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State education officials are pushing their reform agenda with editorial boards, on television and the radio — and now, in teachers’ email inboxes, too.

Last week, Education Commissioner John King sent an email to teachers across the state explaining the State Education Department’s plans to boost student achievement. Under the subject line “We Must Do Better,” the email acknowledges that many teachers are frustrated by changing expectations and curriculum standards and asks educators for advice about what the state can do to help them.

The email was the first of its kind and is part of a stepped-up campaign to fill educators in on the policy changes taking place in Albany, officials say.

“When I became Commissioner last June, I set two goals: one, to help make sure every student graduates from high school college- and career-ready; and two, to make the State Education Department a model government agency focused on customer service,” King wrote in the email. “As part of that effort, I’ll be reaching out as often as possible — through e-mail, Twitter, and other communication tools — directly with educators in the field.”

Other elements of the department’s ramped up communications strategy are already online. (more…)

With their discretionary funds eliminated and their schools’ budgets deflated, city teachers are supplicating strangers to fill in the gaps.

There are 1,793 projects posted by city teachers – mostly from high poverty schools – on DonorsChoose, a website that allows teachers across the country to describe small-scale projects that need funding. The requests paint a depressing picture of what many classrooms are lacking.

There are the occasional requests for cutting edge technology, such as iPads, tablets and digital cameras. And many of the more ambitious projects range from the creative (violins, costumes, wireless microphones) to the healthy (soccer balls, juicers, pedometers) to the icky (fetal pigs, butterfly larvae, composting worms). But most teachers seem to be asking for classroom staples such as pens, paper, and glue.

Here’s what we saw when we checked out DonorsChoose today:

• More than half of all NYC projects relate to literacy and language, a focus of the Department of Education’s this year. Many teachers, hoping to make their reading areas more appealing, are asking for beanbag chairs, rugs, library shelves and books. Ms. Coneys, from Thurgood Marshall Academy in Manhattan, is requesting a class set of “Things Fall Apart”  for her students. She writes: “School supplies have become less of a priority, and asking students to go out and buy a book they have never heard of is even more difficult. That being said, it’s apparent that my students have the desire to learn something new.” (more…)

New York City’s heralded $75 million experiment in teacher incentive pay — deemed “transcendent” when it was announced in 2007 — did not increase student achievement at all, a new study by the Harvard economist Roland Fryer concludes.

“If anything,” Fryer writes of schools that participated in the program, “student achievement declined.” Fryer and his team used state math and English test scores as the main indicator of academic achievement.

Schools could distribute the bonus money based on individual teachers' results, but most did not. Most teachers received the average bonus of $3,000.

The program, which was first funded by private foundations and then by taxpayer dollars, also had no impact on teacher behaviors that researchers measured. These included whether teachers stayed at their schools or in the city school district and how teachers described their job satisfaction and school quality in a survey.

The program had only a “negligible” effect on a list of other measures that includes student attendance, behavioral problems, Regents exam scores, and high school graduation rates, the study found.

The experiment targeted 200 high-need schools and 20,000 teachers between the 2007-2008 and 2009-2010 school years. The Bloomberg administration quietly discontinued it last year, turning back on the mayor’s early vow to expand the program quickly.

The program handed out bonuses based on the schools’ results on the city’s progress report cards. The report cards grade schools based primarily on how much progress they make in improving students’ state test scores. A so-called “compensation team” at each school decided how to distribute the money — a maximum of $3,000 per teachers union member, if the school completely met its target, and $1,500 per union member if the school improved its report card score by 75%. (more…)

Joseph Almeida, a sixth grade math teacher at KIPP Infinity, taught a lesson to adults at Rockefeller Center.

Among the mix of pages, chancellors, and mayors at NBC’s “Education Nation” outdoor museum at Rockefeller Center this week were a cadre of teachers from around the country who taught live “lessons” to the general public.

The exercise was remarkable for its lack of actual students. The lessons occurred inside one of several mini-tents on the plaza, starting at irregular hours, and the only officially invited guests were teachers, not children.

But the one teacher whose lesson I saw — Joseph Almeida, who teaches sixth grade math at KIPP Academy in the Bronx — did not let that deter him. He tailored his lesson, about place value, to the collection of adult tourists and passersby who gathered around him.

The principal training nonprofit New Leaders for New Schools gathered Almeida and the other roughly 50 teachers who taught public lessons through what New Leaders founder Jon Schnur described as a rigorous process. After recruiting nominations of teachers from around the country, New Leaders reviewed information ranging from the teachers’ students’ performance results to videotapes of their teaching. (more…)

President Barack Obama is expected to sign a $10 billion federal teacher jobs bill into law this evening, opening the way for New York City to receive about $200 million for teacher salaries.

The “edujobs” legislation is meant to stave off teacher layoffs. But in New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg avoided layoffs by revoking planned teacher pay raises, leaving the use of the $200 million unclear. The law requires that districts use the funds to pay for teachers salaries and benefits — not any administrative costs.

One possibility is that pay raises could go back on the negotiating table. The money could also be used to prevent the elimination of 2,000 teaching positions that the city is still planning to lose this year through attrition and not replace.

Overall, New York State will receive an estimated $622 million. Districts will have until September 2012 to use the funds.

Speaking to reporters this afternoon after the bill passed the House, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said that states could see the influx of money in a matter of weeks. “We feel a huge sense of urgency here,” Duncan said.

The bill passed after months of Congressional wrangling. Last month, it faced the threat of a presidential veto after lawmakers wanted to pay for the measure by cutting funds originally meant for Obama administration education reform efforts, including Race to the Top. The final version is paid for by other budget trades, including a $12 billion cut to the federal food stamp program.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein argued before the City Council today that firing teachers, perhaps en masse, is the only strategy left to handle expected budget gaps next school year. “There is very little fat left to trim,” Klein said, discussing a gap that his top budget official said will be at least $600 million and at worst $1.2 billion.

It’s still unclear whether state budget cuts to education will necessitate layoffs at the scale Klein described — a total of 8,500 teachers in the most draconian scenario. The state legislature is working towards an April 1 deadline to pass a budget, and while the Senate and governor’s proposed budget would cost the city schools more than $400 million at a minimum, the Assembly is reportedly planning far less severe cuts.

But at the City Council today Klein stuck to his doomsday predictions, outlining how the 8,500 layoffs would hit each school district. Under the state’s current “last in, first out” method of cutting the most recently hired teachers first, neighborhoods from the South Bronx to the Upper East Side — which have the highest density population of younger teachers, due mainly to either high turnover rates or enrollment spikes — would lose nearly a fifth of their teachers immediately next year, Klein said.

Eight other districts in those areas, mainly in Manhattan and the Bronx, would all lose more than 15 percent of their teachers to layoffs. (The Department of Education’s full list of how each district would be affected by layoffs is below the jump.) (more…)

It has now been six weeks since I found out I was being excessed and two weeks since I found a new job. Throughout the process of my job search I relied entirely on the Open Market Hiring System run through the NYC Schools web site. The fact I was hired relatively quickly and easily implies the system is a success, but that doesn’t mean we can’t examine it a bit deeper. First I’ll give some background on the Open Market system, then some number from my search, and finally my unofficial report card for the Open Market.

The Open Market Hiring System can be found by clicking through the careers section of the NYC schools web site. It’s designed to allow any NYC schools employee from teachers to guidance counselors to search for open positions within the system. Using your employee ID it doesn’t take more than few minutes to create an account. From there you can create an application with your basic information, a cover letter and resume, and begin your search for open positions.

The day I found out I was excessed I went straight to the web site, created an account, and within an hour or so I’d already applied to more than 20 schools.

A look at my job search by the numbers:

Total time spent on Open Market web site: Approx. 3 hours
Total number of positions applied for: 49
Total number of interviews offered: 3 (more…)

New teachers who have wanted to help the city address its severe shortage of science teachers can now be considered for jobs.

Until today, the teachers had been shut out of the system because of a hiring freeze that has limited principals to teachers already working in the city. 

Principals are still limited to current teachers when they hire biology teachers, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Ann Forte. In March, there were 35 biology teachers in the “excess pool,” for teachers already on the system’s payroll, but not hired at a school. The hiring restrictions, in place since early May, were meant to make it more likely for principals to hire teachers in the pool, including those whose positions were lost to budget cuts this spring. The department still has not released information about how many teaching positions were cut this spring.

Last week, the city gave the okay to new teachers whose licenses enable them to teach in District 75, which serves the system’s most disabled students. About 70 Teaching Fellows were affected by that change.

I Teach NYC, the city’s program to attract new teachers, posted about today’s change on Twitter just after 5:30 p.m.

Regular commenter KitchenSink, a principal, sparked an interesting debate in the comments section by making this claim (emphasis added):

The muckraking days are over, people, no one is losing fingers in factory accidents and kids aren’t working long hours in windowless rooms. At least not in this country. The key labor battles have been won, and teachers have multiple avenues for dealing with injustice.

Ceolaf, equally regular commenter, challenged (again emphasis mine):

Clearly, the key workplace safety battles have been won. Perhaps the key child labor battles have been won. But it is not clear that work dignity, living wage, healthcare and retirement security are anywhere near won. In fact, there seem to be rollbacks in those areas. I would argue that there remain many key labor battle to be won, or even re-won.

New York City teachers have seen their salaries jump 43% under Mayor Bloomberg. But does that mean they have achieved “work dignity”? Discuss. (Bonus points for providing examples from your own experience!)

Teach for America, the program that places new teachers in hard-to-staff public schools, is planning to send nearly a third of its new New York City teachers to charter schools this fall, up from just 3% in 2005, internal TFA projections show.

The shift to charter schools insulates the latest batch of Teach For America teachers from a new-teacher hiring freeze the city announced earlier this month. Charter schools are publicly funded but privately operated, so they aren’t subject to the freeze and can hire any certified teacher, whether she is already in the Department of Education system or not.

The move follows a downsizing in Teach For America’s pool to about 300 from 500 teachers last year. The city’s dismal budget picture led to the retraction. (more…)