GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Department of Education Senior Deputy Chancellor Marc Sternberg and Shipnia Bytyqi, a graduate of the high school he founded who now teaches at a charter school in the city, took the stage last week at Teach for America New York’s annual gala.

Teach For America used its annual New York City benefit last week to wade into the city’s political debate. Praising the Bloomberg administration’s education record, founder and board chair Wendy Kopp vowed that Teach For America and its supporters would fight to preserve the mayor’s education legacy after he leaves office at the end of the year.

“No matter who takes office,” Kopp said, “we are creating an unstoppable force.”

The remarks reflected Teach For America’s transition to playing a stronger role in public dialogue about education.

Kopp suggested that the organization would not throw its support behind a single candidate. “Progress isn’t a function of one leader,” Kopp said. Instead, she said, the educational change Teach For America supports requires “a constellation of committed souls.”

The strength of that constellation was on display at the nonprofit’s gala, held Wednesday at the glittering Waldorf Astoria hotel. In one night, the organization announced it raised $6.7 million, and speakers included Charlie Rose and Richard Parsons, the former CEO of Time Warner and Teach For America board member who also chairs Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Education Reform Commission. (more…)

A screenshot from Amplify's website

The day Joel Klein resigned as New York City schools chancellor in November 2010, he said he would be joining Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation “to put [the company] in the burgeoning and dynamic education marketplace.”

But after quickly acquiring people and companies, Klein decamped for a year to lead NewsCorp’s internal handling of its phone-hacking scandal. Just what, if anything, was happening behind the education division’s doors remained far out of public view.

That changed today. A month after Klein returned to the division fulltime, NewsCorp announced in a press release that the division has a name, a website, and a mission: “reimagining K-12 education by creating digital products and services that empower students, teachers and parents in new ways.” (more…)

Former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein speaks at iSchool's graduation on Monday. Principal Alisa Berger is on the stage to Klein's right.

In May 2009, the Department of Education launched a new initiative, NYC21C, to remake the American high school using technology. Then-Chancellor Joel Klein made the announcement at the NYC iSchool, then completing its first year, and praised its students and co-principals, Alisa Berger and Mary Moss.

Now, all of those people have moved on.

Klein left the Department of Education in November 2010 and now earns more than $4 million a year running the education division of a multinational corporation. Moss left last year when her family moved to North Carolina. Berger’s family is relocating to Massachusetts this summer.

And on Monday, members of the school’s inaugural class graduated in an afternoon ceremony, featuring a speech by Klein, held at the Ethical Culture Society on the Upper West Side. This fall, they’ll enroll at colleges and universities up and down the East Coast.

“Our greatest hope is that you love college, that you discover something you love learning about, that what you love to do is something that makes the world better, even in small ways, and that you find fulfillment in your life,” said Moss, who returned to see the school’s first students graduate. Of the 100 students who entered the selective school in 2008, 94 graduated on time.

“I ask that you go and do — that you take what you’ve learned at the iSchool to transform the colleges you attend and create communities for yourselves the way that you have created the iSchool,” Berger told the graduates. (more…)

This story has been corrected from its earlier version to clarify the positions expressed by Lasher yesterday.

Two months ago StudentsFirstNY, the New York branch of Michelle Rhee’s political action committee, announced itself with a splash. But it hasn’t been clear where the group will direct its financial and political might.

Micah Lasher, StudentsFirstNY’s executive director, fleshed out the group’s platform for the first time at a discussion hosted Monday by the DL21C, a group of young Democrats. GothamSchools’ Elizabeth Green moderated the discussion.

StudentsFirstNY will also focus on organizing parents to demand policy changes around improving teacher quality and school choice, Lasher said. He also said the group might well weigh in on next year’s mayoral race, whose victor will determine the next phase of the city’s education reforms.

“If there comes a time where it becomes clear that there is a candidate that we think would be effective on these issues, and it makes sense according to our political judgements and the way we think we can best improve schools in the city, I would allow us to get involved in getting support of a candidate,” Lasher said. (more…)

The latest internal Department of Education emails to come to light are mostly dark: The 228 pages released today contain large swaths of blacked-out text.

But between redactions, a few messages stand out — including one in which charter operator Eva Moskowitz speedily outlines an agenda that became the driving focus of former Chancellor Joel Klein’s last year in office.

Urging Klein to be “SUPERAGGRESSIVE in [the] standard of excellence” for schools’ academic performance, Moskowitz wrote, “If folks criticize you for having the bar way too high, you know you are inching closer to success.”

The emails were part of the yield from a massive Freedom of Information Law request filed by the United Federation of Teachers. The union wanted to see the communication exchanged between the city Department of Education and charter school supporters during a period when legislators were under pressure to lift the cap on the number of charter schools in the state. That cap was raised in May 2010.

Hundreds of emails between Klein and charter advocates were released last month, showing that Klein kept careful tabs on the legislative action and was quick to connect advocates with support. (more…)

Parents of children admitted to the STEM citywide gifted program at P.S. 85 attend an open house Wednesday.

Every morning, Tim Smith and his nine-year-old son leave their Bronx home at 7:30 a.m., catch a MetroNorth train to 125th Street and then board the M60 bus into Queens — all so the third-grader can attend P.S. 85 in Astoria, home to one of New York City’s handful of citywide gifted-and-talented programs.

Even so, they brace themselves for an even more difficult journey ahead: Finding a middle school.

In 2009, when P.S. 85′s program opened as part of an effort to expand gifted education, the Department of Education pledged “to identify nearby middle schools where students in these programs can continue after fifth grade.” But last month, responding to parents’ pleas to make good on the promise, the department informed them that P.S. 85 cannot handle expansion into a middle school because it is already “operating close to 100 percent capacity.” It said students in the gifted program — called the STEM Academy (it stands for Science, Technology, Enrichment and Math) — must go to middle school elsewhere.

STEM is the only citywide gifted-and-talented elementary school program that ends with fifth grade. (It is the only citywide gifted program housed within another school.) Three of the four other citywide programs — Manhattan’s Anderson School and TAG Young Scholars, as well as the Brooklyn School of Inquiry — continue through eighth grade, and Manhattan’s NEST+M carries students through the end of high school.

“The school was meant to be a peer for the other citywide gifted programs, and admission to a middle school program was supposed to be seamless,” said Smith.

STEM parents charge that their program has been neglected because of a shift in priorities at the Department of Education. (more…)

The UFT wants former Chancellor Joel Klein to take a break from running News Corporation’s education division to explain just how the Department of Education helped schools it was once barred from closing.

The union has subpoenaed Klein to appear in court in the next phase of a school closure lawsuit filed last year. It has also issued “notices of deposition” to require 11 current Department of Education officials, including Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky, to testify.

That lawsuit, which a judge ruled should not impede the city’s school closure plans, argued that the department had not provided 19 schools with promised support. The city had committed to providing the supports — which ranged from assigning temporary teachers to add extra support to providing additional teacher training — under the terms of a 2010 closure lawsuit.

The union’s 2010 suit focused on the city’s compliance with state law about public notification of closure proposals. A state Supreme Court justice ruled that the city had not followed the law, halting school closures for that year. In a settlement, the city promised to pour extra help into the schools to help them boost performance and avoid closure the next year. But a year later, 14 of the 19 schools were back on the chopping block. (more…)

When the Department of Education’s embargo of Teacher Data Reports details lifted at noon today, news organizations across the city rushed to make the data available.

The Teacher Data Reports are “value-added” assessments of teachers’ effectiveness that were produced from 2008 to 2010 for reading and math teachers in grades 3 to 8.

This morning, department officials including Chancellor Dennis Walcott and Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky met with reporters to offer caution about how the data reports should be used. They emphasized the reports’ wide margins of error — 35 percentage points for math teachers and 53 percentage points for reading teachers, on average — and that the reports reflect only a small portion of teachers’ work.

“We would never advise anyone — parent, reporter, principal, teacher — to draw a conclusion based on this score alone,” Polakow-Suransky said.

Most of the news organizations that filed Freedom of Information Law requests for the ratings plan to publish them in searchable or streamlined databases, with the teachers’ names attached. GothamSchools does not plan to publish the data with teachers’ names or identifying characteristics included because of concerns about the data’s reliability.

At least two other news organizations that cover education are also not publishing the data: the local affiliate of Fox News, according to a representative of Fox, and the nonprofit school information website Insideschools.

Department officials are asking schools not to release the reports to parents. They issued a guide today advising principals about how to handle parents who demand that their child be removed from the class of a teacher rated ineffective. (more…)

The Department of Education’s press office will be getting a new director in less than two weeks.

Natalie Ravitz, the department’s communications director since June 2010, is leaving to become chief of staff to Rupert Murdoch, the CEO of News Corporation. Her last day at the department will be Feb. 10.

Ravitz is following a well-worn path from the department to NewsCorp: Ex-schools chief Joel Klein, who was chancellor when Ravitz was hired, now heads the company’s growing education division. Last summer, Klein picked Kristen Kane, the department’s former chief operating officer, to become the division’s COO. He also acquired Wireless Generation, the technology company that developed and managed ARIS, the city’s school data warehouse.

After years in political communications, Ravitz arrived at the department during the summer of 2010 and shepherded its press operations through two abrupt changes in departmental leadership. She succeeded David Cantor, who held the job for longer than any of his predecessors before leaving for the private sector. (more…)

If Mayor Bloomberg had his druthers, he would fire half the city’s teachers and pay the remaining half more to supervise twice-as-large classes.

That’s what he said during a wide-ranging speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Tuesday in which he argued that weak training, social change, and the teachers union have conspired to fill New York City’s schools with less-than-ideal teachers.

“If I had the ability, which nobody does really, to just design the system and say, ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do, you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers, and double class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students,” Bloomberg said.

Listen to the portion of the speech where Bloomberg talks schools (starting at about 5:00): 

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The comments have drawn fire from UFT President Michael Mulgrew, elected officials, and many others. But while they were provocative and unusually specific, the speech tread familiar territory for the mayor. (more…)