GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Two former New York City schoolteachers have taken to heart Teach for America’s intention to create innovators who maintain a commitment to educational equity even after they leave the classroom — they’ve started a nonprofit organization designed to facilitate individual giving to public schools.

Jessica Rauch and Eli Savit, who now live in Michigan, recently won $10,000 in start-up funds in the August competition on IdeaBlob.com, which pits new business ideas against each other in public voting. Their initiative, The Generation Project, aims to “revolutionize educational philanthropy” by facilitating connections between schools and individuals who want to donate to them.

From 2005 to 2007, Rauch taught English language learners at PS 86 in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx; Savit taught 8th-grade social studies at IS 339 in the South Bronx. “As a new teacher, my time was very limited; between lesson planning, after-school tutoring, and graduate school, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to find individualized opportunities for all of my students,” wrote Rauch in an email to GothamSchools. “Although my administration was great and tried hard to expose students to various enrichment activities, I wished there was an easy way to further expand my students’ horizons.” For example, Rauch wrote, one of Savit’s students who had developed an interest in domestic affairs could have attended a program in Washington, D.C., if Savit could easily have found a way to pay for it.

Motivated by their own experiences, Rauch and Savit are working to create a database of prepaid gifts, “shaped by [funders'] own passions and priorities,” that schools and teachers can apply to receive. This approach represents an inversion of the one taken by the popular website DonorsChoose.org, where potential donors browse funding requests from teachers who have identified particular needs for their classroom.

“DonorsChoose is awesome, but it serves a different role for under-resourced schools than we propose,” Rauch wrote. (more…)

Mayor David Cohen of Newton, Mass. The town faces school budget cuts after failing to override a tax cap. Boston Herald

Last Friday, the New York State Senate approved a 4% annual cap on school property tax increases for local school districts, excluding the state’s largest cities. To override the cap would require the vote of 55 percent of voters in a district. The New York Times reports that the bill is unlikely to pass in the State Assembly, where it is opposed by Speaker Sheldon Silver. The tax cap, proposed by the governor, is intended to provide relief to homeowners.

I grew up in Massachusetts under Proposition 2 1/2, a tax cap similar to that proposed for New York. In Lenox, MA, my hometown, when a tax override was considered to build a new school for our town’s increasing enrollment, voter turnout to town meetings swelled, Planning Board, School Committee, and Board of Selectmen positions were fiercely contested, and rhetoric in the papers and at meetings often turned nasty. Dollars for schools were painted as dollars taken away from the elderly. Our neighbors across the street even constructed a sculpture in their front yard depicting the schools going into the garbage! In the end, we got the new school, but the time and energy lost to fighting can never be recovered.

But don’t just take my word for it. Directors of school board associations in Massachusetts and California penned warnings to the New York State Legislature. Glen Koocher of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, listed five ways the tax cap hurt schools, then concluded,

A bad public policy, once implemented, becomes entrenched and is difficult to rescind. If saving taxpayers money now is your priority, tax caps may be for you. But if maintaining a socially responsible, sound public education policy is important, New York policy makers would be well-advised to be extremely cautious as they consider a tax cap. A poorly crafted proposal will sacrifice the future for many in exchange for short-term benefits for some.

To see an example of Prop. 2 1/2 in action today, read about a proposed override in Newton, MA – and the costs to the schools when the override failed: in May, the town eliminated 79 positions, including all elementary school social workers.

Photo by p_a_h

Elected officials, teachers, and parents offered up a litany of concerns about the DOE’s proposed Contracts for Excellence — regarding both their content and the process by which they were developed — last night at the final public hearing in Manhattan.

The hearing, chaired by Terence Tolbert, executive director of the DOE’s Department of Intergovernmental Affairs (and soon to direct Obama’s Nevada campaign), was well-attended by representatives from numerous organizations, including ACORN, Class Size Matters, the Coalition for Educational Justice, the Alliance for Quality Education, the City Council, school level PTAs, the UFT, and others.

Legally, Contracts for Excellence funding must “supplement, not supplant” existing spending; several speakers expressed concerns that the money will be spent to close holes in the budget rather than create or expand programs. Others worried that the new funding would be used to make up losses due to budget cuts in low-performing schools, rather than expanding services for high-needs children in those schools. Complicating these issues, several speakers noted, the plan includes little oversight of whether principals spend the Contracts for Excellence money as intended.

(more…)

Coming soon… notes from Wednesday’s public hearing in Manhattan.

New York City’s Proposed Citywide Contracts for Excellence plan provides:

• 63% or $242 million in discretionary allocations to schools, which may be used for new or expanded programs in any of six areas: class size reduction, time on task, teacher & principal quality initiatives, middle and high school restructuring, full-day pre-kindergarten programs, and model programs for English Language Learners (ELLs).  The DOE has posted more details about options within each program area.
• 20% or $76 million for targeted allocations to schools based on student need and the school’s capacity to carry out programs.  These funds will be spent on new collaborative team teaching (CTT) classrooms, full-day pre-K expansion, new and expanded autism spectrum disorder, and ELL summer school expansion.  An additional $7 million will be allocated this week to a small group of high-needs schools.
• 10% or $37 million to district-wide initiatives, with $10 million going to new and expanded principal training initiatives, $20 million going to school-wide performance bonuses, and $7 million to new and expanded multiple pathways to graduation initiatives.
• 8% or $30 million to maintenance of effort, specifically maintaining summer programs that target the lowest-performing students.

School-based allocations of the discretionary funding were combined with targeted allocations and other funding to produce this overview of Contracts for Excellence spending by program area:

According to the citywide plan, within the class size reduction program area, $100 million will go to reducing teacher-student ratios through team teaching, while $46 million will go to creation of additional classrooms.  The majority of time on task dollars will go to dedicated instructional time ($42 million) and summer school programs ($31 million), and the majority of teacher and principal quality dollars will go to instructional coaches for teachers ($45 million).

Much more information, including summaries and tables of district and school-level distribution of funds to specific program areas and strategies, and a breakdown of spending by student need category, along with model ELL strategies outlined by the state, can be found on the DOE’s website.

Looks like the City Council made good on its promise not to approve a budget that includes cuts to schools — late last night, the council and the mayor tentatively agreed on a budget that includes $129 million the council is allocating to schools to make up for the DOE’s planned cuts.

Centrally, the DOE will accept a small budget cut, as will most other city agencies. Unfortunately for other New Yorkers, restoring school budgets forced the council to cut some of the other services it funds, including senior centers and workforce and youth development programs. And Mayor Bloomberg also warns that if the city’s economic picture continues to deteriorate, city agencies — presumably, including schools — could see their budgets reduced downward during the year. When that happened this spring, schools were forced to cut programs and services midyear, which can be more disruptive than planning ahead for lean times.

Earlier this month, as it became apparent that the DOE had pretty seriously botched the pre-kindergarten admission process, Eduwonkette offered up a multiple-choice question to describe the DOE’s damage-control options. Should the DOE issue a heartfelt apology and plan for improvement; deny that the problem exist; or minimize the significance of the uncertainty for the many families affected? At the time, the DOE was doing everything except apologizing.

Now, it looks like the DOE came up with a fourth option: gloss over the problem as long as possible, release no information about how or whether it’s being cleared up, and then try to avoid a similar problem with gifted and talented admissions decisions by hand-delivering letters over the weekend at the cost of $5 a pop. The DOE says using a courier service was much cheaper than overnighting all of the letters. But completing the process accurately and according to the original schedule would have been even less costly, at a time when the schools are facing 1.4-6 percent budget cuts.