GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Sixth-graders at Democracy Prep Charter School in Harlem discussed Obama’s speech after watching it via WH.gov. 

Harlem students who watched President Obama’s back-to-school speech today in their school auditorium could not detect anything to disagree with — except for one point.

“I disagree with Obama’s mom about waking him up at 4:30,” Klara Arnold, a 10-year-old sixth-grader at Democracy Prep Charter School, told her principal, who had explained that the speech initially sparked controversy and asked if students had any differences of opinion with the president.

The speech referred to Obama’s mother’s habit of giving him extra lessons to supplement his schooling while he lived in Indonesia.

Since district public schools won’t open until tomorrow, few New York City schools had to tackle the question of whether and how to air the president’s speech today. Democracy Prep Charter School, which opened for full-day sessions today after half-day preparation last week, did, along with other charter schools around the city. (more…)

Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the Board of Regents (file photo)

Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch is challenging President Obama and his secretary of education to a verbal duel over New York’s access to a special pot of federal stimulus dollars for schools.

“I am willing to debate the president and Arne Duncan in public space at any time of their choosing on the impact of this law in New York State,” Tisch said in a telephone interview this evening.

Obama administration officials have said that states that ban the use of test scores to evaluate teachers will not be eligible for the dollars, called the Race to the Top fund. A New York law prohibits something very similar, using student test scores to decide whether teachers deserve tenure.

A nonprofit group, The New Teacher Project, today said the law should exclude New York from receiving Race to the Top funds. (Founded by Michelle Rhee, the D.C. schools chancellor, The New Teacher Project brings non-traditionally trained teachers into school districts and advocates for teaching policies that often clash with teachers unions’ positions.)

Duncan himself has suggested that New York’s law does not make the cut. “Believe it or not, several states including New York, Wisconsin, and California, have laws, they have laws that create a firewall between students and teacher data,” Duncan said at a June conference where he previewed the guidelines around the fund.

The administration’s aim is to spur states to change laws and policies it disapproves of. Duncan has vowed to dole out the dollars in two batches, one this fall and the next in 2010, in order to give state legislatures time to change their laws.

But New York officials, including Governor Paterson and Tisch, have refused to accept that the state might be disqualified. Teachers union officials, including American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who lobbied state lawmakers to pass the law last year, are also lobbying hard for New York not to be disqualified. (more…)

Joel Klein. (File photo)

Joel Klein stayed positive about his reputation in an interview last night on NY1, even as host Dominic Carter played two different clips showing elected officials (both candidates for citywide office) criticizing the schools chancellor.

Klein chalked up any complaints he’s received to politics — and said President Obama is receiving the same kind of flak on the national stage, for implementing a similar education program.

“He’s putting those out there, and you know what’s happening? You get push back,” Klein said.

(I put in a call to David Cantor, Klein’s spokesman, and I’ll write to Klein too, because I’m curious what push back he’s referencing. Both teachers unions have largely supported the Race to the Top stimulus fund, if tentatively. Maybe Klein has in mind Diane Ravitch? Or could he have read Leonie Haimson’s Huffington Post piece yesterday, “Arne Duncan Has Become An Embarrassment”?)

Klein was particularly sanguine about the proposed extension of the city’s so-called “social promotion” ban announced yesterday. “When I came on here in 2004, when the mayor ended social promotion, you had the pictures — everybody was demonstrating, and all the noise,” Klein said. “Now it is 2009 and we have ended social promotion in every one of these grades, and you know what? You don’t hear noise any more, Dominic. You know why? People know what’s right for kids.” (more…)

In a recent speech to the NAACP, President Obama name-dropped a New York City public high school, saying that more schools should emulate Bard High School Early College and push students to earn college credits in addition to their high school diplomas. 

A recent BHSEC graduate who now attends Williams College, Kesi Augustine, explains in a Huffington Post column what makes the small, super-selective school on the Lower East Side so special. (A replica opened last year in Queens.) It’s not just that students can earn as much as two years of college credits before graduating, she writes:

The most rewarding part of my experience at BHSEC, however, WAS more than just the Associate’s degree. The school introduced me to critical thinking and writing about my place in the world. Our teachers did not give us the recipe for performing well on state-wide tests and SATs, although we performed well in that respect, too. Rather, our small classes thrived on student energy in open seminar discussions and debates about course material. …

If we are going to strive for the educational equality Obama calls for, every American student should have the education I did. I was more than prepared for success in “real” college, largely owed to what I learned at BHSEC. (more…)

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan confirmed today that he opposes fixed terms for school board members. “I think you have to serve at the mayor’s pleasure,” Duncan told me on the phone just now. “If you’re going to have mayoral control, you need to have mayoral control.”

The statement inserts President Obama’s top education official even deeper into New York City’s debate on school governance. Duncan first voiced his support for mayoral control in New York City to the New York Post editorial board in March. He argued that giving the mayor full control over urban public schools is the best way to turn them around.

Many education advocates here, including the teachers union, have pushed for fixed terms as a way to eliminate the mayor’s right to remove any school board member at his pleasure. But the issue is facing opposition from Bloomberg and, most recently, from Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, whose latest proposal has school board members serving at the pleasure of the mayor. (more…)

This piece of news slipped through the cracks last month, but it seems newly relevant in light of Mayor Bloomberg’s visit to the Oval Office yesterday: In the wake of gushing visits by Arne Duncan, Obama’s new education secretary, to New York City schools, Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s public advocate, sent Duncan a cautionary note last month.

“While we both agree generally that the Mayor should retain control of the school system, I would caution against focusing too much on the data provided by the Department of Education,” Gotbaum wrote to Duncan in a letter dated April 27. “I have always said that it is a fundamental flaw that the current system gives the Mayor and the Chancellor an incentive to present information in a positive light.”

Gotbaum, who first reported the letter on her blog, enclosed a copy of the report on school governance that she commissioned and the accompanying book, which was published by the Brookings Institution.

For what it’s worth, a slightly curious thing about the visit to D.C. yesterday is that only three men entered the Oval Office with President Obama: the Rev. Al Sharpton; Newt Gingrich, the former House majority leader, and Michael Bloomberg. Joel Klein, who is a co-creator of the Education Equality Project with Sharpton, appeared later with the men outside the White House to speak to reporters, but he did not enter the Oval Office.

Gotbaum’s full letter is after the jump:

(more…)

Mayor Bloomberg will meet with President Obama this afternoon at the Oval Office to talk about the achievement gap. The meeting, which also includes the Rev. Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House majority leader, adds to signs suggesting that Obama is taking the Education Equality Project group’s stance on how to improve public schools seriously.

A spokesman for Chancellor Joel Klein, David Cantor, said that the group will discuss “education reform, in particular how best to address the racial achievement gap.”

The Washington Post reported that Sharpton, who along with Klein is a co-founder of EEP, requested the meeting.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post incorrectly said that Klein attended the meeting at the Oval Office. He did not, though he did appear with the group later outside the White House.

UPDATE: Ben Smith at Politico’s take is that the meeting is “a way for the administration to signal openness to a range of voices on the topic” of education. Seems to me it’s just the opposite, because — believe it or not — at this point Sharpton, Bloomberg, and Gingrich are actually on the same page about education. (more…)

[This post has been updated to include a comment from Jon Schnur.]

WASHINGTON, D.C. —  Jon Schnur, the education policy expert who has been working as an advisor to President Barack Obama and played a pivotal role in writing the federal stimulus plan for schools, will not serve in the Obama administration. He will instead return to running the nonprofit principal-training program New Leaders for New Schools group that he co-founded, according to an e-mail he sent recently to members of New Leaders.

Schnur is one of the most high-profile members of the next-generation “reform” camp of Democrats, who push for dramatic changes in public schools, including strong accountability measures. He had been named as a likely chief of staff to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and was serving as a senior adviser to Duncan, helping him craft the education part of the stimulus bill.

Schnur’s close role in the administration had been seen as a signal of its direction on education, suggesting that the president was siding with the camp of education advocates that includes Schnur (and for which we singled Schnur out as a spokesman), rather than with the camp that is more skeptical of recent accountability efforts.

As word of Schnur’s plans spread around Washington, D.C., the major question I’m hearing people ask is why he is not entering the administration — and what that says about the administration’s direction. (I am in D.C. for the annual meeting of the Education Writers Association, where I am becoming a board member.) (more…)

In his interview with Chancellor Joel Klein this morning, Brian Lehrer of WNYC repeatedly described the $115 billion federal stimulus package for education as being available to states only if they met a steep demand: evaluating teachers based on their students’ test scores.

Klein agreed, calling the evaluations “a general requirement for states to get the stimulus money.” Pressed for specifics on how that would affect the city schools, the chancellor hedged, saying he’s waiting for more details from the Obama administration.

In fact, a spokesman from the U.S. Department of Education told me that states will receive the stimulus funds regardless of their willingness to evaluate teachers using student test scores. “We’re encouraging states to do merit pay,” he said. “But to get all of the stimulus money you don’t have to do merit pay.”

The notion that there are strings in the main pot of the stimulus money is not entirely off base. The federal DOE is asking states to pledge to do a list of four things with the money before they get it (an occurrence that’s scheduled to happen next month, a spokesman told me). Two points on that list also seem to add up to merit pay, or at least provide the ingredients to make it possible — one asking states to improve “teacher effectiveness” and another asking them to create data systems to track students’ progress. And President Obama did, just this week, signal his interest in seeing federally funded merit-pay programs expand to 150 districts from a measly 34.

Finally, there’s another $5 billion pot of money in the stimulus, the “race to the top” fund, that states will have to apply for the use of — and which is dedicated to “innovative” programs that could include performance-based pay.

Here are the four criteria states will have to promise their stimulus funds will meet, cribbed from these federal DOE stimulus guidelines: (more…)