GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The list of low-performing schools the city plans to improve with a management-change next year grew to 22 today, when officials added 13 schools to the nine they announced yesterday.

This group of schools will begin what’s known as the “restart” improvement plan next fall. The restart plan is one of four programs districts can take on in order to win federal grants aimed at improving the country’s lowest-performing schools. It calls for putting an ailing school under new management.

Though city officials would have liked to use two of the other school improvement plans, they were unable to convince the teachers union to go along. Two of those plans — transformation and turnaround — would have required the union to allow the city to remove principals and teachers at some of these schools.

Under the restart model, the city will pair schools with non-profit education management organizations — a plan that’s less invasive than firing teachers or removing a school’s principal. One major question is whether it’s invasive enough.

Already, every public school in the city belongs to a support network whose job it is to give them instructional and operational guidance. These networks can make recommendations about which teachers should receive tenure, which principal should be selected to fill a vacancy, and who the school should hire for professional development, among other things. (more…)

Unable to convince the teachers union to let school officials fire principals and teachers at a group of low-performing schools, the city is resorting to a another option: changing the schools’ management.

The so-called “restart” option is one of four programs districts can take on in order to win federal grants aimed at improving the country’s lowest-performing schools.

City officials announced today that nine public schools will undergo the restart model next year. The plan putting a school under new management — for example, under the guidance of an education management organization like New Visions. A major, and so-far unanswered, question is how this plan will differ from the relationships schools already have with support networks, whose job it is to offer academic and operational guidance. Another question is what organizations would apply to partner with these schools on such short notice.

Three other schools that are eligible for the federal improvement grants will not receive them next year. Plans to overhaul the High School of Graphic Communication Arts, Harlem Renaissance High School, and W.H. Maxwell Career and Technical High School, all of which could begin any of the improvement models next year, will be put on hold for another year while the city decides whether to close them or improve them as they are.

Department of Education officials said they intend to announce their plans for 31 other schools that are eligible for the grants tomorrow. Some of those schools will undergo the restart strategy, but the officials did not say how many. (more…)

The city and teachers union still have not reached an agreement on how to overhaul more than 30 struggling schools. But city school officials said that, deal or no deal, they will announce those plans at the end of this week.

Though the original due-date for submitting school improvement plans was today, state education officials granted the city’s request to postpone the deadline to Friday. That leaves the city and teachers union four days to reach an agreement on which of three federal improvement strategies each of the schools should undergo.

Of the 43 schools that are eligible for school improvement grants, but have yet to begin using them, 31 are waiting to be told if they’ll be transformation, turnaround, or restart schools. Under each of these three plans being considered, schools would receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grant money.

A spokesman for the city’s Department of Education, Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld, said that the city had asked for an extension in part to have more time to negotiate with the union.

Last week, union officials said they were hopeful a deal would be reached by today, but that has not happened. (more…)

Several months ago as the citywide school board considered whether to close nearly two dozen schools, critics of the plan accused the city of turning its back on schools once they begin phasing out. Now, the city says it has a plan to help them.

During a visit this morning to Paul Robeson High School — one of the schools that the Panel for Educational Policy voted to phase out over the next three years — Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced plans to place all of the phase-out schools in the same networks. The change, which would take effect next school year, would mean that the new, as well as currently phasing out, schools would receive administrative and instructional guidance from the same set of people.

Currently, schools are grouped into networks — called Children First Networks (CFN) — that provide resources ranging from professional development to budget writing. Phase-out schools have remained within the same networks before and after the closure decisions, even though their needs often change as their size dwindles.

Under the new plan, schools like Robeson will leave their current networks and join new ones composed only of other schools that are phasing out. Typical networks have a staff of about a dozen people and focus on giving guidance to 25 schools. (more…)

For the first time since introducing school support organizations in 2007, the city plans to end its contract with one of them. But unlike when the city closes failing schools, it has refused to publicly release data showing how the network has performed.

(Update 4/20: City officials now say they are planning to publicly release the data next week.)

Replications — one of several non-profit organizations that provide schools instructional and administrative assistance — will not be able to contract with schools next year, a Department of Education official confirmed today. Every year, the DOE ranks how well support organizations and networks are doing based largely on the test scores and graduation rates of the schools they work with. These rankings have been used to close low-performing networks, but this is the first time a support organization has lost its contract because of them. Replications’ founder John Elwell said today that the decision to cut ties with the DOE was a mutual one.

“I was going to ask them to let us out of the contract,” he said.

Elwell said that for two years, DOE officials have been threatening to end the department’s contract with him based on his network’s ranking at the bottom of the list. He said this year 20 other networks placed lower than his in the rankings, but Replications did not do well enough to keep its contract.

DOE officials have refused requests for the rankings, though they have shown them to principals. Former Deputy Chancellor Eric Nadelstern disagreed with the DOE’s decision not to release the rankings showing how Replications’ schools had performed. (more…)

For more than 6,000 teachers, the path to tenure this year will be different and, the city hopes, tougher.

City education officials announced a new rubric today that will guide principals as they make tenure recommendations this year. The “effectiveness framework” places teachers in one of four categories: highly effective, effective, developing, and ineffective, based on students’ tests scores, classroom observations, parent feedback, and other factors. No single element is meant to be weighed more heavily than the others and principals still have the ability to pick and choose what goes into their final decision.

Principals will be encouraged to give tenure only to teachers they believe are effective or highly effective, city officials said today. Teachers who are “developing” will have their probation extended, giving them another year in which to improve. This extension can occur again and again until a principal makes a final decision or the teacher leaves the job.

In the past, granting tenure meant checking a series of boxes in an online form. Was the teacher dressed appropriately? Check. Did she have good classroom management? Check. Principals who wanted to deny tenure had to offer a brief justification, but granting it didn’t require a principal to give her rationale for doing so. (more…)

The city’s most established for-profit charter school management company is rebranding and recreating itself in light of a new law that forbids the group from running schools.

As of tomorrow, Victory Schools will be named Victory Education Partners and it will no longer be a traditional management company. The group will retain its for-profit status, but will continue to work in schools by offering a variety of services, from professional development to back-office support, that schools can choose to purchase.

The change was prompted by the passage of a new law last spring that doubled the cap on charter schools, and also barred for-profit companies from operating or managing new charter schools. One of three for-profit charter management groups work with New York City schools, Victory had to change or close shop in the city. It’s choosing to change.

Since 1999, Victory has managed 13 New York charter schools and it continues to run seven of them in the city, with an additional two in New York State. Most of them began when community or church groups discovered the charter management company and signed five-year contracts for services that came as one package. A contract with Victory meant the company would oversee everything from professional development to payroll. (more…)

Call it early spring cleaning: the city’s Department of Education is planning its third official reorganization of how schools receive support services in eight years.

Support organization leaders say the new plan involves decentralizing the city’s large service centers, which offer schools assistance with writing their budgets and handling the mountains of paperwork that pile up. Since 2007, a Brooklyn principal would call the Brooklyn Integrated Service Center for help with these tasks; now, she’ll turn to a small group that’s assigned to work with her school through her support organization.

The groups, called Children First Networks, are part of a model that has been quietly piloted for several years by Eric Nadelstern, the DOE’s chief schools officer. About 300 schools are already part of the CFNs, an expansion that took place last year and is now being extended to all of the city’s public schools. The networks are small — each has a staff of 13 staff members — and are meant to personalize the way schools receive non-academic, logistical support. (more…)