Some spooky Halloween disappearing act (or perhaps a whisper from DOE?) may explain how a piece of investigative reporting vanished into thin air. Another surprise came from the UFT, in support of the Teaching Fellows - the groups haven’t always had the coziest relationship, but now, the union’s defending more than 100 new fellows who have yet to be actually hired by any specific school. And substitute teachers will now have to pass a test before being allowed to take over the classrooms.

One snobby newbie will hopefully never teach again; the courts supported a Bronx principal who fired a teacher for cursing at his students and boasting that his parents didn’t send him “to Cornell so I could take care of a bunch of animals.” Others, thankfully, go above and beyond in their lessons on global warming - a Harlem teacher taught class from Antarctica and a Brooklyn teacher did same, from the Canadian Arctic. Not to be outdone, math teachers study comedy improv solutions to classroom problems. And one struggling artist/author who turned to teaching suddenly hit it big with his latest book - but plans to keep teaching art anyway.

And how much art is being taught in city schools? We may never really know, contends an article that questions the DOE’s latest report. But a new research center to study city schools opened this week… again. So now there are two centers researching what is happening in classrooms and principals’ offices across the city. Maybe they can study the effects of overcrowding and reports that schools in some neighborhoods are less and less diverse. The feds, through No Child Left Behind, announced plans to hold schools accountable for the achievement gap in high school graduation rates, and another report said that parents make a substantial difference in a child’s decision to drop out. A Voice column argues that the actions of school safety officers need to be better regulated, and there may just be an obvious, fair, easy, and inexpensive solution to the issue of military recruitment in city high schools.

Maybe the next generation of investors can learn from the current market-troubles: when CNBC recently reported a bounce in the Dow, cheers broke out in a fifth-grade class in Queens. Parents celebrate more options for autistic students, like a charter school specifically designed for students on the autism spectrum, and a school for social justice finally found a permanent home, delivering on a deathbed promise. Seward Park High School’s rooftop got a hip-hop redesign, organized by the New Design High School, and the students at PS 19 weren’t about to let a state-senate hopeful off easily when he served as principal for a day. As 8th graders consider their high school picks, current Staten Island high school students weigh in on the commute to Manhattan.

We can bet the state certainly won’t increase aid to schools next year, but will they decrease it? With all the talk of cut-backs, the DOE defends spending more than $5 million for courier services. After all, high stakes testing necessitate high security. And some wonder how the job of school district superintendent fits into the new systems in the city. Chancellor Klein said he would look into it.

Hundreds of parents lined up at PS 58 last night in Brooklyn for information on gifted and talented programs. Info booklets, which were in short supply, describe the application and testing process and include a short practice test. They’re available in bulk at local elementary schools and at borough enrollment centers, and they are posted on line here – minus the sample test.

Anna Commitante, head of gifted and talented at the DOE, walked parents through the basic process and took questions on testing and placement. (The PowerPoint graphics used to support her talk will be posted after November 6th, according to Commitante.) None of the questions raised had to do with the issues most recently in the press – fewer kids in g+t, less diversity, scaled-back outer-borough programs. Instead, most focused on the process going forward.

First and foremost, the deadline for Requests for Testing (in the booklets and also on line) is November 19th. “We won’t accept it on the 20th,” Commitante said. She urged parents to physically walk the request for testing into their child’s elementary school or a borough enrollment center, citing “many problems last year” with mail delivery.

Testing will take place in January and February at local schools. Four-year-olds, born in 2004, will test individually, with a tester “bubbling in” the answer sheet. Five-year-olds, though, will test in groups of five, with one teacher. Kids are expected to bubble in their own answer sheets (a fine-motor challenge that’s a test in itself for some kids), and they’re not permitted to ask questions during the test. Essentially, the tester reads each item aloud once and the children respond; no questions, no do-overs, no exceptions.

Children who score at the 90th percentile or above are guaranteed seats in a district g+t program, provided ALL district programs are listed on the child’s application. For citywide programs — including the two new programs planned for Brooklyn and Queens — children must score at or above the 97th percentile, and there are NO guarantees of citywide placement, even for high-scorers. There is no sibling preference in place, either, unlike general-education programs at local schools. Test scores determine eligibility, and the order in which schools are ranked on your child’s application determines placement.

All students who score at or above the 90th percentile are guaranteed seats in Kindergarten and first grade, Commitante said. If a surfeit of students qualify, the DOE will open new g+t programs to accommodate them; no inter-district enrollment will be permitted. Openings in grade 2 and beyond are scarce and sporadic; again, no guarantees.

There are also no wait lists. “We run this match one time only,” she said. “All offers are final.”

Watch the blog for an update (and answers to specific questions) later this morning.

by Liz Willen

As a veteran of both middle school and high school tours (not to mention the many college tours I’ve been on as an education journalist), I’m getting really sick of the will-my-child-get-in question. It’s become as annoying as the incessant “are we there yet?” mantra from the back seat of the car.

Of course, in the highly competitive world we inhabit, it’s only natural to freak out a bit about high-school admission, particularly when criteria are so vague.

Top New York City high schools that don’t require the specialized high school exam – schools like Baruch College Campus High School and Lab School for Collaborative Studies, for example – might ask for an average of 85 and above and 3s or 4s on the seventh-grade math and ELA exams. Since thousands of students meet these requirements, the number of applicants far exceeds the spaces. No wonder parents and kids are anxious about who will make the cut.

In the interest of holding public high schools and educators accountable and making sure that all high schools – not just the most coveted ones – are performing, I’m going to suggest moving the conversation toward judging and evaluating schools. In that contest, it’s important to know that New York’s not alone. Most U.S. high schools aren’t doing so well.

Judy Codding, president of America’s Choice, provided a host of useful questions and some data about U.S. high schools at a conference for journalists on high school reform. (In the interest of full disclosure, I helped run it, for the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media.)

Codding presented some frightening numbers about the state of U.S. high schools. For example:

• Two out of 10 students who leave middle school are not ready for a rigorous high school core curriculum

• Teachers indicate that they spend a quarter to a third of their time each year re-teaching what should have been learned in earlier grades

• Approximately 1.2 million students who enter ninth grade fail to graduate four years later

• While nationally 70% of students graduate from high school on time, just over half of African-American and Hispanic students meet that goal (NB: In New York City, the numbers for boys of color are even lower. -hz)

• Three out of four high school graduates who take a core curriculum are not prepared for entry-level college courses

• Nearly a third students entering post-secondary education need remedial courses in one or more subjects

Codding, who has served as a high school principal in communities from Pasadena, California to Scarsdale, New York, suggests asking for statistics and data on every tour. Some other tips:

• Ask how prepared the incoming ninth-graders are and what the school is doing to make sure they get prepared.

• Ask about the teachers. Are most of them brand new? Did the principal get a say in who he or she hired? How are they assigned to classes? Do the strongest teachers teach the brightest kids? Who works with the school’s most challenging population?

• Ask how student performance is tracked, and what policies and practices either need to be put in place or removed to improve student performance?

• Ask about the school’s four-year graduation rate (this information is also posted on the Insideschools’ profiles in the gray box with other helpful school statistics).

Sheer numbers dictate that not all of our children will be accepted into the top tier schools. Let’s push instead to improve the options within all city high schools. One way to do that is by visiting a larger variety of schools and asking lots of questions – and holding educators accountable for the answers.

The NYT story that was on line last night made today’s front page, and a reader wrote in to mention Merideth Kolodner’s coverage in the News.

The apparent under-enrollment in G+T classes stands in sharp counterpoint to consistent overcrowding in the city’s schools; read more here, or read the complete report for yourself. The DOE’s much-anticipated new, 5-year capital plan will be presented next month; how the Department plans to address overcrowding and underenrollment (in G+T and in universal preK, where thousands of seats remain open, until tomorrow) will be of primary interest.

On the Times website now and in tomorrow’s paper, read Elissa Gootman’s analysis of gifted and talented enrollment for 2008-2009 — and weep. With half as many students enrolled in G+T programs — despite nearly three times as many applicants — diversity plummeted, schools that had g+t programs were forced to close them, and kids in underserved, outer-borough communities fared worst of all.

Bring your questions to parent forums on this year’s gifted and talented application process; we’ll be at the Brooklyn meeting tomorrow night, and welcome comments from readers who attend workshops in other parts of the city.

If your child is diagnosed with autism on Monday, you have to choose a therapeutic model that will determine the rest of that child’s life by Tuesday. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but only slightly.

Unfortunately, families do not generally have the luxury of time to choose between the two major types of intervention approaches: ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) and Floortime. Here’s a quick overview:

Traditional ABA is behavior-based, adult-directed, and reward-centered. Tasks are broken down into tiny baby steps and then taught in a rote and repetitive manner. For instance, if little Ethan will only roll a train back and forth repetitively, the therapist will redirect him to a table with a 4-piece puzzle board and then hand him a single piece. If Ethan fails to place the piece into the puzzle, the therapist will physically take his hand and perform the task “hand-over-hand,” all the while recording data about how many attempts were made and how many successes were achieved. Every time Ethan succeeds, he is rewarded: praise, cookies, whatever. The goal is for Ethan to learn how to do the puzzle. (Please note that what I’m describing here is “traditional” ABA. These days, it is generally performed in a much more naturalistic form, but this more disciplined model boasts many peer-reviewed scientific studies.)

Floortime incorporates the entire social, emotional, and cognitive landscape of the child, and treats the collection of behaviors as only one aspect. It is a gentle, child-centered approach that emphasizes the child’s own interests, no matter how simple or repetitive, and builds on them toward more complex and appropriate actions and interactions. In this model, if little Ethan persists in rolling his train back and forth, the therapist gets on the floor and rolls a second train back and forth until Ethan notices. And if he doesn’t, the therapist can bang the second train into Ethan’s train—whatever’s needed to connect and elicit a response, even if that response is as basic as Ethan retrieving his train and continuing to play by himself. The goal here is for Ethan to engage in an interaction that is meaningful to him.

When my husband and I were first presented with this choice, we were fortunate in a few ways: we both had the same gut reaction in terms of which path to choose, we had support from experienced, caring and compassionate advisors, and finally, our son’s pediatric neurologist recommended ABA occupy less than 15% of our son’s weekly schedule. Although this made our choice easier, the vast majority of families we’ve met in parent support groups chose full-on ABA programs, and our decision not to go that route always requires explanation.

Ours goes like this: Yes, we wanted our son to be able to do a 4-piece puzzle, but we wanted him to do it because he enjoyed it, not for the cookie. Those in the ABA camp say the technique is simply a door into the parts of the brain that need to be switched “on.” Once the door opens, advocates say, the kids do start to enjoy the ‘games’ of therapy, as much as any typically developing child. I have to say, I’ve seen ABA work in exactly that way, but I’m still uncomfortable with the overall approach. At its core, it still seems to me a mechanical and lifeless teaching method, and one that would not address one of our top priorities: to instill in our son a love of learning; to show him that it can be interesting and fun and exciting.

As it turns out, my son’s ABA therapists have been some of his best, and he’s made multi-faceted gains as a result of their efforts. But I’m still a huge Floortime fan. It’s complicated, like everything else about autism. To elaborate (or create further confusion), I’ll describe one of my son’s ABA sessions and one of his Floortime sessions in my next post.

At the NYC Student Union meeting today we discussed the somewhat obvious connection that education has with race, income and neighborhood. We talked about the way people are born onto education ‘tracks’ that are extremely difficult to change. We also found that the system works both ways.

Because I live in Park Slope and went to PS 321, I ended up at MS 51, Lab, and am now at LaGuardia. This succesion of good schools was expected of me– and I was kept well informed of these good options, all the time. Then, there’s the other side. Students who have never heard of specialized high schools because no one imagines that they would go there. And because they are not really prepared, they receive poor 7th grade test scores which then follow them and limit them, making it very difficult to get into these good schools.

We all know that living in a good neighborhood doesn’t make me smarter than anyone else. But it does give me the resources I need to have the highest level of education possible. As a small, relatively uncredible all-student union, we realize that it’s going to be close to impossible for us to do anything about this established norm. Instead, we’re launching a project where we’ll try to get into 7th grade classrooms around the city, especially in lower-income neighborhoods where expectations for students might be lower. We’ll explain to students how to apply to high schools, make sure students know about all the high schools, and offer tutoring for the 7th grade standardized test. Hopefully we can take this small step toward equal acess to quality education. As NYSCU member Hasanur put it, “We can’t get 1,000 kids to change their education paths. But if we can affect the lives of 10 students, we’ve made a difference.”

If you know a great high-school science or math teacher — someone who’s been in the public school classroom for at least five years, and is teaching at least four periods a day — the Sloan Foundation and the Fund for the City of New York want to hear from you.

This year marks the inauguration of the Sloan Awards for Excellence in Teaching Science and Mathematics, which will recognize seven of the city’s best with a $5,000 cash award to the winning teachers, and $2500 each to their departments. Of the seven awards, two have been set aside for teachers in high schools specializing in science and math.

The good news: The focus is on more than test scores, although student achievement is a factor. They’re looking for innovation, creativity, strong teaching styles, extracurriculars, and the teacher’s ability to motivate interest and encourage kids to explore careers in science and math.

Did your child’s trig teacher make math sing? Did her robotics coach urge her to consider engineering? Or did a living-environment lab inspire new passions in your budding environmentalist? Now’s the time to do more than simply say “thank you.” Nominations are open through the month of November; visit the Fund’s webite for details — and good luck (and heartfelt thanks) to the teachers who cajole, inspire, motivate, challenge, encourage and nurture our children.

Today’s thunder and lightning may just be place-setters for the budget battle gearing up in Albany. Governor David Paterson is expected to testify this morning before the House Ways and Means Committee, in no small part on the looming $12.5 billion state budget gap, The new, revised estimate is nearly double the $6.45 billion Paterson’s administration projected this past August. And don’t for a New York minute think schools will be immune: “Everything is on the table,” Paterson said yesterday in Buffalo. “Everyone has to be accountable. Everyone has to sacrifice.”

Lawmakers return to Albany in three weeks to slice and dice $2 billion in cuts to the current budget, to narrow the current deficit. For the city and its schools, grim economic times won’t lift with today’s harbinger-of-winter storm.

In a gee-whiz, Those Amazing Suburbs story in today’s Times, readers learn of a swath of electives newly installed to inspire and engage high school students. While the merits of electives are beyond argument — who can complain about classes where a student’s own interest drives the learning or about a class that doesn’t culminate in yet another standardized exam? — it’s apparent that few are aware of the breadth of electives that are thriving at some (not all) of the city’s high schools, including jewelry-making, fine and practical art, robotics, ceramics (complete with best-selling author), computer networking, and cooking, to name a few.

It would be great if high-visibility media would seek out good working examples in the city’s schools to hold up as models, rather than yearn for the suburban ideal. In the meantime, if your child’s school offers something really great, let us know — excellence is worth celebration, even if the dedication that inspires it too often goes unsung.

As the high school search for my eighth-grader intensifies, I’ve been reading up on some interesting and relatively new schools. All are far from where we live and not at all convenient: Frank Sinatra High School of the Arts (which will soon move to Astoria); The Brooklyn Latin School in Bushwick and the High School of American Studies at Lehman College in the Bronx, for example.

I cannot get my eighth-grader to even visit, and a small part of me can’t blame him. If you worked on Wall Street and lived a few blocks away in Tribeca, you might not care much about great deals on homes an hour away, in Flushing or Marine Park.

It’s not surprising that a kid who has always attended schools less than 25 minutes away can’t fathom the thought of spending more than two hours a day squeezed in on a subway, even though tens of thousands of city kids do it every day. Without trying, I’ve raised something of a real estate snob when it comes to choosing a high school. But in the same way that economic reality can interfere with real estate dreams, sheer competition intrudes on the high school search and forces many students and their parents to search far and wide for options. The competition for the top high schools in a city where the supply for quality public education in no way comes close to meeting demand.

For example, while glancing through the most recent edition of Clara Hemphill’s “New York City’s Best Public High Schools,” I nearly choked when contemplating the competition at top schools, including specialized high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. Last year, 27,720 students sat for the SHSAT exam; 5,391, or just under 20%, scored high enough to make the cut.

Non-specialized schools are in high demand, too: For example, the DOE’s high school directory says that Bard Early College High School received 2886 applications for 152 seats. At the familiar swath of popular Manhattan schools — Beacon, Baruch, Eleanor Roosevelt, Lab and Millennium High Schools — applicants regularly outstrip available seats: 4600 applicants for 262 spots at Beacon, 3418 applicants for 140 places at Millennium. (Ed note: It’s important to remember that students rank up to 12 schools on their high-school application, so someone who applies for Beacon can and probably does apply to the other schools listed above, inflating what’s already staggering to a new level.)

The “getting in” question is sure to come up on tours of these selective schools and unfortunately takes up conversation better devoted to teacher quality, course offerings, school philosophy and curriculum. But who can blame parents, when the competition is so fierce and the choices within Manhattan so coveted?

By the time it comes to finding a college, we’ll all be seasoned pros. Small comfort during this intense, competitive, confusing process.

It looks like the city and the schools might get four more years of Bloomberg and Klein; when push came to shove, the City Council’s Education Committee was proportionally more supportive of the mayor than the Council as a whole.On the other hand, 10 public school teachers filed a law suit on Wednesday arguing that the change breached voters civil rights. And in a second lawsuit, the city was sued after police handcuffed a 10-year-old special education student.

Other high profile school news: The $80 million data-management system the DOE bought hasn’t been working all fall (although a homegrown data-tracking system is thriving in Brooklyn) and well-regarded sociologists continue to question the city’s progress reports, which are due out soon for high schools. Crime may be down, but grand larceny is up in city schools, and a bureaucratic mess between the DOE and the Department of Sanitation is playing out on one truly messy Brooklyn street. Also in Brooklyn, a teen with special needs has been assigned to two schools, neither of which provided her with mandated services.

In good news, a new playground - the first of several to come - opened in Brooklyn thanks to a hefty donation. And New York was highlighted as one of the cities that requires green standards for new school buildings, plans for two of which were unveiled yesterday – and should be built cost-free to the city. And it turns out that 270 classic New York school buildings, some built a century ago and still in use, can be credited to one man.

In light of the DOE’s new policy on military recruitment of high school students, one elderly warrior-for-peace assembled her own army to fight back. A school in the Bronx is trying to harness the popularity of online communication into academic purposes, and the highly selective Hunter College High School has seen its applicant pool decline. Klein shared his philosophies and policies with a packed-house in Bridgeport, Conn., while an opinion piece in the Daily News argued that school’s budgets should be cut but the union is bribing politicians in Albany to keep the money flowing…

Parents of preschoolers will soon be aware, if they’re not already, of the application and testing process for gifted and talented programs. Last year, the newly centralized process was plagued with logistical problems — misread applications, missed deadlines, and general confusion about which programs would be offered, which schools would host them, and when students would begin, in kindergarten or first grade.

This year, it seems that DOE planners have taken some of last year’s hard knocks to heart. Now, all g+t programs will commence in kindergarten — last year, some families whose children tested above the g+t threshold were surprised (that’s the polite word) to learn the program wouldn’t begin until first grade, although the children were guaranteed seats. The calendar has been moved up; see this article for details on the process and borough parent workshops which begin next week.

Another major evolution, after significant, vigorous parent demand, is the creation of ‘citywide’ g+t programs in two of NYC’s outer boroughs, Brooklyn and Queens. For years, “citywide” schools meant that kids across the city could apply — but all three schools were sited in Manhattan, and long commutes limited access for many outer-borough families. Elissa Gootman reports, in a City Room article , that the actual new sites have not yet been chosen — so it’s not 100% that the schools will open in September, although that’s the current plan. And, DOE planners assert, citywide schools in the Bronx and Staten Island are in the works for 2010.

The wheels of change may grind slowly, but grind they do.

by Jennifer Freeman

The City Council hearings on school siting today should be lively. In some districts DOE says it sees a need for new schools but cannot find proper sites, while other districts have potential sites but DOE finds no current need.

For people who seek truth in language, consider the word “current.” DOE officials continue to say that they do not think a new school building is currently needed in District 3. Parents, elected officials, and other District 3 community leaders continue to say they think we do need to build a school, and that the DOE should take advantage of a prime school site in a proposed new development called Riverside South. But what if we are all actually saying the same thing?

Schools generally take about eight to nine years to build. The Office of Student Enrollment, OSEPO, says that it does not plan for children until they register for seats in public schools. So the DOE has built a kind of failure into its model, making it difficult to take advantage of one of the best sources of new school sites–spaces designed as part of multi-use developments, planned BEFORE those developments are built and before school children live there.

In District 3 a few years ago, the developer Extell set aside space for a school in a big new development, but the DOE turned it down. Currently, Extell has set aside a new space for a school in its proposed development known as Riverside South– now a parking lot around 60th St. and West End Ave.

DOE officials have said that if the families moving into all the new District 3 developments have the number of kids predicted by planning experts, the district will need a new school. But a site like Riverside South is not likely to magically reappear when the DOE is ready to play catch-up, in five or ten years. The time to move on the site is now.

When I was a young person just developing political consciousness, I was impressed to learn that when a politician says he “currently” has no plans to do something (seek a new term in office, for example) he could turn around and do it the next day without contradiction. I’m going to be optimistic and hope that what the Department of Education is actually saying, in code, that it really does want to build a new school in Riverside South and is just waiting for the developer to make a financial deal, like the one the DOE announced in District 2 . Perhaps, linguistic differences aside, we are all standing on the same shore and seeing the need for a new school on the horizon.

Just in time for this weekend’s administration of the SHSAT (specialized high school admissions test) — and perfectly poised to increase the anxiety of the nearly 30,000 students who’ll sit for the exam (and their parents), a new study says that variations in the high-stakes admission test, meant to prohibit cheating, scramble the results so significantly that many students who should have been offered seats in the specialized high schools were bounced instead. It also documented a preference for math and science whiz kids, over kids with across-the-board high scores — the kids college admissions counselors call BWRKs, bright well-rounded kids who are strong students if not prodigies.

DOE testing guru Robert Tobias, now an education professor at NYU, takes the long view: “If the issue is, could some kids who score lower on the test be successful at these schools, quite frankly the answer would be yes.” His circumspection is tepid comfort for the kids who will learn, come February, that they didn’t cut the SHSAT mustard. But it’s the honest truth, just the same.

On the national education front, the College Board has developed a test to assess college readiness — in 8th graders. Described as a “low-stakes” instrument — whatever that is — the ReadiStep test is meant as a kind of early yardstick, to see whether middle-schoolers are on the college-prep track. The test is not, its makers protest, “a pre-pre-pre-SAT” — but if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it probably isn’t a chicken…

Testing at such an early age bodes ill for late-blooming students; it smacks of tracking, which funnels students into more- or less-rigorous curricula and career tracks. While US schools tracked students well into the late 20th century (and beyond, say advocates for minority and low-income students), the theoretical American meritocracy argues against tracking in favor of individual determination — the “if you can dream it, you can do it” ethic. (Never mind the advantages of race, class, legacies, and long-entrenched social networks.)

Our neighbors overseas unabashedly track students, with whopper exams in middle school or earlier, to determine who’s college material — and who’s not. In France, students sit for cumulative exams to gain access to prestigious high schools and grands ecoles, respected institutions that gleam bright on a resume. In Germany, exams at the end of primary school determine if students will continue their education in high schools that prepares them for trade school, clerical/business school, or university.

Concerns about tracking are legitimate. But before the philosophical debate, parents and school leaders would do well to weigh the practical effect of yet another standardized assessment in the already test-dense 8th grade year. Don’t the myriad other tests 8th graders take, like citywide and state exams, assess a child’s academic readiness for the pre-college challenge? Can’t the wizards who crunch the numbers look at the data they already gather and find a way to infer readiness? Or are the cynics right, and the College Board’s new instrument is meant to generate funds — and stoke the ever-glowing embers of parental worry?

Looks like early-grade testing will commence at 57 city schools. Parents may have issues with tender-years testing, but the schools participating in this DOE pilot all volunteered for the program.

A full list of schools is forthcoming from the DOE; stay tuned.

In today’s Times, a retired social studies teacher and very proud papa got in trouble at Brooklyn Tech — fined and reprimanded, for his decision as school librarian to showcase a comic-book version of ‘Macbeth’ his daughter had illustrated.

Whatever one feels about illustrated classics — some turn their nose up at anything derivative, others say any route into literature is worth celebrating — doesn’t it seem the city might have better, more urgent, or more important things to do than pursue a public-school librarian for potential conflict of interest?

This week alone, I’ve come across two ‘cures’ for autism. The first one, “N.J. Doctor Says Hyperbaric Chamber Cures Autism” came via e-mail, and the other, “Most Experts discuss the autism problem: Now hear a solution” sidetracked me in the form of a half-page ad in Time Out New York (which I was reading to plan an extremely overdue night out with my husband, but which I suspected he would forgive me for postponing yet again, especially if it meant a cure for autism).

For new special needs parents, let me apologize for appearing flip and assure you that I am brimming with hope for my 5-year-old autistic son’s future. But in my experience, any organization or individual who claims a one-size-fits-all, guaranteed success is, at best, well-intentioned but mistaken, and at worst, attempting to exploit a desperate population: parents who would do anything to save our kids.

Fortunately, there was also a break from miracle cures: Melissa Fay Greene’s “Reaching an Autistic Teenager,” which chronicles the experiences of a few teenage boys with autism at a private school in Georgia. I’m familiar with the complex and nuanced development disorder Greene portrays. One autism school director captures the difficulty of choosing one particular type of intervention over another: “You meet one child with autism and, well, you’ve met one child with autism.”

The article provides a primer on the two major intervention approaches: Stanley Greenspan’s D.I.R./Floortime approach (used in the Georgia school) and Applied Behavior Analysis (A.B.A.). I will compare and contrast (and also congratulate and complain about) our experiences with both of these approaches in upcoming posts.

I have to be honest: It’s painful for me to read about autistic teenagers. My son started Early Intervention when he was 18 months old, and we have pinned all our fragile hopes on the belief that his brain chemistry will change. And we’ve seen some proof: The other day, for the first time ever, my son played hide-and-seek in the park with two other children. It was a spectacularly breathtaking moment. But the next morning, instead of having a conversation with me, he chose to talk to himself: “Do you want to take Nagle to Broadway, or Hillside to Nagle? Those are your choices. Which one do you choose? Hillside to Nagle? Okay. We’ll take Hillside to Nagle.”

We’ve seen him outgrow and conquer other challenges. We believe that he will overcome these as well. We choose to believe. But we also read articles about teenagers with autism. So we believe…with a melancholy asterisk.

And something else: Those miracle cures that I summarily dismiss? The ones I have fully investigated and, at the deepest core of my being, believe will not help my son? They haunt me. We should have tried B12 injections. We should have tried Tomatis. We should have tried Glutithione. Guess I’ll just add Hyperbaric Chamber to the list.

It’s axiomatic that steady attendance promotes steady learning: The more you show up, the more you learn. But attendance is more than a simple (if vital) predictor of learning, according to a new report from the Center for New York City Affairs/Milano-The New School for Management and Urban Policy.

“Problems at schools overlap directly with problems at home,” says Center director Andrew White. School attendance reflects a community’s physical and mental health and its commitment to education as a basic value. Chronic absence, endemic across the city’s schools and highest in high-need communities, is a reliable predictor of future academic failure: If students don’t learn the basics they need by third grade, school becomes a dispiriting game of catch-up. Absence can also be a marker for potential abuse or neglect. How effectively a community is knit into the life of the school is a critical factor in increasing attendance, according to the report, and strongly influences the engagement, health, and eventual achievement of the children it serves.

More than 90,000 elementary school children, or 20% of the K-5 total, missed at least 20 days of school last year, according to the Center’s analysis of DOE statistics. The highest levels of chronic absence are seen in the poorest districts; causes range from health issues (like uncontrolled asthma and other childhood illnesses) and family challenges (mental health, economics, language differences, mobility, and relocation) to extended vacations and a lack of emphasis, in some communities, on the value of early childhood education.

The report recognizes steady progress in attendance but challenges DOE structures to continue to strengthen attendance oversight — by increasing its importance in calculating Annual Progress Reports, reshaping the responsibilities of overburdened attendance teachers, developing “community schools” — open 6 or 7 days a week, with a spectrum of social, medical, after-school and tutoring services, and targeting the 50 or 100 schools most burdened by chronic absenteeism.

There’s ample controversy as to whether NCLB strictures–which mandate robust testing–undermine kids’ engagement at school by limiting ‘fun’ classes like music and art in favor of testable academics. Ed wonks can thrash out the relative virtues of a Broader, Bolder Approach or Education Equality. What’s beyond argument is the integrity of the basic premise — attendance matters, and embedding the school into the lives of the families and children it serves strengthens the school and the community, even as it supports consistent academic gains.

For a much more detailed discussion of the issue and potential solutions, along with eye-opening graphics, see the complete report, edited by Insideschools’ co-founder Clara Hemphill.

Many critics and even more parents have criticized the lack of focus on education in the presidential debates. Tonight at 7 pm, representatives from the McCain and Obama campaigns will debate each candidate’s education policy in a forum at Teachers College. While the actual event is sold out, the debate will be on line live, via webcast; register here ahead of the event.

Last Saturday I showed up at my soccer game and found about half the team missing. They were at PSAT prep classes — as if SAT prep classes weren’t time-consuming enough! When I call my friends to see if they want to canvass for Obama on weekends with me, they say no; they have practice SATs all morning. The same is true for countless other events being missed by juniors (and even sophmores!) who are taking SAT prep rather than taking advantage of all the things they could be doing: There are free programs in music and art, writing groups, sports, dance and countless other opportunities for teenagers. Why should these pursuits be lost to something so tedious as SAT prep?

I don’t blame my friends and fellow students for doing everything they can to ensure good scores on the SATs. College is becoming increasingly competitive and I understand the anxiety of having even the slightest disadvantage. But I can’t help wishing that everyone would just agree to stop taking prep classes and stop spending their Saturday nights studying for one meaningless test. Maybe if the SAT frenzy went down a little it would force colleges to look at something with a little more substance to judge their incoming students.

As teenagers in these exciting electoral times, we have the ability and passion to change our system. I know my ideas are idealistic. I know we’re not about to have an anti-SAT revolution. But I would just love to see all high school students and their parents refuse to prep for the SATs, refuse to give more money to our screwed-up prep system and get back to — or discover — the things they love to do!

Bringing academically talented children who are not native English speakers into the city’s gifted and talented programs is a long-touted goal of the DOE, last year’s mixed-bag testing results notwithstanding.

Starting next week, the Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy is hosting informational workshops in all five boroughs — in Arabic, Bengali, Urdu, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Haitian Creole and Korean. Look here for details; scroll down the page to Upcoming Events.

Gifted and talented handbooks and requests for testing will be available on line and at local schools starting October 29th, according to the DOE. Requests for testing are due back by November 19th. Tests will begin in early 2009.

Free Metrocards will be provided to OFEA workshop participants. Planners suggest arriving early, as space (and Metrocards) are limited.

Only a few days after the UFT sued the DOE for infringing on teacher’s freedom of speech by forbidding them to wear political buttons on the job, the feds ruled against the union, satisfying Chancellor Klein: “Keeping politics out of the classroom was our primary concern here, and our position has been fully vindicated.” Just to be sure, DOE told one school to take down a poster of Barack Obama. The UFT, in a move that won’t make Mayor Bloomberg happy, announced that they will support preserving term limits. And more potential teachers competing to be in the classroom could, according to reports, be one of the rare positive trends brought about by the financial meltdown.

Focus on special education and special needs students during the presidential debates elicited an angry response from one advocate. A parent in Brooklyn realized that her son may not have been receiving his mandated services - and someone at his school may have tried to cover it up - and an autistic three-year-old was left on an empty school bus for six hours. Sunday’s Times Magazine looks into how schools are teaching autistic teenagers, and New York parents have successfully lobbied for more publicly-funded residential schools, to reduce the flow of students to private boarding schools in other states. But even a high profile lawsuit didn’t seem to get special education students at Fredrick Douglas Academy IV their mandated services, state officials discovered.

While home-schooling rates have risen in the city (more than 2,600 students registered this year, while only 1,600 home schooled in 2001), the Times wrote about parents who have chosen anti-schooling, not to be confused with un-schooling. Research questions the way gifted students are designated, and the DOE may have ignored warnings of overcrowding in Riverdale schools. Classes are now offered in Brooklyn to “help parents help their kids,” and a conference today was supposed to help educators and school safety officers discipline better.

In high school news, a lawsuit on behalf of students who were illegally pushed out of Boys and Girls High School was settled, and the students can now hopefully get their degrees. And as 8th graders consider which high schools to apply to, the DOE released the list of the most popular schools last year: Francis Lewis HS in Flushing, followed by Benjamin N. Cardozo, Midwood, Forest Hills, and Edward Murrow. For students who want a new option, Post reporter Yoav Gonen wrote about new themed charter schools in the city. “These aren’t your older siblings charter schools,” he said. And vocational schools these days aren’t offering your older siblings - or parents - technical education, either; they are much more academic. The way military recruiters gain high school students’ information has also changed - and this new policy is already being protested by the NYCLU.

Yesterday, the DOE released its second annual Arts in Education report. The ‘gains’ celebrated by the DOE — rising percentages of students participating in the arts –obscure both the comparatively small fraction of students who receive arts education at all, and the overwhelming trend of decreasing arts education as students progress from elementary to middle to high school.

For an example of a little bit of good news, the report says that the DOE has increased per capita arts funding. They have — from $308 per student to $311. Is a $3 rise significant? You be the judge.

Visual arts remains the most widely offered discipline, but less than half of the city’s elementary schools and only a third of middle schools offer four arts options — visual arts, music, drama, and dance. These numbers, while disturbingly low, do represent increases from 2006-07 (38% and 17%, respectively), which the report attributes at least in part to more accurate reporting.

Arts study decreases significantly as students get older. From an average of 83% of elementary students exposed to at least one arts discipline during the academic year, the percentage drops steadily: 73% of 7th graders, 57% of 8th graders, declining to 31% in 12th grade.

An article in the Post highlighted serious shortfalls in elementary arts education, but a couple of nagging questions persist: There’s little distinction drawn by DOE between arts within general-ed coursework (think tri-fold board craft projects) and studio-level arts instruction. And there’s no attention paid to the minority of public schools in relatively wealthy districts which, via PTA funding and other parent-supported efforts, maintain their own robust arts programs, distinct from DOE curriculum.

Reader Amy A, responding October 15 to an earlier post by Jennifer Freeman, shared news worth mentioning:

“I learned at an Executive Committee meeting at Lower Lab / PS 77 last evening that we have 9 empty seats in the school and because there is no longer a waiting list for TAG [talented and gifted] programs, the slots will disappear (as well as the associated funding) if they are not filled by the end of October.

Interested families can contact the LL [Lower Lab] Parent Coordinator Gina Goodman for information 212-427-2798. Applicants will have had to have taken the Bracken & Otis tests and scored above 90 or scored 4’s on State ELA & Math.”

Many thanks, Amy, for taking the time to write in, and if families pursue the open seats, let us know how the process goes for you and your kids.

Update: Elana Hoffman, Lower Lab’s guidance counselor, wrote in to say that although families can contact Ms. Goodman for information, OSEPO, the DOE’s enrollment office, is responsible for allocating the actual seats. Details on how OSEPO will make the placement decisions are forthcoming; watch the blog for updates.

PM PS: No formal word yet from OSEPO, but school representatives wrote to say that no seats are available for 2008-09.

Everyone knows that the SAT is a pre-college ritual — dreaded, anticipated, debated, and ultimately taken (and re-taken) by millions of high-school seniors.

Now comes news from Baylor University that students already admitted to the college are being encouraged AND financially rewarded for re-taking the SATs — as college students. Administrators there hatched a plan to motivate repeat test-takers in an effort to raise the college’s rankings — yes, Virginia, it’s come to this, callous manipulation of students, test scores, and the testing process (plus a tidy $300 bookstore credit and $1000 merit scholarship award) to make the school appear more rigorous, and, they’re betting, to raise the admissions bar for subsequent pools of applicants. (Average SAT scores got a 10-point bump in the re-test process, rising from 1200 to 121o, on a scale of 1800.)

With some colleges gaming the testing system, is it any wonder kids see the test as a hurdle to be jumped? Why not prep to the gills? Why look for a level playing field when institutions of higher learning have little qualm about reshaping the landscape — in their own favor?

Last year, I fell in love with Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. I was deeply moved by the language, the story, the vividness and the warmth of the characters. But it wasn’t my first time reading it. It was assigned reading in sixth grade, and I found it difficult. Rereading it in 10th grade, I wondered why I hadn’t appreciated the story before. But the answer was obvious to me: I had just been too young.

I believe there are best times to read certain books. Just because you can read a book, doesn’t mean you should. Books can be understood on many levels, but great classics deserve deep appreciation. Sixth graders can read Huckleberry Finn, Little Women and Of Mice and Men and “get” it, but these are great books we’re talking about. Books that should be cherished. Over and over again, my middle-school classmates and I complained about the dullness of supposed “classics,” wondering why on earth our teachers, parents and grandparents exclaimed fervently over them. In fact, my grade in seventh grade English dropped 6 points because I failed the Huckleberry Finn pop quiz: I couldn’t bring myself to read another page. Five years later, I adored it.

Beth Handman, assistant principal of elementary school P.S.321 in Brooklyn says, “I hate to see the best books in the world go to waste. When I see my favorite series, like the Narnia series, in the hands of a first-grader I cringe. That same first-grader will read it in first grade and say ‘Oh! Aslan is a lion!’ That really happened, you know’.”

What’s the rush to shove these books on young kids? Are schools trying to prove that they’re more sophisticated by assigning more sophisticated books to students? Just wait a couple of years… Please! It will make all the difference.

Even if you have typically developing children, navigating New York City’s schools is not exactly a low-maintenance activity. Will your neighborhood public school be more crowded than a rush hour local? And if you choose private school, and if your child somehow manages to survive the fierce competition and earn an acceptance letter, what large and impressive heirloom will you sell to pay the tuition? (It can’t be your husband.)

Add special needs into the equation, and things get exponentially more difficult. Especially here in Manhattan, where you share psychic and actual real estate with parents who truly believe that if their children don’t start learning Mandarin in kindergarten, their nascent global-competition skills will be compromised. Mandarin? Reality check: When my son was non-verbal at 3 years old, we were concerned he would never develop the ability to speak English.

Thankfully, there are some great organizations that have helped maintain my family’s sanity in the midst of all this school choice chaos. YAI/NYL/Lifestart is one of the gems on our list, and jointly with the JCC, they annually sponsor a Special Needs School Fair coming up on Wednesday, October 29th. If you are the parent of a special-needs child, stop reading this blog right now and add this event to your calendar. And make sure you go! Many, many special-needs-friendly elementary and pre-K schools will be there to answer your questions. It’s also a nice opportunity to share information and catch up with other parents you’ve met in various support groups.

Among the many excellent schools that will be represented, a few have been instrumental in my son’s remarkable progress. The JBFCS Child Development Center (CDC) is a small, extraordinary program that allowed my son to exceed expectations time after time: The Intensity of Mild Autism describes five minutes of my son’s day there. And I can’t say enough good things about PS 178’s ASD Nest program.

These schools worked and are working for my son, but every kid is unique; some who thrive in one setting won’t flourish in others. The good news is that there are a lot of great programs out there; the bad news is it takes a lot of time and energy to find what’s right for your child and your family. So as this school search season begins, keep in mind that sleep is overrated. If anyone figures out how to implement a 27-hour day, please let me know.

The Broad (rhymes with load) Prize was awarded yesterday in a jubilant ceremony in midtown Manhattan, with remarks by Chancellor Klein and a “celebratory luncheon” that featured newsman Tom Brokaw. The Prize, which carries $2 million in scholarship money for the five urban school districts short-listed to win, was awarded to New York City’s schools last year. This year, the big, million-dollar prize went to Brownsville, Texas; the other four finalists were each awarded a quarter-million in scholarship funds. (For the moment, set aside the fact that four years’ tuition at a private college or university runs above $100,000 per student, making those juicy, round numbers look quite a bit leaner.)

In an extreme example of glass half empty/glass half full vision, the Broad judges recognized Brownsville’s progress and academic gains, especially among students of color, English language learners, and kids whose families don’t have much money. Glass half full, right? Yet the Brownsville schools haven’t met their handy-dandy AYP targets, as articulated in NCLB, for the past two years. (Looking a little empty now, no?)

So the richest education purse in the country goes, with great fanfare, to a potentially failing school, as defined by Federal law. How can the “best” urban school district in the country fail to measure up on NCLB? What does it say about what NCLB measures (and values) and what actually works for children? As parents, and as voters, who do we trust — the Feds? the funders? Congress? the DOE? — to do the best for our kids?

Glorious fall days — brilliantine skies, blazing foliage, crisp breezes — promise soccer games and bike rides, country hikes and apple-picking adventures. But families of eighth-graders should factor in an hour or two this weekend to attend a borough high school fair, especially if the pileup of weekday school tours is getting to be too much to juggle.

This Saturday and Sunday from 11am-3pm, you and your child can meet high-school leaders, teachers and students in settings far less fraught than the all-city high school fair, which drew 34,000 visits over two days at Brooklyn Tech. Yes, it means giving up some valuable weekend time; and it means hustling your kid into a school-related activity on the weekend (never an easy trick). It’s also a great chance to dip a toe into the high-school waters and explore schools both prominent and promising. DOE’s offering additional high-school admissions workshops through mid-November; check here for local dates and times.

With two weeks to go until the specialized science high school test (SSHAT) and interviews, auditions, portfolio reviews, and school-based admissions tests well underway, it’s high season for high school. Making the time to learn more can only help your child, and you, as you navigate the process.

The NY Times picks up the NCLB thread today, with a close study of a solid California school that’s shown steady, upward growth — although not at the rapid rate NCLB and state planners agreed as targets when the law was written. Notably, state planners bet on the likelihood that the law would be changed in 2007 — naievete or denial, up for debate — which, they say prompted them to set outsize, hyper-ambitious Annual Yearly Progress targets. The story also identifies a troubling trend: Schools in states with the hardest tests are having the greatest difficulty making AYP, so much so that 4 in 10 risk being labeled as failing, whether they fall short in one testing category or across the board. In the states with the toughest tests, 60-83% of schools failed to make sufficient progress, while states with easier tests show much greater ’success.’

In an uncanny juxtaposition, an Editorial Observer’s brief today describes a Rutgers study of student cheating which shows, surprise!, a steady rise in cheating among high school students: More than 90% surveyed admit to cheating on exams. Both the Rutgers researchers and the Times endorse honor codes, which foster candor and personal integrity. But one has to wonder if there’s any connection between more testing and more cheating — and about the possible cynicism of students who, faced with steady barrages of standardized exams, just might not take each and every measure with the gravity the test-makers desire.

Frequency of testing doesn’t excuse cheating — nothing does, in fact — but whether test-saturation undermines student behavior on exams surely seems well worth asking.

As the stock market dips and swings, families at city private schools are considering switching to public schools, threatening to flood already-overcrowded schools. Officials in Riverdale, coping with an unexpected influx, have switched students out of their bursting-at-the-seams zoned schools a month into the semester. In Greenwich Village, another prime neighborhood with overcrowded schools, parents are pushing the city to buy a building from the state to accommodate more students.

The economic downturn has trickled into the budget for the Community Education Councils, and Brooklyn parents worry what else budget cuts will affect in the schools. But it seems that the DOE’s central offices just keep growing; despite a hiring freeze, job openings are posted for numerous positions, including Knowledge Management Domain Leader for Leadership & Organizational Management, which comes with a generous $170,000 salary.

Now that the Mayor is pushing for a third term, the debate over mayoral control has become more about Bloomberg and Klein. And at a rally in Queens, one group of parents said no to mayoral control and no to Mayor Bloomberg. At the national level, advocates fret that other issues may have officially relegated education to the back burner in this November’s election.

Bad news for girls in the papers this week: girls in cities play sports less and later than boys, and their math talent is less likely to be identified and encouraged than American boys’ or foreign girls’. And New York girls trying to buck the trend by attending the all-female Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science have obstacles outside the gender battle: a brand new school building in Brooklyn (shared with three other schools) where construction is dangerously incomplete.

Games are more than child’s play, or so it seems from a swath of stories. A computer game that requires solving algebraic equations is in play in 100 city middle schools and a newly-formed institute will study the impact of educational computer games (and develop new ones). A brand- new training center opened in Co-Op city to serve the 3,500 students in the Beat the Streets wrestling program, special needs students in Staten Island practice yoga with their principal, and a petite high school girl in Queens is suiting-up to play in a football game this weekend. Game on.

No Child Left Behind, the Bush administration’s signature education initiative, comes up for Congressional review next year. The NCLB law mandates that schools make Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) on a range of variables — and requires that all of America’s schoolchildren achieve proficiency in reading and math by 2013.

Educators, advocates, and parents have long challenged NCLB’s expectation of universal proficiency, especially in urban districts like New York City where up to a third of students are English Language Learners and far too many approach middle and high school academically underprepared, without the basic skills to demonstrate proficiency on standardized exams. (The difference in rigor between local and national exams is no small matter, either — despite apparent test-score gains in New York City and state, results on national measures are disturbingly flat. A new book from Harvard prof Daniel Koretz details the grim state of affairs in our test-saturated school culture.)

Education Week highlighted two new studies saying that universal proficiency is pie in the Ed sky, and the fact that more and more schools face forced restructuring (a consequence of failing to hit AYP targets for five years) — 3599 nationwide in the past year alone, which represents a 56% increase in a single year. The trend is likely to crescendo as more and more schools fall short of NCLB marks. And once a school’s pushed into restructuring, recovery is unlikely: About one in five restructuring schools surveyed in five states met AYP, leaving the vast majority foundering against remote targets.

The city’s schools are subject to AYP targets, too, as well as DOE-imposed progress targets (evaluated on the annual progress reports), and failure on both measures can foretell restructuring or eventual closure. Dozens of city schools are now in the restructuring queue, with dozens more closed or reconfigured anew. While no one can argue against the ideal of universal proficiency, it does seem worth asking why the difficult reality of working with challenging students merits an official rap on the knuckles — and risks a school’s viability in the community.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration exodus to the private sector has begun — two senior ed officials resigned this week.

“Can we take the A train to 168th and then switch to the B?”

These are the first words my 5-year-old autistic son utters when he wakes up in the morning, before even a yawn or a stretch.

It wasn’t always trains. He went through a lengthy “Chutes and Ladders” phase, then it was nonstop bicycles. There have been so many other pseudo-obsessions that I can’t recall right now because when they were finally over, I enthusiastically purged them from my mind and savored the opportunity never to speak about them again.

For better or worse, my husband and I know all too well how we’re supposed to deal with this. Because my son was diagnosed at 18 months, we’ve had years to become experts at responding to his repetitive comments therapeutically. We can try to redirect him (what’ll we do AFTER the train?), we can time-limit him (two more minutes to talk about trains, then on to something else), or we can get out his train set and work on his imaginary play skills because that’s another area of delay for him.

The problem is, it’s 6:30 in the morning. I don’t want to be a good mom right now—I just want a cup of coffee. And even if I did have the energy to make an effort, I would have to first turn down the volume on the ever-present loop that plays inside my head: “He’ll never be able to make friends because he’ll never be able to stop talking about trains.” Even though I’m a “glass-half-full” kind of person — I believe he will eventually get beyond all this, I know how far he’s come, I see more and more spontaneous parts of him come alive every day — there is, always, a strong and steady heartbeat of worry.

Simultaneously, I am fascinated with my son’s fascination. However worrisome it is to me, he clearly experiences it as pure joy. Autistic savant Daniel Tamet’s Born on a Blue Day describes seeing numbers in his head not just mathematically like the rest of us, but rather as landscapes: beautiful, engaging, passionate visions. Are we missing something spectacular about the A train?

Eventually, I say: “Okay, buddy, we can take the train.” Which invariably leads to: “The A train? Can we take the A train, Mommy? And then we can switch to the B?” I add this to my long list of issues to discuss with his PS 178 ASD Nest teachers at our upcoming team meeting, and I decide that for the moment, I will concentrate on an area where my son has no delays whatsoever: I give my delicious little boy a big squeezy hug and tickle him until he giggles.

News from Toni of the NYC Student Union; visit their blog for articulate, unique, and thought-provoking perspectives on student life in the city.

Yesterday, a friend and fellow student union member told me about a program called the Borough Students Advisory Council (BSAC). It is a DOE-run program that invites every single school in Manhattan to send two students to monthly meetings with other students and higher powers. The idea is to unite students from across the borough and discuss issues in their schools. It sounds ideal, right? It’s a chance to bring together students and give them access to unbelievable resources, connections with the DOE, contact information for every school and a place to meet every month.

Interestingly enough, their mission is almost identical to our mission at the NYC Student Union– the only completely student-run group working toward a collective voice of change in the public education system. So my question is this: Why have we never heard of BSAC? And why, when every school in the borough was invited to send representatives, do only about a dozen schools participate? If Chancellor Klein and Mayor Bloomberg are serious about student involvement, I think they could do a lot better than that.

Every week we meet as a student union and we are constantly frustrated by our limitations: lack of communication with the people in charge and lack of communication with more students around the city (two things that BSAC could offer). And now, as I am discovering, a serious lack of communication between different education activist groups. We are working in isolation for the same cause.

Our union proposed a couple of things today. The first one was a day where all education activists could get together and present their organization or cause. The second one was a wiki page for educational activists, allowing everyone to search for other groups that could work with them on projects, etc. We also considered the idea of using LinkedIn to connect all the people in this education world.

In the past week alone I have heard of two or three organizations with goals closely aligned with ours in the student union. We are trying to reach out to them; today, today two representatives from ICOPE came to our meeting and it was incredibly inspiring to talk to them. We are constantly impressed by the work of other groups trying to better our schools, and yet we rarely find the opportunity to collaborate with them. So contact us! students@lists.nycstudents.org.

Imagine someday all of us education activists will meet together and our concerns will live as one.

Chancellor Joel Klein, visiting the Hudson Guild Children’s Center, announced today that “thousands” of seats remain open in the city’s universal pre-K program.

Worth asking: How did the seat surplus occur at all, given the high demand for pre-K seats? And, given this surplus, how did the seats go unfilled for this first month of the academic year?

The DOE has posted a pre-K page that lists schools and community-based organizations with current openings. Most are half-day, which limit their use for kids of working parents.

See this article for more information on the 6000 seats Chancellor Klein said are waiting for young pupils.

by Jennifer Freeman

Can you call an activity “planning” if it consists of playing catch-up with old problems (years of chronic underfunding of school construction) while ignoring new ones (massive residential high-rise construction)? The inspiring crowd of parents and elected officials who rallied on the steps of City Hall last Friday to call for “A Better Capital Plan” thought not. Students from P.S. 3 held up signs with messages such as “We are not packing peanuts!”

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer presided over the rally. Elected officials stood up one after another to recognize that the Department of Education urgently needs to improve the way it makes capital plans.Stringer has issued two reports showing that school seats in Manhattan have not kept pace with residential building in the city: In District 3 alone, over 7,000 apartments have been built since 2003, or are currently under construction. Many are multi-bedroom apartments clearly aimed at families with children. Yet not one city dollar has been allocated to the district for new schools.

Last June at a CEC meeting, DOE officials told District 3 parents that there was no population boom: kids in new high rises would fill the void from a loss of population in older buildings. Overall, we were told, the district had shrunk by over 700 children since 2001. But it turns out that figure referred to the number of District 3 children now attending charter schools. Even though these are public schools located in District 3 that use space in District 3 public school buildings, they are not technically considered “in the district.”

In September 2008, the DOE put out figures saying that enrollment in Upper West Side schools (below 110th Street) had risen by 84 children from 2005-06–although enrollment increases posted on schools’ DOE websites added to 166. DOE also used outdated “historical” class size to count potentially free seats if DOE changed enrollment rules, instead of using the smaller “target” class size numbers, as mandated by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) lawsuit.

In recent weeks, the DOE acknowledged that District 3 schools might not be able to absorb all the kids expected once those thousands of new apartments are occupied. But they switched rationales in order to keep arguing against any construction in the new 5-year plan. The new story:

- Other districts are in even worse shape.

- In these tumultuous economic times, the future is even murkier than usual, so it would be imprudent to commit new funds.

In its new 5-year capital plan, due out this November, the DOE should practice planning ahead, not just cleaning up old messes. Planning means making predictions of the near future and acting on them.

The DOE has often said “you can only improve what you can measure.” DOE should measure the need for new school seats without massaging the numbers. A clearer, more accurate picture of school needs would be the first step towards solving the problems of District 3, and other crowded districts as well.

By Liz Willen

“Excuse me,” a woman’s voice said to me this week, as I waited with what felt like thousands of other parents and children on West 61st Street to get inside the Beacon School for an open house. “What are they giving away? What is everyone waiting for?”

“A good education,” I replied. “And yes, it’s free.”

As I examined the large number of students in New York City private-school blazers or logos waiting for the open house, I wondered briefly if our flagging economy is creating even more interest in the city’s best public high schools, with some Wall Streeters suddenly forced to find alternatives.

Perhaps, but more likely the long wait to get in signified the same old truth I have already discovered when searching for good middle schools in the city — demand outstrips supply. And Beacon has the right combination of challenging academics, an interesting curriculum and extensive after-school sports and extracurriculuar activites. The students milling about outside politely answered questions and spoke with enormous enthusiasm about their school, started 16 years ago by principal Ruth Lacey.

“It’s been a wonderful journey,” Lacey told parents and students who packed the library. Even she looked a bit taken aback by the enormous crowds and Beacon’s popularity.

We are too early in the tour process to have much to compare it with, but Beacon seems like an ideal school for kids who love to learn in both traditional and non-traditional ways. There were plenty of advanced placement courses and community service opportunities, and the teachers seemed engaged and excited.

When the tour was over, I wanted to stick around and visit a few more classrooms, but my son was already out the door, reminding me that I’m not the one going to high school next year.

Too bad, because if I was, I’d for sure choose a school like Beacon. And so will thousands of other students — who won’t get in, because there isn’t enough room.

Why can’t there be more schools like Beacon in New York City?

The Post has two school-tech pieces today, including one optimistic feature on the new, affordable XOXO laptops (and the DOE plan to give families 24/7 internet access in the bargain). On the flip side, the paper reports the wide spread and increasingly frequent thefts of school laptops, including plenty of higher-priced Dell and Mac machines.

The XOXO machines, created at MIT for children in developing nations, are sturdy enough to survive being stuffed into a backpack. But the cyber-bandits in question aren’t that subtle; school security videos shows some brazen thieves wheeling entire laptop carts — yes, those bulky, unwieldy, locked metal cabinets that hold a couple of dozen computers — right out the schoolhouse doors.

Bloomberg admitted that when he argues for renewal of mayoral control, he also hopes to continue as Mayor, despite the twice-voted term limits law currently on the books. But Bloomberg’s second major reason for wanting to stay in City Hall – the economic woes of late – has already wreaked havoc on schools’ budgets. Whether the state is doing enough to help continues a hot topic, and Wall Street donations to public education will certainly start drying up soon – meaning less, less, less. Would it be cheaper to allow high school students to take some classes online (and “at 3 a.m. in their pajamas if they desire”)? And a new program is bringing laptops created for students in developing countries to city classrooms at the wonderfully affordable sticker price of $200 each.

The Public Advocate explained her position on mayoral control – again – in the Daily News, and the Times analyzed the data used to compile the controversial school progress reports, demonstrating how manipulating the methodology yields different results for individual schools. City students’ standardized test scores are being used to generate yet another type of report card: teachers’ grades. The DOE doesn’t want teachers to wear political buttons to school; some teachers are now asking whether Klein’s prohibition is un-Constitutional. And the eternal debate over how to best teach English language learners was rehashed and re-argued in the Times this week.

Craving news that everyone can celebrate? Local kids are bucking the stereotype of nicotine-craving urban teens: dramatically fewer New York State teenagers are smoking than teens in the country as a whole. A $9-a-pack pricetag can be plenty persuasive…

Mayor Bloomberg wants a third term and seems to think the way to avert a pesky term-limits law is a kind of end run via the City Council. Plenty of folks agree with the Mayor’s thinking, from the sages at the New York Times to Ronald Lauder, the deep-pocketed original term-limits proponent, who pleads “one time only” to “rescinding the voice of the voters” on today’s Opinion page. But Albany’s support of mayoral control is critical if Bloomberg swings a third term; the power to revoke or remake that law resides in Albany, and whether the threat is idle or substantial remains uncertain.

Meanwhile, UFT members sporting Obama paraphernalia are being directed by the DOE to remove same from the classroom. Here’s hoping that at least some of the teachers subject to the DOE’s no-politics dictum will still assign the vice-presidential debate tonight and the Presidential debates on October 7 and 15 as homework. If not, motivated parents can take a few debate-viewing pointers from the League of Women Voters — and invite their kids into the political process.

Marni Goltsman is the parent of a 5-year-old in P.S. 178’s Intensive Kindergarten (which feeds into the Autism Nest program), and she is also the Web Developer here at Insideschools. We’re pleased and proud to welcome her regular contributions to Insideschools’ blog this year.

I am in love with my son’s new school. It’s both a schoolgirl crush and real, ripe, grown-up love: I often find myself smiling for no particular reason, even as this mature, substantive stabilizing force eases me into a good night’s sleep.

There are only 6 children in my son’s classroom, and they all have autism. He has an extraordinary teacher, several assistant teachers, an occupational therapist, a speech therapist, a counselor, and a physical therapist, and almost every day he gets adaptive PE, music and art.

At least once a week, supervisors from Hunter College, who originally created the ASD Nest program, visit the classroom and advise the staff on each child’s individual intervention plans. These highly educated professionals possess a wealth of casework experience with autistic kids: they know what works and what doesn’t.

It was not an easy process to get this placement. My husband and I investigated virtually every type of kindergarten within the 5 boroughs that was open to children with autism, in both in the private and public realms: mainstream, integrated, and special needs. Starting in September 2007, we immersed ourselves — evaluations and paperwork and tours and interviews and special ed attorney consultations. It wasn’t until late April, when Nest was finally confirmed, that we were able to cancel our Plan B — move to Westchester because there simply would have been no other appropriate placement for our son in NYC. (We did move uptown, to be closer to the school.) Other committed parents in our situation are all too familiar with this long, relentless, and too-often fruitless process (detailed here by an astute special needs teacher), and most put in the same due diligence that we did. But we also got lucky. Like anything else in life, hard work brings more opportunities, but luck plays a role.

A part of me still believes we’re living inside of a fantasy, that this school can’t really exist in the same NYC Department of Education that’s challenged with overcrowding and ineffective teachers and principals and low test scores and nightmare-inducing special needs classes.

But it’s already October; this has gone on too long to be a dream. I’m wide awake and my son is learning how to overcome his challenges and make his own way in the world. There I go, smiling again.