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Since the first protesters arrived at Zuccotti park nearly five weeks ago, the Occupy Wall Street movement has ignited protests from California to the United Kingdom. The city Department of Education could be next.

Calling Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott a member of the maligned “1 percent,” city education activists say they are planning to bring hundreds of protesters to next week’s school board meeting for an “Occupy the DOE” action.

The idea to form ODOE came to organizers, many of whom are city public school teachers, during a Sunday afternoon “grade-in” for educators at Occupy Wall Street, according to Leia Petty, an organizer who works as a guidance counselor in a Bushwick high school and is a long-time activist.

As the teachers discussed how the OWS movement intersected with public education, she said, they united around a shared concern that educators and families have been shut out of DOE decision-making process. So they decided to protest the entity that does ratify DOE decisions: the Panel for Educational Policy, which is holding a special meeting next week about new academic standards.

Petty said ODOE protesters will fill the 350-seat auditorium and draw attention to the PEP’s track record of ignoring public testimony before approving the DOE’s proposed policies. Most of the panel’s members were appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (more…)

The highly anticipated teachers’ contract for the Green Dot charter school in the South Bronx, which has been heralded as an innovative collaboration between a Los Angeles-based charter school operator and the union president Randi Weingarten, is expected to be finalized as soon as today.

The contract is being closely watched for signs of just how flexibly Weingarten is willing to negotiate a teachers’ contract — eagerly by supporters of looser protections for teachers, and with gritted teeth by veterans who believe strong job security is crucial. The original Green Dot charter schools in Los Angeles raised many veterans’ eyebrows here because the schools’ contracts do not include the concept of “tenure” for more senior teachers. The contracts do guarantee teachers protections against unfair dismissal.

Steve Barr, the charismatic leader who founded Green Dot, told me Wednesday that he expects a contract by the end of the week. “It should be finalized this week; I would be very surprised if it’s not,” Barr said. Barr has said in the past that he expects the New York contract to be similar to the one negotiated in Los Angeles. (more…)

In Los Angeles, the teachers union is echoing calls we’ve heard here about what to throw out given budget cuts. First, the tests! The particular focus in L.A. right now is periodic assessments, the standardized tests given three or four times a year, which, unlike state tests, have no stakes attached.

While some dismiss periodic assessments as yet another degradation of the teaching profession, others argue the assessments actually help teachers do their jobs better. This latter group now includes former New York City chancellor Ray Cortines, the new head of the Los Angeles schools. His system just released a report showing exactly how much the assessments help.

Here’s one of the charts they use to argue that the more periodic assessments a student takes, the better her test scores will be:

The Los Angeles Times reached a similar conclusion after its reporters studied the data. We’d love to analyze periodic assessments in New York City. Data please, Department of Education?

School districts all over the country have reached out to the city’s Department of Education to learn more about its school progress reports. Those districts are shaded in red on the map above. They include all of the local districts in Florida and New York State and nine of the country’s 12 largest school districts. (The other three districts — Hawaii; Houston*; and Clark County, Nev. — haven’t yet asked the DOE for progress report advice, according to DOE spokesman Andrew Jacob.)

The Netherlands; Denmark; Israel; Singapore; Ontario, Canada; Sao Paolo, Brazil; and Victoria, Australia have all talked with the DOE about the progress reports, according to Jacob. (He cautions: Just because a government has consulted with the DOE “doesn’t mean that all of them have created or are planning to create something like [the progress reports], of course.”) And last week as part of its tour of Tweed Courthouse, the department headquarters, a team of officials from Los Angeles heard a presentation about the progress reports.

The national governments of Australia and England have so far gone the farthest in replicating the progress reports. Chancellor Klein is headed to Australia next month, where education officials’ zeal to create progress reports has generated controversy. In England, schools secretary Ed Balls “seems eager to adopt” New York-style progress reports, the Guardian UK recently reported.

*In fact, DOE officials have talked with consultants who are working with the Houston school district about the progress reports, but they haven’t met with district officials themselves, Jacob says.