Until I was about twelve I wanted to be a teacher.  More recently I’ve felt otherwise, thinking that in order to create real change in education I needed to be in a position of greater power.  But I was reminded of the unbelievable impact that a single good teacher can make after reading the story of Rafe Esquith, a classroom teacher in a tough Los Angeles neigborhood.

His second book, “Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire” tells the stories of his years of teaching, intertwining inspiring anecdotes with education theory, psychological theory and lesson plans.  It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to become  a teacher, a parent or work with kids in any way.

Rafe Esquith is one of those rare teachers who honestly would “do it for free.”  And rest assured, he already  does a lot for free. He comes to school over an hour before the official day begins, only to be greeted by a huge group of students anxious to work on math problems. He stays late after school every day to show educational films, and to rehearse for the rock/Shakespeare production students put on at the end of the year. He takes kids on overnight trips during school vacations, takes former students to visit colleges during their breaks, and has students come in on Saturdays to prepare for their trips in order to get the most out of them. All students who come in for extra school or trips do it voluntarily, and no one is penalized for not participating.

It is not just the insane amount of effort that sets Rafe apart from other teachers, its also his philosophy and his ability to stick to it.  His four core ideas about teaching are: “Replace fear with trust,” “children depend on us, so be dependable,” “discipline must be logical,” and, “you are a role model.”  He also discusses the reasons why students do things (mainly out of fear or want of a reward), and encourages his students to strive for a “level 6: I have a personal code of behavior and I follow it (the Atticus Finch level).” For Rafe, it’s not just talk. Through 25 or so years of teaching, he has found a way to apply all these ideas into his teaching. His classroom is a place that is full of trust, honesty and commitment. He introduces his students to characters such as Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch so that they learn to strive for a truly moral existence. And  you can tell that he is successful a huge percent of the time:  He teaches his students for life.

Rafe is not a young radical who earns his students’ love by burning standardized tests.  (His students do well on tests, though Rafe offers his own analysis of the problems with testing in our system.)  He is, pure and simple, a teacher who pushes himself and his students to do more, mentally, physically and emotionally — and sees it pay off, year after year.

If I ran teacher training, I would definitely make this book required reading.

A close analysis in today’s Times confirms what seems to be basic logic: For the most part, principals with more experience fare better than younger, less-seasoned school leaders, even those groomed by the city’s Leadership Academy to take over, and often turn around, troubled or failing schools. The observation is particularly acute given the relative inexperience of New York City’s public school principals; nearly 80 percent have been school leaders for eight years or less. (For more on principal training, visit New Leaders for New Schools, a national leadership-training program, and read this Q&A with Leadership Academy head Sandra Stein.)

But even with budget control and other elements of autonomy, all principals do not control or direct their school’s enrollment, a critical management lapse, according to families of pre-K students and those currently waiting for middle school results (and placement offers) for district and citywide gifted and talented programs.

Principals’ job descriptions continue to expand: “You’re a teacher, you’re Judge Judy, you’re a mother, you’re a father, you’re a pastor, you’re a therapist, you’re a nurse, you’re a social worker,” Maxine Nodel, principal of the Millennium Art Academy in the Bronx, told the Times. “You’re a curriculum planner, you’re a data gatherer, you’re a budget scheduler, you’re a vision spreader.”

What you’re not, apparently, is a source of enrollment information for parents in your community. That power rests with the DOE — and parents are caught in the gap, waiting for information while the clock ticks toward DOE-imposed deadlines.

Sean Keaton, the controversial principal of PS 20 in the Fort Greene/Clinton Hill neighborhood in Brooklyn, was arrested Thursday after allegedly knocking a kindergarten teacher off a chair, kicking him in the head, and stomping on him. The teacher, Robert Segerra, is the teachers’ union representative at PS 20, and, at the time of the assault, had been in Keaton’s office, discussing the case of a special education teacher who had been accused of using corporal punishment against a student.

“Every time I said I’m not hitting you, I got another hit in the head or another punch in the neck or another scrap or another drag me across the floor,” Segerra told WABC. (For Segerra’s full account of the incident, click here.)

Keaton was charged with misdemeanor assault and reassigned to administrative duties while the investigation is pending, according to the Department of Education.

Keaton has taught at the school since the 1990s and served as principal since 2005, but parents have been sharply divided over his leadership. While test scores have risen, enrollment has declined, and now only 27 percent of eligible kindergarten students in the zone are attending PS 20.

One of the three new citywide gifted and talented programs is scheduled to open as part of PS 20 next fall, which will be under the purview of the PS 20 principal. Parents whose students scored at the 97th percentile or higher on the gifted and talented exam were able to rank the PS 20 program on their forms, which were due on Tuesday. We are following up with the DOE to see if there will be an opportunity for parents to reconsider their choices after new leadership is announced.

The debate over Keaton’s administration turned particularly vehement on the New York Times Local Fort Greene/Clinton Hill blog this spring. Yesterday, the Local described the debate’s racial and class undertones: “The community conversation about him [Keaton] often seemed to break down along class lines, with new-to-the-neighborhood, more affluent parents finding him difficult to work with and working-class parents defending him. There was often a racial component to the debate as well (Mr. Keaton is black).” (more…)

At a jam-packed and raucous meeting on Monday night, the Community Education Council of District 28 in central Queens passed a unanimous resolution recommending the immediate removal of Dr. John Murphy as principal of MS 8 in South Jamaica. The resolution came at the end of the monthly meeting, attended by upwards of 150 parents, teachers, and community members. They crowded into the makeshift basement auditorium of PS 182, which quickly became a standing-room-only venue. The CEC voted on the resolution minutes after Rev. Charles Norris read a litany of complaints against Murphy, ending each with a rousing declaration of  “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

Although a recent incident thrust MS 8 into the media spotlight, the press (WCBS, Daily News, Queens Chronicle, and the New York Teacher) reports that there is a long history of abuse by Murphy at MS 8, as well as at other schools. CEC member Emily Ades spoke from the stage, saying she issued her own report in November 2008 after performing a walk-through of the middle school, which she likened to a detention center.

Ades, a former elementary school teacher in the district, said she received no response from the Department of Education about her report, which detailed a school where “there was no School Leadership Team, the principal made all decisions, there were numerous safety issues, and the children were on lockdown,” she said.

Martine Guerrier, Chief Family Engagement Officer from the DOE Office for Family Engagement and Advocacy (OFEA), came late to the meeting after notifying the CEC that she would not be attending, and sending two representatives in her stead. Her arrival was unexpected and was not met with a warm reception.

Both parents and CEC members said they had reached out to her office to no avail. Kenneth Williams, one of the CEC vice presidents, spoke of his dissatisfaction with OFEA after he sought their support following negative experiences with the principal of PS 30. “[The community has] been left out in the cold for two years. Not just MS 8. Not just PS 30. It’s the whole district,” he said.

Guerrier said, “A number of issues were raised to me today that have not been brought to me before.”

In a telephone conversation with Insideschools.org, Department of Education spokesperson Ann Forte said that there is an “ongoing investigation” of the principal.  “We don’t believe that his removal is warranted,” she said, noting that he “sent a letter home to parents a week ago trying to reach out and push to try to communicate better.” She said concerned parents should reach out to District 28 Superintendent Jeanette Reed. The superintendent’s office is ultimately responsible for the hiring of principals and for their dismissal.

Meanwhile, protestors gather each morning before MS 8 begins its school day. They hold signs and photos of Murphy and often cheer “get rid of the rat.” A rally will be held Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Jamaica branch of the NAACP.

Yesterday, the City Council members called on state legislators to establish a process by which charter schools are sited in public school buildings. Charter schools, which receive public money but are not managed by the Department of Education, are not entitled to space rent-free in DOE buildings, but Chancellor Klein’s administration has tried to accommodate charters in public school buildings whenever possible. This spring, when the DOE announced that it was closing PS 194 in Harlem and replacing it with a charter, the controversy erupted, a lawsuit was filed, parents screamed at each other in a hearing, the DOE eventually backtracked, and then newspapers blamed the teachers’ union for “condemning” students to failing schools.

At City Hall yesterday, council members questioned many of the players involved (teachers union representatives, parent groups, charter school leaders, Department of Education officials), and introduced a resolution urging state legislators to give communities more of a voice in charter school sitings. DOE officials who testified did not think the resolution was necessary.

Eva Moskowitz, the founder and leader of the charter school network Harlem Success, testified before the committee, which she used to chair when she was a city council member. It was her fourth charter school that had been slated to replace P.S. 194, and her former colleagues on City Council held her responsible for any role she may have played in the ensuing controversy. See a video from the Moskowitz testimony on GothamSchools.

Meanwhile, many of the city charters have been holding their lotteries this week. The number of applicants to charters more than doubled this year to 39,200 from last year’s 18,672. Democracy Prep Charter School, which is also in Harlem, held its lottery last night to pick 100 students out of 1,500 who applied (making the odds “harder than Harvard’s” according to the school). Tonight, at least 27 more charters will hold their lotteries and thousands of families will show up to see if their child’s name is called.

Half of the teachers working in American classrooms today could retire over the next decade, according to a report from the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a non-profit, non-partisan advocacy group based in Washington, DC.

Because many teachers today are near 50, and because the median age for teacher retirement is 56, the group predicts a steep falloff of teaching professionals as this generation of boomers heads into retirement.  Many principals are also boomer vintage and will retire  in the coming years.  (See their graphic on page 2 for a stark image of an aging profession.)

The report additionally cites declining demand for education, as the overall proportion of families with children continue to fall to new lows in the nation’s demographic mix.  What this fortells for New York City is uncertain — but steady teacher attrition might be compounded if a generation of teachers elects to exit the classroom.

The Department of Education has decided to back down on its planned closing of three neighborhood schools and creation of charter zones without Community Education Council approval, the subject of a recent lawsuit filed by the United Federation of Teachers and the New York Civil Liberties Union. (Details and analysis here.)

This is a great first step toward better DOE compliance with parent engagement laws in the future. But more than that, the DOE should be curious: why do so many parent leaders think that there are problems with how charters are sited? Might there be something legitimate to our concerns? Wouldn’t it be interesting to find out, by holding a public discussion (whether or not such a discussion is mandated by law)?

I look forward to seeing some signs that the DOE is prepared to be a better listener, because it’s not very efficient to play out our disagreements in court.

The expansion of charter schools into zoned school buildings took a legal turn yesterday as the United Federation of Teachers and the New York Civil Liberties Union jointly filed suit to block the DOE from emptying school zones of their schools without public process or approval from Community District Education Councils.

DOE has long been pushing the limits of parent tolerance of its authoritarian use of power. When they closed PS241 and proposed only one school, a charter, to take over its building, we realized that for the first time in our district a zone would be empty of any zoned school. This seemed like a zoning change, but according to the law that outlines mayoral control, only CECs have the authority to approve zoning changes. To members of CEC3, DOE’s unilateral action seemed illegal. But we are not lawyers, so we reached out to lawyers we knew, and organizations with lawyers on staff, and asked how it looked to them.

The responses came one after another: the DOE’s action did seem illegal. We also discovered that some citywide organizations were hearing the same story from CECs in other districts. Parents in those districts had the same experience of zones being emptied of their neighborhood schools without CEC approval, and had come to the same conclusion as we had: a legal response seemed warranted. It took citywide organizations with legal resources, like the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and New York Civil Liberties Union, to organize the legal response. In pushing the envelope, DOE was testing the limits of its authority until someone came along willing to provide a firm response.

Fortunately, the sunset of the mayoral control laws this June provides a good opportunity to ask the hard questions, and demand the discipline that the DOE so clearly needs. I am a named plaintiff in the lawsuit because the CECs were the ones legally mandated to approve zoning changes. In the announcement, I am quoted as saying ““This is about the rule of law and community participation. The law requires local involvement in zoning changes through the approval of Community Education Councils. By closing these schools, the DOE is not only breaking the law, it is subverting the democratic process.”

If DOE’s plans have a sound basis, they should be able to withstand the “withering scrutiny” of honest public hearings and the CEC approval process — which is grounded in the very same “power to the parents” DOE says it is encouraging, in the upcoming CEC elections.

Parents have been asking how the kindergarten placement process works; we asked the DOE for details — and why they advised families to “wait until September” for possible placements at local schools.

Zoned schools fill their seats drawing from the applications they receive before the March 6 deadline, says Andy Jacob of the Department of Education. (This is a change from years past, when schools accepted students on a first-come, first-served basis, or based on pre-K enrollment.) If more children apply than the school has seats, a lottery should be held; some students will receive placement offers, and others will be wait-listed. There is no ‘rank’ or priority of any kind on wait lists, Jacob says. As seats open over the spring and summer, as families move, opt for other schools or opt out of public schools — families are notified. “We simply don’t have a really solid grasp on seats that are available until September,” Jacob said, which is why he advises watchful waiting. (The DOE also doesn’t know the total number of kindergarten applications citywide. It’s up to individual schools to count the applications they receive.)

All zoned schools reserve some seats for the inevitable September arrivals. The number of seats they save depends on past years’ enrollment and prior experience with latecomers. But not every family who moves into a zone can get a seat at their zoned school of choice. Jacob says, “we guarantee a kindergarten seat, but we don’t guarantee a seat at your top school.”

Some families have received offers from two schools while others have received no offers. Because each school administers its own admissions process, it’s possible for a single child to receive more than one offer. Families can ask to be placed on their zoned school’s wait list even if they’ve been offered a seat at another school. According to Jacob, they do not forfeit the wait-list spot if they accept placement at another school.

In a zoned school that has more applications than available seats, capping the number of kindergarten classes the school will have is a last resort, says Jacob, and isn’t undertaken casually. The DOE will first ask a zoned school if another class can be opened, or if classes are already filled to the UFT contractual maximum. “There are lots of steps before capping,” says Jacob, and a school can’t elect to cap its classes independently. “The school has to accept zoned students unless a capping plan is worked out by the DOE,” says Jacob. Timing-wise, decisions are made right up to the start of the new school year, which is why the waiting game takes so long. Families whose children applied to but aren’t placed at their zoned school are “offered different options nearby,” says Jacob. Accepting a seat doesn’t mean giving up access; “they have the right to return,” he says, if and when seats open up at their zoned school.

“This is nothing new,” Jacob said. “It’s something we’re used to dealing with every year.” What’s “routine” to the DOE is vitally new to plenty of local families who report frustration and disappointment with the kindergarten admissions process. We’ll continue to ask questions, and we look forward to bringing you answers.

Update: Andy Jacob asked that we clarify two points above: First, regarding wait lists at zoned schools, enrollment priority goes in the order established by DOE on the initial application — siblings of current students who live in the zone (who are rarely, if ever, wait-listed), students who live in the zone , siblings who live outside of the zone, and, finally, out-of-zone kids. Within those subgroups, applications are not ranked in any particular order. That means that all zoned kids on the wait list are in the same pool, and that, as seats open, applications are randomly selected from that pool (once siblings have been accommodated). So you can’t be first, or last, on the wait list, but rather you are part of a group of wait-listed students.

Second, Jacob would like to emphasize that DOE will place all students in kindergarten classes — although there’s no guarantee of a placement at every family’s zoned school. He says that in some cases, families may be offered more than one alternative to their zoned school, in an effort to find a good fit between the child, the family, and the school.

Those who like to read between the lines should peruse the sheaf of letters printed today on the Times‘ editorial page in response to last week’s profile-in-power of Chancellor Joel Klein. One has to wonder how many letters are rejected for every letter published and how the mix of pro and con — and professional-academic writers versus plain citizens — is decided.

Also worth noting is David Brooks’ column, praising President Obama’s recent education address. But it’s funny how parenthetical phrases can reveal an essential difference in understanding. Here’s what Brooks writes, in the context of Obama’s proposal to scale up merit pay:

“…[I]t would increase merit pay for good teachers (the ones who develop emotional bonds with children) and dismiss bad teachers (the ones who treat students like cattle to be processed).”

Brooks’ definition of good and bad teachers is not what’s rewarded by Klein and the accountability crowd at DOE, where merit is correlated with academic progress, as measured by test scores, and reflected in annual progress reports. Teachers and schools get high grades and cash for raising achievement, how they do it isn’t the issue. While one would like to believe that building strong personal relationships helps kids make academic progress, it is by no means the DOE’s yardstick or criteria for merit pay. (Learning environment surveys touch on teaching — and contribute only slightly to a school’s progress report grade.)

Does David Brooks believe that the teachers who the kids love get DOE love, too? “No picnic” is right.

Teachers union leader Randi Weingarten threw the union’s collective glove at the mayor’s feet yesterday, in a challenge to Mayoral Control that proposes reshaping the Panel for Educational Policy – the majority-mayor-appointed committee that replaced the admittedly partisan former Board of Education. Controlling the PEP, including ousting recalcitrant members, has been critical to education reform, say DOE leaders; spokesman David Cantor wrote to journalists: “The union’s proposal for a central, political Board…is an almost exact replica of the worst part of the old system.”

Lost in the sauce — and in the media scrum — was the principal union’s mixed-bag endorsement of mayoral control, with specific caveats, most notably restoring the requirement that an actual, professional educator head the city’s Department of Education – and specifically opposing the waiver that allowed Joel Klein to ascend to the Chancellorship.

Today at noon, Mayor Bloomberg will give his annual budget address – the last before the November election. The mayor’s budget is expected to include 23,000 job cuts, nearly a billion in new taxes, and other “doomsday” strategies to stanch a $4 billion budget gap. (Slim consolation in the Times’ report that things aren’t quite as bad as they could be.)

Earlier this week, Chancellor Klein testified in Albany that up to 15,000 education jobs are at risk; in a statement yesterday that echoed Klein’s threat (and, possibly, predicted similar challenges for organizations like New York City Teaching Fellows), Teach for America’s New York office announced drastic cutbacks in recruitment and funding. GothamSchools has details here; their prediction that there won’t be too many eager 22-year-olds teaching in the city’s schools come September seems entirely plausible. (Of note, more of the new teachers who do get hired will likely be placed in charter schools, which characteristically feature longer workdays and a longer school year — and, rarely, union protection. The truism of sending the least-proven teachers into the toughest settings is, unfortunately, looking all too true again.)

Tune in here to watch the Mayor speak.

One-time anonymous, now-outed ed blogger Eduwonkette Jennifer Jennings announced yesterday that she’s trading the computer screen for a classroom — “I’m hanging up my cape” — as a new-fledged faculty member at New York University, where she’ll begin teaching in the fall. After more than a year of dissecting and describing statistical minutiae — and of welcome challenges to both the conventional wisdom and the DOE spin — her contributions will be missed.

But fear not, policy wonks: Eduwonkette’s frequent co-blogger Skoolboy, aka Columbia University professor and Teachers College faculty fellow Aaron Pallas, lives on — posting occasionally at GothamSchools.

The Globe today highlights an MIT/Harvard study of Boston-area charter and ‘pilot’ schools, in which charter schools steadily outperformed both the pilot schools — essentially, charter-style schools run by the city with union contracts for teachers and staff — and Boston’s traditional public schools. The study documents striking gains in middle-school math — gains that are reflected here in New York’s 78 public charters, despite profound gaps in early-grade math scores.

Citywide, only about half of third-graders in charter schools score at level 3 or 4 on state math exams (54%), compared with 87% of third-graders in the city’s hundreds of non-charter elementary schools. By eighth grade, though, the balance has flipped: Three-fourths of charter students score level 3 or 4 in math, compared with 60% citywide.

Some might attribute the gains to the focus many charters place on drills, skills, and testing, while others contend that without basic skills, kids can’t progress to master more sophisticated content. No one can argue that stronger parent engagement, a characteristic many charter schools share, drives attendance and thus achievement: Kids who show up learn more. Notably in Boston, charter schools are characterized as “independent public schools dedicated to innovative teaching,” while New York’s charters extend the DOE’s familiar focus on achievement and accountability.

The pesky ‘details’ nearly always overlooked deserve loud mention: According to the New York City Charter Center annual report, charters serve far, far fewer English Language Learners than other city schools — only about 3% of charter students need language instruction, compared with 14% of students citywide. (Yes, that’s nearly five times as many.) And students who require special education count for only 9% of charter students overall, compared with 14% of public-school students. The Center says charters are “marginally behind” other public schools in this regard, but from here, the gap doesn’t seem marginal at all: Non-charter public schools have a third more special-needs students, many of whom require a level and sophistication of services charters cannot provide, such as special, self-contained classes and cash-intensive resources, like adaptive gyms, speech instruction, and physical and occupational therapy.

So all well and good to compare apples with apples — but when the fruit bowl’s more inclusive, it’s important to recognize what goes into the mix.

While the economic and policy debates swirl like the eddying snow — and school cuts loom on the near horizon — the Times today showcases a teacher of English, part of the Teach for America corps. It’s a warm and flattering profile, but the most pressing question isn’t posed: It’s not clear whether Ms. Grant will continue to work as a teacher or move on to achieve other career goals after her TFA stint ends– a widespread objection voiced by education researchers and plenty of principals, too, that the well-intentioned program recruits young talent, sponsors their certification (and their Masters degrees) and then, loses the new teachers’ skills to career pursuits beyond the schoolhouse door. New York magazine offers its own gallery of classroom leaders, whose after-school activities include break-dancing, standup comedy and a glam rock tribute band.

Let no one doubt the diversity of the adults who teach our children, or the myriad contributions these creative, multitalented professionals bring to school each and every day.

In a good economy, college grads go to work; in a bad economy, they go to grad school. So goes the long-held thinking — but it seems that the current crop of incipient grads has other ideas, if GRE (for Graduate Record Examination) applications are any guide. Early projections anticipated over 675,000 potential applicants would sit for the exam; those numbers have been revised steeply downward, to about 621,000, with the drop attributed (no surprise here) to the effect of the tanking economy on grad-student funding like grants and loans — and on the teaching assistantships that often support students working on advanced degrees. (The Times reports that grad school test-takers increased steadily from 2005 to 2007, from 539,000 in ‘05 to 633,000 students last year.)

The drop underscores last week’s dire reports on skyrocketing college costs – if fewer people go to grad school, and fewer students attend college, the costs of the economic downturn will have enormous, lasting social and cultural repercussions. Into this fray comes the Gates Foundation, which will turn a nearly $70 million focus on improving college and post-secondary outcomes for poor kids, via grants to improve post-secondary education and scholarship programs at colleges in four states, including two New York schools. The Gates Foundation, long the economic engine behind small-school creation and high school reform here in New York City, says its commitment to high schools will continue, although largely in teaching and curriculum reform, according to the Times (and perhaps less in actual new-school creation or direct funding for efforts like the principal-grooming Leadership Academy).

On a local level, UFT and AFT president Randi Weingarten says she’s in the ring for Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat, should Clinton be approved as Secretary of State. But in the meantime, she’s teaching a model lesson today at RFK High School in Queens, on the life and legacy of Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, in a social-justice curriculum element intended for citywide use.

On the hyper-local level, Insideschools founder Clara Hemphill and her daughter Allison Snyder are the focus of a profile by Jennifer Medina that’s small consolation for the parents of this year’s 80,000+ eighth-graders applying for high-school seats — if some cool comfort: the cumbersome, daunting high-school search is hard for everybody. Are DOE enrollment planners paying attention?

This week was filled with bad news for schools and students, but on the same day that the DOE announced it would close three schools, nine other city schools were lauded in US News as among the nation’s best. The news magazine also interviewed Chancellor Klein, who has just wrapped up his tour Down Under, sponsored by Australia’s education ministry. The Chancellor had plenty to deal with upon his return: one of his deputy chancellors had to be reminded of the department’s ethics code; Brooklyn residents are concerned that the city will use eminent domain laws to gain property for a new school; and the DOE had apparently advised principals to “keep the [school] surveys away from toxic person(s)” who might rate the schools unfavorably.

The Times editorial board argue that bad teachers need to be “ushered” out of the system, but one school leader can’t praise her teachers enough; Pamela Taranto, the principal of Brooklyn International, who received the highest grade among all the principals in the city on the progress reports, said she will spend some of her hefty bonus on taking her teachers out to dinner. Another city principal, of John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx, plans to remake his school into a “Digital Academy,” hoping that it will improve the school’s lackluster academic reputation. The settlement of a lawsuit challenging policies at Boys and Girls High School in Brooklyn brought by Insideschools’ parent organization, Advocates for Children, grants students who had been pushed out of school options. But many high school dropouts are finding they don’t have as many options anymore as the waiting lists grow for GED and literacy programs. And many of the students at Newcomers High School in Queens gave thanks for the opportunities of immigration while empathizing with the pilgrims’ struggles — a good lesson for all.

A troika of bad-news education stories in today’s Times: An administrator possibly worried about her next job is suspected of changing test scores on a Regents exam (her current, six-figure-plus position, at a Bronx school that scored an A for ‘progress,’ is being cut in budget rollbacks) and has been ousted after nearly three decades in the city’s schools. (The Post basically indicts her here.) The 36-year-old founding principal of the teacher’s union’s flagship charter school, the UFT Secondary Charter School in East New York, has made an exit, by mutual consent, if reports are to be believed. And in Pembroke Pines, Florida, a 7-year-old is facing possible expulsion for pulling a butter knife on a first-grader — in washroom stickup, for $1 in lunch money. Incredibly, the incident, which left the 6-year-old with a nosebleed, went unremarked until parents complained — raising questions about what, exactly, school personnel were doing when a bleeding child was discovered. The child ‘perp’ may be placed in another school, according to Broward County schools spokesman Keith Browery. “We don’t expel to the street.”

As an antidote to the gloom, consider what a few extraordinary kids have to say, via the “Be A Champion” essay context, which named 100 winning essays among 350 entries from special-needs students across the city — and included a celebration featuring New York Jet Tony Richardson, DOE reps, and Lime Connect, which together sponsored the contest. One Bronx boy writes:

“I am a very energetic 12-year-old amputee. At birth,…I was diagnosed with Amniotic Band Syndrome which resulted in my left leg being amputated below my knee, three days after my birth. As much as I can remember, I have never experienced any difficulties achieving my goals. … I am a champion because I never allow my disability to prevent me from fitting in. … Last summer I received the First Place medal for running [with my amputee support group]. I taught myself to swim. … I mastered rock-climbing and bike-riding. Sometimes, I even forget I am wearing a prosthesis.”

A high-school girl in Queens has a different outlook: “I feel everyone is a champion in my eyes. If you put your all into something you want badly, you need to fight. … At one point in my life, I was a champion. Then I let myself down by giving up. I stopped being good in school and doing all my work. … I even stopped going to school. Now I’m back in school and will go on to college. … I have the power and courage to do what I need to do to get what I need. I always let people tell me I will never be anything in life. I’m proving them wrong by doing the right thing. … My word for all the champions out there: don’t let anyone stop you from finishing, or trying to make your goals in life.”

Heartfelt advice, and welcome perspective in a too-cynical world.

In a signature transposition of business practice into the education environment, the Klein administration at the DOE has installed a range of mechanisms to pay people — teachers, principals, and students, at selected schools — for performance. Today’s Times story challenges the merits of a $2 million REACH incentive program (for REwarding ACHievement). Guess what? The results are a mixed bag.

Turns out more high-school students took Advanced Placement exams, which can earn college credit for high-scoring students. Fewer students passed, but a fraction more scored at the highest level, 5.

Promoters beg more time to show stronger results; critics say there are better ways to spend that kind of (private) money, despite similar programs’ rising popularity in schools nationwide. And you can bet that man-about-town Joel Klein will face sharp questions on the program in his three public appearances today, at a REACH briefing, an NAACP event in Brooklyn and a Teach for America welcome-teachers evening program. But a quote at the end of the story caught our eye: Kati Haycock, director of the DC-based Education Trust, says that “rich kids get paid for high grades all the time and for high test scores by their parents.”

Do you pay your kids for good grades? Do you reward effort (trying hard) or outcomes (the grade itself)? And what’s the line between motivation and bribe — between incentive and payoff? We don’t think parents have deep pockets for report-card shakedowns, but we could be wrong…

A new schools blog has launched here in Gotham City, with Philissa Cramer, well-known to all Insideschools faithfuls, and former teacher Kelly Vaughan, at the helm. Welcome to the fray –

It’s not just parents and students on tenterhooks waiting for school placements. This week is incredibly stressful for the faculty and staff at many city schools, too. As principals hand out next year’s teaching assignments, some teachers are discovering that the proposed budget cuts have left them officially “excessed” — still employed by the DOE but without an active position. (While teachers historically had been automatically transfered, the 2006 UFT contract gave excessed educators control over their job search.)

Excessed teachers who don’t — or can’t — find a new school can spend up to two years in the “reserve pool,” earning full wages and benefits, temporarily assigned to schools where the principals decide their workload. Cost to the city since 2006? $81 million. Predictably, the UFT and The New Teacher Project, which has close ties to the DOE, disagree over whether or not this policy is a waste of funds.

This year, looming budget cuts may mean even more teachers in reserve; this week, when assignments are made known, the atmosphere at many schools is tense.

With the Obama/McCain showdown claiming more above-the-fold newspaper space and primetime television minutes each week, I have been considering the delicate relationship between teachers’ personal politics, and their educational obligations to their students. Children have no qualms about asking blunt questions, including “who did you vote for in the last election?” which I was often asked when I taught sixth and seventh grade social studies at IS 143 in Washington Heights.

My students really wanted to know what I believed. Most of them were immigrants or first-generation Americans, and they were learning about democracy and politics for the first time in my class. They struggled in particular to understand modern political parties, and they wanted to know what the adults they looked up to believed, so that they could begin to build their own political opinions.But is it fair for teachers to share their personal political views with students or is it a teacher’s job to present the all of the ideas and arguments and teach the students the skills they need to form their own opinions? According the chancellor’s regulations, it is forbidden: all DOE employees “shall maintain a posture of neutrality with respect to all candidates,” while on the job, but in reality, this is not always followed. And remember what happened when a Bronx high school teacher and his students made a video for the Obama campaign this fall?Stanley Fish, a distinguished professor who has worked at several prominent universities, would also argue against bringing politics into the classroom. Fish writes in his New York Times blog that it is not only possible but critical that teachers don’t share their personal political opinions with their students. Gray Lady readers, particularly those who are also professors, have responded in force, igniting a vigorous debate that Fish has now responded to twice (I have even noticed some of my own professors from college chiming in).

But the relationship between politics and teaching is not just confined to higher-education. The commentators who complain that kids don’t know enough, or care enough, about the democratic process are usually quick to blame elementary, middle and high school teachers. If teachers are passionate about politics, should they share that with their students? I am inclined to side with Professor Fish and argue that politics need to be taught but not partisan ideas. In this presidential election year, do you think that teachers’ political opinions should be shared or silenced while they are at school?

I’m Lindsey Whitton Christ, the new Insideschools staff writer. Although I am new to the Insideschools team, I have used both the blog and the website for years, first as a social studies teacher at IS 143 and then as a journalism student at Columbia. I am thrilled to begin contributing! On a visit to PS 183 on the Upper East Side this week, I watched a group of excited fifth graders distress the edges of the paper on their own pioneer diaries, and I was reminded of my favorite computer game as a child, Oregon Trail. The students were undoubtedly so enthusiastic (they were falling all over each other to tell me everything they had learned about westward expansion) because the project let them imagine that they were pioneers experiencing the trail. The computer game had allowed me to do the same thing – although on a clunky 1980s Apple computer it was hardly the degree of computer simulation we are now used to. While computer games can be a distraction, they can also be a great tool for learning. With social studies, computers can help students to model life in the past and understand social history. Sandra Day O’Connor has even gotten in on the game. My seventh graders would have loved to use the website the former justice is helping develop about the American justice system. My sixth graders each spent a short time on computers doing an activity on mummification and then they talked about what they learned for weeks. And I know several, otherwise mature, adults who would never admit that they occasionally stay up late creating civilizations on their computer.During summer vacation when it’s too hot to go outside, which games do you encourage your children to play? And which (be honest) do you like to play with them?

Last week, the DOE released results of the Principal Satisfaction Survey that it said proved that principals are happy as clams. Of course, we know the truth is a little more nuanced, and as Diane Ravitch noted after speaking to a number of principals at an event, many principals were hesitant to express their true feelings because they feared retribution; officially, the survey was anonymous, but it was distributed and collected via DOE email addresses.

Still, looking past the sunny picture the DOE painted, Insideschools reporter Vanessa Witenko saw some more unsettling results. In particular, she noticed that only 28 percent of the principals who responded to the survey (who represent 70 percent of all principals) said they were at all satisfied by the way the central student enrollment office handles enrollment of kids with special needs. Check out her full report on principals’ dissatisfaction with special ed enrollment.

Tonight, supporters of the Khalil Gibran International Academy are holding a “an evening of celebration and support” for the school, which continues to be troubled a semester after it opened. Earlier this month, the DOE finally announced a permanent replacement for original principal Debbie Almontaser. This week, the Post reports that shorted in the chaos of the opening months were the school’s 10 students with special needs, who don’t have a dedicated teacher and who apparently have not been receiving any of the services mandated by the IEPs. Class size is also around 30 students with only one teacher in the room, the Post reports, and kids in special education and general education alike are having a hard time learning. For more details about the event tonight, see the Insideschools calendar.

Would you wait in the cold at 4:30 a.m. to sign up for more classes with your elementary school science teacher? That’s what parents from PS 261 in Brooklyn did this past week when Carmelo Piazza, known in the neighborhood as “Carmelo the Science Fellow,” opened registration for the 8-week summer program he runs. The New York Times reports that parents started lining up around 4:30 a.m., and the entire summer session was full less than 3 hours after registration opened at 9 a.m. Piazza sounds indefatigable (and possibly insane), teaching a full schedule, running after-school classes at his neighborhood science joint, and entertaining at weekend birthday parties. The city needs more teachers like him.

It always surprises me how my fellow students always seem to take much more moderate and pragmatic positions on many of today’s more controversial education issues than I would expect.

At last week’s New York City Student Union meeting, the issue that came up was mayoral control of NYC schools, which Albany can either reinstate or let sunset in 2009. While much of what we hear on the issue from other members of the education community (parents, teachers, activists) is outright condemnation, most students were supportive of the idea of mayoral control.

I’ve been on the fence about the issue for a while now, but after hearing my fellow students arguments, I am convinced that mayoral control is not the devil after all.

For starters mayoral control assures that at least someone is responsible and accountable for the success and failure of our education system. It makes education an important issue in the municipal election with both the largest voter turnout and the greatest amount of press coverage and it also serves to keep education in the news because there are always reporters surrounding the mayor.

Mayoral control also centralizes education giving some hope for equal standards citywide and the possibility of important sweeping change.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe it needs some changes. I just took my US History Regents and the idea of checks and balances comes to mind. Since the president has to get his Secretary of Education approved by Congress, why shouldn’t the mayor have to get the chancellor approved by the City Council? Makes sense right? I would also advocate that a Chancellor Selection Board be appointed comprising of teachers, parents, students and administrators to publicly review candidates for the position.

Up to now, most of what I have heard as criticism of mayoral control seems more to be criticism of what Bloomberg and Klein have done to our schools. What we have seen with the current Bloomberg-Klein Complex is a complete denial of some of the most important issues in education, especially class size. They have also shown a pattern of disrespect to many of the constituents of our education system and filled the department with bureaucrats, lawyers and businessmen instead of educators.

We know that we need a chancellor who has experience as an educator in the classroom and in the schools. We need one who understands the delicate processes of teaching and learning. So I say, instead of drifting back to decentralization and the disorganization and confusion that comes with it, why not demand a mayor who will give us just that, who will pledge to put an educator in charge of our schools. This in my belief is one of the biggest positives of mayoral control is that we the people can make this statement.

In 2009, Albany will have a tough decision to make. Mayoral control is an extreme system. It is likely to be very good or very bad because under it change comes much more easily. It does not tend towards moderation. However, in our current state of education, in which way too few of us students graduate and fewer leave our schools ready to support ourselves and become able participants in our democracy, we need a system that will enable change to occur. What we have had is not working. We need new solutions, new ideas. Mayoral control is the most effective way to implement the changes we seek in our schools.

So the question before Albany is this: Do we want to abandon a system that has such a potential for good, just because it hasn’t been used as such in the past six years?
–Cross-posted at NYC Students Blog

When choosing a middle school, what happens after hours is critical in a city where space is scarce and fields are threatened.

Parents mulling middle school options spend a great deal of time comparing math and science programs, class size and school philosophies. They also can’t help noticing the wide disparity of sports and after-school programs and activities

Extras like robotics and rock bands can be big factors for working parents. Who wouldn’t prefer having their kids in fun, structured activities in school instead of hanging out in city parks, unsupervised?

Kids care a lot about these offerings as well. My 5th-grade son is absolutely swayed by the promise of track, soccer and swim teams.

After school sports are even more critical at a time when the few athletic fields available to New York City kids are threatened by politics - as at Randall’s Island - or by development, as at Pier 40, where a huge rally is planned this Sunday at noon to save the fields from development.

So far, no middle school we’ve toured can compete with the offerings at M.A.T. in Chinatown, detailed in a great piece last week in the Downtown Express. The promise of the long-awaited community center that will be available free for all students at IS 289 will also be welcome.

But only M.A.T. offers a climbing wall (a great metaphor for middle schoolers, who literally climb them anyway) along with a surfing club and a tremendous track and field program. John De Matteo, the school’s ambitious athletic director, is building a really impressive program where 65 percent of all students participate in a sport.

To his credit, De Matteo has already met with the principal of Tompkins Square Middle School to explain how M.A.T. can support 16 sports and 38 teams. He plans to meet with other middle school principals to talk about how they can model their programs after M.A.T. as well.

De Matteo is happy to share his insights because he is so convinced that it makes a huge difference in the lives of middle schoolers.

“I believe that being on a structured sports team which teaches children how to work with their teammates, build sportsmanship, build community and character and motivate to improve grades will be one of the most important opportunities for our children to have,” he says.

Any advice M.A.T. can offer middle school principals will be a positive step for all New York City public schools. Space, money and scheduling issues all interfere with the creation of after school programs. Just last week, hundreds of kids and parents crowded into PS 3 in the West Village, pointing out the critical need for more schools in Chelsea and the Village. Kids wondered why luxury condos are cropping up everywhere when schools are not.

There are not enough good public schools in the city. We also need fields, after school programs and sports. Parents are going to have to make a lot of noise to make sure we get them.

In the meantime, let’s offer support and encouragement to the educators and visionaries who are creating, pushing and sharing programs that mean so much to our kids.

Next year, kids at 10-15 schools will have more time in school if all goes according to plan for The After School Corporation, which at the chancellor’s urging has bought into a national push to give up on traditional school hours.

According to the Daily News, TASC is planning a pilot in which kids might go to school through the summer or until 6 p.m. daily in an effort to extend the amount of time they’re learning. In addition to having more time for academics (and, presumably, testing), TASC President Lucy Friedman told the Daily News the new schedule will allow schools to preserve art, music, and sports programs that have been pushed out during the regular school day. TASC says the pilot will honor the teachers’ contract, although it’s difficult to imagine how it could, and it can’t be a good sign that UFT President Randi Weingarten has already called the pilot “another one of these secretive plots.”

The Daily News notes that the idea for the pilot germinated in conversations with Chancellor Klein. Nationally, there is a growing movement to extend school time; the National Center on Time and Learning was launched in October (with some funding from Klein favorite the Broad Foundation), and the issue even got discussed during a Democratic presidential debate this fall. Many charter schools already have longer school schedules.

Looks like parents at PS 40 and PS 116 in Manhattan are taking the advice of Robert Pondiscio and the legions of parents who would do the same thing if they could find enough allies and boycotting some of the testing mandated this year by the DOE. The parents are upset that their kids were selected to take “field tests” to help testmakers devise future exams, in addition to having to take the real state tests in math and ELA and diagnostic tests to generate progress report data.

I don’t think [the field test is] going to be a strain on any particular child, but it replaces classroom teaching, and it is a waste of everybody time, PS 40 parent told the Times. But according to Louise at Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn, individual kids are feeling the strain of one test after another. Louise, who says she’s sick of testing, wrote yesterday that her 5th-grade daughter became distressed last week that the following day she would have to take “what seemed a sudden standardized math test that her teacher told me had something to do with appraising teacher performance.” Louise asks, as did the Manhattan parents boycotting the tests, “Why put a kid through this kind of anxiety?” Perhaps Louise should spearhead a boycott at PS 321. I’m sure she’d have no trouble finding followers.

Who knew I was already right when I hypothesized two weeks ago that the DOE was hoping to change the way teachers are evaluated? Well, besides Eduwonkette, who left a comment telling me so, and at least 140 principals whose teachers are already being judged according to their students’ test scores in an initiative so top secret that even the teachers don’t know about it? Very few people, it appears, according to the New York Times.

In the already-underway experiment, which the Times was the first to report, the test score gains of students at 140 schools will be used to judge their teachers’ success. The DOE is setting “predicted gains” for teachers based on their students’ skills, experiences, and backgrounds and then crunching the numbers to see if the teachers meet those goals. The DOE told the Times, which broke the story, that it doesn’t plan to use the results to make hiring or firing decisions about individual teachers. But Chris Cerf, who apparently has been deputized to talk up the program, said the results could be one factor used in those decisions, and that ultimately making the results public (a la the progress reports) would reward good teachers and put pressure on bad ones. Certainly, the DOE must be interested in providing more ammunition for the teacher firing squads assembled earlier this year.

Naturally, the UFT’s Randi Weingarten, who has backed down in her opposition to other controversial plans, including the Teacher Performance Unit, sounds angry about this one, telling the Times that she and the city disagree on whether results from this pilot or its expansion could be used under the teachers’ contract to make hiring or firing decisions. (On the other hand, the Times says the UFT has known about the experiment for four months, but we haven’t heard any complaints until now.)

The initiative also appears to undercut the little agency afforded teachers in determining how performance pay is distributed this year. I’m pretty sure that we don’t know how many of the schools included in the performance pay pilot elected to distribute their earnings across the whole faculty rather than to individual teachers, but I think it’s safe to guess that’s what happened in most schools. Now the DOE is doing the divisive, problematic work its teachers declined to do.

The Times predicts a battle this summer between the DOE and the UFT over the experiment results. Let’s hope Randi Weingarten (or, potentially, her successor) is up for the fight. The DOE is abusing test score data, which aren’t meant for this kind of crunching, and keeping teachers in the dark about how they’re being evaluated. Regardless of the quality of the research (though even that is questionable  Eduwonkette wonders whether the experiment is ethical given that many of the research subjects don’t know they are part of an experiment at all), the way the DOE has gone about this one is just not right.

The DOE makes a lot of noise when it rolls out a new initiative but it does a good job of staying quiet when it scales them back. The Post reported this past weekend that the science test planned for grades 3 and 6 will not be offered this year after all, at least not for the vast majority of middle and high schools. And science proficiency won’t be a consideration in promotion decisions as the DOE last year suggested it would be. According to the Post, the DOE now plans to start testing all students in science next year.

What’s the reason for the delay? Apparently, the DOE found it didn’t have time to train teachers adequately in the new citywide science curriculum; the Post has quotes from a couple of anonymous teachers who report having “boxes of junk” in their classrooms but no idea how to use their contents. The DOE also says it needs further field testing to devise a fair test.

Inadequate training for teachers and a flawed test sound like good arguments for slowing down implementation of the science test schedule. I’m just surprised that the DOE listened to those arguments after rolling out initiatives far more half-baked than this one. And for those who saw the science test as a sign that the DOE would no longer tolerate schools spending all of their instructional time working on skills tested on the math and English state tests, the delay is certainly disappointing. Let’s hope that schools haven’t been trained too well on teaching only to tests and still make use of the new science curriculum.

What is our role, the students’ role, in our society?

As it stands now we are the constant object of the education discussion sentence. My English teacher told me (and mind you, this was last year… in my junior year of high school) that a simple sentence contains three parts: the subject or actor, the verb or action, and the object or that which is acted upon.

As in: “The Department of Education (that’s the subject) puts (the verb) children (the object) first (I guess that’s an adjective).”

In the American education debate, we are acted upon by many subjects: The Department of Education, which treats us like products, numbers that need to be manipulated so that it can look good; the city, which treats us as criminals who need to be babysat by the NYPD for a couple of hours a day; and our teachers, whom people assume can snap their fingers and turn us into brilliant astrophysicists ready to herald in a new age of American economic glory.

In debates about the issues, class size for example, we always hear about how current conditions make teaching impossible. What about learning? Do you think it’s any easier to learn in a class of 34 than it is to teach? Since when has learning become a passive action? Just because it contains no plosive sounds and seems to flow off the tongue a bit easier doesn’t mean it’s any smoother of a process. Learning is not an exact science. It takes hard work, intense concentration and in today’s schools, quite a bit of luck.

If our education systems are truly trying to put “Children First,” then it is time for us to become the subject of our education. People like Joel Klein need to stop asking, “Are our teachers teaching?” and instead ask, in the words of the Bard, “Is our children learning?”

To refocus this picture, we students need to take a more active role in our schools. That is the key mission of the New York City Student Union, a citywide, student-founded, student-run organization. Since its creation in 2006, the union’s goals have been to act as a powerful collective voice for New York City’s students, to give students a say in the decisions made about them, and to provide communication between students from all over the City.

Each Monday, these students from small schools, impact schools, specialized schools and others, meet to examine the problems in our city’s schools and come up with student-generated solutions to them. For example, we’ve advocated the need for smaller classes to the governor and other state officials. We testified before the New York City Council against the cell phone ban, and most recently we’ve lobbied the Department of Education on improving its new progress reports and student surveys.

Additionally we work on student empowerment projects such as our Student Government Project, in which we are researching the state of student governments around the city and look to develop an effective student government model so that students can have a greater say in their individual schools, and the NYC Students Blog, the first-ever student-run blog about the NYC education system, which features the voices of seven student bloggers, representing every borough, giving their take on education issues.

I believe that the only way to make students the subject of the education debate is for us to take a more active role in larger education politics and the goings on of our own schools. We must remember that we are the learners. That is an honorable position to be in. We are not products or tools or criminals. We are potential incarnate.

Cross-posted on the NYC Students Blog

It’s been a couple of years since the mayor added another grade to the list of those in which a failing grade on either state test requires a child to go through the holdover process, but in his “State of the City” address today, Mayor Bloomberg announced that next year, 8th grade will join grades 3, 5, and 7 on that list.

The details have yet to be announced — that must be what the chancellor’s 3 p.m. press briefing is for — but we can expect that 8th grade teachers and middle school principals can plan to spend time this spring reviewing the work of their 1-scoring students, as the automatic review process requires. And this new policy will be sure to cause problems for high schools and summer school planners, who will have to update their rolls based on the results of 8th graders’ test scores.

The mayor also noted that the city is planning to step up vocational offerings in the public schools. A task force has been convened to supervise the 2009 launch of programs that will begin in high schools and continue in local colleges. And he also said that this fall, families will be able to log in to the test score monitoring system that principals and teachers already use. Hopefully it’s less confusing than the progress reports, which befuddled parents and school officials alike.

The mayor had lots to say about things other than education. You should read the whole address and find out what else he has planned for New Yorkers.

In Insideschools’ most recent college advice column, our counselor noted that guidance counselors in many high schools are responsible for so many students that they often are unable to give each kid the attention he or she deserves. I recently heard from a father who said the same situation persists in middle schools as well. Kids applying to high school or college don’t get adequate support, nor do kids who need help solving personal or family problems.

Why doesn’t this issue get more attention? Possibly, it’s because the situation hasn’t changed much in decades. Check out a 1990 New York Times article on the subject, “Trying Times for Guidance Counselors.” The article describes a system that is underfunded by the state, where guidance counselors can just barely stay on top of paperwork, much less grapple with the individual and very adult challenges of their students. If that doesn’t sound familiar, perhaps this will:

”Our kids are feeling totally alienated and not connected,” said Caesar Previdi, the principal of Martin Luther King Jr. High School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. ”The schools have gone too far in the direction of judging kids on the basis of test scores and grades. In the schools we should not be ducking our responsiblity to support the family if and when thqe family is crippled.”

Some things never change.

This letter, signed by Dana O’Brien, was published last week in the New York Times.

As a public school student myself, as well as on behalf of the New York City Student Union, I would like to commend Assemblyman Mark Weprin on his public statement on the overemphasis on high-stakes testing in New York City public education.

While there are still many great teachers in this city who are working hard to foster critical thinking, creativity, imagination and all of the qualities that make a truly educated person, their efforts are often squelched by Department of Education policies and curriculums that value uniformity and accountability over teaching and learning.

While we at the Student Union recognize and appreciate the need for accountability in such a large system, we believe that a degree of flexibility and subjectivity is necessary in evaluating schools and students. We are working with Chancellor Joel I. Klein’s staff on improving aspects of the school report card system, but there is still much to be done.

Prospective and current middle school parents might want to question math curriculums more aggressively. What topics are covered and what kind of background and training does your child’s math teacher have?

Chances are the answer to both questions could be not enough.

A new study, Mathematics Teaching in the 21st Century,’’ by Michigan State University researcher and Professor William H. Schmidt, reminded me why I should be paying more attention to math issues during middle school tours.All too often, middle schools offer an unfocused curriculum taught by unprepared educators who can’t help middle school kids make the transition from arithmetic to real mathematics, Schmidt’s study found.

Teachers in five other countries are more prepared to teach math than middle school teachers in the United States, the study says.Schmidt believes the existence of a coherent and challenging math curriculum should be a deciding factor for judging the quality of a middle school. Kids who don’t get the math they need will have trouble with math in high school and won’t get very far, he warns.

Any parent touring middle schools in New York City can quickly discern wide variation in the way math is taught. Some schools offer more and push students to learn high-level math, like the well regarded NEST+M, which offers a challenging program of Singapore math. Some middle schools provide Regents-level math and others don’t.

School of the Future offers a curriculum map for 7th grade, promising a linguistic/real life approach to mathematics.’’ One school I toured handed out a sheet noting that math is part of the 6th-grade curriculum; another simply said it offers “high-quality instruction, without further explanation.

It’s easy to get confused and skip the math questions if you don’t know what to ask.That’s one reason Schmidt has long pushed for specific content standards laying out what every child is expected to learn and know by every grade in mathematics. If such standards existed nationally, parents would know what to expect. The standards would inform teacher training in math, he says.

“It’s incumbent on education schools and on our society to deem math education important enough to have such standards,€™™ Schmidt told me during an interview about his study last week.

“It’s logical,’’ he explains. With clear standards, you would have the whole system organized instead of arbitrary and hit and miss. If you follow Schmidt’s logic, choosing a middle school with a particularly strong art or music program should not mean sacrificing math education. Each and every middle school would offer similar math curriculums with properly trained teachers.

Parents who want to know more about math requirements can consult the New York State math standards, which describe should be taught in each grade. That they are somewhat confusing to follow comes as no surprise to Schmidt.

“The problem is the standards are not very accessible to parents,’’ Schmidt says. “And they can be so full of jargon it’s difficult for parents to agitate for them.

School officials may tell you it’s really hard to find enough highly trained and math teachers, says Schmidt. “But your child shouldn’t have to suffer as a result.”

Parents, says Schmidt, should ask questions about math and demand answers.

It’s one small way to push for change.

Since the DOE has demonstrated that it will do whatever it wants, a good way to predict future DOE initiatives is to pay attention to what DOE officials say ought to be done. So when DOE bigwig Christopher Cerf participates on a panel about the “dismal” state of teacher evaluations and decries teachers’ “deep antipathy” to being evaluated in a meaningful way, we can assume that somewhere inside Tweed, someone is thinking about new ways to rate teachers. Unfortunately for those of us who think the influence of test scores should be limited, Cerf also said he is “unapologetic that test scores must be a central component of evaluation,”
Education Week reports from the panel.

In fact, Cerf said at the panel that DOE leaders are working on an evaluation system that will look at how far teachers raise their students’ test scores. As I recall, one of the papers presented at the Research Partnership conference in October drew on data that showed how far individual students progressed within each classroom, so evidently the bones for such a system must already exist. I imagine the larger obstacle for the DOE will be getting the UFT to agree to use a new evaluation system that relies on hard data instead of observation by other teachers. Of course, the UFT hasn’t been much of an impediment to any of the DOE’s other initiatives, even when those initiatives appeared not to be in the best interest of teachers.

An article in the Sun today takes a look at tension between students and the administration at Stuyvesant High School, which has been percolating for years and has reached a new high this fall. Kids are upset that they must now swipe their ID cards when they enter the school and leave for lunch and that the school is now assigning lockers and locks to students, instead of allowing them to select their own. Students have started StuyWatch.com to protest these policies and monitor students’ rights at the school; one user complained of “a general air of mistrust from the administration with regards to students,” the Stuyvesant Spectator reported. The site, which doesn’t appear to be public right now, has hundreds of registered users, the Sun reports, but Principal Stanley Teitel isn’t taking it too seriously; he says the new policies are necessary for safety reasons.

The situation at Stuyvesant is like those that Seth and the other members of the NYC Student Union are working on citywide. Across the city, kids must contend with policies that include random scanning and a cell phone ban. I’m guessing that even reasonable changes in this climate feel disrespectful to students.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Many New York City students would like to have someone to whom they can turn,” but their schools don’t provide mental health services, writes a high school student in an article first published in New Youth Connections and reprinted by the Gotham Gazette. The author, April Daley, writes that kids might be more likely to seek out help if it’s available at their schools, but many schools don’t have on-campus health centers and even those that do don’t always have staff members trained in mental health issues.Daley also notes that City Council member Gale Brewer and others pressed this year for funding for school health centers and mental health professionals for every school. They were not successful but plan to try again next year.Does your school have a counselor on staff? What can kids do if they feel, as Daley says is common, like they “need someone to talk to”?

At the Contracts for Excellence hearing in Manhattan last night, dozens of parents, teachers, advocates, and students voiced harsh criticisms about the Department of Education’s plans to spend this year’s record increase in state education funding.

The funds, which are a direct result of a joint lawsuit against the state by two non-profit organizations, will result in over $1 billion in additional money for New York City schools during the coming school year. Of that total, $228 million is required to conform to Governor Spitzer’s Contracts for Excellence mandate, meaning the money must be used to accomplish one of five specific goals, including smaller class sizes and more “time on task” — i.e. longer days or more days in the school year. (For more on the history of this issue, check out our previous posts on the topic.)

Last week Chancellor Klein announced his plan for spending the Contracts for Excellence money, essentially claiming that the City’s new Fair Student Funding system would automatically meet the requirements of Contracts for Excellence, and nothing more needed to be done. The plan did, however, specify how much money will be used to address each of Spitzer’s allowed spending categories. This week the DOE is conducting hearings throughout the City, gathering public comment on the plan, and at last night’s hearing in Manhattan the comments reflected serious disenchantment with the plan.

Geri Palast of Campaign for Fiscal Equity (one of the groups that brought the original lawsuit) stressed the need for specific commitments in the plan. “The City’s plan is overly broad and is not specific enough,” she said, and she asked the city to post individual schools’ plans on the DOE’s Contracts for Excellence webpage.

Many speakers criticized the lack of serious public input for the DOE’s spending plan. The press release detailing the plan and the schedule for public hearings was published July 5, and the plan must be submitted to the state by July 15, leaving only ten days for public comment of any sort. The short notice, and the fact that the hearings are occurring in July– when education is not at the forefront of many parents’ minds– drew sharp criticism.

Others bemoaned the lack of a long-term plan to comply with the Contracts for Excellence requirements. Leonie Haimson– a parent and blogger for NYC Public School Parents– said the plan is in “flagrant violation of state law” because there is “absolutely no five-year plan to reduce class size, as mandated by the Contracts for Excellence.”

But the most common criticism by far was the need for more focus on reducing class sizes. Of the $228 million governed by the Contracts for Excellence requirements, the plan classifies $111 million for class size reduction, hiring an additional 1,300 teachers for the coming year. However, it’s unclear how much this will actually reduce class sizes, since we don’t know how many of those teachers will have their own classrooms. Additionally, Haimson and many others have noted that even if every teacher were to have their own new classroom, average class size across the city would only fall by between .3 and .8 students. The DOE, for its part, provides only the following clarification: “By investing in class size reduction, the DOE projects first-year class size reduction that exceeds the annual rate of reduction over the last five years.” Seth Pearce, a senior at Laguardia and representative of the New York City Student Union, also stressed the need for smaller classes, saying reduced class size is “instrumental to improving teacher quality.” His complete comments can be read here. Ben Shanahan, of Hunter College High School, also weighed in– see his comments at NYC Student Word.

For a more complete discussion of the class size reduction plan’s criticisms, read Haimson’s post on the topic. Otherwise, check back here for continuing coverage.

7/13 Update: NYC Public School Parents has links to the comments made by several more people Wednesday evening.

President Bush’s No Child Left Behind act is coming up for reauthorization in congress, and many are calling for changes. In particular, Edspresso reports today about the Derby, Kansas, board of education’s decision to issue a resolution on the matter.

The board voted to endorse the No Child Left Behind Improvement Act (also known as HR 648) with specific recommendations for greater local control. The school board from Highland, Indiana, has followed suit. The Northwest Indiana Times reports National School Board association urged the board to issue the resolution.

So the wave is starting, and local education groups are weighing in. Check out the current state of No Child Left Behind, and if you have thoughts, tell your congressional representative or organize a resolution within your PTA or district.

The On Education column this week in the Times, by reporter David Herszenhorn, addresses a simple idea that, if actually understood by legislators and the general public, could dramatically change the way schools are governed: “Working with children looks easy. It is not.”

Herzsenhorn writes that covering the schools has shown him that the challenges facing people working in schools are broader than most on the outside imagine. He writes:

School professionals are called upon not only to educate children, but also to nurture curiosity and civic values, and even to teach the most basic manners. … Not only do professional educators have to know how to deal with children, they have to be clever about soothing an even wackier bunch: parents.The daily work in schools is so hard that most educators in the system do not distinguish between the chancellor’s office and the mayor, the labor unions and state government, the teachers’ contract and the federal No Child Left Behind law when they complain, frequently, that the “system” is against them.

Forces above and beyond school level often make the work in classrooms more difficult. And the work in classrooms is difficult enough.

While this notion might seem like a no-brainer, the fact is that teachers and administrators are continually asked to improve students’ performance — measured in standardized test scores — without being able to address kids’ vast “non-academic” needs. And when teachers struggle to raise scores, their quality is impugned. Sometimes criticizing teachers is justified, but often it’s a smokescreen to distract from the more complicated factors underlying student performance.

A quarter of kids in New York City live in poverty (as do 1 in 6 kids nationally). The city’s expansion of the summer meals program underscores the reality that many kids here are often hungry. This reality, like many others beyond teachers’ control, makes it hard for kids to learn. Not until legislators sincerely address the “forces above and beyond school level” can successfully teaching kids get easier.

Above: Parents at the press conference demonstrate the minor effect of reducing class size by less than one kid per class. Philissa Cramer/Insideschools.org

At this morning’s press conference on the steps of City Hall, Robert Jackson, chair of the City Council’s education committee, and small class size advocates railed against the DOE’s “bad faith effort” to reduce class size, as outlined in the city’s proposed spending plan. They also took aim at the DOE’s “lack of transparency” with the hard numbers behind this initiative and others; in particular, they noted that it’s unclear just how many of the 1,300 new teachers the DOE says it is hiring will have their own classrooms. Here are some sound bites from the press conference:

Jackson: “We said, where’s the rest of the plan? … You question [DOE officials], and most of the time they will not come up with answers. … There’s so much lack of transparency, I cannot tell [what’s true] as chair of the education committee.”

Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters: “We asked [DOE officials] how many new general education classes will there be? They couldn’t tell us.”

Noreen Connell of the Educational Priorities Panel: “What is the advantage of this bad faith effort? What can be gained by not reducing class size?”

Several people who spoke also decried the mid-summer timeline for responding to the DOE’s spending plan, which could prevent people from being able to get information quickly and weigh in with their feedback. You can give feedback on the plan at five public hearings on the Contracts for Excellence this week. See the Insideschools calendar for details.

At Insideschools, we pay careful attention when a school gets a new principal. So when Jolanta Rohloff, the controversial principal of Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School, resigned in March, we took notes — especially because we had been following her exploits, which included unfairly reducing students’ grades and issuing many “unsatisfactory” ratings to teachers, pretty closely. Now, Rohloff has resurfaced in news that reveals unsettling information about how principals are assigned to schools.

Last week, the Post reported that Rohloff was one of two candidates for the principal at Manhattan Center for Math and Science. Earlier this week, Manhattan Center parents told the Daily News they felt “hoodwinked” because they had received no information about Rohloff and her terrible track record before interviewing her. Yesterday came the news, also in the Daily News, that Rohloff had removed herself from contention for that job and instead will work to develop a new high school that will open in 2008 — where she will be principal.

The Daily News also reported recently that Rohloff is receiving the maximum bonus for Lafayette’s performance, even though she left the school before the year ended and the DOE considers the school so weak that it is being phased out. (In general, the list of schools where principals are receiving bonuses doesn’t seem, at first glance, to correspond to what Insideschools knows about the schools’ quality.)

Here are a few questions I’d love to have answered: Why are some principals censured and even removed for grading improprieties and others are not? Why are principals who have proven themselves divisive and even unfit allowed (or in this case, it seems, encouraged) to continue to lead schools? And what checks are in place at the DOE to make sure the results of data-crunching on principal performance and other matters actually make sense?

Today the New York Times published an article by Sam Dillon on the growing trend toward merit-based pay for teachers. Although Chancellor Joel Klein’s plan for incentive-based teacher pay in New York City has stalled, the Times article reports that the movement is gaining steam at the national level. Dillon cites University of Wisconsin’s Allan Odden, a professor of educational administration who studies teacher pay. According to Odden, the merit pay trend has now reached “critical mass,” and teachers unions (whose members have historically opposed merit-based compensation) have begun to cooperate with the movement in some regions.

In New York City, Klein has wanted to implement an incentive-based compensation program since he became chancellor, but the issue has stalled over conflicts with the city’s teachers union.

Despite the standoff over Klein’s incentive pay proposal, merit pay did see a recent boost in New York City when a group of NYC charter schools received a federal grant for $10.5 million from the Teacher Incentive Fund. Check out the New York Sun’s article for more.

For more on the state of the merit pay debate, check out the Economist’s May 10 article.

Last week, when Washington, D.C., named Michelle Rhee, a Teach for America alum who was running the New Teacher Project, its new schools superintendent, some pointed to a TFA “insurgency” in public education. Teach for America began placing graduates of top universities in hard-to-fill teaching positions in 1990, and the oldest of its 12,000 alums are now nearing age 40. The ones who have stuck in education have almost two decades of experience and are poised to make the leap from classrooms to leadership positions.

Critics of Teach for America say the program’s structure — requiring its participants to teach in a high-need classroom for two years — does little to address the national problem of teacher retention, and they complain that the young teachers are ill prepared for the most challenging classrooms. These are legitimate critiques. Still, I’ve visited schools in the city where the infusion of youthful energy and enthusiasm have benefited the entire school. I’ve also met several young principals of new schools who launched their careers in education through Teach for America; according to the organization, more than 80 administrators in New York got their start in TFA.

Rhee’s position as a superintendent marks a watershed moment for Teach for America, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise. As much as it has been positioned as outside the mainstream, TFA actually promotes only what we all know works to improve schools: dedication, teacher quality, and a healthy dose of innovation. The ascendancy of TFA grads in educational leadership — whether in traditional bureaucracies or in non-profit reform organizations like KIPP, which one could argue are more influential right now — reflects less an “insurgency” than the trickle-up effect of getting smart young people hooked on teaching and reforming schools. There’s little for critics to fault in that.