One way to deal with the problem of teachers who don't have permanent jobs in the Department of Education but can't be laid off thanks to their union contract? Buy 'em out. And that option is exactly what Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott proposed doing yesterday. Probably better than spending $100 million or so a year to keep them employed, which Walcott says we currently do. more ›

Teachers looking to talk to their students on Facebook should think twice. The Department of Education has just released its first guidelines for social media. The short of it? Don't. "In this digital era, the lines between professional and personal endeavors are sometimes blurred," the guidelines intone, before going on to recommend that teachers reject friend requests from their charges. more ›

With a rash of Department of Education employees being arrested for inappropriate behavior—the Department's special commissioner of investigation has received 248 complaints of sex abuse in 2012, up 35 percent over the same period last year—parents keep asking why teachers with questionable history are still getting to work in classrooms. A series of reports released thanks to a Freedom of Information request now provides one partial-answer: Unions. more ›

Remember the uproar when people found out about a list of words and phrases that the Department of Education no longer found acceptable for city-issued tests? The DOE would like you to forget about all that. The Department quietly announced yesterday that the taboo test topics—which included words like "cancer," "divorce," "politics" and "war"—have been scrapped. more ›

A 12-year-old boy is claiming that his teacher at I.S. 399 in the Bronx taped him to a chair for 20 minutes during class last Friday. Since the incident the boy—who says he was strapped to his seat after he'd gotten up to help a classmate with a math quiz—has not returned to school and the teacher has been taken out of the classroom while the Department of Education investigates. more ›

Earlier this week, we were pretty shocked/saddened to learn that the Department of Education had made up a list of words that were no longer acceptable for city-issued standardized tests. Y'know, words like birthday, poverty and dinosaurs. Then we got a look at the full list, below, and our response turned to horror. Cancer? Bodily functions? Homelessness? Ugh. more ›

"Pink slime" is getting the pink slip at New York's public schools, just as Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer wanted. The meat product (the industry calls it "lean finely textured beef" and uses it as filler in ground beef) has been much in the news lately, with everyone from Safeway to McDonalds and Taco Bell responding to public pressure and saying they're getting rid of the soylent pink. So back to dog food it goes! more ›

Last month, in the midst of a spate of school employees being accused of sexual misconduct, Department of Education Chancellor Dennis Walcott promised a thorough review of school employees to make sure nobody with bad history was still working with kids. Well, that review happened and now eight school employees are in hot water. more ›

Though it looked for a hot second like it was settled, the ongoing fight over having church groups worship in public schools is far from over. Yesterday a federal court went and upheld an injunction issued Friday that lets the services continue. For now! more ›

Amidst charges of sexually abusive teachers, depressing teacher evaluations and high student arrest numbers, the Department of Education finally had some good news to report yesterday. After years of decline, the number of black and Latino students accepted into the city's top specialized high schools went up 14 percent this year! more ›

Another day, another New York City teacher arrested for inappropriate behavior with their students. Yesterday a Manhattan ROTC instructor at a Hell's Kitchen high school was arrested on charges he inappropriately touched a 14-year-old girl on school grounds earlier this month. Darryl Lynch, 55, was charged with forcible touching, acting in a manner to injure a child and sexual abuse. more ›

It isn't just teachers getting arrested in our schools. According to new data released by the NYPD [PDF], an average of five students were arrested every day in the city's school system last fall, and nine more were issued summonses. Things look especially bleak for black students who, despite comprising only 29 percent of the student population made up 60 percent of the arrests (add in Latino students and the number climbs to 90 percent). The news led Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, to again point out that "If the Bloomberg administration is truly serious about helping young men of color succeed, then they must address these disparities and focus more attention on educating children—not arresting them." more ›

After a flood of alleged sexual abuse in New York City Public Schools (see here, here and here) Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott is working fast to try and control the damage. Earlier this week he promised parents at P.S. 87 that he would be reviewing screening procedures for school employees and today he is sending out a letter to parents announcing just that. more ›

Some folks like to complain that teachers, with their summer vacations and school breaks, get too much vacation. But many teachers would heartily disagree. To wit: Hot on the heels of the teacher who allegedly faked their daughter's death for vacation time comes the story of Mona Lisa Tello, a Manhattan science teacher busted today for claiming she had jury duty when she didn't [PDF]. How'd they catch her? Well, it didn't help that she spelled "trail" instead of "trial," "sited" instead of "cited" and "manger" instead of "manager" in a letter she forged to her boss. Whoops! more ›

A last-minute entry in this year's pervy teacher contest comes to us from Ozone Park, Queens, where a 44-year-old physical-education teacher has lost his job because of an "inappropriate relationship" with a teenage former student. How inappropriate was it? According to Department of Education documents obtained by the Post, Mr. Gerard Cassidy was a teacher at MS137 America’s School of Heroes in Ozone Park in 2009 when he became very, shall we say, devoted to the unidentified 16-year-old, showering her with gifts—including an iPhone—and allegedly promising to marry her when she came of age. By the way, this was also around the time he was dating her mom. more ›

Angela Jewth is living a parent's nightmare. Her only son, 9-year-old Jonathan, died Wednesday—nine days after a choking incident at his Bronx school left him clinging to life in the hospital. Now she is getting ready to sue the city to find out why it appears nobody at P.S. 47 knew how to properly clear the healthy boy's airways of a rogue meatball. "If something had been done differently, my son would've been alive today," Jewth told the Daily News. more ›

Charles Oross, a 44-year-old teacher at IS 238 in Queens, has been arrested for allegedly engaging in a lengthy sexual relationship with a 13-year-old student when she attended his school [PDF]. According to the student's statements, the pair met regularly with Oross between January and May 2009 in his classroom for 6 a.m. hook up sessions that included "oral sex and physical touching" before having sex for the first time in June 2009. Oross is charged with rape, criminal sexual act and endangering the welfare of a child. more ›

Food prices keep going up, sure, but some of this is absurd! In its second audit this month related to food in the city, the Comptroller's office has called out the Department of Education for not being careful with its food contracts—with costly results [PDF]. Like, for instance, with the distributor who charged the DOE the same amount to deliver cases of "Beef - Gyro Strip" as it did to deliver cheaper and lighter cases of "Eggplant, breaded." And it goes on. After the audit, the Comptroller's office went and smacked down a Department of Education contract that inexplicably jumped $20 million dollars in a year! more ›

"These aren't marginally bad schools or non-performing schools," Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday regarding the list of schools the Department of Education wants to shut down or truncate this year. "They just don't do the job, this is no question they're not doing the job." In a two-part process the city released a list of 19 schools that are facing execution at the end of the school year—including one Manhattan school with a violent rep that included an assault on a pregnant woman—as well as six schools that may have their middle school grades removed. "This is about student performance, student outcome, making sure we improve our schools and making sure students are college ready and career ready," schools chancellor Dennis Walcott assured parents today. more ›

After CBS 2 noticed an interesting quote Michael Bloomberg gave regarding education this week (in a hypothetical world, if he could—and he can't—he "would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones") the Mayor's office has been working hard to clarify just what he meant. Luckily, today at the announcement of a new Facebook office, Hizzoner got the chance and turned the tables, blaming the media, Capital reports. "Nothing I've said in Boston I haven't said for the last ten years," Bloomberg said. "I don't know why you have't paid attention." more ›

[Update below] Mayor Bloomberg was apparently full of interesting things to say while talking at MIT this week. Not only did he refer to the NYPD as "my own army" but he also apparently expressed a very, shall we say, interesting view on how he would fix the city's schools in a perfect world: "if I had the ability, which nobody does really, to just design a system and say, ‘ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do,’ you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones." more ›

At what point do you start teaching kids the complicated geopolitics of the Middle East and how much detail on each side do you give? That is the question brought up today by public school parent Dana Milstein, whose 10-year-old recently came home from school with what Milstein found to be an alarming, propagandist "fact sheet" on Israel. Now she's taking her concerns to the public—and she has some points. more ›

Last week we learned that students in city schools would be taught about sexual intercourse and its implications as the DOE set one semester of required cirriculum for sixth or seventh graders and students in their first two years of high school. Thankfully, parents who prefer to keep their children ignorant of the crucial details surrounding humanity's most primal and consequential activities have prevailed: some of the course work has been cut. Specifically, the "risk cards" that were to be used by middle schoolers to explain different types of sex acts and their health implications. Thankfully, a dusty VHS copy of Showgirls is willing to fill in the gaps. more ›

The new "report cards" for New York City's public high schools are out (you can read them here) and they do not paint the prettiest of pictures for our city's students, especially considering the fact that education has been one of the biggest touchstones for the Bloomberg regime. According to the data only one in four students who enter high school in the city are ready for college after four years and less than half of those that are ready bother to enroll. Shame Mayor Bloomberg can't blame this on Cathie Black, eh? more ›

Brace yourselves: sex ed arrives at the city's middle and high schools next year, and it. Will. Be. SEXY. According to the Post, high school students will note the cost of condoms and "research a route from a school to a clinic that provides birth control and STD tests." Middle schoolers will use "risk cards" to sort activities likes mutual masturbation and oral sex. "I didn't know how much detail they would get," one SoHo mother says, quaintly assuming that students don't already think and talk about sex all the time. more ›

As anyone who has seen the documentary Dangerous Minds knows, teaching is pretty difficult. But a few simple guidelines will make getting tenure easier: don't tell your students about your sexual exploits, brandishing a box cutter isn't a good idea, and cut back on the compulsive hugging. The Daily News looks into the more than 20 DOE employees who were disciplined over the last 24 months and they make our 6th grade English teacher's habit of shaving her eyebrows seem normal. more ›

The high-ranking Department of Education official who was arrested in the winter and accused of sexually torturing his wife with hammers, nails and hangers has been found guilty of sexually abusing and assaulting his wife. Official Laurence Harvey, who previously made $165,000-a-year from his DOE gig, was not found guilty of raping his wife. more ›

A Bronx elementary school teacher has been arrested and charged with sexual abuse of a boy. According to NY1, 35-year-old Tulsie Singh was suspended without pay in January and finally fired for his job at PS 306 in April. Sources claim that Department of Education officials have known about Singh's actions for "years," and he was suspended from work "more than once as a result." Singh reportedly began molesting the boy, then eight-years-old, in his classroom in 2004, and "the abuse continued until March 2007." more ›

At PS 51 in the North Bronx, students have been learning their ABCs and their TCEs. No, TCE isn't a newfangled standardized test—it's the potentially carcinogenic chemical trichloroethylene! There was already an "emotional meeting" between PS 51's parents and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott last Thursday, where Walcott apologized for the city sitting on the information for months, and pledged to relocate students to St. Martin of Tours, a Catholic school two miles away. But Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. drafted a letter calling for Walcott to "Release copies of all environmental testing, reports and data from both P.S. 51 and the new facility at St. Martin of Tours." more ›

An octogenarian teacher who says she was fired from her job because she couldn't physically take every kindergartener on a bathroom break is suing to get reinstated. And worst of all, the physically impaired 80-year-old Lillie Leon claims that the school set her up for failure: "I was expected to bathroom all of the children, boys and girls, at the same time, which is impossible. I really think it was an entrapment," Leon told the Post. more ›