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For months, students have been fighting back against the MTA’s budget cuts that would phase out the free Metrocards that allow them to get to school and back.

Khaair Morrison, a Queens high school student, explains in the community section what such a change would mean for him and his peers. Morrison writes:

I wouldn’t even attend the great school I go to, Francis Lewis High School in Queens, if I hadn’t known I would be able to get there for free. But my mom knew I couldn’t go to the schools in my neighborhood. Now those schools are among 19 that the mayor and chancellor are closing. Next year, if I don’t get a free Metrocard, it would be hard for me to stay enrolled at Francis Lewis for my senior year. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg’s directive that principals should use student test scores to determine whether teachers get tenure this year rests on sketchy legal ground, lawyer and Brooklyn College professor David Bloomfield argues in the community section.

What’s more, Bloomberg’s directive could have undesirable unintended consequences, Bloomfield writes:

Rather than hastening their exit, the mayor has created a legal loophole for ineffective teachers to remain in classrooms.  What the mayor has actually done is to hand every failing teacher, already on the chopping block based on principals’ prior determinations, a ready argument that his or her tenure was denied on illegal grounds.

A debate is brewing over in the community section about how the Department of Education assigns progress report grades to high schools.

On Wednesday, Teachers College professor and regular GothamSchools contributor Aaron Pallas critiqued the DOE’s methodology for producing the high school grades, which were released earlier this week. Pallas writes:

Three-quarters of a school’s score comes from a school’s location in relation to a group of 40 peer schools. The idea of comparing a school to peer schools is to create an “apples to apples” comparison. … But it only works if the right criteria are used to determine a school’s peer schools.

Today, the DOE’s chief accountability officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, responds with a defense of how the reports are made and what they measure. He writes:

The student characteristics most predictive of high school success — as measured by ability to earn credits, pass Regents, and graduate — are students’ incoming proficiency levels and special education and over-age status. Our peer index controls for these factors.

As schools await news about midyear budget cuts, the Department of Education gave out $5 million in bonuses to high school principals and teachers today.

The $5 million, which is going to teachers and administrators at high schools with good progress report grades, is $3 million less than what was awarded last year to high schools under the DOE’s two bonus programs. Still, it brings the total value of bonuses awarded this year to $38 million, $10 million more than last year. Teachers and principals at high-performing elementary and middle schools got $33 million in bonuses in September.

The bonuses are awarded under two programs: One gives cash bonuses to principals at the top 20 percent of schools, and the other gives a pool of money to UFT members working at designated high-needs schools. A team of teachers and administrators at those schools will decide how to distribute the bonus money.

Here’s the list of high school principals receiving bonuses, including the size of their awards.

Tomorrow is the last day of work for 500 school aides whose jobs have been in limbo since last summer. So it seems pretty bold for Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to appear at the annual “Quality of Work Life Ceremony” held by DC 37, the aides’ union.

But that’s exactly what he’s doing, according to a media advisory that just came from the Department of Education:

Mayor Bloomberg might be guaranteed four more years in office, but that doesn’t mean Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is, David Bloomfield writes in the community section.

Who might replace Klein if he leaves Tweed? Bloomfield highlights several possibilities, including Chief Schools Officer Eric Nadelstern and New Visions for Public Schools President Robert Hughes. And he’s looking for more suggestions:

Assuming Bloomberg is a lame duck, his choice of Chancellor — or a decision to keep Klein — is especially hard to predict. Since the selection of Chancellor need not be approved by the City Council or other body, the choice is largely the Mayor’s alone. So choose from the above or write someone in: The betting window is now open to name the next person responsible for educating over a million of our kids.

Mayor Bloomberg and Comptroller William Thompson both want to see arts thrive in the schools but have different strategies about how to make that happen, according to their mayoral campaigns’ responses to questionnaires from the Center for Arts Education.

In its response, the Bloomberg campaign explains why city schools don’t need dedicated arts funding, which the city eliminated in 2007: 

A fixed per-pupil arts allocation does not work because no two schools are the saem. A micro example would be that a school that is adjacent to the Brooklyn Museum does not need the same resources to provide arts exposure for its students as a school in Far Rockaway would.

Thompson would restore dedicated arts funding, according to his campaign’s response. And he says he wants the arts to have a place of prominence in the city schools:

We can no longer tolerate the erosion of arts education in our schools. It is time that dance, music, visual arts, and theater are valued and treated as an integral part of a child’s academic experience.

Writing in the community section for the first time this school year, Principal 2.0 Jason Levy has just posted a speech he gave yesterday at a Google-hosted conference about digital-age schooling. As principal of IS 339 in the Bronx, Levy has long tried to integrate new technologies into teaching and learning; last spring, IS 339 hosted an online conference to showcase student work.

The Internet is a language students know and teachers have to learn, Levy writes:

I realized that our students were hardwired for modern technology. Social networking spots like MySpace met a felt need for connecting, and sharing and collaborating. Yet our school ran as it had in the 90s, the 80s and the 70s. We’d rearranged some of the deck chairs, yet our 1.0 band was indeed playing many different tunes, and none that our students wanted to hear. Despite all of our fears, I was determined to get technology into the hands of staff and students. Students were fluent in the language of the 21st century Internet. We adults needed to quickly catch up.

Read Levy’s entire post to find out how he and his staff have brought IS 339 into the 21st century.

Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability president Thomas Carroll thinks Christopher Cerf’s suggestion on the Brian Lehrer Show yesterday that Mayor Bloomberg has given up on building individual merit pay for teachers into the next teachers union contract was a carefully placed leak. In the community section, he asks what this decision could mean for the future of other potential policy changes.

Carroll writes:

This move ends any speculation about whether the Mayor intended to fight the UFT to open up the contract to allow greater education reforms in the City. Bloomberg, despite his vast wealth and Type A personality, apparently has no stomach for a fight with the UFT on the eve of his attempt to secure a third term, after earlier repealing the city’s term-limit law.

Bloomberg’s apparent cave on teacher performance pay may signal a desire to get a contract agreement at any cost, which would mean other key reforms may be dead as well.

Over in the community section, Francis Lewis High School UFT chapter leader Arthur Goldstein offers a long-term, personal perspective on the Absent Teacher Reserve situation. 

Because the 2005 teachers union contract ended senior teachers’ ability to claim open positions in the system, any teacher can become an ATR if Chancellor Joel Klein closes his or her school, Goldstein writes:

Teachers would no longer be sent to schools simply because there were open positions. Instead, they’d become ATRs, teaching whatever, wherever, to whomever. From there, we were assured, they’d easily find jobs. Unless, of course, they didn’t. Personally, I’m very glad I transferred when I could. For all I know, they could be closing my former school this very moment. I’d be very unhappy as an ATR teacher, and I’ve met many ATR teachers who feel precisely the same way.