GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

This story originally appeared in Miller-McCune. Since this story was completed, New York City has said it would require Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School to undergo “turnaround,” which would cause the school name to disappear and half the teachers to be replaced.

At 18 years old, Moustafa Elhanafi has embarked on an academic journey that has brought him tantalizingly close to obtaining a high school diploma. (Ben Preston)

On a hot, sunny September afternoon — the sticky kind so common in New York City that time of year — a tall, dark-haired young man with his shoulders hunched slightly forward padded into Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School’s back entrance and into a small courtyard. Moustafa Elhanafi sought the school’s principal. He needed her help. Not being a student there, he didn’t know what she looked like or where he would find her inside the massive, unfamiliar building. In the courtyard beneath the shade of a wide-leafed tree, looking for crafty students cutting class, stood Principal Geraldine Maione.

“I saw her, and I didn’t know if she was the principal, but she was wearing a suit, so I asked her if she was,” said Moustafa.

Maione welcomed him inside and listened to what he had to say. With his father beside him, Moustafa told Maione how, at 18 years old, he still didn’t know how to read or write. He had tried and failed at other schools, and he was willing to work as hard as he could to learn, but Moustafa said he needed help. After 15 minutes relating his frustrations, he began to cry. Maione, too, became emotional. She told him she knew just the person who could help. As if on cue, special education teacher Rosalie Dolan strode around the corner on her way home for the day, right into the tear-streaked faces of Moustafa and Maione.

“He cried, she cried, I cried,” recalled Dolan, relating the details in the thick accent shared by so many of the South Brooklyn school’s teachers. “I don’t know how to explain it; it was like a rainforest. I think we all had a spiritual experience that day.”

The trio’s first meeting that day launched Moustafa on an academic journey that has brought him tantalizingly close to obtaining a high school diploma. Outside of school hours, and without pay, Dolan began the painstaking process of teaching Moustafa how to read, one letter at a time.

That was in 2008, at the end of Moustafa’s three-year run at the Roy Campanella Occupational Training Center — known colloquially as the OTC — a school for developmentally disabled children. The New York City public school system — the largest in the world — has many resources at its disposal, but as Moustafa’s case suggests, it’s not always successful at plugging every student into the right ones. (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…)

Teachers brainstorm where features of the ideal classroom fit into the Danielson Framework's four domains.

Training sessions about a classroom observation model opened up dialogue between teachers and principals this month, even after becoming a flashpoint in the city and teachers union’s ongoing conflict over a new evaluation system.

The city and union planned to host trainings on the teaching model the city hopes to adopt for its new evaluation system together. But after Mayor Bloomberg ratcheted up rhetoric against the union in the State of the City address, the union cut city officials out of the planning. The sessions began two weeks ago, drawing hundreds of attendees even after the Department of Education emailed principals informing them that the sessions were off.

I spent an afternoon last week at a training session at the United Federation of Teachers’ Bronx headquarters, where well over 100 union chapter leaders and their principals were receiving a crash-course on the Danielson Framework, a classroom observation model that serves as one component of the city’s proposed evaluation system. The city has encouraged principals to practice using the Danielson Framework when conducting informal classroom observations this school year, and 140 schools have been piloting the observation model more formally.

As an impasse over new teacher evaluations has deepened between the city and the UFT, a tension has emerged about whether the model is meant first to help teachers improve — the union’s position — or whether it is a tool to help principals usher weak teachers out of the system, as the city’s rhetoric has sometimes suggested.

Catalina Fortino, the UFT’s vice president of education, said the purpose of the training sessions is to foster “a shared understanding” of the model for teachers and principals — an understanding that the city’s pilot of the Danielson framework had failed to develop, she said. (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.

This story originally appeared in Spanish in El Diario, which supplied the translation.

Esteban Durán, an activist with the community organization El Puente, speaks at P.S. 19's school closure hearing last month. (GothamSchools)

P.S. 19, the Roberto Clemente School, is Annabel Cabal’s second home.

“Three generations of my family have been shaped by this school and I am grateful for the years I had here as a student and for what they’ve done for my kids,” said Cabal, who serves as the president of the school’s parent-teacher board.

For 40 years, the Clemente name has branded P.S. 19, paying tribute to a hero as famous for his humanitarian missions as for his baseball milestones.

Clemente, a Puerto Rican, became the first Hispanic baseball player to reach 3,000 hits, including 240 home runs. The former Pittsburgh Pirate died in an airplane crash on New Year’s Eve of 1972, while he was on route to take supplies to Nicaraguan victims of an earthquake.

On Thursday, the city’s Panel for Educational Policy is expected to approve the closure of P.S. 19. The Department of Education has categorized it as a low-performing school. A number of heated protests and meetings have taken place around the proposed closure.

Aside from stirring debates, the shuttering of schools also seems to do away with their names. P.S. 19 could disappear and be replaced with another school, all in the same building on 325 South 3rd St, in Brooklyn.

But the Roberto Clemente name would not necessarily transfer over. (more…)

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.
• Among three schools opening on Staten Island next year is one set to be zer0-energy. (S.I. Advance)
• 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)

• A dairy industry lobbying group has masterminded a Super Bowl bet between schools. (SchoolBook)
• Educators receive some love from a teacher-themed spin-off of the “Hey Girl” Tumblr trend. (Tumblr)
• The Common Core’s approach to “pre-reading” conflicts with Doug Lemov’s. (Common Core Watch)
• The P.S. 22 chorus joined Mayor Bloomberg at yesterday’s Groundhog Day ceremonies. (Chorus Blog)
• High school students share reasons they are protesting plans to close their schools. (NY P.S. Parent)
• Former schools chancellor Joel Klein describes his vision for classroom technology. (Huffington Post)
• The city teachers union, like Mayor Bloomberg and many others, donated to Planned Parenthood. (UFT)
• Advocates call for state’s NCLB waiver application to include ELL supports. (Learning the Language)
• A New Hampshire middle school teacher and parent probes the value of homework. (Motherlode)
• An association of governors tells Congress to give states more leway in renewed NCLB. (Politics K-12)

Allison Gaines Pell sees herself as a builder, and now that she’s completed her latest project it’s time to move on to a new one.

Pell, who founded Urban Assembly Academy of Arts & Letters in 2005 and steered its growth into one of Brooklyn’s most popular middle schools, announced this week that she was resigning at the end of the year. The announcement comes roughly a year after Pell also oversaw Arts & Letters’ bumpy expansion into an elementary school.

John O’Reilly, who has been a co-director since the beginning of the school year, will take over the helm.

Pell said today that she would be moving on to the Blue School, a growing private elementary school on the Lower East Side that is so far best known as a school started by members from The Blue Man Group. But the school is also steeped in progressive education, a model that Pell is familiar with. Pell attended Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn Heights, one of the city’s most progressive schools, then taught there for three years after graduating from Brown. Pell, a graduate of the city’s Leadership Academy, was a favorite at Tweed and praised as a model candidate from the new brand of young principals in the public school system.

In an interview, Pell said her reasons for leaving had more to do with where she is headed than any difficulties she faced in navigating the bureaucracies of the DOE.

“There is no part of me that’s leaving because I’m not happy,” Pell said. “I enjoy building things and this is an exciting prospect for me.” (more…)