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View the TV program here.

A new television look at Joel Klein’s reforms airing in Australia paints a mixed picture of the results for schools. While one Bronx high school explains how it has flourished under Klein’s leadership, the sociology graduate student Jennifer Jennings, who blogged under the alias Eduwonkette, urges Aussies to consider that school an exception, not the rule, in New York City.

The Australian education minister, Julia Gillard, has been eying Klein’s reforms as a model for her  work down under.

The new TV story, airing on Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service network, on a program called “Dateline,” focuses on Bronx Lab School, a small high school in the Evander Childs building the program calls the “poster child” for Klein’s reforms. Principal Marc Sternberg explains that the city’s move to give principals more freedom allowed his school to flourish.

“It is because the chancellor communicated very clearly to us what we had to accomplish, and then left the rest up to us,” Sternberg says. “If a school a decade ago was creative in some of the ways that we have been creative, they would have been breaking all the rules.”

But the documentary piece also visits Jennings, who argues that small schools like Evander Childs got advantages over other public schools in the kinds of students they admit. “I think that if you were under the impression that there was going to be a miraculous rebirth of your schools as a function of looking at a lot of the PR in new york city, you’d end up with quite a disappointed education minister,” she says.

Watch the full program here.

• The doctor accused of sex abuse resigned from his institute, which did work for the city. (Times)
• In Australia, Joel Klein said the media should “scream” when schools are rated failures. (Herald Sun)
• At a Financial District high school, the Dow is out-performing the NBA in popularity. (USA Today)
• A history lesson spun from the newly named RFK Bridge. (Journal News, Press & Sun Bulletin)
• Brooklyn second-graders go on a college visit and gush over the… automatic toilets. (Daily News)
• A Co-Op City school gets a new special education center, after using one tattered room. (Daily News)
• A teacher accused of sleeping with a runway model student is suing to get her job back. (Daily News)
• Two Bronx school leaders who pulled strings for their families will be fined. (Daily News)

IN NEW YORK:

• Schools graded D’s and F’s are more likely to have large black and Latino populations. (Daily News)
• To stop cheating, Stuyvesant might scan students for cell phones before final exams (New York Post)
• Geoffrey Canada starts a nonprofit to lobby for renewing mayoral control, with tweaks. (Daily News)
• Cynthia Nixon co-writes an op/ed saying the Center School fight is not dead yet. (Daily News)
• Joel Klein is in Australia today to tout a “revolution” planned for schools there. (Adelaide Now)
• Opposition to the Australia plan has Aussies criticizing New York City’s record of progress. (ABC)

AND BEYOND:

• Terry Moe hopes that Obama will side with his party’s rebels and fight teachers unions. (WSJ)
• Finding agreement on the federal role in schools will be a challenge for Obama. (Washington Post)
• Jay Mathews boosts a retiring Virginia superintendent for Secretary of Education. (Washington Post)
• 30% of superintendents are increasing class sizes to save money. (Christian Science Monitor)
• In San Diego, saving by exchanging central bureaucrats for outside consultants. (Voice of San Diego)
• High school homecoming dances are paring down because of the economy. (New York Times)
• The Georgia state schools superintendent is filing for bankruptcy. (Times)
• For the Obama girls, it’s Sidwell Friends, Chelsea Clinton’s private school. (Times)
• Meanwhile, in D.C. public schools, anti-prostitution lessons. (Washington Post)
• A move to raise math standards in Virginia. (Washington Post)

School districts all over the country have reached out to the city’s Department of Education to learn more about its school progress reports. Those districts are shaded in red on the map above. They include all of the local districts in Florida and New York State and nine of the country’s 12 largest school districts. (The other three districts — Hawaii; Houston*; and Clark County, Nev. — haven’t yet asked the DOE for progress report advice, according to DOE spokesman Andrew Jacob.)

The Netherlands; Denmark; Israel; Singapore; Ontario, Canada; Sao Paolo, Brazil; and Victoria, Australia have all talked with the DOE about the progress reports, according to Jacob. (He cautions: Just because a government has consulted with the DOE “doesn’t mean that all of them have created or are planning to create something like [the progress reports], of course.”) And last week as part of its tour of Tweed Courthouse, the department headquarters, a team of officials from Los Angeles heard a presentation about the progress reports.

The national governments of Australia and England have so far gone the farthest in replicating the progress reports. Chancellor Klein is headed to Australia next month, where education officials’ zeal to create progress reports has generated controversy. In England, schools secretary Ed Balls “seems eager to adopt” New York-style progress reports, the Guardian UK recently reported.

*In fact, DOE officials have talked with consultants who are working with the Houston school district about the progress reports, but they haven’t met with district officials themselves, Jacob says.

Joel Klein

Australian deputy prime minister Julia Gillard visited New York earlier this year to learn about its schools, and she raised hackles upon her return by pushing the DOE’s progress report and merit pay schemes. Next month, Chancellor Klein will reciprocate the visit, with financial firm UBS footing the bill for a tour of the land down under, Australian news outlets report.

The Australian Associated Press says Klein will “spruik” his policies — that’s a lighthearted Australian colloquialism meaning “to promote goods, services, or a cause by addressing people in a public place” — in meetings with education officials and in a public speech.

Gillard’s opponents accuse her of using Klein as a surrogate in Australia’s current battle over education reform; Gillard says she’s merely trying to “add another dimension to that debate.” She may also be passing the time until Australia has a national education authority that can coordinate the school rankings and performance pay initiatives she announced this summer; state governments agreed to create the national authority but it won’t officially be created until later this year.

Julia Gillard with Australian students Courtesy of The Age

It’s no secret that Michelle Rhee, down in Washington, D.C., is faithfully replicating New York City’s recent school reforms. But it might be more of a surprise that some of Joel Klein’s ideas have gained traction with leading education officials in the land down under.

After a trip to New York earlier this year, Julia Gillard, the deputy prime minister tasked with carrying out the Australian Labor Party’s promised “education revolution,” returned home sold on Klein-style school reform. She told the Australian Council for Education Research conference last month:

We can learn from Klein’s methodology of comparing like-schools with like-schools and then measuring the differences in school results in order to spread best practice. Something Joel Klein is personally and passionately committed to is the identification of school need, the comparison of like-schools and the identification of best practice.

Since that speech, when Gillard’s ministry proposed ranking Australian schools publicly according to the methodology used to create the controversial report cards released last year for New York’s schools, Gillard has sworn to restructure failing schools by removing school heads and firing teachers; proposed financial incentives to attract good teachers to weak schools; and promised more money to low-performing schools, although states that refuse to carry out the national reforms will have their funding withheld. Klein told the Australian, a newspaper, that he’s pleasantly surprised by how quickly Gillard adopted his ideas.

But school advocates in Australia aren’t letting Klein-style reforms be implemented without question. (more…)

At home and abroad, the ultimate consequence a failing school can face is closure. Under No Child Left Behind, schools can be restructured or even closed if they fail to make progress for several years at a time. Here in New York, the chancellor has the ability to close schools at will, and this past year he shut the doors of several schools where student performance hadn’t budged in years. In addition, last year the DOE released school progress reports for the first time; schools that receive a failing grade on those reports in the future will be subject to closure.

But the handful of school closures each year in the city is nothing compared with what Britain may face in three years. Last month, the British government’s year-old Department for Children, Schools, and Families launched “National Challenge,” an initiative to hold schools accountable for preparing at least 30 percent of their students to pass five comprehensive exams that are considered a first step toward winning university admission. The General Comprehensive Subject Exams, required before students can take the A-level tests required for admission to universities, are offered in dozens of subjects. Currently, only about half of all British teens pass five GCSEs, and a fifth of schools don’t meet the National Challenge requirements. The remaining 20 percent have only until 2011 to improve their performance.

In the initiative’s first phase, the government released a list of schools currently not in compliance with the National Challenge standards. The schools on the list contrast sharply with those considered unsatisfactory by Ofsted, the national unit that inspects schools. In fact, the BBC recently reported that only 10 percent of the schools given only three years to improve or be closed are considered “in need of intervention” by Ofsted. School heads resent the stigma being attached to their schools, with one telling the BBC, “Branding my school as weak is simplistic in the extreme and downright unfair.” The whole affair closely parallels the fallout  of the  progress reports’ release here in New York last fall, when it became clear that many schools with top grades were on the state’s list of schools in need of improvement, and some failing schools were actually quite high-performing. In England, pundits are asking, “Can naming and shaming help schools?” It’s a question worth considering. (Mike Baker,  the British education journalist who posed that question recently, said the answer is no — and that those who named and shamed schools in the past now regret it.)

Another question Britons are grappling with: whether the GCSEs are even valuable. GCSEs have traditionally been considered rigorous exams. But some believe the most popular exams have gotten easier in recent years. A new English course that focuses on “real-life contexts” where English is used rather than on literature will roll out in 2010. A media studies course requires students to analyze scenes from an action film. And in recent years, many independent schools have reduced the number of GCSE exams they offer, saying some subjects are “too easy” to merit class time. The British government seems to be out of step with A report being released this week by two influential British academics concludes that the multiple-test system encourages students to think of learning as a fragmented, disconnected experience. It suggests replacing the GCSE system with a single baccalaureate exam that all students must pass to graduate from secondary school. Here, Britain might learn from the example of the U.S. states that have adopted high school exit exams, only to find that they discourage high school completion.