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The hardships of the Great Depression marked the beginning of the end for a Thanksgiving tradition of children dressed as beggars going to door-to-door seeking handouts (although in some neighborhoods it lived on into the 1960′s).

These days, you’re much more likely to read of children collecting money or food for others on this holiday. Hundreds of New York City schools participate in the annual Penny Harvest around this time of year, gathering pennies which they later donate to a cause of their choice.

Whatever you’re doing to celebrate, we thank you for reading and contributing, and wish you the best — Happy Thanksgiving!

We’re making like the students and taking a Thanksgiving vacation Thursday and Friday. Here are a few morsels to gnaw at when you finish the turkey.

• Inside Higher Ed makes the most complete list ever of Ed Sec possibles. (via Richard Whitmire)
• Diane Ravitch wonders about the distance between Good Intentions, Ignorant Elites, and Scoundrels.
• Did you know that I hurt my foot? Other facts about me are in this Alexander Russo interview.
• Kevin Carey reviews Malcolm Gladwell’s book, and quotes this passage on KIPP: “Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren’t achieving, is that there isn’t enough of it…”
• Arne Duncan of Chicago is killing in Flypaper’s who-will-be-Education-Secretary poll.
• Liz Willen wonders what we can learn from a school where a tradition of dressing like pilgrims became controversial.
• Ed in the Apple gives four reasons New York City small schools have high graduation rates.

From an invitation advertising the retreat.

Here’s an interesting picture of how things happen at the Department of Education.

A while ago, a source told me about a retreat he attended at a hotel in Westchester, where the Department of Education invited a bunch of education people — especially small school and charter school leaders — to a hotel for a two-day community-building experience.

An invitation had promised discussion of “The Future of Our Work,” including a run-down of the successes and challenges of the Bloomberg administration’s school efforts. Successes included the fast expansion of small and charter schools, which the invitation concluded are out-performing traditional district schools and the reorganization of the school system with “schools at the center.” Challenges included the financial “sustainability” of partner groups that assist the schools; the requirement of sharing facilities with traditional public schools; and “Human Capital development.”

There was also a lot of worrying about what is probably a bigger potential obstacle: The possibility that, come 2009, when the state Legislature votes on whether to keep, abolish, or alter mayoral control of the public schools, the system could be organized in a completely different way. There was no question on which side the Department of Education stood. At the end of the first day, a group that is fighting for the preservation of mayoral control of the public schools, but which has said it has no formal ties to the Bloomberg administration, spoke about its political plans. Chancellor Joel Klein also gave a speech passionately declaring that the successes that have happened would endangered if mayoral control was abolished. (more…)

Talk about a team of rivals.

Campaign K12 discloses the full list of names on Barack Obama’s education policy transition team, which includes two prominent New Yorkers who have sparred on this Gotham ground. Robert Gordon, now at the Center for American Progress, was the Department of Education’s mastermind behind the Fair Student Funding scheme that was supposed to spread education more equitably across schools, so that the schools with the most challenges get the most money. Geri Palast, who heads the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, has criticized the funding scheme as not being equitable at all.

Another big difference: Gordon fought the teachers union to get his funding scheme enacted (and only partially won), while Palast’s organization often works as an ally with the union and (I’m almost positive*) receives funding from it.

Also, this explains why the last time I called Palast she was weirdly in Washington, D.C., and told me she would “explain later.”

*Confirmed! I found a $25,000 contribution listed on the United Federation of Teacher’s 2007 tax filing.

In case you were not fully convinced, it appears that, yes, Teach For America is flexing its muscle to influence Barack Obama’s Secretary of Education pick. The organization is concerned about the possibility that Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond, who has criticized TFA and is chairing Obama’s education policy committee, could get a prominent role in the Obama administration.

In a mass e-mail today, Teach For America urged alumni to “stay on top of about [sic] what is happening and not happening regarding education reform at the national and local levels.” The e-mail (pasted below) also directed them to the Web site of TFA’s new political group, Leadership for Education Equity, where alumni are invited to post comments on several Web sites (including this one), saying, “Decision makers do watch online reactions.” We hope so!

This is the site’s main graphic:

Here’s the e-mail, after the jump: (more…)

Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters, must have the “Joel Klein” Google alert routed permanently to her brain. Here’s a gem of an interview she found at Hamptons.com, in which Klein discloses that he’s about to purchase a new Sag Harbor home ($2 million) and that, with regards to the will-he-go-to-Washington question, he is “not big on commuting.”

A notable thing is that Hamptons.com put the story up at 1:55pm, and Haimson posted it on her e-mail list at 2:13pm, for which swiftness I considered giving her a gold medal and the nickname Leonie “Bolt” Haimson.

Alas, when I called to ask how she was able to find the article so fast, she told me it was really not a big deal. She had just been doing her usual, punching Joel Klein’s name into Google News, searching for articles on his trip to Australia, when up Hamptons.com popped. Just another average day in the average life of everybody’s favorite workaholic education organizer…

A colleague drew my attention to this fascinating video, tied to The New York Times Magazine’s screens issue. It plays a series of young people’s faces captured while they played a video game.

I wonder what would it look like to videotape the same kids in class.

(For more on the notion that schools have something to learn from video games, see this Times story, this story I wrote for the Village Voice, and this Web site, the home of Marc Presnky, an educational consultant who has made a career out of the idea.)

A late-afternoon e-mail sent by the Department of Education yesterday means that new teachers facing termination on Dec. 5 can enter the Thanksgiving weekend with renewed hopes for a career in the city’s classrooms.

Called Teaching Fellows, the teachers are brought into the system with no teaching experience but gain credentials through evening university classes. About 100 90* fellows who had not been placed in classroom jobs are slated to be removed from the city if they still do not have a job by Dec. 5, a deadline that had some lobbying for more security. Yesterday, they got a little bit, in the form of an e-mail from the head of the program, who said that they can be added back to the payroll if they find positions by Feb. 3 of 2009.

Those who don’t find a job by then can join next fall’s Teaching Fellows class, according to the e-mail, and all of the Teaching Fellows who finish out their required coursework this semester can work as substitute teachers for the rest of the school year. (more…)

Teachers at a small charter school in Brighton, Massachusetts, have decided to unionize under the American Federation of Teachers union, the Boston Globe reports. The teachers reportedly had complaints about management — which is interesting also because the school leader, Diana Lam, appears to be the same Diana Lam who was ousted as Joel Klein’s first deputy chancellor in a nepotism scandal.

This is a clear victory for the AFT, which has been campaigning to bring charter school teachers under its fold in New York and nationally. But is it a loss for the charter school world and, more importantly, for children?

Charter leaders in Massachusetts are reacting with vocal concern, much more than I saw raised here when a few charter schools unionized. Here, charter leaders have quietly sought to counteract union efforts to organize teachers, offering information on the downsides as well as the up-sides of unionization, but supporters have also welcomed warmly a unionized charter school, Green Dot, to the Bronx.

The Globe quotes the school’s board chairwoman, Stephanie Perrin (more…)

Andy Rotherham at Eduwonk highlights two writing assignments, both given to seventh-graders, with widely different levels of difficulty. As Rotherham says, this is what wonks mean when they worry about an “expectations gap.”

I’m highlighting this because we would like to collect similar comparisons from New York City. What does student work look like at your school? What do the assignments look like?

Send us your stuff so we can start comparing. We’re happy to keep you and your students anonymous, as long as you give some identifying information (grade, district, public/private, charter/traditional public, large/small).

The first seventh-grade assignment: (more…)