Kammie Sifonte, 14, stood outside MTA's Manhattan headquarters, protesting budget cuts that would eliminate free student Metrocards.
Hundreds of New York City high school students rallied outside of the Metropolitan Transit [...]
City Councilman David Weprin (right) signs a petition urging the DOE not to close 20' [...]
Students and teachers protest the proposed closure of Jamaica High School on Wednesday. Photo courtesy William McDonald.
Tis the season to light candles, exchange gifts, visit family — and protest school closures?
Last [...]
At the same time city schools are poised to suffer mid-year budget cuts, the Department of Education is awarding $12 million in pay raises over the next two years to non-union department employees, Chancellor Joel Klein announced this afternoon.
Central office employees have gone two years without raises and are getting [...]
A coalition of state teachers, superintendents, administrators and school boards is suing Governor David Paterson to stop him from withholding aid payments to school districts.
The lawsuit, which the state teachers union plans to file this afternoon, claims that the governor violated state law and the constitution yesterday when he [...]
Kimberly Morcate, principal of Girls Prep's middle school, rallied with students, teachers and parents on the steps of City Hall this evening.
The city is re-shuffling a [...]
State Education Commissioner David Steiner and the Board of Regents today urged the state legislature to increase the cap on charter schools in New York.
While he stopped short of asking for a specific number, Steiner roughly calculated using the Race to the Top application guidelines that a cap of 400, [...]
State Education Commissioner David Steiner and Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch welcome board members to their December meeting in Albany this morning.
The public will [...]
The Department of Education released details of a controversial space-sharing proposal for a Brooklyn charter and district school today, and it would allow the charter to remain in the building until 2015 and add five more grades of students.
The plan follows months of controversy about whether PAVE Academy Charter [...]
Lower East Side parents who want to ensure their pre-k students stay in the same school for kindergarten will now be able to do so, though a citywide policy bans schools from giving admissions preference to their own pre-k students.
Parents in Manhattan’s District 1 have been lobbying for the exemption [...]
Parents at a school for students with disabilities are accusing the city of excluding them from discussions about plans to move their school to make way for an expanding charter school.
For the past month, debate has raged in District 1 over three scenarios the DOE has proposed to accommodate [...]
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein defended the city's results on the NAEP math exams this afternoon at Tweed Courthouse.
Frustrated with criticism that city students made no progress on a national math [...]
Anderson Cooper recently visited the Harlem Children’s Zone, and last night he reported that Geoffrey Canada’s schools have made huge progress in closing the city’s racial achievement gap. That story has also been celebrated by other high-profile media figures, like the New York Times’ David Brooks.
But Teachers College [...]
Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch supports raising the cap on the number of charter schools allowed in New York State, she told me in an interview yesterday.
“My opinion is that the charter cap is now at a place where it will prevent us from opening great charter schools,” Tisch [...]
Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch disagreed with Mayor Bloomberg’s education proposals in the most agreeable way possible tonight, saying that the mayor’s call for New York to accept common national curriculum standards doesn’t go far enough.
In a speech in Washington, D.C., last week, Bloomberg called on Tisch and [...]
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The United Federation of Teachers is indicating it will resist Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s effort to judge city teachers based on their students’ test scores beginning this year.
“When we see an actual proposal in writing we will take appropriate action,” Mulgrew said in an emailed statement. “The [...]
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The city’s Department of Education will use student test scores in teacher tenure decisions this year, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced this morning.
Speaking at the Center for American Progress, Bloomberg asked Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to follow a new interpretation of the state law that bans the use [...]
The city’s Department of Education has nearly hit the ceiling on the number of charter schools it is allowed to authorize and will not approve any more until the state cap is lifted.
On Monday, the DOE sent a list of 15 approved charter schools to the State Education Department for [...]
A reader points us to another sign that New York’s teacher tenure law might hurt the state’s Race to the Top chances: In a memo released in September, the Gates Foundation removed New York from a list of states able to receive help building its application.
The memo specifically named [...]
New York State’s student data tracking system lacks several key elements needed to make it effective, according to a report released today.
The elements New York lacks, according to the report by the Data Quality Campaign:
transcript-level information on what courses students take and how they fare; information about which students take tests [...]The New York State Education Department is failing to ensure that Regents tests are properly scored, according to an audit published today by the state comptroller’s office.
The exams are given to high school students, who have to pass five in different subject areas in order to receive a Regents diploma. [...]
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced today that it will invest a total of $335 million into teacher effectiveness initiatives. The vast majority of those funds, $290 million, are headed to three school districts — Pittsburgh, Memphis and Hillsborough County, Florida — and a consortium of Los Angeles charter [...]
Responding to protests that it was breaking the new mayoral control law, the Department of Education will hold a public hearing before extending PAVE Academy Charter School’s stay inside a district-owned building.
The law passed this summer requires the DOE to issue an “educational impact statement” and hold a public hearing [...]
Parents and students rallied outside P.S. 20 to protest plans that would require them to share space with a growing charter school.
Parents at Lower East Side [...]
The state education department needs to regulate how it spends its stimulus money more thoroughly, according to an audit released last week by the U.S. Department of Education.
The report, prepared by the USDOE’s Office of Inspector General in a round of “initial” audits of four large states, calls into [...]
Parents at district schools on the Lower East Side that may be forced to share space with an expanding charter school are telling the DOE to look elsewhere.
Girls Prep Charter School has requested building space from the DOE in order to expand its middle school program, which launched this [...]
The New York State Board of Regents wants to certify new teachers based on their students’ academic achievement in their first two years of teaching, Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and Education Commissioner David Steiner announced today.
The proposal came as part of a plan to overhaul the way teachers are trained [...]
Hoping to bring a diverse mix of students to a new Upper West Side high school, parents and neighborhood activists are jumping at the chance to write rewrite its admissions rules.
Frank McCourt High School, which will have a writing and communications focus, is highly anticipated by middle and upper-middle [...]
Brushing aside criticism that current state laws could jeopardize New York’s chances at Race to the Top Funds, state officials say they will enter the contest in round one.
On Monday, the State Education Department will release a comprehensive plan to overhaul teacher training, Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch [...]
The U.S. Department of Education released final guidelines for its $4.3 billion Race to the Top grant program this evening, leaving a provision that could ban New York State from applying for the funds still intact.
States that bar districts from using test scores to evaluate teachers and principals are [...]
To occupy myself on a couple of long airplane rides I took this week, I decided to check out what “urban school reform” meant in a different time and a different place: Chicago, fifteen years ago.
Before Ira Glass was the host of the nationally-known radio and television documentary series This [...]
The city will pay $55,000 to a Queens high school student who alleged that he was abused by a school safety agent.
The family of Stephen Cruz, a senior at Robert F. Kennedy High School in Flushing, Queens, sued the city a year ago after a school safety agent, Daniel [...]
Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch yesterday called on city charter school operators to move away from elementary education and take on the problems of fixing large failing high schools.
Speaking at Hunter College, Tisch said that charter schools have benefited from being the political “darlings” of the city and state, [...]
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein congratulated Department of Education staff this morning, saying their work in the public schools contributed to the re-election of Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
“Mayor Bloomberg’s continuity of leadership has led to historic achievement gains and what I hope is a permanent culture shift — creating a school system [...]
Another member of the truth squad is leaving the Department of Education: deputy press secretary Andrew Jacob departed the press office this week after four years there. Regular readers of this site will recognize Jacob from his comments on data, testing, progress reports and school enrollment. We expect to [...]
Mayor Michael Bloomberg won re-election last night by slightly more than 50,000 votes, beating opponent William Thompson by a narrow margin in an election with one of the lowest turn-outs in the city’s recent history, the New York Times reported this morning. The Times also has an interesting [...]
Mona Davids and her daughter, a sixth grade student at Equality Charter School in Co-op City. (Photo courtesy of Mona Davids.)
A Bronx parent who went from charter school foe to cheerleader in [...]
Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew dismissed proposed legislation that would overhaul New York State’s teacher tenure and charter cap laws.
Mulgrew criticized Assemblyman Sam Hoyt’s bill in an interview with GothamSchools on Saturday, after delivering an address to approximately 3,000 parents assembled for the United Federation of Teachers’ annual parent [...]
If you’re close to a radio (or an internet connection) this weekend, be sure to tune to WNYC for a look at why otherwise strong suburban schools fail minority students. The hour-long documentary is produced by reporter Nancy Solomon and focuses on a school that’s close to home — [...]
Much of the attention paid to Assemblyman Sam Hoyt’s proposed changes to state education law has focused on its immediate repeal of the charter school cap. But the legislation, introduced in both houses of the state legislature yesterday, seeks much broader changes.
Hoyt told GothamSchools that his proposed law is [...]
Fourth-grader Francisco Gomez, 8, received his H1N1 vaccine shot this morning at P.S. 157 in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He was cheered on by city health officials and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein [...]
The roughly 500 school aides the city has targeted for layoffs will keep their positions for another week under an extension of a temporary restraining order first issued last week.
State Supreme Court Justice Carol Edmead ruled today that officials from D.C. 37, the union that represents the school aides [...]
Sheanica Davis is set to lose her job at Mosaic Preparatory Academy.
Parents and staff at an East Harlem elementary school are protesting the city’s plan to lay off all of their school aides.
Rallying outside of the [...]
Deputy mayor Dennis Walcott spoke to parents last night at Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing Arts.
Speaking at a townhall-style event last night, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott said the [...]
New York City has launched an experimental model of teacher training that pairs inexperienced newcomers to the city’s schools with seasoned pros.
Developed by Hunter College, New Visions for Public Schools, and the Department of Education, the Urban Teacher Residency program aims to give new teachers the skills they’ll need to [...]
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein today announced an addition to New York City’s phone assistance service designed specifically to answer parents’ questions about the city schools.
The city is adding about 40 operators to the city’s 311 call centers specially trained to answer questions [...]
DOE officials and parent activists have called the planning process of the new Frank McCourt High School a model for parent involvement [...]
The Department of Education has notified the principals of a Red Hook charter and district school that they will continue to share a building until the charter school secures its own private facility.
In a letter to the principals of PAVE Academy Charter School and P.S. 15, the interim director of [...]
Board of Regents chancellor Merryl Tisch addressed members of the New York State School Board Association this morning.
New York State education commissioner David Steiner and Board of Regents chancellor Merryl [...]
Mayor Bloomberg's senior education adviser Chris Cerf (left) and former Congressman Herman Badillo touted the mayor's promotion and retention policies [...]
Number of students retained or needing academic intervention services, 2004-2008
A highly anticipated independent research study on the effects of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s promotion and retention policies says that fifth graders benefit from the promotion practices — at [...]
The flat scores New York students received on a national math exam released today have led some to question the validity of the huge jump in state math scores over the same time period.
The results seem to support skeptics who have argued that the statewide exam questions have become [...]
The city’s Department of Education will likely lift the ceiling on class sizes this year, a department official said today.
DOE chief operating officer Photeine Anagnostopoulos told the City Council education committee this morning that it was realistic to expect the city to “adjust” its class size targets. How dramatic the [...]
Klein argued that the gains made by city students on state exams compared to their peers elsewhere in [...]
Thanks to commenter Tim, who alerted us to the latest entry in the ongoing conversation on how researchers should properly measure the performance of charter schools.
Researchers from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) are responding to their colleague Caroline Hoxby’s criticism of the methodology they used in [...]
The CSA is running about 1000 advertisements on all of New York's MTA lines.
If you’ve ridden the subway lately, you may have just noticed a series of posters advertising the Council of School Supervisors [...]
After the first meeting of the citywide school board packed Tweed last month, it was a return to normal last night, as the board unanimously approved all of the contracts up for discussion before a thinly-populated crowd.
The main items of interest for the panel were the new contracts [...]
Readers looking for an interesting and informed conversation about charter schools’ use of space, the renewal process and school transparency should head over to the comment thread discussing Girls Prep Charter School’s request for more school space in District 1 on the Lower East Side.
In addition to a lively [...]
A new study examining one of Chancellor Joel Klein’s central reforms, as well as similar efforts in three other cities, calls the changes promising but says that the work is too incomplete to draw a conclusive answer on its effects.
The paper, released by the University of Washington-based Center on [...]
David Steiner is making raising standards and the overhaul of teacher preparation his major goals as education commissioner. But his ambitious agenda for reform may be slowed by a grim financial climate and a large, unwieldy bureaucracy, education leaders said in interviews last week.
Today was the last day of work for more than a hundred school aides whose union says they were laid off because of mismanagement rather than budget cuts.
District Council 37, the city’s largest municipal union, attacked the education department this afternoon for what they called “a clear case of union-busting.”
In [...]
Two new studies out today look at what makes performance-based pay plans for teachers successful. The first, written by Harvard education professors Susan Moore Johnson and John P. Papay and published by the Economic Policy Institute, proposes a tiered pay system that rewards teachers for not only improving [...]
In a move that could shake up the debate over school space, a mix of charter and district parents is pushing to bring charter school parents into local school districts’ parents councils.
Such a change would mark a significant departure from charter schools’ separation from the traditional school district. It could [...]
In the tug-of-war between charter school advocates and opponents over building space for the city’s charter schools, emotions frequently churn and bubble over; protests and shouting matches are not unheard of. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way, a team of district and charter school administrators [...]
State lawmakers are warning that if the Department of Education doesn’t comply with the new governance law immediately, they will try to force them to.
School officials came under attack earlier this week when they laid out their time-table for implementing changes ordered by the legislature. The law required that [...]
Here’s one more reason state tests might be getting easier to pass: a longstanding State Education Department practice of publicly releasing every question on each year’s exam.
The unusual practice makes it harder for test-makers to gauge how difficult a test is, said Howard Everson, chair of the state’s Technical Advisory [...]
Changes in the way public schools are run that were ordered by a law this summer could take until the end of the school year to implement, school officials said today.
At a meeting of the City Council Education Committee this afternoon, council members, along with teachers union president Michael Mulgrew, [...]
In the first policy speech of his campaign for mayor, Comptroller Bill Thompson announced a ten-point plan to improve the city’s public schools.
Simultaneously attacking Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s schools record and outlining his own priorities, Thompson outlined a plan focused broadly on changing curriculum and school environments, improving programs for under-served [...]
