Online Education in America

• Two of the three consortia competing for Race to the Top test grants won. (Edweek)
• The two groups won a combined $330 million to revamp states’ K-12 tests. (WaPo)
• Wendy Kopp reflects on Teach for America’s 20th anniversary. (WSJ)
• D.C. banned chocolate milk in schools, NYC should do the same say parents. (GS)
• Seattle got a new teachers contract that ties test scores to teacher evaluation. (Seattle Times)
• Mike Petrilli argues against obsessing over the achievement gap. (Flypaper)
• D.C. high school students put their schools questions to Arne Duncan. (NPR)
• Should other states adopt Texas’ top 10 percent rule for college? (GOOD)
• And a made-up study finds that tests are biased against students who don’t care. (Onion)

Source: Anna Phillips

Rhetoric around the city’s excessed teachers has cooled off since last year, but the issue hasn’t disappeared. More than 1,700 teachers remain on the city’s payroll without full-time teaching positions, officials said today.

Teachers enter the so-called Absent Teacher Reserve pool when when they lose their jobs to budget cuts or school closures. At the ATR pool’s height this summer, nearly 3,000 teachers were in excess. Just over 40 percent of those teachers either found jobs, retired, resigned or went on leave, leaving 1,779 still without positions.

That’s roughly the same number who lacked teaching jobs at this time last year. DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte said that there are currently just over 1,200 vacancies in the city’s schools, around 100 fewer open positions than there were just after the start of school last year.

Principals are currently only allowed to hire teachers already on the city’s payroll, except in certain areas like special education, science and some foreign languages. Earlier this summer, the city also relaxed its hiring restrictions for schools in the Bronx that were having trouble filling their open positions.

Forte said the city anticipates that the number of teachers in the excess pool will drop as the first day of school approaches and during the first few weeks of the school year. Last year, the rate of hiring increased rapidly just after school started, as principals adjusted their teaching staffs to the number of students who ended up enrolling.

When city officials released the ATR figures today, they were critical of the high number of teachers they say remain on the city’s payroll but who have given up looking for work. Nearly 60 percent of the teachers currently in excess have not applied for a new position through the city’s hiring system or attended one of the Department of Education’s recruiting fairs, they said.

But the city could not say today how many of the teachers who did apply for positions were eventually hired. Critics of the administration often charge that the city’s budgeting process, which requires principals to pay for the average salaries of their teaching staffs, harms older teachers with higher salaries when it comes to hiring and excessing.

City teachers union chief Michael Mulgrew said that Chancellor Joel Klein has the authority to unilaterally assign teachers in the pool to vacant positions. ”The fact that he has chosen not to do so indicates that he prefers to have the issue to complain about rather than to resolve the problem,” Mulgrew said.

Last spring, Klein said that the experience level of teachers in the excess pool tends to fall along a bell curve, with most teachers having between five and 15 years of experience. An analysis by researcher Kim Gittleson using ATR numbers at that time showed that older teachers were over-represented in the excess pool.

The average salary of the teachers currently in excess is $82,000, and they have served for an average of 12 years, city officials reported.

Source: Maura Walz

With the Democratic primary a few weeks away, the battle over a West Harlem senate seat — turned charter school proxy war — is heating up.

On NY1 last night, Senator Bill Perkins and challenger Basil Smikle debated Perkins’ support for charter schools. Perkins accused Smikle of being too cozy with charter school supporters (”We all know that it’s the hedge fund charter movement that has initiated his candidacy, with the support of course of the New York Post,” he said). And Smikle fought back, charging Perkins with intentionally pitting charter school parents against district school parents.

More interesting than the back and forth is how Perkins is now describing his relationship to charter schools. Months ago, Perkins’ line was that he had been an early supporter of charter schools — he spoke on NBC’s Morning Joe about founding a charter school — but that the reality had not lived up to his expectations. Rather than acting as incubators for new teaching methods traditional public schools could adopt, charter schools had become rouge, unregulated agents, he maintained.

Now, Perkins’ explanation for his position has evolved. Replacing the narrative of charter schools not doing what they were intended to do is one about how his April hearing on charter schools directly impacted and improved the state’s charter school law.

Smikle interrogated Perkins about why he voted against lifting the charter school cap and then voted in favor of it. Perkins responded that, between the two votes, more oversight of schools had been added to the legislation, which he approved of. This change came about, Perkins said, because of the hearings he held on charter schools in April. He said:

“We have brought to the attention of the public the need for reform, the kind of issues we believe that were holding back special ed kids, that were holding back English Language Learners, that were discriminating against homeless children as per the charter school movement at the time. We fixed that. Those hearings were very instrumental in making that happen and so I think that we are all moving forward in a more positive direction.”

Smikle: “But my point is though, as a legislator your responsibility is to fix the bill, first and foremost.”

Perkins: “Yeah we did. We fixed the bill by having charter reform and by having hearings.”

Source: Anna Phillips

• The city has opened its registration centers for new students. (NY1, Insideschools)
• The city is shuffling around a dozen principals to meet federal requirements. (GothamSchools, Post, NY1)
• Community activists want the city to test all school buildings for toxins right away. (Daily News, NY1)
• Pedro Noguera says it’s time to stop pretending that poverty isn’t an obstacle to learning. (Daily News)
• Fifteen new school buildings and 17,000 new seats are opening this year. (GothamSchools, NY1, Post)
• Charter schools came up in a debate between State Sen. Bill Perkins and challenger Basil Smikle. (Post)
• New Jersey’s fired ed chief says Gov. Christie defamed him over the state’s Race to the Top loss. (Times)
• The schools chief in Newark won’t be coming back next year, N.J. officials announced. (WSJ)
• Scholastic Book Clubs is turning to social networking to sell titles. (Times)

Source: Philissa Cramer

• A mother’s poem about how her daughter got 90’s and 3’s, then bombed the PSAT. (EdNotes)
• Last-minute registration centers opened today to place the unplaced. (Insideschools)
• The charter cap lift was big but not “mathematically” key for NY’s RTTT win. (EdVANTAGE)
• Los Angeles teachers aren’t too happy with the LA Times’ value-added project. (LA Times)
• A study finds “mutual consent” policies against forced teacher placement don’t pay off. (Ed Week)
• “Value-added data is not gospel,” writes David Leonhardt, summing up the LAT drama. (NYTM)
• A 29-page chronicle of reasons to be skeptical of value-added. (Economic Policy Institute, PDF)
• Poll: Michelle Rhee is so divisive that she is a “political wash” for DC’s mayor. (WashPost)
• A lack of training to teach special ed is deemed a “national crisis.” (Hechinger Report)
• Nationwide, charter schools are being urged to serve more English language learners. (Ed Week)
• Preschoolers use statistics when they interact with each other, a researcher finds. (Ed Week)

Source: Elizabeth Green

The city is removing some principals, but letting others keep their jobs or take on mentorship roles, at a handful of low-performing schools that are being overhauled this year with federal funds.

The eleven schools are part of a select group about to begin the federal government’s “transformation” model intended to improve some of the state’s lowest-performing schools. Though it is the least invasive of the four models offered — it doesn’t require firing teachers — it does call for the removal of principals.

City school officials have decided to entirely replace principals at four of the schools. Another four will get brand new principals, but their current principals will remain in the schools under a new job title. Department of Education officials believe these administrators, who will be called “transformation mentor principals,” should remain in leadership roles because the schools have shown improvement on their watch.

“This is a creative solution for select schools that will mean new teachers, more resources and needed reforms — all while making sure to keep recent positive trends in place,” said Department of Education spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld.

The DOE is calling the new job title a promotion for these principals, but it is unclear whether they will get raises. The city is negotiating an agreement with the principals’ union.

Transformation mentor principals will essentially be a second principal in these schools, but they will focus on carrying out the changes that accompany the transformation model, such as a longer school day and improved curriculum.

Three new principals who’ve had their jobs for three years or fewer are being allowed to remain in their posts.

List of new principals:
(These are all interim acting principals because they have yet to go through the full approval process.)

FDR

• Steven DeMarco will be interim acting principal.

Flushing

• Carl Hudson will be interim acting principal

Grady

• Geraldine Maione will be interim acting principal

Long Island City

• Vladimir Hurych will be interim acting principal

Cobble Hill

• Anna Maria Mule will be interim acting principal.

Queens Voc

• Melissa Burg will be the interim acting principal

Brooklyn School for Global Studies

• Joe O’Brien was appointed principal a few months ago

Bread and Roses

• We are in the process of identifying a new principal.

Source: Anna Phillips

A stitched-together panorama of the Mott Haven Educational Campus, which will house five schools this year and is the largest school building project completed by the School Construction Authority.

The city’s largest new school building since the founding of the School Construction Authority will open for classes next week, creating room for more than 2,000 students in the Bronx.

The seats at the Mott Haven Educational Complex are among more than 17,000 new classroom seats that will become available when school starts next week, city officials announced today.

Of the 26 new school sites opening this year, 15 are completely new school buildings. Three projects add annexes to existing buildings, and eight sites are opening in newly-leased space. Nearly 700 of the new seats will be set aside for students in the city’s District 75 program for special education students.

Not all of the new seats will be filled with students when schools open next week. I’ve asked the DOE for estimates about how many of the seats they expect will be filled this year, and will update when I hear back. A map showing where the new seats added this year are located is below the jump.

Sweating on a blacktop next to Mott Haven’s new football field as construction workers put finishing touches on the building behind them, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Chancellor Joel Klein and other city officials said that this year’s new seats put the Department of Education on track to add 100,000 school seats by 2013.

Bloomberg and Klein contend that their school construction efforts are the largest in the city’s history. But critics of the administration argue that the city needs to accelerate new construction even more dramatically to ease the burden of overcrowding.  The new seats that will be created this year were funded almost entirely by the city’s 2005-2009 capital plan, which spent $13.1 billion on new schools. In the next five years, the city plans to spend about $2 billion less to create new seats.

Bronx officials today hailed the opening of the Mott Haven campus, which comes after years of controversy over the site’s environmental quality. Adolfo Carrion, Jr., who was Bronx borough president when plans for the new campus began and who is now regional administrator at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, praised the city’s persistence in cleaning up the site to create badly-needed classroom seats in the Bronx.

“This is one of the sites that because of the toxicity, because of the controversy, it was probably easy to walk away from,” Carrion said.

Located on land that once contained a railyard, laundry and plant that made gas from coal, the 6-acre site required $30 million in clean-up. In 2008, a state judge ruled that the city violated environmental law when it began construction on the building before developing a plan to ensure that future students would not be exposed to pollutants.

In the end, the construction and clean-up will cost between $230 and $250 million, School Construction Authority chief Lorraine Grillo estimated today.

View NYC DOE new school buildings opening 2010 in a larger map

Source: Maura Walz

To save her school from closure, the principal of a large Bronx high school took a drastic step and applied to become a charter school. But her application, along with nearly a dozen others, was rejected by the state today.

New York State’s Education Department announced today that of the 24 New York City charter school applications it received earlier this month, 12 schools have been green-lighted for the next step of the approval process.

Christopher Columbus High School, which applied to become a conversion charter, is not among them. Columbus is one of nearly two dozen low-performing schools selected to be “turned around” with federal money, meaning that in the next year it will be closed and replaced by a new school or it will lose half its staff and its principal.

A Columbus teacher who helped write the application said she was disappointed and felt the school’s application had been strong.

“We had hoped we could really focus on positive things this year,” said Christine Rowland. “We were looking forward to making plans, moving forward, having it be a positive start to the year. It makes that more difficult.”

The state also rejected applications from four Arrow Academy schools that might have tested the state’s new law barring for-profit charter school managers from running schools.

SUNY’s Charter School Institute has also seen its list of pending applications shorten as schools have withdrawn their applications. Superintendent of District 79 schools, Cami Anderson, applied to open three charter schools in 2011 for kids at-risk of not graduating. Anderson has withdrawn all of the applications, but intends to reapply in January, said Jonas Chartock, executive director of SUNY’s Charter School Institute.

Active applications for New York City:

State Education Department applicants:

• Bronx Charter School for Health and Wellness (Bronx)
• Democracy Preparatory 3 (Manhattan)
• Dr. Muriel Petioni Charter School for Scholarship, Health, and Leadership (Manhattan)
• The Joint Services Military and Maritime Charter High School (9-12; Brooklyn)
• Lamad Academy Charter School (Brooklyn)
• Launch Expeditionary Learning Charter School (Brooklyn)
• Mott Hall Charter School (Bronx)
• Neighborhood Charter School of Harlem (Manhattan)
• New York Academy for Student Success Charter School (9-12; Brooklyn)
• New York City Montessori Charter School (Bronx)
• New York Flex Charter School (9-12; Manhattan)
• Urban Dove Charter School (Brooklyn)

SUNY applicants:

• Bronx Success Academy Charter School 3 (K-5; Bronx)
• Success Academy Charter School (K-5; Manhattan)

• Previously announced applicants:

• Broome Academy Charter High School (9-12; Manhattan)
• Our World Neighborhood Charter School II (K-5; Queens)
• Heketi Community Charter School (K-5; Bronx)
• New Visions Charter High School for the Humanities (9-12; Bronx)
• New Visions Charter High School for Science and Math (9-12; Bronx)
• KED Manhattan Charter School (6-8; Manhattan)

Source: Anna Phillips

• A new study finds that students fare better in K-8 schools than in traditional middle schools. (Post, WSJ)
• Value-added models to assess performance are already in use widely, including in NYC. (Times)
• A new state law mandates that schools tell parents if bedbugs appear in the building. (Daily News)
• A judge ruled that the city can cut school bus service to some middle-school students. (WSJ, NY1)
• Teachers union head Michael Mulgrew says city schools should drop test prep this year. (Daily News)
• The state has advised school districts not to ask enrollees about their immigration status. (Times)
• Parents at the private Horace Mann School are suing over their son’s 3-day suspension. (Times)
• Texas is encouraging schools to pool their resources to pay for bureaucratic help. (Reuters)

Source: Philissa Cramer

• The tent-sleeping principal of East Side Community HS explains why he moved outdoors. (YouTube)
• Ross Global Academy’s former principal was de facto cleared of test-tampering charges. (NY Sun)
• Kate Walsh says releasing teacher value-added data won’t serve all children. (Talk of the Nation)
• Why not publish only the names of the top 25% of teachers?, suggests Doug Lemov. (TOTN)
• Can the charter school founded by John King, now of NYSED, scale its success? (Boston Mag)
• A push to consider cutting high school sports spending. (Reason via Flypaper)
• A case that “blame the teacher” and “anti-teacher” aren’t the same, and that one is real. (Corey)
• The president of D.C.’s teacher union calls the IMPACT evaluation “dangerous.” (Learning Matters)
• India now has schools on wheels, so that teachers travel to students. (City Fix via Flypaper)
• Reminiscing on NYSUT’s “rather breathtaking 180-degree turnaround” on RTTT. (NYFERA)

Source: Elizabeth Green

For years, the High School for International Business and Finance has been one of four schools in the George Washington campus, each named the High School for Something and Something. But over the summer, the school changed its name, rebranding itself as College Academy.

New York City public schools can re-name themselves only by jumping through a series of bureaucratic hoops that ultimately lead to Chancellor Joel Klein’s final approval.

Once a principal approves or initiates a change, it’s voted on by the parent association, which then passes it on to the school’s superintendent. In cases where a school is part of a community school district, the superintendent makes a recommendation to the community education council, which holds a public meeting and then votes on the change. But for most high schools and other schools that are not zoned for a district, the decision goes straight from the superintendent to Chancellor Klein.

Unlike schools that change buildings or expand, schools that give themselves new names do not need the citywide school board’s approval.

There are a few rules: you can’t name a school after someone who’s still alive, and if your school is already named after someone and you decide to change it, you have to tell their relatives first. Once a school is given a new name, it can’t be changed for ten years, though there are exceptions to this.

Nationally, it’s becoming increasingly rare to name a school after a person.

Two other schools changed their names this summer. Bard High School Early College II, which opened in 2008 and is modeled on the Bard High School in Lower Manhattan, is now Bard High School Early College Queens. And the Bronx Studio School for Writers and Artists, which opened in 2009, is now the Urban Assembly Bronx Studio for Writers and Artists.

It’s unclear why the High School for International Business and Finance’s principal, Juan Alvarez, chose to change the school’s name to College Academy. Still on summer break, no one at the school returned calls. DOE officials did not respond to a request for information.

Source: Anna Phillips

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan defended himself yesterday to critics of one of the centerpieces of his federal education policy — his practice of staging competitions to reward student progress or new ideas.

Duncan’s approach, which inspired his signature Race to the Top grant program, has drawn criticism from advocates like the NAACP, some state leaders and even members of Congress. His critics say that a policy that awards funds based on anything other than student need will inevitably leave some districts behind.

During Duncan’s visit to the state teachers union headquarters in Albany yesterday, those concerns surfaced again, this time from a teacher from Newburgh. Patricia Van Duser told Duncan that school districts like hers depend on the reliable funding that the federal education department doles out to schools based on need.

Van Duser worried that her district’s finances could be jeopardized if the federal government moves towards a more competitive model as the Obama administration plans its overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

“You really need that to be formula-driven, not competitive-driven,” she said.

Duncan responded that under his proposal, the Department of Education would still hand out 80 percent of federal education funds based on need. And Race to the Top has proven that the federal government can use competition to leverage widespread policy change with a small amount of money, he argued.

Less than one percent of current federal education funds have been spent on competitive grant programs, Duncan said. That contest, which in the end awarded funds to a total of 11 states and the District of Columbia, prompted policy changes in 34 states.

“It’s not either-or,” Duncan said. “The vast majority will be formula-driven…but we still have a chance to reward excellence through competitive grants. I think we need to do that.”

For next year, Obama and Duncan have asked Congress for nearly $50 billion in education funds, a 7.5 percent increase from the year before. Most of that increase — about $3.5 billion — would go to new competitive programs, including continuations of the Race to the Top and Investing in Innovation grant programs.

Source: Maura Walz

• The Yankees briefly offered a back-to-school promotion for a game on the first day of school. (Post)
• Ed Sec Arne Duncan praised New York’s reforms in Albany. (GothamSchools, Daily News, Post, WNYC)
• Last night’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting reprised conflict over test scores. (NY1)
• An all-girls charter high school opened in Albany yesterday, the state’s first. (WNYC)
• New Orleans parents want to see more racial diversity now that there is more school choice. (NPR)
• Seattle and its teachers might have agreed about using test scores in evaluations. (Seattle Times)

Source: Philissa Cramer

• Tracking down South Bronx students eight years later, with disappointing results. (Robert Pondiscio)
• A kindergarten teacher’s son was murdered by one of her former students. (Baltimore Sun)
• An inspiring story about a student who tried, failed, and tried again. (Pissed Off Teacher)
• A historical argument for why translating memos to parents is a really good idea. (Tablet)
• Unpacking the New York Post’s high school rankings. (Leonie Haimson)
• Budget documents suggest the city is cutting funds to lower class size. (Norm’s Notes)
• The Economic Policy Institute finds issues with score-based value-added evaluations. (Answer Sheet)
• Race to the Top and the problem of trying to do too much at once. (Sara Mead)
• Why D.C.’s mayoral primary is “a caution for overcaffeinated fans of mayoral control.” (Rick Hess)
• What teachers really want: Well-rested students. (Dan Willingham)
• D.C.-area schools are growing more diverse, maybe because of the recession. (Washington Examiner)
• Or maybe because schools are actively recruiting white families. (Washington City Paper)
• And congratulations to Elizabeth! She’s writing a book based on “Building a Better Teacher.” (Russo)

Source: Philissa Cramer

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan (right, blue shirt) and NYSUT President Richard Ianuzzi listen to a teacher at a roundtable at NYSUT’s Albany headquarters today.

ALBANY, N.Y. — Teamwork was the watchword as U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan took his national back-to-school bus tour to Albany today.

Duncan has taken to the road to celebrate teachers, and to convince them that his reform efforts will not undercut their interests.

In New York, many teachers are still skittish of a new teacher evaluation plan that will, for the first time, allow school districts to judge them based on their students’ test scores. The state and city teachers union struck the agreement with state education officials in May, in part to improve the state’s Race to the Top application.

And so, in appearances at the state teachers union headquarters and the State Capitol, Duncan and state officials emphasized that New York’s reform policies are the result of a team effort between state education officials and its teachers unions. Those policies won the state nearly $700 million in federal Race to the Top funds last week.

“Where other states were not able to reach consensus, New York was,” Duncan said.

At the offices of the state teachers union, Duncan and New York State United Teachers Union President Dick Ianuzzi faced a panel of teachers and administrators from six upstate districts. The group shared lessons from a teacher evaluation experiment they had begun before the teacher evaluation deal was struck. They were generally upbeat about the changes, but they also sounded warning notes for Duncan.

Duncan asked the group why it’s taken so long to create momentum around creating new teacher evaluations. One reason, said Dawn Sherwood, a social studies teacher from Hempstead, is that school districts rarely collaborate.

“In the past, it felt like every man for himself,” she said. “What that led to were pockets of success.”

Julius Brown, the assistant superintendent of Sherwood’s district, cautioned that the increased attention on teacher effectiveness should extend also to principals and administrators. “The teachers didn’t hire themselves; they weren’t granted tenure themselves,” he said.

Duncan agreed. “The teaching piece is huge, but by itself isn’t going to get us all the way we need to go,” he said.

“There obviously is still anxiety around [the new teacher evaluation plan],” Ianuzzi said. ”At the moment, [teachers are] not convinced it’s going to be fair.”

But Ianuzzi said that the state’s winning second-round Race to the Top application reflected teachers union input to a far greater degree than in the first round. And he predicted that if the union continues to be involved, support among rank-and-file teachers will grow.

“I think my local members will feel that it’s fair if they feel that they had a voice that was heard,” Ianuzzi said.

Source: Maura Walz