Gotham Gazette reports that Kew Garden Hills residents are preparing to protest the DOE’s decision to locate a new transfer alternative school in the neighborhood. City Council member James Gennaro is more upset that the DOE didn’t seek community approval before making the decision than he is about the nature of the program, which will serve older students who may have had difficulty at their previous schools. “It’s really just the community feels so left out,” Gennaro’s spokesman told Gotham Gazette. “It’s almost hurtful.”

In the last year, several school communities have successfully protested the DOE’s attempts to locate new schools in their buildings. But this situation is different — the alternative school in Queens will have its own building, in an old Catholic school. And usually, when a community finds out it will be getting a new school, folks are happy. Could it be that Gennaro is concerned about having older, less academically successful high school students in his neighborhood? I hope that’s not the case. But I think about how folks at MS 113 in Brooklyn recently told the Daily News that sharing space with a GED program instead of a suspension center was “the lesser of two evils.” As the recent story about transfer alternative schools in the New York Times made clear, taking more than four years to graduate from high school is becoming more and more common. Instead of resisting schools that will help older kids graduate from high school, communities should be happy to see them made available.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the Times this week about the nationwide shortage of qualified teachers. First, a front page article on Monday described how schools across the country compete for teachers because of high rates of teacher turnover. Then, an editorial Wednesday contended that the shortage will persist, stunting school reform efforts, “until states, localities and the federal government start paying much more attention to how teachers are trained, hired and assigned.” Today, six readers offered their own solutions, ranging from higher pay to a simplification of credentialing requirements to using retired teachers on a part-time basis.

I’ve always been a little baffled by reporting about the teacher shortage. I haven’t seen any data to suggest that the shortage is particularly worse than it has been in the past, at least since women and minorities became able to enter other fields, nor that New York fares worse than other places with a similar wealth of employment options. In general, half of all teachers leave the profession within five years. Half stay longer. In an era when young people are encouraged to try different fields before settling on one and to work before entering graduate school, a profession where half of all people who enter choose to stick with it five years later doesn’t sound bad at all.

Of course, it’s still worth working to recruit better teachers and then retain them — something the Times barely touches on. The current trend in education reform is to attach financial incentives to every desirable outcome, but I’m not sure that’s what makes the most sense here. It’s unlikely that the incentives schools can offer can compete with the private sector — $5,000 help for a down payment in New York City?! Ha! — so perhaps school districts shouldn’t waste their money offering them. For young people at the beginning of their careers, starting teachers’ salaries and benefits in public schools aren’t all that bad — but the working conditions often are, as Dan Brown points out in his new memoir about teaching in the Bronx. To retain teachers, schools have to make sure teachers feel safe, comfortable, and free from excessive administrative requirements. Schools must also help new teachers become better faster, so they believe it’s worth it to keep teaching. Investments toward those ends would benefit schools, not just individual teachers.

In my first post, I made a quick reference to the NYC Student Union. You might be wondering (and for purposes of this post I hope you are) “What is this so-called NYC Student Union?” Ashu Kapoor, an NYCSU member and organizer puts it this way:

The NYC Student Union (NYCSU) is an emerging collective organization of NYC high school students whose goal is to be a voice for student issues and rights, empower students to take ownership of their education, work with administration and DOE officials to secure an education students deserve, build connections across the NYC school system, and take collective action. The NYC Student Union is entirely organized and run by NYC high school students and is open to all NYC high school students interested in working to make a change in our schools.

The union was started by students from three Manhattan schools in spring 2006 to combat the cell phone ban. Representatives testified at the City Council Hearing on the issue, protested on the steps of Tweed (using cups and string as cell phones), and later had a letter to the editor published in the New York Times. From there we decided to expand.

After launching a student-created and run web site, the union held its first citywide student meeting Sept. 25, 2006. Students from around 15 schools attended. At the meeting, students aired their grievances about their schools and the school system.

For the rest of the year, NYCSU tried to take action on these problems. In addition to holding meetings like the first one every other Monday at the UFT, the union lobbied politicians on issues such as class size, security and funding; conducted workshops with middle school students on becoming engaged in their high schools; held a forum on youth involvement in the education system at Pace University with Future Voters of America; and then ran the Education committee of the 2007 New York City Youth Congress.

This year NYCSU wants to do even more. I’ll keep you posted.

If you want more info or are a student who wants to join the union visit NYCStudents.org or contact union@nycstudents.org.

Columbia University’s Teachers College, with the support of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, has developed a curriculum based on Spike Lee’s documentary “When the Levees Broke.” The curriculum, titled “Teaching the Levees,” is intended for students in high school and older and addresses many of the social and political issues raised by Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. It also encourages “citizen action through further study, community service, service learning, and political action,” according to its website. I hope schools in New York and nationwide will be able to find space in their busy testing schedules for Teaching the Levees.

Two New York City schools that have already used Katrina as a tool for learning are featured in videos on the curriculum’s website. One video depicts Beacon School students’ trip to New Orleans to volunteer in rebuilding efforts there. Another shows a vibrant classroom discussion at a Brooklyn high school about the political implications of natural disasters.

TC is hosting a launch event Sept. 6 that will feature a panel discussion moderated by New York Times columnist Bob Herbert; you can RSVP through tomorrow.

After her staff called almost 100 phone numbers at district offices and received responses to fewer than half, Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum released a report yesterday saying what many observers have long known: the DOE’s reorganization has left parents in the dark. “The start of the school year can be a stressful time for parents and students. The DOE makes matters worse by providing very little information and support,” Gotbaum said in a New York Post article.

Gotbaum has set up an education hotline for parents to find out information that district offices should be making available. Right now, the hotline is just getting started, but it should be fully up and running soon. Call 212-669-7250, and let Insideschools know what you find out!

As always, you can call also Advocates for Children’s helpline at 1-866-427-6033 with your education issues.

Today is the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating landfall along the Gulf Coast. In the last two years, not too much has improved in New Orleans, but the schools have changed dramatically, with important lessons that we in New York can learn.

First, I think we’d be better off if we kept some perspective about how bad things can be when we get worked up over comparatively minor affairs.

Second, and more rooted in policy, New Orleans has embraced charter schools as a panacea for its educational woes, including those that were entrenched well before the storm. As an article in this week’s Nation magazine points out, the state and federal government has privileged charter schools over regular public schools in decisions about funding, enrollment, and space. Among the many consequences are increased violence, diminished teacher quality, and reduced attention to students with special needs. In addition, according to the article,

If a child doesn’t have parents or guardians willing or able to navigate the sometimes labyrinthine path into a charter school, that child will join the other, less fortunate students in an [regular public] school. “Many in New Orleans now refer to the [regular public] schools as ‘the dumping ground,’” writes Leigh Dingerson of the Center for Community Change. “Such a set of catch-all schools is required in a free market system, because there must be a place for the kids who don’t gain entry elsewhere.”

As New York continues to go wild over charter schools, we must guard against this consequence. Already some regular public schools are feeling squeezed by sharing space and resources with charter schools; the Post reported this week that the Choir Academy of Harlem isn’t happy about the Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy Charter School expanding in its building. The Choir Academy’s response seems psychic more than realistic — the school has more than enough classrooms to accommodate its own students, even after giving over part of the building to the charter school — but as we know, psychic damage can be crippling.

The Nation article reminds readers that although the charter movement is “represented on the national stage by conservatives,” it’s “dominated in the trenched by progressives,” and that charters may introduce real possibilities for positive change. But New Orleans’ experience shows us that unrestrained zeal for charters hurts kids and schools. We are fortunate in New York not to have had a disaster clear the field here, and we have no reason not to proceed cautiously with charter schools. I hope that’s a message Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein take from this somber anniversary.

Yesterday, Newsday published an article entitled “Single-Sex School Aren’t the Educational Answer,” by Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett, co-authors of a book on how gender myths are hurting our society. In the article, Rivers and Barnett explore the current media clash between those who think girls are favored in our schools and those who believe that boys are.

There has been a lot said about girls doing better in school thanks to (as New Republic puts it) a “verbally drenched curriculum,” designed to encourage girls to succeed. In my experience as a student, only recently (the end of junior year) have boys been able to catch up to girls academically.

However, as Rivers and Barnett point out, data has shown that boys are getting into colleges and getting bachelor’s degrees at ever-increasing rates. A recent US News article supports this side of the argument, noting that it is much harder for girls to gain admission to college than it is for boys due to overwhelming competition. When colleges try to maintain gender balance and have a larger female applicant pool, boys have it much easier.

With all of these gender issues some public school systems have been creating single-sex schools, something that Rivers and Barnett are very much against.

The evidence hardly suggests single-sex public schools are the answer. When you account for such factors as parents’ income, student motivation, teacher ability and class size, kids in co-ed class and kids in single-sex classes perform about the same. When California set up single-sex schools in the ’90s, it failed to improve academic performance. And, says the Ford Foundation, the schools tended to foster gender stereotypes, not helpful to either sex.

As a student, I cannot endorse this view. Sure, single-sex schools are not best for many students, but for some it is a very valuable option. I know that most of pro-single-sex-schools arguments were said a long time ago but for some students they are still true. Students of both genders can find members of the opposite sex distracting or pressure-causing in an academic setting. For them, a single-sex school can be much more relaxing and a better learning environment. Single-sex schools are not for everyone, but until the we have all the answers you need to keep all options open.

New York may have better public transportation, restaurants, and sports teams, but Washington, D.C., has at least one thing on us — kids in the surrounding counties can carry their cell phones to school. The Washington Post today reports that “school boards everywhere are revisiting decade-old bans against portable communication devices in the classroom” because parents and kids view cell phones as a necessity and because fears about how cell phones would undermine discipline and learning simply haven’t come true. The last Washington-area school system to allow cell phones in school will finally do so this fall.

Of course, New York isn’t like most places, and the mayor and chancellor are holding firm on the cell phone ban, even in the face of City Council opposition. With school starting next week, I haven’t heard anything more about which schools will receive cell phone lockers as part of a “compromise” pilot program. Has anyone else?

East New York Preparatory Charter School, which has been located in the PS 158 building in Brooklyn since it opened last year, was told to hit the road this year, even though the DOE had promised it could stay at PS 158 for two years, the Daily News reports today. PS 158 had made sharing space unpleasant for East New York Prep, denying the school’s kids use of a nearby bathroom and instead requiring that they go down four flights of stairs to the basement; the DOE intervened last year to resolve that issue, but evidently things were not going to get better this year because East New York Prep has been told to move to PS 323, about 30 blocks away.

What’s interesting about these space-sharing showdowns — and there have been at least half a dozen at this point, in almost every borough — is that we’re seeing parents who might not have been the most involved before organize for the benefit of their schools. If their unity outlasts the immediate crisis, this shift could help them improve their neighborhood schools even more. But it is just plain spiteful for undercrowded schools to display such open antagonism against new small schools sharing their space. A principal who would humiliate small children to make a point about sharing space is not one I would want making decisions about my kids’ education.

Yesterday, the Daily News ran a tiny article saying that the DOE is revisiting the changes to school bus eligibility rules that caused such a fiasco last January when they were put in place. Kids will no longer have to live a quarter mile from a bus stop to get service, and kids in second grade or younger will now get yellow bus service instead of Metrocards. It looks like much of the work done by the highly paid consultancy Alvarez and Marsal is being undone, which is good news for parents who weren’t happy that their young children were suddenly denied school bus service and required to take dangerous or convoluted routes to school. (One child was hit and killed by a city bus when walking to school earlier this year; he previously had taken a bus.) Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum is right to ask why the DOE isn’t publishing the changes widely. Contact the Office of Pupil Transportation if you have questions about how your kids should get to school.

Have you seen the DOE’s revamped website yet? It launched yesterday and it’s a vast improvement over the old site both aesthetically and in terms of function. We heard the DOE might be looking to Insideschools for inspiration, and so we aren’t surprised by the strengthened and more prominent “Find a School” feature — though we are a little surprised by that it has the same name as ours! Imitation is, of course, the sincerest form of flattery, and we hope the changes to its website signify that the DOE is adopting Insideschools’ respect for the city’s parents.

What’s your take on the new site? Are you finding it easier to use than the old one? Is everything you’re looking for on there?

I was told I wouldn’t be able to get into the PEP meeting if I stuck around for the Khalil Gibran rally on Monday, so I didn’t get to see the substance of what happened. So I was pleased that an Insideschools reader who supports the school has posted a link to a 9-minute YouTube video of the event. I don’t really get the sense from the video that the widely reported calls for original principal Debbie Almontaser’s reinstatement were planned or central to the protest.

As Seth noted in his post yesterday on solving the security issue in high schools, the state has added 16 city schools to its list of “persistently dangerous” schools. Schools earn this classification if they report a high number of violent incidents compared to the size of their student population. (Schools that under report incidents are less likely to end on the list, and it seems that very small schools could be more likely to make the list. It’s also worth noting that New York appears to label schools as dangerous more aggressively than other states.)

Four of the new additions are special education schools in District 75. Some of the other schools newly added to the list are known to have problems, such as Jamaica High School, which is currently on the city’s list of Impact Schools as well. But we’re perplexed about the inclusion of others, such as PS 47 American Sign Language School, that don’t have a reputation as being particularly dangerous.

For being so obsessed with data, the state and the DOE don’t seem particularly able to figure out whether or not schools in the city are safe. Both the content and scope of the state’s list are at odds with the DOE’s own accounting of school violence — most of the city’s Impact Schools did not make the state’s list — and the state’s announcement came just one day after DOE officials announced a “dramatic decrease” in violent crime last year, while the Post today has a graphic showing a large increase in major crimes in schools in the 2005-2006 school year.

Insideschools must have started a trend with our recent article about dual language programs citywide — two daily newspapers have profiled the programs this week! Yesterday, the Daily News noted that Khalil Gibran will be “just 1 in 70” dual language programs (although it will not be dual language in its first year). Today, the New York Times takes a look at this fall’s influx of French dual-language programs, many of which were started with the help of the French Embassy and the organization Education Francaise a New York. Everyone agrees that it’s terrific when students achieve fluency in a second language, with one parent telling the Daily News that she turns heads at cocktail parties when she mentions that her son, a student at Amistad Dual Language School, speaks fluent Spanish.

At 11 a.m. today, the Brooklyn NAACP will hold a “Back to School/Stay in School” rally on the steps of Brooklyn Borough Hall. Chancellor Klein will be on hand to hand out 1,000 backpacks to needy students celebrate the NAACP’s 23-year-old program of encouraging school attendance, supporting at-risk students, and promoting parental involvement. Borough President Marty Markowitz and the DOE are co-sponsoring the rally, along with other education organizations. Map

If you’re still looking for a school for the fall, we’ve heard of a couple of new schools that are still trying to fill openings. The Urban Assembly School for Criminal Justice, an all-girls school in Brooklyn, has 6th grade seats, and Cornerstone Academy, located in a new building near Co-op City in the Bronx, has seats in multiple grades; it’s opening with pre-kindergarten through 5th grade and is taking applications until Friday. Contact those schools if you’re interested. You might also want to contact other elementary and middle schools opening this fall to see if they still have seats.

For anyone who thought our schools were on a constant (albeit slow) path to excellence, here is some disturbing news. Today, Fox reported that the number of “persistently dangerous” schools in New York under the No Child Left Behind Act has raised from 18 to 27 this year. Twenty-five of these schools are in New York City.

The question now is how to deal with this? It is a serious problem. It seems from that dramatic increase in the number of schools on the list, our current strategies are not working. Students from Urban Youth Collaborative, a coalition of 10 activist organizations, present an interesting argument against our current security measures. From their website:

When we walk into school the first thing we see is a metal detector cops and x-ray machines that the city believes will help the kids and the school…We believe what the city does in our schools actually makes kids want to be more violent. It doesn’t give us any privacy at all, and it just scares us. Having so many cops in one building intimidates and agitates student and increases tension rather than decreasing it.

The NYC Student Union, a citywide student run education advocacy group, has also been lobbying government officials including Governor Spitzer’s policy director about the issue.

Students from all ends of the city feel this tension. Even at specialized high schools, students complain about being “herded” away from the school after dismissal.

However, we need something more creative then just a lessening of current security; that would also create fear. Students, school safety agents, city officials and all of the other groups that have a stake in our schools need to work together to craft policies that foster better relationships between safety agents and students. This means revising policies that alienate students and examining alternative security methods for safety agents. Most of all, this means giving these two groups a chance to talk openly about the problem and have a say in the policies that so heavily influence their relationship.

As of now, we don’t have any answers to this security crisis. What we have tried has not worked. We do know, however, that creating an atmosphere of trust is the first step. What do you think?

Last week, the DOE posted proposed revisions to Chancellor’s Regulation A-655, which governs School Leadership Teams. The new regulation is almost twice as long as the old one and includes a lot more details on the selection of SLTs, as well as a grievance procedure for parents to complain about the SLT election at their school.

The most significant change appears to be the one addressing the role of SLTs in setting schools’ budgets. As the regulation currently stands, SLTs are required to “consult with the principal in developing a school-based budget”; the revision makes it clear that while SLTs should have “input” in developing the budget, principals have the final say. This makes sense, since the dominant trope in the new reorganization has been about giving power (and accountability) to principals.

The DOE is accepting comments on the proposed changes by email until Sept. 16.

Advocates for Children got a shout out in the Times today in an article about how school districts nationwide are beginning to recognize that many students need more than four years to graduate from high school. New York is on the vanguard of cities studying dropouts and providing alternatives for students who have not been successful in traditional high schools. From the article:

The push for alternatives came in part because of a lawsuit from a nonprofit group, Advocates for Children, which charged that many lagging students were being pushed out of school against their will. The suit was settled, and schools now conduct ‘exit interviews’ with students who want to leave the system and suggest alternatives.

Although the DOE would like to see kids graduate on time, it makes sense that some would need to take longer, given the fact that only about a third start high school performing on grade level in reading and math.

Despite the rain and cool weather, a healthy crowd gathered outside Tweed for the rally in support of Khalil Gibran International Academy, apparently split pretty evenly between the school’s supporters and journalists.

Inside, a much smaller group of people assembled for the August meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy. Marcia Lyles, deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, gave an overview of the new middle school reform initiative. In selecting which remedies to put in place for struggling middle schools, Lyles said the task force and the DOE “looked at what the schools that were performing well had and what the schools that were not performing well didn’t have” — and came up with Regents-level courses and good professional development. Lyles continued the pattern established last week of the DOE taking credit for the City Council’s work; Lyles called it “my first initiative” as deputy chancellor, even though work on the task force was underway long before she moved into the position, and began her presentation by detailing how the DOE’s Children First program has supported middle schools.

PEP member Patrick Sullivan asked why the DOE didn’t adopt the task force’s recommendation to lower class size in middle schools. Lyles didn’t rule out more aggressive class size reduction for the future but said that principals “recognize that that is not the sole ingredient” in getting kids to achieve.

Julia Levy from the press office showed off the new version of the DOE’s website, due to launch “hopefully later this week.” Many of the improvements in navigation, search, and content reflect the priorities behind Insideschools‘ own redesign, which we’re working on now. But I don’t think the DOE is going to put us out of business — Levy said the redesign will not replace all of the old, outdated content on the DOE’s site, just “sit on top” of the existing site.

Finally, Elayna Konstan, the CEO of the Office of School and Youth Development, reviewed changes to the discipline code and announced that preliminary data shows a “dramatic decrease” in violent and major crime in schools last year. She said at least a couple of the nine schools currently designated as Impact Schools will likely come off the list soon. But schools will continue to discipline kids who bring cell phones to school — in response to Sullivan’s question about whether the City Council’s recent cell phone bill conflicts with the discipline code, Konstan said, “We have to wait for the litigation,” signaling that the cell phone ban is headed to court.

When Joyce Saly, the principal of PS 58 in Brooklyn, was fired in the spring of 2006 after an investigation concluded that she had allowed students to see state test questions in advance, parents protested the decision. One parent wrote to Insideschools, “Ms. Saly is an outstanding educator. … Why would she have risk ruining her reputation by giving the students a ’sneak peak’ at the exam? She was obviously railroaded through petty politics.”

Now it turns out that this parent might have been on the right track, according to a piece in this week’s Village Voice. Saly says old test questions were sent home, but whether it was because of a miscommunication or a desire to give PS 58 kids an unfair advantage, the fault lies with her former assistant principal, Patricia Peterson, she says. And Saly says she has evidence that shows Peterson was given preferential treatment when she left PS 58 to become Region 8’s gifted and talented coordinator, a position for which she lacked proper certification and, it seems, never even applied. So while Peterson had allies in the DOE making sure she was protected from blame at PS 58, Saly lost her job, she told the Voice.

This situation obviously involves complexities that few besides Saly and Peterson themselves can grasp. Whether or not Saly is exonerated this month, as she told the Voice she believes she will be, the case points out both the pressures school administrators face and the fallibility of investigations (like the one at the Cobble Hill School of American Studies, PS 58’s neighbor, that resulted in the removal of the principal and was recently revealed to have been hopelessly bungled). I also wonder why Saly had to do all of this detective work on her own when it seems the documents she says she has found should have turned up during the original investigation.

Reminding us that for all of the uproar over Khalil Gibran, the school is offering a unique program, the Post today highlights the Middle School Task Force’s revelation that many middle schools are not teaching foreign language, despite the state requirement that kids get two years of language instruction by the end of 9th grade. A Staten Island parent says in the article that foreign language is “one of those things that kind of fell by the wayside” as schools have shifted their focus to the high-stakes subjects: math and English. In fact, the DOE now employs 200 fewer foreign language instructors than it did in 2001, according to the article, even as interest in studying foreign languages has risen nationally.

At tonight’s meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy, members will discuss the new Middle School Task Force recommendations; preview the DOE’s website redesign, set to launch within the next few weeks; and take a look at last year’s school safety data. The meeting’s at 6 p.m. at the Department of Education (Map); arrive a few minutes early if you want to sign up to make a public comment.

PEP meetings have gotten a little more interesting lately since the June appointment to the panel of Patrick Sullivan, an independent-minded public school parent who doesn’t shy from asking hard questions. Sullivan also writes for the NYC Public School Parents blog.

Also at 6 p.m., supporters of the embattled Khalil Gibran International Academy plan to rally on the steps of the DOE, sponsored by a number of tolerance-oriented organizations and individuals. From the announcement of the rally, posted on the website of the organization Arab Women Active in Arts and Media:

As New Yorkers and others in support of quality public education for all of our communities, we stand in solidarity with the Khalil Gibran International Academy, which has sustained hateful and false attacks by anti-Arab media and extremists. … We call on all communities who want to see peace on our streets and in our world to stand with us in support of the Khalil Gibran International Academy.

Today marks Joel Klein’s fifth anniversary as schools chancellor. He’s now the longest-serving chancellor ever (the position has existed only since 1970). Earlier this week, he told the New York Observer that he’s pleased with his performance so far but intends to do much more before he and the mayor leave office in 2009. The New York Sun predictably praised Klein in an editorial for “bringing meaningful positive change to a system rife with entrenched educrats and other special interests,” while the NYC Public School Parents blog strikes a different tone, noting that class size hasn’t decreased during Klein’s tenure.

Over at NY1, you can grade Klein’s performance according to the same scale he’s using to evaluate schools. Edwize, the UFT’s blog, has a similar poll, but with slightly different results so far. No matter what you think of Klein, no one can say he hasn’t been busy these last five years — he’s devised three different reorganizations for the system.

The featured article this week on Gotham Gazette is about diversity at the city’s specialized high schools. A year ago, the Times reported that the city’s most elite high schools had suffered an inexplicable drop in minority enrollment, even though the DOE had created special programs targeted toward helping gifted black and Hispanic students pass the entrance exam.

Gotham Gazette says the drop may be related to the creation of new options for strong students, such as Brooklyn Latin, the newest exam school, and the Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science, and Engineering, opening this fall. These schools are largely located in lower-income neighborhoods and some require a certain portion of their students to come from those neighborhoods, ensuring some racial diversity and also potentially diverting top minority students from enrolling in more distant elite schools.

As Insideschools founder Clara Hemphill pointed out last year in a column in the New York Times, several programs groom talented black and Hispanic kids for admission to top private and boarding schools, taking them out of the pool of kids who might enroll in the specialized high schools. Self-selection almost certainly comes into play as well; a black student touring Stuyvesant might easily decide that the fact that only 2.2 percent of Stuy students are black makes another school more attractive, and students of all races might be turned off by the school’s tendency for students to segregate themselves by race.

His decision came down to the wire, but Governor Spitzer last night signed legislation restoring the burden of proof in special education cases to school districts. This wasn’t at all an easy decision for the governor, so AFC and other advocates for kids who receive special education services are relieved that he chose to support kids and their families even in the face of opposition from local school boards.

An article in the Times today profiles a high school in New Jersey where kids will have to pick a major. They’ll be able to choose among focuses on sports management, fine and performing arts, health sciences, international studies and global commerce, communications and new media, and liberal arts, with environmental studies and teaching coming next fall. Their decision — made in the spring of 8th grade — will dictate their elective choices and will be, except in unusual cases, permanent.

Administrators say making kids pick a major will keep them interested in school, stop them from complaining that school is not relevant to real life, make them more attractive to colleges, and give them a leg up in the job market. That’s a pretty tall order for one course a term. Kids are a little more sensible, with one telling the Times, “I think I’m too young to make a decision because I might change my mind later on.”

Students at Brooklyn Tech have long been required to select majors, but they have until the end of their sophomore year to do so. (The student newspaper last month crunched numbers to show that choices often break down on ethnic lines.) But with the proliferation of small high schools, many kids in New York are essentially picking majors when they pick their schools, signing up for schools with themes as esoteric as urban planning, human rights, and fire safety. Some of these schools work well and use their themes to keep kids engaged, but students who realize they might have made the wrong decision have little recourse, as the DOE has all but stopped allowing high school transfers. Given the massive academic deficiencies that plague many of the city’s 9th graders, the themes at many small schools end up being almost an afterthought in the curriculum.

The Gotham Gazette analyzes the politics behind yesterday’s Middle School Task Force announcement, concluding that the mayor is trying to coopt the City Council’s efforts to improve middle schools and speculating that Speaker Christine Quinn is allowing him to do so in anticipation of her anticipated 2009 mayoral bid.

I can’t imagine that Robert Jackson, head of the council’s education committee, is thrilled about this dynamic, given his frequent criticism of the DOE for its refusal to address the issue of class size adequately and to make information available to his committee. But like everyone else who pays attention to schools in the city, Jackson knows that middle schools have always been a weak link in a strengthening system, and so I hope he’s pleased that Bloomberg and Klein for once sound genuinely committed to taking the council’s advice — even if they do inevitably try to spin the results as their own creation, as they have managed to spin the initative itself.

We addressed this issue in our most recent email alert, but it’s so important that we wanted to remind you that now is the time to tell Governor Spitzer that you want him to sign into law new burden of proof legislation.

By midnight tomorrow the governor must decide whether to sign a bill that would restore the burden of proof in special education cases to school districts. The bill would make it easier for families to secure special education services even when schools are trying not to provide them. Obviously, school districts are lobbying the governor not to sign the bill, and the word is that he has not yet decided what to do.

AFC urges you to tell the governor to sign the bill. To contact the governor’s office, call 518-474-8390 or 518-474-1041 or fax 518-474-1513. All you have to say is, “Governor, please approve A.5396-A.” The only other thing you’ll need to know is your zip code. This is a fast and easy way to make a difference for many families all over the state.

See NYSARC’s site for background on the legislation.

Today, the mayor and chancellor announced a host of reforms based on the recommendations put forth by the City Council’s Middle School Task Force. Council speaker Christine Quinn convened the task force this spring to address what the New York Times recently called the “critical years” of middle school, when adolescence threatens to derail kids’ academic and social successes.

Parents will be most interested in the DOE’s commitment to add Regents-level courses to all middle schools by 2010 and the fact that the highest-need schools will receive extra funds. Here’s exactly what the DOE has agreed to, from the city’s press release:

• Identifying at least 50 high-need middle schools that will have access to a $5 million fund to implement the Middle School Task Force recommendations
• Working to implement Task Force recommendations citywide
• Waiving fees for professional development for high-need schools
• Expanding Regents-level courses citywide
• Establishing an ongoing discussion on middle-grade reform with various stakeholders

Interestingly, the task force report mentions 15 times that middle school class size is too large, but the DOE’s announcement does not address class size at all, except in a quote from UFT President Randi Weingarten. The announcement similarly does not address parent involvement or safety and discipline at all, although those topics take up more than 10 pages in the report.

It’s possible that those topics will be broached by the DOE’s new “Director of Middle School Initiatives.” The person appointed to this new position, housed in the Division of Teaching and Learning, will be responsible for making sure the task force recommendations are carried out. The mayor announced today that Lori Bennett will be the first person to take on this task; she was formerly a LIS in Region 8, where her new boss, Marcia Lyles, was the superintendent.

Following the resignation of Debbie Almontaser on Thursday, the DOE has appointed Danielle Salzberg, a senior officer at New Visions for Public Schools, to head Khalil Gibran International Academy.

Prior to working at New Visions, Salzberg was an assistant principal at Millennium High School in Tribeca, where students seemed to have mixed opinions on her, and she was also on the founding team at Baruch College Campus High School. Already, the Arab-American Family Support Center, the school’s lead partner, has issued a statement applauding Salzberg’s appointment.

Several organizations serving the city’s Arab and Arab-American community are holding a town hall meeting tonight in Bay Ridge to discuss the Khalil Gibran situation. On the agenda are a possible boycott of the New York Post, which viciously campaigned against Almontaser and the school, and a discussion of the way the mayor and Chancellor Klein handled the controversy.

An article in today’s Times takes a look at the difficult job of providing translation services to schools and parents. Even with a stepped up translation unit that can now handle the city’s eight most frequently spoken languages, the DOE can’t meet all of the demand for translation services, especially if the many principals who “don’t even know the unit exists” start to take advantage of it.

It sounds hard enough to spread 40 translators across all the work that must be done for the 42 percent of kids whose parents aren’t native English speakers. On top of this, translators must invent new words in their languages to explain the DOE’s frequently changing jargon, much of which is only barely intelligible in English.

The New York Times is reporting right now that Debbie Almontaser, the founding principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy, has resigned. Her resignation comes after a week of intense criticism over her will and desire to maintain the school’s political neutrality.

Without Almontaser, it’s unclear whether the school will open as planned next month. “An immediate replacement was not announced, and Ms. Almontaser’s abrupt exit left the future of the school in question,” the Times reports. The Post reports that of the 60 kids who are signed up to be part of the school’s first class, only six speak Arabic.

At the request of Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s Independent Budget Office took a look at the state of the city’s vocational schools — and found that despite receiving lower per-pupil funding than “general academic schools,” vocational schools actually graduate their students at higher rates. The IBO notes correctly that vocational schools have been largely under the radar in the last few years, as the DOE’s ongoing reorganizations have focused squarely on improving test scores, not alternate paths to post-graduation success.

The report also points out that while the DOE’s new Fair Student Funding formula assigns extra weight for students in vocational programs, the number of seats in vocational programs may be threatened by local and federal accountability programs. More than half of all vocational schools in the city are considered failing according to No Child Left Behind, and the DOE seems eager to restructure these failing schools, as it has with Harry Van Arsdale High School, which closed this year. The smalls schools now in the Van Arsdale building do not offer vocational instruction.

Earlier today Mayor Bloomberg vetoed the City Council’s recent bill that would allow kids to carry their cell phones to and from school. I’m somewhat surprised by this development because the line from the DOE when the council was discussing the bill was that kids are not prevented from taking their phones to school, just from taking them inside once they get there.

In a statement reported by Staten Island Live, Bloomberg wrote that he vetoed the bill because it represented “an invalid attempt at imposing the (City) Council’s views on how the public schools should be managed.” But council members were explicit about the fact that they don’t control the schools.

It seems pretty clear that the mayor is overstepping his bounds here by vetoing the council’s bill because of what he thinks are its supporters’ intentions. The council plans to override his veto, and Bloomberg seems eager to set up a court battle over the cell phone ban. I’m curious what he seeks to gain from this showdown. Certainly he won’t have a chance of winning the support of the city’s parents — though of course we know he isn’t terribly interested in that anyway.

A second public hearing on the proposed changes to the discipline code will be held from 6-8 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 13, at the Department of Education. Map. Check out our earlier post on the proposed changes, which include a proposal to make “sexually suggestive” behavior punishable with a year-long suspension.

The first (and, originally, only) hearing was held yesterday, but attendance may have been affected by the day’s travel woes. The deadline to submit comments on the proposed changes by email has been extended as well, to Aug. 14.

If you’re concerned about teacher quality and retention, take a look at “Your Own Blackboard Jungle,” a long article in this week’s Village Voice about the training and support that Teaching Fellows receive. (The article is similar in both structure and content to Insideschools’ May 2005 article on the subject.)

The fact that “seven weeks of crash-course training and summer school student teaching, [recent fellows] say, is no preparation for the realities of city classrooms” comes as no surprise to anyone who has spent a moment in the city’s schools as a teacher, parent, student, or even observer. More interesting are the article’s revelations that even in high-needs schools, new fellows may receive the highest-need students, especially those in special education; that 25 percent of all math teachers and 18 percent of special ed teachers are fellows; and that administrators are aware of the vast “room for improvement” in the flimsy graduate programs set up just for fellows.

I’m also always excited to hear teachers with concrete proposals for how to improve the profession; in the article, one teacher advises the DOE to let fellows work as assistant teachers for a year before getting their own classrooms. I’m less interested in reading about young professionals who feel duped by “gauzy subway ads” into becoming teachers, only to find out that teaching is actually hard. That complaint sounds to me like smokers’ claims that they just didn’t know the cigarettes they were smoking could cause lung cancer. Except, of course, that teaching can be worth the risk, as some of the Teaching Fellows who have stuck with the profession have found.

Those who are opposed to the school opening this fall with a focus on Arabic language and culture have been searching high and low all summer for ammunition against the school and its founding principal, Debbie Almontaser. Much of the criticism of Khalil Gibran International Academy has been insubstantial or just plain hate-filled, but this week the critics stumbled upon a truly disquieting situation: An organization on whose board Almontaser sits had printed T-shirts reading “Intifada NYC.” When reporters asked Almontaser about this, she said the intifada the shirt referred to had nothing to do with the current intifada that has left more than 5,000 Palestinians and Israelis dead.

By yesterday, Almontaser had apologized for those remarks, but this reaction has clearly shaken the school’s supporters’ confidence that Almontaser will maintain Khalil Gibran’s religious and political neutrality. Now, Almontaser is taking fire from some of her former defenders, including UFT President Randi Weingarten, whose comment in the Post may be the least controversial thing she’s ever said:

It’s not OK to explain away ‘intifada’ … Maybe this was just a real error in judgment for which [Almontaser] has now apologized, or maybe, ultimately, she should not be a principal. … She now has a much higher standard that she has to prove, that this is not the way she’s going to run that school.

Assertions that the school will be a madrassa remain ludicrous. But more and more it does seem that Almontaser sees the school as a chance to draw attention to discrimination against Arab-Americans. That subject deserves a great deal of attention and energy, and all schools should strive to teach tolerance. But the purpose of school leadership is to shepherd kids to academic and personal success, not to use them as pawns. I am worried that Khalil Gibran students (if they even exist — the school has not yet opened!) are being used as pawns and I don’t know why any parent would sign his children up for that.

The DOE has just posted the testing schedule for the upcoming school year, and it’s a doozy. With a host of “predictive assessments,” the expansion of the calendar to reflect No Child Left Behind testing requirements, and the city’s new science test for grades 3 and 6, it looks like at least some kids will be taking a test nearly every day next year. May 17 and 18 look pretty clear — maybe that’s when schools will be able to fit in required arts instruction.

Joseph Berger, in today’s “On Education” column, discusses the pros and cons of DOE Chief Equality Officer Roland Fryer’s plan to pay pay some kids for their performance in school. Berger found parents to mostly rehash familiar arguments about the plan, but he also talked to Manhattan Institute scholar Sol Stern, who suggested an alternative that makes a lot of sense to me: putting the earnings not into kids’ hands but into college funds they can access when they graduate from high school.

I can’t imagine a few hundred dollars a year, spent immediately on games and play items, making a sustained difference in a child’s will to learn, but having a couple thousand dollars in a bank account could make all the difference in the world to a motivated kid for whom college might feel out of reach financially. And this alternative plan would signal that the DOE is concerned with the long-term growth and success of its students, not just the annual testing and attendance bottom line.

I’ve heard of school officials being censured and fired for all sorts of reasons, but this, reported by the Associated Press, is by far the oddest:

Maritza Tamayo, principal of the Unity Center for Urban Technologies, paid a woman named Gilda Fonte to lead several Santeria rituals at the Manhattan school during midwinter break in 2006, when students were not there, according to Richard Condon, the special commissioner of investigation for city schools. Tamayo coerced staff members to participate in and help pay for the cost of the ceremonies, investigators said.

The coercion, not the fact that she paid for chicken blood to be sprinkled on her school, is the reason for Tamayo’s firing, DOE officials said. She has been the principal since 1997 and oversaw the school’s transition from a transfer alternative school to a regular high school. Evidently, the transition did not make a difference for the troubled school, as the AP reports that “there was a running joke at the school that sage should be used to cleanse the building because many of the students were ill-behaved.”

You might not have noticed, but for the last couple of weeks we’ve had a small poll in the sidebar of the blog. Only nine of you answered this first poll, which asked, “Do you think the reorganization is going smoothly?” Seven of you answered that it’s going “somewhat” smoothly, and two of you thought it’s not going smoothly at all. No one answered that the reorganization is going “very” smoothly — which was no surprise to us at Insideschools; we’re spending this week trying to figure out just how to reach our contacts at the DOE.

Be on the lookout for a new poll soon!

If you haven’t already seen the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development “Summer Fun Guide,” you should definitely check it out. The department compiled free and low-cost events for every day of the summer, beginning in June and running through Labor Day. Just this weekend, there’s an origami workshop for kids in Staten Island, a Shakespeare performance in Inwood, a family science fair at the Bronx Zoo, and the Hong Kong Dragon Boat Festival in Flushing, among many, many other exciting events. The guide also contains a comprehensive list of family-friendly city spaces, such as pools, libraries, and parks — a perfect resource for these long, hot August days.

Spherion Technologies, the contractor hired to run the DOE’s computerized high school application process botched the applications of kids from a Flushing Catholic school, the New York Daily News reports today, costing some of those kids spaces at their top-choice schools. After City Council member John Liu intervened, the kids got their applications reconsidered and their placements adjusted; one even got into Townsend Harris High School, one of the most selective schools in the city.

But it does make you wonder how many other applications might have been botched and how many kids without the wherewithal to enlist their City Council representative as an advocate might be winding up at the wrong schools. The contractor was hired in one of the many no-bid contracts that has led Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum to complain that the DOE is “throwing taxpayer dollars out the window.”

UPDATE 8/3: Andy Jacob from the DOE’s press office just called us to let us know that the article had a couple of factual errors. Most important, he said, is that Spherion’s contract, which was originally issued in 2001, is not a no-bid contract. In fact, the contract process was fully competitive then and will be again in 2008 when the Spherion contract comes up for renewal, Jacob said, noting that the DOE plans to request proposals from other vendors as part of the renewal process.

The man behind a Florida charter school that features Hebrew language instruction wants to replicate the school in New York and eventually nationwide, the Sun reported yesterday. Ben Gamla Charter Academy, which is opening this month with a kindergarten through 8th grade, will teach Hebrew language one period a day and offer another period of Hebrew-English dual language instruction. The school’s founder hopes to bring a Ben Gamla clone to New York in the next couple of years, taking advantage of the recent lifting of the cap on charter schools.

Ben Gamla NYC sounds like a controversial prospect. Opponents of the Khalil Gibran International Academy, a public secondary school focusing on Arabic language and culture set to open in September in Brooklyn, have accused the school of being a “public madrassa.” In fact, they recently filed Freedom of Information Act requests to find out whether the curriculum will have Islamic content, even though DOE officials have repeatedly assured critics that the school will be using standard curriculum packages. So are those same people worried that Ben Gamla NYC could be a “public yeshiva” that will inculcate students with Jewish culture and religion?

Those who have said they are opposed to all schools that cater to a single population don’t like the idea of a Hebrew charter school, and the Anti-Defamation League told the Sun it’s concerned that Ben Gamla may be skirting the line between church and state. (It’s unclear how many Ben Gamla students are Jewish. About 20% of students are transferring from Jewish day schools. The school has been eager to mention the fact that 20% of students self-identify as Hispanic; of course, those kids might also be Jewish.)

But many of the most vociferous Khalil Gibran opponents don’t see a problem with Ben Gamla. A member of the “Stop the Madrassa Coalition” told the Sun, “It’s just so much different with Arabic because there’s so many instances of the language being wrapped up with the religion, whereas Hebrew it’s not.” Right.All kids should have the opportunity to learn foreign languages and about other cultures. Arabic and Hebrew are just as worthy of being taught in the city’s public schools as Spanish, French, or Latin. But it’s a serious problem for the city if controversy over schools’ themes distracts from discussion about how the schools are going to serve their kids before they even open, and if the only language kids can choose to learn is the one their grandparents speak. I’m willing to bet that most parents would rather enroll in a school with a number, rather than a fancy themed name, if it meant their kids would get a well-rounded education free from angry protest.

The Times today published a story on teacher Austin Lampros, who resigned from his post teaching math at Manhattan’s High School for Arts and Technology after the school’s principal overruled his decision to fail a student. The Times’s Samuel Freedman writes:

Mr. Lampros’s introduction to the high school’s academic standards proved a fitting preamble to a disastrous year. It reached its low point in late June, when Arts and Technology’s principal, Anne Geiger, overruled Mr. Lampros and passed a senior whom he had failed in a required math course.That student, Indira Fernandez, had missed dozens of class sessions and failed to turn in numerous homework assignments, according to Mr. Lampros’s meticulous records, which he provided to The New York Times. She had not even shown up to take the final exam. She did, however, attend the senior prom.

The full article is well worth a read.