GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Feminist movement icon Gloria Steinem has weighed in on Hearst Magazines executive Cathie Black’s appointment as the new schools chancellor, backing up her former colleague from Ms. Magazine.

But if the bulk of the criticism being directed at Black centers on her scant background in education, Steinem’s statement of support might not do any good. After describing Black’s accomplishments and suggesting that critics are holding Black to a higher standard than they did Joel Klein, Steinem bungles the name of the school advisory board Black sits on.

“Now, her abilities as a publisher are being held to a different standard than Joel Klein as a prosecutor, even though she is on the board of a Harlem magnet school,” Steinem writes.

Black does sit on the national leadership advisory board for a group of schools in Harlem, but they aren’t magnet schools. Harlem Village Academies schools are charter schools, meaning they are privately run, but publicly funded. (more…)

Teachers at a high school under investigation for grade-changing were surprised to receive the school’s yearly progress report this week. The report was supposed to be under wraps until an investigation into the school’s grading process ended.

But a bureaucratic mistake at the Department of Education led to the letter grade being released and folded into a report that was given to the school and posted online.

Last year, when the DOE published schools’ grades, Herbert Lehman High School was left off the list. Allegations that the school’s executive principal, Janet Saraceno, was changing dozens of grades to boost the school’s graduation rate, were serious enough that the progress report data couldn’t be published, officials decided. The report, which is based on Regents passage, credit accumulation, and graduation rates, heavily relies on data that could be compromised by Saraceno’s alleged actions. (more…)