Who briefs Joel Klein over at DOE?

Because what he told NY1 TV’s Mike Scotto on “Inside City Hall” Monday about the 19 closing schools was, “Nobody could make a good case why these schools shouldn’t be closed.”

Has he been away? His deputy chancellors, John White, Santi Taveras and Kathleen Grimm, chaired 20 public hearings over the last two months where parents, teachers and support staff, CEC leaders, Council members, Assembly representatives, grandmothers, local business leaders, students, graduates, principals and advocates testified on why most of the schools on the list should not close. Did the deputies not report back? More »

The Obama administration recently announced proposed changes in the No Child Left Behind law. The “jury is out” on whether it would be an improvement. Much depends on the extent that there is enlightened collaboration between education professionals and political forces. In either case, it may be revelatory to reflect on where some of the contributing “reformers” have been intellectually “coming from” lately.

Mike Johnston, a member of the Commission on No Child Left Behind, who is also a Colorado state senator and former principal, bunted some softball pitches lobbed at him late last year by interviewer Michael F. Shaughnessy of Eastern New Mexico University. Many of the observations were minor league.

By virtue of Johnston’s having been at some point and for some time an actual principal, he is “uniquely qualified to lead this committee,” according to Shaughnessy.

Johnston seeks to “build on the commission’s previous work by developing updated federal policy to improve teacher and principal effectiveness.”  The focus on teachers and principals as joint problem-solvers is commendable in theory. It’s more than a good idea; it’s indispensable to success. More »

"You didn't ask WHICH goals."

In the world of Tweed’s top-down directives, issued by apparatchiks who view time spent in real schools with Kurtz’s “the horror, the horror,” more than one good idea has been transformed into its opposite.

In this regard, exhibit number one is the school quality review. In its original conception, the school quality review was founded on the premise that the most important information about a school’s performance came not from decontextualized statistics, but from observations by professional educators. A team of accomplished educator reviewers has a rich knowledge of good teaching and learning practices, so they can recognize in a school the presence — and the absence — of such practices. Just as importantly, they can provide useful feedback to a school on how a school can develop good teaching and learning practices.

But put that idea in the hands of Tweed, and it becomes a virtually unrecognizable caricature of the real thing. More »

Craig Garber, UFT Chapter Leader at Beginning with Children Charter School in Brooklyn, reflects on his recent trip to Albany as part of Charter School Lobby Day, orchestrated by the New York Charter Schools Association and the New York City Charter Schools Center.

The early morning three-hour drive to Albany put me in a reflective mood. My mind wandered from lesson plans and midterms to the state of New York’s charter schools. I wasn’t sure what my particular “message” was going to be. But I figured I had better think of something, given that I and the 50 other members of my school’s community would be meeting with our state senator, our assembly member and perhaps the Governor. What do I have to say? What do the parents of our students have to say? Most importantly, what do our students have to say for themselves?

I decided to speak from the heart. I believe in my school. We are a small charter located in Williamsburg. We have strong academics, a proud eighteen-year history in Brooklyn, and a genuine sense of community within the school itself. We are the kind of school where people want to send their children because parents have a genuine opportunity to be involved. More »

In its zeal to close NYC’s high schools, the DoE like to point to the low graduation rates of particular schools. It is a number that plays well to the press. After all, who can argue in favor of, say, a forty-five percent graduation rate? The school down the block has the same kinds of kids, doesn’t it? And it has higher graduation rates. A low grad rate is a great sound bite, and it works.

But a closer look reveals that to a large extent the differences in school graduation rates are a function of a very specific demographic rather than a function of school quality. Joel Klein has concentrated high-need (self contained) special education students in fewer and fewer high schools because — for whatever reason — his new schools generally do not accept them. These are students who require very small classes and intensive academic, behavioral and/or emotional support. Those are just words to folks who do not teach, but to the schools that embrace these kids (and the closing high schools did indeed embrace them) they conjure up a world of challenges. These are the kids whom teachers wake up to worry about at 4 a.m., and sometimes the worry is that no one else will worry. For many teachers the idiosyncratic success of special education kids is deeply meaningful simply because every scrap of it is so hard-won. For many, success with self-contained special education is why they teach.

These students do not, however, tend to graduate with a diploma, on time. More »

Seth Andrew, 31, founder of Democracy Preparatory Charter School and aspiring Charter Management Organization CEO.

This weekend, the parents and students of Democracy Preparatory Charter School learned that Seth Andrew, the school’s founder/leader, intends to leave New York and open new charter schools in Rhode Island. This is a surprising turn of events, given Andrew’s track record of spirited public engagement in New York. Ironically, it appears as if Andrew could use a lesson in democracy from President Obama: “we don’t quit!”

In rationalizing the move, Andrew commented that the environment in New York just isn’t “supportive” enough. Apparently, the preferential treatment given by Klein and Bloomberg to charters over district schools isn’t good enough. Or the fact that charters receive nearly the same operating funding as a typical district school, despite enrolling a less-challenging student body. Or the City’s allocation of over $500 million in capital funding to charter and partnership schools and the placement of two-thirds of the City’s charters in free public space. [1] Not to mention the heretofore light touch by the City’s oversight officials. Inexplicably, these ‘unsupportive’ policies place New York among the top 10 places in the country to run charters — but what do NAPCS and CER know, anyway? More »

[Ms. G is a fourth-year teacher in a high school in Manhattan.]

Terrell reminded me of Reuben Nassau, a high school classmate of mine. “When the lights go out, we all Negroes,” Reuben said to me after I rejected his homecoming invitation.

Terrell and Reuben Nassau were about as similar as a lobster and a unicorn.

During my first, nervous, long-skirted week of teaching, Terrell was quiet, peaceful, and polite. As a new teacher, it’s so nice to have someone treat you with politeness, I wrote in a note to him after the first week of class.

Terrell remained quiet, peaceful, and polite for the rest of the semester.

Terrell came to class in spurts. He’d come for almost an entire week, and then leave an empty seat in the third row for the next week.

I missed Terrell when that chair was empty. More »

Imagine a teacher who, on the first day of class, told his students that no matter how well they performed, 5% of them would fail the course and another 10% would eke by with ‘D’s. And that no matter how poorly they did, 25% would receive ‘A’s.

That teacher is Joel Klein, and the students are New York City elementary and middle public schools. More »

East New York Preparatory Charter School founder and Maybelline honoree Sheila Joseph

Sheila Joseph, the disgraced founder of East New York Preparatory Charter School, was once a rising star in New York’s charter school movement.  Today, she has become a stark symbol of why New York charter schools so desperately need the accountability and transparency reforms, the guards against profiteering and the guarantees of teacher and parent voice advocated by the UFT and elected officials.

Born in Rockaway, Joseph attended Berkeley, got a law degree at Georgetown, and for three years served as a Teaching Fellow.  She received a cool $100K from Joel Klein’s Charter Center and was a fellow at Building Excellent Schools, the well-heeled training program for hard-charging charter CEOs.[1] Heralded as “the first African American woman to found a charter school in New York,” she is the star of an upcoming documentary and was even honored by Maybelline as a leader in education reform.  With a back-story like this, what could possibly go wrong?

Just about everything. More »

[Editor's note: Mr. Foteah is a second-year teacher in an elementary school in Queens. He blogs at The World As I See It, where this post originally appeared.]

Several weeks ago, my colleague across the hall and I were offered what sounded like a sensational opportunity for our impoverished students, something they might never experience in their lives: a trip to see the Broadway show “Wicked.” We were thrilled up until the point when we were told “the catch.” We each have 28 kids in our class, but, unfortunately, only 43 tickets were available.

Ouch. Talk about a punch in the gut. I am staunchly against ever withholding the experience of a field trip from my students, even for behavioral issues. (I’ll clarify: I would never disallow a child to attend the trip based on a transgression in school. I don’t believe in taking things away without warning, like some teachers do. I would however, if cause arose, make the child earn the right to go on the trip. The latter scenario has not occurred in my career thus far).

Given the news that only 43 out of 56 children would be getting this once-in-a-lifetime gift, I knew I would be forced to make some difficult decisions. More »

This week’s Panel for Education Policy meeting made it clear that the DOE is not serious about including parents in the decision-making process, according to NBC’s Gabe Pressman.

When the Mayor took control of the city’s schools, he promised to make them better.

Whether he kept that promise is debatable. But whether he has made parents part of the improvement process is not. They are definitely excluded. And that’s a shame.

He goes on to write:

It’s easy to understand the frustration and anger of the parents. But they are learning a practical lesson in how a supposedly democratic process can be distorted to suppress opposition.

The Mayor himself could benefit from some education. He could use a crash course in the values of democracy. The educational policy panel is not there just to ratify decisions already made.

Read the entire piece at NBC New York.

Image by arimoore: flickr.com/photos/arimoore/

[Editor’s note: Ms. Aha-Moment is a third-year ESL teacher in an elementary school in Brooklyn.]

I taught my first year in the New York City public school system at an elementary school in a hardscrabble neighborhood of the South Bronx. My self-contained ESL class consisted of twenty-six students, bridging 2nd and 3rd grade. As in many classrooms throughout the city, the children who entered my classroom brought with them an array of linguistic, academic and social issues.

Fresh out of graduate school, I imagined my class would be a Community of Learners, a circle of polite and happy children interacting seated on the rug. While the majority of my students displayed typical, manageable behavior in the classroom, I had my hands full with no less than five Serious Disrupters. All boys, the Serious Disrupters seemed bent upon sabotaging every attempt I made to create a Community of Learners by engaging in a variety of activities such as, chronic interruption, name-calling, cursing, stealing from, and punching or body-slamming other students. More »

What’s that smell in this room? Didn’t you notice it Brick? Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?…There ain’t nothin’ more powerful than the odor of mendacity…You can smell it. It smells like death. — Big Daddy in The Streetcar Named Desire

The stench of mendacity appeared on the pages of the New York Post yesterday, where the DoE’s John White is quoted as claiming “Any statement that the teachers union was trying to satisfy the requirements of Race to the Top through an agreement with the state and the [city] Department of Education is a lie.”

The RttT pledge included a core statement of US DoE and State Education Department principles, but also allowed local school districts and unions to add additional terms and clarifications to which they both agreed. Long ago, the NYC DoE e-mailed the UFT’s Secretary, asking if we would sign a joint RttT application. We responded that we would need to know what was being added, and that we should meet to discuss it. Week after week passed by without the slightest effort on the part of Chancellor Klein and the DoE to meet and negotiate these terms and clarifications with the UFT. The eleventh hour came and went. Receiving signs from Albany that their obstructionism was backfiring, the DoE asked to meet with us at the very last minute. They then proposed all manner of addenda that would have violated the collective bargaining agreement, knowing that it would be unacceptable to us. The UFT submitted a pledge on our own, without the NYC DoE’s unilateral addenda.

What a tangled web the DoE weaves.

UPDATE: We got our Tennessee Williams plays mixed up: the quote was from Cat On A Hot Tin Roof.

Yesterday I said that High School Progress Reports were driven to a significant extent by a buried demographic: the populations of high-need/self contained Special Education students. Some schools took on these challenging students when other schools did not. Now, instead of being supported for it, they are being punished with low grades and threat of closure.

What follows are some charts I did not have time to post yesterday.

As we know, a school’s grade is largely determined by its performance relative to its peer group’s performance. Each dot on the chart below represents one of the schools in the peer groups of closing High Schools. Along the side of the chart is the percent of high-need Special Education students within the Special Education population. More »

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. and the UFT are co-sponsoring a rally outside the Bronx Supreme Court today, Monday, Jan. 25, at 4 p.m., to protest the DOE’s unjustified proposal to close seven Bronx schools. Parents, educators, students, alumni and community activists will be coming out to keep the pressure on the Department of Education.