Chancellor of New York City Schools Dennis Walcott says that reaching a deal with unions on a teacher evaluation system is a critical part of improving education in the city — and policy detailing teacher evaluation will be forged one way or another. If the current impasse continues to June 1, the State of New York will step in and arbitrate the process.

In an op-ed in the New York Daily News, Walcott writes that the city has been trying to negotiate with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) for some time, but progress has stalled. The UFT, as described by Walcott, is both historically and famously hostile to change. In his view, the union has protected its own interests, and those of its members, as the city’s education system suffered.

That approach has driven teacher evaluation policy — or lack thereof — leading to a system in which professional evaluations have lost meaning and that makes management inefficient.

No organization, public or private, can survive if its managers cannot reward good employees or replace poor ones. Under the current rules, though, principals are virtually prevented from assessing their teachers, much less removing them if they fail at their jobs. The evaluation process is widely regarded as a farce.

Walcott points out that other cities have fared better on evaluations and have massaged the approval of unions. But that’s not always what it seems, he says — in Buffalo, the deal unofficially includes an agreement not to take the policy seriously:

Some districts, like Buffalo, submitted their proposals with union approval and received their state aid. But they also signed secret side deals with their unions pledging not to enforce the tough new evaluation rules. Mayor Bloomberg and I refused to engage in that charade. Instead of being rewarded, the state withheld a quarter-billion dollars in education funds [from New York City], punishing our schoolchildren.

He and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg won’t do that, as Walcott says the stakes are too high for the city’s 1.1 million students to warrant compromising such a critically-important policy.

Critics of the city’s position on the issue have argued that teachers should drive a plan that evaluates teachers — who could be better-positioned to forge teacher evaluation policy than teachers themselves? Walcott and Bloomberg answer that question by pointing to the status quo in New York as evidence that the union has had their chance for decades and that the dismal results are a testimony to that.

With two weeks left to the deadline, there’s little indication that the UFT will find a proposal appealing enough to endorse. When the state takes over the process, they won’t have a choice.

The post June Deadline Nears for New York City Teacher Evaluation Deal appeared first on Education News.

According to Matthew M. Chingos and Paul E. Peterson in EducationNext, the prototype for the school voucher programs was created in New York City in the mid-90s when Cardinal John J. O’Connor and Mayor Rudy Giuliani couldn’t secure public funding to allow NYC children enrolled in the worst-performing public schools to enroll in Catholic schools instead. To bring the program to life, a group of philanthropists created the New York School Choice Scholarship Foundation and distributed grants of up to $1,400 per student to 1,000 low-income students who were about to enter public school or were already enrolled in 2nd through 5th grades.

Since the program was oversubscribed almost immediately, the founders established a lottery system to determine who would get the scholarships. The winning families were guaranteed scholarships for the first five years in school for each one of their children.

And thus was born not only one of the first voucher programs in the country, but an unparalleled research opportunity for anyone interested in looking at long-term impact of vouchers. EdNext explains that the opportunity was not one that SCSF was interested in passing up, so it asked an independent research team to look at the difference in outcomes between families that entered the voucher lottery and won and those who did and lost.

Families who won the voucher lottery were told that scholarship renewal was dependent on participation in annual testing at a designated site other than the child’s school. Families who lost the lottery were compensated for participating in subsequent testing sessions, and their children were given additional chances to win the lottery. Those who won a subsequent lottery were dropped from the evaluation control group. Those families who won the lottery but who did not make use of the scholarship were also compensated for participating in subsequent testing sessions. The original evaluation identified, after three years, large positive effects of the voucher opportunity on the test scores of African Americans but not on the test scores of students from other ethnic groups.

Brookings had published the previous phase of the study which looked at academic outcomes when it came to achievement and graduation. Now Chingos and Peterson expanded their scope to see if participation in SCSF’s program had any impact on college enrollment rates.

The paper takes great care to outline the methodology used to study the college enrollment impact and concludes that for the entire population studied, the increase in college enrollment in the three years after high school graduation was only .7% – not considered statistically significant. However, as Chingos and Peterson explain, this small increase masks much more substantial impact when the results were broken down along demographic groups – especially for African-American students.

The SCSF-NSC linked data indicate that a voucher offer increased the college-enrollment rate of African Americans by 7 percentage points, an increase of 20 percent. If an African American student used the scholarship to attend private school for any amount of time, the estimated impact on college enrollment was 9 percentage points, a 24 percent increase over the college enrollment rate among comparable African American students assigned to the control group (see Figure 1). This corresponds to 3 percentage points for every year the voucher was used.

The post Vouchers Show College Enrollment Success for African Americans appeared first on Education News.

When an advocate for public school education pulls their child from their local public school to enroll them in a private school, does that have an impact on their status as an advocate? That is the question being asked by Geoff Decker at GothamSchools as he reports that long-time New York City education advocate Leonie Haimson has announced that her youngest child will now be going to a private school — mere days before the news was going to be made public by GothamSchools.

According to Decker, Haimson didn’t hide the change from her friends or the other parental advocates she worked with, but she didn’t choose to announce it until contacted by Gotham for a story. On her own blog, which has been covering the New York City public school system and facets of education reform nationwide since 2007, she said that she didn’t feel that the status of her own children was relevant to her advocacy.

Others, however, were taken aback.

The disclosure caught some other advocates off guard.

“I’m surprised,” said Sheila Kaplan, a student data privacy advocate who has worked with Haimson in recent months. “She’s never said anything about her kids being in private schools.”

After shaping much of her identity around her role as a public school parent, decamping from the city’s public schools puts Haimson in a delicate situation. It also opens her up to questions from her many opponents in the polarized education policy debate.

According to Decker, Haimson’s change of heart and subsequent silence are particularly puzzling in light of the fact that she has taken other lawmakers, policymakers and education advocates to task regarding their own choice of schools for their children. Specifically, she has more than once criticized politicians for spurning public schools in favor of private schools.

She took the issue head on in a column for the Huffington Post demanding that lawmakers stop getting defensive and evasive when asked why they would choose private schools for their own kids. In the column, notable education reformer politicians like Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie were cited by name as people who pushed education policies while declining to expose their own children to their impact.

But Haimson and supporters said they have only criticized policy makers who push one agenda in public schools but support a different one by sending their children to private schools that do not reflect the public agenda. Unlike those policy makers, Haimson said she wants all students — in both kinds of schools — to have small classes, an enriched arts curriculum, and freedom from standardized tests.

The post What Happens When a Public School Advocate Eschews Public Schools? appeared first on Education News.

Although girls have been outperforming boys in academic benchmarks and grades, when it comes to standardized tests they continue to lag behind male students, The New York Times reports. This lag is most obvious when it comes to admission to New York City’s 8 specialized high schools which use the results of a standardized test as their sole admissions criteria where boys outnumber girls, sometimes substantially.

Student bodies of the the two high schools that focus on mathematics, technology and science – Stuyvesant in Manhattan and Bronx Science – are 60% male, while at the new High School for Mathematics, Science and engineering at City College, boys make up 67% of total students.

While studies suggest that girls perform as well as boys in math and science classes in high school, their participation in those fields drops off in college and ultimately in careers, a phenomenon that the White House, with its Council on Women and Girls, and the National Science Foundation have tried to reverse.

The fact that girls are underrepresented in New York’s top high schools, which tend to be focused on math and science, and which have more than a dozen Nobel laureates among their alumni, worries some academics who see the schools as prime breeding grounds for future scientists and engineers.

This isn’t the first time that the demographics of the city’s top schools have made news. The racial makeup of the schools has been a controversy for years, as African Americans and Latinos are greatly underrepresented in the elite high schools. This year only 5% of the admitted students are African-American and 7% are Hispanic.

Minority advocates in the city have led a long – and so far unsuccessful – battle to change the admissions criteria used by the schools such as encouraging them to take into account middle school grades, among other proposals.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief academic officer in the city’s Education Department, said the eight specialized-test schools represented just a portion of the city’s best schools, so there was a flaw in studying gender disparities solely in those eight schools. “These are not the best schools in the city,” he said of the eight specialized schools. “They are among the best schools in the city.”

He said that at the highest echelons of test-takers, girls scored as well as boys, but that overall, fewer of the strongest female students were taking the exam.

He said the answer to the question of why fewer girls take the standardized exams could go a long way to addressing the problem of gender disparity in technology, the sciences and mathematics.

The post Boys Outnumber Girls in Elite NYC Tech, Science High Schools appeared first on Education News.

Bronx’s Stevenson High School and its 3,000 students were in New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg’s eyes what was wrong with public education in NYC. The building that housed the students was constantly under threat from gang violence, had low graduation rates, a high dropout rate and was generally one of the worst-performing campuses in the city. Changing the way schools like Stevenson operated was the cornerstone of Bloomberg’s reform strategy.

After 2002, Stevenson as it once existed was no more. In its place there were 9 separate schools, each offering a more individualized educational experience and providing more support to its students to keep them on the path to graduation and future success.

Of the 337 new high schools that have opened, nine are in what is now called the Stevenson Campus, the most under one roof anywhere in the city. They are identified in their hallways by the color of their door frames, and by flags, like those of Renaissance city-states. Each school has its own vision of utopia, from video game design classes at the new Bronx Compass to college-level discussions of “A Streetcar Named Desire” at Millennium Art Academy. Success varies wildly from floor to floor.

It’s hard to look at the statistics and argue that Stevenson kids have been done wrong by the change. The graduation rate among the students learning on the former Stevenson campus is nearly 60%.

All the usual metrics are up as well. Attendance is up from 75% to 81%, and the crime rate is down by more than 60% since the 2004-05 academic year.

Standardized test scores, however, are less optimistic. SAT results have stagnated as have scores in U.S History. The English Regents scores, however, have improved since 10 years ago.

Yet on the most important of metrics it seems no progress has been made at all. Students enrolled in Stevenson campus schools continue to be woefully underprepared for college come graduation. Fewer than 3% were ready for college-level work after high school – a number that is bad even when compared to the not-particularly-impressive city-wide average of 20%.

Rick Ouimet, 37, a popular English teacher at Millennium who began his career in 1998 at Stevenson, wrestles with whether small schools are the better path. “Is the educational quality necessarily higher?” he asked.

Millennium received five consecutive A’s from the city, until the 2011-12 school year, when it got a B. To Mr. Ouimet, the opening and closing of schools “symbolizes how with all the change, things really haven’t changed that much.”

The post Closure of Big Failing Schools in NYC is Working – Or is it? appeared first on Education News.

The grand experiment that brought together the teachers unions and the school choice movement appears to be a failure, according to SchoolBook.org. A Brooklyn charter school run by the United Federation of Teachers had its performance savaged by the latest review from its authorizer, the State University of New York Charter School Institute, for poor academic performance, discipline problems and even a few occasions of corporal punishment.

SUNY serves as an authorizer for ten charters around the state that are up for renewal this year. The UFT Charter School appears to be the only one that didn’t pass inspection and might now face closure unless it finds another organization to take over as the authorizer from SUNY.

The report didn’t recommend outright closure, but the reviewers declined to give a recommendation at all, saying that the data didn’t support either conclusion outright. It is the first time that a SUNY reviewer took this step after inspecting a charter school in the city.

The mixed review of the U.F.T. charter school presents an awkward situation for the union. Shelia Evans-Tranumn, the school’s executive director, issued a statement saying the union appreciates the SUNY Charter Institute’s analysis but that it took issue with some of the assertions by its reviewers.

The charter school was supposed to serve as proof of a concept that teachers unions and the school choice movement were not incompatible. It opened its doors in 2005 in East New York, one of the toughest neighborhoods in Brooklyn. It operates a full slate of classes, K-12. And this is not the first time that the school’s performance has been called into question.

During the last round of charter operating renewals in 2010, the school was given only a conditional license to continue for three years instead of the typical extension of a full five years. The foreshortened renewal meant that the school had only three years in which to prove that it deserved a renewal for a full five-year term because a three-year conditional license can only be granted once.

The reviewers who visited the school’s two campuses last fall found “strong” performance on state exams in grades 3 and 4, and said they would have recommended a full renewal for the elementary school if it stood on its own. More than 60 percent of fourth graders were proficient in math last year. But that figure was cut in half among eighth graders. Reviewers labeled the academic outcomes in grades 6-8 as “poor,” adding that if this was a separate middle school it would not meet SUNY’s renewal criteria. They said they couldn’t make a recommendation for the high school because it hadn’t been around long enough to graduate any students.

The future of the UFT Charter is now in the hands of the SUNY trustees, who have a number of options in front of them. They could issue a full-term renewal, or they can vote to shut the school. They can also take the middle-ground and allow the elementary school – which is performing well – to continue operating while shutting the middle- and high-school part of the charter.

The post Union-Run NYC Charter School in Danger Of Closing appeared first on Education News.

Twenty New York City middle- and high schools are going to be taking part in a pilot program that will bring a comprehensive computer science curriculum into their classrooms, Mayor Mike Bloomberg has announced. The pilot program is part of the effort by the city to prepare its students to succeed in a world that is becoming more dependent on technology every year.

Like other parts of the country, companies based in New York City are reporting a severe shortage in qualified engineers, computer programmers and other technology workers, and hopes that efforts like Software Engineering Pilot will make it easier to produce homegrown candidates to fill this gap. With this goal in mind, the schools taking part on the pilot will begin offering courses covering topics like computer programming, web design, embedded electronics, robotics and mobile computing starting next year. As part of the pilot, teacher training programs will also be put into place.

“We know it’s vital to prepare our children to succeed in an increasingly technology-centered economy, and the Software Engineering Pilot will help us do just that,” Bloomberg said in a statement today. “This groundbreaking program will ensure that more students receive computer science and software engineering instruction so that they can compete for the tech jobs that are increasingly becoming a part of our city’s economy. We’re creating the home-grown workforce our city needs and teaching our students skills that will open up new doors for them and their future.”

Among those selected to participate are schools located in all five boroughs and includes at least one specialized school – the Brooklyn Technical High School commonly known as “Brooklyn Tech” – which requires an entrance exam. The city’s acclaimed public school for gifted kids – Mark Twain IS. 239 will also participate in the pilot.

The announcement follows the “Made in NYC” campaign that Bloomberg announced last week, which supports the city’s startup community. Students participating in the SEP program will likely be strong applicants for Cornell NYC Tech’s campus, which is scheduled to open in 2017 (classes have already begun in temporary Manhattan locations). If all goes according to plan, NYC’s engineer shortage will be less of a problem in several years.

It is no coincidence that Brooklyn’s High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology served as the setting for the announcement of the new educational push. The school, which is one of the participants, was created as part of an effort by the Bloomberg administration to bring better STEM education to the city.

The post NYC Kicks Off Tech Education Pilot Program in 20 Schools appeared first on Education News.

Last Friday, a vote by New York City’s school bus union leadership brought to an end the school bus strike that has been in effect for nearly a month. The vote means that more than 8,000 drivers and support personnel will be heading back to work this week, without any concrete movement from the Bloomberg administration on any of their demands.

According to the statement released by the union leadership, the strike came to an end because the five Democratic mayoral candidates looking to succeed Bloomberg when his last term wraps up this year, have pledged to open talks with the union once they are sworn in in 2014.

Because of this strike, we have gained the support of many political allies in the city, in the state,” Michael Cordiello, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181, said on a conference call to members. He said the strike was successful in raising awareness of their cause.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg also declared victory.

“For decades, the monopolistic bus contract process benefited the bus companies and unions at the expense of the city’s taxpayers and students—but no longer,” he said.

The drivers walked off the job when Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that transportation companies were no longer going to be required to fill open jobs strictly by seniority. A 2011 decision by the state court said that such clauses were illegal, but the union argued that the decision didn’t apply to the routes under discussion.

Although the first week of the strike was chaotic, as the action dragged on, the 150,000 effected students made adjustments. According to The Wall Street Journal, the attendance for regular schools went back up to 90% in the last week of the strike, and that of special-needs students – who were more effected by lack of transportation – rose to 78%.

Larry Hanley, international president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, said he had been in talks with Democratic mayoral candidates to figure out a “creative way” to end the strike.

The five candidates—City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, former Comptroller Bill Thompson, Comptroller John Liu and former City Councilman Sal Albanese—signed a letter asking them to return to work.

Although Republican candidate for Mayor Joseph Lhota praised the ending of the strike, he chided his Democratic opponents for bowing down to the union. As Lhota put it, by signing the letter and agreeing to keep the issue open, the candidates were clearly content to maintain the status quo at the expense of students’ needs.

The post NYC School Bus Driver Strike Ends With No Gains for Union appeared first on Education News.

One of the examples cited in the State of the Union address by President Barack Obama of technology applied successfully to education was the Pathways in Technology Early College High School in Brooklyn, New York. The revolutionary program, supported by IBM, allows students to graduate not just with a high school diploma, but – thanks to a collaboration between the company, the school and City University of New York – also with an associates degree either in computer science or engineering.

It serves as a standard for the way the goal of aligning education with the marketplace outlined by President Obama might be achieved. Rashid Davis, the founding principal of P-TECH, spoke with GigaOM about what makes the school a success and how this success might be replicated in other areas of the country.

One of the main things that set P-TECH apart is the fact that students commit to staying there for six instead of the customary four years. At the end, not only do they get a substantial leg up towards any higher education aspirations that thy might have, they also have an opportunity to apply for entry-level positions at IBM. Davis believes that it is this close partnership between the school and the tech industry that makes the model so promising. Instead of bemoaning the lack of skilled employees, programs like P-TECH allows companies to have input into the kind of training students should be receiving in order to play a vital part in the country’s economy.

GigaOM: Corporations have worked with educators in the past but what really distinguishes P-Tech’s model?

Davis: Every student has a mentor from IBM and the expectation is for students to complete the post-secondary credential, not just earn a college credit. And it’s an open-admission school that starts in grade 9. We’re not taking students that have taken an academic test or have been academically screened for this particular model.

This kind of partnership has the potential to transform not just technology education. Any industry where companies are looking for particular skills can invest effort and money in schools that teach just those skills to their students. Davis pointed specifically to manufacturing and even fashion as the fields that would substantially benefit for similar partnerships.

GigaOM: If you could do more to make this model a success, what would it be?

Davis: I would add a boarding component for six months in the summer and I’d try to find a way to house the students for the last two years… 85 percent of my students are on free or reduced lunch and they’re not coming from within walking distance of the community. And it’s important to remember that 76 percent of our population are boys, with 73 percent being young men of color. Every day they go into their communities and we’re at risk of losing them or having them sidetracked to other realities. With boarding, I think it’s essential to make sure we can continue the learning.

The post Is Brooklyn’s P-TECH Model the Answer to Career Training? appeared first on Education News.

Some parents are speaking out on New York City’s pilot program that allows some schools to give out controversial “morning after” birth control pills, referred to as “Plan B.” The debate reflects a national divide in opinion about how parents and schools should relate to teens and pregnancy. Ben Yakas of The Gothamist reports that the pilot program has the support of statistics, which show teen pregnancy in the city dropping.

But pragmatic success isn’t everything, said Mona Davids, president of the New York Parents Union. The South Africa-born mother of two has fought for the right for parents to establish Parent-Teacher Associations at charter schools and to protest the mayor’s appointment choice for Chancellor of Schools. Now she is speaking out on parents’ rights to maintain knowledge and control of minor children’s health care.

“I’m in shock,” Mona Davids, president of the NYC Parents Union and mother of a 14-year-old, told the Post. “What gives the mayor the right to decide, without adequate notice, to give our children drugs that will impact their bodies and their psyches? He has purposely kept the public and parents in the dark with his agenda.”

While the pilot program has been given some publicity, Davids was referring to the news that more schools are participating than the public had been aware of. A report in September estimated the number of schools at around a dozen, but the New York Post is now reporting that it’s more like 40. Mayor Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn have both made public statements in support of the program.

Health Commissioner argues that the program is necessary for public health, as well as for the students’ own personal health:

“Two things are happening here — teens are using more contraceptives, and they’re also delaying sexual activity,” said Health Commissioner Tom Farley, who lauded the city’s morning-after pill program as one of the keys to bringing down the pregnancy rate. “It shows that when you make condoms and contraception available to teens, they don’t increase their likelihood of being sexually active. But they get the message that sex is risky.”

Farley’s department released statistics showing that their initiatives may be working. Teen pregnancy rates are down 27% over a decade. The Gothamist explains:

For every 1,000 girls between the ages of 15 and 19, 72.6 got pregnant in 2010, down from 98.8 in 2001. The rate was 43.1 for girls 15 to 17, and 114.5 for 18- and 19-year-olds. Girls were using the Pill or other long-term birth control methods 26.9% in 2011, up from 17.3% in 2009.

But some parents are still concerned, pointing to loss of parental involvement and ethical concerns. In the pilot program, parents can opt their children out of the service, but some have said that the forms weren’t provided. Since the “Plan B” pill is a more complicated medicine than pills for headache and pain relief, they ask why the school has more leeway to provide them without notice or permission. Davids adds another concern, pointing out that school-based health centers tend to be placed in poor minority communities that raise the possibility of racial bias.

The program’s defenders point out that the health centers are placed where the need is, and often where the teen pregnancy rate is highest. These may be minority areas:

But as Estelle Raboni, director of Changing the Odds, an anti-teen pregnancy program at the Morris Heights Health Center, put it: “The Bronx still has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the country.”

For Plan B’s advocates, the proof is in the dropping pregnancy rates, even if some parents are not persuaded.

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