GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

A 1998 agreement that gives the city’s police department control over school safety is still in effect, despite city officials’ insistence that it had expired more than six years ago.

The revelation has advocates and elected officials lambasting the city for not disclosing the agreement’s extension.

The original agreement, between Mayor Rudy Giuliani and then-Board of Education President William Thompson, was set to expire in 2002 and was widely assumed to have done so. But in fact, Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein quietly renewed the agreement in January 2003.

The renewal came to light for the first time this month, after Assemblyman Karim Camara urged his colleagues to consider school safety issues when deciding how to vote on mayoral control, according to Udi Ofer, director of advocacy for the New York Civil Liberties Union. The NYCLU was working with legislators to raise the profile of school safety in the mayoral control fight.

When Camara met with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Silver showed him a copy of the memorandum’s renewal, Ofer said. The paragraph-long agreement was signed by Bloomberg and Klein on Jan. 22, 2003, and does not include an expiration date.

The renewal contradicts information the City Council received during a 2007 hearing on school safety, where council members repeatedly asked whether any formal document existed to define the relationship between the city schools and the police department. (more…)

Image courtesy of the Center for New York City Affairs

The City Council’s education committee this morning is taking up concerns that the city could be in for a rude awakening in the coming years as high school graduation requirements become more stringent.

In the past, students could opt for either of two diploma types: The local diploma requires scores of at least 55 on five state Regents exams, while the more challenging Regents diploma requires those scores to be 65 or higher.

Starting with this year’s ninth-graders, all students will have to earn Regents diplomas. Some advocates are warning that the state’s new requirement could slash the city’s graduation rate, particularly for needy students. They point out that if that requirement had been in place five years ago, the city’s graduation rate would stand at just 37 percent. (more…)

Principals will receive school budgets tomorrow that include a new 5 percent cut, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced today. The cuts are so deep that the department is temporarily abandoning its plan to finish adopting a new funding formula that it said would make school budgets more equitable.

The cuts, totaling $405 million across the city schools, could threaten non-teacher staff positions, after school programs, and training for teachers. But roughly 60 percent of schools will not actually experience cuts of the maximum size, Klein told reporters at a briefing today. That’s because slightly more than half of all principals chose not to allocate every dollar in their budgets for this year, instead “rolling over” a total of $95 million. The rainy day funds are being wiped out by the new cuts but are also softening the blow of next year’s cuts for many schools.

In addition, about 80 schools receiving the largest amounts of federal anti-poverty funds will actually see a slight increase in the size of their budgets, Klein said. The remaining 40 percent of schools will see their budgets drop the maximum 4.9 percent, he said.

Today’s cuts are on top of a total average 3 percent cut made to school budgets over the last year and a half.

Because of the cuts, the DOE is suspending its plan to start charging schools the real salaries that teachers make, a change that had been the cornerstone of the department’s Fair Student Funding formula. (more…)

Elizabeth reported last week about Comptroller William Thompson’s claim that the Department of Education overspent on some of its contracts with external vendors. At the time, the department argued that Thompson’s analysis overstated the difference between projected and actual costs, sometimes “wildly.”

In a strongly worded letter of his own sent to Thompson this weekend, Klein elaborated on the department’s defense, saying that the comptroller disregarded information about how the department structures contracts and pays for services when he put together his report. One example of the “distortions and misrepresentations” in Thompson’s claims, Klein wrote, was that a contract with the Xerox Corporation had cost the city 6700 percent more than it was supposed to:

The Xerox contract was actually registered for $31 million. We originally registered the contract for $20 million in 2002, and later extended it twice, once by $10 million and a second time by $1 million. It appears that you cite the amount of this last extension as if it were the entire registration amount. 

Klein’s entire letter to Thompson is posted after the jump. (more…)

Chancellor Klein, right, with Pedro Noguera at a panel discussion today

If Joel Klein is nervous about his future as chancellor, he wasn’t showing it this morning.

After participating in a panel about the achievement gap at a conference sponsored by Channel 13 today, Klein was swarmed by audience members who wanted to thank him for the opportunities his leadership has given them.

Three of the well-wishers I encountered were people who have risen to leadership positions under Klein’s administration: Mercedes Qualls, who in 2003 took over a failing school in Queens that has since stabilized; Jackie Boswell, currently ushering Lafayette High School through its final years; and Robert Armond, who is training right now at the city’s Leadership Academy to join his wife as a principal in the city’s schools.

Klein was all smiles and hugs as he listened to one fan after another. After hearing a particularly effusive expression of gratitude, Klein joked about his reported unpopularity. Laughing, he said, “I’m staying here next year!”

The number of schools considered to be failing state standards dropped to an all-time low this year, both among city schools and schools across New York state, according to a new list released by the state education department today.

The state has been using student test scores to make the list of schools placed “under registration review” since 1989. Every year, the state makes avoiding the list slightly harder, by raising the bar for how many students need to pass exams. Schools placed on the list risk being shut down; of the more than 300 schools placed on the list since 1989, 228 have been removed. Today’s list, which includes 43 schools statewide, takes into account test scores from last school year, which skyrocketed across the state in reading and math for students between grades 3 and 8.

Thirteen New York City schools improved their test scores enough to climb off the list of schools categorized as being “under registration review,” while four city schools joined the list. Another three city schools would have joined the list, but are being shut down by the city.

As Elissa Gootman reports at CityRoom, the Times metro blog, two of the four city schools joining the list — West Bronx Academy and New Explorers High School — are among the recent new small schools created by Mayor Bloomberg as part of his effort to improve the school system. The other schools are Boys and Girls High School and PS 230 in the Bronx. Three schools, Samuel Tilden High School, a large high school in Brooklyn, Business School For Entrepreneurial Studies in the Bronx, and South Shore High School in Brooklyn, would have been put on the state failing list but are being shut down by the city. (more…)

Yesterday’s Quinnipiac poll results showed the chancellor’s popularity holding steady. But no one would call him popular — his approval rating has never broken the 50 percent mark.

Not true for charter schools. The poll results Quinnipiac released today show that 67 percent of registered voters in New York City want to see more charter schools open. Among public school parents, the number rose to 72 percent. Support for an expansion was highest in Brooklyn and the Bronx, where charters are prevalent. One caveat: Only registered voters were polled. In a city of immigrants, many public school parents are not registered to vote.

As far as I can tell, this is the first time Quinnipiac has asked about charters. (more…)

When the City Council scrutinizes the Department of Education’s planned budget cuts tomorrow (at a hearing scheduled for 1 p.m.) members might want to have aspirin on hand.

That’s because, like the budget itself, the department’s Power Point presentation of the cuts it has identified would give even the most seasoned analyst a headache. The image above is just one page of the dizzying document.

The cuts are divided into five “buckets,” ranging from the central administration to District 75, the city’s district for severely disabled students. How deeply schools and students are actually going to feel the mid-year cuts isn’t at all clear, nor is it clear exactly how the proposed cuts add up to the $185 million the mayor asked the DOE to cut from its budget by Nov. 21.

Some questions, among many, that education committee members might ask: (more…)

It looks like Schools Chancellor Joel Klein isn’t satisfied with the pace of progress in the city’s schools — he’s been reading a book called “Results Now: How We Can Achieve Unprecedented Improvement in Teaching and Learning.”

Chancellor Joel Klein mentioned the book by Arizona educator Michael Schmoker at least twice during public appearances this week. I heard him refer to it in a speech at a conference for alumni of Teach For America, the program that places recent college graduates in high-needs schools. Then on Monday, he mentioned it again during a presentation to reporters about ARIS that Elizabeth attended.

What might be on the chancellor’s mind, based on the description provided to Amazon.com by the book’s publisher? “Consistent curriculum, authentic literacy education, and professional learning communities for teachers.” Amazon’s reader reviews range from wildly approving to ultra-critical; one reviewer says the book is “distasteful and offensive to the majority of teachers across America who are ‘doing it right.’”

When she was at the Sun, Elizabeth reported on other books the chancellor has found inspiring.

DOE headquarters at Tweed Courthouse

Who is getting fired and when? That’s the question on everyone’s mind at Tweed Courthouse today.

As Elizabeth already reported, as part of the mayor’s citywide budget cuts, the Department of Education is cutting 6.6 percent of its budget centrally and passing down 1.3 percent cuts to individual schools. That means 475 DOE jobs are going to be lost. The bulk of those jobs — nearly 300 — will be cut from the department’s central administration, housed at Tweed.

In a conversation with reporters outside City Hall this afternoon, Chancellor Joel Klein said he has already asked his senior leadership team — heads of departments and other top DOE officials — to identify positions they might eliminate. In addition, department officials are looking at “every program” to identify which are “less vital” or possible to streamline, he said.

No one has yet been fired, the chancellor said, but layoffs will begin within the next few days. All of the positions will be eliminated by the end of 2008.

DOE officials chose to make the majority of the department’s cuts centrally because doing so is in line with the DOE’s focus on children, who “didn’t create the current financial crisis,” the chancellor said.

Still, schools will lose 1.3 percent of their budgets for this school year. (more…)