GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The city is closing Community Prep High School, the only program here designed to transition students from juvenile prisons and jails to mainstream high schools.

Launched in 2002, Community Prep works with the most struggling young people in the city, offering support and coursework for a few semesters before routing students into high schools and GED programs. On average, Community Prep students have attended seven different schools when they enter, a former director said.

The program has successfully steered many students back into high school, but it has struggled to reach all its charges. The school’s average monthly attendance this year was less than 50 percent. In the first semester of this school year, students earned only 40 percent of the course credits they attempted.

The disappointing showing is the reason that Department of Education officials have concluded the program doesn’t work, despite praise from juvenile justice advocates.

“We know better options already exist,” said spokeswoman Ann Forte. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg and UFT President Michael Mulgrew got a lot of applause when they vowed to shut down the city’s infamous “rubber rooms” by December. But that might be an impossible goal.

The trouble hinges on the fact that the city has not ended the practice of granting a trial to all teachers accused of incompetence or misconduct. It has simply decided to speed up those trials, which take place in a lower Manhattan office building across from Tweed Courthouse, presided over by paid attorneys called arbitrators who act as judge and jury.

To speed up the trials, the city has promised to nearly double the number of arbitrators starting in September, and also to increase the number of days they work on teacher cases each month to seven from five. By doing this, the city and the union claim, all of the nearly 650 teachers still waiting for a verdict will get one by December.

But a GothamSchools analysis shows that, to meet this goal, the city will have to force arbitrators to cram multiple hearings into each working day — a rate that is now unprecedented. (more…)

Teach for America, the program that places new teachers in hard-to-staff public schools, is planning to send nearly a third of its new New York City teachers to charter schools this fall, up from just 3% in 2005, internal TFA projections show.

The shift to charter schools insulates the latest batch of Teach For America teachers from a new-teacher hiring freeze the city announced earlier this month. Charter schools are publicly funded but privately operated, so they aren’t subject to the freeze and can hire any certified teacher, whether she is already in the Department of Education system or not.

The move follows a downsizing in Teach For America’s pool to about 300 from 500 teachers last year. The city’s dismal budget picture led to the retraction. (more…)

The Department of Education's new organizational chart.

After reshuffling its internal bureaucracy, the Department of Education will publish a run-down of the changes on its web site in the next few weeks, in the form of the following flow chart — or, to be precise, a small variation of this flow chart. (A DOE spokeswoman, Ann Forte, says small parts of the chart still need to be fleshed out, such as the labor strategy team.)

The chart lays out the new internal structure of the people who work at DOE’s Tweed Courthouse headquarters, with only six people reporting directly to Chancellor Joel Klein, down from a number that had been around 20.

Publishing such detailed information in chart form, and on the DOE’s web site, comes after critics charged the department with being obtuse about its internal makeup. Right now, the web site offers only a list of the names and titles of people who report to Klein, without clarifying how the department is organized. The last time the department published an actual chart mapping out this structure was in 2004, after a reporter filed a request asking for one.

The most notable change is the new spot for Garth Harries, whose office of new schools is now folded under Kathleen Grimm, the deputy chancellor for infrastructure and planning, under the title “system planning.” John White, a top aide in the old new school office, now oversees that team, while Harries is on a special assignment to rethink special education.

Here’s the full chart, below the jump: (more…)

The Department of Education created videos to explain the reports. View them here.

The Department of Education is moving to extend a program that judges teachers based on their students’ test scores — and it plans to start paying for the project with taxpayer dollars, at a projected cost of $1.5 million over the next three years. A formal request for vendor proposals released today indicates officials are also mulling an expansion of the program to more teachers.

The program, called the Teacher Data Initiative, launched quietly this school year after causing a politically explosive fight between the DOE and the teachers union the year before. The reports allow principals to track the “value” teachers add to students by looking at student test scores from one year to the next. The teachers union here has gone along with programs to judge entire schools based on test scores, but it drew the line at measuring individual teachers’ performance, arguing that so-called “value-added” models risk unfairly misjudging teachers. (Many academic researchers make this claim as well.)

After news of the effort surfaced, the union fought back by ushering a bill into state law that made it illegal for the city to use test scores when making decisions about job security. Both Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein decried the bill (Bloomberg called it a “special interest protection”), which the legislature passed with no public debate, and the data reports went out as planned. (more…)