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Hundreds of Department of Education employees doomed to lose their jobs next month might not be laid off after all.

Talks to avert the layoffs of 737 school aides were rekindled this afternoon between the DOE and labor officials representing the employees, according to union officials who are directly involved in the negotiations.

“I can tell you that we made significant proposals to see if we can prevent these layoffs,” said one of the sources, who requested anonymity because negotiations were ongoing. “I feel very positive about the meeting today.”

The layoffs to non-pedagogical school staff were abruptly announced last month by the DOE and came after the city blamed the employees’ unions for not providing “any real savings that could have saved these jobs.”

The layoffs caught union leaders at DC-37, the city’s largest municipal union and its affiliate Local 372 off guard. Local 372 President Santos Crespo, who said he attended this afternoon’s meeting, criticized the layoffs as political and being too heavily concentrated in the city’s poor and minority communities.

The drama over layoffs at the Department of Education has persisted since last year, when Mayor Bloomberg first announced that thousands of teachers’ jobs would have to be cut because of widening gaps in the budget. Those talks temporarily ceased in late June, however, when the teachers union agreed to concessions in an eleventh hour deal to avert the layoffs. (more…)

Flyer outside Harlem Success Academy 1 on Tuesday. (Tony Richards)

Charter school parents and advocates are planning a massive rally tomorrow to demand that the NAACP withdraw from the city teachers union’s school closure lawsuit.

The UFT is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit to halt 22 school closures and prevent 17 charter schools from opening, moving, or expanding. But the New York State Conference of the NAACP also signed on, as it did last year to a similar suit that ultimately blocked 19 school closures. Last year’s suit did not challenge the city’s charter school co-location plans.

Organizers expect the rally to draw thousands of attendees from dozens of charter schools, including all 17 named in the lawsuit, to 125 Street in Harlem at 8:45 a.m. Thursday. At least some schools are delaying classes to allow parents, teachers, and students to attend.

Critics of the lawsuit “can march and have rallies all day long,” said Hazel Dukes, president of the state NAACP chapter. “We will not respond.”

Dukes said she joined the lawsuit for the same reason that the NAACP brought the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, which ended “separate but equal” schooling based on race. “Co-location is not the answer,” Dukes said. “We are setting up separate and unequal education.”

But city officials and charter school advocates say the civil rights group is working to stymie school options that would benefit mostly minority students. (more…)

The debate that began in Los Angeles over whether it is ethical to release public school teachers’ effectiveness scores has made its way to New York City. The city’s Department of Education plans to give the ratings, which are based solely on test scores, to reporters this week.

According to sources familiar with the discussion, city officials are debating with the teachers union over whether to release the scores with or without teachers’ names attached. The union has announced that it plans to seek an injunction in order to halt the release.

“The union will charge in its lawsuit that the TDRs [teacher data reports] are ‘unreliable, often incorrect, subjective analyses dressed up as scientific facts,’ and the methodology’s calculations of individual teachers’ value-add is ‘a complex and largely subjective guessing game on the part of the DOE,’” union officials said in statement.

DOE press secretary Natalie Ravitz said the city plans to give reporters the ratings this Friday.

“It had been our intention to respond to those FOILs and release the information today. However, UFT lawyers informed us that they intend to sue us to prevent the release,” she said in a statement. (more…)

Security camera footage captures students walking into a building that is not certified for educational use but houses the offices for the Believe Charter School Network.

Strapped for space, a Brooklyn charter school network sent its students to classes at a facility that was only approved for factory and office use — not educational purposes, according to security camera footage and interviews with people who witnessed students’ use.

The footage and accounts document students’ regular trips to the space this summer and during the last school year. A student at the school told me that the space, a former factory at 33 Nassau Ave. in Williamsburg, is known to students as “the art building.”

View the full footage in a slideshow below.

The charter operator, Believe High Schools Network, appears to have begun to send students to the office space after its plan to open two new schools in a private facility hit a snag in 2009. Forced to improvise, the network arranged to house both of the two new schools in the same district school building used by its original school, Williamsburg Charter High School, a former employee said.

That was despite the fact that the second floor office space at 33 Nassau Ave. is certified by the city Department of Buildings only for use as a factory, shipping, storage, or office space.

State education law requires that charter schools use buildings approved for educational use. For that reason, Believe officials originally used the 33 Nassau space only for offices, said Joshua Morales, a former consultant to Believe.

In the last month, both the city and state departments of education have launched investigations into Believe’s use of the 33 Nassau space. The city department oversees Williamsburg Charter High School, and the state department oversees the two new schools, Northside and Southside charter high schools.

Officials at Believe did not return several phone call and e-mail requests for comment today.

The arrangement highlights the risks of the city’s current charter school space situation. (more…)

Charter school leaders concerned about frozen budgets got a friendly hearing at City Hall Tuesday. But they didn’t get any promises that officials will follow their call to unfreeze their budgets. And the mayor himself did not show up.

Instead, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott offered to schedule a second meeting with the leaders of the schools to continue discussing their request.

I explained the outlines of charter leaders’ request earlier this week. The gist is they want the city not only to lobby on their behalf in Albany — but also, if lawmakers decide to freeze charter school budgets anyway, to make up the difference from its own coffers.

A reader who attended the meeting sent over the above photos from it. They show a strong turnout from a community that once shied away from politics, but followed the lead of more outspoken leaders when Michael Bloomberg ran for reelection last year and when mayoral control of schools came up for renewal.

The more politically active leaders — Eva Moskowitz, of the Success Charter Network in Harlem; Seth Andrew, of Democracy Prep in Harlem; and Stacey Gauthier, of Renaissance Charter School in Queens — made personal appearances. The heads of the largest networks — Uncommon Schools, KIPP, and Achievement First — sent representatives from their charter management organizations.

The principal of the Bronx's Herbert Lehman High School is charged with changing students' failing grades to passing.

Teachers are accusing a Bronx high school principal hired with a $25,000 bonus to improve the school’s academics of instead transforming the school into a “diploma mill.”

Transcripts given to GothamSchools by current and former teachers show that in the last year, dozens of students at Herbert Lehman High School have been given credit for courses they failed or never took.

In some instances, a student failed a class, passed the Regents exam by a slim margin, and then had his failing grade overturned. In others, students were given two credits for a class they passed once, or for classes that never appeared on their schedules.

Click here to view Lehman transcripts and school records. Multimedia feature by Maura Walz.

Changing students’ grades is commonplace in the city’s schools and is often done by principals and teachers for legitimate reasons. In some cases, students are given credit recovery, meaning they complete a project, make up work, or re-take part of a class in order to get a passing grade. Other times, students who are on the cusp of passing a class can receive a boost from a Regents exam they passed by a substantial margin.

But teachers said that at Lehman, students are getting credit without doing any work. Dozens of students have had their failing grades overturned without their teachers’ knowledge.

“The Office of Special Investigations is investigating allegations of grading improprieties at Lehman,” said a spokesman for the Department of Education, David Cantor. “We’ll comment once we have findings.”

Lehman’s principal, Janet Saraceno refused repeated requests for comment. (more…)

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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…)

The Obama administration’s proposed regulations on a $4.3 billion federal fund for schools would block New York State from receiving any of the money, according to a draft copy of the regulations that I obtained today.

States that block schools from using “data about student achievement” to evaluate teachers would be banned from applying to the fund, called the Race to the Top grant, under the proposed regulations. (The ban is written in a tricky double-negative way, saying that only states that don’t have such a law are eligible to apply for grants.)

The regulations define “student achievement” as “a student’s score on the State’s standardized test,” for subjects that are tested. For subjects that aren’t part of federally required testing regimes, states can propose an alternative measure, including scores on quizzes known as “interim assessments.”

New York State law prohibits principals from using student test scores when deciding whether to give a teacher tenure or not. The law was passed last year after private lobbying by the state teachers’ union, and against loud objections from the Bloomberg administration. (more…)

In one city classroom this summer, a computer algorithm is telling students what to do.

The classroom is actually a library at a Chinatown middle school with just 80 students, but school officials are hoping that it offers a glimpse into the future of the school system, one in which every student’s individual strengths and weaknesses are calculated before each day is planned.

Students in the new pilot program, a $1 million effort that officials are calling the School of One, take a quiz every afternoon, and then receive a computer-generated schedule each morning, called a “playlist.” A student’s playlist might tell him to begin the day by meeting with a tutor, then to complete a set of online tasks, and then to work on a project with his classmates. The program, which focuses only on math instruction, will expand to three sites in January.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein will roll out the program today, along with its mastermind, Joel Rose, who previously worked for Edison Schools, the for-profit education management company now known as EdisonLearning. The announcement will mark one of the first initiatives of Klein’s administration that focuses on what happens inside classrooms since he unveiled citywide math and reading programs six years ago. That effort scripted moves down to how teachers should arrange their classrooms and the size of rugs. (more…)