GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The start of school in three weeks comes as initiatives to revamp instruction, assessment, and teacher evaluation ramp up.

The climate of change — and what it might mean for the city’s schools — is the subject of the “On Education” panel discussion that Manhattan Media is hosting next week. I’m moderating the panel along with Andrew Hawkins, managing editor of City Hall News.

The discussion, set for Thursday morning, is part of a series of policy breakfasts that Manhattan Media periodically holds, and the company put together the panel of government and policy leaders whose positions have helped shape the city schools.

I’m happy to report that the lineup now includes a working teacher, Stephen Lazar. A GothamSchools Community section contributor, Lazar helped organize the EDUsolidarity blogging event that attracted over 100 educators nationally to write about why they support their unions.

The other panelists are

• Leo Casey, a UFT vice president;
• Sydney Morris, co-founder of Educators 4 Excellence;
• Eva Moskowitz, founder and CEO of the Success Charter Network;
• Shael Polakow-Suransky, the DOE’s chief academic officer;
• Bill Thompson, who is running for mayor;
• Merryl Tisch, Board of Regents chancellor; and
• Joseph Viteritti, a Hunter College public policy professor.

I have plenty of questions of my own to cram into the hour-and-a-half-long event. But I’m happy to take suggestions in the comments section for what I should encourage panelists to discuss.

City schools are staring down their fifth round of budget cuts in the last two years, and we want to know what’s on the line.

Mayor Bloomberg has ordered the Department of Education to cut its budget by 1.5 percent for the current fiscal year and to schedule another 2.5 percent cut for the fiscal year that begins in July. State aid to city schools is also sure to be reduced, even if Gov. Paterson doesn’t get the steep midyear cuts he’s pushing.

Individual schools haven’t learned yet how much they’ll have to cut. But we want to know what’s at risk at schools across the city. So we’re renewing our call for budget cut casualties on the interactive comment map that we first launched in June, where principals, teachers, and parents described “devastating” cuts to teaching staffs, arts programs, and after school offerings. 

Head over to the map and leave a comment explaining what might be next to go at your school.

While the school system limps toward a new governance structure, we at GothamSchools are shaking things up, too. To mark our first anniversary, we’re adding new staff (have you noticed those shiny new bylines?), excessing old ones, paying the bills in a new way, and changing up our content delivery model. We also plan to throw a party, at which we hope you’ll help us celebrate our continued existence despite the tough times.

Finally — permit one more forced parallel? — this post marks a new era of transparency and reader input, because we are both telling you all about the changes and asking for your help in pulling them off.

Please begin by enjoying our revised design, in which we distinguish between shorter dispatches and full-blown, robustly reported daily news stories. The shorter dispatches are indented and touched off by arrows, as in the post below this one. The stories are in the same maroon-headed format that you’re used to seeing blog posts.

The goal is to hold ourselves to an even higher standard, truth-telling-wise, while still keeping you up to date on the minutiae of school news (who just went wild at a City Council hearing, what article we just read and recommend, a deep thought, a breaking news item). (more…)

Teachers and students are returning this week to schools changed by deep budget cuts over the summer.

Because of the city’s shrinking coffers, principals were told last spring to cut nearly 5 percent of their budgets for this year. Some schools lost closer to 10 percent of what they had to spend last year.

For months, we’ve been trying to document how the cuts are affecting individual schools. In June, we launched an interactive comment map where principals, teachers, and parents placed flags to show cuts to teaching staffs, arts programs, and after school offerings. One principal, from PS/MS 179 in the Bronx, reported “devastating” cuts at his school.

Now, we’re asking our readers to add to the map with the latest information about how schools have changed because of the budget cuts. Teachers, are you juggling more responsibilities than in the past? Do you have fewer colleagues than you used to have? Parents, is your school offering fewer after-school activities than it did last year? Is your child’s class larger than you expected? What else have you noticed? Visit the comment map here to add details about your school.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg is offering to open up. Photo via Wikimedia commons.

Responding to the national push for more transparent government, the Bloomberg administration is opening up some of its datasets for easier public consumption. The only question is what data the city will throw up on the new Web site.

The city is taking suggestions starting Monday, and the nonprofit that houses GothamSchools, The Open Planning Project, is part of the push to send those in. We will be helping TOPP fill out what are called RFEI’s, or requests for expressions of interest, this coming Monday.

With the deadline breathing down our necks, on our staycation no less!, we need your help. Our wish list includes information on outside contracts the Department of Education holds, school-by-school budget documents, and school accountability information organized in easy-to-search Excel spreadsheets rather than individual PDF’s.

What should we add? Please name names of specific documents, and please don’t be shy with ideas. Info on how to submit your own RFEI is here.

A photo posted to GothamSchools' Flickr pool on Nov. 5, 2008

We do a good job reporting about the schools. But we’d love to be able to show more of what happens inside them.

So we’re asking our readers to submit photographs to GothamSchools’ photo pool on the picture-sharing Web site Flickr. There are already 49 pictures in the pool, including the one in this post.

We want to see any school-related pictures you take: of graduations, end-of-year parties, teachers working together, the conditions of your school building, or anything else you want to share with other GothamSchools readers. We’ll highlight the best pictures here on the blog.

To send pictures to the pool, create a Flickr account (or log in to your existing one). Then join the GothamSchools group. After that, you can add any school-related photos you upload to Flickr to GothamSchools’ photo pool. You can even post short videos to the group.

If you don’t want to join Flickr, you can also send us your pictures via e-mail. Be sure to tell us what we’re seeing!

Note what's at risk at your school on this map.

At schools across the city, principals are struggling right to trim nearly 5 percent from their school budgets by June 18. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has said that schools will have to cut deep into their extracurricular programming, and some will even have to reduce the number of teachers they employ. But the depth of cuts at the school-by-school level isn’t yet clear.

We’re trying to bring some clarity to the dismal budget picture by documenting how the cuts are affecting individual schools. We’ve just launched a groundbreaking interactive comment map so readers can help us paint a comprehensive picture of the toll budget cuts are taking at schools across the city.

Here’s how the map works: When you add a comment, you’ll be prompted to enter a location. Use the address of your school, or an intersection near it. Then describe the budget cut situation at your school: Will there be fewer teachers working at your school next year? Is your school going to be without an after-school program, music classes, or extra tutoring for struggling students? Is your principal asking community members for advice about what to cut? We want to know it all. Be sure to include the name of your school in your comment. Comments will be ordered by date, so you can update your contribution as the situation changes.

The map was developed by a crack team of programmers at The Open Planning Project, where GothamSchools is housed.

Please note: Comments on this post are closed, because we want you to attach your comments to the interactive map!

In just a little while, we’ll have some analysis of the newly released state English language arts test scores, which show that children in grades 3 through 8 are, on average, more proficient in reading and writing than they were last year, by 7 percentage points. But first we need your help sorting through the numbers morass! (State Education Department Commissioner Richard Mills wasn’t lying when he said at a press conference today, “We’re going to give you more data than you’ve ever seen before.”)

The broadcast of today’s state press conference, as well as the slide show that Mills presented there, is now online. The state also made available an enormous PDF of every single school’s proficiency breakdowns and scale scores, by grade. And for the really ambitious armchair data analysts, there’s also a 5-megabyte Microsoft Access database of all of the state’s raw data.

I’ve posted the state’s full press release, which touts “steady, moderate growth” across the state, after the jump. Feel free to leave a comment with your insights about the data dump. (more…)

One thing that went under the radar during the nonstop news cycle of the last few weeks is a sizable data dump from the Department of Education, which for the first time released statistical reports about the 11 organizations that support the city’s schools.

The reports went online last week to inaugurate the period when schools can choose which organization they want to affiliate with. The organizations, called School Support Organizations, or SSOs, have provided support services to individual schools for the last two years in place of the traditional school-district bureaucracy. This is the first time that the DOE has allowed schools to change the affiliation they originally selected back in 2007.

The new reports include a chart (above) comparing the SSOs according to their schools’ progress report scores, quality review evaluations, and principal satisfaction survey results. The result is the public evaluation that Eric Nadelstern, the DOE’s chief schools officer who formerly ran the Empowerment organization, said back in January was being cooked up the department’s accountability office. The comparison, which takes into account school data from the 2007-2008 school year, shows that the SSO run by the City University of New York did the best, followed closely by the Empowerment organization.

The reports are available on the DOE’s Web site only in PDF format, and there is a different one for each organization. A DOE spokeswoman told me that the department had not made available a database compiling the data, so I went ahead and made one, available here or after the jump. I also went one step further and added some calculations of my own, based on the DOE’s data: The percent change in progress report and quality review scores from 2007 to 2008.

Among my first impressions: Schools either improved their internal operations significantly between 2007 and 2008, or else they figured out how to look like they had improved, because the percentage of schools receiving top ratings on their Quality Reviews jumped in every organization.

If you have more statistics knowhow than I do and some extra time on your hands (like during this school vacation), take a look and note what you see. Leave your observations in the comments. (more…)

As I predicted on Wednesday, most of the schools that didn’t fill up in the main round of the high school admissions process are either brand new or have reputations that are mixed at best.

But there are always hidden gems that still have spots open: either new schools led by educators with a strong track record or excellent programs inside middling high schools. In an article that it unfortunately must reprise every year, Insideschools runs down the options for the nearly 7,500 students who didn’t get a high school match this week. The site is also asking its users to recommend schools on the Department of Education’s three-page list of available spots.

I see a handful of schools on the list that look like they might be solid choices for students still looking for a high school spot. One, The Cinema School, is the selective school in the Bronx that will be run in partnership with the Ghetto Film School. I was also impressed by Brooklyn’s School for International Studies when I visited several years ago, and I’ve heard good things from students who have since attended. And the progressive Queens School of Inquiry, which is adding a ninth grade in the fall, was one of the more memorable schools I’ve visited; it was at QSI where I first encountered competitive speed-stacking.

Do you see other schools you’d recommend on the list (which you can read in full below the jump)? If so, for what kind of student? (more…)