GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The Department of Education has named seven more schools it intends to close and three more schools where it aims to lop off middle school grades.

The 10 schools named today join 15 whose proposed closures or truncations were announced yesterday. The new additions to the closure list include three long-troubled high schools; two middle schools started under the Bloomberg administration; and the middle school grades of Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing Arts, where scholar Cornel West last week pledged to fight any closure plans.

Under the proposals, Manhattan’s century-old Washington Irving High School, which the DOE had shrunk in recent years, will stop accepting new students and will close its doors in 2015. So will Grace Dodge Career and Technical Education High School, where students recently complained that they had been left without teachers in some classes. And Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education High School in the Bronx, where students had been sounding the alarm about the school’s status for years, will also close.

Both Washington Irving and Grace Dodge are in their first year of federally funded “transformation,” an improvement strategy reserved for the most struggling schools. Department officials said that the schools chosen to replace Washington Irving and Grace Dodge would get their federal funds in an arrangement that the city used to support 16 new schools this year. (more…)

Yesterday’s high school progress reports release put 60 schools on existential notice.

Fourteen high schools got failing grades, 28 received D’s, and another 14 have scored at a C or lower since at least 2009 — making them eligible for closure under Department of Education policy.

In the coming weeks, the city will winnow the list of schools to those it considers beyond repair. After officials release a shortlist of schools under consideration for closure, they will hold “early engagement” meetings to find out more about what has gone wrong. City officials said they would look at the schools’ Quality Reviews, state evaluations, and past improvement efforts before recommending some for closure. Last month, they said they were considering closure for just 20 of the 128 elementary and middle schools that received low progress report grades.

The at-risk high schools are spread over every borough except for Staten Island and include many of the comprehensive high schools that are still open in the Bronx, including DeWitt Clinton High School and Lehman High School, which until recently were considered good options for many students. They also include two of the five small schools on the Erasmus Campus in Brooklyn and two of the three  small schools that have long occupied the John Jay High School building in Park Slope. (A fourth school, which is selective, opened at John Jay this year.)

They include several of the schools that received “executive principals” who got hefty bonuses to turn conditions around. (more…)

Principals will receive school budgets tomorrow that include a new 5 percent cut, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced today. The cuts are so deep that the department is temporarily abandoning its plan to finish adopting a new funding formula that it said would make school budgets more equitable.

The cuts, totaling $405 million across the city schools, could threaten non-teacher staff positions, after school programs, and training for teachers. But roughly 60 percent of schools will not actually experience cuts of the maximum size, Klein told reporters at a briefing today. That’s because slightly more than half of all principals chose not to allocate every dollar in their budgets for this year, instead “rolling over” a total of $95 million. The rainy day funds are being wiped out by the new cuts but are also softening the blow of next year’s cuts for many schools.

In addition, about 80 schools receiving the largest amounts of federal anti-poverty funds will actually see a slight increase in the size of their budgets, Klein said. The remaining 40 percent of schools will see their budgets drop the maximum 4.9 percent, he said.

Today’s cuts are on top of a total average 3 percent cut made to school budgets over the last year and a half.

Because of the cuts, the DOE is suspending its plan to start charging schools the real salaries that teachers make, a change that had been the cornerstone of the department’s Fair Student Funding formula. (more…)

Even the mighty Teach For America, whose annual budget nearly tripled in the last three years to $110 million, is suffering the effects of recession.

The national organization that places recent college graduates in hard-to-fill teaching positions is dramatically scaling back the size of its New York City cohort this fall, according to an e-mail sent today by the region’s alumni director to former TFA corps members. About 350 TFA teachers will start teaching in the city in September, down from more than 500 this year. Of the 350 teachers, nearly 30 percent are likely to be placed in charter schools, a higher proportion than in the past, the e-mail said.

And the organization says it could reduce the size of New York City cohort even further, depending on how the city’s budget shapes up. (If the layoffs that the mayor and chancellor have warned about actually happen, you can be sure that there won’t be too many 22-year-olds teaching in the city this fall.)

The e-mail also contains a guide to some of the factors that could affect demand for new teachers this fall, no matter their path to the classroom:

• A reduced NYC DOE budget means there is simply less money with which to hire new teachers at the school level; principal budgets will be cut across the board.
• Retirement and resignation rates among all city employees, including central NYC DOE staff, school administrators, and teachers, are expected to decline as a result of the poor economy.
• The NYC DOE recently instituted a meaningful financial incentive for principals to hire teachers from the Active Teacher Reserve as opposed to hiring new teachers through sources such as the NYC Teaching Fellows and Teach For America, or through traditional routes.
• Central NYC DOE staff may go back to working in schools, occupying both teaching and administrative vacancies, as a result of cuts in central staff positions.

The entire letter is after the jump. (more…)

Philissa wrote that we were confused earlier today when Mayor Bloomberg said that Governor Paterson is actually proposing to cut on the order of $600 million from schools in the next fiscal year. The Daily News had reported a much lower figure this morning, $206 million.

What are the true facts? The above chart shows, in billions of dollars, how much funding the state has sent to New York City public schools each school year from 2006-07 to the current one, 2008-09, and how much Governor Paterson’s proposed budget would have it send in 2009-2010. The big increases up until 2009-2010 were not just big but historic, reflecting the settlement of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, which led to a plan to pour billions extra dollars into the city public schools over four years.

The amount Governor Paterson is proposing to send 2009-2010, $8.1 billion, cuts both off of last year’s total funding (by $280 million) and off of what the city had expected to get additionally in increases (almost $300 million, according to the mayor’s office). (more…)

Another Wall Street Journal report on how the financial crisis is hitting foundations highlights the Harlem Children’s Zone. HCZ, run by the mayoral control proponent Geoffrey Canada, was promised $25 million grant by the Starr Foundation, which is run by Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the former chief executive officer of AIG.

Now, the Journal reports:

Anyone with a foundation whose endowment is heavily invested in AIG stock “is taking a bath,” says Mr. Greenberg, adding that he intends to fulfill current commitments but that gifts would inevitably be fewer and smaller in the months ahead. “You can’t give what you haven’t got.” …

Among the beneficiaries feeling the pinch are Harlem Children’s Zone Inc., to which Mr. Greenberg recently pledged $25 million. “I’m spending a lot of time now thinking about how we could replace the kind of support we’ve received from Wall Street,” says Geoffrey Canada, president of the organization, which provides parenting classes and charter schools for poor families. Mr. Canada says he is cutting 10% of his staff of 1,400.

Other New York City education projects could be affected. (more…)

I live-blogged the City Council hearing on the education budget today, where school officials explained in more detail than ever before how they plan to cut $180 million from the Department of Education budget in the middle of the year. Here’s an overview of what we know now — and what we still don’t.

WHAT WE KNOW

• If the plan goes through as the DOE has outlined, schools will have lost about $560 million total since the mid-year cuts last year. The cuts have come from both the central bureaucracy and school budgets. How it breaks down:

• A substantial portion of cuts will come from cutting 475 administrative positions, moves that not only cut out their salaries but also add to the “fringe” blue portion of the graph above, since the department will no longer have to cover those employees’ benefits. Of the 475 total job cuts planned for the middle of the school year, none are teaching jobs, and no full-time school positions will be cut — although principals could choose to cut back on the hours that non-teaching staff like cafeteria aides put in. (more…)

Layoffs have started at the Department of Education’s central offices, beginning the round of 475 personnel cuts ordered by the mayor earlier this month, DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte confirmed for me today.

Forte said she couldn’t tell me how many employees have already gotten pink slips. But she said that some people who work at the department’s Tweed Courthouse headquarters in lower Manhattan have already been let go. So have some people who have administrative jobs that are not based at Tweed, a category that could include human resources staff, who are housed in downtown Brooklyn, and staff at the Integrated Service Centers that are sprinkled throughout the five boroughs.

Forte said that more employees will be laid off “in the next couple of weeks.”

Our understanding is that all of the DOE’s department heads were told how much of their budgets they needed to cut, and then it was up to them to decide how.

Have you heard of anyone who’s been told to pack up his or her desk? Let us know.