GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

If Joel Klein handed over the reins of the Department of Education to its top graduates, we’d soon see stronger arts offerings, less tracking, and an end to the policy of assigning schools a letter grade.

The suggestions came from a panel of students who won scholarships available at schools managed by the nonprofit New Visions. Asked what they would do if they became chancellor, the students, and a few of their teachers, offered this advice:

“You should totally let us have cell phones in school,” said Karina Melendez, the cancer survivor who aspires to the Supreme Court. But then she got serious, saying she’d do away with the letter grades that schools are assigned annually. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg and UFT President Michael Mulgrew got a lot of applause when they vowed to shut down the city’s infamous “rubber rooms” by December. But that might be an impossible goal.

The trouble hinges on the fact that the city has not ended the practice of granting a trial to all teachers accused of incompetence or misconduct. It has simply decided to speed up those trials, which take place in a lower Manhattan office building across from Tweed Courthouse, presided over by paid attorneys called arbitrators who act as judge and jury.

To speed up the trials, the city has promised to nearly double the number of arbitrators starting in September, and also to increase the number of days they work on teacher cases each month to seven from five. By doing this, the city and the union claim, all of the nearly 650 teachers still waiting for a verdict will get one by December.

But a GothamSchools analysis shows that, to meet this goal, the city will have to force arbitrators to cram multiple hearings into each working day — a rate that is now unprecedented. (more…)

The Daily News reports this morning that Governor Paterson will propose cutting $206 million from the New York City schools. Mayor Bloomberg has already guess-timated his likely cut to the schools next year at $385 million. Both numbers are moving targets, changeable if the two executives’ legislative bodies push to do so. (Recall that just a few months ago, the state legislature axed a plan by Paterson to cut state funding to schools in the middle of this school year.) 

But let’s assume that the mayor and governor do get what they’re asking for. That would be a grand total of $591 million slashed from city schools budgets in the 2009-2010 school year. We can get an extremely rough estimate of what that might look like on the ground by thinking about the cuts the mayor ordered in the middle of this school year. The cut, of $181 million, happened by eliminating 475 bureaucratic jobs; delaying or cutting a half-dozen or so small centrally administered programs; and slicing 1.3% from school budgets. If we scale each of these up by a factor of 3.2 (the amount by which $591 million is larger than $181 million), we get:

• 1,550 jobs cut from central (more…)