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Teachers across the city are leaving their classrooms this week to grade the state reading tests required by the No Child Left Behind law. This is a change from last year, when they were paid extra to grade the tests after school and on weekends. But the new arrangement also carries costs. Meredith Kolodner recently pointed out in the Daily News that schools lose not only the teachers’ time but also the money it costs to pay a substitute.

This could be a matter of “too bad, but move on.” In terrible budget times, the system has no choice but to use school time to grade the exams. Except for one thing: It might be that the time allotted to grade the tests is too long.

Eva Moskowitz, the Harlem charter school operator and former City Council member, says that when her teachers graded 60 children’s practice third-grade English Language Arts tests earlier this year, under exactly the prescribed conditions, the whole procedure took just 43 minutes. Yet grading of the ELA tests in district schools began last week and will go on through the middle of February. Charter schools, whose grading is coordinated by the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence, are being asked to send teachers for three-day stints.

“This is a very lickety-split operation,” Moskowitz said. “How you would drag it out over three days, I don’t know.” She said that the actual tasks required are simple. “This is like two sentences and an editing passage. And the rubric is very strict,” she said. “I don’t know why we’re asking teachers to do this, frankly. To me, high school students would suffice. Maybe even good middle school students would suffice.”

Andrew Jacob, a spokesman for the city school system, said there is a simple reason for the time demands: “We have a lot of tests to grade and we have a lot of measures in place to ensure that the tests are being graded accurately.” James Merriman, executive director of the charter center, said the grading process follows strict guidelines meant to ensure credible results.

The Daily News reports this morning that Governor Paterson will propose cutting $206 million from the New York City schools. Mayor Bloomberg has already guess-timated his likely cut to the schools next year at $385 million. Both numbers are moving targets, changeable if the two executives’ legislative bodies push to do so. (Recall that just a few months ago, the state legislature axed a plan by Paterson to cut state funding to schools in the middle of this school year.) 

But let’s assume that the mayor and governor do get what they’re asking for. That would be a grand total of $591 million slashed from city schools budgets in the 2009-2010 school year. We can get an extremely rough estimate of what that might look like on the ground by thinking about the cuts the mayor ordered in the middle of this school year. The cut, of $181 million, happened by eliminating 475 bureaucratic jobs; delaying or cutting a half-dozen or so small centrally administered programs; and slicing 1.3% from school budgets. If we scale each of these up by a factor of 3.2 (the amount by which $591 million is larger than $181 million), we get:

• 1,550 jobs cut from central (more…)

The nonprofit pro-mayoral control advocacy group that was originally titled MASS, for Mayoral Accountability for Student Success, is now called Learn NY, and its official first day of existence is today. The group has close ties with the Bloomberg administration, but it is not being funded by the mayor, officials said in a background press conference with reporters this morning.

Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters has already done impressive digging into the group’s media strategy. A spokesperson for the group confirmed to me today that the blog commenter Haimson noticed voicing his passion for mayoral control is indeed on the payroll of Learn NY. Brian Keeler, an online-media specialist who ran unsuccessfully for state senate in 2006 with the help of a following he built at Daily Kos, has been posting positive comments on this blog, Leonie’s, and others. He is also an employee of the Web design firm that built Learn NY’s Web site and will write a regular blog on the site, the spokesperson, Julie Wood, said.

Something that will surely be asked — especially by critics of mayoral control and the Bloomberg administration, including Haimson — is how much of a “MASS” organization Learn NY really is. (more…)