GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

While Elizabeth is enjoying a well-deserved vacation in the wilds of Wisconsin this week, take a look at what’s she’s been working on these last few months: A New York Times Magazine cover story about the building blocks of good teaching.

The story is centered on Doug Lemov, a founder of the Uncommon Schools charter chain who realized that no matter how much schools tinker with — or even fundamentally restructure — their curriculum, schedule, and use of data, they can still be left with mediocre teaching. So he decided to figure out how to make teachers great.

From Elizabeth’s article:

But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. …

When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.

It was the tiniest decision, but what was teaching if not a series of bite-size moves just like that?

• Arne Duncan is set to tell most states that they didn’t win Race to the Top funds. (Wall Street Journal)
• The possible elimination of student Metrocards is dominating this week’s MTA hearings. (Daily News)
• Diane Ravitch’s education policy about-face is the subject of her new book. (Times, GothamSchools)
• The pro-mayoral control lobbyists in Learn NY raised $7.5 million, but spent just over half. (WNYC)
• A new study finds young people don’t think much of their high school counselors. (Times, USA Today)
• The largest-ever survey of teachers finds they want good principals. (Washington Post, Seattle Times)
• Los Angeles’s school board will warn 5,200 employees that they could be laid off. (AP)

• The DOE will open a new school on the Upper West Side, but residents say the plan isn’t good enough.
• The State Assembly re-elected six members to the Board of Regents.
• Could a recession-driven exodus from private to public school reshape the face of public education?
• Chaz explains what the “just cause” and “arbitrary and capricious” standards for firing teachers mean.
• The AFL-CIO is coming out in support of the teachers who were fired in Central Falls, RI.
• Mass Insight’s Justin Cohen says that simply firing all of a school’s teachers is not a turnaround strategy.
• EdWeek imagines emails to RttT finalists and losers. (Finalists are urged to recruit Oprah to the cause.)
• Kindergarten isn’t mandatory in New York State. It’s still probably a good idea, though, says Ask Judy.
• Ed in the Apple writes an open letter to the Congressional Black Caucus arguing against school closure.
• The panel at Morning Joe takes Arne Duncan to task, just a bit, for being too moderate on teachers unions.
• And Duncan foreshadows a Race to the Top competition for early childhood education.
• Draft national standards for K-12 are due out for public comment next week.
• And happy birthday, Dr. Seuss! Mimi takes lessons from the good doctor and thinks Duncan should, too.

School districts should abandon lay-off policies that require principals to dismiss the newest teachers first and instead incorporate measures of teacher quality into firing decisions, a new report out today from The New Teacher Project argues.

The report proposes a scorecard that would rank teachers, weighing their classroom management skills, attendance, performance evaluations and length of service to the district to determine who should be laid off. Under the group’s proposal, a teacher’s performance rating would be given the most weight, while his or her number of years served would count for only a tenth of their score.

By doing so, the report argues, school districts can avoid laying off their best teachers who may not have worked in the system the longest. (more…)

More than a month after the citywide school board voted to close 19 schools, City Council and Comptroller John Liu are reexamining the criteria that city officials used to declare the schools failures.

Liu, who campaigned for comptroller on the promise of auditing the Department of Education’s data, announced today that his office is beginning an investigation of the DOE’s progress reports — the annual report cards that assign each school a letter grade, largely based on students’ test scores. Later this afternoon, the City Council’s education committee held a hearing where members accused department officials of targeting large, struggling high schools without considering what would become of their current students. Department officials defended the schools they chose to close, citing the schools’ abysmal graduation rate.

“This is not a random list,” said Deputy Chancellor for Strategy and Innovation, John White. “These are the lowest performers even considered among a set of schools where students are not achieving at acceptable levels.” (more…)

Diane Ravitch offered a first look at her new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” at a GothamSchools event in December where she explained that seeing education theories play out in reality caused her to change her mind about standardized testing, school choice, and the entire notion of “accountability.”

Today, the book officially hit shelves, after receiving a spate of favorable reviews in major newspapers. People who have been following Ravitch’s transformation in recent years will find much of her argument familiar. Still, her book offers those who are new to the story a 240-page primer on major trends in education policy — trends that Ravitch says are undermining the country’s once-great schools.

While the book contains Ravitch’s take on New York City’s recent education history — hint: she’s not positive — it is by no means solely about New York. Ravitch also weaves tales from San Diego and Washington, D.C, where activist superintendents have pushed aggressive changes, into a big picture about the general direction of American education. New Yorkers did play a special role in helping Ravitch prepare the book for publication: Diana Senechal, a city teacher who has contributed to GothamSchools, was her research assistant.

Visit the community section to read an exclusive excerpt from the book, in which Ravitch describes why her favorite high school teacher wouldn’t succeed in today’s data-driven teaching environment. Also, Queens teacher Arthur Goldstein, who received an advance copy, offers a glowing endorsement.

Here’s a sign that our reporting on a grade-changing scandal and the intense pressure on schools to perform or shut down have entered the public consciousness: Law & Order used the storyline last night.

Returning to NBC’s 10 pm spot, the series debuted “Boy on Fire” last night, a story that (judging by the sudden flood of emails I got) seemed to strike a chord with the city’s public school teachers. I didn’t catch the episode, but those who did report that it bore some similarities to the case of grade-changing at Herbert Lehman High School in the Bronx, where the executive principal who was hired with a $25,000 bonus  is still under investigation for changing grades in order to boost the school’s graduation rate. (more…)

• Despite new initiatives, the DOE still does not make data about bullying available. (Gotham Gazette)
• The city launched a new school violence hotline yesterday. (NY1)
• Spending on Metrocards is lower and more efficient than the $1 billion spent annually on buses. (Post)
• Three East Village schools are the first in the city to ditch meat in some of their school lunches. (NY1)
• Experts say homelessness among city students is on the rise. (Columbia Spectator)
• President Obama backed the Central Falls mass firing and other turnaround efforts. (Times, AP)

• A new school violence prevention program hopes to hear the chatter that comes before the crime.
• Politics K-12 picks its Race to the Top finalists (and New York isn’t among them).
• Tom Carroll puts Florida, Louisiana and Tennessee in the top three. NY is a “likely loser,” he says.
• Andy Smarick thinks no one will get the entire list of finalists correct by guesswork.
• Teachers unions are backing the wine-in-grocery-stores proposal with an eye to where the profits will go.
• DOE charter chief Michael Duffy: before mayoral control vocal parents made the system dysfunctional.
• A francophone charter school finds it needs money to find space, and needs to find a space to get money.
• Helen Zelon says she was surprised that Harlem Children Zone isn’t tracking all of its students.
• After being saved by stimulus fund, 90 after school programs are once again in trouble.
• NYC should learn from North Carolina’s connected high schools and colleges, writes a Hofstra professor.
• For how to deal with years of fiscal belt-tightening, look to Kansas City writes Rick Hess.
• Good books and good teachers can still turn kids off reading, leaving book choice as the last resort.
• And P.S. 41 has architectural renderings of its green roof, or Greenroof Environmental Literacy Laboratory.