GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Principals union president Ernest Logan with Diane Ravitch after Ravitch's speech to union members on Tuesday

City principals should overcome their fear and join with more than a thousand of their colleagues from across the state who oppose New York’s teacher evaluation rules, Diane Ravitch urged during a speech to the principals union Tuesday.

A group of Long Island principals launched a petition in November arguing that the state’s evaluation regulations — which require a portion of teachers’ ratings to be based on their students’ test scores — are unsupported by research, prone to errors, and too expensive at a time of budget cuts.

The petition has attracted nearly 1,300 principals from across the state, but relatively few — just over 100 — work in New York City, in a trend that has persisted since the petition’s earliest days. Sean Feeney, a Nassau County principal who drafted the petition, said in November that city principals seemed to be more afraid of jeopardizing their jobs by speaking out.

Ravitch, a frequent and outspoken critic of the Bloomberg administration’s education policies, took aim at those concerns during the kickoff event in the union’s 50th anniversary celebration. She concluded her speech by exhorting city principals to sign on to the evaluations petition.

“There is strength in numbers,” she said to the roughly 150 current and retired principals in the audience. ”The DOE can’t fire you all.” (more…)

A transfer school that the city is planning to close is desperately trying to escape an accountability dragnet planted by No Child Left Behind.

Its plight could reshape how other transfer schools are assessed under a new accountability system the state is working to devise.

Bushwick Community High School is one of 33 schools that Mayor Bloomberg has said he wants to shut down and reopen after replacing half of the teachers. It landed on the list after its low graduation rate triggered penalties under city, state, and federal accountability systems.

BCHS teachers say the school is being penalized because it enrolls only students who have been unsuccessful in other high schools, making it unlikely for them to graduate on time. This week, the staff submitted a letter to Bloomberg arguing that he should remove BCHS from the list schools that the city is planning to “turn around.”

“BCHS’s placement on the PLA list is the illogical conclusion of a crude, one-size-fits all accountability system,” they wrote. “As a transfer school, BCHS is designed to be part of the solution for struggling students in the city, but the current accountability metrics punish us for working with our students while allowing the source of their failures to go undetected.”

It’s a position that state officials support and are even trying to turn into policy. (more…)

The Obama administration is warning New York State that it could lose hundreds of millions of federal dollars if it doesn’t stick to its Race to the Top promises.

The stern warning comes in conjunction with a set of U.S. Department of Education progress reports summarizing implementation successes and setbacks in each of the states that won federal Race to the Top funds in 2010. Eleven states and Washington, D.C., shared a $4.3 billion pot of prize money.

Department officials said New York was doing better than Hawaii, which last month was deemed as being at “high risk” of losing its Race to the Top funding. But they said the state was falling behind after making progress in Race to the Top’s first year.

“New York has a chance to be a national leader or a laggard and we are only interested in supporting real courage and bold leadership,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a statement. ”Backtracking on reform commitments could cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars for improving New York schools.” (more…)

A dispute over who would take the fall if something goes wrong inside struggling schools is delaying a federally funded turnaround effort that had already gotten off to a slow start.

As part of its application to secure school improvement grants, the city agreed to hand over operations to independent education organizations at 14 of its lowest-performing schools through a process called “restart.” The Department of Education selected six nonprofits to take over the reins at those schools, awarding them more than $17 million altogether.

But four months after the groups started working in the schools, the money remains in the city coffers.

The sticking point is that city lawyers want the groups, known as educational partnership organizations, to cover their own legal costs for any litigation brought by teachers, principals, staff or students in the schools they’re working in.

The proposition is controversial because the groups are replacing an authority figure — the superintendent — who does not actually carry any of the liability costs. The DOE is effectively an insurance carrier for superintendents, so when a lawsuit challenges, for example, a teacher rating that the superintendent signed off on, the DOE bears the legal costs.

The EPOs said they assumed they would have the same protection against legal liability, known as indemnification, because the state’s regulations mandate that they adopt all of the roles and responsibilities of each school’s superintendent. But according to several EPO directors, the city’s initial contract language treats them like vendors providing services to the schools, not managing everything from hiring to budgeting to discipline.

“It’s been several months of frustration over what we see as a fairly straightforward issue,” said a program director from one of the EPOs. “We feel we should be covered to the same extent that a superintendent would be covered in the case of a lawsuit.” (more…)

The State Education Department official who has supervised the state’s testing program since 2004 — through skyrocketing scores, a brutal crash, and the dawn of an overhaul — has resigned.

David Abrams, the State Education Department’s assistant commissioner for standards, assessment, and reporting since 2004, announced his resignation today. His resignation is effective immediately, shocking some people who had expected to participate in meetings with him this week.

Abrams’s departure comes at a time of robust efforts to overhaul both state tests and how their scores are used — and of robust criticism of those efforts. Most recently, principals across the state have launched a rebellion against the state’s plan to use student test scores in teacher evaluations. This week, a plan to lengthen reading tests to four hours was released prematurely, then rescinded the next day amid backlash.

The department has yet to find a replacement for Abrams, according to SED spokesman Dennis Tompkins. He said other department officials would fill in for Abrams for now, as would members of a privately funded group that has been advising SED on implementing Race to the Top commitments, which include redesigning student assessments and teacher evaluations.

“Obviously [Abrams] will be missed, but we do have a really strong team that can fill in,” Tompkins said. He declined to comment on the reasons for Abrams’s departure.

Abrams supervised the state’s testing program during a period of controversy and change. (more…)

On the same day that she spent time denying weeks-old rumors about being the future mayor, Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch was rebuked by the current one.

Speaking with reporters in the Bronx today, Mayor Michael Bloomberg took aim at Tisch’s characterization that the Department of Education had “warehoused thousands of kids” in failing schools. Tisch made the comments to the editorial board of the New York Daily News after visiting Brooklyn’s Automotive High School, which started undergoing federally funded “restart” this year.

“She’s totally wrong on the facts,” Bloomberg said. “I don’t know where she got that from. … She’s obviously been misinformed.”

But Tisch had backed up her statement not with hard facts but with anecdotal evidence about what she saw in Automotive’s classrooms and hallways. “No one’s in the class and kids are wandering around the hallway. I couldn’t tell me for the life of me what the instruction was,” Tisch told the Daily News.

Bloomberg, whose administration has relied on data to drive school improvement, said today that Tisch’s approach to identifying and solving problems in schools is misguided:

You can’t run a school system on anecdotal evidence. We have a 1.1 million students to take care of and you can’t run it on … you have to have numbers. (more…)

Three weeks after Merryl Tisch’s name first surfaced as a potential mayoral candiate, the New York Times is reporting something we’ve known all along: she’s not interested.

From our Oct. 21 story:

“I am aware that people are talking about it,” Tisch said. “I am not an idiot.”

“Have people mentioned it to me? Yes. Have I considered it? I am so busy with my work right now, it’s ridiculous.” …

In 2004, Tisch mulled a run at an open City Council seat, but ultimately decided not to, she said, because she enjoyed her work too much on the Board. Over the years, however, she’s remained active politically, donating more than $50,000 to a variety of candidates, mostly Democratic candidates, according to campaign finance filings.

This time around, Tisch said she isn’t even pondering the prospect of a political run. “I am absolutely, positively not going to run,” she said.

This morning, a short item in The New York Post’s Page 6 column reignited these rumors, mentioning that business and real estate leaders are pressing” Tisch to run. In its follow-up story, the Times reports that Tisch once again denied any interest in running for mayor, despite the fact that she and her husband, James Tisch, have been paying a consultancy firm for at least a year: (more…)

Tisch speaking at a GothamSchools panel earlier in August.

Talk is swirling that an unexpected contender from the education world is being drafted to run for mayor of New York City: Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents.

Education, political, government insiders, and Tisch herself say Tisch has been courted by political consultants as a potential candidate to succeed Mayor Bloomberg. The election is still two years out, but so far no clear favorite has emerged from the crowded field of Democratic hopefuls. Even more room is open in the thin slate of independent and Republican candidates. And so far no candidate fits the mold that Bloomberg has established: nonpartisan, well-connected, and wealthy enough to fund a campaign without making many promises.

Some believe the charismatic Tisch, a registered Democrat from the billionaire Tisch family, could emerge as someone to fill that void. More than a half dozen government and education officials, most of whom only spoke anonymously because they didn’t want to speculate, confirmed her name has been surfacing since last year.

“I wouldn’t be surprised so you can’t count her out yet,” said a source.

Longtime New York City political consultant George Artz said he had also heard the chatter but doubted that Tisch would actually run. At this point, he said, a lot of names are being thrown around, including that of Tisch’s own brother-in-law, Jonathan Tisch, Chairman and CEO of Loews Hotels. Still, Artz said, Merryl Tisch had the pedigree to be a solid candidate.

“I wouldn’t be stunned by it,” Artz said. “Merryl’s been around and she obviously has substance, contacts and money – all the ingredients you need to run for political office.” (more…)

After they endorsed anti-cheating measures and the state’s bid for a No Child Left Behind waiver, the Board of Regents turned yesterday to a different policy issue: the plight of students whose families came to the country illegally.

As part of their 2012 legislative agenda, the Regents voted to support the federal Development, Relief, and Education Act for Minors. The DREAM Act, which failed in the U.S. Senate last year, would clear a path toward citizenship for high school graduates whose families are in the country illegally. The act would benefit nearly 350,000 students statewide, many in New York City, by making them able to work legally and get financial aid for college.

Today, Board of Regents Chancellor and State Education Commissioner John King sent a letter to New York’s congressional delegation, urging them to back the DREAM Act when it comes before them during the next legislative session.

The Regents’ endorsement didn’t come without question. Roger Tilles, a Regent who in the past cast one of just three “no” votes against letting test scores count more in teacher evaluations, initially questioned the wisdom of weighing in on the issue. He said the political consequences of taking a stand on immigration could alienate groups that prioritize other education policies. He did not say what those groups could be.

Tisch responded to Tilles with a personal appeal. (more…)

ALBANY — Members of the Board of Regents today endorsed an independent review of the state’s procedures for investigating cheating.

The independent review is a first step in a complete overhaul of the state’s test security procedures that a State Education Department task force recommended last week. The Regents are reviewing the recommendations at their monthly meeting today and tomorrow.

Today’s vote to pursue the independent review came from the P-12 Committee, which supervises education from preschool through high school. With the committee’s endorsement, the measure is expected to pass easily when the entire board votes on it tomorrow.

Approval will trigger an “immediate” review, just as soon as the state finds an entity to conduct it. Education Commissioner John King said the state would look for entities to participate in the review at low or no cost to the state.

That review is likely to generate ideas for how SED can expand its investigative arm, which officials characterized as muddled. (more…)