City’s School-Liaison Office Is Said to Seek Supportive Parents By Fernanda Santos & Sharon Otterman - NYTimes.com

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In 2007, the New York City Department of Education created an office to help families navigate the school system and to make sure their grievances got to the right ears.

Known then as the Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy, it was set up as a bridge between parents and the department’s central office, and was intended to address complaints that parents had lost their voice when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of the schools.

But lately, according to people who have had dealings with the office, the role has been expanded in a way that has made some of them uncomfortable.

In January, at a meeting of parent coordinators from a number of schools, employees of the office asked them to forge relationships with parents who they thought might speak out in support of the department’s policies, including its controversial push to close failing schools. The employees at one point used a nickname to describe the type of parents they were looking for: “Happy Harrys,” and not “Angry Sallys,” as two coordinators recalled it.

And on Tuesday, an employee at the office circulated a petition among nearly 400 coordinators citywide, asking them to round up parents’ signatures. The petition was in support of one of the mayor’s most concerted political efforts of the year: to persuade the Legislature to end the law protecting the most senior teachers in the event of layoffs.

The unions representing teachers and parent coordinators — city employees who work inside schools and act as points of contact for families — have called for an investigation, charging that the Education Department used public money and civil servants to advance a political cause.

“Seniority has been and is a political issue,” said Santos Crespo, the president of District Council 37, Local 372, which represents the city’s roughly 1,200 parent coordinators. “They were asked to do a political function, out of the purview of their job scope, let alone the conflicts of using public employees to do political work.”

In an interview, the city’s deputy mayor for education, Dennis M. Walcott, said, “What happened around the petition should not have happened.” But he made no excuses for the Education Department’s broader attempts at mobilizing parents.

“There are parents who aren’t satisfied with what’s going on in the schools and there are parents who are,” Mr. Walcott said. “That’s what we work on: to improve our abilities to engage them.”

There has always been a political gray area embedded in the mission of the family engagement office, a division of about 20 employees. Among its roles are running elections to citywide parent councils and organizing an annual lobbying trip for parents to Albany to advocate state financing for city schools, two relatively noncontroversial efforts.

But after Mr. Bloomberg only narrowly won a third term in 2009, there was a growing realization among some in his inner circle that the city had not done enough to win the support of public school parents for the mayor’s education agenda. There was also a sense that the office of family engagement offered a great deal of untapped potential for organizing through its existing network of parent coordinators, said a person who was familiar with the discussions within the Bloomberg administration at the time, but declined to be named so as not to anger City Hall.

One change was to appoint Maura Keaney, a top aide from Mr. Bloomberg’s re-election campaign, to head the Department of Education’s office of external affairs, which organizes all political lobbying and communications work for the department. She appointed a new executive director for the office of family engagement, Ojeda Hall, a dynamic youth minister and community organizer from Queens. Ms. Keaney, who is on maternity leave, did not return calls for comment.

In the effort to reshape the office, one of the first moves was to give it a new name: the Office of Family Information and Action.

There was little discussion, the person said, about whether there might be a conflict about taking on a more political role. “I think the feeling is you are not asking someone to do something they don’t want to do, and parents who disagree with you, it’s not like you are going to give them worse services,” the person said. “You are just trying to identify parents who do support parts of your agenda, and if they want to, why not enlist them?”

On Jan. 11, at a public library branch in Midtown, at least 40 parent coordinators got together for what had been billed as a training session. After workshops on social media and the technological shift in schools, representatives from the family engagement office made their pitch.

“They asked us to get parents to lobby,” said one coordinator at a Manhattan elementary school, who, like others who discussed the meeting, insisted on anonymity for fear that speaking publicly could cost them their jobs. The content of the meeting was reported this week by Gothamschools, an education blog.

Another coordinator, also assigned to a Manhattan elementary school, said the representatives noted that “only complainers come out” to protest to the Panel for Educational Policy, where school closings are decided. The meetings are often dominated by loud protests, often organized by the teachers’ union.

With a vote on 22 school closings scheduled for early February, the coordinators said they were urged to drum up allies among parents in their schools, saying the parents would be more likely to come if they were invited by someone they knew.

The room fell silent, the coordinators recalled. One of them said that when a woman tried to talk about some issues she was having with the principal at her school, one of the office’s representatives said, “No negatives, only positives.”

The phrase would become like a mantra, repeated over and over during the meeting, the coordinators said.

According to the coordinators, the family office representatives also said that because of the city’s financial straits, principals would be allowed to fire parent coordinators to free up money for other staff members and programs in their schools.

“It didn’t feel right for them to do that to us, to tell us that our jobs are in danger and then asking for our help,” one of the coordinators said.

Some principals said they had also become skeptical of the office, and after word got out of the tone of the meeting on Jan. 11, they advised the parent coordinators in their schools against attending future meetings.

In a statement, Ms. Hall acknowledged that circulating the petition this week was improper. “I regret that it happened, because it is not reflective of the day-to-day work that OFIA does to help families navigate the school system,” she said.

And city officials maintained that their efforts to get parents to meetings were not improper. “Our bottom-line goal is to make sure parents are respected stakeholders,” said Mr. Walcott, the deputy mayor.

Heckuva Job, Blackie by Arthur Goldstein - GothamSchools

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Incoming Schools Chancellor Cathie Black visited overcrowded Francis Lewis High School a few weeks ago. She came with her entourage from Brooklyn, and was therefore an hour late. She stayed only 40 minutes, as she needed to run off somewhere else. Admittedly, I lack the organizational skills of a publishing executive (let alone someone about to run the largest school system in the country). Yet even I know how long it takes to get from Brooklyn to Queens.

Ms. Black got a good look at the principal’s office. It’s a great office. There’s a desk, a computer, a sitting area, and a full conference room. She didn’t see the trailer. (The trailer is not so great, but after considerable effort, I got it a desk.) She didn’t see our dual-national champion JROTC program, or meet our award-winning science students. She didn’t meet our parent representatives. She didn’t see our kids struggle to get to class at peak time, the half-classrooms we had to create to accommodate the overflow, or the kids who run around in the cold and the dark because we haven’t got sufficient gym space. She didn’t see kids eating lunch at 9 a.m., but she joked to some kids about it.

Cathie Black was there, in fact, because those kids are student activists who got themselves on NY1 and invited her. It was good public relations for her to show up (and PR seems to be the one thing Tweed is good at).

This was a good opportunity for Ms. Black to reach out, as relations between teachers and the DOE grew absolutely toxic under Joel Klein’s tenure. Nonetheless, she didn’t ask to meet me (I was out teaching in the trailer), and she didn’t ask to meet any other teachers either. She did say she opposed tenure for teachers, but it’s unlikely that was her opening salvo at mending fences.

Having missed Ms. Black, I spoke to the kids who met her. One told me she seemed rehearsed, and that her crack about the 9 a.m. lunch period seemed planned. I was told she didn’t answer questions directly, that she gave “politician’s answers,” and that she didn’t have “the sense of an educator.” Another said she seemed sincere about wanting change, but in a business-oriented, and not educational, way. This student felt she was a bad choice for chancellor, and said she could not give one instance in which she had helped a student.

Faced with a question about undocumented students, she had no reply whatsoever. Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott answered for her, and the kids felt he was there to rescue her. They seemed to like him very much — one told me he should have been chancellor.

Still, the kids learned a lot. They learned that the incoming chancellor could come to the second largest school in the city, speak to a handful of kids who’d gotten on TV, and not bother with their teachers or parents at all. They learned that an utter lack of qualification makes no difference as long as you go to the same cocktail parties and gala luncheons as Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

On the other hand, they also learned the power of the press. I hope they remember that, because when the richest man in New York City is also mayor, it’s one of their most effective resources. Mayor Bloomberg can defy term-limit laws city voters twice affirmed. He can get fellow billionaires Eli Broad and Bill Gates to finance campaigns promoting what I’ve termed mayoral dictatorship. He can find ways to appoint his buds to jobs for which they are not remotely qualified.

He can downsize the sanitation department and act surprised when snow doesn’t get picked up. But when he and Cathie Black try to do the same to New York City schools next year, having learned nothing from either the snowstorm or the disasters that visited city schools in the 1970s, they’ll have to contend with not only outraged teachers and parents, but also young people like those from our school, who aren’t afraid to get in front of a camera and speak their minds.

We need more brave souls like these kids, and fewer fronts for hedge-funders and billionaires. Thus equipped, New York City could move toward real substantive improvements for not only schools, but also the city as a whole.

The Case of the Early Test Scores and Resulting Confusion by Anna Phillips - GothamSchools

There is nothing like gaming the tests to make charters look good. This is out and out fraud..!

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When the New York Post ran a story last week praising a Harlem charter school network’s test scores, a few principals wondered why their own schools’ scores hadn’t arrived.

State and city officials were also puzzled. City eighth graders sat for the science and social studies exams only weeks ago and the state won’t release the results for months, so how did Harlem Village Academies have their scores?

Harlem Village Academies Chief of Staff Matt Scott explained that because the network grades its own tests and the state publishes scoring guides online, it was able to figure out how its students fared in advance of the state’s official release. According to the network, all of its eighth grade students passed the state’s science and social studies exams this year.

“We do not release test scores for Science or Social Studies until the school report cards for 2009/2010,” said SED spokesman Tom Dunn. “They are not scheduled for release until next winter. The charter school promoted their own performance.”

The early release highlights the different ways that charter and district schools grade their students’ state tests.

Charter schools can grade their own students’ exams because in the eyes of the State Education Department, each charter school is treated as its own school district, or “local education agency.”

New York City’s district schools grade their tests collectively, as they’re all part of the same local education agency. Every year, the city pulls teachers out of their classrooms to grade state tests — these could belong to their school or other schools — but in most cases charter schools grade their own.

The exception is the math and English exams. Most of the city’s charter schools grade these tests together as part of a consortium run by the New York City Charter School Center. Similar to district schools, each charter school that participates sends teachers to grade for several days, though the Center uses software to ensure that teachers do not grade their own schools’ exams, said Charter Center head James Merriman. But the grading consortium is optional and charter schools must pay for the service, so some schools choose not to.

City Schools See a Spike in Students Failing State Exams by Anna Phillips - GothamSchools

How's that teaching to the test and mayoral control working out for our kids..?

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Public school principals were told this morning how many of their students passed the state’s annual math and English exams and from what we’re hearing, the numbers aren’t pretty.

One principal wrote in to say that the percentage of his students who scored so low they didn’t meet promotion criteria has quadrupled since last year. On the English exam, his percentage of low-scoring students is more than ten times higher. Almost all of his special education students and most of his students who are recent immigrants didn’t pass the exams.

“It’s not like the kids have gotten dumber or the teachers worse, it’s just the tests are being looked at differently,” the principal said.

A Department of Education official confirmed that because the city and state set higher score cutoffs this year, fewer students will meet the standards for promotion to the next grade. As a result, the city expects that more students will be required to attend summer school this year.

“We are committed to raising the bar for our students, so we’re using preliminary results on this year’s tests to set higher promotional cut scores than last year,” said DOE spokesman Matt Mittenthal. “We will guarantee a seat to every student who requires summer school.”

“We’re going to have a huge summer school program now,” the principal said. “No question about that.”

Schools haven’t received their students’ raw scores — they only know whether a student met the promotion criteria or didn’t — and the DOE is not releasing the cutoff scores.

Leonie Haimson: Steve Brill's Imperviousness to the Facts by Leonie Haimson - The Huffington Post

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Steve Brill wrote a controversial and much criticized article in the NY Times Magazine, in his ongoing effort to demonize the teachers union and promote the privatization of public education.

The article failed to interview a single opponent of the rapid spread of charters except for the sole exception of Michael Mulgrew, the head of the teachers union in NYC, although there are many parents, advocates and experts throughout the country who decry how our public schools are being steadily undermined by their expansion, with a two tier system, inherently inequitable taking hold.

He failed to mention the bitter battles over space taking place in communities throughout the city, as charters invade and often take over classrooms, libraries, art rooms, and special education intervention spaces, leading to students with disabilities having to receive their services in hallways or converted closets. He neglected to mention the legions of disaffected charter parents, who complain of their children suffering overly harsh disciplinary methods and being pushed out of their schools. He failed to mention any of the numerous scandals in which charter operators have been found to engage in improper financial practices.

But the most absurd part of his article was when he compared the scores of children at PS 149 with those at Harlem Success Academy, the charter school that shares its building, implying that they served the same sort of students. These were his exact words: "Same building. Same community. Sometimes even the same parents."

Last week, Brill responded to online questions at EdWeek; one concerned the claims he made in his NY Times article:

Mr Brill, given the importance of these issues and the crisis in funding for public education today, I was troubled by the unbalanced nature of your recent NYT Magazine cover story. Specifically, Where was balanced discussion of conflicting research on the diversity of the charter school movement, showing that many charter schools - even in new york - underperform district schools; that charter schools enroll significantly smaller proportions of ELL and SPED students than district schools; and that some charter schools do counsel out students, in which cases declining cohorts of students correlate powerfully with increasing test scores? Where was serious discussion from experts on both sides of the education reform divide of the inadequacy of standardized testing as a metric for evaluating student and teacher performance? ....

This is how Brill responded:

The way i stepped through that debate was 1) to acknowledge clearly that not all charters schools are good for kids (didn't you see that statement?); and 2) to use a building that had two schools in it -- one a charter, one a traditional public school -- and compare expenses and results side by side. I labored over this, and think the comparison is valid FOR THOSE TWO schools. And taxpayers pay nothing extra for the school choice that these two schools provide, so i don't understand you statement that the government is using "valuable funding as a stick to spur undemocratic reforms." Choice is usually thought of as being pretty democratic. As for empirical evidence, one thing is clear, we keep spending more money than all other countries with worse results. And the charter i spent time examining spends less with better results.

First of all, nowhere in his article or the above is it mentioned that Eva Moskowitz raised $2.4 million for her charter schools in 2009, and pays herself a very hefty salary.

Secondly, it is clear that Steve Brill still hasn't learned a thing.

Numerous blogs have shown since the publication of his article that these two schools have widely different student populations.

Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post; Kim Gittleson in Gotham Schools, and I at the NYC public school parent blog, have pointed out in detail the disparity in the sort of students enrolled in Harlem Success Academy compared to PS 149; and how the charter school enrolls far lower numbers of free lunch, English language learners, sped students with serious learning disabilities, and homeless kids.

Here are the figures side by side (taken from each school's NY State report cards from 2008-9, Kim's analysis of sped reports and homeless figures from here and here):

STUDENT CHARACTERISTICS
PS 149 vs. Harlem Success Academy
% free lunch: 68% vs. 49%
% Limited English Proficient: 10% vs.2%
% students with IEPs: 21% vs.14%
% of IEPs; separately educated more than 20% of day: 67% vs.35%
% homeless students: 10% vs.1%

Apparently, Brill is impervious to correction, with PS 149 serving many more poor students, five times the percent of LEP students, twice as many seriously disabled students, and ten times the number of homeless.

Taking a closer look at the state report cards, I also examined the data relating to teachers and staff (all for 2008-9, unless otherwise indicated):

TEACHER CHARACTERISTICS
PS 149 vs. Harlem Success Academy
teacher turnover (2007-8): 22% vs. 50%
total no. of teachers: 41 vs. 27
total no. of other professional staff: 7 vs. 26

HSA had twice the teacher attrition than PS 149; with fully half of all teachers turning over that year. This is not the sign of a good working (or learning) environment. Apparently as a result of this high level of attrition, 30% of HSA teachers had less than 3 years experience in 2008-9- compared to 20% at PS 149.

The comparative data on "other professional staff" is quite striking: HSA had 27 teachers and 26 other "professional staff" in 2008-9. Compare that with 41 teachers at PS 149, with only 7 other professional staff.

I don't know who all these other "professionals" are, whether they are administrators, fundraisers, PR flacks, or people who actually provide instruction or services to kids; but so little proportional investment in classroom teachers seems to me an indication of poor educational priorities.

See also the many letters written in response to Brill's articles in today's NY Times magazine.

City Says Strapped Schools Can Go Without Parent Coordinators by Philissa Cramer - GothamSchools

Joining 6,400 teachers on the chopping block are 350 parent coordinators whose schools will no longer be required to employ them, Chancellor Joel Klein announced today.

For the first time since the position was created in 2003, high schools will be allowed to go without a parent coordinator, Klein told principals today, saving up to 350 schools just over $40,000 a year each. Parent coordinators whose jobs are eliminated will be at high risk of layoff, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Ann Forte. Elementary and middle schools are still required to keep a parent coordinator on staff.

The instruction is a stark example of how budget cuts could undo some of Mayor Bloomberg’s most ambitious education initiatives. The creation of the parent coordinator position in January 2003 was a central element of Bloomberg and Klein’s early reforms.

Klein also announced today that the Fair Student Funding formula the city devised to fund schools according to their students’ needs no longer covers some schools’ essential costs. To compensate for the outsized cuts at those schools, the department will redistribute money from schools with less lean budgets. While the shift technically does not deconstruct Fair Student Funding, it effectively makes it moot for the time being.

“No school’s FSF budget will be reduced as a result of the shift, and we are, of course, working to ensure it will have only a minimal impact on your schools,” Klein told principals in an email this afternoon.

Klein said the changes don’t mean the city is backing down from its commitments to parent engagement or to funding schools equitably.

But a spokeswoman for DC 37, the union that represents parent coordinators and other non-teaching school staff, said that’s exactly what allowing parent coordinators to be laid off will mean.

“Just a few months ago, the Mayor was heralding the importance of parent coordinators as a response to critics who were agitating for more parental input into the schools,” said D.C. 37 spokeswoman Zita Allen. “Parent coordinators were then intended to serve this critical function. Now, the Mayor has moved on disregarding the importance of parent coordinators as he indiscriminately slashes budgets.”

Here’s the email that Klein sent to principals today:

Dear Colleagues,

This morning, I testified before the City Council’s Education and Finance Committees about our budget for the coming school year. As I told the Council, our budget situation remains uncertain due to Albany’s failure to pass a budget. In fact, it’s not much clearer than the last time we spoke two weeks ago.

I encourage you to read my full testimony, available here, carefully. In it, I explain a funding change that will affect some of your schools. With the large cuts to Fair Student Funding over the last two years, the FSF budgets for a number of schools-particularly middle schools-are now well below what is needed to cover basic operations with these dollars. While funds from sources other than FSF have helped to sustain schools’ operations during these declining budget times, we must bring all schools’ unrestricted budgets to a basic operating level before we implement another large cut to 2010-2011 budgets. To do this, we plan to shift unrestricted, non-FSF dollars from schools where FSF allocations combined with other unrestricted funds are above a minimum operating threshold, and redirect them to the severely under-funded schools. No school’s FSF budget will be reduced as a result of the shift, and we are, of course, working to ensure it will have only a minimal impact on your schools.

In my testimony, I also describe our enrollment projections for next year. Our most recent estimates predict increases of about 5,000 general education and 7,300 special education students. However, actual enrollment figures could be higher. I understand a potential increase of this magnitude will have a significant impact on your schools, and we are currently determining the best way to factor it into your budgets.

Finally, I want to note that while we believe parent coordinators are critical to our schools’ success, we have decided that at the high school level, principals should be able to consider parent coordinators as they review their overall budgets. As such, a high school principal may decide to excess a parent coordinator to retain a teacher or an after-school program. Parent coordinators, however, remain mandated for all elementary and middle schools.

I know many of you will have questions about what all this will mean for your schools. We still hope to release your budgets by June 1, but our situation is very fluid and some issues remain unresolved. I will schedule another Webcast soon after your budgets are released.

I look forward to talking with you soon. And, as always, thank you for your hard work.

Sincerely,

Joel I. Klein

War! | GothamSchools by Arthur Goldstein - Gotham Schools

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What is it good for? Well, war has been around for an awfully long time, and sometimes if you can create the right war, you wag the dog, and no one even needs to win.

If you’re Mayor Bloomberg and Joel Klein, you find one of the last remnants of vibrant unionism in the center of your fiefdom and ask, “Why should we put up with such nonsense? Unions? We don’t need no stinking unions!” After all, most charter schools don’t have unions, and you can fire teachers simply for telling their colleagues how much UFT teachers earn. You can fire them for hanging Picasso paintings in the classroom.

So, how do you start this war? Well, a good start is to seek out some nervous and wacky senator facing an uncertain future. If he’s desperate enough for your support, maybe you can persuade him to propose an uphill bill demanding an end to reverse-seniority layoffs. You will demand this only for teachers, not for firefighters, police, or anyone else. After all, you haven’t invested years into sliming them. Also, you’ll insist this bill be restricted to New York City, where you have mayoral control and a fake board of education that votes for absolutely everything the mayor wants. If they don’t, they’re fired on the spot, and teachers should be fired on the spot too, goshdarn it!

By some remarkable coincidence, the very same week you unveil this brainstorm, two young teachers appear out of nowhere with a very professional-looking website and also demand an end to reverse-seniority layoffs. And the ensuing buzz is this — the system’s good, the system’s no good, the senior teachers are better, the junior teachers are better, the better teachers are me, the worse teachers are you, and no one is quite happy at all.

They’re not really supposed to be. It’s tough to fight 80,000 teachers. But maybe, if you can get 40,000 teachers to spend their time fighting with the other 40,000, you can divert them from what you’re doing, and you can sneak in your real agenda without anyone being the wiser. After all, you just ran a campaign ostensibly based on jobs, you fired 500 DC37 employees right in the middle of it (just after their union happened to endorse your opponent), and no one really saw any problem.

Did anyone notice when you took hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce class sizes, and then class sizes went up anyway? Only a few random crazy people, the NAACP, and oh, that awful UFT. Man, those unionized teachers are a pain in the butt.

And who really cared when you held public hearings to close 19 schools? True, every single speaker got up and condemned your plan. Sure, your statistics were nonsense. But you ignored the speakers and had your rubber-stamp education board, the Panel for Educational Policy, approve them anyway. What difference did it make that not a single member on the board could make an argument in defense of your actions? The papers ate it up and called you courageous.

But there are those uppity teachers again, ruining everything and demanding you follow the law! Outrageous! Where will it all end? Sure, you can pull a few more editorial writers out of your pocket, and have them scribble your demands for you. After the UFT Prez wins by a landslide, you can have them claim it’s a mandate for him to judge teachers by test scores. You can demand merit pay for the millionth time, and you can follow up by making sure the writers support your bill to end reverse seniority layoffs.

After all, those same editorial writers have been telling the world for years that bad teachers are everywhere. They’re in the classroom. They’re under your bed. They’re taking over the world! There’s that awful tenure system. So you preach from the rooftops that it awards tenure to far too many teachers.

The solution, your bill maintains, is to take the very same people you’ve ridiculed for awarding tenure to far too many teachers for no good reason, and allow them to decide which teachers have merit and which don’t. You can blunt that by setting up advisory committees and acting like you aren’t giving those administrators the final say. You can play it down in the papers and hope, as usual, that no one bothers to read the actual bill. The fact that you’ve repeatedly insinuated these administrators have the most abysmal judgment on earth, therefore, will be neither here nor there.

As long as you can pit the old against the young, the senior against the junior, teachers will argue in the comments at GothamSchools, duke it out in the hallways, stop speaking to one another, perhaps the UFT will take their troublesome eye off the ball, and then you can get back to the business of doing what you want, when you want, how you want, and with whom you want. Because that, after all, is how things are done at the PEP, and how things should be done everywhere.

This business of turning teachers into Willie Horton hasn’t worked out exactly as planned. Sure, it’s good when you can get the public to believe teachers need fewer benefits and less job protection. The media here are fantastic. In any other country, the public would demand more benefits and job protection for themselves, rather than scapegoating teachers.

But if you can get them focused on throwing stones at one another while you pursue your real agenda-well, that’s the ticket! Forget seniority. Let the public chew on that nonsense. There are bigger fish to fry. After all, you’ve failed miserably to improve test scores you can’t manipulate, your entire program is an abysmal failure, someone’s gotta take the blame for this, and it ain’t gonna be you!

And that, in the year 2010, is what you call “accountability.”

Breaking News: Court Overturns the Closure of the 19 Schools..!

A school board vote to close 19 city schools is "null and void," according to a decision handed down by a state supreme court justice today.

The bombshell decision leaves the fate of all 19 schools and their staffs up in the air and forces the Department of Education to rewrite arguments for why they deserve to be shut down

The city received the decision at 12:30 this afternoon, two days after the deadline for high school students to be notified about which schools they'll attend in the fall. In February, the teachers union sued the city, arguing that the DOE had violated the law that governs school closures. The decision (posted below) notes:

"The court wishes to make clear, however, that this decision is not intended to prevent completion of the matching process for any students who are not directly affected by the proposed closure or phase out of the 19 schools."

The court decision is based on three, clear findings of fact:

1. The EIS's "failed to provide any meaningful information regarding the impacts on the students or the ability of the schools in the affected community to accommodate those students" in the closing schools, or where the students would be able to find" similar programs elsewhere, such as the LYFE centers, for pregnant students or those with small children.

2. Lack of public notice: the DOE failed to provide hard copies of these proposals to CECs, Community boards, Community superintendents, and SLTs.

3. The DOE failed to hold joint meetings with the SLTs and CECs; some of whose members were invited to participate but had only a minimal role.

News Stories Follow...

New York Times - Judge Voids City School Closings By Sharon Otterman

A Manhattan judge on Friday reversed a city decision to close 19 schools for poor performance, ruling that education officials engaged in “significant violations” of state education law and failed to follow proper process in closing the schools.

The ruling means the city will have to start over again in making its case to close the schools — this time including more community input. That lengthy process will delay the moment when thousands of eighth graders who applied to the closing schools learn where they will go to school in the fall. It represents a victory for the United Federation of Teachers and the N.A.A.C.P., which had filed suit to stop the closings.

The judge, Joan B. Lobis of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, said the decision is not intended to delay admissions notifications for the other 80,000 eighth graders citywide who did not apply to the schools that are affected. High school admissions letters citywide, originally due to be distributed March 24, had been delayed pending the outcome of this lawsuit. The ruling may allow them to go out shortly.

Judge Lobis ruled that the city failed to act in compliance with education law when it issued its Educational Impact Statements for the schools, providing insufficient detail of what the closings would mean to the surrounding community, her ruling said.

The city, she said, “failed to provide the detailed analysis an impact statement mandates.”

The city must reissue the statements for the 19 schools before it completes the process of finding seats for the 8,500 students who applied to those schools, she ruled. While the court realizes “this will create inconvenience” for those students, it “cannot overlook what it reluctantly concludes are significant violations of the education law by respondents.”

The January 26 votes by the Panel of Education Policy to close the schools, which followed nearly 9 hours of public comment, are “null and void,” she said.

The schools that have gotten at least a temporary reprieve include Jamaica High School and Beach Channel High School in Queens; Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx; Paul Robeson High School in Brooklyn; and Norman Thomas High School in Manhattan, along with smaller schools, including the Global Enterprise Academy in the Bronx and the high school grades of the Choir Academy in Manhattan.

“We are thrilled,” said Christine Rowland, the U.F.T. representative at Columbus High School. “I think there’s a chance now. It was so hard for us to get anyone to listen in the very tight space of time we’ve had.”

The Department of Education did not have an initial comment, but a press officer said that lawyers were reviewing the decision.

Daily News - Judge sides with teachers; halts city plan to close 19 schools - By Tanyanika Samuels and Rachel Monahan

In a stunning blow to the city, a judge halted the controversial closing of 19 failing schools that some teachers and students fought to keep open.

Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Joan Lobis's ruling Friday sided with the teachers union and the NAACP in their case against the city, which temporarily delayed the high school admissions process.

The surprising decision elated critics of the mass closures, who packed hearings to speak up for their schools.

"The principal made an announcement over the loud speaker and immediately cheers sounded throughout the school," said Christine Rowland, a teacher at Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx. "We are thrilled. This is very exciting."

"We're ecstatic," said James Eterno, a social studies teacher and the teachers union chapter leader at Jamaica High School, in Queens.

"The word is spreading like wildfire throughout the school. We feel like we're born again, like we got a stay of execution."

The lawsuit charged that the city had not followed the requirement under the new mayoral control of schools law that officials must provide a full explanation of how the closings would affect school communities.

Lobis found the city "failed to comply with the requirements" of the law and ruled that the middle of the night vote that approved the closing schools in January is "null and void."

"We feel vindicated about our concern that closing these schools without a real process was problematic," said Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, one of the elected officials who sued.

Lobis had temporarily banned the city Education Department from giving eighth-graders high school decision letters, which were slated to be handed out Wednesday.

But her judgment allows the letters to go out to all but 8,500 students who applied for admission to the closing high schools. The decision did not come in time for the letters to be given to students before spring break.

"As soon as possible, the Office of Student Enrollment will mail your child's high school admissions letter to the home address listed on his or her high school application," Chancellor Joel Klein wrote in a letter to parents.

There was no immediate indication from the city on whether they will appeal the decision, which will also affect new school slated to take over space in closing schools next fall.

After a teachers union lawsuit last year, the city Department of Education backed down on closing three schools - Public Schools 194 and 241 in Manhattan and PS 150 in Brooklyn.

Those schools remained open and were not put on the closing list again.

List of the 19 schools:

1. Academy of Environmental Science

2. School for Community Research and Learning

3. Christopher Columbus High School

4. Global Enterprise High School

5. Monroe Academy for Business/Law

6. Metropolitan Corporate Academy

7. Robeson High School

8. W.H. Maxwell CTE High School

9. Beach Channel High School

10. Jamaica High School

11. Business, Computer Applications and Entrepreneurship High School

12. PS 332

13. KAPPA II

14. Academy of Collaborative Education

15. Middle School for Academic and Social Excellence

16. New Day Academy

17. Choir Academy of Harlem High School

18. Frederick Douglass Academy III Middle School

19. Norman Thomas High School

rmonahan@nydailynews.com

New York Post - Judge rules Dept. of Ed.'s bid to close 19 schools violated state law - By Yoav Gonen

The teachers union won a lawsuit today in its bid to roll back the city's plan to close 19 low-performing public schools.

The United Federation of Teachers filed the suit in Manhattan Supreme Court last month, accusing the city of ramming its plan through in a way "that would have made Tammany Hall proud."

The union claimed the Department of Education plan violated state law because it failed to consider the impact of the closings on their communities.

As a result, the Department of Education has to either redo the entire student application process or revert to an old list in which kids had picked those schools.

Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have defended closing schools that they say are failing.

Among the 19 schools that had been slated for closure were six large high schools, including Jamaica and Beach Channel in Queens, Paul Robeson in Brooklyn and Columbus in The Bronx.

The judges ruling also appeared to clear the way for the Department of Education to notify all but the 8,500 students who initially applied to one of the closing schools of their high school placements -- which had been delayed since Wednesday.

A DOE spokesman said officials were reviewing the decision.

GothamSchools.org - Court overturns closures of 19 city schools by Anna Phillips

A school board vote to close 19 city schools is “null and void,” according to a decision handed down by a state Supreme Court justice today.

The bombshell decision leaves the fate of all 19 schools and their staffs up in the air and forces the Department of Education to rewrite arguments for why they deserve to be shut down. The ruling is the first time a court has interpreted the new mayoral control law Albany put in place last summer.

The city received the decision at 12:30 this afternoon, two days after the deadline for high school students to be notified about which schools they’ll attend in the fall.

In February, the teachers union sued the city, arguing that the DOE had violated the law that governs school closures. The decision (posted below) notes:

“The court wishes to make clear, however, that this decision is not intended to prevent completion of the matching process for any students who are not directly affected by the proposed closure or phase out of the 19 schools…”

After Years of Complaints, Union Sues City Over Class Size Dollars by Maura Walz - GothamSchools

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UFT President Michael Mulgrew announces the union's lawsuit. Behind Mulgrew are, from left to right, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, NAACP NY President Hazel Dukes, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and Yolanda Morales, a plaintiff in the suit.

The city teachers union, along with a coalition of parents and advocacy groups, sued the Department of Education this morning, charging it with not spending allocated state money on reducing class sizes.

Since 2007, the state has allocated nearly $761 million for class size reduction, yet class sizes in schools across the city have risen over the past two years.

The lawsuit accuses the DOE of causing the class size increase by willfully misusing those funds.

“As far as we are concerned, this is deliberate,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said in a press conference at union headquarters this morning.

“New York City how has the highest class sizes in New York State,” Mulgrew said. “$760 million, for what?”

The lawsuit, filed this morning in the State Supreme Court in the Bronx, was brought by a coalition of parents, activist groups, the UFT, the New York chapter of the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation.

“The charges are without merit,” DOE Press Secretary David Cantor said.

Class size is one of six areas the state money is supposed to target as part of a legal agreement known as the Contracts for Excellence. The state has allocated the targeted funding since 2007 as part of a settlement of a lawsuit brought by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE), which charged that the state was underfunding city schools.

(The UFT was not a plaintiff in the original CFE suit, although the union did file a brief in support of the plaintiffs and then-union president Randi Weingarten testified in the case.)

City officials and their critics have been arguing over how to explain rising class sizes in the city for several years. DOE officials have repeatedly said state class size reduction funds have been included in principals’ budgets, but the city’s wider budget cuts have caused principals to reduce teaching staff anyway.

Nevertheless, city officials argue the state funds have prevented class sizes from growing even more.

At the press conference today, Mulgrew disputed that argument, saying a pattern of class size increases began before the fiscal crisis that led to widespread budget reductions.

The city first reported an increase in class sizes last school year, when class sizes in all grades grew by fractions of a point, with the largest increases happening in early grades. This school year, the jump in class size across all grades was substantially bigger.

DOE officials sent out a table today highlighting that average class sizes in all grades except kindergarten have decreased since the 2001-02 school year, the year before Mayor Michael Bloomberg assumed control over the school system.

But critics say those numbers mask larger class size increases in many high needs schools. Even before the city’s average class sizes began to rise, a state report showed that more than half of city schools reported increases in either their class size or student-teacher ratios.

Mulgrew also criticized the DOE’s defense that principals have discretion to spend funds on Contracts for Excellence programs other than class size reduction, saying it is Chancellor Joel Klein’s responsibility to ensure the money is spent on this issue.

“You cannot pass the buck,” he said.

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who joined the lawsuit’s plaintiffs at the press conference today, said the DOE’s approach to allocating state funds to schools without monitoring how they are used was unacceptable.

“It sounds like a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy,” he said.

A DOE official said that schools with high class sizes are actively instructed to use the state funds on class size reduction, and once a principal commits in their budget to using the funds to hire new teachers, the DOE’s budget system won’t allow them to divert the funds elsewhere.

Plaintiffs said the suit is a last resort after years of lobbying the DOE to properly dedicate the money. Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, one of the plaintiffs, has called on the state to withhold Contracts for Excellence funds until the city commits specifically to reducing class sizes.

Queens City Council Members Petition Klein to Save Schools by Maura Walz - GothamSchools

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City Councilman David Weprin (right) signs a petition urging the DOE not to close 20 city schools. Councilman Eric Ulrich (left) plans to deliver the petition to Chancellor Joel Klein's office this afternoon.

Members of the Queens City Council delegation called on Chancellor Joel Klein to abandon plans to close 20 city schools today.

Standing on the steps of Tweed Courthouse and joined by colleagues representing other boroughs, Queens Council members accused the Department of Education of threatening to close schools without first trying to improve them or seeking community input.

City Councilman Eric Ulrich, who represents Rockaway Beach, said the DOE did not notify his office before announcing its proposal to close Beach Channel High School.

Ulrich is circulating a petition signed by nearly all of the Queens Council members calling on the DOE to abandon its plans to close the borough’s schools.

Ulrich said he intended to deliver the petition to Chancellor Joel Klein’s office this afternoon. (He jokingly said he might nail it to the doors of Tweed.)

Many of the 11 Council members and members-elect who attended the news meeting called for discussions with parents, community leaders, and the teachers union about how to improve struggling schools before resorting to closure.

“The Chancellor is turning his back on these students and these schools,” Queens Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley said. “That is unacceptable.”

Three of the 20 schools the DOE has marked for closure this year are in Queens and two of the three — Jamaica and Beach Channel — are large high schools. Critics of the DOE’s plans to shutter the schools worry that the closures would displace students from eastern Queens, crowding them into already crowded schools such as Francis Lewis High School.

Updated Data Show Class Sizes are Up, Especially in Early Grades by Elizabeth Green - GothamSchools

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Class sizes and student-to-teacher ratios went up this year, especially in the elementary school grades, according to data the Department of Education released today. This is the first time the Department of Education has reported an increase in class sizes since Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools in 2002.

School officials blamed the economy for the rising figures, which come despite millions of dollars poured into class-size reduction over the last year. In a release, officials said budget cuts have prohibited some principals from hiring new teachers.

The data show that classes are slightly less crowded than a preliminary data set released to the City Council late last year suggested, but still more crowded than they were last school year. The average third-grade class, for instance, now has almost 22 students, up from 21 last school year. The biggest increases in class size came between kindergarten and fourth grade, where research is clearest about the benefits of reduced class sizes.

The average class size in high school is also up, to 26.2 from 26.1 last year. The department’s presentation argues that the change is due to a new form of reporting. Some classes with more than one teacher in a single room used to be treated as two separate classes, but this year the department counted them as one. Under the old form of reporting, the average high school class size would have dropped to 25.6, school officials said.

The rising class sizes come against a backdrop of big investments by the state into reducing class size. The DOE, in its release, says that schools where reducing class size was a high priority have seen lowered figures.

We’re still working on a deeper analysis. While we do that, please feel free to peruse the release — and send us tips for questions to ask.