GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Mayor Michael Bloomberg fought against growing opposition to his selection of magazine publisher Cathie Black this morning, saying that he and Chancellor Joel Klein had “spent a lot of time finding the right person.” Bloomberg said he had been discussing Klein’s departure with him “for months” and only began to search for a successor in earnest once he “slowly…became convinced” that Klein truly intended to leave.

His remarks, on the John Gambling radio show this morning, described the search process:

Anybody that comes in wants to have a chance to really get up to speed and make a difference and stick with that difference and implement it and show that it works earlier rather than later. And we’d been talking about it for months, and I’ve been looking — at the beginning I wasn’t sure he [Klein] was serious, but slowly as I became convinced he was, I started looking — and he and I together spent a lot of time finding the right person.

The description follows a report in the New York Times that Klein himself only learned who his successor would be on Monday.

Black told the New York Post this week that the mayor offered her the job after approaching her a “couple of weeks ago on a Monday.” Black’s account, as reported in the Post, suggested that the mayor offered her the job at their first meeting:

“Monday the mayor called,” she told me. “We know each other a long time. I didn’t know what he wanted. He only told me this was a personal call and he wanted to meet. I couldn’t exactly say, ‘Sorry, Mr. Mayor, but I’m busy,’ but the fact is I had back-to-back meetings at Hearst, so I said I couldn’t today but could tomorrow.’

“He said, ‘How’s 7 a.m. tomorrow?’ I said, ‘Fine.’ We met in his foundation offices. The offer came out of left field, and my stomach did a flip-flop. The opportunity made me feel fantastic.”

In her Post interview, Black described meeting with Klein for an hour and a half. (more…)

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein’s emphasis on standardized test scores appears to be working: an analysis of state test scores before and after mayoral control reveals “a broad and steady march upward,” the Times’ Elissa Gootman and Robert Gebeloff report.

The rates of New York City students passing standardized English and math tests have risen at a faster pace than statewide passing rates overall, and Queens and Staten Island have gone from among the lowest-scoring counties in the state to among the best, according to the Times’ report.

The story mentions in passing that the results of the 2007 federal National Association of Educational Progress showed no significant progress among New York City’s eighth-grade students during Mayor Bloomberg’s tenure. Some experts claim that NAEP scores may be a better measure of overall student performance because it’s more difficult to engage in direct test preparation and thus less vulnerable to score inflation.

But Klein dismissed those concerns, telling the Times that the state tests are a valid measure of learning: (more…)

The special pot of federal stimulus dollars for schools known as the “Race to the Top” money should go toward extra services outside of education, like health clinics, child care, and immigration advice, teachers union president Randi Weingarten suggests in her latest paid New York Times column (PDF).

The idea is to infuse the federal stimulus effort with Weingarten’s favored “community schools” concept, in which schools function not just to teach children but also as service centers for the wider neighborhood around them. Weingarten calls the idea “a model for the best use of mayoral control.”

She also discloses that she has asked Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to join the United Federation of Teachers in supporting the “broader, bolder mission” of what she is calling Active Communities Enabling Success, or ACES.

From the column:

The network of schools, open evenings and weekends, would be a locus for health and mental health services, either through the co-location of clinics, mobile clinics or partnerships with local providers and hospitals. After-school tutoring and enrichment programs would be closely aligned with the instructional day, but the schools would also include opportunities for exercise, sports, arts and culture, and community service. For families and members of the community, childcare, pre-school, ESL, GED and vocational classes would be available. Finally, referrals could be made for housing issues, employment opportunities, immigration issues and legal problems. …

And for those who say this approach tries to do everything but teach, that is far from the truth. There is no conflict between emphasizing academics and tending to children’s broader needs. For our most disadvantaged kids, our schools can and must do both.

The proposal is consistent with what Weingarten told me the day after the stimulus bill was announced in February. It’s also a part of broader efforts to tie better social services to mayoral control: A representative of one of the city’s oldest social service agencies told me she thought improved social services are the promise of mayoral control.

A public school principal in Fort Greene is asking for a public, face-to-face meeting with concerned community members after Internet and newspaper reports described dissatisfaction with his leadership.

One report, in the Brooklyn Paper, said unhappiness with the principal, Sean Keaton, of the Clinton Hill School, P.S. 20, is behind a surge of interest in the nearby Community Roots charter school. Another report, at Insideschools.org, includes a parent describing Keaton as “authoritarian,” “hostile,” and “abusive.” The frustration comes as a flood of middle class families are moving to the Brooklyn neighborhood – and often searching for options outside P.S. 20, their zoned school. The Brooklyn Paper reported that only 27% of kindergarten-aged students zoned for P.S. 20 attend it.

Parents posting in the comments sections of the Times blog and at Insideschools said they feel Keaton shuts them out of the school. One said that he has a “closed door policy to the parents.” (more…)

The sign-off on the November 2002 letter in which Mayor Bloomberg hired Joel Klein as schools chancellor.

There’s an argument raised in Elissa Gootman’s long-anticipated profile of Chancellor Joel Klein that deserves more reporting. That’s the idea that Klein, though he was hired by Mayor Bloomberg and serves at the mayor’s pleasure, is actually different from the mayor in terms of personality and policies.

The most vociferous spokeswoman for this view is Randi Weingarten, who for several years now has been differentiating between Bloomberg, the good-guy pragmatist she can work with, and Klein, the ideologue who alienates teachers. She uses the distinction to illustrate a larger point she makes on the national stage, about the importance of finding a “third way” in which so-called reformers, who often criticize teachers unions, work collaboratively with unions to improve public schools.

Weingarten’s distinction became most prominent when the mayor announced he’d seek a third term. While many of the teachers, parents, and education advocates opposed to Bloomberg’s school reforms were enraged by this possibility, Weingarten was softer on the mayor. She reserved her raised-voice fury for Klein. “The discussion on mayoral control has changed significantly with the prospect of Joel Klein being the chancellor for the next four years,” she told me the next month, adding:

I’ve heard a lot of debate and conversations about this, and it has actually changed the debate on mayoral control, when people think about who will be the chancellor for the next four years. And when they think it’s going to be Joel Klein as chancellor, I’ve heard lots of people talk about the need to have far more stringent checks and balances.

But is there really much distance between Klein and Bloomberg? Maybe Bloomberg strikes a somewhat more conciliatory public persona, or at least is more polite during his meetings with Weingarten. But how does he act privately? Does he ever pull the reins on Klein’s more radical proposals? (more…)

A major downside to opening up boutique schools with special programs and higher expectations is that some children will inevitably be left behind. What becomes of them?

Victor Harbison, a Chicago teacher, grapples with this question on a post on Nicholas Kristoff’s New York Times blog today. Selective schools offer opportunities for top students, Harbison writes, but they also cause less motivated or skilled students to be concentrated in non-selective schools, making it harder for those schools to succeed. He writes:

When educational leaders decided to create magnet schools, they didn’t just get it wrong, they got it backwards. They pulled out the best and brightest from our communities and sent them away. The students who are part of the “great middle” now find themselves in an environment where the peers who have the greatest influence in their school are the least positive role models.

Schools adapted, and quickly. We tightened security, installed metal detectors, and adopted ideas like zero-tolerance. And neighborhood schools, without restrictive admission policies based on test scores, quickly spiraled downward …

Imagine if pulling out the “bottom ten” had been the policy for the past 30 years. Neighborhood schools could have purred along like the go-go 90’s under Clinton and the students with the greatest needs, facing the greatest challenges, would have had millions of dollars in resources devoted to their education in brand new state-of-the-art buildings (with Ivy League-educated, amazing teachers, no doubt). …

I look forward to the arguments defending magnet schools. They are legion and many are spot on. That is, if you can live with the idea of condemning the vast majority of students in your community to sub-standard schools.

There’s an extensive discussion of this phenomenon, which critics call “creaming,” going on elsewhere on our site. Read more here, here, and here.

Like City Room just said, in adding us to their blog roll, we cover the New York City schools. Here you can find daily updates on developments like these: What the teachers union thinks of the Mayor Bloomberg, how budget cuts are affecting schools — and their paper, all the secret government investigations you aren’t reading about, real video of movie stars defending their children’s schools, and more things that haven’t happened yet.

Sound good? Please subscribe to our RSS, join the bustling comments section, and send tips about your school.

When the city last year centralized admissions standards for gifted and talented programs, setting a single standard for all city programs, one goal was to open the programs up to a more diverse set of students. But, as Eduwonkette first pointed out and Elissa Gootman then reported in the Times, the result was the opposite: Although more students were tested for giftedness, poor children fared much worse on the admissions test. The low admit rates put gifted programs in poor neighborhoods at risk of shutting down; the city discontinues programs if there aren’t enough students eligible to join them.

Now, I’m hearing that at least one of the programs that’s in jeopardy is fighting back. Its strategy: stealthily test-prepping 4- and 5-year-olds for the admissions test, which students take in January. The program’s idea, described to me by an educator who asked to remain anonymous, is to zero in on pre-kindergarteners and kindergartners at the school that houses the program. If those students can learn to score well on the gifted test, called the OLSAT, the program might survive.

There’s nothing unique about prepping children for the test. Tutoring companies offer just that service to families that can afford it. But at this program, the educator I spoke to said she’s doing the homework herself, studying the OLSAT and buying prep materials that matched the kinds of skills it demands.

The media watchdog's logo.

The media-watchdog group FAIR, a left-wing enterprise that refers to most major newspapers and magazines as the “corporate media,” says that mainstream publications deserve a “failing grade” for coverage of the fight to become Obama’s education secretary. FAIR says the press failed by characterizing just one side of the debate — those who disagree with teachers unions —  as being reform-minded.

It holds up a single exception in Sam Dillon of the New York Times, who on Sunday wrote:

Editorials and opinion articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have described the debate as pitting education reformers against those representing the educational establishment or the status quo. But who the reformers are depends on who is talking.

Hey, we’ve read that idea somewhere else. Where was it … ?

Talking about Barack Obama’s hopes for expanding early childhood education (school for 3- and 4-year-olds) Sam Dillon reports in the Times this morning that, despite efforts to make pre-kindergarten available, New York State’s efforts are “far from complete.” How far? Pretty far. There are two areas to pay attention to: access (how many 4-year-olds are actually enrolled in programs) and quality (are the programs doing real teaching or simply baby-sitting?).

Let’s start with access. New York City advocates told me last year that they estimate demand for pre-kindergarten in the city at about 75,000 4-year-olds. Yet the number of 4-year-olds who are taking part so far this year is 54,000. That represents a steady increase from years past, the Department of Education’s director of early childhood education, Recy B. Dunn, just told me in a telephone interview. But it’s still far away from universal — and it’s also below the number of seats the state agreed to pay for this year, 60,000, a package that would cost just over $230 million, Dunn said. The picture statewide is arguably bleaker. Winnie Hu of the Times reported last year that only 38% of 4-year-olds in the state participated in programs. (more…)