirt) and NYSUT President Richard Ianuzzi listen to a teacher at a roundtable at NYSUT's Albany headquarters today.

ALBANY, N.Y. — Teamwork was the watchword as U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan took his national back-to-school bus tour to Albany today.

Duncan has taken to the road to celebrate teachers, and to convince them that his reform efforts will not undercut their interests.

In New York, many teachers are still skittish of a new teacher evaluation plan that will, for the first time, allow school districts to judge them based on their students’ test scores. The state and city teachers union struck the agreement with state education officials in May, in part to improve the state’s Race to the Top application.

And so, in appearances at the state teachers union headquarters and the State Capitol, Duncan and state officials emphasized that New York’s reform policies are the result of a team effort between state education officials and its teachers unions. Those policies won the state nearly $700 million in federal Race to the Top funds last week.

“Where other states were not able to reach consensus, New York was,” Duncan said.

At the offices of the state teachers union, Duncan and New York State United Teachers Union President Richard Iannuzzi faced a panel of teachers and administrators from six upstate districts. The group shared lessons from a teacher evaluation experiment they had begun before the teacher evaluation deal was struck. They were generally upbeat about the changes, but they also sounded warning notes for Duncan.

Duncan asked the group why it’s taken so long to create momentum around creating new teacher evaluations. One reason, said Dawn Sherwood, a social studies teacher from Hempstead, is that school districts rarely collaborate.

“In the past, it felt like every man for himself,” she said. “What that led to were pockets of success.”

Julius Brown, the assistant superintendent of Sherwood’s district, cautioned that the increased attention on teacher effectiveness should extend also to principals and administrators. “The teachers didn’t hire themselves; they weren’t granted tenure themselves,” he said.

Duncan agreed. “The teaching piece is huge, but by itself isn’t going to get us all the way we need to go,” he said.

“There obviously is still anxiety around [the new teacher evaluation plan],” Iannuzzi said. ”At the moment, [teachers are] not convinced it’s going to be fair.”

But Iannuzzi said that the state’s winning second-round Race to the Top application reflected teachers union input to a far greater degree than in the first round. And he predicted that if the union continues to be involved, support among rank-and-file teachers will grow.

“I think my local members will feel that it’s fair if they feel that they had a voice that was heard,” Iannuzzi said.

With fewer dues-paying members, the United Federation of Teachers is renting out space in its downtown headquarters to help cover its operating costs. (Photo via Flickr)

The bags of swag at the city teachers union’s regular conferences might be lighter this year, the catered dinners less lavish. The recession has caught up with the union and it’s beginning to cut back.

Hit with the combination of a two-year hiring freeze and typical teacher attrition, the United Federation of Teachers has lost roughly 2,000 members in the last year. With them has gone about $2 million in dues.

On top of the membership decline, the union is now funding programs that the state used to support. This year, the state legislature cut all $16 million of its funding for the Teacher Center, a professional development program that trains teachers at over a hundred city schools. To keep a cut-back version of the program going, the UFT has had to kick in $5 million of its own money.

“In many respects, you can say the economy caught up to us,” said the union’s Chief Financial Officer David Hickey. “We’ve done okay in the last couple of years. And so it did, it got us.”

At the same time that it’s losing members and dues money, the union’s political fund is the largest it’s been in 10 years. But the millions it has set aside to wield its influence through campaign contributions can’t be used to cover its operating costs.

To remain in the black, the union has had to renegotiate all of its contracts with vendors and cut back on how much it spends on conferences and other extras. In past years, the UFT hosted an annual parents conference at the Hilton Hotel in November. This year, parents will convene at the union’s less glamorous borough offices.

The union is also cutting some employees’ hours by as much as 20 percent. With more teachers choosing to work past the retirement age due to the poor economy, the UFT needs fewer people to answer questions about pensions or consult on retirement, Hickey said.

“We’re not necessarily cutting things out, but we’re cutting back,” he said. “No full time person was laid off.”

In an effort to bring in new revenue, the UFT is leasing out space in its headquarters in Lower Manhattan. In about a week, a new high school, the Manhattan Academy for Arts & Language, will open on the building’s fifth floor.

Though the union has been able to make small cuts, city officials have warned that next year they may have little choice but to lay off more teachers, costing the union more members.

Hickey wouldn’t speculate about what steps the UFT would take then. “We’ll cross that bridge if we come to it,” he said.

• N.J. Gov. Chris Christie fired his education chief over his costly Race to the Top goof. (Star-Ledger)
• Christie previously blamed federal officials for not checking the clerical error. (NYTimes)
• But USDOE released video showing that the state didn’t give the right data when asked. (USDOE)
• Nine of the 12 winning RttT applicants were supported by Gates Foundation grants. (State Ed Watch)
• Former city schools Chancellor Rudy Crew is “not there yet” in his support for RttT. (Russo)
• La. schools chief Paul Pastorek says most state ed departments aren’t designed for reform.  (Rick Hess)
• And Arne Duncan will appear at the state teachers union on Monday to talk teacher evaluations. (T-U)

And in other news:

• A parallel between Mayor Lindsay’s fire department and Mayor Bloomberg’s schools? (NYSun)
• A Mississippi middle school has ended its race-based rules for class election eligibility. (Jezebel)
• A group of parents write to President Obama opposing the federal turnaround strategy. (Answer Sheet)
• And a portrait of how New Orleans schools have changed since Katrina. (EdWeek)