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This has been popping up all over the internet, but what better video to post with Election Day fast approaching? If you’re still undecided, perhaps these students from the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, Georgia, can help you. Here’s a taste of their lyrics:

Lower your Taxes – you know Obama Won’t
PROTECT THE LOWER CLASS – You know McCain won’t!
Have enough experience – you know that they don’t
STOP GLOBAL WARMING – you know that you won’t

And here’s the whole song, performed live.

Ron Clark, the school’s founding teacher, is the author of a best-selling book on teaching, The Essential 55: An Award Winning Educator’s Rules for Discovering the Successful Student in Every Child. Check out the blog of the American Prospect for some additional context about the school that might surprise you. Here’s a hint: the school isn’t free.

Students from PS 282 make guacamole at Palo Santo.

When Jacques Gautier, chef at Park Slope’s Palo Santo restaurant, first asked students from PS 282 to name the five flavors, the first child he called on volunteered “chips.” When Gautier said that was incorrect, half the students lowered their hands.

Just weeks later, those same students could name all of the flavors — sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and even pungent — and they could also have a conversation about what fruits are in season, thanks to a 14-year-old program that each October brings professional chefs into elementary school classrooms for food appreciation classes.

The Days of Taste program, offered free to schools by the American Institute of Wine and Food, this year paired about 2,000 students at 22 city schools with 63 restaurants for a four-session course on food, nutrition, taste, cooking, and the restaurant industry.

Before the PS 282 students visited Palo Santo, Chef Jacques had taken them to a local greenmarket, where they sampled unfamiliar fruits and vegetables, and visited the school twice to teach food vocabulary and salad-making.

Yesterday, the children toured the restaurant, made fresh limeade, smashed avocados into guacamole, and molded dough into an El Salvadorean dish called papusas. Then they sat down at a table they’d set themselves and enjoyed the lunch they’d prepared. (more…)

Satellite Academy graduate (via flickr)

New federal regulations are going to force many states to change the way they report high school graduation rates. But not New York, a spokesman from the state education department, Jonathan Burman, said.

That’s because the state already uses a formula that Burman calls “substantially compliant” with the one that all states are now required to use to calculate their graduation rates. In fact, New York adopted the formula in 2004, even before the governors of all 50 states promised three years ago to work toward adopting it.

Not that the state hasn’t had its fair share of statistical tugs-of-war. Before last year, the city touted a graduation rate that was calculated using a formula that excluded special education students and included students who earned GEDs instead of regular high school diplomas. Critics said this rate was artificially inflated. Last year, the city DOE agreed to begin using the state’s graduation rate formula after negotiating an agreement that would allow August graduates to be counted in the four-year rate. The city was on the vanguard: the new federal regulations also permit states to include August graduates in their calculations.

Once all states adopt the same formula — only 16 use it right now — we’ll be able to see how the state’s graduation rate compares to the rest of the country’s, in addition to being able to measure the city against the state. That won’t happen until 2011 at the earliest, however; the new regulation doesn’t requires states to adopt the uniform graduation rate until they release accountability reports for the 2010-2011 school year.

The above policy change, passed by the state Board of Regents in September, is something to watch. It will allow students still learning English to get extra help on state tests for two years after they pass a English as a Second Language proficiency exam.

The way English Language Learner students take tests has been a matter of dispute in the city for a while, and it comes up a lot in the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to explain why students test scores have not gone up as much as some would have hoped. Their reason: that a federal policy change led more ELL students to take tests.

By the same logic, giving accommodations to ELL students might help push test scores up.

Disney's Aristocats. (Via Flickr)

We covered the Daily News’s story on the “fat cat lives” of top school officials because the story was killed, which aroused our curiosity.

Now that we see the story, the question we’re asking at our office is, so what?

Some have seen the News story as exposing corruption. That’s wrong. The story reports no evidence that school officials are being paid too much or improperly collecting assets that present conflicts of interest. What it does report is essentially what we already knew: Top school officials in the Bloomberg administration took nontraditional routes into public education. We learn that Chancellor Joel Klein, a former CEO, lives on Park Avenue, and that Garth Harries must have a trust fund. (How else could an early-30′s guy whose glitziest resume bullet is a consulting job at McKinsey have assets between $3.9 and $6 million?)

There are some reasonable questions to pull out of the story. There’s nothing wrong with asking whether a former McKinsey consultant and a former CEO are the most qualified people to run the nation’s largest public school system, or whether $250,000 is too much to pay a schools chancellor (Randi Weingarten, the teachers union leader, makes $350,000) — or even whether affluent people with sparse ties to public schools and public schoolchildren should run them.

Another fair question is whether there is a conflict of interest in a top school official coming from the ranks of a top Department of Education contracting company. Photo Anagnostopoulos, the DOE’s chief operating officer, previously was president of McGraw-Hill Digital Learning, which has an $80 million contract with the department to produce interim assessments — the same ones that racked up courier costs.

But the biggest takeaway here is not that affluent business-world transplants are running the public schools; it’s the likelihood that, by putting in a phone call, the same affluent people were able to go over the heads of reporters and editors and get a story killed.

State Senator Kevin Parker of Brooklyn meets with charter school students at the Brooklyn Museum of Art last night (Philissa Cramer/GothamSchools)

Charter school boosters are often seen throwing compliments at Mayor Bloomberg.

So yesterday it was a little surprising to hear a state senator, Kevin Parker, in one breath sing the charter gospel and in the next lambaste the Bloomberg administration for its management of the public schools.

At Brooklyn Charter School Night yesterday, Parker told me that his position isn’t really a contradiction. Everything he loves about charter schools, he said — their freedom from bureaucratic restrictions, their creative spirit — is absent from traditional public schools. And he said that charter schools’ long waiting lists reflect families’ frustrations with district-run public schools. (more…)

It’s Halloween today, so it’s no surprise that kids at PS 261 in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, arrived at school in costume. But there were no witches, goblins, or ghosts. Instead, for PS 261′s first-ever Storybook Character Parade, the kids dressed as characters from their favorite books.

Librarian Danielle Taylor Brocco dressed as Alice the Fairy.

There were Harry Potters galore, and an entire class of second graders wore handmade hats that turned them into mice from an award-winning series of books by Kevin Henkes, whose work the grade studied in detail this year. Outside the school doors, parents with cameras snapped shots of their children and a father dressed as Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat serenaded the parading students.

The event was organized by PTA member Kim Wiley-Schwartz. (Wiley-Schwartz works for the Livable Streets Network, which like GothamSchools is an initiative of The Open Planning Project.)

At PS 261, the Storybook Character Parade is likely to become an annual tradition: As the children returned to their classrooms, parents huddled on the sidewalk outside the school discussing plans for next year’s parade.

I mentioned in a previous post that two charter school students from Harlem were among those testifying in favor of extending term limits at the City Council earlier this month. Their school head, Seth Andrew of Democracy Prep, sent me their testimonies, which he said they drafted on their own, on blank pieces of paper, by hand.

Andrew said the students had the opportunity to testify either for or against extending term limits. Both came out in favor. (Not a surprise, since Andrew also said that his students testified at the invitation of James Merriman, the executive director of the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence and a political ally of Mayor Bloomberg.)

The testimonies are worth a read. Here’s how seventh-grader Daniel Clarke Jr. explained the connection between term limits and education:

Well, this chancellor has made a lot of progress in seven years, but he’s not done…YET. My school goes from grade 6 to 8 right now, but we are supposed to grow all the way to grade 12. Unfortunately, we can’t do this without a public school building, and this chancellor says he wants to give us one. He wants to close bad traditional schools and grow good ones like mine. If you pass this bill, my school will have a chance to take me all the way to college. If you don’t, the progress can’t continue and my school might not be able to grow. But I deserve a great high school, and there aren’t any others in my neighborhood like Democracy Prep that are open to all kids.

Term limits prevent my family from having a choice, both in schools and in mayors and what we need are more choices, not fewer. This bill is not about Mayor Bloomberg or the City Council; it is about giving our community choice, voice, and progress for the kids of New York City. Thank you for Listening, I’m Daniel Clark Jr.

The full testimonies are after the jump. (more…)

Someone had the Daily News story about Department of Education officials’ personal wealth killed the other night, but not before Google stored a copy in its cache. You can read the story in full online now. Thanks to the reader who helped us figure this out. (NYC Public School Parents also captured the cached story.)

For those who read the recent New York Times magazine article about Floortime, an educational method for students with autism, here’s one New York City parent’s explanation of why she prefers it over Applied Behavior Analysis for her son:

Yes, we wanted our son to be able to do a 4-piece puzzle, but we wanted him to do it because he enjoyed it, not for the cookie. Those in the ABA camp say the technique is simply a door into the parts of the brain that need to be switched “on.” Once the door opens, advocates say, the kids do start to enjoy the ‘games’ of therapy, as much as any typically developing child. I have to say, I’ve seen ABA work in exactly that way, but I’m still uncomfortable with the overall approach. At its core, it still seems to me a mechanical and lifeless teaching method, and one that would not address one of our top priorities: to instill in our son a love of learning; to show him that it can be interesting and fun and exciting.

As it turns out, my son’s ABA therapists have been some of his best, and he’s made multi-faceted gains as a result of their efforts. But I’m still a huge Floortime fan. It’s complicated, like everything else about autism.