GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

City and union lawyers agreed in court today to postpone releasing individual teacher’s effectiveness scores until legal hearings are held next month.

In a meeting held with Judge Cynthia S. Kern in a Manhattan court this afternoon, city and union lawyers agreed to schedule a hearing on November 24 on whether the city should release the ratings with teachers’ names included. The teachers union sued the city to stop the release of the performance scores, arguing that releasing teachers’ names would violate their privacy and that the ratings are not yet complete and thus exempt from freedom of information laws.

In the meantime, the city has agreed not to release teachers’ names, but may give reporters more limited information, including possibly the data with the names redacted.

“Names you will not see until the 24th, that I can promise you,” said Charles Moerdler, a lawyer for the United Federation of Teachers.

The lawyer representing the city, Assistant Corporation Counsel Jesse Levine, said that the two parties would meet tomorrow to negotiate what, if any, information could be released before the November hearing.

“We’ll know tomorrow whether something will be released imminently or if there will be further discussion,” Levine said. (more…)

New York State has won coveted federal Race to the Top grant funds in the second round of competition.

State education officials spent this morning in a meeting as news of the win began to spread. Governor Paterson, State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, Commissioner David Steiner and New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein are expected to hold press conferences later in the afternoon. We’ll have updates as we learn more.

UPDATE:  The other winners are Florida, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Maryland, Hawaii, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia.

One big question we don’t know yet: exactly how much money the state has won. But by our math (see below), it seems possible that all of the winners will get the maximum amounts for which they are eligible. And Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch just told me that she’s heard the state will receive almost all of the $696 million it asked for in its application.

UPDATE: State officials have confirmed that New York’s application will be fully funded. New York City is likely to see about $250-300 million of the state’s award.

Here’s our summary of how the state plans to use the money, and here’s our rundown of the lead-up to today’s announcement.

New York received the second-highest score overall in the competition’s scoring rubric, coming behind only Massachusetts. (The list of the winning applicants and their final scores is below the jump.) This is the state’s second try at the funds; in the first round, New York placed second-to-last among all the finalists.

The formal announcement of winners will come this afternoon from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. We’ll have updates throughout the day. (more…)

Gov. Paterson’s proposed budget for next year includes cutting $1.1 billion in school funding — and spending $750 million in supplemental federal funds that the state doesn’t yet have.

Most of the cuts would come as a 5 percent reduction to districts’ per-pupil funding, according to budget documents Paterson’s office released this morning. Paterson is also proposing to halt plans for new pre-kindergarten programs and eliminate grants for school districts the state deems to be failing.

Paterson is counting on Race to the Top funds to balance the state’s budget. According to the budget summary, Paterson’s proposal includes a $750 million “in anticipation of a successful application for competitive funds” through Race to the Top. The state is actually eligible for about $700 million in Race to the Top funds, but winning them is hardly assured. (more…)

The widow of Mitchell Weiner, the Queens assistant principal who died of swine flu in May, will sue the city, claiming that her husband died because of negligent practices. In a claim filed today, along with her three sons, Bonnie Weiner asks for $20 million to compensate the family’s loss.

The claim targets the city, the education department, the health department, and the Board of Education. (My understanding is that there is no legal difference between the Department of Education and the Board of Education, but this could be an interesting test case of the board’s legal standing.)

Read the full claim while we get more details.

Responding to shrinking budgets and rising costs, the Department of Education is putting in place what amounts to a systemwide teacher hiring freeze, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein informed principals today.

Individual schools will still be able to use their budgets to add new teachers if they are able, but the DOE is planning to cut school budgets so far that many schools will have to shed teachers, DOE officials revealed. And any new hires, to replace teachers who leave, will have to come from teachers who are already in the system, according to new rules the department is implementing.

Klein informed principals about the hiring restrictions, which the department says should allow it to avoid actually laying off teachers, this morning during a Webcast and just now in a memo, which is included at the end of this post. The department is planning to give principals more detailed information about their schools’ budgets during the week of May 18.

Speaking to reporters today, a top DOE official, Photeine Anagnostopoulos, said she could not predict how many schools would need to eliminate teachers but said that a “high percentage” might be able to cut their budgets sufficiently by reducing non-teaching staff and axing programs. She said “the goal” for the department is for all schools to make the same percentage cut to their budgets. That size of that cut has not yet been finalized, she said, adding that principals would ultimately have discretion about how to cut their own budgets.

The new restrictions require principals to fill vacancies created by attrition by picking up current teachers who are either in a classroom elsewhere in the city or in the existing pool of excessed teachers, which already includes about 1,100 teachers. (more…)

Students were evacuated from a South Bronx school that houses three middle schools after a teacher barricaded himself inside this morning, reportedly claiming to have a bomb. The New York Times reported that police said there does not appear to be a bomb in the building. The teacher told police that he is protesting the mistreatment of teachers, the New York Post is reporting on its web site.

The teacher is an employee at M.S. 328 in the Bronx, which shares a building with two other middle schools: J.H.S. 145 and M.S. 325. A source with knowledge of the situation tells me that the teacher is his school’s union chapter leader, an elected post for a person that teachers choose to represent them in hiring, firing, and work-environment disputes. A Department of Education spokeswoman, Melody Meyer, said the department has no comment and referred questions to the NYPD.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports that the teacher told police he was going on a hunger strike after being assigned to the rubber room, the holding center for teachers accused of infractions from corporal punishment to incompetence. Here’s the Times’ report:

With the teacher isolated inside the classroom, negotiators talked with him, said Mr. Browne. During these talks, he admitted that he had planted no bomb, but said he had undertaken a hunger strike over the way a disciplinary case against him had been handled and that he wanted to see the principal, “ousted,” said Mr. Browne.

“He slipped a note to negotiators and said he was on a hunger strike because of some disciplinary case,” said Mr. Browne.

An official with knowledge of the case said that the teacher was a union chapter chairman at the school and had received a letter Thursday informing him that that he was being reassigned to a so-called “rubber room” — a term for classrooms where teachers removed from teaching duties are assigned — as discipline for imposing corporal punishment on a student.

I think we’ll hold off running to the scene and rely on the sure-to-be-exhaustive work of the Times, Post, and Daily News. Let us know if you’re a teacher or parent at the school or have any background on why the teacher would want to protest mistreatment.

UPDATE 12:15 P.M.: According to several news sources, the teacher, who has been identified as Francisco Garabitos, has been taken into custody by police. Students and teachers are returning to the building.

Parents and a slew of community leaders filed a lawsuit today against the Department of Education, demanding that the department reverse its decision to shutter three struggling elementary schools and replace them with charter schools. The parents say the decisions violated state law, because they happened without any consultation of the elected parent councils that have replaced community school boards.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers union; Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s public advocate, and a slew of parents of children at the schools are among the plaintiffs to the suit, which personally singles out Chancellor Joel Klein as a defendant. (Read the full suit here, in PDF form.)

Suing Klein and his department is a dramatic escalation of the ongoing saga over the city’s decision this year to shut down three elementary schools — two in Harlem and one in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn — and fill their buildings with charter schools instead. Charter schools are publicly funded, but operate outside of the regular district bureaucracy, meaning they usually lack teachers unions and can only serve a limited number of students. (more…)

The number of city schools failing to meet guidelines laid out in the No Child Left Behind law dropped this year to 401 from 432 last year, buoyed by improvements at 58 schools that came off the last. Another 10 schools that had been failing were shut down, while 37 saw their test scores, graduation rates, and other factors that go into the NCLB calculations decline and were added onto the list.

The pattern of improvement matched trends statewide, where the number of failing schools dropped to 665 from 719. The changes follow test scores last year that shot up at a rate so dramatic some researchers challenged their validity. To get off the NCLB failing list, a school must meet performance benchmarks — a combination of test scores, attendance rates, and graduation rates — for at least two years in a row.

Mayor Bloomberg greeted the news as evidence that his efforts to improve the public school system are working. “This is yet another sign that our school reforms are producing real results for New York City students,” he said in a statement. “In a year when many districts across the country saw increases in the number of schools needing improvement under NCLB, the number in New York City fell significantly.” (more…)

Robert Bennett

Opening the door to new leadership just as the state is planning changes to its education system, Robert Bennett, the chancellor of the state’s Board of Regents, is announcing today that he will step down at the end of the month, one year before his term was set to end. Bennett’s decision comes as the Board of Regents is searching for a new state education commissioner to replace Richard Mills, who announced his plan to retire late last year. The Regents have also been steering a reorganization of the state Education Department.

Bennett, a Buffalo native who ran United Way’s chapter there and once served as mayor of that city, announced his decision to step down in a short letter dated today. He gave no reason for his departure, but said he intends to continue his service as board member. “As we all know, there are many issues that warrant our collective attention and resolution,” he wrote. “I am very grateful to all of you for your confidence and support. It has been a unique and tremendous honor to serve as Chancellor.”

The Board of Regents will elect its next chancellor on March 16 and 17, the date of the group’s next meeting. Merryl Tisch of Manhattan, who is an ally of the Bloomberg administration, is vice chancellor of the Board of Regents. The board also includes some critics of the administration. Tisch did not immediately return my phone call this evening after the press release was sent out (at about 5 o’clock).

Mills, the departing commissioner, said of Bennett: “I never found a better companion with whom to visit a pre-kindergarten or a school. He demands the best for every kid and is impatient with barriers he finds in their way.”

Bennett had been chancellor since 2002. Here is the full text of his letter: (more…)

Eric Nadelstern will take on expanded duties. (Via Cody Castro)

A top schools official who spearheaded the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to allow private control of some public schools is leaving the Department of Education, in a reorganization that could save the department a significant amount of money — and might or might not signal a new direction for the school system. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced the change to school leaders in a conference call this morning.

The official, JoEllen Lynch, oversaw the department’s transition to allowing schools to affiliate with private management groups like New Visions for Public Schools and CEI-PEA, in lieu of the traditional bureaucracy. The groups, known as PSO’s, were the closest that the Bloomberg administration came to emulating other urban school systems’ privatization efforts, like one in Philadelphia where for-profit management groups competed for control of public schools. Lynch’s office will be headed by another top schools official, Eric Nadelstern, who will maintain his current portfolio of schools affiliated with the Empowerment network.

The reshuffling elevates Nadelstern’s position in the department, a promotion that could elevate his gadfly ideas, too. Officials are selling the change as a way to cut costs amid ballooning concerns about the city’s fiscal prognosis. But some people who work at PSO’s are worrying the change could also be a signal that PSO’s days are numbered, and that the Empowerment network Nadelstern champions as a very lean way to run public schools will overtake them. (more…)