Your independent guide to NYC public schools

Dear Judy,

My son’s teacher said he might have to go to summer school so he won’t be left back. Does he have to go to summer school? I want to send him to camp.

Annoyed parent.

Dear Annoyed,

Good news: No one is going to force you to send your son to summer school – attendance used to be required, but now is voluntary. However, they can keep him back from the next grade if his school work does not warrant promotion. It is all covered in Chancellor’s Regulation A-501. More good news, summer school sessions run until August 8th at the latest. So he can go to the last three weeks of camp – most camps have flexible schedules with campers signing on for a few weeks rather than a whole summer.

It’s the end of teacher appreciation week: the DOE's number two guy, Shael Suransky, taught a class, Chancellor Walcott has been visiting schools, Mayor Bloomberg and countless others shared some #thankateacher love on Twitter, and maybe a few students brought apples to their teachers. We wonder, how can we best show our teachers appreciation all year round?

There are several politically charged answers to the that question that have been highlighted in the news lately. But, what about better pay? It’s no secret that teachers aren’t in it for the money. Teaching can be a highly rewarding job but it is not a career path paved with financial gold. A public school teacher in New York City with a BA can expect to earn $45,530 his first year, according to the UFT’s salary schedule.

Still, that’s almost 10K more than the national average: $36,502, according to Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s most recent survey of education from around the world. But the high cost of living in the Big Apple, eats up much, if not all, of the difference.

After three decades on the job NYC teachers with a Master's degree can make over $100,000. Of course if you luck out and get a job at TEP, The Equity Project Charter School, you'll make $125,000 your first year there. But that's the exception.

Average starting pay for teachers in Finland, Diane Ravitch’s favorite place to learn, is actually lower, $32,692 (of course, the Socialist country has much better government benefits, but that’s a blogpost for another day). Teachers in Japan make $27,995 starting out and $30,522 is first-year pay for teachers in Korea. In Poland, on the other hand, starting salary is $9,186 on average. Luxemborg is one of the best places to teach if you’re after some green, starting teachers there make $51,799. (All these numbers are from OECD.) 

With that perspective, maybe New York’s not so bad! Then again, teachers are some of the most valuable members of society, should we pay them more? What do you think is a fair starting salary? Take our poll!

Fed up with multiple errors on state exams (including loudmouthed pineapples), some parents are planning to boycott "field tests" next week that will be used to design future exams. 

Students at more than 1,500 public and parochial schools in the city are among students at more than 4,000 schools statewide who will sit for the exams. The results will not be used to measure student achievement or evaluate schools, city officials said.

Organizers have launched a statewide campaign and are urging other parents to have their children abstain from the tests as well, providing sample letters and a fact sheet.

"Field test" questions were embedded in the math and reading exams students took last month, which was part of the reason the exams were longer.

Although this is not the first time stand-alone field tests have been administered and the exams will only take up a period or two for one day, some parents say they are in no mood to have their children "help" design future tests.

“I was very upset to learn that the DOE has mandated that our children take these field tests,” said Patricia Velotta, who has notified her son’s school that she doesn’t want her eighth grader taking the planned field test in June. “When I heard yesterday, after the relief of the ELA and math tests being over, that now they want to subject our kids to another week of field testing, I felt exasperated. Our children have had enough.”

The Pearson company's $32 million contract to create the new and improved exams has also rankled parents, who have seen school budgets slashed for several years in a row.

PS 321, PS 107 and PS 261, all in brownstone Brooklyn, are test sites and home to parents who have been vociferously opposed to the rising stakes of standardized exams. But the exams will be given in all corners of the city. Third graders at the elite Manhattan school Anderson will be quizzed on math. Sixth and seventh graders at JHS 125 in the Soundview section of the Bronx will take the reading field test. At PS 207 in Howard Beach, 4th graders will sit for the science exam.

The science field tests will be given between May 14 and 18. Students will take the English and math field tests between June 5 and 8.

For more information about the boycott, parents can email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

UPDATE April 27: The Panel on Educational Policy voted last night to close and reopen 24 schools including high profile and often sought-after schools such as John Dewey and Lehman High School. Others are huge historic neighborhood schools that have long served a large immigrant population such as Flushing High School and Richmond Hill, both in Queens. They will all have new names and a new staff sometime soon.

There were no surprises in the voting, GothamSchools reports. The seven mayoral appointees at the meeting voted for every turnaround plan, as did the Staten Island borough president’s appointee, Diane Peruggia. The four other borough presidents’ appointees voted against each proposal. That's how the voting has gone in other school closure hearings this year and last.

The day of the vote the city decided to give a reprieve to two of the 26 schools on the turnaround list: Bushwick Community High School and Grover Cleveland High School.

The decision comes after an emotional hearing last week in which graduates of Bushwick, a last-chance transfer school for older students, spoke about how the school and its educators had turned their lives around. An Education Department official appeared moved by the appeals and promised to take the message back to the chancellor.

Cleveland, a large traditional high school in Queens which serves a diverse population, also attracted vocal supporters at hearings earlier this year. A statement from the chancellor said that "public comments" helped confirm that both schools "had the capacity to make great improvements."

Teachers, women's groups and elected officials will rally Tuesday afternoon (Jan. 10) to demand that the Education Department remove a Bronx principal who made lewd remarks to staff members.

One of my favorite holiday traditions is watching educators get into trouble when Christmas creeps into the classroom. Keeping God out of government-funded schools can be tricky, particularly when everyone outside the building seems to be celebrating a religious holiday. Often, a misguided decision generates a news story.

Among this year's holiday offerings:

-- While giving a lesson about the North Pole, a teacher in Nanuet, NY, told her 2nd-graders that Santa didn’t exist. Dubbed the “Santa Clod” by the New York Post, the teacher later called outraged parents to apologize.

New York State is changing the way it evaluates teachers and principals. Starting in the 2011-2012 school year, the state will use a new system to evaluate teacher effectiveness based on factors like classroom performance and student achievement on standardized tests. The new system will affect how teachers and principals progress in their careers. Depending on ratings, teachers and principals may be given extra professional development, granted tenure or fired. Principals will also be judged on the school's performance.

This coming school year, teachers of grades 4-8 ELA and math and their principals will be evaluated under the new system. In 2012-13 all teachers and principals are scheduled for evaluation under the system.

Under the new system, each teacher and principal will receive an annual professional performance review (APPR) resulting in a single effectiveness score on a four-point rating system of "highly effective," "effective," "developing," or "ineffective." Under the current, less nuanced system, teachers either received satisfactory or unsatisfactory scores.

This year, still being rated with the old ratings system, about 97% of all New York City teachers received "satisfactory" ratings. These numbers correlate with the amount of NYC teachers denied tenure this year, which was also around 3%, and are likely a result of "the city's sustained push to usher more weak teachers out of the system," according to Gothamschools.org. In 2010, the city introduced a four-point rating system for awarding tenure similar to the system the state will put into effect next year, and the number of teachers who recently received tenure dropped dramatically compared to past years.

According to the state Board of Regents, the following factors will determine "teacher effectiveness" ratings:

• Student growth on state assessments or a comparable measure of student achievement growth (20%)

• Locally-selected measures of student achievement that are determined to be rigorous and comparable across classrooms (20%)

• other measures of teacher/principal effectiveness (60%) including multiple classroom observations for teachers and broad assessment of leadership and management actions for principals.

You can read more details on the New York State Education Department website. Advocates for Children posted fact sheets in English and Spanish to help parents understand the system and to monitor it for fairness.

With summer vacation just days away, homework may be the last thing on families' minds....unless your child attends one of those schools that sends home assignments to do over July and August.

For school administrators, however, summer is a planning time and in at least one school district in New Jersey,  principals are hoping to curtail the "nightly grind that is stressing out children." The New York Times reports that the school board in Galloway, NJ  "will vote this summer on a proposal to limit weekend homework to 10 minutes for each year of school....and ban assignments on weekends, holidays and school vacations," at least for grades K-8.

At one citywide gifted and talented elementary school in New York City, the Brooklyn School of Inquiry, homework is already optional. Principal Donna Taylor told The Times that homework is less about rigor and more about parents who like to feel "connected to the classroom." Most NYC teachers do assign homework, even over the winter holidays, according to an Insideschools  unscientific poll. But more than half of the nearly 2,000 parents who took our follow-up poll said they would prefer homework-free holidays.

Is it time for a homework revolution? Have your children gotten too much homework this year? Or, has homework been a useful tool, helping your children practice skills learned at school and helping you stay on top of what they are learning? Does the answer lie somewhere in between? Take our poll and share your ideas.

Sean Keaton, former principal of PS 20 in Fort Greene, was acquitted in a Brooklyn court last week of "menacing in the third degree," a charge stemming from an altercation with a teacher in the principal's office in 2009, Department of Education officials confirmed. But the DOE would not say whether Keaton would return to his post or whether the interim acting principal, Lena Barbera, would stay.

The original charges of assault and harassment were downgraded in November 2009. Keaton was placed on administrative leave in May 2009 while his case was pending and Barbera, an assistant principal at PS 261, was named interim acting principal. She could not be named as principal while Keaton's case was unresolved. PS 20 parents repeatedly cited the lack of a permanent principal as a problem during contentious hearings last fall over the expansion of another school in the building, The Urban Assembly Academy for Arts & Letters.

Now that Keaton has been acquitted, the Department of Education may move to appoint a  principal. At a Community Education Council Town Hall meeting in District 13 last night, DOE official Marc Sternberg and District 13 Superintendent James Machen said they could not comment on personnel matters but that they hoped to move  "as quickly as possible" to appoint a principal. Whether that person will be Lena Barbera or whether it is possible that Sean Keaton could return to the building, was unclear.

"If the person has been exonerated, he has a right to the position, pending DOE review," said Antoinette Isable, a spokesperson for the principal's union. "If he chooses to take on another assignment, the interim acting principal would go through the C-30 process  [the regulation governing the process of selection and appointment of principals and assistant principals]."

A $5 million civil suit against the city and Keaton by the aggrieved teacher is still ongoing, according to Hugo Ortega, a lawyer for Robert Segarra, the teachers' union representative at PS 20 who claimed Keaton kicked and punched him. Ortega said Keaton is in default of the civil lawsuit for never answering the summons and complaint against him.

More details as we get them.

Last week was extremely hard for all principals and teachers, as we faced a free fall in our "proficiency" percentages on the 2010 state tests, the most important indicator of success of the city’s accountability measures. And, it will become even harder when parents and students learn of the new scores and find out that many have moved from proficient (Level 3) to not proficient overnight. Mulling this over, and talking to colleagues in the week since the test scores were released, I have come  to two conclusions about the results and an important question about the future.

Conclusion 1: For years, educators I know have noticed that a Level 3 is not truly proficient. We have a Reading Lab in our school for struggling readers who were not succeeding in our middle school because of lagging reading skills. “But,” their parents would say, “my child has a level 3!”  These children were really struggling, but the tests were saying something different.

While as a principal, I was quite happy for the vast majority of our students to be testing at proficiency,  I think we all shared a nagging feeling that something was not quite right. And so, the new scores are a better reflection of where our students actually are.

Conclusion 2: In the long run, it is always better for kids when they know where they stand. New York State was bold in raising the bar, and in so doing, saying that mediocre (or worse) isn’t enough for New York’s young people;  it isn't acceptable that many high school graduates are failing when they reach college.  I agree. This readjustment lends a great deal of urgency to our work because no one should be satisfied with the percentages of proficiency we are facing. Despite disappearing gains that make us all look and feel bad, we need to circle up and make a game plan for how to push our students higher.

My question: Where do we go from here? For several years, we have been building a staff of educators who are interested in project-based learning that is tied to specific, measurable skills. We have been concentrating on maximizing the number of thinking minutes that take place in every classroom. We have consciously chosen NOT to follow a test-preparation curriculum, but rather a test-inclusive curriculum. Of course we want all students to become fluent readers and develop the necessary math skills  but we want much, much more as well.

Educators and parents want their children to develop scientific curiosity, to learn about the history of the world, to discover the arts, enjoy physical health and education, and do independent research.  I think the state wants this for its children, which is why the tests are becoming broader and less predictable.

And, because we know that schools will teach what is tested, I hope that the state and city will pursue assessment programs that are more reflective of what I know New York State’s citizenry wants for its next generation of artists, journalists, scientists, researchers, baseball players, bankers, historians, parents, good samaritans, doctors, and friends.

In other words, we need to flip the formula. While we clearly must push ourselves and our students in areas of basic proficiency, we also must pursue, with undiminished ambition, our larger goal of well-rounded – not test driven—standards for the education of our children. The assessments, then, will need to catch up with us.