Gotham Schools

• Mark Zuckerberg’s IPO yield today was about $20 billion, what the city schools spend each year. (WSJ)
• More schools are taking the option to sub Common Core prep for two days of class. (Insideschools)
• A teacher offers suggestions for getting students to open up when they aren’t inclined to. (Mr. Foteah)
• A question: Why hasn’t the DOE used its right to try to fire U-rated teachers all along? (Ed in the Apple)
• Even most high-quality charter school studies fall short of the gold standard of research. (Shanker)
• An online chat about the pitfalls of testing included Community section writer Mark Anderson. (Nation)
• Education writers from across the country are still chatting in Philadelphia. Read their updates. (Twitter)

State Education Commissioner John King observes an English and Language Arts class at the Dual Language Middle School.

Hiring is set to resume at the 24 “turnaround” schools under an agreement city and union officials reached late Friday afternoon.

But the hiring decisions could be reversed if an arbitrator ultimately decides that the unions’ complaint — that the city is attempting to circumvent contractual hiring and firing policies at the schools — is valid.

The city teachers and principals unions sued to stop the hiring process, but on Wednesday, a State Supreme Court judge urged both sides to accept arbitration rather than pursue litigation. Today, the city and unions agreed “in principle” to seek arbitration, selected an arbitrator, and selected a first meeting date — June 5.

In the meantime, the city will continue the process of rehiring or replacing teachers at the schools — but will have to run the risk of having those decisions undone if the arbitrator rules in the unions’ favor.

The outcome of the contractual dispute could affect the state’s ability to approve those 24 schools for a pot of federal funds, Commissioner John King told reporters today.

King said he is still hoping to decide about the city’s applications for federal School Improvement Grant funding at the 24 schools in early June. But he also cautioned that the city might not be able to fulfill some of the promises made in the applications if the city-union dispute prohibits the city from carrying out its plans for the schools.

To be eligible for School Improvement Grants, “turnaround” schools are typically expected to meet a rigid set of expectations, including replacing veteran school leaders and replacing half their teaching staffs or more.

“In order to be able to do the turnarounds as they described it, they’ll need to get a resolution to the litigation,” King said. “One of the challenges is the level of discord between the city and the UFT. I think it is incumbent on both to figure that out.”

King said another area of the applications he is looking closely at is what programs the schools promise to offer students next year and beyond.

“Certainly in the School Improvement Grant program the idea is to match the spending to the needs of the students. As we look through the applications, we are looking for whether or not the city has good, clear plans for programs at the schools that will meet the needs of the student population,” he said.

But an agreement on new teacher evaluations would be a more straightforward path toward federal funding, King said.

“I think the best thing for the city will be if they can move forward on an evaluations deal with the UFT so they can access not only the School Improvement Grant funds but also some of the other Race to the Top funds,” he said.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott said yesterday that the city would prefer a teacher evaluation deal but would pursue other initiatives to improve teacher quality even without one.

Some critics of Walcott’s new proposals called them a distraction from the more pressing need for a teacher evaluation system. King’s response was more sympathetic.

“They’re in a difficult spot. The city wants to move forward on the teacher effectiveness initiatives and clearly they’ve had a hard time getting this resolution with the UFT,” he said. “They’re right to have a sense of urgency. I wouldn’t call this a distraction, but it is a small part of everything that needs to happen: an evaluation system that supports good professional development, and that teachers and principals buy into.”

King spent the morning touring the Upper West Side’s Dual Language Middle School with two top Department of Education officials, Shael Polakow-Suransky and Josh Thomases. The discussion focused on the rollout of new curriculum standards, known as the Common Core, and best practices for teaching English language learners. The middle school, which Walcott visited last month, has a high population of ELLs (35 percent) and special education students (25 percent), but consistently performs well on the city’s measures of student progress.

King and other city and state officials popped their heads into several English and math classes and watched a dance class with two dozen seventh-graders practice the mambo.

When King asked his guide, Principal Claudia Aguirre, the describe the biggest challenge the school faces, she did not hesitate before responding: “This is just hard work.”

She said teachers and administrators struggle with the added workload required to help high-needs students progress — work such as offering extra tutoring or grading multiple assignment revisions per student that other elementary schools may be able to forgo.

“How far can you push it? How many revisions can you do, and how much time can you spend in a day? My teachers are doing this work knowing that if they just go downstairs [to P.S. 84, which shares the building on 92nd street], they don’t have to do any of this.”

When I spoke to Valerie Reidy, principal of the Bronx High School of Science, earlier this week, she said criticism about how she manages teachers and the student newspaper distracts the public from her students’ accomplishments.

“They work so hard, they study so hard. I hate to get caught up in administration-kid rivalry,” she said, adding that she doesn’t hold criticism by students against them. “The kids who push back — that’s what they’re supposed to be doing. I fully understand.”

A teacher at the school followed up on Thursday, sending a picture of 221 Bronx Science students taking Advanced Placement World History exams in a school gymnasium. The test took place on the penultimate day of a two-week spree of AP exams.

“As Principal Reidy mentioned to you, so much is written in the press that focuses only on the negative aspects of teenagers; this photograph is a testament to the seriousness of purpose with which so many of our students pursue their academic studies,” wrote Alex Thorp, an English teacher who also advises the senior class, the school’s print publications, and the yearbook staff. Thorp took the photograph that appears above.

Across the city, more students are taking and passing AP exams after a push in recent years to enroll students in college-level courses. In 2010, 14,522 high school seniors took at least one AP exam, up from 13,697 the year before. This fall, AP course participation will be among the college-readiness metrics factored into high schools’ city progress reports for the first time.

Like most seniors at the Queens High School of Teaching, Sabrina Alphonse takes a range of academic classes, had a blast on her senior trip, and is starting to plan her future.

But Alphonse is different in one key way: She is not technically a student at the school. Instead, Alphonse, who is wheelchair-bound, attends Q811, the District 75 school for severely disabled students sited on QHST’s campus.

All city schools include students with special needs in some way. Many have self-contained classes that serve only students with disabilities. Others operate some classes where special education and general education teachers work together to serve both kinds of students. But few are “fully inclusive,” as QHST is.

Full inclusion means that every student with special needs who is admitted to QHST is educated in the same classroom as general education students. There are no self-contained classes.

It also means that students such as Alphonse, whose disabilities are so severe that they are enrolled in District 75, taking classes alongside general education students and joining in with all of the QHST’s day-to-day activities, clubs, and programs. About three dozen Q811 students are enrolled in QHST classes, but all of the District 75 school’s students can participate in the high school’s extracurricular activities, and many do.

QHST is not just different because of how it has included students with special needs. Its success with them is also substantially different. Across the city, only a little more than one in four students with special needs graduates from high school in four years. At QHST, it’s well over 70 percent — not far off the school’s overall 88 percent graduation rate.

Laura Rodriguez, the Department of Education’s outgoing deputy chancellor for special education, has hailed the school’s graduation rate, and Nigel Pugh, the former principal, says the school has been singled out for having the smallest graduation rate gap between general education and special education students.

QHST administrators are baffled when they hear school communities sometimes point to oversized special education population as a reason for lagging performance.

“Given what they’re saying, the demographic we have should lead us in one direction, but it’s not,” said Jae Cho, the school’s interim acting principal.

Soon, all schools will look a little more like QHST. The department is in the middle of introducing special education reforms aimed at distributing students with special needs equitably among schools — and encouraging schools to place those students in the “least restrictive environment” they can handle. For many students, that means being included in general education classes for at least some of the school day.

“Their stated goal is not about inclusion, but it is about educating more and more students with disabilities in community schools,” Maggie Moroff, coordinator of the ARISE Coalition of special education advocacy groups, said about the Department of Education. “The way it’s playing out, it looks like there will be less self-contained [classes] and more inclusion for greater access to the academic curriculum.”

The shift is likely to be challenging for schools that are used to handing off disabled students after explaining that they can’t meet the students’ needs. Some educators and parents are complaining that the shift is motivated by finances — it costs less to include students than keep them in self-contained classes — rather than by what’s best for students or schools.

“For schools that don’t have structures in place, it’s a shift in thinking,” said Cho.

Moroff said inclusion can’t succeed unless schools have extra resources, administrative support, and “continuing, ongoing, at-the-elbow professional development.”

But she said it is worthy work. “Life is inclusive,” she said. “Or should be.”

This was the belief Pugh emphasized when he founded QHST in 2003. “The question is: Do you value these kids?” he said recently, speaking from his new office at the Department of Education’s central administration, where he is helping roll out the new special education reforms.

In addition partnering with Q811, the District 75 school, from its opening day, QHST made it a custom to recruit eighth-graders with special needs.

And even after a large number were admitted through the regular high school admissions process, Pugh sought out more. The first time Pugh called the department’s central enrollment office, the person who answered the phone thought he was calling to complain about how many special education students he was assigned. He was so used to hearing principals resist that he just assumed Pugh was doing the same, Pugh recalled.

But Pugh had realized that more students with Individualized Education Plans could be a boon to his fledging school: They brought with them additional funds. About 10 students with IEPs would buy a special education teacher, Pugh calculated. Then he set out to play the numbers game.

“If I want to fund a robust program, I need more students,” he said. “The more kids you have, the bigger the budget will be for special education and the better services you’ll be able to offer.”

Now, the school maintains a special education enrollment rate of about 20 percent — with about 16 percent of students on QHST’s roll and the balance Q811 students who are included. The consistency allows the school to maintain a structure to absorb the students without scrambling for services for them.

That means flooding the school with a stable team of adults. Some classes have two teachers — one with special education certification — for Integrated Co-Teaching, and others have paraprofessionals on hand to support inclusion students from the District 75 school. Teachers work together each week to brainstorm ways to serve students.

It also means being able to sustain a consistent spread of students by past academic performance. The school uses the “educational option” approach to make sure about two-thirds of each entering class performed close to average on middle school exams, and the rest of the students are evenly divided among high and low performers.

Once accepted, students are divvied up into three “small learning communities,” with the District 75 school making up an unofficial fourth SLC. Each community includes an even proportion of students by past performance, and each has three classes of 34 students.

In each community, the three classes offer different services. In integrated co-teaching classes, about 10 of the 34 students has special needs and many of them were in self-contained special education classes at their past schools. A second class offers Special Education Teacher Support Services, a type of small-group support that happens multiple periods a week for the eight or so students whose IEP mandates it. And a third class boasts inclusion for a handful of District 75 students such as Alphonse. (QHST shares the costs of serving the District 75 students, but their performance counts only for Q811.)

That means there’s not a single classroom at QHST that doesn’t have students with special needs. Every student and teacher is involved in inclusion.

Parents say the effect is positive for all students. Sandra Dastagirzada, the PTA president, is gearing up to send her third child to the school. She said that her older son, a strong student now pursuing medicine, benefitted from working with mixed-ability classmates.

“He was helping other kids who were not doing as well and he was still being enriched by the students he was helping,” she said.

But inclusion doesn’t always mean everyone always feels included. Even with intentional structures, staff, and leadership, the school’s arrangement can still be an adjustment for students — in both general and special education — who have never been mixed before.

That became clear to Alphonse as she tackled a project in her senior seminar this year. The assignment was to make a presentation about a day in the life of a QHST student, and while putting hers together, Alphonse realized that her day was not quite typical. She added pictures to her presentation of District 75 students sitting separately in the cafeteria and walking alone in the hallways and juxtaposed them with photographs of general education students eating in groups and chattering together. She was making the case that inclusion is more than just being educated side-by-side — it should also mean being treated like a regular kid by other kids.

After Alphonse delivered her presentation the first time, teachers started bringing their advisory groups for encore presentations. Now, Alphonse is making weekly presentations within the school. Over the summer, Cho plans to have incoming ninth-graders watch the presentation, too.

The presentation kicks off with a warning: “This film may cause your heart to overflow.” Pictures illustrate Alphonse and other District 75 students doing things that all students do: playing video games, dining out, shopping.

“So, tell me why can’t we be friends?” the presentation asks.

On a Thursday in late March, Alphonse posed that question to a few dozen QHST juniors. When the powerpoint finished, Alphonse addressed her audience. “So can you guys try to make a change?”

When her classmates’ response was a quiet “yes” in unison, Alphonse pressed on. “And what are those types of changes?”

An Adidas-clad junior said, “I promise to start talking to people in wheelchairs.”

“But we’re not all in wheelchairs, you know,” Alphonse replied. She said other students’ simple efforts “really would make the world a better place.”

That’s a message that underlies the school as it pushes students to grow academically and interpersonally — and aims to lift the stigma of disability.

“All students benefit from learning how to respect, understand and accept all students, regardless of ability or disability,” Cho said.

• A new coalition aims to challenge Bloomberg’s schools policies in the mayor’s race. (Times, Daily News)
• The city will try to fire or buy out more teachers. (GothamSchools, Post, Times, Daily News, NY1, WSJ)
• A Harlem charter school called the police about a union photographer in the building. (Post)
• The Harbor School has major plans to expand its space and potentially enrollment. (Downtown Express)
• Bronx schools are busy with Regents exam prep and visits from Holocaust survivors. (Riverdale Press)
• An N.M. student graduated on time by making up an English class in a weekend. (Albuquerque Journal)

• A teacher recalls a conversation with her non-teacher husband about testing. (Miss Eyre/NYC Educator)
• Arne Duncan said he doesn’t know why states keep offering free tutoring that doesn’t work. (Politics K-12)
• Education writers from across the country have convened in Philadelphia. Read their updates. (Twitter)
• The director of fiscal strategy for StudentsFirst says LIFO causes more teachers to be laid off. (Flypaper)
• Students who left a Denver school suspected of cheating saw their scores fall later. (EdNews Colorado)
• The UFT has issued the RFP for community social services grants that it promised last week. (Edwize)
• “Top-rated” teacher Maribeth Whitehouse offers 10 explanations for why she teaches. (Learning Matters)
• A Camden principal fired six years ago for whistle-blowing thrives; the district struggles. (Inquirer)
• Rishawn Biddle calls New York City’s latest ed policy news “all in all, not a bad move.” (Dropout Nation)
• The chair of L.A.’s Democratic party wants DFER to stop using the party name. (LACDP via Ravitch)

Chancellor Dennis Walcott speaks to business leaders at the Association for a Better New York breakfast.

After years of trying to win new powers to fire under-performing teachers, the city is turning to rights it has had all along.

Speaking to a coalition representing the city’s business elite this morning, Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced that the city would move to fire any teacher who receives “unsatisfactory” ratings for two years in a row. He also announced that the city would ask the UFT to allow buyouts for teachers who have been without permanent positions for more than a year.

Both policies are already permitted under the law and the city’s contract with the teachers union— a fact that drew ridicule from UFT President Michael Mulgrew.

“It’s theater of the absurd. It’s getting old,” he said. “I think they believe that everyone’s a fool. They’ve made an announcement about something they already have the ability to do.”

Mulgrew noted that the union contract already allows Department of Education officials to do exactly what Walcott’s two plans announced today would do—incentivize teachers without permanent jobs to take buyouts, and require schools to remove teachers who receive consecutive unsatisfactory ratings. He also said the buyout plan was proposed by the union several times over the past three years, but the city rebuffed it.

“In their own minds they’ve convinced themselves they’re out there making news and being bold,” he said, adding that the city should already know the union is willing to negotiate a buyout program. “I don’t know how you can negotiate just by making a speech.”

Negotiations between the city and union over new teacher evaluations broke down in December. Those evaluations would have done away with the current teacher rating system and made it harder for teachers to earn top ratings and would have required the city to try to fire teachers with the lowest ratings.

Walcott said today that the city still wants to adopt new evaluations — and that the new policies would not go into effect if new evaluations are in place by next year — but the announcement shows that the city is seeking a plan B.

The question of how to rid the school system of weak teachers has perplexed the Bloomberg administration for years. The Department’s attempts to fire teachers in the ATR pool when Joel Klein was chancellor fell short, as did efforts to end the last-in-first-out policy that governs which teachers principals can ask to leave schools.

Educators for Excellence, a teacher advocacy group, also suggested that the city’s plans were un-novel solutions to a bigger problem: the lack of a teacher evaluation deal.

“These are band aid solutions,” the organization’s founders said in a statement. “The only way to ensure that students are in classrooms with effective teachers is for both sides to finally negotiate a meaningful multi-measure evaluation system that gives educators the support, feedback, and recognition they deserve and need.”

Walcott declined to take questions from reporters, an atypical choice for him, but department officials filled in some details this afternoon.

Of the 831 teachers now in the ATR pool, most would be eligible for the program if it begins this fall, officials said. The program will be open to any teachers who have spent one year or more in the ATR pool, and its start date will be determined during union-city negotiations, which are scheduled to begin next week.

City officials said the buyout offers will be more generous than a similar buyout program that has been used in other cities, including Dallas and D.C.. Depending on their number of years teaching, city teachers can expect to receive offers ranging from $1,000 (for one to five years of teaching) to $20,000 (for 20 years) or more.

According to statistics provided by the city, the average salary for members of the ATR pool is $82,420, plus an average of $30,000 in annual benefits. ATR teachers are expected to actively search for permanent jobs while they are fulfilling their week-to-week assignments. But officials said nearly half of the ATR teachers have not submitted a single city job application or attended a city recruitment event in the past year.

The total cost of the ATR pool has ranged over the years, and the exact figure has been a source of disagreement between city and union officials. But the city has never strayed from its position that the cost is too high.

Other figures the city provided portray the ATR pool in a somewhat bleak light: Nearly a third of its teachers were removed from their last permanent job assignment through some formal disciplinary action, nearly a quarter have been in the pool for two or more years, and nearly one fifth have received at least one U-rating. 

The ATR pool could grow this summer as the city moves to close more schools at once than ever before, and relocate many of their teachers. Department of Education spokesman Matt Mittenthal said the pool has been shrinking this year, perhaps thanks to a policy change that requires ATRs to act as substitute teachers, rotating through schools from week to week. That change has motivated some principals to offer permanent jobs to teachers they may otherwise have never met, but it has also encouraged some teachers to quit their jobs or retire.

But without this extra push from the city, Mittenthal said, “We don’t think the pool is going to get much smaller, given how it is now.”

The city’s second proposal of the morning, to prevent elementary school students from being taught by a U-rated teacher for two years in a row, would effect the student class assignments for 217 elementary school teachers who received U-ratings in 2011. The city is planning to issue some kind of policy guideline to principals that they may not assign the 4,000 students being taught by those teachers this year to another U-rated teacher in the fall.

The third prong of Walcott’s announcement calls for schools to formalize a practice already in use—the removal of classroom teachers who have received U-ratings in the past two years. 235 teachers fit that bill, and half of them are still teaching in permanent classroom jobs. The rest are either in the ATR pool or are awaiting dismissal decisions.

Many of those teachers have appealed their second U-ratings. If the U-rating decisions are upheld after the appeal process, the city will formally see their dismissal. Officials said the DOE currently relies on principals to file these charges against teachers, but principals often decide not to. In the future, the DOE will initiate the dismissal process from its central office.

Eva Moskowitz and her charter school network are objecting to new targets meant to push charter schools to enroll a fair share of students with disabilities and English language learners.

When they revised the state’s charter schools law in 2010, legislators included a requirement that the schools register a “comparable” number of high-needs students. Now the state has proposed a methodology to calculate enrollment targets for charter schools based on how many students attend the school and the overall ratio of high-needs students in each district. Schools that currently enroll too few students with special needs will be required to show at least a “good-faith” effort to enroll more.

But a top official in the Success Academies network said Wednesday that she objected to any such requirement. Setting enrollment targets creates a disincentive for schools to help students get to the point that they no longer need special services, said Emily Kim, general counselor for the Success Academies network.

“For us, our goal is not to hit a number and stay at that number for English language learners,” Kim said. “Our goal is that they learn English, that they perform at the highest levels, and that they graduate from high school college ready and are successful in life.”

“So if our figures go down, we’re proud of that,” she added.

Updated: A state education official said the proposed targets would not penalize schools schools if their students are declassified as special education or ELL. Through what’s being called a “three year lag,” schools would get credit for students who had been classified anytime in the last three years. “With the three-year lag, there is little to no chance that there will be a dinging of schools for declassification of a child,” said Assistant Commissioner Sally Bachofer, who helped developed the targets.

Bachofer also said that declassification rates at individual schools, while not a part of the proposed methodology, could be presented during the charter renewal period as a “good faith effort” to serve these high needs students.

Kim was part of a four-person panel recruited by the New York City Bar Association to discuss charter school co-locations.

That topic soon gave way to a discussion of the general merits of the charter school movement. UFT Vice President Leo Casey, Coalition for Educational Justice organizer Zakiyah Ansari, and New York City Charter Center CEO James Merriman also sat on the panel, which Inside City Hall host Errol Louis moderated.

Kim said she wasn’t speaking on behalf of the Success network, but a spokeswoman later said Moskowitz agreed with her.

Moskowitz is a critic of the way the state currently tracks ELL students and believes a more telling metric is the rate of students who pass a state proficiency exam for English language learners.

Across the city, many students do not pass the exam even after attending city schools for several years. According to a Success network review, 36 percent of first-graders identified as ELLs in 2003 had not passed the exam seven years later.

Of the nearly 2,500 students who attended a Success school last year, 7 percent were ELLs, according to state data. In some of the districts where the network operates, the ELL rate is twice as high. But in the 2009-2010 school year, 36 percent of students in Success schools tested out of ELL, twice the citywide rate, Sedlis said.

“That is a major problem in this city,” said the spokeswoman, Jenny Sedlis. “Charters should not be forced to replicate the dysfunctions of the district.”

Merriman said special education enrollment targets could run the same risk by incentivizing schools to identify students as having disabilities excessively.

“Special education has been used, unfortunately, sometimes as a tool for discrimination against African American males, as a way to isolate them in self-contained classrooms,” he said. “We don’t want to make normative what we all know is a bad system.”

The charter school center that Merriman runs released a report last month acknowledging that the city’s charter schools don’t serve as many high-needs students as they should. He said during the panel that changing the distribution of students isn’t as simple as it might seem.

“It’s not easy sometime to get ELLS to come in to your school,” Merriman said. “They tend to come in as a community. They want to make sure as a community that their students will be served well.”

Plus, with many city charter schools still scaling up, they lack the kind of specialized teachers to serve even small populations. Some charter schools, such has Achievement First Bushwick, which received a shortened renewal in part because of its struggles, have hired English as a Second Language teachers specifically to serve larger numbers of ELL students that live in the district.

Even without a new teacher evaluation system, New York City will ramp up efforts to weed out teachers who “don’t deserve to teach,” Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced today.

In an early-morning speech to the Association for a Better New York, a business and political group, Walcott said the city would adopt new policies to insulate students from teachers deemed “unsatisfactory” under the current evaluation system. Under the new policies, no student will be allowed to have a teacher rated unsatisfactory multiple years in a row, and the city will move to fire all teachers who receive two straight U ratings.

“If we truly believe that every student deserves a great teacher, then we can’t accept a system where a student suffers with a poor-performing one for two straight years,” Walcott said. “One year of learning loss is bad enough — but studies indicate that two years could be devastating.”

The policies would go into effect if the city and union do not agree on new teacher evaluations by September, when the new school year begins. Under the existing evaluation system, two consecutive U ratings can trigger termination proceedings but do not have to. Two “ineffective” ratings on teacher evaluations now required under state law would automatically trigger termination proceedings.

Walcott also announced that the city would capitalize on a clause in its contract with the teachers union to offer a resignation incentive for teachers who have spent more than a year in the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of teachers without permanent positions. Buyouts would have to be negotiated for each teacher, and Walcott promised that the incentives would be “generous.” The move represents a shift in approach for the Bloomberg administration, which has previously sought the right to fire members of the ATR pool.

Walcott’s complete speech, as prepared for delivery, is below. We’ll have more on his proposals later today.

The following is text of Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott’s address as prepared for delivery at Association for a Better New York breakfast event on May 17, 2012

“Thank you, Mr. Mayor. It’s been an honor to serve in your administration for the last ten years. And thanks to Bill Rudin for your leadership and for making New York City a better place.

“Good morning. Let me start by thanking ABNY for hosting us today. It’s a pleasure to be joined by so many New Yorkers who share a passion for this great city, especially those who work hard on behalf of our students. I’ve attended my fair share of ABNY events over the years, so I am truly honored to speak to you this morning as your Chancellor.

“Today, I’d like to talk about the extraordinary work happening in our 1750 schools, and discuss some bold new ideas we believe will make a lasting impact on the lives of our students.

“Let me start with some perspective on the size and complexity of our school system. Everyone, please take out a piece of paper and sharpen your number two pencils. It’s time for a test. First, does anyone know how many meals we serve each day in New York City public schools? Eight hundred thousand. Other than the US military, no single organization buys more food than we do.

“Here’s another question: if our public schools were a large US city, how do you think it would rank compared to the population in other cities? 20th in the nation? 15th? The population of our public schools would make it the 10th – largest city in the United States, right behind Dallas.

“Think about this for a second: with over a million children in our schools, one in every 311 Americans is a New York City Public school student.

“I have one more question: how many languages are spoken by students in our public schools? Any guesses? By our latest count, it’s 184. Some of our fastest-growing languages include Punjabi, Albanian, Mandinka and Fon, to name a few.

“So with those facts in mind, let’s talk a little bit about how we got where we are today. I remember that summer day in 2002, at an East Harlem school, when I stood with Mayor Bloomberg to celebrate a pivotal moment in New York City history. State lawmakers had just voted to give control of New York City’s public schools to our elected Mayor.

“Remember that for decades, the quality of education in our schools was stagnant. Student performance was flat and high school graduation rates hovered at 50 percent. Only one in two students who started high school left with a diploma.

“In some corners of the city, jobs at schools were handed out as favors. A well-connected parent could make a phone call and get their child into a particular school. No one was held accountable. And I assure you, no one talked about a school’s college and career readiness rates.

“So in 2002, our first priority was to reform a broken system that didn’t serve our students. And that’s what we did. Under mayoral control, we have improved teacher quality and created schools that put students on a path to success. Instead of making excuses for those schools that graduated as few as one in four students, we took action.

“It wasn’t easy, but today, with higher standards, graduation rates are at an all-time high, and the dropout rate has been cut in half. We made our schools safer. Today, crime is down by almost 50 percent. Working together with the New York City Police Department, we have made our schools some of the safest of any large American city. We infused more money into our schools. Since 2002, the Mayor has increased funding for schools by more than $11 billion – that’s up over 100 percent.

“We created the best school choice system in the nation, as recently recognized by the Brookings Institution. Ten years ago, a child could be forced to attend his or her neighborhood high school, no matter how bad it was. This is no longer the case.

“We empowered principals to manage their own budgets and become the CEOs of their buildings. Before 2002, the school system was designed around compliance and following the rules, and that stifled creative thinking. Now, principals are encouraged to innovate, problem-solve, and make hiring decisions to help their students succeed.

“We instilled a culture of accountability throughout our organization. Today, the conversation in schools and across America is focused on student achievement – that simply wasn’t the case ten years ago.

“We created 535 new public schools, including 139 charter schools. Together, they would make up a school district comparable to the size of Philadelphia. We will continue this strategy into next fall, bringing the total number of new schools created to 613. And our new small schools work: students in these schools are graduating at rates 20 points higher than graduates at schools they have replaced.

“Some of our most exciting new schools are Career and Technical Education models, or “CTE”.  Just two weeks ago, TIME magazine highlighted the positive impacts of CTE schools for students, businesses and communities. CTE schools are perhaps the best way to train students for the jobs that exist today and those that will be created tomorrow. That is why I am thrilled that we will be opening 12 new CTE schools in the next two years, on top of 18 we’ve opened since 2002.

“We’ve also recently taken on a problem seen throughout the United States: the lagging achievement of students in middle school. In the next two years, we will open 50 new middle schools and embark on a citywide campaign to improve literacy in those grades.

“And we’ve doubled down on efforts to make parents our true partners and find new ways to communicate with them through surveys, meetings, and online tools. Next fall, we will launch a Parent Academy to help parents reinforce learning and help their children with homework. And we will begin a new series of webinars for parents on a range of topics.

“To those of us who work in our schools, it’s clear that lawmakers made the right choice in 2002. And they did so again by renewing Mayoral control just a few years ago. It’s important to take stock of what this means for our students – and, more broadly, for New York City. We would not have been able to give students and families more options, make schools safer, and improve teaching and learning without this authority.

“But it’s still not enough. In some areas, we continue to do things the ‘old-fashioned way.’ We know that teachers are the most important factor in helping their students learn and grow. The data is clear: during the course of a school year, a student can learn three times as much material from a high-performing teacher as they would from a low-performing teacher. Even more: an above-average teacher can help their class earn an additional $400,000 over their lifetimes. That’s the effect of just one year of great teaching. If you expanded that to our entire city, we are talking about adding billions of dollars to the city’s economy, just by improving teaching.

“The facts speak for themselves: teaching matters. That’s why we’ve gone to great lengths to make New York City a more attractive place for aspiring educators. Mayor Bloomberg has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, raising teacher salaries by 43 percent.”

“But if we can’t find a way to improve teacher quality even further, it will be impossible to ensure our students are being taught the skills to succeed beyond high school. Unfortunately, in many of our efforts, we have been unable to find a partner in our local teachers union, the UFT. In some cases, they have even stood in our way.

“But that’s no reason to stop trying. Today, I want to share a few key ideas that I believe will help greatly improve the quality of our teaching force.

“Right now, our teacher evaluation system is outdated. More than 97 percent of teachers get “satisfactory” ratings. The ratings offer no feedback to help teachers improve, and leave us unable to remove teachers who get low ratings in multiple years.

“The teachers union knows this. In February, the UFT committed to a new evaluation system that would allow us to identify great teachers and reward them accordingly, support those who are still developing, and allows us to remove those who are poor-performing. The UFT President celebrated this deal with Governor Cuomo in Albany, and I applauded him for it. Three months later, we have made little progress. As each day passes, we are still waiting for the UFT to return to the table and finalize this agreement.

“If you don’t know me, I’m an eternal optimist, and I am still hopeful we can complete this deal in time for next school year. But right now, the clock is ticking. Rather than come together on behalf of our students, the UFT takes every opportunity to stall, often suing us in court and complaining to a State panel when they don’t get their way.

“We don’t have time for stalling tactics. We need the UFT to finalize a citywide evaluation system before it’s too late. Until that happens, our 1.1 million students – the 10th largest city in the country – are stuck in this system. It is upon us to find another way.

“Early in this administration, we made a decision not to force any principal to accept a teacher they don’t want. We believe that principals should be empowered to make the best choices for their students. As a result, some teachers have ended up without permanent teaching jobs, and are placed in something we call the Absent Teacher Reserve, also known as the ATR pool.

“Unfortunately, we, the taxpayers, continue to foot the bill. If they can’t get hired by another principal – and even if they don’t try to find a job at all – we still have to pay their salaries. There have been over 3,600 teachers in the pool at some point this year, and that’s now down to 800.

“But those who remain will cost the city an estimated $100 million in salaries. That’s a huge, wasteful expenditure that doesn’t help our students succeed. More than a quarter of these teachers have been disciplined for bad behavior. Almost half of them have not even submitted a job application or attended a recruitment fair in the past year. That’s unacceptable.

“Think about that: when unemployment is still high and budgets are tight, we are spending more than $100 million on teachers who aren’t interested in teaching.

“Today, I am proposing an idea. If you’re a teacher who can’t find a permanent job in our schools after a year, we will offer you a generous incentive to resign and pursue another career. It would reduce a significant burden on our budget, allowing us to divert millions of dollars back to schools. Every dollar we save, we can use to benefit our students, instead of wasting it on teachers who probably chose the wrong profession. This buyout proposal will be more attractive than any we’ve seen across the nation—for teachers, and for the taxpayers of New York City.

“Of course, we can’t limit ourselves to focusing on teachers in limbo. We need to find a way to ensure every child has a good teacher right now, and support or remove those who can’t get the job done. But without a meaningful evaluation system that allows us to remove ineffective teachers, we are left with few options.

“Now, let me be clear: singling out bad teachers for the woes of education is a convenient, over-simplification of our problems, and I won’t stand for it. The vast majority of our teachers deserve our praise and support. Blaming them for our challenges is simply unacceptable. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t evaluate teachers based on how much our students are learning.

“When I think about the fact that a child’s future could be opened up to great opportunities – or closed off forever – by a single teacher in elementary school, I am both hopeful and worried. Teaching is just that important. Plain and simple: we need a way to ensure that no child gets stuck with one of the few teachers who are ineffective, especially in the early grades.

“So today, I am proposing a solution. If the new evaluation system isn’t in place by the beginning of next school year, I will implement a new policy that would protect these young students:  First, it would prevent any elementary school student from being taught for two consecutive years by a classroom teacher found to be incompetent.

“If we truly believe that every student deserves a great teacher, then we can’t accept a system where a student suffers with a poor-performing one for two straight years. One year of learning loss is bad enough—but studies indicate that two years could be devastating.

“Second, this new policy would set a trigger: after any teacher receives two consecutive unsatisfactory ratings for incompetence, we would remove that teacher from the classroom and seek their dismissal from our public schools. In my view, if you are one of the few hundred teachers who gets poorly rated two years in a row, you don’t deserve to teach in our schools and in front of our students.

“That’s the spirit of the new evaluation system—so we will move forward, whether or not the union decides to join us.

“The union and others would rather stay silent than cheer the progress our students have made since 2002. Some would even disparage the hard work of our students and staff these past few years.  So you have to wonder: with students doing better by every measure, who is the union trying to protect?

“We are focused on the students, and the reasons are obvious: The effects of these proposals will pay dividends now and well into the future. We know that higher levels of education lead to greater incomes for individuals and their families. And that’s true today more than ever.

“Over a lifetime, a high school graduate makes half a million dollars more than a dropout. And a college graduate makes even more than that. Only 11 percent of jobs today are available to those without a high school diploma—that’s way down from just a few years ago. And the fastest-growing industries – such as healthcare, engineering, and education – require college diplomas.

“So we’re not going to stop at high school graduation: in this economy, our students need to be ready for college and careers. That’s why we are hard at work introducing the new Common Core Standards in our schools. This year and next, students in every school will be exposed to more critical thinking, essay writing, and real world problem-solving.

“New York City is leading the way in these efforts. While most states are waiting until 2014, our work has been underway since 2010. Next year, we’ll expand it even further. Today, I am proud to announce that the GE Foundation has decided to renew their commitment to our students with a gift of $14.3 million. This gift will build upon GE’s previous investment and help give our students the tools they need for college.

“So, increasing graduation rates isn’t just about data—it means thousands of families being put on the path to economic-self sufficiency. And as more and more New Yorkers earn their high school diplomas and complete college, New York City’s workforce will become more globally competitive.

“Now, this is really personal for me. I am the son of a high school dropout, a city worker who enabled me to stand before you today. As many of you know, I am a graduate of New York City public schools. I still live approximately two miles from the elementary school I attended as a child.

“Every morning, when I see children in my neighborhood and across the city attending our public schools, I think about their futures. I know that the workforce and the economy today are far different than they were when my father dropped out of high school. If he was navigating today’s job market, his prospects would be bleak.

“So my message to you today is this: if we’re going to make college and careers a reality for all our children, we need to continue our bold approach to reforming education. I know that some adults might not like it. The teachers union may stand in the way. But the best interests of our students need to come first.

“We can’t rest until every family in New York City can send their children to an excellent public school. I believe, and I hope you do too, that a better school system today will mean a better New York City tomorrow.

Thank you.

• Sitting too close together cost hundreds of students their SAT scores. (NY1, Times, Daily News, WSJ)
• A school “study tour” is the next step in an initiative to link charter and district schools. (Daily News)
• The state is preparing to set high-need student enrollment goals for charter schools. (GothamSchools)
• A new study finds that 15 percent of students nationally can be considered chronically absent. (Times)
• A judge encouraged arbitration in the union-city suit over turnaround. (GothamSchools, SchoolBook)
• Tottenville High School staff members were honored for saving a student’s life with a defibrillator. (NY1)
• A lucky conversation led to a new Joffrey Ballet program for Fort Hamilton High School. (Daily News)
• Comptroller John Liu found improprieties in payments to a tutoring company. (GothamSchools, Post)
• The parent council for Queens’ District 29 is weighing a middle school choice proposal. (Daily News)
• Downtown families who are still on kindergarten waiting lists are growing frustrated. (Tribeca Trib)
• Parents from P.S. 195 in Queens rallied against the slow pace of the city’s PCB cleanup. (Daily News)
• Across the state, voters overwhelmingly okayed school budgets set under a brand-new tax cap. (Times)
• Chicago aims to add 60 more charter schools in the next five years and go from 110 to 170. (Tribune)

• Teachers are complaining about flawed scoring guides for this year’s state tests. (Insideschools)
• David Coleman, College Board’s new chief, said future SATs will be Common Core-aligned. (EdWeek)
• A parent reports that state test prep took a backseat to a talent show at her son’s school. (Insideschools)
• A teacher says project-based learning keeps students motivated through exam season. (Mr. Foteah)
• A teacher says the city’s plan to flag teachers subject to disciplinary action is problematic. (JD2718)
• A city program encourages District 75 teachers to incorporate more art into lessons. (Schoolbook)
• Students in P.S. 22′s chorus perform Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ ’bout a Revolution.” (PS22 Chorus Blog)
• A teacher details his experience in the “Rubber Room,” with an apologia for taxpayers. (Protect Portelos)

The first court appearance in the union lawsuit to halt hiring decisions at 24 turnaround schools ended with the judge telling the city and unions to resolve their dispute out of court.

Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Joan Lobis urged the city and teachers and principals unions to resolve their contractual disputes through arbitration, rather than litigation. If the two sides would agree to let an independent arbitrator hear their case, then she would not need to rule on the unions’ request for an injunction to halt hiring at the schools.

Union and city lawyers both said they wanted to resolve the dispute quickly because schools would be harmed if hiring decisions are not well before the end of the school year.

“If you’re both saying you need the arbitrator as soon as possible, an injunction would not be necessary,” Lobis said. “If what you’re saying is really sincere, then you’ll get it to the arbitrator as quickly as possible.”

After conferring this afternoon, city and union lawyers accepted Lobis’s suggestion. The two sides are meeting tonight to select an arbitrator and meeting dates, with the goal of resolving the legal questions about teacher and principal staffing at the turnaround schools by early June.

If they agree on an arbitrator, the city plans to continue laying the groundwork for rehiring at the schools. But it would hold back from finalizing any personnel decisions until an arbitrator is agreed upon or the matter returns to court.

Still open for dispute is the question of whether there will be one arbitrator to review both the United Federation of Teachers’s case and the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators case (the unions’ preference), or if two arbitrators will review each case individually (the city’s preference).

The city and teachers union have not had good luck letting a third party referee unrelated disputes in the recent past. After negotiations over teacher evaluations broke down in December, the union asked for a third party to step in. The city has resisted entering mediation even as the state’s labor relations board has twice ordered a mediator to step in.

A teacher from Long Island City High School who listened in on the hearing said the turnaround schools will be harmed regardless of the lawsuit’s outcome. “It’s like they’re pushing Humpty Dumpty off a wall,” the teacher said. “You will have a lot of trouble putting [the schools] back together again.”

Holes in the Department of Education’s oversight of tutoring companies that work in city schools allowed one of the companies to collect payments without proving it had delivered services, according to an audit by Comptroller John Liu.

Liu found that Champion Learning Center collected about $860,000 in the 2009-2010 school year for tutoring students who had not signed into tutoring sessions or for tutoring sessions that officials had not certified had taken place.

The audit highlights the murky world of “supplemental educational services” providers, companies that offer tutoring mandated under the No Child Left Behind law. They are private entities but are subject to a host of city and state regulations, and the city must both monitor them and give them access to students.

The audit comes weeks after the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit against another SES provider, Princeton Review, for falsifying attendance records and bilking New York City out of millions of dollars. In that case, investigators found that the company had submitted false signatures showing that tutoring sessions had taken place.

Liu does not conclude that outright fraud took place at Champion Learning, which New York Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez revealed three years ago took home as much as $320 an hour for serving city students when overhead costs were included. Rather, Liu found that the group violated some regulations by delivering tutoring during school hours and played fast and loose with others — and that the city’s monitoring systems allowed for the possibility of fraud.

Liu wants the city to try to recoup the irregular payments to Champion Learning, and city officials said they would heed the suggestion.

“While the law requires that we offer contracts to all state-approved providers, they still have to comply with their contracts and applicable regulations,” said Marge Feinberg, a department spokeswoman, in a statement. “We will seek to recoup all payments for services that were not permitted or that could not be verified.”

Liu’s office has also referred the audit to the city’s Special Commission of Investigation for further scrutiny. SCI has previously detailed improprieties by other SES providers in the city.

Liu’s audit of Champion Education Partners is below.

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A screenshot from the state's proposed enrollment targets calculator. It shows the range of target enrollments for a school enrolling 150 students in Brooklyn's District 15.

The state is preparing to take a step forward in implementing a two-year-old clause in its charter school law that requires the schools to serve their fair share of high-needs students.

When legislators revised the charter school law in 2010, their main objective was to increase the number of charters allowed. But they also added a requirement that charter schools enroll “comparable” numbers of students with disabilities and English language learners, populations that the schools typically under-enroll.

What comparability would mean has never been clear — until now. Last week, the state unveiled a proposed methodology for calculating enrollment targets, and it intends to finalize the algorithm at next month’s meeting of SUNY’s Board of Trustees, which oversees charter schools.

The targets would vary from school to school and be determined based on the overall ratio of high-needs students in each district. The proposal includes a calculator that determines enrollment targets for any school based on its location, the grades it serves, and the size of its student body.

Under the proposed methodology, a charter school with 400 students in grades five through eight in Upper Manhattan’s District 6, for example, would have to enroll 98 percent students who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, 15 percent students with disabilities, and 44 percent ELLs. In District 2, which has more affluent families and fewer immigrants, a similar school would be expected to enroll 64 percent poor students and 13.4 percent ELLs. But it would still need to have 15 percent of students with special needs.

Some charter schools already meet and exceed their enrollment targets. But many others fall far short, as a charter sector self-assessment published last month indicated. The report found that 80 percent of charter schools enroll a lower proportion of poor students than their district.

Under the law, repeated failure to meet the enrollment targets could result in a school losing its right to operate. But more immediately, charter schools that don’t meet their enrollment targets will be expected to show a “good faith” effort to boost their numbers, according to Cynthia Proctor, a spokeswoman for SUNY’s Charter Schools Institute.

“Once the methodology is approved and targets set, part of developing authorizer practice will certainly be conversations with schools and related guidance on expectations in terms of good faith efforts to meet targets,” Proctor said in an email.

Those efforts are likely to include focusing recruitment efforts on high-needs populations and asking the state for permission to give preference to different groups of high-needs students in their admission lotteries, as some schools have already done.

“Some of the charters may need to change their enrollment procedures to make sure they’re reaching out to those families and places and centers,” said Jacqueline Frey, who runs DREAM Charter School in Harlem.

But Frey added, “From my perspective, this doesn’t change the nature of how we do our business.” The school has more special education students than the targets would require but slightly too few low-income students and ELLs.

Other charter school operators say the targets represent a step forward in addressing ongoing inequities in charter school enrollments but don’t solve the problem.

“It seems like it’s the outcome we all want, but it doesn’t sound like it’s telling us how to get there,” said Morty Ballen, the founder of the Explore Charter Schools network.

Indeed, schools face real challenges around enrolling some high-needs populations. State law requires that they admit students via a lottery and fill their seats, so charter schools cannot simply set aside a portion of seats for high-needs students. Once schools are full, they cannot admit midyear arrivals, who are often immigrants who do not speak English. Plus, schools that help some students shed their ELL or special education designation could be dinged if their portion of high-needs students decreases.

The methodology could still be changed to reflect some of the challenges. The state’s proposal notes, for example, that ELL students are not evenly distributed within school districts, but instead tend to concentrate in certain neighborhood pockets, so the methodology might generate targets that are unreasonably high or low for schools.

The targets are only for charter schools, but their creation is causing the state to look at enrollment trends in district schools, too. Together, the scrutiny can only be good for students, said James Merriman, executive director of the New York City Charter School Center.

“We support efforts to improve transparency around special education and student enrollment in both charter schools and district schools with the end goal of improving achievement for all kids,” he said.

SUNY’s Charter Schools Institute is holding a webinar May 18 to detail the proposed target methodology and will accept comments about it until May 29.

“We hope that one of the realizations that emerges from the extensive process followed to bring us to the point where we are now is that this is complex work,” Proctor said.

• Common Core standards architect David Coleman will head the test-making College Board. (Times)
• The city’s response to the union “turnaround” suit says a delay would be damaging. (GothamSchools)
• A janitor at P.S. 160 in the Bronx is being hailed for foiling a potential kidnapping. (Post, NBC)
• The principal removed after being accused of lewd behavior is being demoted. (Post, Daily News, NY1)
• A growing emphasis on standardized testing nationally has given rise to scattered rebellions. (WSJ)
• The backlash has led to intense criticism of testing firms even as the firms continue to expand. (WSJ)
• Florida schools won’t be penalized for low writing test scores after all scores fell. (Orlando Sentinel)
• Michelle Rhee’s ongoing advocacy through StudentsFirst continues to win big funders. (Reuters)
• A lawsuit funded by reform advocates takes aim at California’s tenure and seniority rights. (L.A. Times)

• A Los Angeles teacher says a robust teacher evaluation protocol has turned into a checklist. (Hechinger)
• Jay Mathews says he changed his mind about value-added ratings: They won’t work. (Class Struggle)
• A city teacher with top students scored low while her students aced an advanced exam. (GS Community)
• Analysts say the “Pineapple” debacle isn’t likely to hurt Pearson’s growing education arm. (Crain’s NY)
• Two Denver schools are under scrutiny after test scores fell amid tighter security. (EdNews Colorado)
• Reading materials at city schools are likely to change under Common Core standards. (Learning Matters)
• A teacher and union leader reports that a principal sent to sensitivity training has resigned. (JD2718)
• A Park Slope parent makes and sells maps showing the zones for neighborhood schools. (SchoolBook)
• A teacher worries what will happen to a depressed student over the summer. (Miss Eyre/NYC Educator)
• Tech leaders are showing an increasing interest in public schools and their students. (Fast Company)
• A half-hour show on education innovation by Channel 13 features Chancellor Walcott. (Metrofocus)
• A parent asks whether she must honor her child’s teacher’s summer school suggestion. (Insideschools)

City lawyers have filed their response to a union lawsuit that seeks to derail plans to move forward on 24 school closures. Both sides are due in court tomorrow to argue their case about whether a temporary restraining order on the closures should be extended.

The lawsuit seeks to prevent the Department of Education from following through on its decision last month to “turn around” 24 schools at the end of the school year. The plans include the replacement of up to 50 percent of the teaching staffs at the schools.

Lawyers for the principals and teachers unions filed the lawsuit last week, and the DOE agreed to halt all hiring until Wednesday’s hearing as part of the restraining order.

As we reported last week – and as the city’s response below argues – one problem the city has with the motion is that further delay to its plans could “cause disruption” to the hiring process.

The hearing will be for a preliminary injunction, so the unions will need to  successfully argue, among other things, that the closures are harmful enough to justify an extended restraining order. They will also need to prove a high likelihood of ultimately winning the case.

Whatever the Judge Joan Lobis rules on Wednesday — if she rules at all (a preliminary injunction on last year’s closure lawsuit ended with no decision) — it will only be on the temporary restraining order, not on the larger merits of the lawsuit.

Department of Education Legal Response – UFT/CSA Lawsuit

During her brief stint as city schools chancellor, Cathie Black pulled the brakes on a planned rollout of special education reforms. Now, educators and parents are asking the city to slow things down once more.

They say the departure of the city’s top two special education officials will leave the Department of Education ill-equipped to carry out the planned reforms. They are also charging that the city’s proposal to change the way special education instruction is funded could encourage schools to place disabled students in settings that are not ideal for them.

The special education reforms are meant to encourage schools to move disabled students to settings that are less restrictive. The shift is in keeping with best practices in special education, and students are supposed to have their services changed only if it makes sense for them. But the city wants to add an incentive: Under a proposal likely to be approved next week, students who receive special education services for only a portion of the day would bring more city funds than students in self-contained settings for the entire day.

It’s a proposal that has educators and parents alike concerned. ”When it comes to special education we all know that as you move a child to a less restrictive environment, it’s a better thing, but it only works when it is appropriate for the child,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said at a union conference on Saturday. “When you start pushing to make that decision based on budget, then we have to start to question whether it’s appropriate or not.”

The elected parent council from Manhattan’s District 2 aired the same concerns in a letter sent last week to Laura Rodriguez, the outgoing deputy chancellor in charge of special education. “While it is difficult to tell exactly what the net result of the new Fair Student Funding formula will be, it seems likely that the proposed formula is neither sufficient nor flexible enough for schools to develop the best support structure for the students with special needs,” the letter reads.

The council is asking the city to delay the special education reforms until after Rodriguez’s successor, Corinne Rello-Anselmi, is firmly in place and a new deputy has been named. Lauren Katzman was the executive director of special education for the department until last month, when she left to head special education in Newark.

“During the time when a new initiative is introduced, a stable staff, particularly the architects of the reform, at the leadership level is critical in avoiding confusion and facilitating a smoother implementation,” the council’s letter says.

The Panel for Educational Policy, which has never rejected a city proposal, is set to vote on the new funding formula next Wednesday. The complete letter sent last week by District 2′s Community Education Council is below.

For Abraham Moussako, a 2011 graduate, working on the student newspaper at Bronx High School of Science was an exercise in frustration.

He writes today in the Community section:

Getting an article approved in your school newspaper covering an incident that garnered the institution bad publicity citywide is the sort of thing that probably would be a chore in any circumstance. But it was an even dicier situation at the [Science] Survey, where the administration took its power of prior review over the paper seriously.

Moussako’s description of several run-ins that he and other editors had with the school’s famously hands-on administration fans a longstanding debate about the role of school officials in reviewing student journalism. Reports from advocates of student journalism suggest that many city principals exercise their legal right to review and curb reporting that appears in school newspapers.

Bronx Science Principal Valerie Reidy is one of them. She told GothamSchools she has a responsibility for every word that appears in the Science Survey, so she reviews the paper for grammatical errors, tone, and whether issues are presented in a balanced way. While some students don’t like her involvement, she said it’s no different from the way she works with the student government, where students gain experience in politics but don’t actually make school policy.

Fundamentally, she said, she is involved with the newspaper’s management for educational reasons.

“Good journalism is the scientific process,” Reidy said. “Our goal [at Bronx Science] is that everyone can analyze situations and think clearly and show both sides of an issue objectively before drawing conclusions.”

But sometimes, according to Moussako, the issue for student journalists wasn’t how to cover an issue but whether they could write about it at all. He describes spiking an editorial about widely reported conflicts between Reidy and teachers at the school after Reidy rejected it. Speaking with GothamSchools, Reidy suggested that those conflicts don’t belong in the student paper precisely because they have gotten attention in the city’s professional press.

“In a school newspaper are we going to allow that newspaper to vent every single complaint of a teacher or should it be about student issues?” she asked.