Weekly news round-up: politics and product placements

Posted by Lindsey at 11:40 AM

More money woes this week: city funding for pre-K programs run by community groups was cut in half, leading to the overnight evaporation of about 300 seats. Yet Obama accepted the endorsement of the national teachers union (AFT) union, vowing his commitment to "quality, affordable early childhood education for all our children,” and McCain announced his intention to fully fund No Child Left Behind, offer private school vouchers and put tutoring funds directly in the hands of parents. Ambitious plans on all sides, given the current economic climate.

Meanwhile, NYC education bigwigs are going national: Joel Klein is hoping to advise the next president and UFT President Randy Weingarten was elected head of the AFT. She says she's staying in New York for now (and announcing fresh lawsuits on behalf of city teachers) but just might be grooming a successor. Klein, who claims accountability as his hallmark reform, might want to explain why it apparently took a newspaper article to stop the city school bus system from “losing” parent complaints.

Children's health came under fresh scrutiny: A new report confirms what parents have known for eons -- that America’s active kids morph into sedentary teenagers – and documents health risks that have led others to recommend cholesterol meds for kids. And each successive scandal that the Administration for Childrens Services (ACS) faces tragically impacts the city’s most vulnerable citizens.

Too many teens are stuck in middle school , according to a report released by Advocates for Children. While some kids in the Bronx are apathetic about keeping their neighborhood clean, juvenile offenders are helping restore and reopen classic American diners. And the Times celebrated high school theater geekdom at its best, which seems a lot more wholesome than the current crop of product-infused teen novels. But for now, ditch the screen, shut the book, and get out! It's summer.

Town Hall: Governance, grievances and sunsets on the horizon

Posted by helen at 12:56 PM

Last night's Town Hall in Brooklyn was the first of many, according to City Council member Bill deBlasio, that will address issues raised by mayoral control of the city's schools -- a state law that's slated to sunset in 2009.

Most speakers described the erosion of public influence on public education due to mayoral control: Community Education Councils as weak substitutes for elected school boards; policy decisions (and PR disasters) enacted by remote DOE leadership; and the mayorally-appointed (and thus beholden) Panel for Educational Policy in lieu of the former Board of Education, whose antagonism to the Mayor -- any mayor -- was legion.

Parents brought specific and legitimate complaints about the high-school admissions process and the exclusion of special-education parents and students from many policy-level conversations. Martine Guerrier, head of the Office of Family Engagement, was present; more than a few charged her office with "Orwellian" practices and a dismissive, "we'll get back to you" philosophy. Notably, veteran school leaders said that parents are reluctant to step into leadership roles because of fears that their questions will lead to repercussions for their children.

In a practical reflection of the Mayor's corporate ethos, small-business providers of resources for English Language Learners said their bids were no longer welcome at the DOE, which restricted some bids to businesses worth $5 million or more. The irony is particularly stinging given that Local Law 129 provides preferential bidding practices for small businesses, especially those headed by minorities and women -- and that the DOE is apparently exempt from that ruling.

The UFT, ICOPE, ACORN/the Alliance for Quality Education, the Council for Economic Justice, Time Out From Testing and other advocates promise to keep the mayoral-control dialogue going.

Weingarten moves up but not out

Posted by Lindsey at 3:19 PM

This morning Randi Weingarten, president of the UFT, was officially elected head of the national teacher’s union, the American Federation of Teachers. Weingarten has wielded enormous influence over the past decade as head of the 200,000-member New York union, where she plans to remain, although some question whether anyone can handle leading both unions at once – even a work-horse like Weingarten.

Weingarten speaking in June with Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein.

In New York, she secured a 43 percent raise for teachers, fought for smaller class sizes, and railed against high stakes testing. Weingarten’s relationship with the mayor depends on the issue: she’s not afraid to make a joint announcement with him in the morning and then blast another of his initiatives later that afternoon. And although she has generally been very popular among New York teachers, her tentative support of charter schools (she has even opened two of them) and support for merit-based pay is controversial among union members.

In her acceptance speech today Weingarten – the daughter of a teacher and a former part-time social studies teacher herself – argued that schools should become multi-service community centers, offering a lot more than just classroom instruction. That does sound better than test prep, but what's her plan to make such a dreamy vision actually happen on a large scale? And how will Weingarten stay focused on New York, now that she has vaulted to the national stage?

Weekly news round-up: scoring students, scoring Klein, no more summer vacation?

Posted by Lindsey at 12:03 PM

It was the last week of school, and the big story was the generally higher test scores, although the controversy continues over what the scores actually mean. Chancellor Klein was riding high on the test results, although the teachers slammed his performance in a UFT survey. New Orleans superintendent Paul Vallas, said to be short-listed for an eventual successor, says that New York students might say bye-bye to future summer vacations. Large middle schools are the first in line on the chopping block, however, as Klein suggests that he plans to slice and dice them into smaller schools (reported first here, on our blog). Maybe smaller schools will tone down the 8^th grade graduation frenzy. At best, they'll avoid serious issues, like apparent negligence in one Brooklyn junior high school.

Another study confirms what what we already know: there is a woeful lack of playgrounds at New York elementary schools. Let’s hope the new grade school in midtown includes outdoor play space.

The Times ended the school year with a summer storm of local and national school stories: career programs seem to work; a segregated retention program is, unsurprisingly, controversial; a NYC Harbor-based high school builds confidence (see their profile for more); an immigrant parent program boosts involvement; and rent assistance keeps helps families in one place, and kids from switching schools. Whew.

The Times also cautions: summer means bad nutrition. Keep healthy and cool!

Schools cut teaching positions

Posted by Lindsey at 3:56 PM

It's not just parents and students on tenterhooks waiting for school placements. This week is incredibly stressful for the faculty and staff at many city schools, too. As principals hand out next year's teaching assignments, some teachers are discovering that the proposed budget cuts have left them officially "excessed" -- still employed by the DOE but without an active position. (While teachers historically had been automatically transfered, the 2006 UFT contract gave excessed educators control over their job search.)

Excessed teachers who don't -- or can't -- find a new school can spend up to two years in the "reserve pool," earning full wages and benefits, temporarily assigned to schools where the principals decide their workload. Cost to the city since 2006? $81 million. Predictably, the UFT and The New Teacher Project, which has close ties to the DOE, disagree over whether or not this policy is a waste of funds.

This year, looming budget cuts may mean even more teachers in reserve; this week, when assignments are made known, the atmosphere at many schools is tense.

Checking In

Posted by helen at 8:53 AM

One more sweltering day, with a welcome break in sight. Articles and opinions debate how best to weather this brutal weather, as a new UFT member poll weighs the Klein effect -- its own kind of weather system -- on the practice of teaching.

High pressure, in the form of high demand, cost some District 15 fifth-graders middle school seats, according to the DOE, which says that students who didn't get seats or who were placed at schools not on their lists had applied to extremely popular schools. We're trying to find out which six or so schools drew prohibitively large waves of applications -- and also trying to learn what the DOE will do to prepare for next year, when a similar student tsunami may roll in.

Stay tuned -- and stay cool. News to follow when we have it.

"Noise," but Not Much News

Posted by helen at 3:38 PM

A midday protest on the steps of Tweed organized by Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum and City Council member Bill deBlasio drew a few dozen parents and DOE representatives David Cantor and Andy Jacob, who fielded questions but had few concrete answers to offer.

"The scale of the problem is misrepresented by the amount of noise," said Cantor, as parents of barraged him with questions. "Everything will be resolved within the next couple of days." That means a seat in a pre-K program, although not necessarily at the first-choice school, for siblings of already-enrolled students.

DeBlasio and others challenged the DOE's count of 200 families affected. "The issues this raises for parents are huge," he said, citing the thousands parents may have to pay for private pre-K, and the fact that many programs are already full for fall. Frustrated parents want to know what to tell their kids, and worry aloud about plans to centralize next year's kindergarten admissions process.

DOE reps promise that all legitimate sibling priority enrollments will be honored (though again, not necessarily at the first-choice school), and that all calls and emails to OSEPO will be returned (not what we're hearing). But the issue, while immediately pressing for hundreds of city families, has a much larger import.

"We know pre-K is an essential educational tool," says UFT president Randi Weingarten. "They've done with this what they did with high school enrollment, and with middle school enrollment -- they've taken all human judgment out of the equation. They dismiss the nature of neighborhoods, they dismiss the nature of human needs, for what a computer tells them to do. It's a computer, instead of common sense."

And for the record, even DOE staff aren't immune from the vagaries of the system: Cantor's 4-year-old will attend their local public-school kindergarten in the fall -- but, he said, "even my kid didn't get into pre-K" last year.

Report: Non-working teachers costing DOE as much as ARIS

Posted by Philissa at 8:45 AM

What has cost the DOE as much as ARIS in the last couple of years? Teachers who aren't working, according to a report being released today by the New Teacher Project, a non-profit organization that helps school districts find and train new teachers.

The report, titled "Mutual Benefits: New York City's Shift to Mutual Consent in Teacher Hiring," takes a look at the effects of the 2005 UFT-DOE contract, which ended the practice by which older teachers could "bump" younger teachers from their schools and instituted a system where teachers who are "excessed," or released from their positions at schools, continue to earn tenure and be paid while they apply for new positions — or not. The report concludes that the practice of "mutual consent" has resulted in teachers being happier with their positions but that the growing pool of excessed teachers is becoming a financial burden on the system. Half of the 600 teachers who were excessed in 2006 and early 2007 who did not find a new position did not apply for any jobs through the DOE's online hiring system, according to the report, to the tune of $81 million by the end of this school year.

Many of the report's findings are likely verifiable, but it's important to note that the New Teacher Project has an organizational interest in making sure there are positions for new teachers and funds free to pay them — it runs the city's Teaching Fellows program. Evaluated in this context, the report's central recommendation — that excessed teachers be removed from the payroll after a "reasonable period" and allowed "for a certain number of years" to be able to return to a teaching position at the same salary and seniority level — reads like opportunism, not thoughtful education policy. And it makes Mayor Bloomberg's use of the report as a reason to reopen contract negotiations with the UFT positively inexcusable; he is planning to seek permission to remove from city payroll teachers who have gone without a job for 12 months.

The Times notes that Chancellor Klein has characterized most teachers in the reserve pool as undesirable or unwilling to look for work. We don't know exactly how many of the non-working excessed teachers fit that bill. But we do know that with budget cuts making it financially stressful for schools to maintain experienced teaching staffs, principals must make hard choices to be able to afford to hire senior teachers. And with a cadre of first-year teachers always at the ready (thanks in part to the New Teacher Project), the incentives to make those choices are slim. That's why the UFT earlier this month filed an age discrimination lawsuit against the DOE. In times like this, senior teachers need more protections, not a new rule that removes them from the system so long as schools can get along without them.

And if you're worried about unqualified teachers keeping their jobs, don't be — the Teacher Performance Unit is on the job.

UFT president likely Washington-bound

Posted by Philissa at 12:24 PM

The head of the American Federation of Teachers, the national teachers' union, is stepping down this summer, and UFT President Randi Weingarten is the heir apparent to the job; elections will be held in July and she could be headed to Washington, D.C. shortly after that. The Times notes that Weingarten has secured higher teacher salaries and participated in education policy experiments, such as performance pay and charter schools, when many in her union and in teachers' unions nationally opposed them. Blogging teacher NYC Educator has an entirely different, much less congratulatory list of Weingarten's accomplishments.

Last month, the Sun took a look at the UFT leaders who might become president after Weingarten leaves.

New coalition asks state and mayor to keep their promises to NYC's schools

Posted by Philissa at 5:19 PM

Photo by Philissa Cramer/Insideschools

Everyone who's anyone in the fight to improve the city's schools stood on the steps of City Hall this afternoon for a press conference announcing the creation of the "Keep the Promises" Coalition. The coalition of teachers, principals, advocates, elected officials, and community groups, formed during an emergency meeting held Thursday in response to the mayor's mid-year budget cuts, is calling for state lawmakers as well as the mayor to follow through on their promises to fund the city's public schools at the level agreed to in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit.

CFE Executive Director Geri Palast explained today how the state agreed to pay $2.35 billion to the city's schools in four years and how the mayor committed $2.2 billion to match. Now that times are tough in Albany, however, the state reduced the amount it plans to pay the city in the first year of the deal, and the mayor not only reduced schools' budgets for next year but took money back from them for this year as well, forcing principals to cut after school programs, tutoring, and other services.

"This is ridiculous," said the UFT's Randi Weingarten today. "At the drop of the Dow, kids become the last priority again." The coalition plans to hold a larger rally sometime in the near future.

Using kids' test scores, DOE conducting secretive experiments on teachers

Posted by Philissa at 9:52 AM

Who knew I was already right when I hypothesized two weeks ago that the DOE was hoping to change the way teachers are evaluated? Well, besides Eduwonkette, who left a comment telling me so, and at least 140 principals whose teachers are already being judged according to their students' test scores in an initiative so top secret that even the teachers don't know about it? Very few people, it appears, according to the New York Times.

In the already-underway experiment, which the Times was the first to report, the test score gains of students at 140 schools will be used to judge their teachers' success. The DOE is setting "predicted gains" for teachers based on their students' skills, experiences, and backgrounds — and then crunching the numbers to see if the teachers meet those goals. The DOE told the Times, which broke the story, that it doesn't plan to use the results to make hiring or firing decisions about individual teachers. But Chris Cerf, who apparently has been deputized to talk up the program, said the results could be one factor used in those decisions, and that ultimately making the results public (a la the progress reports) would reward good teachers and put pressure on bad ones. Certainly, the DOE must be interested in providing more ammunition for the teacher firing squads assembled earlier this year.

Naturally, the UFT's Randi Weingarten, who has backed down in her opposition to other controversial plans, including the Teacher Performance Unit, sounds angry about this one, telling the Times that she and the city disagree on whether results from this pilot or its expansion could be used under the teachers' contract to make hiring or firing decisions. (On the other hand, the Times says the UFT has known about the experiment for four months, but we haven't heard any complaints until now.)

The initiative also appears to undercut the little agency afforded teachers in determining how performance pay is distributed this year. I'm pretty sure that we don't know how many of the schools included in the performance pay pilot elected to distribute their earnings across the whole faculty rather than to individual teachers, but I think it's safe to guess that's what happened in most schools. Now the DOE is doing the divisive, problematic work its teachers declined to do.

The Times predicts a battle this summer between the DOE and the UFT over the experiment results. Let's hope Randi Weingarten (or, potentially, her successor) is up for the fight. The DOE is abusing test score data, which aren't meant for this kind of crunching, and keeping teachers in the dark about how they're being evaluated. Regardless of the quality of the research (though even that is questionable — Eduwonkette wonders whether the experiment is ethical given that many of the research subjects don't know they are part of an experiment at all), the way the DOE has gone about this one is just not right.