GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

New York Magazine’s news blog Daily Intel ran a post this morning summing up the Wall Street Journal’s take on the number of unemployed teachers who are “ignoring openings,” as the Journal put it. Both publications got facts wrong, but in their own ways.

Daily Intel’s post adheres faithfully to the WSJ and Department of Education’s line until the very last paragraph when its author took a left turn. She writes:

The Journal thinks Klein is holding on to the pool for philosophical purity. “For Mr. Klein, forcing teachers into vacancies would go against his philosophy of giving principals market-based autonomy and accountability.” So in order to promote free-market principals and accountability, Klein wants to offer job security for life to laid-off employees during a recession with no stipulations for getting them back into the city’s workforce? We must have missed that social-studies class.

Klein does not want to offer job security for life to laid-off employees during a recession with no stipulations for getting them back into the city’s workforce. In fact, he wants the opposite. (more…)

Overcrowding in Manhattan schools seems to be more acute than usual this year. But in the rest of the city, Manhattan’s overcrowding story isn’t news: For years, many schools in the outer boroughs haven’t been able to accommodate all of the children who live near them for years.

So writes Jeff Coplon in next week’s New York Magazine: 

The DOE perennially “caps” the enrollments of dozens of schools in the Bronx and Queens and Brooklyn, busing hundreds of kindergartners out of places like Elmhurst or Norwood. In the northwest corner of the Bronx, the poorest urban county in the nation, District 10 leads the city in capped schools-seven by the count of the DOE, nine by that of Marvin Shelton, the president of the district’s Community Education Council. (The crush can only worsen this fall, given the closure of kindergartens at city-run day-care centers: more than 3,000 of the city’s least-advantaged 5-year-olds, thrown into the DOE’s Mixmaster.) The children are bused miles east to west in rush-hour traffic and arrive home so exhausted they take two-hour naps. More than a dozen other schools dodge formal caps by shunting students to annexes blocks away or hauling makeshift “mini-schools” or double-wides onto their properties.

Coplon’s report jives with data made available online last week by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, which show that Manhattan is far from having the most crowded schools.

There’s actually a fair amount of news today, but I want to make sure that this doesn’t slip through the cracks: New York Magazine reported yesterday on a new friendship between Joel Klein, the chancellor, and the actress Julia Stiles.

Apparently Stiles met Klein by interrupting him at a recent party where he was reacting to an Obama speech. Stiles stopped him in order to describe her own issues with the city’s public schools. Then she got embarrassed for getting so excited about the education issue:

Afterward, Stiles, mortified (“I have a lot to say and I was wildly inarticulate”), apologized and awkwardly asked for Klein’s e-mail. He took hers instead, saying “I’ll be in touch.” “I’d seen a couple of her movies, but I couldn’t remember her name,” Klein admitted, but he e-mailed her to follow up. “We’re now e-mail pals. She likes what we’re doing on charters.”