Amid the giant balloons and candied yams, Insideschools wishes our readers and their families a warm Thanksgiving, with hopes for just a moment’s quiet to hear “the still, small voice of gratitude” echoing down the decades, from Milton to dining-room tables across the city.

With every wish for a city where every child and every family has a Thanksgiving to share — and a table to gather around — we send our best thanks for your continued support in this ongoing conversation. Speak up: The stakes are high, and passions run higher still, but common ground — the city’s complicated, diverse, challenging, wacky and enchanting kids — underpins us all.

Author’s Note: For the purpose of protecting my 5-year-old autistic son’s privacy, I’ll call him “Brooks.”

Brooks is an autism success story. Or he is well on his way to becoming one. But like everything else about this puzzling neurological condition, any definition of “success” is complicated.

Yes, there are specific challenges that Brooks has overcome one hundred percent. They are now set in stone; that is, we are confident they will not reverse themselves, and our family owns them proudly. There are big ones and small ones, and we are fortunate enough to have a long list.

I’ll start with the huge arena of speech and language. When we took him out in the stroller, Brooks used to point and make broad inarticulate vocalizations that made it impossible to respond to his rare attempts at a social interaction. This was heart-breaking, especially since by then, all his typically-developing peers were having full-on conversations with their parents, and all my husband and I could do was watch longingly. These days, we constantly have to remind Brooks to use his “indoor voice” on the A train when he casually chatters on and on: “What stop is next, Mommy? The A train is an express train, but I think the C train is a local…” He often charms even hardened NYC subway riders and I get compliments on my well-behaved and happy little boy. I smile and say thank you.

Then there are smaller things like haircuts. Brooks used to completely melt down even before anyone ever touched his hair; simply walking into the waiting room of the salon was enough to set him off. These days, he loves going: He sits in the cool chair that goes up and down, he enthusiastically (and politely) asks if it’s time for the blow dryer, and the other stylists often compliment me on such a well-behaved and happy little boy. I smile and say thank you.

And these jaw-dropping transformations keep coming. Just this past weekend, our family attended the circus. A few short years ago, even way up in the nosebleed seats, Brooks was so overwhelmed that he cried and screamed until we finally had to leave. But this past Saturday, he laughed at Grandma the Clown and said “Wow!” during the high-wire act. More compliments. More smiles.

But these smiles of mine are complicated. While they mostly express my inescapable joy that Brooks is deserving of compliments even by strangers unaware of his diagnosis, they also have a knowing, melancholy aspect because even though he looks “normal,” his brain works differently. Not necessarily better or worse, but differently, and that is something that strangers will never know or understand. In fact, even well-meaning family and friends who do know, don’t really understand. And how could we expect them to, when the truth is that my husband and I don’t fully understand?

For all of Brooks’s miraculous developments, he is still not a child who can attend a mainstream school, or even a regular integrated classroom—we had to move 160 blocks uptown to get him into a program that provides the wide range of specific one-on-one services he needs. And when he chatters on and on, his language is often repetitive and slightly obsessive. And when he gets a haircut, I have to prompt him to say hello and goodbye. And during the circus, he watches many of the acts with an odd curiosity instead of laughter or delight. Maybe because he can’t read certain social cues. Or maybe because it’s too loud. Or maybe because of the smells. Or maybe because he needs more sensory input. Or maybe because he needs less sensory input. We still sometimes can’t figure it out, and we’ve been at this since he was 18-months-old!

Does this mean Brooks is not an autism success story? It all depends when you ask me that question. Is it at the end of a long day when I’m frustrated that Brooks can’t change into pajamas by himself because his brain can’t sequence the number of steps necessary to get through it all? Or is it right after his teacher tells me that all by himself, for the first time ever, Brooks approached a classmate and said: “Do you wanna play with me?” and sat and played with the boy for a full 15 minutes?

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. I’m thinking that perhaps my husband and I will take the day off from being ever vigilant of our son’s deficits, and instead simply be thankful for his remarkable progress since last Thanksgiving. And, just as importantly, we will look forward to the extraordinary changes that we know next Thanksgiving will bring. Happy Turkey Day, everyone!

According to the Student Bill of Rights published by the DOE each year, students have the right to “organize, promote and participate in a representative form of student government.” Additionally, they have the right to “representation on appropriate schoolwide committees that impact on the educational process, with voting rights where applicable.”

It’s a shame, then, that most schools don’t have student governments, or don’t have effective ones. Many of the Student Governments that do exist in schools are generally in charge of bake sales and dances but have no real voice in their school. It’s hard to know whether this is because the students are unomotivated, because they recieve little cooperation from their school, or both.

The NYC Student Union has developed a student government model, as part of the Student Government Project, based on the idea that an effective student government is not a privilige but a right. Here’s what we’ve got so far:

A Good Student Government has direct contact with the principal of the school and an agreement by the principal to cooperate with the Student Government and respect their ideas that includes:

* A way to communicate with the student body (announcements, a newsletter) and a way for students to communicate with their government (voting, a suggestion box).

* A fair method of choosing student representatives that ensures enthusiastic and voluntary participation.

* Representation beginning on a smaller level (prefects, classes, grades) which expands to the whole government and the principal.

* Scheduled and consistent meetings in a space provided by the school.

* Fundraising for prioritized purposes derived from the desires of the student body.

* Representation on other, larger committees (school safety, School Leadershi Team, etc.)

* We’re still crafting this basic model. If you have revisions, suggestions or new ideas for us to consider, please let us know, by visiting the Student Union or commenting here, on this post.

The Community Education Council of District 3 officially released its resolution to address overcrowding in District 3 today. The buck is now passed to the Department of Education, which ultimately controls what actions will be taken. (DOE cannot redraw zone lines without CEC approval, but all other recommendations in the CEC resolution are up to the DOE to implement.) The DOE is expected to issue a statement soon describing what it plans to do.

The DOE is also fielding an appeals process from residents of the buildings that were newly excluded from the PS199 zone in the last week of the process. The goal of the appeal is to make sure this group of residents get the same chance as other members of the public to respond to the resolution.

Meanwhile, the Community Education Council of District 2 continues to work on overcrowding issues of its own. The DOE issued a Blueprint for District 2 enrollment and capacity last spring. CEC2’s response emphasized concern over whether overcrowding in that district is being adequately addressed in DOE proposals.

No rest for the weary: Members of CEC3 will be present today when Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s Task Force on Overcrowding meets to discuss its recently released capital planning report. The D3 CEC has also committed to investigating school space issues above 110th street, starting in 2009. And of course, CEC3, like CECs all over the city, will be the point organization for collecting schools’ comments on capital projects and repairs included in the DOE’s new 5-year capital plan. Reading the capital projects part shouldn’t take too long, as there are no construction projects currently planned for the next five years in District 3. But don’t count on it: There’s always the possibility that things could change.

My 13-year-old son turned to me on Sunday morning with the first expression of genuine interest – and fear – since the search for a New York City public high school began this fall. He made this solemn declaration: “What happens today,” he said, as we raced out the door for his audition at the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music, Art & the Performing Arts, “will determine the rest of my life.”

For a moment, my stomach seized with butterflies. I envisioned thousands of hopeful eighth-grade actresses, musicians, dancers and artists from all over the city waiting for their own Big Chance. The collective anxiety and excitement overwhelmed me.

Would I remember my lines?

Wait, I had to remind myself. I was not a character in “A Chorus Line,” but simply a harried mom, like so many others in New York City, wanting the best education and opportunity for my child in the highly competitive world of public high school admissions. For many of us, that has already meant preparing our children to sit through the specialized high school exams, dragging them on tours and overseeing efforts to secure letters of recommendation, prepare portfolios and write essays.

There is only so much a parent can do, though, and yesterday’s tryout reminded me of that once again.

Since early November, the arbiters of talent at LaGuardia have spent weekends listening, taking notes and evaluating every applicant – some twice, with callbacks already underway. If the stakes feel extraordinarily high, it is because they are. Last year, according to the school’s website, some 9,000 applicants vied for 664 spots in art, dance, drama, instrumental music, technical theatre and/or vocal music. Founded in 1936 by then Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia, the school began its life as the High School of Music & Art, a place where the city’s most gifted and talented musicians and artists could get free, top-notch instruction while also pursuing a full academic program. A 1961 merger with the School of Performing Arts followed by a 1984 move to a Lincoln Center facility with a concert hall and theater paved the way for what is now LaGuardia Arts. The astonishing list of famous alumni includes conductors, producers, composers and actors like Al Pacino and Jennifer Aniston.

A strong academic program with a full menu of honors and advanced placement courses ensures that graduates routinely attend some of the finest and most competitive colleges and universities in the U.S. They also get extensive training from top experts in their specialty area, and unsurpassed opportunities to produce and perform.

As my son and I walked into LaGuardia, I mumbled something about how one audition could not possibly determine a lifetime, about the many other excellent high schools where he’d also be happy. He didn’t hear a word. I once again offered food. He once again refused.

We immediately ran into plenty of nervous but cool-on-the-outside parents. My son saw many of his equally anxious classmates. Parents were politely told to get lost; kids were ushered toward their specialty area and asked to answer an essay question about why they wanted to go to LaGuardia. Eventually, they got their chance to play, perform, draw or show their portfolio. About two and a half hours after I left the building, my cell phone rang. The tryout was over. I remained calm.

“How did it go?” I asked casually.

“It was AWFUL,” he said.

My heart sank. I’d heard him play the same two songs on the piano so often for so many months that I’d find myself shouting, “STOP PRACTICING!” He knew them cold. What went wrong?

“Awful?” I gulped, my heart sinking.

“No, not awful. AWESOME!” he replied. “It’s over! I did my best. Can we go home now?”

I took a deep breath, which I’ll be holding until sometime in February.

Two stories today focus harsh light on a bitter, if familiar, reality. While it’s far from news that poor kids and kids of color fare less well than their better-heeled, white and Asian peers, confirmation of these long-entrenched trends is never welcome.

In the Times, Manny Fernandez previews a study from NYU’s presigious Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy and its Institute for Education and Social Policy that documents academic shortfalls for kids living in public housing. The study compiles data on 343 public-housing projects and 112,000 children aged 5 to 18, 95% of whom are living in poverty, and 56% in single-parent homes. Although the report relies on troublingly old data, from 2002-2003, its conclusion is, unfortunately, entirely current: Lower fifth-grade test scores predicted higher dropout rates; obstacles at home profoundly affect students’ ability to learn, achieve, and succeed in school. And in the News, Merideth Kolodner documents a correlation between progress report grades and race: Schools that scored poorly on the city’s progress reports have higher-than-citywide-averages of African-American and Hispanic students.

Chancellor Klein’s in Australia this week; one only wonders what New York City’s complex experience with educating poor, urban, often under-served youth will mean to the folks Down Under.

Good news for teachers this week: most educators who participated in the experimental bonus program last year have elected to continue with the program this year, and the Department of Education agreed to a deal that will encourage principals to hire excessed teachers, despite the budget cuts. Randi Weingarten, head of both the New York teacher’s union and a national teachers’ union, spoke out in support of new tenure requirements and merit-based pay programs. And as other sectors suffer from the economic downtown, teachers maintain relative job-security. Employees of the Department of Education have not been so lucky – layoffs have already begun.

In lawsuit news, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity may go back to the courts if the state cuts more from city schools; a student, whose forehead was apparently bloodied by a school safety officer, filed a suit; and after a judge found that the city had illegally built schools on a toxic site, the city’s lawyers claimed the judge had misunderstood two conflicting state laws.

Some downtown families may be sending their kindergarteners to the DOE headquarters at Tweed Courthouse next year. But despite a developer’s offer, it doesn’t seem the DOE wants a new elementary school at the South Street Seaport.

And all of that time that teenagers spend online? According to a new study – it may be an important part of their 21^st century socialization and education.

As the markets continue to slide and tumble, the City Council takes up the issue of education budget cuts in hearings today. See Gotham Schools’ preview here, or go downtown and watch the wheels of urban democracy grind for yourself — always sobering, from time to time, to see how the sausage gets made.

Two stories today highlight college costs — one, on early admission, says applicants are more blithe than bothered (despite a strong focus on elite, high-tuition private schools), and the other anticipates a double-digit tuition increase in Florida.

Worth remembering: For all the focus on faraway, fancy colleges and tuitions that outstrip the 2008 Department of Health and Human Services poverty-guidelines income for a family of eight, more than half of all New York City high school graduates go on to attend CUNY two- and four-year colleges, according to former CUNY Dean and Teachers Academy head John Garvey. Of those students, 30% require remediation in reading, and twice as many — 60% — require math help as well. “They’re not ready to begin college-level work,” said Garvey. “The consequences are fairly disastrous.”

What does that particular disaster look like? According to Garvey, only 2.1% of students graduate from two-year, A.A. CUNY programs on time. After three years, 10% have graduated; after six, 26% have earned the A.A. credential. At the four-year schools, grad rates are somewhat higher: 50% of students graduate with a B.A. or B.S. within six years.

It’s great to aim high and reach for the academic stratosphere, but higher-ed coverage too often skews to the sky, forgetting the thousands here on the ground, in our city, under-prepared and failing out of college.

Last night, the Community Education Council for District 3 passed a controversial resolution which rezones three large apartment buildings on the Upper West Side from the popular PS 199 to lower-performing PS 191. Residents of these buildings, including one man who has yet to father his first child, spoke out during the public comment portion of the meeting, saying that they had invested in the neighborhood, assuming their children would attend PS 199.

The resolution also recommended that the DOE move the Center School out of the overcrowded PS 199 building. Center School parents, students and administrators staged a protest rally before the meeting and walked out before the vote. A large corps of police officers stood by throughout the evening.

The debate has gotten ugly during the past two weeks, and Center School parents vowed that it wasn’t over last night since the Department of Education makes the final decision on whether or not to move a school. There have been allegations of racism, since Center School has a more diverse student-body than PS 199, but Insideschools blogger and CEC3 member Jennifer Freeman wrote that such accusations are unfounded.

“I am really, really angry,” a seventh grade student from Center School said, as she handed out fliers at the door to the meeting. “Nobody at my school wants to move. I want to spend my last year in middle school in the building I started in.”

The student’s mother, actress Cynthia Nixon has been involved in the protests and remains a vocal defender of the Center School.

Parents from the Computer School who also spoke at the meeting, expressed concern that the resolution to move citywide gifted and talented school Anderson into their building might lead to future overcrowding.

“Are we going to be in the same situation as Center School in a few years?” one parent asked. Officials from the Department of Education told her not to worry; they believe that all of the moves on the table are long-term solutions.

by Liz Willen

When I first visited the Lab School for Collaborative Studies three years ago, I hoped my oldest son, then a fifth-grader, would rank it first on his middle school list. Lab has always attracted top students and teachers, and in the classrooms we visited, students seemed engaged and excited about what they were learning. The quality of art and writing on the walls stood out. I liked the whole idea of collaborative learning, but I especially loved the idea that if he got into Lab, he could stay for high school, because Lab spans grades 6 through 12.

As it turned out, my son, who loves both art and writing, preferred the Clinton School for Artists and Writers, in part because he’d heard “too many cruel stories about the homework at Lab.” Clinton was a great choice, but alas, it has no high school. Like tens of thousands of equally harried city parents, we are on the tour circuit once again, climbing stairways, peeking into labs, and earnestly discussing what we like — or don’t like — about each school. I’m certain I’m the one having more of those conversations, however. My tour-weary son seems to sleep through many of the question-and-answer periods, although he certainly checks out the neighborhoods and finds out if the kids are allowed to leave school for lunch.

With great curiosity, we checked out Lab’s high school this week, where I learned something that would have made me furious if he were a student there now. Lab can no longer give preference to its own middle-schoolers; all applicants from Manhattan’s District Two have the same priority status for the 138 Lab high school seats. That means if you have a kid at Lab who wants to stay, you have to apply and rank it first, just like any other District Two applicant.

It’s enormously complicated and competitive to find and get into great public schools in the city. That’s why Lab seemed like such an obvious choice to me a few years back – why not choose a middle school attached to a highly-regarded high school? Why not skip these mornings of coming late into work and pulling your child out of classes to wander scuffed linoleum corridors and peer into classrooms like unwanted guests, all the time sniffing that universal school-lunch smell that brings me back to the the crumbling fishsticks and rubbery hotdogs of my childhood.

While it’s true that some Lab middle school students leave anyway — preferring the larger specialized high schools or other options — many families depended on the back-up of staying put. I know I would’ve.

Lab principal Brooke Jackson didn’t spend a lot of time talking about the new policy, and seemed much happier fielding specific questions about the school. She articulated its values, which include a fierce regard for pluralism and diversity. And she detailed the rich educational opportunities that await students who learn together and from one another, all part of the school’s well-established philosophy. The students we met seemed passionate about their high school and the many opportunities to learn. They spoke of participating in clubs that examine breakfast cereals — and others that explore Marxist philosophy. Lab offers plenty of challenging academics and sports (but little music, to my son’s disappointment). I’m not sure where he’ll rank Lab this time, but I’m sure of one thing – parents and kids who may have already invested a lot of time and energy into one school can’t possibly appreciate rule changes that might force them out.

While it’s high season for pre-K and Kindergarten applications, families of children with special needs are part of the admissions process, too, and want information on which schools will best serve their children. Particularly for families new to the city’s schools, identifying solid schools with the right supports can be harder than the search for the proverbial needle in a haystack. To help ease the transition into school, the DOE is hosting kindergarten information fairs for families of kids with physical and learning disabilities. Fairs are scheduled during school hours and in the evenings, so working and at-home parents have ample opportunity to learn about the options the city offers their children.

Fairs continue through December 15th and are organized by school district. Click here for fair information. Take a look, too at this overview of DOE special education services, and their PowerPoint introduction to the IEP, or Individualized Education Program, evaluation process. One point highlighted in the IEP ‘deck’ is well worth repeating: Kids are more alike than they are different, no matter their challenges. And, one might add, families are more alike, too, no matter what services, supports, or special-education programs they seek.

As parents slog through the application process for the city’s gifted and talented programs, today there’s a chance to step back and consider the evolving definition of what ‘gifted’ means. EdWeek.org is hosting a conversation with three leading experts in the field, whose book, The Development of Giftedness and Talent Across the Life Span, will available soon. Submit your questions now, and check back at EdWeek between 4 pm and 5 pm for answers.

Meanwhile, tell us what you think about giftedness: Do you agree with recent developmental theories that it’s not a static, innate condition but a trait that can be nurtured and developed? What about social and emotional intelligence? Giftedness beyond the academic realm?

When I think about scientists in a laboratory, my mind goes to the episode of comedian Martin Mull’s classic small-town talk show, “Fernwood Tonight,” where a guest doctor claims that leisure suits cause cancer, holding up a cage with lab rats in tiny plaid blazers and matching pants. In that same vein, is there a researcher somewhere today taking notes while a little white mouse is trying to enjoy a gluten-free, casein-free cheese wedge?

Thankfully, a lot of very smart folks out there grew up in households where offbeat comedy did not trump science. Some of them are not only investigating the causes of autism, but also striving to develop better treatments. I was fortunate enough to be invited to a conference last weekend at Columbia University Medical Center where leading neuroscientists and clinical researchers spoke about their current projects.

The Simons Simplex Collection is going the DNA route and attempting to identify specific genes related to autism by looking at families with only one autistic child (and preferably at least one typically-developing sibling). I’ve always been confused about these kinds of studies: You hear that they found a gene abnormality that they think is significant, but the catch is that it only occurs in 1% of the autistic sample. But I learned at this conference that 1% in these cases is indeed significant, because the gene mutation is so extremely rare in the general non-autistic population. If this study positively identifies any genes associated with autism, diagnosis would finally be a matter of an objective blood test instead of a subjective collection of observable symptoms. And although no one has yet been able to figure out how to fix a defective gene, “yet” is the operative word.

Participation in this study involves a day at Columbia University Medical Center, thorough evaluation of the autistic child (at no charge!), a family social history, and blood draws for all. If your child would benefit from a comprehensive evaluation, this seems like an excellent opportunity to get a great one, gratis.

Another research project had to do with transcranial magnetic stimulation. I don’t know about you, but that’s not a term I hear bandied about very often. Plain English: Magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, studies show diminished activity in the brain’s speech and social interaction centers in autistic subjects. Researchers manage to non-invasively stimulate these tiny parts of the brain by placing specialized electromagnets on the patient’s forehead. Although it’s only in its infancy, this research path holds real promise, as brain imaging techniques like MRI’s and PET (positron emission tomography) scans become more and more sophisticated (and less stressful on the subject). Participation in this study involves a 3-hour MRI for the autistic child, which can be broken down into shorter sessions if necessary.

I’d like to be able to tell you that my family and I are contributing to the greater good and participating in both of these studies. The truth is, we’re choosing not to — for now, at least, because a 3-hour MRI would be a nightmare for my son (and for many autistic children, I would imagine), a blood draw would make him very anxious, and mostly because I already ask him to do so much that I just can’t bring myself to ask him for anything more.

If you feel your child would benefit from a free evaluation, or if it wouldn’t be too much of a hardship for your family, you might consider participating. For more information, contact Cassandra D’Accordo at daccordc@childpsych.columbia.edu.

Middle school families inclined to celebrate the next President’s inauguration in Washington D.C. faced a mighty calendar conflict, as the tests are slated to begin on January 20th, Inauguration Day.

The DOE has, in its wisdom, moved the middle-school ELA test dates back by one day, to commence on Wednesday January 21st. According to Assessment Implementation Director David Raphael, “the ELA exam is now scheduled for January 21-22 for grades 7 and 8 and January 21-23 for grade 6.”

After my dog Maggie graduated from the Good Dog training program for therapy animals last week, my husband and I were asked to choose her first volunteer project. As we scanned a long list of nursing homes and hospitals that use therapy dogs, we noticed several reading programs at public schools and libraries. I must admit – when I first heard of dogs serving as reading-assistants last year, I dismissed it as a ridiculous, only-in-New-York idea. Unlike a sick child in need of distraction or an elderly person who needs companionship, it did not seem as obvious to me how a furry, slobbery “therapist” might benefit a struggling reader. But last spring, after reading two articles about these canine-led reading programs, I was convinced that the idea had merit.

Studies show that struggling students can overcome their fear of reading aloud when their audience is a non-judgmental pup. The evidence isn’t just anecdotal – the dogs have been proven to lower some young readers’ blood pressure and heart rates. Curling up with a pet helps some students forget that they thought reading was boring or intimidating, and the dogs have led students to choose reading clubs over the more typical popular choices, like basketball or cooking.

Unfortunately, our Maggie’s only free to volunteer on the weekends, so she won’t get to try out the theory. But one of Maggie’s co-graduates, a big, friendly black lab, has already been signed up for the reading program by his owner, who was a reading specialist in the public schools for the past 30 years. Seems that sometimes these “crazy” ideas may be able to offer certain students just what they need to be able to learn.

By unanimous vote, the UFT board approved a plan to put hundreds of teachers in New York City’s Absent Teacher Reserve back to work. The ATR program, estimated to cost DOE (and thus taxpayers) about $155 million from 2007 through 2009, acts as a holding pool for teachers who’ve been ‘excessed’ out of work, typically due to school closings and restructuring. These teachers often have long experience in the classroom — and the comparatively higher salaries that reflect their education and expertise. Principals, in control of their own increasingly strapped budgets, often see the merit of hiring younger, less-experienced and less-pricey teaching talent when new spots open. This plan rewards principals who hire seasoned teachers from the ATR, for up to eight years, if the teacher becomes a permanent member of the school’s faculty.

Here’s how it works: Schools that hire from the ATR will pay the teachers they hire the base salary for a starting teacher in New York City’s schools. The DOE will pay the difference between that teacher’s actual, prior salary and the new-teacher figure, and they’ll award schools that hire ATR teachers a tidy ‘lump sum’ as well, equal to half of the annual salary for a new teacher. Teachers can also hire in on a ‘provisional’ or year-to-year basis, with a slightly different cash incentive. Schools gain experienced teaching talent and extra funds; teachers go back to work; the money spent on paying idle teachers in the ATR will dwindle (although it’s not clear how much or how quickly, as there are about 300 fewer open teaching spots than there are teachers in the ATR).

In a time of threatened and actual education cuts, this agreement is more than welcome and far too long overdue.

The NYC Student Union is launching a new project called “Other Options Day.” This is an educational day for all high school students to learn about options after high school if they can’t – or think they can’t – go to college, and for those who think about delaying college for a year or so. In many high schools with high levels of military recruitment, students are led to believe that there are no good alternatives to joining the military. Other Options Day is not anti-military; our goal is to broaden the playing field and show young people that there are other options besides college and military service. Our plan is to have booths from community colleges, jobs that don’t require college degrees, volunteering and intership opportunities, organizations like AmeriCorps, career counselors and anyone or anything else that seems appropriate.

This plan is in its preliminary stages, and we’re looking for more connections. If you know a person or group who might want to host a booth or assist us in another way, I’d love to hear about it. Also, if anyone spends a lot of time in schools and would be able to promote this day to students, that would be great. My email is toni@taty.org. Thank you in advance, and I’ll keep the updates coming.

In response to swirling confusion on this blog and other local parenting sites, here is the official, on the record, DOE sibling enrollment policy for prospective kindergarten students. Enrollment priority, in descending order:

“Zoned students with siblings,

Zoned students without siblings,

Non-zoned students with siblings - first in district, then out,

Non-zoned students without siblings - first in district, then out.”

In a climate where standardized tests are praised and vilified, depending on your point of view, comes a study from the State University of New York, showing a strong correlation between SAT score and eventual college graduation. Also notable is the graduation rate itself: At some schools, just over half of enrolled students completed their undergraduate degrees, even with grad-rate rises linked with more rigorous admissions policies. By raising the SAT bar, SUNY Stony Brook documented a grad-rate climb from 53.8 to 59.2 percent; at the regional college in Old Westbury, the grad rate nearly doubled — from 18.4 to 35.9 percent — when SAT requirements were raised, yet nearly two out of three students left school without a sheepskin. What happened to all the students who fell out of school along the wayside? The piece in today’s Times doesn’t ask or answer that question — but it’s a safe bet that it’s the source of some serious soul-searching among the State Regents, parents, college admissions counselors, and educators state- and citywide.

The long-anticipated, $81,000,000 (yes, million) DOE Achievement Reporting and Innovation System known as ARIS has launched at last. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and DOE Accountability head James Liebman introduced journalists to the nimble, flexible data-management tool at a workshop this afternoon in downtown Brooklyn. Principals and other administrative leaders began working with ARIS last week and teachers are getting the good ARIS news just this week (via postcard in their school mailbox — so much for cutting edge e-tech). Families, however, will have to wait until the end of the current academic year to access information on their children.

ARIS consolidates the mythic Permanent Record (which doesn’t actually exist in a single, physical place, despite the admonitions of school deans and angry parents citywide) into a responsive, customizable database. Teachers who want to know which students passed which tests, or who came from other schools, or who have special-needs or English-language-learner designations, will be able to organize and access vast quantities of information, based on the DOE’s template. And as befits an era of social networking, ARIS permits teachers to blog, create virtual community groups both private and public, build wikis, share lesson plans, and access data and resources from online archives. It will also include a nifty attendance “speedometer,” according to Liebman, which color-codes each child’s attendance levels in green, yellow, and red and will be refreshed weekly.

Chancellor Klein praised the system, saying “the only thing I keep telling Jim [James Liebman] is, I want it to go faster and faster…” Klein also said that ARIS anticipates Bill Gates’ education accountability goals, outlined last week in Seattle — and said “for New York City teachers, the future is now,” predicting that cities nationwide will turn to New York as a model of data-driven instruction, likely earning strong support by Gates and other funders.

“New York is at the cutting edge, the vanguard,” Klein said — and in a moment animated as much by enthusiasm as political will — “and it will be, under Jim [Liebman]’s leadership, for the next several years.” So much for the mayoral control conversation and small matters like the election…

by Jennifer Freeman, a member of the Community Education Council in District 3

Last Wednesday’s Community Education Council meeting on school overcrowding in District 3, attended by hundreds of people, morphed into an impromptu rally about diversity.

CEC3’s process for addressing overcrowding in District 3 is drawing to a close. Next Wednesday, the Community Education Council members will submit final votes on a resolution that involves both school relocations and redrawing zone lines.

Last week, some parents and educators who do not want the Center School to move tried re-framing the overcrowding issue in racial terms. This led to an odd tableau of Upper West Side democracy, in which white audience members exercised their right to free speech by heckling a CEC member of color whose entire career has been devoted to increasing educational opportunities for minority students.

The confrontation sidestepped the fact that the CEC’s resolution takes on a different issue, overcrowding, and is founded in values that benefit the entire community, including keeping siblings together at one school where possible, maximizing opportunities for the youngest students to attend school close to home, and maintaining District 3’s kindergarten lottery, which gives kids the chance to go to any school in the district, as long as seats are available. The kindergarten lottery has been used to increase diversity, for instance by recruiting native Spanish speakers to dual language programs.

CEC3 members have long sought ways to preserve and increase diversity. Last year, they attended hearings and expressed concerns about diversity when the Department Of Education changed the Gifted & Talented admissions process. A recent report in the New York Times showed that these concerns were prescient: the new, centrally administered admissions system seems to have reduced the population of children of color in G&T classes this year. The City Council’s education committee under Robert Jackson is looking at why this might have happened.

This coming Wednesday, people planning to attend the District 3 CEC meeting on overcrowding may have to pass through a demonstration about race, as Center School parents continue to try to divert attention away from the overcrowding issue and make a last minute argument that moving their school several blocks north, to a larger space in a building that will gain diversity from its presence, is somehow bad for the district.

I uphold the right to free speech by all parents and community members, and support the vibrant participation that this process has stimulated in District 3, but the resolution addressed a crisis of overcrowding, and has potential to improve the education of hundreds of children in the district for years to come. Let’s keep our eyes on that prize.

For a solid recap and stage-setting on the mayoral control debate, see Gail Robinson’s ‘Issue of the Week’ at Gotham Gazette. Opponents of the law spoke out yesterday at City Hall, and it seems likely that the school-control debate will vie with budget conversations in the new year in Albany.Meanwhile, Yoav Gonen highlights declining enrollment in parochial schools, and Javier Fernandez unpacks the free-breakfast stigma in some city schools. (For an awkward bit of class-based ‘compare and contrast,’ see Susan Dominus on a 12-your-old Fieldston gourmand with a penchant for seafood and prosciutto, and a $25 budget for a solo schoolnight supper.)High school progress reports, released last week, showed big gains in many struggling schools’ credit-earning power; for a savvy analyis of credit recovery and its influence on school stats, dig into Eduwonkette’s November 13th post. For an assessment of whether the progress reports actually reflect school quality — always a worthwhile question — see Jennifer Medina and Robert Gebeloff’s analysis in the Times. Parents of next year’s kindergarteners, your questions about sibling priority haven’t been forgotten: Questions sent to the DOE on Friday were answered on Saturday (thank you, Andy Jacob); clarifications requested in response to those answers went back to DOE on Saturday, and answers should be forthcoming later today, with luck.

Education is apparently fifth on President Obama’s list of priorities, which Nicholas Kristof thinks is too low. Chancellor Klein knows people in high places;, will he be the next Secretary of Education? Half of the city high schools that opened in September don’t have enough students, and school psychologists spend so much time doing paperwork that they don’t have enough time to actually talk with kids. And in the wake of a problem-riddled, centralized pre-k process, the DOE has announced that they won’t centralize kindergarten admissions as planned.

Earlier in the week, Governor Patterson sliced and diced the school budgets, angering education advocates, especially since 20 percent of U.S. school districts have already laid-off staff since September. Families have begun to defect from expensive private schools (but not those showcased in a new ‘anthropological’ documentary), and school bus routes will be back on the chopping block come September. Despite all these cuts, the DOE still plans performance bonuses, even though a new report that shows how expensive all of New York’s accountability measures are.

High school progress reports were released this week. The author of a study on the progress reports defended them in the Post, and the Daily News claimed that the high grades this year were a strong defense of mayoral control. The study, however, shows that receiving a low grade doesn’t initiate a significant improvement in a school.

Mayor Bloomberg renamed a school in Harlem in memory of Terence D. Tolbert, the DOE lobbyist and Obama staffer who passed away on Nov. 2. The new capital plan doesn’t do enough, say parents in Riverdale, and parents in Chelsea are worried about overcrowding in a building the DOE proposes turning into a school. Schools sharing one building in the Bronx still don’t have a library, and on Long Island, a Jericho school makes an effort to get Asian parents to participate. The original Blue Man Group has opened a school designed to foster creativity, called Blue School, complete with black lights, plastic tubing, and a “wonder room” with a light-up floor. Hopefully the shrinking economy won’t doom other creative educational experiments.

A new coalition of parents, youth, community organizations and education advocates called the Campaign for Better Schools plans a rally this Sunday, November 16th at 1pm, at City Hall, to advocate for changes to mayoral control. The law is set to expire in the end of June, but will be discussed in Albany beginning in January.

Some of the groups involved include the Alliance for Quality Education, Advocates for Children, the New York City Coalition for Educational Justice, and the Coalition for Asian-American Children and Families. Email nycinfo@AQENY.org for particulars.

One of the campaign’s key goals is increasing the voices of parents, students and the community in educational decision-making; Sunday’s a good time to make your voice heard.

In a procedural 180, DOE has revised its plans for centralized kindergarten admissions. In January, their intention was to centralize the process — much as the pre-K process was centralized this year and last. Now, Elissa Gootman reports, applications will all follow a consistent calendar (which makes sense) and a specific set of citywide rules.

Schools will still give initial preference to students whose older siblings attend the same elementary schools; in-district applications will be considered before out-of-district apps, and pre-K students will be required to apply for K, even at schools they already attend.

Whether the change of direction was due to parent outcry, school protest, logistical apprehension or a flash of insight from the central enrollment office, the newly announced policy means that local schools will administer local admissions — at least, for 2009-2010.

At the request of Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, the city’s Independent Budget Office undertook a review of DOE spending on accountability measures – everything from the mythically plagued ARIS computer program to the progress reports. A summary is here, and the complete pdf is here, but short report: at least $352.2 million spent on accountability, from fiscal year 2007 to fiscal year 2009.

For context, that’s nearly six years of textbooks for every classroom and child in the city ($57 million in 2006-07) — and within 10% of the $385 million in DOE funding cutbacks that the Mayor projects for next year.

All the papers today cover the newly released high school progress reports. The Times has a good breakdown of grades and school size, the News highlights a significant bump in schools earning top grades this year, with 82% earning A’s or B’s, vs. 65% last year, and the Post recaps the high-scoring school, Brooklyn International, which serves new immigrants (and proudly lists a number of Peace Corps veterans as teachers), and the bottom-scorer, long-troubled Washington Irving High School. Higher grades were attributed to higher grad rates and increases in numbers of Regents exams taken (although it’s not entirely clear how many students took more exams).

From the city’s point of view, the high schools are doing well: 57% maintained an A for two years or moved up a letter grade, and of last year’s A schools, 86% held onto that top mark. Notably, the specialized high schools all got As (save for Brooklyn Latin, which has yet to graduate a class) — a big difference from last year — although small, ambitious Bard High School Early College’s B prompted Bard College President Leon Botstein to dismiss the grading process as “irrelevant…arrogant and misguided.” Because the progress reports reward gains made by the lowest-achieving students, schools that serve the city’s highest achievers, which enroll few low-level students, face particular challenges in demonstrating sufficient ‘progress’ to merit high marks.

For mystery-lovers, a note on the calculations: The grades are correlated with school scores, and school scores are determined, in large measure (3/4 of the grade, according to the DOE) by how the school compares with peer schools. So in practice, two schools could have identical numerical values for particular items — graduation rate, say, or student progress — and wind up with different grades, if they are part of different peer groups. And once again, an A here isn’t an A anywhere else in the academic universe: A’s start at 64.2 (of 100 points) and B’s, nearly 20 points lower, at 43.5.

Earlier this afternoon, DOE released progress report grades for the city’s high schools.

Here’s the link to the new set of grades. Unfortunately, the new set doesn’t show you what the schools scored last year — to compare grades directly, go to the DOE home page, click on Search for a School, add the school name, and then use the left toolbar to get to Statistics, where both years’ Progress Reports are archived (along with plenty of other material). It’s cumbersome and a little tedious, but it’s the best way to see a school’s growth (or regression) from year to year.

Watch the blog first thing tomorrow for more on the high school grades.

Tonight’s CEC 3 meeting might include a showdown between parents and administrators from two different schools that share one overcrowded building, wrote Insideschools.org alumna Philissa Cramer on Gothamschools today. A CEC 3 proposal released last week suggested that the Center School, a small, unzoned middle school, move 14 blocks north to alleviate overcrowding in PS 199, a popular zoned elementary school, but parents and administrators at the Center School staunchly oppose the plan. The disagreement has taken a nasty tone, with fliers appearing outside the building calling the principal of Center School “a dictator, ” and Center School families claiming that racism might have motivated some PS 199 parents to push the middle school, which has a more diverse student body, out of the building. See the Gothamschools blog post, last week’s New York Times article or attend the meeting tonight to find out more.

City schools have to trim 1.2% from their budgets by Monday – and just now, Gov. David Paterson says the state will cut back on planned support for the public schools. While Paterson says his cutbacks aren’t true “cuts” — actual programs and services aren’t going by the wayside, for the moment at least — they do represent a substantial and significant decrease in state aid for the city’s schools, and will surely have profound and durable repercussions for New York City’s 1.1 million students and their families.

UPDATE: The high school progress reports were released today and can be found on the DOE website. For real data-heads, all of the statistics used to compile the progress reports are available in one spreadsheet. Analysis to come…

For parents thick in the high-school search process, the applications clock is ticking: Ranked applications are due in early December, with some middle schools setting pre-Thanksgiving deadlines to permit application review and possible revisions. But current progress reports for the city’s high schools have yet to be released. If this resource, which DOE Accountability chief James Liebman describes as “a system that people can understand and respond to,” is to be useful to parents, the current progress report scores should be made public, and soon.

“The schools have them,” said Peter Vaccaro, Liebman’s second at DAA, adding that DOE will release the progress reports “probably some time this week.”

At a Manhattan Institute breakfast yesterday morning, held at the plush, posh Harvard Club, accountability bigwigs from the DOE, Columbia University and the Institute debated the effects of F progress reports on elementary and middle schools. For recaps of the meeting, see Gotham Gazette and GothamSchools; click here for the full report. A couple of salient points that emerged may be of interest to city parents.

For example, James Liebman, head of the DOE’s accountability department, related average “levels” on test scores to eventual high-school graduation. If a child’s 8th grade math and ELA scores average (add up the levels, divide by two) equals 3 — which the city defines as proficiency — that child has a 54.7% chance of graduating high school on time with a Regents diploma. (Seems disappointingly slim, for an academically proficient student.) The prediction rises steeply for those with higher average levels: 81.1% kids with 3.5 averages are predicted to graduate on time, as are 93.2 % of kids with level 4s. But the core question — what happens to nearly half of the proficient kids along the way? — wasn’t addressed by Liebman or the Manhattan Institute panel, which confined the conversation to the progress reports study. Still, it’s worth noting that proficiency, as ‘demonstrated’ by standardized test score, does not predict or guarantee graduation.

On the correlation of progress-report score and letter grade, Manhattan Institute scholar and report author Marcus Winters said, “anyone who’s been in school knows, you get an 89, you get a B” — but that familiar yardstick isn’t used for progress grades, where A’s begin at 64.0 of 100 (which looks like a C- from here). B’s begin at 49.9. and C’s at 38.8. And the skew is very much toward A’s and B’s — of the 977 elementary and middle schools for which progress reports were published last year, 599 were graded A or B, with 125 total F and D schools. Demographically, troubling trends persist: Schools with low performance grades tend to have more African-American students (45% in F schools, vs 35% across the city), and higher-graded schools have more Asian students (16% in A schools, vs <12% citywide).

Critics derided the report as self-congratulatory and overly selective of good results: Test-score increases were celebrated, while decreases at the top proficiency levels were minimized to near-invisibility. Even author Winters worried aloud about “no repeat Fs” from 2006-07 to 2007-08, adding that “a lot of them becoming A’s makes me worried.” Tellingly, Columbia economist Jonah Rockoff said, “Those aren’t magic numbers. They reflect the values of the people who create the system.”

Last Wednesday, when I told my 5-year-old autistic son that Barack Obama was our new president, he asked: “Is he going to fix everything?”

I know that my son wasn’t referring to the rapidly-collapsing economy or the wars or to global warming—it was probably one of his occasional non sequiturs. But on some innate level, he picked up on the optimism of this history-making election and the pervasive enthusiasm it has spawned: “Yes, we can.”

As long as I can remember, I’ve been a big believer in “Yes, we can” (most recently as an autism mom), and I’m thrilled that President-Elect Obama has managed to channel it into a national movement. My husband and I chose to believe that yes, our son could, and would, develop language and respond well to therapy when guarantees to that effect were as absent as his 2-year-old voice. While we were acutely aware of far more heart-breaking scenarios, our rationale was that in order to help him, we needed to be optimistic—for us, it would have been too painful “not” to believe.

In addition to our new president’s campaign tag line, I’m also fond of his observations on being a parent: “I’m inspired by the love people have for their children. And I’m inspired by my own children, how full they make my heart. They make me want to work to make the world a little bit better.”

In my own small way, I’d like to make the world a little bit better, too. My husband and I recently embarked on a project with long odds (what else is new?): We created ShopForCharityNow.com, which allows you to shop at major online stores while automatically triggering charitable donations, without any extra cost to the shopper. In this economy, your extra click from ShopForCharityNow.com to your shopping site (to buy what you were going to buy anyway!) generates new and desperately-needed revenue to non-profits reeling from Wall Street losses.

Getting back to my son’s curious question about the president-elect, I responded by telling him that I thought our new president would indeed try to fix everything, to which he responded: “On Tuesday, or on Wednesday?”

If you don’t buy anything at ShopForCharityNow.com on Tuesday or Wednesday, that’s okay. I told him it might take a bit longer.

Last week I discovered that a friend of mine lives alone in an apartment in midtown Manhattan (at age 16) while the rest of her family lives in Pennsylvania. She gets along well with her mother and sister and misses them a lot, so I wondered why she wasn’t living with them. Her answer was totally unexpected: She wanted to stay at our high school, LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and the Performing Arts.

Wow.

In a constantly trashed (usually with good reason) public high school system, why would a public high school cause a 16-year-old to live by herself, miles away from her family? Well, this answer was less unexpected: Acting. My friend is a drama major and her passion for acting wouldn’t allow her to pass up the opportunities that LaGuardia offers. Hearing that definitely made me even more worried that arts education will be threatened by ever-increasing budget cuts. The one thing that inspires so much passion from students is the one thing constantly being taken away.

I see students working harder in their studios at LaGuardia than any other subject of school or life. Students stay until 11:00 at night rehearsing for the musical, putting together an art gallery, working out a jazz arrangement to a piece they composed or choreographing a dance for the talent show. And it’s not just the classic high-achievers who stay late. In fact, the studios at my school do an unbelievable job of uniting students with different grades and attitudes toward school, as well as different races and places in life.

Education activists, teachers, and parents often wonder how they can deal with students who are apathetic towards school and learning. I know for a fact that many kids at my school get up each day mostly for their studio classes. The arts put failing students in center stage and allow them to achieve beyond anything expected of them in any of their classes. Students who struggle in math put their passion into music, drama, dance, visual arts, whatever it is- and find that, as our country just discovered (!!!), yes, they can.

A week of bad budget and economic news does not bode well for the city’s high schools. The New York Daily News reported that the city’s newly downsized capital plan includes plans for just two new high schools—even though 59% of the city’s high schoolers spend their days in overcrowded buildings.

Parents and kids who are currently searching for high schools can’t help notice how many kids are inside the classrooms we visit. I counted more than 40 on one of my tours this fall, and I noticed just how cramped the room felt.

At one school, I saw at least one or two kids nodding off during a calculus class. The teacher mostly likely couldn’t even see them—or he didn’t want to take away from the rest of his lesson by trying to wake them up.

I know that some high schools have split sessions and that some kids are attending class in trailers. I wonder what it’s like to be a student in an overcrowded high school or to teach in one.

As I was nearly squished and barely able to breathe on my morning commute today, I thought about city kids who travel long distances on jammed subways only to squeeze themselves into crowded classrooms and hallways. There really is such a thing as too much human contact.

In a new survey from Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum’s office, school psychologists and social workers say they’re struggling under the dual demands of the education bureaucracy and the needy students they’re assigned to serve.

Nine in ten mental-health professionals surveyed say that case management chores take time away from meeting with students and families. The 86 school psychologists and social workers now assigned to the Absent Teacher Reserve, to the annual tune of $7.1 million, are working as subs and temporary teachers instead of counseling and evaluating students, even as the demand for their professional services has increased, with new special-ed structures, not to mention a 43% rise in new schools and 60,000 additional special-education students in New York City since mental-health staffing minimums were set — twenty years ago.

Click here for more and a link (pdf) to the full report.

Buried in yesterday’s Times, there’s news of an October 16 court decision that implicates the DOE for lack of environmental oversight on a long-beleaguered new school project, planned on a toxic ‘brownfield’ in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx. With a new school construction budget proposed last week, Class Size Matters‘ Leonie Haimson points out a new and novel line item — nearly $1 billion of the $3.7 budgeted for new construction is to be held back for “potential site specific/environmental code costs.”

Like so many DOE gestures, this one has multiple layers of meaning: First, it’s an acknowledgment that new schools may sit on old manufacturing or industrial sites and that environmental threats are real. That’s real progress. It’s also troubling to think that parents, children, and teachers can’t be assured that new schools will be built on never-toxic sites. And it’s a tacit admission, long due, that DOE must carefully plan for environmental remediation (as well as academic catch-up, once the schools are built). Whether Haimson’s assertion is correct - that the DOE will spend more to clean up the polluted site than they might have spent on another, cleaner site - is hard to know, especially in the current economic abyss. But one can only hope that her concern “that the SCA is planning on building as many schools as possible in [the] future on toxic sites” is wrong, and that DOE planners will work to make sure that dire prediction is, in fact, false.

The results are in! And it turns out that a Catholic school in Queens ‘elected’ the winning candidate… again. High school students in the South Bronx had been holding their breath earlier this week to see who would win the presidential election. And on Wednesday, boys at Eagle Academy in Brooklyn were thrilled to learn about the man headed for the Oval Office: it “makes us think that we could accomplish anything when you put your mind to it,” one 11-year-old student explained. Younger students in Harlem were equally impressed; one second-grader said, “I’m so happy I don’t know what to do,” — a sentiment shared by many decades older. Down the street, students at a Harlem middle school shared their enthusiasm.

Several pundits wonder if Barack Obama will tap Chancellor Klein for Education Secretary. New York State’s education commissioner will resign in June after 14 years in the position, and Mayor Bloomberg is expected to fight to retain mayoral control now that he’s won round one in the fight to retain the mayorship. Sad news from Nevada last weekend: Terence Tolbert, a beloved top DOE official, died of a heart attack on Sunday, where he had been managing the state’s Obama campaign.

The Post realized that a high-paying position in the DOE, the director of middle schools, has been vacant for months, and at a time when middle school reform has been given a lot of lip-service. Parents might get more (symbolic?) control if a plan to grant them “advisory votes” in Community Education Council elections gains traction, and the City Council has scheduled hearings into the controversial new gifted and talented admissions process, which has left fewer minorities with coveted spots in the program. The New York Times analyzed the specialized high school admissions process today and found that just like the kindergarten G&T admissions, there is a concerning racial imbalance.

Budget cuts were announced this week, along with a pared-down building agenda – principals are coping with these year’s cuts and already preparing for next year’s tougher budgets. Parents, DOE officials, and advocates battle over re-zoning proposals in District Three, and schools vie for a space in Riverdale that may not even be available next year, as promised. At another school in the Bronx, many children are taught in temporary trailers that have become anything but temporary. Elsewhere in the same borough, a neighborhood is relieved to be getting a much-needed new middle school. Students and teachers in most overcrowded high school buildings, however, will have make do – only two new high school buildings are slated to be built across the city during the next five years.

Beyond reading, writing and arithmetic, health classes are viewed as a vital addition to the pre-school course schedule at one school in the Bronx, and students at one city high school can take skateboarding for credit… now that is an innovative physical education option for the urban teen.

Last night, parents crowded into a hot auditorium at PS 84 for the two Manhattan gifted and talented information sessions. With people sitting side-by-side and back-to-back along both aisles, cramming into the space by all four doorways, and squeezing next to the presenter in front of the stage, many parents grumbled about the set-up of the meeting. Dozens of attendees didn’t fit into the room and ended up talking with each other about the G&T admissions process in the hallway, making it even more difficult for people inside the auditorium to hear.

“I can’t imagine how many fire-code regulations they are breaking right now,” one mother said. “It is a total mess in here.”

Anna Commitante, head of gifted and talented at the DOE, gave the same power-point presentation that hundreds of Brooklyn parents showed up to hear last week. She took some questions last night, although there wasn’t nearly enough time to call on all of the people with their hands in the air. Commitante suggested parents who didn’t get their questions answered could go to the DOE website where she is answering questions this week, but according to the website, yesterday was the last day that she was accepting online questions.

As always, you can post your questions here or in our forum, and we will do our best to find the answers. If you weren’t jostling around in the crowd last night, you can still attend the final information session tonight in Queens, but many parents last night advised that they didn’t learn anything new in the live presentation that they hadn’t been able to learn online. The slides from the presentations should be added to the online resources on the DOE website today - we will update you when they are.

Late yesterday afternoon, with little fanfare and zero public pronouncement, the DOE released its new capital plan for 2010-2014.

Remarkably lower-key than the splashy launch of the first capital plan, this pared-back version proposes $11 billion for 42 new schools to create 25,000 new seats. Nearly $4 billion is meant for new construction. A significant fraction of the ‘new’ seats are actually holdovers from the prior capital plan; 8,000 seats that were part of that expansive (and expensive) 76-school, 66,000 new-seats plan were never opened.

Construction will focus on already-overcrowded neighborhoods; critics say the plan vastly underestimates the number of seats that will be needed (read more here)and doesn’t solve crowding problems created by high demand at well-regarded schools. City planners say that bitter reality sets its own ground rules: escalating construction costs and economic woes limit what the city and state can do.

Mayor Bloomberg presented a revised budget today; click here to see the slides he used to talk through the dire financial thicket.

‘Dire’ is a weak word for where we’re headed, if city estimates are correct. Tax revenues for fiscal years 2009 and 2010 are projected to be $2.6 billion and $3.1 billion less than they are now, in FY 2008.

Cuts to DOE include $181 million this year and $ 385 million the next — which translates to 284 positions cut in central administration, and 54 “in the field.” In addition, CUNY schools will lose $6 million in FY 09, and 9 million in FY ‘10 - funds sorely needed to stanch the flow of students out of post-secondary programs, among other efforts.

Bear in mind, there’s still a fair amount of speculation involved: “Whether 2010 estimates are accurate, nobody knows,” said the Mayor, because the many forces that shape the city’s financial landscape defy precise prediction. The broad-stroke outline raises real fears about cuts to essential services like schools, housing, and health care. Quite the constellation of events to launch a third term bid…

…and stay tuned, DOE will post a new Schools Construction Budget soon, outlining how schools can grow in this time of extreme financial contraction. For those who can’t wait, see Philissa Cramer’s preview here.

by Marni Goltsman

As promised in last week’s post, here’s how my family fared with ABA and Floortime.

First ABA Session:

What I expected: I would have to hold myself back while a cold, unfriendly therapist forced my screaming, crying son to sit at a table. Then, his desperate, brief escape, after which I would hold myself back again when the therapist physically placed him back at the table. And I would continue to bite my lip and let them rip my heart out of my chest because ABA is backed by a ton of scientific research, and because it was highly recommended as the best way to teach my 20-month-old how to clap and point and wave — skills he had not yet managed to learn on his own, unlike his typically-developing peers.

What actually happened: A warm and kind-hearted therapist watched me play with my son for the first few sessions in order to get to know him. What?! Wasn’t this supposed to be scary? Apparently not, when it’s done well. Although I can’t say that my son enjoyed the sessions (do you enjoy being forced to stretch yourself and perform outside of your comfort level?), this gifted therapist gave him so much support that it was almost impossible for him NOT to respond favorably. Every tiny success brought choruses of congratulations, and testimonials like “Wow, you are doing such an incredible job—I am sooooo proud of you!” I imagined that the 20^th congratulatory chorus might not have the oomph of the first. But remarkably, each endorsement was even more heartfelt and genuine than the last; undimmed enthusiasm, thus no diminishing returns.

My son knew that he couldn’t clap, but this therapist told him he could, and she had more than enough confidence for both of them. Within 3 months of starting therapy, he could. Perhaps not more than once or twice in a row, and perhaps not a hundred percent of the time, but that would come. As would, a few months later, pointing and waving.

First Floortime Session:

What I expected: A warm and fuzzy therapist would immediately begin all the strategies detailed in Stanley Greenspan’s “The Child with Special Needs,” which I devoured immediately following my son’s diagnosis. She would get my son to interact more and more with the world, but never forcefully; she’d follow his lead and his natural interests. And I would be completely comfortable with this slow-and-steady pace.

What actually happened: Whenever my husband or I tried to leave our son alone with other therapists, he repeated a heart-wrenching ritual, holding onto his white safety gate and crying for us to rescue him. Not so with his first Floortime therapist: he happily spent 90 minutes straight alone with her. Wow. Something inherently different in her approach focused on pure and simple acceptance. Her only objective was to get to know him—the real boy—without any judgment, and with truckloads of patience. If he wanted to read a book seven times, she would sit there and read it with him.

Many would argue that her job was to intervene, to teach him that you ’should’ only read a book once, but her quiet acceptance of his joys, wherever and however they existed, quickly earned his trust. He learned that she would not only allow him to be himself, she encouraged it. She celebrated the unique little person he was, with all of his unusual habits intact. This therapist was a breath of fresh air, especially at a time when everyone else, including me and my husband, were interfering with our boy’s most basic instincts. He must have wanted to swat us away like flies.

I learned that sometimes, it’s therapeutic NOT to intervene; that my son needed to know that we loved and accepted him and all the things that made him happy, regardless of whether they were socially acceptable or if they contributed to his cognitive development. Gradually, this therapist introduced toys that would help my son learn, like animal flashcards. Her slow and gentle pace yielded incredible results. Within 3 months, my son, who was previously unable to identify a single animal, could recognize animals and animal sounds, with an ease that was slightly above average for his age level. Honestly, this slow-and-steady pace is much easier to endorse after the fact. When we were living it, many sessions prompted me to second-guess my confidence in this approach and wonder, is this therapist actually doing anything?

My Family’s Bottom Line:

Both ABA and Floortime were hugely effective therapy models for my son. In fact, both theories have been incorporating more and more of each other’s strategies of late, and there is a new movement to combine them.

Our experiences with ABA and Floortime are not intended to recommend one type of therapy over another, but simply to share my family’s understanding of each one. And to the parents we know and respect who would sell a kidney to get their child a 27^th weekly hour of ABA, I wish you gifted ABA therapists (of whom there are many) who treat children like the individual, complicated, mysterious, and ultimately fascinating little human beings they are.

For euphoric New Yorkers still dazed and reeling in the post-election coverage, news of the city’s financial woes — and the Mayor’s new capital plan, expected to be released today – comes as a bracing wake-up call: Grim financial times lie ahead, with cuts across all city departments, including schools.

Preliminary reports that 425 Department of Education jobs will be cut do not, of course, detail which positions are on the chopping-block. Allusions to cutbacks in school administration don’t say whether some of DOE’s biggest earners — named in a spiked story that later posted online – are vulnerable.

Watch the blog for education particulars when the Mayor’s new proposals are made public.

In order to accommodate voting machines and long lines of voters, there was no school today for city students (although teachers and administrators had to show up for professional development). Early indicators suggest that a high turn-out of New York adults had the chance wait for hours inside their local public school with an array of celebrities, politicians and cookies – PTA election bake sales have gotten a lot of attention today.

Some parents struggle to manage work, voting and childcare - would changing election-day to Saturday help? And do you bring your kids to the polls? Do you let them pull the lever? David Sedaris remembers his mother letting him decide for her. Most students at Townsend Harris High School can’t vote, but they had elaborate mock-elections leading up to the election.

An election-day profile of a politician-turned-charter-school-leader (who plans to run someday for the city’s highest elected office), reminds us how closely politics and the schools are intertwined everyday of the year. And finally, a particularly lively choir of middle school students remind us that “you can vote however you like…”

Our intrepid teen blogger, Toni Bruno, wrote in to say she won’t be blogging for Insideschools this week — she’s otherwise engaged, volunteering in Pennsylvania through this historic election. We’re grateful for her passion and civic engagement — and also that her parents and teachers see this young person’s drive to change her world as a valid reason to miss a couple of days of school.

Go Vote! From what we hear, wear comfy shoes and bring plenty to read — lines are long at many polling places, and have been since before 6AM this morning.

By Jennifer Freeman

A recent Daily News editorial dismissed the need for more open discussion of city schools’ capital needs. The editorial blast was aimed at a recent report, A Better Capital Plan (full disclosure: I am a contributing author). The report documented that more school seats were built during the last six years of the Giuliani administration than during Mayor Bloomberg’s entire tenure to date.

The report’s signal offense was to recommend that the DOE honestly and accurately identify in its soon-to-be-released capital plan how much money would be needed to provide small classes for all public school students in New York, rather than minimizing new school construction needs.

The Daily News editorial writers claimed that the report’s authors were out of touch with reality, that they must live in a fairyland the News derisively called “Gliffenglob.” But mentioning a need is not the same as claiming that unlimited money exists to address it. Maybe the editorial writers are in their own fairyland, where the atmosphere’s thick with murky and massaged numbers, and breathing pure reality would be fatal.

Schoolchildren of the city would be better served if the DOE openly identifies true new school construction needs, even if the costs of those projects is large. The fact of a troubled economy offers no shelter; they did not face the size of the need even in economic boom times, when impact fees paid by the developers of new residential buildings might have helped. In the more honest and transparent–more accountable–system advocated by the Better Capital Plan report, at least the public would know what we are up against.

State Education Department Commissioner Richard Mills announced his plans to retire late last week. Mills sits at the head of a sweeping state-wide educational network, from the SUNYs and private/independent colleges and universities to the public schools (a giant portfolio in and of themselves), vocational rehab, museum/library/archive programs and oversight over four dozen professions.

How Mills’ exit from Albany will affect city youth is the subject of considerable speculation; the NY State Ed Dept.’s long-fraught relationship with the NYC DOE is sure to be tempered by the outcome of next year’s Mayoral election, and whether Chancellor Klein will remain at the head of the city’s schools.

Comments made by Anna Commitante at a parent forum this week in Brooklyn seemed to contradict the posted, published gifted and talented handbook in regard to DOE policy on sibling preference.

For clarity: DOE officials say there is, in fact, sibling preference, in both district and citywide g+t programs. Siblings who score above minimum thresholds will be permitted to enroll in the school/program their older sibling attends, provided that’s the school that’s ranked first on the g+t application.

In fact, siblings who are eligible can be offered seats ahead of non-siblings with higher scores. As David Cantor of the DOE wrote, “If the sibling is eligible, he or she gets preference for admission into the program over a student who may have scored higher. E.g, the sibling of a student enrolled in Anderson who scored in [the] 97th percentile will get preference for admission into Anderson over an applicant who scored in [the] 99th percentile but doesn’t have a sibling in the school.”

So, yes to sibling preference, provided minimum scores are met; and tough break for non-sib kids who score higher, because the sibs get the first shot at the coveted, g+t seats.