On June 28, the UFT held a press conference concerning Chancellor Klein’s letter to parents on the issue of the school calendar and the opening day of schools in September.

Read Mulgrew’s statement after the jump. More »

As more light is shed on the education of students with special needs in New York City charter schools, it has become increasingly evident that the New York City Department of Education [NYC DoE] has flouted the local Freedom of Information Law in an effort to keep from the public view not just a full and accurate picture of the state of Special Education in charter schools, but also its own egregious failure to provide the most minimal oversight in that field.

Here is what we now know. In fall 2009, when the UFT started to compile and analyze the information which provided the basis for our report, Separate and Unequal: The Failure of New York City Charter Schools to Serve the City’s Neediest Students, we discovered that the most important data on Special Education in NYC charter schools had never been published and was not in the public realm. More »

In a letter, dated May 8, to school principals, Chancellor Klein laid out matters of budget and The New I-Zone.

Most incriminating of the motives and mindset of its malicious author, was the part bemoaning the current seniority for the layoff system.

That “last hired, first fired” principle has thrived for generations throughout the city, state and federal civil service system. It has of late been under all-out siege nationwide, especially against members of teacher unions. You don’t hear or read of it with respect to police officers, members of Congress, et al.

Chancellor Klein would like all principals, including those who never or hardly ever taught and whose expertise is based on a quickie leadership course and/or social networking skills or a fortuitous DNA link, to exercise life and death control over the careers of all educators, including those whose mastery and experience infinitely exceeds theirs. More »

Video from yesterday’s press conference:

[Editor's note: This piece first appeared on the Huffington Post.]

Rubber rooms, where New York City teachers can sit for years while being investigated or while going through a hearing process, don’t work for anyone. They don’t work for schools, students or teachers.

Fixing this problem has been a high priority for me ever since I became President of the UFT eight months ago.

In a groundbreaking agreement between the UFT and the Department of Education, we have agreed to shut the rubber rooms down; from now on teachers under investigation or facing charges will generally be employed in administrative tasks in schools or DOE offices. More »

The DoE is upgrading — or at least changing — some aspects of its Progress Reports, the school wide accountability reports that assess school progress and performance based primarily on test scores, as well as credit accumulation and graduation rates in the high schools. For the first time, the special challenges brought to schools by students in self-contained classes will be part of the equation. I have been arguing long and hard on this blog that the cards inadequately addressed this challenge, and that that inadequacy was a factor in the low scores of closing schools (see here, here, and here, for example).

The relevant high school changes: More »

The federal Education Department’s What Works Clearinghouse just released a review of the city’s Leadership Academy, the principal training program that Joel Klein brought in with the help of “Neutron” Jack Welch, the former General Electric chairman.

Apparently it doesn’t work. More »

Since Joel Klein’s new schools do not seem likely to take Maxwell’s neediest students, and since all that its current and future self-contained kids are guaranteed is an opportunity to apply, it seems fair to ask whether or not the community might be well-served by keeping the school open and building on its strengths. This is also a question worth asking because Maxwell is only one of fourteen high schools slated for closing, and the situation I am about to describe with Maxwell is typical of what we find when we look at other closing schools.

The DoE has created two accountability measures to determine school quality: Quality Reviews and Progress Reports.

Quality Review

Quality Reviews are on-site 2-day reviews of the school, performed by a different reviewer every year. For the past several years, the DoE has invested huge resources in its Quality Reviews. Though I don’t know the budget amounts, I do know something about what goes into shaping and implementing them. Over multiple meetings, standards of review are debated and fine-tuned every year. Senior instructional people are trained over several days in order to ensure inter-rater reliability. Reviewers, well-steeped in the philosophy and specifics then perform the reviews armed with standards, rubrics, templates, and on-going support.

Basically — ask anyone in the schools — Quality Review is a very big deal. More »

In posts over the past several weeks I have described how the DoE has stacked the deck against students in self-contained special education classes and the schools that serve them.

In terms of the schools, the DoE’s fancy high school Progress Reports are significantly biased against those that serve self-contained students. Making matters worse, when it chose what schools to close the DoE tossed out the results of the expensive and intensive Quality Reviews. The DoE did this even when reviewers found the schools were doing well for three years in a row, and they did it in spite of the fact that the reviews were supposed to play a key role in the DoE accountability standard.

In terms of the students, we know the DoE has not generally admitted self-contained students to the schools that replace the ones that are closing. These schools may serve IEP students with less severe disabilities (for example, students who need speech services or who can succeed in CTT classes), but they do not serve students with the more significant disabilities found in students in self-contained classes. Call it mismanagement, or call it a plan, the result has been to create two separate and unequal school systems within the regular public schools.

To understand how all this plays out, let’s look at just one school: W. H. Maxwell High School in Brooklyn. More »

At the request of a commenter on my recent post, I am posting a second, more detailed chart on the relationship of graduation rates to the percent of self-contained special education students. Graduation Rates decline as the percentages of self-contained students in a school rise. As self-evident as this relationship is to anyone in the schools, Tweed continually points to graduation rates at some of our closing schools and then claims that other schools with similar populations do better. However the DoE peer schools with supposedly similar populations often serve few or no self contained special education students. Graduation rates generally track the rate of self-contained special education in a school: as the population goes up, the graduation rates go down.  The same is true for the overall score on the Progress Report. More »

Who briefs Joel Klein over at DOE?

Because what he told NY1 TV’s Mike Scotto on “Inside City Hall” Monday about the 19 closing schools was, “Nobody could make a good case why these schools shouldn’t be closed.”

Has he been away? His deputy chancellors, John White, Santi Taveras and Kathleen Grimm, chaired 20 public hearings over the last two months where parents, teachers and support staff, CEC leaders, Council members, Assembly representatives, grandmothers, local business leaders, students, graduates, principals and advocates testified on why most of the schools on the list should not close. Did the deputies not report back? More »

"You didn't ask WHICH goals."

In the world of Tweed’s top-down directives, issued by apparatchiks who view time spent in real schools with Kurtz’s “the horror, the horror,” more than one good idea has been transformed into its opposite.

In this regard, exhibit number one is the school quality review. In its original conception, the school quality review was founded on the premise that the most important information about a school’s performance came not from decontextualized statistics, but from observations by professional educators. A team of accomplished educator reviewers has a rich knowledge of good teaching and learning practices, so they can recognize in a school the presence — and the absence — of such practices. Just as importantly, they can provide useful feedback to a school on how a school can develop good teaching and learning practices.

But put that idea in the hands of Tweed, and it becomes a virtually unrecognizable caricature of the real thing. More »

In its zeal to close NYC’s high schools, the DoE like to point to the low graduation rates of particular schools. It is a number that plays well to the press. After all, who can argue in favor of, say, a forty-five percent graduation rate? The school down the block has the same kinds of kids, doesn’t it? And it has higher graduation rates. A low grad rate is a great sound bite, and it works.

But a closer look reveals that to a large extent the differences in school graduation rates are a function of a very specific demographic rather than a function of school quality. Joel Klein has concentrated high-need (self contained) special education students in fewer and fewer high schools because — for whatever reason — his new schools generally do not accept them. These are students who require very small classes and intensive academic, behavioral and/or emotional support. Those are just words to folks who do not teach, but to the schools that embrace these kids (and the closing high schools did indeed embrace them) they conjure up a world of challenges. These are the kids whom teachers wake up to worry about at 4 a.m., and sometimes the worry is that no one else will worry. For many teachers the idiosyncratic success of special education kids is deeply meaningful simply because every scrap of it is so hard-won. For many, success with self-contained special education is why they teach.

These students do not, however, tend to graduate with a diploma, on time. More »

This week’s Panel for Education Policy meeting made it clear that the DOE is not serious about including parents in the decision-making process, according to NBC’s Gabe Pressman.

When the Mayor took control of the city’s schools, he promised to make them better.

Whether he kept that promise is debatable. But whether he has made parents part of the improvement process is not. They are definitely excluded. And that’s a shame.

He goes on to write:

It’s easy to understand the frustration and anger of the parents. But they are learning a practical lesson in how a supposedly democratic process can be distorted to suppress opposition.

The Mayor himself could benefit from some education. He could use a crash course in the values of democracy. The educational policy panel is not there just to ratify decisions already made.

Read the entire piece at NBC New York.

Yesterday I said that High School Progress Reports were driven to a significant extent by a buried demographic: the populations of high-need/self contained Special Education students. Some schools took on these challenging students when other schools did not. Now, instead of being supported for it, they are being punished with low grades and threat of closure.

What follows are some charts I did not have time to post yesterday.

As we know, a school’s grade is largely determined by its performance relative to its peer group’s performance. Each dot on the chart below represents one of the schools in the peer groups of closing High Schools. Along the side of the chart is the percent of high-need Special Education students within the Special Education population. More »