I fancy myself forward-thinking, even revolutionary, when it comes to envisioning the urban school district of the future. But after an hour-long conversation with a truly exceptional group from the NYC Department of Education’s portfolio and charter school teams, I felt downright humdrum.

What they are implementing-not just thinking about, not just talking about, but actually implementing-via closures, charters, and new start-ups is (next to the charterization of New Orleans’ system) the most exciting development in the affairs of traditional districts in eons.

This team is ably led by the very impressive Michael Thomas Duffy who accomplished great things for charterdom while in Boston. In addition to helping bring great new schools online for the nation’s largest school district, Duffy will also be called on to play an important role in this tricky effort.

After this meeting, I’m more bullish than ever about what Joel Klein is accomplishing. I’ve long believed that the only way to fix urban public education is to completely replace the traditional district model. But if it’s possible-if-to transition that failed model into something much better, NYC may be providing the blueprint.

Revolutionary patriots picture by flattop341 on Flickr

We DC-based policy types are susceptible to getting dangerously far removed from the quotidian thrills and struggles of real schools. So I visited four schools earlier this week while in NYC. It was a complete delight. If you find yourself suffering from policy- or research-induced edu-malaise, here’s a highlight from each school.

At the Cornelia Connelly Center, an all-girls Catholic middle school on the Lower East Side serving a 100 percent minority and 90 percent free and reduced-price eligible student body, my two “student ambassador” tour guides were pulled out of their mandatory Latin class where they were, at the moment, learning the roots of the word “intractable.” “I like Latin,” one of the young ladies told me, “it helps me understand English better, too.” Walking past a picture of the president hanging next the history classroom, the other young woman said, “We were allowed to watch the inauguration in school. Some students got pretty emotional. It showed what we could become.”

At the remarkable Harlem Success Academy charter school (run by the remarkable Eva Moskowitz), the school’s powerful culture was evident everywhere, from the founders’ vision to the teachers’ behavior to the inspirational adages affixed to the walls. Their results are outstanding and their replication goals audacious.  I thought I was blown away by the five- and six-year olds doing science experiments on momentum (all students take one hour of science five days a week beginning in kindergarten), but it was eclipsed by seeing a sea of six-year old hands shoot into the air during the required chess class when asked how they could free the bishop from the back line. “Move the pawn at E7 two spaces forward,” a student said with pride.

At the much-heralded Harlem Children’s Zone charter schools, Harvard economist Roland Fryer provided an excellent presentation on the project’s outstanding academic gains in recent years. This was exciting but even better was founder Geoffrey Canada’s admission that their early results, despite huge investments, were disappointing and that the whole team acknowledged their shortcomings and redoubled their efforts. The highlight of the tour of the fifth-floor medical clinic, with full health and dental services for all students, was walking past the classroom where five-year olds were learning the proper way to brush their teeth and wash their hands.

Finally, at Mount Carmel-Holy Rosary Catholic school, the principal told the riveting tale of the school’s two brushes with closure and ultimate salvation through a large donation from a previously unknown out-of-state benefactor. Despite having nearly all of its students attend on scholarship, 100 percent of 8th graders pass the state ELA exam. Though the class sizes were large—all above 30 from what I saw, one at 35—there couldn’t have been more order or higher morale.

In one classroom, 34 second-graders were determining which emotions were associated with which colors so they could improve poems they had recently written. With the lesson complete, the teacher asked the students to get out their recorders so they could play “Ode to Joy” for their guests. Who wrote “Ode to Joy?” she asked as they silently got out their musical instruments. A sea of hands. “Beethoven.” Then 34 low-income seven-year olds played the most beautiful recorder version of a Beethoven song of all time.

Ode to joy, indeed.

Jumping for joy - photograph by reebs* on Flickr

Ok, so last week we saw a story or two out of New York describing how the teachers union gave city council members cue cards telling them what questions to ask during a hearing on charter schools. Yes, that definitely makes for an interesting discussion. But a colleague of mine here at Fordham caught something that made us chuckle a bit, with disturbed amusement. Gotham Schools’s Flickr page displays some of these actual cue cards. Sadly, slide #6 uses the term “steakholders.” That’s right. Now granted, someone had penciled it in, and we obviously don’t know who. But....if it’s true, it’s pretty disturbing. I mean, yes there ARE INDEED actual steakholders, as we can see here. But I don’t believe that’s what the cue-card author was attempting to say.

Cue cards slideshow by Gotham Schools from Flickr

The New York Times reports on the state legislature’s pending decision on renewing mayoral control in the Big Apple.  Unfortunately, and maybe unsurprisingly, the debate—or at least the article—is not so much about student performance or reforming New York City Public Schools; it’s about the reaction to Joel Klein’s penchant for aggressively pushing for change at the expense of political niceties.

One other reason you might consider reading the article:  You’ll want to see for yourself how the reporter makes eating pizza with Alan Alda relevant to education reform.

Interesting article in the New York Times about the proliferation of charter schools in Harlem. This borough has a substantial and growing share of NYC’s charters. But what’s with the headline? The article certainly shows the “more choices in Harlem,” but where’s the “stir concern for public schools”? The whole article is about the benefits of choice, not a developing war between the two sectors. Either an entire section was cut out of the article before it went to print or the editors are trying to stir a controversy that doesn’t exist.

We were all sort of shocked a few weeks ago when KIPP AMP and another KIPP school in New York reached out the New York United Federation of Teachers. How could a school whose model is based on long hours and staff hiring and firing autonomy possibly consider union representation, which would, in effect, prohibit those two things? Then, just this week, another famous charter school, LA’s Accelerated, announced its teachers were reaching out their local union, too. Well, it looks like KIPP’s teachers may have changed their minds after all. According to yesterday’s New York Times, AMP’s teachers have let the deadline pass to voluntarily recognize the union. The UFT must now file for recognition with New York State’s Public Employment Relations Board. Let’s hope the KIPP administration, which will be given an opportunity to respond by the PER Board, puts its foot down! Stay tuned...

Update: I misread... the teachers have (in my opinion, unfortunately) not changed their minds about unionizing. The school is simply running down the clock on recognizing them.

Update: After all of you pointed out that I had read too quickly, I became curious on what exactly KIPP could do to fend off the UFT. The short answer is not much. If a majority (not even a supermajority) of teachers want to unionize, the school has to, by law (at least in New York State) recognize them. Its only out is if the organizing teachers committed some blunder, like not following procedure or artificially inflating their numbers by having former KIPP AMP teachers fill out union cards. There are strategies for preventing unionization before teachers have submitted their cards—talking to teachers, trying to address their concerns internally etc. In the case of KIPP AMP, the UFT seems to have accused Dave Levin (KIPP co-founder and supt of KIPP’s four NYC schools) of trying to intimidate teachers into redacting. Doesn’t sound like it’s worked though. After the teachers have submitted their cards, the school’s hands are basically tied unless teachers change their minds. Find out more here. HT to Elizabeth Green.

All of this makes me ponder the neverending question of human capital. KIPP schools and charters like it have high turnover and burnout rates (these, in fact, are some of the reasons AMP’s teachers decided to unionize). If successfully educating socioeconomically disadvantaged and typically way below grade level students requires an unsustainable commitment in the long term, how can we possibly marry the successful elements of a charter model to the large scale traditional public education system? Does that mean we need, instead, to change our perceptions of teaching as a long term career? What is the give and take between teaching staff continuity and the 80-hour work weeks of places like KIPP?

I feel like we’ve turned reporting on the shenanigans in the Big Apple into a weekly event. The latest? Overfunding schools that are slated to close in 2010. Sure, we can’t just rip the mats out from under these schools as they head for the exit, but let’s not also give them double the average per-pupil student funding. That’s right, at least five schools are getting as much as $28,000 per kid . The NYC average is $14,000. According to the NY Post , all of this is due to some funding glitch that creates a lag in budget cuts for schools with declining enrollments to temper the shock. Adlai Stevenson High School in the Bronx, for example, kept an extra $2 million even though student enrollment dropped from last year’s 687 to this year’s 303. What are these schools doing with the extra dough? Spending it of course—on SMART boards, copies of Obama’s memoir Dreams of My Father for the entire school, and a grand piano, to name a few. As one teacher put it, "I have no clue why this is going on." Neither do I.

Economist Roland Fryer’s Educational Innovation Laboratory is off to the races, thanks to the Broad Foundation, experimenting with new ways of incentivizing kids to learn in three big cities (New York , Chicago, Washington ). In D.C., the plan involves paying students in fifteen middle schools up to $1500 a year if they (a) attend, (b) behave and (c) get good grades.

I’m a longtime believer in giving young people real-world incentives to study hard and do well in school, though I’ve long supposed that means doing a better job of hinging promotion, graduation, college admission and jobs on school success. I don’t have any big problem with more immediate and kid-like rewards, either, such as taking students with perfect attendance records to a theme park at the end of the year or giving pizzas to those who read more books .

Paying them cold cash to do the right thing gives me pause, however. It’s fundamentally amoral. It creates weird and perverse incentives for pupils and teachers alike. It could get very expensive, using serious money that might otherwise go into better teachers, better textbooks, longer times, more instructional technology, etc. (Chicago has about 125,000 students in grades 5-8. At $1500 apiece, a totally successful program for them would cost $187.5 million per annum.)

Besides all that, I really want to know if it’s going to work—and I really want that question to be addressed by analysts completely independent of Roland Fryer. Is there a freestanding evaluation built into this? Will the necessary data be available to one and all to analyze? Fryer is a fine economist and presumably an honest man. But nobody should be his own evaluator. That’s an even more dubious proposition than paying kids to do what’s in their own interest in the first place.

Some days our blog exhausts me. Not writing for it—I’m usually too busy—just reading it and thinking how I would have said something differently myself or would have bitten my tongue and said nothing at all. When we started it, I promised not to edit, just occasionally to point out what I take to be errors—and once in a while to pen items myself that can’t wait for next Thursday’s Gadfly or aren’t appropriate there.

In the past, these are the sorts of "corrections" I would have sought to make via quiet meetings in the office, but Mike insists that today’s fashion is to air our internal disagreements in public. So here are a few that cropped up today (which is just half over):

For reasons not clear to me, Liam wants to prove that the Democratic party is not anti-charter school or anti-merit pay. So he names a few worthy Democrats and Democrat-leaning organizations that themselves have advanced the charter and/or merit-pay cause. He’s right about the names. Indeed, there are more. But a few swallows do not prove that spring has come. Go to state capital after state capital around this broad land and anywhere that charter schools or some form of merit pay are on the table observe which legislators (with rare and honorable exception) are trying to make it happen and which (with rare and less honorable exception) are trying to kill it. Case closed. I’d love to see it reopened. But the ground is still mostly frozen.

Speaking of charter schools, I agree with our newest arrival, Stafford, that a two-hour-a-week high school is idiotic ; but far from being a charter school, I read that Los Angeles Times article to suggest that the school system is very likely going to shut down a (somewhat idiotic) charter and then create this bizarre inside-the-system alternative for the displaced kids (and to recapture more state dollars for itself). With a little more digging I’m sure that Stafford, who is very able, can find out what’s actually happening in LaLa land rather than simply commenting on two short and less-than-clear grafs in a newspaper article.

And then there’s Coby. He’s very able, too (as is Liam, by the way), but I surely wouldn’t have issued his vigorous defense of the NYC education department’s new "truth squad." He suggests therein that the poor mayor and chancellor don’t get nearly the media exposure that teacher union chief Weingarten gets (because she buys it) and that the poor, underappreciated bureaucracy thus doesn’t get its "sensible reforms" adequately noticed. Balderdash. Some of those reforms are sensible, some not, but I have rarely seen as overwhelming and relentless a governmental PR machine as the one that Joel Klein presides over—at least not in what we used to call the free world. Overexposure might be more accurate.

By the by, the Checker quote in the New York Sun that Coby tees off from, while accurately reprinted, originated in my own error. When Elizabeth Green called to ask what I thought of the "Department of Education’s new ‘truth squad’," I, like any self-respecting Beltway dweller, assumed she was referring to the FEDERAL Department of Education. That’s what I was referring to when I said they might better use their money for NCLB repair work or vouchers than to add media watchdogs and blog eagles. It was Margaret in my imagination, not Joel.

And now I’m truly pooped.