Parents, teachers, facilities managers, and students can share ideas and information about schools going green on a new citywide website, Green Schools NYC. Green schools experts can post links, ideas, and information, while people looking for ideas and advice on greening schools can find them on the site, or ask experts for information.

The more users who  join the website, the more useful it will be for both experts and newbies. Already participating on the site are parents and teachers at schools that have worm composting projects (that give kids a science lesson while reducing food waste) and parents at schools who are throwing green-themed fall festivals.

The Links and Resources page contains links to local organizations that provide programs, advice, and curriculum on schools going green, including one where children visit farms and cook meals with freshly picked vegetables. The new site makes it easy to post documents, such as the Back To School Green Schools Supplies memo posted by a mom at PS 334, which can be downloaded and adapted by other schools. (more…)

Last spring we reported that the Department of Education issued a ban on hiring new teachers due to budget cuts. Instead, principals were urged to hire teachers from the pool of excessed teachers — those who lost their jobs due to schools closing, or staff cuts, but who continue to receive a full salary, even though they are not in the classroom.

A week into the new school year, Chancellor Klein reiterated his call for principals to hire excessed teachers. In his weekly letter to principals, Klein said there are 1,500 teachers in the excessed pool, 500 more than last year. “This is a fiscal liability in this budget climate, and we must reduce it,” he writes. He goes on to point out there are 1,100 teacher vacancies in the city’s schools.

Klein imposed a hiring deadline of Oct. 30 and insists that most vacancies be filled with “internal staff.” For those schools which are unable to fill the positions by that date, the DOE “may be be forced to take back the dollars budgeted for those positions to pay for the increase in teachers in the excess pool.” (more…)

GothamSchools led us to a post on The New York Times Bits Blog about a partnership between two innovative websites that allows you to turn unused gift cards into donations for schools.

According to Plastic Jungle, which buys, sells and trades gift cards, the average American household has around $400 worth in unused cards. Plastic Jungle’s users typically exchange cards for crash or a credit at Amazon.com, but now they have another option: allied with DonorsChoose.org, the site allows users to donate the face value of a gift card to schools in need.

Back in 2007, our blogger Jennifer Freeman introduced us to DonorsChoose, which offers public school teachers the opportunity to post their needs for classroom projects in the hopes of receiving funding. You can browse the project requests and donate to the cause of your choice — and thanks to Plastic Jungle, not just with your credit card, but with your unused gift cards, too!

A study released yesterday by NYU’s Institute for Education and Social Policy takes a look at graduates of the city’s controversial Leadership Academy, which offers educators an alternative route to becoming school principals.

According to the study, graduates of the Leadership Academy’s 14-month Aspiring Principals Program (APP) tend to be younger educators with fewer years of teaching experience than other new principals who were traditionally trained. In keeping with the program’s mission to place its graduates in the hardest-to-staff schools, they are also  more likely to serve at troubled schools with a history of poor student achievement. Nonetheless, the study says, program veterans showed gains comparable to those of their traditional peers, and on elementary and middle school ELA exams, their increases outpaced those of other new principals. (more…)

In an editorial in today’s Daily News, Eva Moskowitz weighs in on the controversial  decision by the Department of Education to  clamp down on parent associations paying for non-union teaching aides in their children’s classrooms. Her take? Schools benefit from parent fund-raising that helps lower class size, especially in middle class schools which get less funding than those with a high percentage of low income students.  She posits, “The UFT doesn’t like it because these aspiring teachers aren’t union members.”

Commenters on Insideschools have been debating the merits of the practice, which according to the New York Times, only affects about 18 highly desirable city schools. Some argue that this is “another example of  Bloomberg steamrolling important parent input,”  that  will “drive more  middle class [families] out of the city. ” Others argue that, “It’s a public system and there should be a level playing field.” A few commenters suggest ways in which schools across the city can “pool fundraising.” Others note the role of the powerful teachers union, which filed a grievance last fall about the hiring practice. (more…)

A group of Upper West Side parents, elected officials and other concerned citizens has been meeting this summer to plan a new, academically challenging high school focused on journalism and writing to open with a 9^th grade class in fall, 2010, in the Brandeis High School building on West 84^th Street. The group, organized by City Councilwoman Gale Brewer, hopes the school will be named in honor of Frank McCourt, a former Stuyvesant High School teacher and author of the bestseller Angela’s Ashes ,who died on Sunday.

The school is still in the planning stages, but the parents, led by Tom Allon, publisher of the West Side Spirit who taught with Frank McCourt at Stuyvesant, hope it will grow to serve between 800 to 1,000 students. That’s small enough to give students a sense of community, but large enough to offer art, drama, several foreign languages, Advanced Placement, special education and services for English Language Learners that are often missing at the new small schools that have been created in recent years. The Department of Education is interviewing prospective “project directors” for the school this summer. The “project director” will be hired part-time in the fall and, if the school is approved by the DOE, will likely be assigned as principal early in 2010. (more…)

United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten will be leaving the NYC-based teachers union, as has been widely rumored and reported, to focus on her duties as president of the national union, the American Federation of Teachers, a post she’s held since last July.  UFT VP Michael Mulgrew, who began his professional life as a carpenter and is a long-time advocate for career and technical education, will step up and serve as president until elections are held in 2010.

Weingarten’s most recent achievements cap her decade of service with the UFT: She succeeded in negotiating a new contract that gives teachers Labor Day weekend off (and which succeeded in angering the Principals Union), and she worked with the Department of Education’s  Charter Office and Green Dot Public Schools, the California-based charter school entrepreneurs, to secure well-paying union contracts for the new charter’s teachers.

At a recent middle school event, some of the newly tall eighth-graders looked down at their parents. Many had caught up with the girls who once towered above them. I saw facial hair and giant sneakers.   I glanced over at the incoming fifth-graders attending the event and wondered what these tiny, tiny children were doing in the same building.

By the end of middle school, these children may become unrecognizable in ways large and small. They might begin to tune out the voices of their parents and teachers. They’ll rely heavily on electronic communication — Facebook, text messaging, instant messaging — and, probably, on forms of e-connecting we don’t yet imagine.

I shared an observation about the unpredictable ways of eighth-graders to a teacher that faces three full classes of at least 32 thirteen and fourteen-year-olds every day. “Wait, who am I talking to?’’ I said with a shudder. (more…)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you’ve spent all week wondering whether paying some teachers not to teach improves the over-all quality of instruction, or if you have been too engrossed in the Times Magazine’s annual College Issue to get to the papers, here’s a recap of NYC school news.

First, some some shake-ups in the DOE: Chief equality officer Roland Fryer has resigned to lead the newly minted Educational Innovation Laboratory. Fryer, who is also a Harvard professor, will continue to study the controversial cash-for-performance program that he brought to New York, which is being expanded to include some eighth graders. The city has hired a new person in charge of schools ethics who held the same job for an infamously ethically-challenged former-politician. Christine Quinn, who is most likely running for mayor in ‘09, staunchly defended mayoral control of the schools. She may be facing some steep competition in that mayoral race; both Bloomberg and Klein might throw their hats in, with schools at the center of either potential candidate’s platform.

With all the excessed teacher news, the Sun also wrote about a disturbing trend that the percentage of new teachers who are black is shrinking, rather dramatically. A host of teachers with illegally-large class-sizes have filed grievances with the DOE. And there doesn’t seem to be any space for classes of any size downtown next fall, but when new schools finally do open, parents are relieved that they will have K-8 options. Students and teachers across the city may get two more religious holidays off next year: Eid ul-Fitr and Eid ul-Adha. And a new field-trip option opened in Harlem: a state of the art DNA lab.

City Limits took an in-depth look at universal pre-k issues in the city, and a five-year-old was mistakenly loaded onto a school bus and then kicked out at the end of the line. The big push to get soda out of schools may not have had much of an effect on soda consumption, but an advertising lesson in three California High Schools aims to emphasize the value of drinking milk to students across the country.

Both the Sun and the Times today take up the thorny issue of ‘excessed’ teachers, after a UFT press conference and volleys of emails and other communication between DOE and UFT leadership. Of the city’s 15,000 teachers, about 1,000 have been ‘excessed’ from their schools — because the school closed or was restructured by the DOE or as the result of budget-cutting efforts by CEO principals faced with contracting school budgets. (It’s also entirely possible that some weak teachers were moved out to improve the overall quality of teaching, but no one addresses this question directly.)

Excessed teachers are assigned to the Absent Teacher Pool — which the nonprofit New Teacher Project suggests will cost the city $74 million in 2008-09. The Pool is a kind of human reservoir, that schools can dip into in order to fill temporary or longer-term vacancies.

The Catch-22 here is, no surprise, money. The contract negotiated between the city and the UFT in 2005 significantly increased teacher compensation, which was long overdue. But for principals looking to trim $75,000 or so from their budget, laying off an experienced classroom veteran in favor of less-costly newbie makes tough sense.

The DOE wants to limit the time a teacher can remain in the Pool; the UFT says that’s not what they agreed in the contract and wants a hiring freeze until excessed teachers have jobs. Several members charge discrimination, saying that principals aren’t interested in more-expensive, older talent.

How to best use the teachers in the Absent Teacher Pool will surely persist as a nagging and very expensive question: How many teachers at failed or closing schools — some of the same classroom leaders who received big cash rewards a few days ago — will find themselves there next year?

Three 6-12 schools already exist in Brooklyn’s District 15 — The Secondary Schools for Law, Journalism and Social Research, in the old John Jay High School building — to mixed reviews, but the DOE has approved a new secondary charter, the Brooklyn Prospect Charter School, to open in September 2009. It will be District 15’s first charter school at any level and only the second secondary charter school in the city. Admission is by lottery, with priority to District 15.

Information sessions are planned for October 6 and 27 from 6-8 p.m. at Methodist Hospital in Park Slope. Tours are moot: There’s no actual site for the school just yet. Executive director and co-founder Dan Rubenstein says that he’s hoping for a site within walking distance of BAM, their community partner, although he expects the school will incubate in one site in the short term before being assigned its own building.

Led by Rubenstein and Luyen Chou (a founder of the fabled School at Columbia University, ed-tech wizard, and former Dalton faculty member), the new charter will open with 88 students in four sixth-grade classes and grow with a new grade every year. Rubenstein, who describes himself as “a teacher first and a school leader second,” says all Brooklyn Prospect teachers will be certified but will not be bound by union contracts, as is common among charters since they often require longer hours and other work not permitted by UFT regulations.

No building seems to be no problem for interested parents. Applications are being accepted for the coming year; to learn more or RSVP for an info session, visit the school’s website.

Should teachers at schools destined for closure double down and teach with greater vigor — or slouch into oblivion? An article by Jennifer Medina in today’s Times highlights the apparently contradictory (and surely embarrassing) fact that the DOE gave significant cash awards, linked to the school progress reports, to teachers and administrators at five DOE-designated ‘failed’ schools.

The core question — how can DOE both reward and punish the same schools? — is well worth asking. And some of the players, notably John Hughes of the newly-renamed Hunts Point School (which was, last year, MS 201), do force questions of ethics and judgment. But for a moment, consider the teachers, the folks in the classrooms, and recognize the dedication that keeps them coming back, despite a school being shuttered around them and the pressure to find a new job.

Teachers who help students learn are to be celebrated. Teachers who help students learn even when the school they share is on the DOE chopping block deserve medals — and loud praise from the communities they serve.

Chancellor Klein and UFT president Randi Weingarten announced this morning that more than 6,000 elementary and middle schools educators will receive cash bonuses in reward for their schools’ performances on the progress reports. Faculty at 89 schools, slightly more than half of the 160 elementary and middle schools that elected to participate in the pilot program, qualified for the bonuses. The schools decided how to distribute the bonuses among full-time union members (either equally or based each individual’s contribution). Most schools chose to divide the money equally, sending teachers home with either $3,000 or $1,500 each, depending on the school’s progress report turned out. (Principals were awarded up to $25,000; for more details on the methodology and results, see the DOE’s breakdown.)

The bonuses for elementary and middle schools this year totaled $19.7 million (cash awards for teachers and administrators at high schools will be announced later). All of the money was privately donated. Next year, however, the program becomes publicly funded. Since there is no cap on how many schools can qualify for the cash, if the progress report grades continue their upward trend, the bonus-program could take a big bite out of the shrinking DOE budget. Yesterday, Helen rounded up several concerns about the progress reports, and today, Insideschools alum Philissa Cramer analyzed apparent methodological errors in the progress reports. Chancellor Klein and Randi Weingarten stressed that the pilot bonus program would be studied by an independent consultant – but will the progress reports, which the bonuses are based on –undergo the same scrutiny?

In this first year, the program was both an experiment in implementation and a welcome reward for hard-working educators; whether the ‘carrot’ of a bonus actually inspires better teaching or contributes to hiring and keeping qualified teachers is still left to be tested because schools opted into the program too late last year for the cash incentives to have substantially affected this year’s progress reports. It will take many years, and no doubt many independent consultants, to determine whether the carrot-aspect of the plan actually works and whether that means even more stress on test prep.

Like so many official school announcements, the Washington Heights location of the press conference was strategic; everyone hiked uptown to the Mirabel Sisters campus, formerly the site of one of the city’s worst-performing middle schools and now the home of three small schools, two of which received As on their progress reports and cash bonuses for their faculty and staff. The teachers and principals from those schools talked about a moral imperative to help students succeed, collaborative work among the staff, and using data to drive instruction, barely mentioning the windfall they had just received. “The money is very nice,” Janet Heller, one of the two principals, eventually acknowledged with a smile. “We aren’t working for it, but it recognizes that we did it.”

What has cost the DOE as much as ARIS in the last couple of years? Teachers who aren’t working, according to a report being released today by the New Teacher Project, a non-profit organization that helps school districts find and train new teachers.

The report, titled “Mutual Benefits: New York City’s Shift to Mutual Consent in Teacher Hiring,” takes a look at the effects of the 2005 UFT-DOE contract, which ended the practice by which older teachers could “bump” younger teachers from their schools and instituted a system where teachers who are “excessed,” or released from their positions at schools, continue to earn tenure and be paid while they apply for new positions — or not. The report concludes that the practice of “mutual consent” has resulted in teachers being happier with their positions but that the growing pool of excessed teachers is becoming a financial burden on the system. Half of the 600 teachers who were excessed in 2006 and early 2007 who did not find a new position did not apply for any jobs through the DOE’s online hiring system, according to the report, to the tune of $81 million by the end of this school year.

Many of the report’s findings are likely verifiable, but it’s important to note that the New Teacher Project has an organizational interest in making sure there are positions for new teachers and funds free to pay them — it runs the city’s Teaching Fellows program. Evaluated in this context, the report’s central recommendation — that excessed teachers be removed from the payroll after a “reasonable period” and allowed “for a certain number of years” to be able to return to a teaching position at the same salary and seniority level — reads like opportunism, not thoughtful education policy. And it makes Mayor Bloomberg’s use of the report as a reason to reopen contract negotiations with the UFT positively inexcusable; he is planning to seek permission to remove from city payroll teachers who have gone without a job for 12 months.

The Times notes that Chancellor Klein has characterized most teachers in the reserve pool as undesirable or unwilling to look for work. We don’t know exactly how many of the non-working excessed teachers fit that bill. But we do know that with budget cuts making it financially stressful for schools to maintain experienced teaching staffs, principals must make hard choices to be able to afford to hire senior teachers. And with a cadre of first-year teachers always at the ready (thanks in part to the New Teacher Project), the incentives to make those choices are slim. That’s why the UFT earlier this month filed an age discrimination lawsuit against the DOE. In times like this, senior teachers need more protections, not a new rule that removes them from the system so long as schools can get along without them.

And if you’re worried about unqualified teachers keeping their jobs, don’t be — the Teacher Performance Unit is on the job.

Here’s one way to deal with the disheartening and overwhelming school admissions process in New York City: don’t apply.

A growing number of the city’s families who are choosing to homeschool are middle-class black families who believe the options open to them won’t sufficiently challenge or support their children, particularly their boys, according to an article in the Village Voice. Instead, those parents present an enriched curriculum, often with an Afrocentric orientation, in a setting that’s free from bullying and other negative social pressures. There are downsides, of course — one parent has to give up working, school supplies and enrichment activities cost money, and it can be hard for kids to make friends — but according to the Voice, more black parents every year think homeschooling pays off in academic achievement, safety, and self-esteem.

I’ve always thought that New York City would be a great place to homeschool — it’s sort of absurd that in a city with such deep cultural, artistic, and academic resources, kids sit in classrooms all day. But homeschooling, like any other alternative school choice, should be a positive choice, not a means to escaping schools that can’t meet kids’ academic and social needs.

Anyone who thinks the New York Times has been soft on the DOE in recent years should take note: Sam Freedman is on the job. His column today addresses the question of “How a Middle School Can Be ‘Dangerous’ and Still Get an A.” Freedman takes a look at South Bronx Academy for Applied Media, which got an A on its progress report but also holds a slot on the state’s list of “persistently dangerous” schools.

Former teachers describe a place where they spent more time putting out fires and deflecting profanities aimed at them than teaching. It’s true that teachers who have left a school may have competing reasons for wanting to go to the press with their complaints — but the school’s Learning Environment Survey bears out their assertion that the school isn’t safe. Principal Roshone Ault said the school got its “persistently dangerous” designation because she reports every incident, but teachers said they were dissuaded from reporting some incidents. (Ault, formerly a teacher at a charter school that was closed due to poor performance, was the subject of a Times article last year about the new wave of young principals.)

At South Bronx Academy, which opened in 2005, 13 of 16 teachers were brand new last year, and Freedman said half of teachers fled the school in the last year. The progress reports don’t take teacher retention into account. James Liebman told the Times that “many teachers flee schools that are in the midst of reform and instilling a ‘culture of accountability,’” though how a new school can be in the midst of reform is not clear. What is clear is that in the bizarro world of DOE-2K7, teacher attrition, widely understood to seriously inhibit school success, is actually a good thing.

Freedman doesn’t contest the fact that the progress reports adequately measure what they’re designed to measure — year-to-year improvement, especially among the most needy students. But his column points out, as many others have, that the progress reports don’t measure many of the factors that teachers, parents, and students think are most important.