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Edgar Rodriguez recently became principal of the Academy for Careers in Television and Film in Long Island City, Queens. He helped start the school in 2008 and acted as its assistant principal for the last four years, until the founding principal left in January.

On his first day as principal of the Academy for Careers in Television and Film in January, Edgar Rodriguez had his hands full. The two phones in his high school office rang in short, steady intervals. After a few loud rings, he picked up the one on his desk and calmed the muffled voice on the other end. Then, with a couple of strides, he was on the second phone on the opposite side of the room. “Code Blue,” he said. It was a signal for staff members who could operate a defibrillator to report to one of the school’s rooms. “Okay, great. Get everyone there.” That day, ACTvF was doing a practice drill.

For more than four years, Rodriguez had been the assistant principal of ACTvF, a Long Island City high school with 419 students. The school opened in 2008 under the leadership of founding principal Mark Dunetz, Rodriguez, and a team of staff members whose vision was to create “a non-selective high school that provided a high quality education.”  They did not screen students by their academic performance. Instead they opened their doors to a diverse mix of students, many from the surrounding Queens neighborhood.

Located just south of the bustle of 36th Avenue in Queens, ACTvF aims to train students for practical careers in television and film production through in-house work and industry internships. Within a year of opening, the school was attracting more applicants than it could accommodate. Soon, students were thriving and, when the school graduated its first class last year, all of the students in it had gotten into college. The 96 percent graduation rate helped the school post the third-highest score last year on its progress report, the tool the city uses to evaluate and compare schools.

In January, Dunetz left the school he founded to join the nonprofit New Visions for Public Schools as its first vice president of school support, a promotion that made him the main contact between New Visions and the 73 city schools it supports. His departure was a testament to ACTvF’s success — but it also meant that the school faced a leadership transition that many other new schools had found difficult to overcome. (more…)

Hundreds of child care providers like Iraida Tkacheva are affected by the EarlyLearn initiative.

On a cool Friday afternoon, 10 bright-eyed toddlers played outdoors, giggling and speaking Russian, before heading inside for a homemade lunch. During the week, they spend more time with Iraida Tkacheva, their child-care provider, than they do with their working parents.

Tkacheva has transformed nearly every room in her Bensonhurst house to cater to the children’s needs: an area with tables and chairs where the toddlers eat, a library full of children’s books, a nap area surrounded by walls plastered with educational posters, and a backyard that accommodates toys for playtime with security gates and enclosed circuit cameras to ensure the children’s safety at all times.

Yet once the mayor’s ambitious overhaul of the city’s child-care system takes place on October 1, through a program called EarlyLearn, Tkacheva and hundreds of people who offer subsidized child-care in their homes are set to lose their jobs if funding falls through.

EarlyLearn – one of Bloomberg’s latest education reforms before he leaves office next year – sets out to increase the quality of publicly funded early childhood education while distributing child-care slots to the neediest neighborhoods. It is, according to some advocates, the biggest change to the city’s child-care services in 40 years.

Criticism of EarlyLearn has focused on the fact that it reduces the overall number of early childhood seats. But another major change — about who the city is hiring to provide child care in private homes — has some child-care advocates concerned. (more…)

The Obama administration’s $3.5 billion effort to turn around the country’s lowest-performing schools has had a bumpy start in New York City.

The first schools to participate in the program here used one of the less dramatic of the four models laid out by the Obama administration for how schools can be overhauled. To comply with a requirement that the principal of the school be removed, one set of schools played a game of musical principals. And officials’ efforts to reach an agreement with the teachers union on how to use a more drastic model — one that requires removing teachers as well as the school principal — faltered. Late in the school year, officials to turned to the “re-start” model instead.

A new package on Education Week’s web site suggests that New York’s rocky experience is not entirely unique. The package showcases reporting on other cities’ turnaround efforts, including reporting from GothamSchools. It also shows that a wide majority of schools receiving the turnaround funds opted for the less dramatic “transformation” model that was the first city school officials turned to.

In Denver, a turnaround plan for a group of schools became so contentious that it was a top issue in a recent school board election, according to coverage from Education News Colorado.

In Philadelphia, Superintendent Arlene Ackerman has embraced the restart model, welcoming charter school networks to take over 15 schools. She’s invested additional resources in another group of 18 schools called “promise academies.” But her efforts have faced resistance, too, including a lawsuit by the teachers union protesting the removal of a teacher who challenged the turnaround plan, the Philadelphia Public School Notebook reports.

And in Kentucky, a principal has removed half of the original teaching staff and changed the name of his school altogether. It’s now called the “Academy @ Shawnee,” Education Week reports.

Read the full package here.