GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

A week after hundreds of its members who worked in schools were laid off, the DC-37 union is hosting a trial of the Department of Education.

The Coalition for Public Education, a local activist group, organized the trial, to be held Saturday at DC 37′s downtown headquarters, to air concerns about public education under mayoral control. Already more than 100 parents, teachers, students, and community members have signed up to testify, according to Akinlabi Mackall.

The event is meant to resemble Panel for Educational Policy meetings’ public comments segment, which frequently attract many people but rarely influence the panel’s decisions, said Mackall, the father of a public school graduate.

“The PEP and the mayor have pretty much turned a deaf ear to the voices of teachers and students,” he said. “We’ve seen people be very eloquent and very passionate, but then there’s just a rubber-stamp response.”

He said CPE would record the testimonies and present them to state lawmakers. The group will also use the complaints as a blueprint for organizing future meetings around issues that trial participants raise, he said.

Some of the same criticisms are likely to arise at a second education event being held Saturday 12 miles north, at Lehman College, where Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. is convening a borough-wide education summit. (more…)

The annual mayor’s management report on the city schools, out today, offers some old data points but also some new ones. Among them is a look at the Department of Education’s goals for the coming school year — and its explanations for why it didn’t meet some of last year’s goals.

In some cases, the city’s targets actually undershoot where it is already. For example, one of the DOE’s goals for the year is to have 72 percent of students attend school 90 percent of the time. Last year, just over 74 percent of city students met that bar.

But in other cases, the city’s goals are more of a reach. The city wants to see a jump of between 3 and 4 percentage points in the number of graduating seniors passing their math and American history high school Regent’s exams with a score of 55 or higher, for example.

And in cases where the city didn’t make progress, the report offers an unsurprisingly rosy view of why the DOE fell behind.

The backlog of hazardous building violations increased by 25 percent, for example, but the report says the city expected that increase, caused by a rise in fire-door and exit obstructions, to be merely temporary.

The city’s full management report for the Department of Education is below, and more information about the reports in general can be found here. (more…)