Online Education in America

Michael Mulgrew’s tone in last week’s union newspaper could signal a tough stance in union negotiations.
Mulgrew also called for an “army of volunteers” to stave off damage caused by budget cuts.
More than half the jobs created or saved by the stimulus were in education, officials said today.
Norm Scott connects the dots between the ATRs, New [...]

Department of Education officials are tamping down expectations before next month’s release of the annual high school report cards.
Testifying at a hearing before the City Council’s Education Committee, the DOE’s chief accountability officer Shael Polakow-Suransky said today that the reports will not show the preponderance of A’s that dominated the elementary and middle school reports [...]

The month of November promises to be a remarkable series of boundless conversations on the intersections of creativity, technology and innovation in education.

First and foremost, I owe many thanks to Fons van der Berg for organizing Education Futures NL at the Creative Learning Lab in Amsterdam, November 2. The event will feature talks by me [...]

A DOE report shows that city charter schools overall are doing worse than district schools. (Daily News)
A report suggests that states, including NY, lowered test standards to show gains. (Times, Post, WSJ)
Because it’s an election year, UFT contract talks are staying quiet and big changes aren’t likely. (Times)
Today is the deadline for principals to hire [...]

The Daily Beast looks at cities with the highest high school dropout rates.
Students are planning a protest outside City Hall against the new bake sale regulations.
David Bloomfield takes an evenhanded look at the role of parents in school governance.
The teachers union contract, which technically expires this weekend, is full of anachronisms.
Why it could be important that Wireless [...]

Much of the attention paid to Assemblyman Sam Hoyt’s proposed changes to state education law has focused on its immediate repeal of the charter school cap. But the legislation, introduced in both houses of the state legislature yesterday, seeks much broader changes.
Hoyt told GothamSchools that his proposed law is a kind of “kitchen-sink bill” intended [...]

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

The Bloomberg administration will investigate the whistleblowing teachers at Herbert Lehman High School who are accusing the school’s principal Janet Saraceno of tampering with students’ grades.
The teachers approached GothamSchools with students’ transcripts after some of them had submitted the same transcripts to [...]

Officials from Bill Thompson’s campaign are pointing to a story about grade tampering at a Bronx high school as evidence that the city’s education data is unsound.
Yesterday, I reported that current and former teachers at Herbert Lehman High School are accusing principal Janet Saraceno of transforming the school into a “diploma mill.” Student transcripts given [...]

A plan to replace city high schools with charter schools will be part of NYS’s Race to the Top bid. (Post)
Teachers at Lehman HS say student grades were changed to boost the school’s stats. (GothamSchools)
The Daily News has the story, too — but doesn’t credit GS for our exclusive. Maybe it’s a coincidence?
Students are backing [...]

A Bronx principal changed grades to boost graduation rates, violating state regulations.
The New York Observer has the audio of NYSUT’s ads bashing Paterson’s mid-year school budget cuts.
NYSUT’s Richard Ianuzzi says Arne Duncan personally assured him of NY’s Race to the Top eligibility.
Peter Murphy says that kind of presumption is “risky business” without a lift to [...]

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 [...]

Fourth-grader Francisco Gomez, 8, received his H1N1 vaccine shot this morning at P.S. 157 in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He was cheered on by city health officials and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein went to Brooklyn’s P.S. 157 this morning to give students moral support while they received the first round of swine flu vaccinations. The [...]

News from New York City:

The Gates Foundation will let all 50 states to seek its Race to the Top help, not just its chosen 15. (Times)
A Manhattan Institute study: Schools whose students leave for charters get a reading score boost. (Post)
Marcus Winters, the study’s author, explains the effects on students “left behind” in district schools. [...]

Leonie Haimson wonders where the parents Bloomberg says will flock to the city will find classroom space.
Peter Murphy thinks Paterson’s reluctance to lift the charter cap is a jab at Obama.
Chicago Public Schools plans to re-train security guards to curb school violence.
The federal education department will require districts to report their stimulus spending at the [...]

The mayoral candidates took a few seconds out of an otherwise unremarkable debate tonight to forecast how the city’s students will do on a federal math test.
In the next month, New York City students’ scores on a national math exam, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, will be made public. When the last round of [...]