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The City Council’s education committee has given a great deal of scrutiny to schools the Department of Education wants to close. Now it’s turning its attention to the new schools the department wants to open.

Today, the committee held an oversight hearing about the DOE’s new school creation process, which has resulted in more than 400 new schools in the last nine years.

The process to open a charter school is set in law, but how new district schools come to exist is more obscure, Robert Jackson, the committee’s chair, said during the hearing.

“Some charge that there’s been two many new schools opened in too short a time, with too little planning and preparation and too much emphasis on quantity over quality,” he said.

Of the 500 district and charter schools that have opened since 2002, just six have closed because of poor performance, said Marc Sternberg, the DOE deputy chancellor in charge of new schools. He said the schools’ success stems in large part from the department’s selection process for school models and principals.

That process has gotten more stringent this year. Prospective school leaders will have to complete a rigid, three-month-long series of assignments, and at three points, some will be culled from the pool. (more…)

New York State’s Board of Regents approved 15 new charter schools today that will open in New York City in the fall of next year.

Ten of those schools were authorized by the State University of New York’s Charter School Institute back in September and the remaining five were authorized today by the Board of Regents. The board also approved charters for three schools that will open in Mount Vernon, Rochester, and East Irondequoit.

Among the charter schools approved today is the New York City Montessori Charter School, the city’s first public Montessori school. Also on the list is Launch Expeditionary Learning Charter School, the first charter school opened by the Expeditionary Learning network in the city. Expeditionary Learning currently oversees ten district schools in New York.

The two charter schools that New Visions is opening in the South Bronx are the only typical four-year high schools in the group. Launch Expeditionary Learning Charter School will, at full size, be a 6-12 school, and the Urban Dove Charter School will admit students who are ages 16-18 regardless of what grade they’re in. (more…)

Afraid of another lawsuit from the teachers union, city officials have decided to force fewer new schools to share space this year.

Originally, the Department of Education planned to begin closing 19 schools next September and open 16 schools — most of them brand new — in their buildings. But that plan was put on hold when the union successfully sued to stop the closures. With the court silent on whether new schools could still open, the city announced that it would proceed to open them.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said he was concerned that opening new schools while keeping the original schools in business would mean severe overcrowding in some buildings.

Now the two sides have reached an agreement that will change some of the planned colocations and, as part of the deal, the UFT has waived its right to sue over the colocations.

Under the agreement, five new schools that would have co-located with closing schools will open elsewhere, including one in the union’s office. The deal also gives the saved schools more support and possibly more staff, but not more money. (more…)

The city has no plans to fight an appellate court ruling that will keep open 19 schools marked for closure, Chancellor Joel Klein said today. But it does plan to open new schools in the same buildings.

That’s despite the fact that the same closure proposals that judges deemed inadequate were also used to justify opening 17 new schools in those buildings.

Whenever the city wants to shut down a school or make several schools share the same building space, state law requires city officials to prepare “educational impact statements” (or EIS’s) that examine how the changes will affect students and the surrounding community. The EIS’s that the citywide school board approved in January included, in the same documents, both the plans to close the 19 schools and replace many of them starting next year.

Today, five appellate court judges unanimously ordered the city to reissue those EIS’s with more detail than what the court called “boilerplate information about seat availability.”

But Department of Education officials said today that ruling does not mean the city has to re-start the public approval process to co-locate the new schools in the buildings where they had planned to shut schools down. “The court’s decision relates to the phase-out of failing schools, not the siting of new schools,” said DOE spokesman Danny Kanner. (more…)

Having narrowly escaped laying off more than 4,000 teachers — at least for now — Chancellor Joel Klein is permitting some principals to hire new ones.

Hiring rules posted today on the Department of Education’s website continue, and in some cases tighten, restrictions that have been in place since May 2009. Under the new rules, schools that opened in 2008 or later can hire up to 40 percent of their new teachers from outside the system. Last year, new schools could look outside the system for 50 percent their hires.

Unlike last year, new schools are barred from hiring elementary school classroom teachers who don’t already work in the system. And the exemption granted for science teachers in the past is no longer in place; only a tiny number of license areas are free of restrictions, such as special education and Spanish bilingual education.

Anticipating that principals are likely to cut assistant principal positions this year to meet their slimmed down budgets, the city is also requiring that all schools hire assistant principals from the excess pool. Last year, as in previous years, principals could hire assistant principals from inside and outside the system.

Prospective teachers have only until the end of the month to apply to teach. The rules posted today, which could change as the system’s staffing needs become clearer, are listed below. (more…)

Principal hopefuls line up outside Wagner Middle School to enter the city's new school creation fair.

Bronx assistant principal Michelle Vargas wants to open a school where teachers will have ample time to work together and students will benefit from her years of experience in the classroom.

But before she can get started, Vargas must persevere through the city’s new school creation process. She took the first step Thursday night by joining more than 400 other school leader hopefuls at a fair to learn about what the city wants to see in new schools.

Every year, the Department of Education opens new schools — more than 400 since 2002. Director of Portfolio Planning Debra Kurshan told fair attendees that the city intends to keep up the pace in 2011.

What’s different this year is that the city is telling wannabe principals exactly what kind of schools it wants to open, and where it expects to site them. The request for proposals released today lists schools identified as having extra space and schools that could be reopened with new leadership under new federal rules. (more…)

Four days before the vote that will determine whether the city can close 20 schools this year, the Department of Education released a list of their replacements.

The DOE is making a pretty safe bet — the citywide panel that will decide these schools’ fate next week has never voted down any of the chancellor’s proposals.

It’s difficult to understand what next year will look like because information about the closures has come out in drips and in Educational Impact Statements no civilian should have to read. Hoping to make the picture a little less foggy, I’ve compiled a list of all the schools that are slated for closure and their planned replacements.

When possible, I’ve included enrollment sizes and descriptions of the new schools. Some new schools’ impact statements are so vague and full of edu-speak, it remains well-nigh impossible to know how they’ll be pedagogically different from the schools they replace. (more…)

Principal wannabes hoping to open up new city high schools got marching orders from city officials last night: Try to focus on students still learning English or vocational programs.

The advice came at a meeting held by the Office of Portfolio Planning, where more than a dozen people stood before an audience of community board members and parents and tried to sell their vision for a new high school. Most said they wanted to open schools that focus on English Language Learners or students who are older and are not on track to graduate.

Though the final proposals are not due until December, the principal-hopefuls were there to see what kind of reception their envisioned new schools would get from parents and community board members.

Johanny Garcia, an assistant principal at the Urban Assembly School for Careers in Sports, proposed a high school for ELL students, which he once was. (more…)

The city’s drive to open new small high schools has taken a serious toll on older, larger schools, and there are signs that the new schools’ success could be short-lived, according to a report being released today.

The report, an analysis of the small schools bonanza by the Center for New York City Affairs, concludes that the city must do more to support large high schools, which continue to enroll the vast majority of city high school students despite the proliferation of small schools, and which are straining under the burden of enrolling the system’s neediest students. 

At the core of the report is the finding that as small schools opened, large schools nearby suffered huge jumps in enrollment, especially among low-performing students and students with special needs. Those schools have seen attendance decline, disorder increase, and graduation rates drop, according to the report. In some places, these shifts have caused the city to restructure the newly troubled large schools, displacing at-risk students once again, the report concludes.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein told researchers that he understands that his strategy of closing low-performing schools and replacing them with new options could inflict some collateral damage on large high schools. “This is about improving the system, not necessarily about improving every single school,” he said about the strategy at the center of his reforms since he took office in 2003.

The report backs up the city’s claim that the small schools graduate their students in higher numbers, but it raises questions about how long the schools can sustain their success. (more…)