Khaair Morrison, a Queens high school student, explains in the community section what such a change would mean for him and his peers. Morrison writes:

I wouldn’t even attend the great school I go to, Francis Lewis High School in Queens, if I hadn’t known I would be able to get there for free. But my mom knew I couldn’t go to the schools in my neighborhood. Now those schools are among 19 that the mayor and chancellor are closing. Next year, if I don’t get a free Metrocard, it would be hard for me to stay enrolled at Francis Lewis for my senior year. And all the students who might have gone to the schools that are closing will have to spend their own money to get to schools like mine, which are already overcrowded.

Here at The Open Planning Project, which has helped incubate GothamSchools, the team at Livable Streets Education has a guide for how to fight back against the possible cuts. And a citywide student group is planning to collect messages for legislators on their expired cards.

Are you a student with something to say? Email us to contribute to the community section.

School buses parked in Red Hook, Brooklyn, wait out a winter storm. From Flickr via Michelle

No news travels faster than word of a snow day. It’s on the radio, on teacher blogs, and in a notice sent by the Department of Education this morning: There is no school tomorrow.

The Department of Education sent out a notice at 11:10 am to say that regular school as well as all after school activities and sports are canceled. The Panel for Educational Policy meeting, which was scheduled for tomorrow night, has also been canceled and the proposals moved to the March meeting.

Last March, Chancellor Klein waited until 20 minutes before 6 am to declare a snow day, angering teachers who’d already begun their commutes and parents who had to find childcare.

The chancellor’s notice this year reads:

Due to anticipated inclement weather conditions, all New York City public schools will be closed tomorrow, February 10, 2010. All after-school activities and PSAL events will also be cancelled. While travel conditions to school in the morning may not be difficult, the weather is expected to worsen as the day progresses, complicating dismissal. We are making this decision today to give parents as much time as possible to make alternative plans for tomorrow.

I think education reporters should disclose information about their schooling–public or private–as well as where their children go, if they have them. I think this is fair especially when a cover story blasts certain aspects of public schools. I always wonder after reading such a story: Did this reporter go to private school? Just a random thought.

We agree that it’s fair to ask education reporters, like all journalists, to reveal any biases they might have. So here’s the answer to Random Question’s question for GothamSchools’ four reporters: We are all products of public schools, but not New York’s. And none of us has children.

My mother is a single parent. She is putting two kids through college — one at Howard University and the other at St. John’s in Queens — and she still has to keep up with her mortgage payments and other bills. Her job gives her great benefits and a good salary. But it is still really hard and I see her struggle every day to provide for her family and keep us together especially lately in this economic downturn. The last thing she needs on her plate is the question, “How am I going to get transportation to and from school for my son?” Providing a Metrocard for me to get to school would be another bill and another burden on her back.

I wouldn’t even attend the great school I go to, Francis Lewis High School in Queens, if I hadn’t known I would be able to get there for free. But my mom knew I couldn’t go to the schools in my neighborhood. Now those schools are among 19 that the mayor and chancellor are closing. Next year, if I don’t get a free Metrocard, it would be hard for me to stay enrolled at Francis Lewis for my senior year. And all the students who might have gone to the schools that are closing will have to spend their own money to get to schools like mine, which are already overcrowded.

And it’s not just about getting to and from school for me. I do a lot of extracurricular activities all over the city. I work with a group in Manhattan called The Youth Justice Board, I intern with the Public Advocate’s office, and I volunteer all around the city. Right now my school Metrocard allows me to go to one additional location every day, free of charge. If I didn’t have this Metrocard, I would have to pay for transportation to school, which is two buses, then from school to work, which is a bus and then a train, and then from Manhattan back home, again a train and then a bus. This would be $2.25 and a transfer three times a day, or $7.75 a day. I would spend approximately $154 a month and $1,395 a year, just for my transportation on school days.

I am able to work to enhance my experiences, but I have friends who really have to work not for themselves but for their families. Without a free Metrocard, they would have to spend their pay on getting themselves to school. This cut could almost force them not to go to school at all.

New York students, parents, teachers and citizens know we are in a time when cuts need to be made, but educational cuts are not the way to go. They are never the way to go. For students right now, it feels like the MTA, governor, and mayor are working together to constrict our opportunities.

But donors say that although their gifts coincided with increased speculation about Cuomo’s entry into the governor’s race, the donations are more a reflection of what they want to see happen now than a sign they’re taking sides in a future race.

The state teachers union, which vigorously opposed Paterson’s recent attempt to raise the cap on charter schools in the state without additional restrictions, gave $8,400 to Cuomo in the middle of December. That donation followed a $10,000 gift to the attorney general last June.

Union spokesman Carl Korn said that the most recent donation was an indication of support for the attorney generals’ crackdown on predatory lending to students and not a forward-looking political move.

Cuomo has so far kept quiet on his views on charter schools and recently refused to comment on whether he supported Paterson’s push to increase the number of charters allowed under state law.

By contrast, Democrats for Education Reform, the lobbying group whose political fund-raising often challenges efforts of local teachers unions, put $10,000 into Paterson’s coffers this month. The political action committee’s contribution was dated January 11, three days after Paterson announced his proposal to abolish the cap on charter schools in New York. Encouraging charter school growth, along with instituting merit pay programs and changing how teachers are evaluated, are among the political priorities that guide DFER’s giving.

Joe Williams, DFER’s executive director, said that the donation should not be read as a line in the sand. “We’ve had a long-standing relationships with Governor Paterson, and a lot of our supporters have supported the attorney general,” he said.

Rather, DFER’s donation to Paterson was intended as a boost to the governor’s effort to lift the charter cap before the deadline for the federal Race to the Top grant application, Williams said.

“If we can’t [enact] Race to the Top [reforms] this year, we need to do it next year, but we can’t really wait a year,” he said.

Charter school interest groups have so far kept out of the donations game. The Coalition for Public Charter Schools, the political giving arm of the New York Charter Schools Association, donated $500 to Cuomo in October but has not given to either candidate since.

Other interests, including unions who may not have been motivated by the battle over Race to the Top, are giving to both sides.

The Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, which represents city principals, has donated $5,000 to each campaign — to Cuomo in mid-December and to Paterson at the beginning of January.

D.C. 37, the union that represents school aides whose contracts do not protect them from layoffs under sustained school budget cuts, also donated to both candidates on the same day in December. The union donated $2,000 to Paterson, while Cuomo received a $1,000 donation.

According to the State Education Department’s website, the Board of Regents is considering three changes that would not alter the English and math tests’ content, but could still affect their level of difficulty. The changes under consideration include implementing vertical scaling, adding about 15 multiple choice questions to both exams, and curbing the amount of test information that’s made public.

Vertical scaling means creating a common scale that is used to compare test scores that a student receives in different grades. Currently, it’s difficult for testing analysts to look at a third grader’s math score, compare it to her seventh grade math score, and deduce how much progress she’s made.

By vertically scaling the tests, the state would have a more credible measure of students’ grade-to-grade growth, some argue. It could also feed into the development of a system where teachers and principals are evaluated on measured student progress — a change the Board favors.

SED is also looking to make the tests slightly longer and less predictable by adding questions and publishing fewer test questions.

Every year, New York releases all the questions on the state exams after they’re administered, a practice that some testing experts say winds up making the tests easier. Chair of the state advisory group that monitors testing, Howard Everson, has said that publishing each year’s tests makes it harder for test-makers to gauge how difficult a test is. It can also lead teachers to prepare students for exams by drilling them in multiple choice questions they know were previously on the test and could appear again in a similar format.

The state still wants to release some test questions, which testing experts say has its benefits.

“Whenever you are forced to show what you are giving kids the light of the day, all of the sudden a lot of the obnoxious style questions drop out of the tests,” Paul Kanarek, founder of the Princeton Review of California, told Maura last year. “They’re no longer asking questions that are so class-based, for example.”

In a half-hour interview on WWRL’s Working New York radio show this Saturday, Perkins said that a group of charter school parents who have become disenchanted with their childrens’ schools came to see him and left a lasting impression. Those parents belong to the New York Charter Parents Association, a recently-started group that’s supportive of charter schools, but quite critical of their management.

“There’s a parent movement that’s not being paid attention to within the charter schools,” said Perkins, who recently supported a bill backed by the teachers union that would have lifted the charter cap while placing tight restrictions on how and where the schools open.

“A part of their concern is how the money is being spent, and whether as parent leaders they are allowed to have certain types of access to information. They have been threatened with being put out of the schools if they insist on those types of opportunities that normally any parent would get access to,” he said.

The hearings — which aren’t scheduled, but will be “soon” he said — will focus on the city and state’s oversight of charter schools, the rates at which students are expelled or counseled to leave, and the difficulty parents have in obtaining and understanding schools’ by-laws.

“We want to make these charter school operators in the city to be more transparent and be more open, especially to the parents,” Perkins said.

But a bureaucratic mistake at the Department of Education led to the letter grade being released and folded into a report that was given to the school and posted online.

Last year, when the DOE published schools’ grades, Herbert Lehman High School was left off the list. Allegations that the school’s executive principal, Janet Saraceno, was changing dozens of grades to boost the school’s graduation rate, were serious enough that the progress report data couldn’t be published, officials decided. The report, which is based on Regents passage, credit accumulation, and graduation rates, heavily relies on data that could be compromised by Saraceno’s alleged actions.

So Lehman teachers were more than a little surprised last Monday when Saraceno announced to the staff that the school received a low B and had been mere points away from a dreaded C grade.

“She was pointing to some document that she projected onto the screen of the auditorium,” said a veteran teacher at the school who asked to remain anonymous.

“And a few of us looked up and said wait a minute, we thought we would have heard that the info was being released.”

Lehman also received a B in 2008. Though its overall score was higher in 2009, raised cutoff scores caused it to fall into the B range last year as well.

The leak was an honest mistake, said DOE spokesman David Cantor. In addition to progress reports, all schools receive a report called a CEP School Demographics and Accountability Snapshot that includes their enrollment data, quality review score, and progress report grade.

Lehman’s administration never saw its official progress report, Cantor said, but it did get the snapshot report, which had the school’s letter grade and its scores in the various categories like “student progress” and “school environment.”

When I brought it to the department’s attention that Lehman’s principal had divulged the grade to her staff, the DOE removed all the progress report data from the school’s website.

“When we learned it was up there, we got rid of it because they don’t technically have a progress report grade,” Cantor said. The city’s investigation into the school is not complete.

According to the veteran teacher, Saraceno has told the school’s staff that she’s innocent of any wrongdoing.

Still, the DOE is taking extra precautions this year. Lehman students’ Regents exams are typically graded on campus, but this year teachers at the Theodore Roosevelt Educational Complex are overseeing the grading.

The Department of Education reports that 5,898 students made the cut this year for the city’s nine specialized high schools, eight of which offer seats to students based on their entrance exam scores. The exception, Fiorello LaGuardia High School, admits students based on their auditions, as well as their grades and exam scores. The deadline for accepting these schools’ offers is February 23.

Already, parents are emailing to ask what the lowest scores were that gained students admission to each of the schools. If you happen to know, please post in the comments section.

A chart breaking down the race/ethnicity of the admitted students is below.

CHANCELLOR KLEIN ANNOUNCES SPECIALIZED HIGH SCHOOL ADMISSIONS RESULTS

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein today announced that 5,898 eighth graders have received an offer to attend one of the City’s nine specialized high schools beginning in September 2010. Offers to eight of the schools are based on the results of the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, a competitive exam taken by approximately 27,000 students this year. Admission to a ninth school, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, is based on a rigorous audition and a review of academic records.

The specialized high schools that admit students based on the results of the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT) are Bronx High School of Science; The Brooklyn Latin School; Brooklyn Technical High School; High School for Mathematics, Science and Engineering at City College; High School of American Studies at Lehman College; Queens High School for the Sciences at York College; Staten Island Technical High School; and Stuyvesant High School.

“It is a major accomplishment to be admitted to one of our city’s specialized high schools,” Chancellor Klein said. “I congratulate all of the students who received an offer and those who took on the challenge of applying.”

This year, 5,261 students received an offer to a specialized school based on their exam scores, similar to the 5,246 students who received one last year. Students applying to LaGuardia may receive an offer to more than one program at the school, as well as an offer to one of the other specialized high schools. In all, 1,000 students received one or more offers to LaGuardia. Of these 1,000 students, 363 are also receiving an offer to one of the testing schools.

Students began receiving notification of their offers yesterday. The deadline to accept an offer is February 23. Students who do not accept their offer by February 23 will forfeit their seats and be entered into the main round of the high school admissions process. Students who do not receive an offer are automatically entered into the main round. Results of the main round will be announced in late March.

In a speech delivered last month, Weingarten announced her newfound support for using test scores as a factor in deciding whether or not a teacher gets tenure. Following the speech, Mulgrew sent an email to United Federation of Teachers chapter leaders distancing himself from Weingarten’s position.

“Her proposals would require a climate of collaboration and trust that simply does not exist here,” he wrote.

In the message, Mulgrew wrote that the UFT supports “fair and objective standards” for teacher evaluations. But he argued that the New York State tests are not a reliable measure on which to base evaluations, and that in any case test scores should be only one part of how teachers are judged.

During the year that Weingarten led both the New York City and the national union, she also occasionally exempted New York City from her reform proposals.

Last year, she told Elizabeth that she pushed the New York State legislature to ban linking test scores to tenure decisions because she couldn’t trust the city’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein.

“No one trusted Joel Klein to use that tool judiciously,” she said.

But Weingarten would also extend olive branches to the city, especially via Mayor Bloomberg, whom she always distinguished as more cooperative and understanding than Klein. Mulgrew’s assault so far is equal-opportunity.

During an interview on NY1’s political news show Inside City Hall last night, Mulgrew said the UFT and city couldn’t even manage a “respectful working relationship” right now.

“We’re constantly being accused, we’re constantly being scape goated, and these are things that are inappropriate,” he said.

The fund’s annual report, released last week, shows that it lost 29 percent of its value, more than $9 billion, last school year, even as the portion the city is required to pay reached unprecedented heights.

The mix of rising costs and declining value raises serious questions about how the city will be able to afford to pay the pensions it has promised in the future without major concessions by the teachers union.

The fund, called the Teachers Retirement System (TRS), is a collection of investments paid for with a combination of taxpayer dollars and teacher salaries. Every year a chunk of it is used to pay retired teachers and principals the pensions state law says they are owed.

Last year’s financial crisis sunk the fund to its lowest level in more than 15 years, effectively erasing all of the gains made in the past decade’s bull market, according to a database of TRS’s financial reports. Over that time span, the fund’s value, adjusted for inflation, has shrunk by more than $11 billion.

This leaves a $15 billion gap between what the fund expects to pay out in the next 30 or so years and what it will have saved by that time, according to the TRS’s preferred accounting method. Another way of calculating these “unfunded liabilities” used in the private sector puts the number even higher, at $27 billion.

“It’s not a crisis. It’s a long-run big problem: The pension system is far more costly than it ought to be,” said Charles Brecher of the Citizens Budget Commission, an independent group that advocates for changes in city and state finances.

Sources of the “big problem”

At the center of the mismatch between what is promised and what was saved is the basic structure of what is called a “defined benefit” pension. A typical defined benefit plan promises a certain annual payout to retirees, usually in the form of a percentage of the retiree’s final annual salary. In New York, these payouts are defined by law and are not adjusted to reflect how much a member contributes over time.

Nobody expects the amount a member contributes to fully fund his promised pension. The idea is that the difference will be made up through a combination of taxpayer dollars and market returns.

The problem is that since 2000 a slew of factors have made this gap between how much teachers put in and how much they take out larger than ever before. One reason is that salaries have gone up 43 percent in the past decade, hoisting up the final amount retirees can expect each year. Current teachers’ pay-ins, based on higher salaries, help a bit. But the effect is dampened by the fact that even as teacher salaries have gone up, the proportion of member contributions used to pay for the plan in each year has gone down. In 1999, teachers’ contributions made up 18 percent of the total. In 2009, they were only 6 percent.

Another gap-widening factor is the fact that, for the past decade, a state law has allowed the highest-paid teachers in the city to opt out of contributing to the pension altogether. The rule has changed with the start of a new pension system for employees entering work today.

In addition to raising salaries, the city has also granted a series of pension sweeteners in exchange for union concessions. In 2007, teachers with 25 years of service won the right to retire at age 55 with no penalty, a union victory that came in exchange for a touted performance-based pay deal.

The sweeteners reduced the retirement contributions for teachers and principals, putting more of the burden to pay for pensions onto the city. They also allowed per diem salary — money teachers make for taking on extra tasks like running after-school clubs and sports — to be counted in the overall final salary number. And, in 2008, a provision allowed teachers to retire early without being dinged in their pension earnings.

Together, the rising salaries and pension sweeteners have created a perfect storm: increasing costs just as the plan’s performance has plummeted in the down market. Although the TRS has not performed significantly worse than the market according to the new report, the annual rate of return it assumes — 8 percent — is high by most private standards. (To be fair, most public pension plans also use a number around 8 percent. Similar private sector plans assume a rate of around 4 percent.)

Assuming a steady and high rate of return leaves little room for error. Imagine that the fund fails to make 8 percent returns one year and instead breaks even. To recover the lost ground the next year, TRS will have to make last year’s 8 percent and this year’s, a total of 16 percent returns. The recession of the past two years has followed this pattern of compounding losses. As a result, the fund was so far behind last year that even the high market returns from earlier in the decade couldn’t make up for the losses.

All of this has left taxpayers to make up the burden. In the late 1990s, the amount the city put into the pension fund every year was around $500 million in today’s dollars. By 2009, the sum the city had to contribute ballooned to $2.2 billion. 

This amount is incredibly high, especially compared to the New York State Teachers Retirement System, which serves all teachers outside of New York City. Last year, the state contributed half as much to its teacher retirement system as New York City contributed to the TRS, even though there are twice as many retirees in the rest of the state as there are in the city.

Even the new Tier V pension plan, which increased all new teachers’ required contribution to the plan and doubled the amount of time before they can qualify to draw a pension, has not alleviated all costs. That’s because the Tier V law included a special provision for New York City’s teachers that no other plan received, allowing them to retire with a full pension at age 55 if they’ve taught for 27 years. Teachers in the rest of the state must wait until age 57 to retire with a full pension.

Though the city is not benefiting as much from Tier V as the rest of the state, Tier V reforms are still expected to save the city $19.1 million next year, according to Division of Budget estimates.

But E.J. McMahon, of the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, warns that Tier V will do little to close the TRS’s budget gap. Instead of making retirement benefits fundamentally sustainable, Tier V actually turns back the clock to before the recent decade of pension sweeteners, he argues. Tier V “does not deserve the label reform,” McMahon said.

Brecher doesn’t even think Tier V merits its name. “They call it that, but it’s not really a tier in the sense that it’s a big change in the benefit structure,” he said.

Grim prospects

Going forward, the city cannot alter any current TRS member’s benefits due to a state law that prohibits the public pensions from being “diminished [or] impaired.” Only a handful of states have this provision, which guarantees that pension reforms affect only future teachers.

One possible alternative for the future is a cash balance plan, which California and Nebraska have adopted for their employees. Cash balance plans blend features of the TRS model (the defined benefit plan) with features of private sector pensions, known as defined contribution plans, to spread out risk more evenly among employees and employers. Although cash balance plans were surrounded by controversy when they were first introduced, in recent years they have been gaining popularity in academic and public policy circles.

Another option is a straightforward defined contribution plan, like the 401k plans that are offered to private sector workers and even some CUNY and SUNY faculty. Such plans are subject to market fluctuations and are dependent on the quality of investment advisors, but some consider them less likely to see costs spiral out of control.

“Anything that has a defined benefit at the end of it … is complicated, more costly and subject to manipulation by the union through a legislature that doesn’t understand it,” McMahon said.

Any of these alternative pension plans could make their way into city teachers’ contract one day, but for now the UFT is publicly committed to at most tweaking the current system, as Mulgrew indicated before legislators yesterday.

“We believe in a defined-benefit plan,” said Dick Riley, a UFT spokesman, adding that he would not discuss contract negotiations with the media.

Whatever happens, making TRS sustainable is likely to require city teachers to give up some of the perks of their profession.

“It’s up to the union to decide whether they’re going to make some concessions on these benefits or take layoffs and both deprive kids of educational services or members of their jobs,” said Brecher of the Citizen’s Budget Commission. “That’s the trade-off.”

Kim Gittleson is a research assistant employed by Ken Hirsh, a GothamSchools funder and contributor.

Parents of East New York Prep students said the city should help the school correct its governance problems rather than close it.

Parents and students at an East New York charter school are pleading with the Department of Education to keep their school open after an investigation found that the school had violated its charter and its principal was expelling high-needs students.

Charter schools are rarely closed in New York City, but when they are it can inspire as much anger and confusion as the shuttering of a traditional public school. At a hearing at East New York Preparatory on Wednesday night, about 100 parents filled the auditorium to ask questions of DOE officials and speak out against the school’s proposed closure. Its embattled principal Sheila Joseph might have broken a few rules, they said, but in a high-crime, high-poverty neighborhood, a seat in her school was the only way out.

“In this community there aren’t many options for these kids,” said Leon Smillie, the father of a second grader. “This is a good option.”

ENYP has a monopoly on hope in a desperate section of Brooklyn, making its problems seem insignificant to parents who said they felt inspired by classrooms named after universities and by their childrens’ high test scores. Some parents noted that the DOE hadn’t called the school’s academics into question. Others charged that ENYP had only become a target for investigation because of the population it serves.

“They [the DOE] don’t care about children in the ghetto,” more than one parent said.

“We do care,” Michael Duffy, director of the office of charter schools, told the crowd. “The number one question is if East New York is better served by this school or another school.”

ENYP’s board has until March 5 to submit a response to the DOE’s allegations, at which point the decision about whether to keep the school open will fall to Chancellor Joel Klein.

Latisha Lane, the mother of a 9-year-old student, said there had been rumors of mismanagement for years and calls for more parental involvement had gone ignored. Still, she wants the school to remain open, she said, as the chances her child will get into another nearby charter school are slim.

Garnette Gibson was one of few parents at the hearing who wanted to see ENYP closed. Gibson said she moved her son to another charter school after he fell off a desk, hit his head, and was allowed to sleep off the injury in class.

ENYP’s board of trustees and Joseph have been accused by the state and city of going rogue with the school’s finances. The city’s notice of intent to revoke the school’s charter states that the school made questionable payments to Mercer Givhan, a board member and the father of Joseph’s child. It also accuses Joseph of increasing her salary from $120,000 to $180,000, changing her title to superintendent so she could sit on the board, and revising the school’s charter without the DOE’s consent.

Joseph denied that she had increased her salary.

“We’re going to look back on this and think ok, that was a hiccup,” Joseph said after the meeting. “Maybe it was a big hiccup, but it was a hiccup that we had to go through to become stronger.”

President of the New York Charter Parents Association, Mona Davids, said the violations at ENYP are evidence that New York needs more oversight of charter schools and charter parents need to become more aware of what constitutes a violation.

“This could happen at any school, and it is happening at other schools,” Davids said.