GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The mayor would lose appointment power over a majority of seats on the city school board, which would be strengthened into a powerful check over decisions ranging from when students can be promoted to the next grade to when and how schools should be closed, under recommendations the city teachers union is set to finalize this week.

By giving the mayor a minority 5 of 13 appointments to the city school board, a group now seen as a rubber-stamp for the mayor’s agenda, the union’s recommendations carve away more authority from the mayor than the two other detailed recommendations released so far. The union also said today that it intends to endorse some of the proposals contained in other reports, including an idea proposed by Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum’s governance commission, which would form an outside agency to analyze Department of Education data.

Sharing the recommendations with reporters this afternoon, union president Randi Weingarten said the UFT’s proposal preserves mayoral control, insisting repeatedly that the chancellor and the mayor would retain great power under the proposal. “This is not shared decision-making,” Weingarten said. “This is a check and balance to make sure that policies are done wisely and well and that the kids in this school system get what they need on a timely basis.” (more…)

The panel where Linda Darling-Hammond spoke yesterday.

Linda Darling-Hammond may be feared and loathed by the younger reform set, but among the people who sat with me last night on the Upper East Side to watch her talk, she is such a star! Before the start of the panel, put on by Bank Street College of Education, all I could hear was the simultaneous sound of my Blackberry buzzing with eager e-mails about her and audience members asking their neighbors, “Has Linda arrived yet?”

She finally did, apparently via the very last available train to New York from Washington, D.C., where she had been for Barack Obama’s inauguration. At the panel, she quickly made it clear how dramatically accountability regimes would change if she is given a major role in the Obama administration. (Of course, that’s a big if: Though Darling-Hammond chaired the education policy team for Obama’s transition, it’s looking like those who have the ear of new Education Secretary Arne Duncan come from a different set. She didn’t comment on this yesterday.)

Darling-Hammond laid out a dramatic picture of how she hopes Obama will change American schools, one that (for the most part) differed substantially from the vision currently in vogue, the “idealocrat” program Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has pushed. Darling-Hammond’s big idea is to move America away from a factory model of education, where teachers are seen as trade workers, and toward a model that treats teachers as just as important as doctors or lawyers. The change, as she sees it, requires that teachers are given better and more extensive training, and that the federal government change the way it evaluates their work, moving from No Child Left Behind’s standardized test-based system into one based on sensitive open-ended assessments that schools might create themselves.

She hinted that the last part might be the biggest challenge — to “get the measuring right.” (more…)

Those who think we in New York City have an unconventional schools leader in Joel Klein might be interested to hear about the latest appointment to the state board of education in Connecticut: Linda McMahon, the CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly WWF).

Here’s a look at McMahon’s family, who run WWE with her. She appears — and does some teaching — at about minute 3 and a half:

Confirmation hearings by the state legislature will determine if McMahon really joins the board.

The logo from KIPP AMP's web site.

If I hadn’t spent the last several hours in a meeting, I would have conveyed this dramatic news sooner: Teachers at one of the country’s most prominent charter school networks, KIPP, have decided to buck their board members‘ skeptical attitudes towards teachers unions — and organize.

Fifteen of 20 teachers at KIPP AMP in Brooklyn, a middle school, today sent a letter to the school’s board of trustees declaring their intention to form a union with the United Federation of Teachers. The president of the union, Randi Weingarten, signed the letter.

In letters to fellow city teachers, the KIPP AMP teachers explain that they want to “create a more sustainable culture so that we can better serve our students and reduce teacher turnover.” They said they’re asking for a “basic contract” that sounds, in their short description, kind of like the slim, tenure-less Green Dot contract: Administrators would have to prove “just cause” before firing a teacher, and discipline would follow a graduate scale, including measures to support struggling teachers.

The union also announced today that teachers at a second KIPP charter school, KIPP Infinity, would like to enter collective bargaining talks. KIPP Infinity’s teachers were already represented by the union, in an agreement that guaranteed them health insurance and other benefits, but now want to negotiate a job contract. In a letter released today, UFT official Michael Mendel asked KIPP Infinity’s board for detailed information on the school’s employees and their salary and benefits details.

The two moves represents a dramatic victory for the UFT, which has been campaigning to bring charter school teachers into its fold for at least the last year. (more…)

John Goodlad

In the fourth essay in “Those who Dared,” John Goodlad writes about his career, which included stints teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in Canada and at American universities, spent promoting the notion of schools as places where children can learn from each other in a nurturing, age-integrated setting. Goodlad’s description of what he thinks inspired educators ought to be doing to schools presents another option, or two, for GothamSchools’ ongoing name-those-reformers contest:

School reform is a nasty concept; reform is defined by my Webster’s dictionary as “amendment of what is defective, vicious, corrupt, or depraved.” What an insult to throw at the stewards of schooling! My conception of school renewal, which aims at improving our educational institutions, is vastly different.

School reform will never give us the schools our democracy needs. Reform is a companion of the mechanistic, Industrial-Age, command-and-control model of organizational behavior that has been challenged again and again by thoughtful analysts for its dehumanization of the workplace and, indeed, work itself. Renewal is a radical departure from that model, fitting more systems, complexity, and perhaps chaos theories, which have been discouragingly slow to enter the schooling enterprise. Business leader Dee Hock has coined the word chaordic in describing the emerging age of chaos, complexity, and necessary order in which “the second digital” decade Bill Gates talks about will be only a part, admittedly an important one. …

The common practice of trying to replicate some existing, perceived model, whether or not it is mandated, is doomed to fail — even if bits and pieces of it come into being. The major goal in renewal is to establish the right chaordic circumstances — primarily cultural.

The University of Washington, where Goodlad is a professor emeritus, recently announced that it would create the Goodlad Center for Educational Renewal.

SEATTLE — Here’s another big development: As part of its new approach, the Gates Foundation will advocate for the politically thorny goal of national standards — and will aim to write its own standards and its own national test.

Foundation officials said that the moves are motivated by their frustration with current tests and standards for what children should know, which each state drafts individually as part of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Vicki Phillips, the Gates Foundation’s director of education programs, said the result is a “testing crisis in this country,” in which tests are losing credibility among teachers, who see them as so low-quality that they are useless.

“Let’s admit it,” she said. “We can’t dispense with assessment, but neither can we keep adding low-quality tests.” (more…)

CIF's 2003 report about segregation in District 3

Rather than tinkering with zone lines, District 3 should do away with school zones altogether and instead institute a near-random lottery for school placement, advocates for the district’s immigrant families say.

The Center for Immigrant Families says students should be assigned to schools not because of where they live but by a lottery that takes into socioeconomic status into account. This type of admissions system, called a “controlled choice” program, would be radical for New York City.

Cambridge, Mass., has had a controlled choice policy in place for more than two decades. Some parents in Cambridge say the policy is too formulaic and are advocating for a return to neighborhood schools, the Harvard Crimson recently reported.

In a letter sent yesterday to the Community Education Council for District 3, CIF argues that the district’s residential segregation requires attention: “The catchment seats increasingly reflect the gentrifying reality of our neighborhoods and further cement segregation.” (more…)