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Pedro Noguera and Karen Sprowal talk after the "Miseducation Nation" panel ended.

Panel members at an event critiquing current school reform policies last night criticized  testing, large classes, and charter schools — and also a university professor sharing the stage with them.

More than 100 people filled a school auditorium in Manhattan to attend the four-member “Miseducation Nation” panel, which was convened in response to – and got its mocking namesake from – NBC’s “Education Nation” summit, a two-day event that wrapped up earlier that day at Rockefeller Center.

Pedro Noguera, an NYU professor who studies urban education, was invited to speak on the panel and for most of the evening, he was on the same page as his fellow panelists, historian Diane Ravitch, Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters, and teacher Brian Jones of the Grassroots Education Movement. They all criticized policymakers for adopting reform ideas that they said were not working – and ignoring alternative ones, such as smaller class sizes and culturally-relevant curriculum, that they said would improve schools.

The panel also criticized the media coverage, which they characterized as biased toward current reform policies. The event was hosted by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, a national media advocacy group. ”We feel beleaguered and we feel there is only one story told repeatedly in the mainstream media,” Haimson said.

More than 100 people, many of which were teachers and parents, packed into the auditorium at P.S. 66 School of the Future.

When moderator Laura Flanders opened up questioning to the audience, criticism quickly turned on Noguera, a board member of the SUNY Charter School Institute, which oversees many of New York City’s most prominent charter schools.

Veteran teacher Michael Fiorillo first brought up the subject when he asked Noguera to explain how he could support opening charter schools, while at the same time being such a vocal opponent of closing the ones that they replace. (more…)

John Elfrank-Dana, UFT chapter leader at Murry Bergtraum High School, says his history classes have as many as 37 students.

After three years of budget cuts, the city’s schools started the year with more oversize classes than at any time in the last decade, according to data collected by the United Federation of Teachers.

Union members reported that on the sixth day of the school year, nearly 7,000 classes had more students than the teachers contract allows, mostly in high schools and a large number in Queens. That was almost a thousand more oversize classes than they reported at the same time last year.

The union will soon file a grievance against the contract violations, and many of the classes will shrink as schools shuffle students around in the coming weeks, as typically happens at the beginning of the school year. But union officials said it appears that for the fifth year in a row, average class sizes have inched up again.

“Our worst fears have now been confirmed,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew at a press conference announcing the numbers today. He urged Mayor Bloomberg to protect the city schools from additional budget cuts in the coming year.

Now, nearly a quarter of all city students are spending all or part of the day in overcrowded classes, according to the UFT. The contract limits classes to 25 students in kindergarten; 32 students in elementary school; 33 students in middle schools and 30 students in middle schools with many poor students; and 34 students in high schools. (more…)

The lead plaintiffs on a new lawsuit against the Department of Education stand on steps of Tweed (from left: Arthur Schwartz, of Advocates for Justice; Mona Davids, of NYC Parents Union; Noah Gotbaum, District 3 Community Education Council President; and Leonie Haimson, of Class Size Matters

Just days after the city received some good news in a lawsuit targeting its policy on charter school co-locations, another legal battle has arrived.

A group of parent activists filed a long-threatened lawsuit against the Department of Education today, charging that it is in violation of state law that requires school districts to collect rent and utility money from charters schools that occupy public school buildings.

The state education law cited in the lawsuit, Section 2853(4)(c), asserts that charters may rent public space and be provided with basic maintenance services, such as custodial work, utility payments and safety measures. But the law also states that the expenses from these services should be provided to charters “at cost.”

The exact amount of “at cost” is not clearly explained in the law – and state education officials did not respond to emails seeking clarification – but the city currently charges $1 in annual rent to about 80 charter schools that operate in public school buildings. It also waives fees for utilities and provides operational services.

The lawsuit estimates that these costs add up to $100 million per year and should be shouldered entirely by charter schools. (more…)

The City Council is requiring the education department to provide more transparent reporting to support claims for two of its signature achievements: higher graduation rates and fewer failing schools.

In the midst of finalizing next year’s city budget, the council managed to pass two bills that target the Department of Education’s bookkeeping. One of them requires the department to disclose more detailed information about students who leave the system without graduation. The second mandates the release of information about students who do not graduate when their high schools close.

Under the first bill, the DOE will be forced to provide more detailed data about student discharge rates, which critics say is overused by schools in order to inflate graduation rates. In 2009, Leonie Haimson, of Class Size Matters, released a report that found discharge rates steadily climbed since 2000. That prompted a state audit that concluded the dropout rate was in fact higher than claims made by the DOE.

Out of 88,612 students from the 2004-2008 cohort, 19 percent – or 17,025 – were discharged and 10 percent – or 9,323 – dropped out, according to the audit.

“This bill will for the first time allow us to know what happened to the thousands of students every year who are discharged from high schools,” Haimson said. “It will make it possible to see if they’re honestly reporting discharge rates. (more…)

Six years after Schools Chancellor Joel Klein vowed to crack down on a bureaucratic loophole that allowed principals to hide students’ failure to graduate high school, a new report (PDF) suggests that the loophole remains open and may be growing wider. The report calls for closer study of the students classified as “discharges” — departures from the system, but not dropouts — through steps including a state audit.

The report says that 21 percent of students who entered high school in 2003 both never graduated and were never counted as dropouts, instead falling into a category known as “discharges.” The percentage was up from 17.5 percent among the Class of 2000. The rate is especially high among special education students, and includes a remarkable jump in 2005, when the special education discharge rate shot up to 36 percent from 23 percent in a single year.

Students classified as discharges can include those who left the school system for legitimate reasons, such as moving to another state, deciding to enroll in an outside G.E.D. program, or death. But some advocates have argued that principals can also misuse the discharge code, entering students who simply dropped out in order to inflate their graduation rate artificially.

A recent audit of 12 high schools in New York State by the state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, found that high schools classified students as G.E.D. discharges who did not actually enroll in a G.E.D. program. “As a result,” DiNapoli’s audit concluded, “the report cards understated the number and percentage of dropouts and overstated the percentage of graduates for some of the schools we reviewed.” The audit did not probe any New York City high schools.

Two persistent critics of the Bloomberg administration compiled the report: the executive director of Class Size Matters, Leonie Haimson, and a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University, Jennifer Jennings. Jennings was the author of the now-defunct Eduwonkette blog, whose analysis of New York City education data became (as I reported) a thorn in the Bloomberg administration’s side. The report is being released at a press conference this morning held by a third critic, the city’s public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum.

City school officials were already disputing the report’s claims yesterday, before it had been released. (more…)

Jonathan is already skeptical of the Department of Education’s explanation for why average class sizes are going up across almost all grades, despite an infusion of $150 million over the past year in funds earmarked to class-size reduction. The DOE’s argument, embedded in a Power Point released today: It’s the economy, stupid.

The idea also bothers Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, who pointed out to me earlier today that the state actually increased funding to schools this year, while the city’s budget cuts came with a promise that classrooms would be insulated. “What they’re trying to do is confuse people about the current economic situation to somehow excuse the fact that class sizes went up in the past,” Haimson said.

The economy explanation first arose in a Power Point released today, and the DOE is sticking to it. On the telephone this afternoon, a spokesman, Will Havemann, said the rising class sizes can be traced back to a cut to schools of about $100 million in October, on top of another $100 million cut to schools in the middle of last year. The idea is that, with less money to spend, principals have decided not to hire additional staff when people retire. Not replacing retiring teachers means class sizes get bigger. Havemann said the city this school year had 440 fewer teachers working directly with students than it had the year before. (more…)

Some not-quite-mayoral control news from the mayoral control hearing: Overcrowding in the city’s schools might be worse than anyone has estimated, according to the organization responsible for the promise of billions of new dollars for the city’s schools.

Helaine Doran, deputy director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, just said that CFE would release a report next week saying that 501,632 students in the city attend school in an overcrowded building.

CFE’s numbers would mean that about 46 percent of the city’s approximately 1.1 million students attend overcrowded schools — far more than the 38 percent that the advocacy organization Class Size Matters calculated last year. Class Size Matters used the Department of Education’s school capacity and enrollment data to come up with its figure; Doran didn’t say today how CFE arrived at its calculation.

Doran said the overcrowding developed over a long period of time. “I’ve been in this school system a long time and the number even startled me,” Doran said. “We just didn’t get there.”

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, leading a press conference. (Photo courtesy of Haimson)

She is privately (and sometimes not-so-privately) loathed by allies of the Bloomberg administration, dismissed as a rabble-rouser whose loud protests represent just a tiny segment of parents. Yet Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters, who targets the administration on the issue of class size and on other subjects, has powerful allies.

Take just one case: At the State of the State address this year in Albany, Haimson sat in a seat many rows ahead of Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. Did she steal the chair from an unsuspecting innocent? No, it was the gift of Assemblywoman Cathy Nolan, the chair of the education committee, who selected Haimson as her single guest.

“I just love her,” Nolan said. “I feel she’s a real honest advocate and a fellow parent.” (more…)

Caroline Kennedy is the vice chairman of the Fund for Public Schools.

The state assembly’s decision to study whether the Fund for Public Schools should be exempt from a state law that asks nonprofits for detailed financial disclosure reports is something to watch. That’s because the charity group’s exemption stems from a claim that has enabled the city Department of Education to opt out of a list of other laws and protocols: the notion that the Department of Education is not legally a city agency, and therefore doesn’t have to follow city law.

The claim doesn’t come from nowhere; the city school system has been a state-authorized entity since it was created in the 1840s, and only briefly became a fully city-run entity, thanks to a power play by Boss Tweed circa 1873. But the claim is important because it’s the reason the DOE has given for exempting itself from a laundry list of other city laws and protocols over the years. So if the assembly forces the Fund to disclose its finances, that could produce a ripple effect.

Here’s a partial list of laws and protocols the DOE has avoided via this claim, compiled largely from a list Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters put together in testimony (Word doc) to a mayoral control panel recently: (more…)

In the battle over whether to make class sizes smaller, the city appears to be scoring a win against the state. That’s the picture painted in a report school officials sent to the City Council Friday. The report shows that, two years after the state poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the city with the aim of lowering class sizes, public school classes are on average larger than the target values in most grades. (View all recent class size data reported by the city here.)

The figures are a relative win for the Department of Education, which has repeatedly dismissed the goal of reducing class sizes as a pipe dream that will not improve education. (more…)