GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

FROM NEW YORK CITY:

• The state will decide this week whether to open a Hebrew language charter school in Brooklyn. (Times)
• The band from Brooklyn’s Boys and Girls High School is playing in the inauguration parade. (Times)
• A popular Stuyvesant High School junior died suddenly, apparently of meningitis. (Times, Daily News)
• Some city schools have special programs to teach about the Holocaust. (Daily News)
• A small Bronx school struggles with the gun deaths of two members of its first senior class. (Daily News)
• A Post columnist says Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver despises Joel Klein.

AND BEYOND:

• Joel Klein and Al Sharpton tell Barack Obama what to do about education. (WSJ)
• A host of wonks offer education advice for Obama. (Washington Post)
• To save money, Massachusetts might slow down its charter school expansion. (Boston Globe)
• In his last major act as Chicago schools chief, Arne Duncan is closing 25 schools. (Chicago Sun-Times)
• In some places, charter schools provide a haven for immigrant students. (Times)
• Los Angeles schools are getting one-page report cards for the first time. (L.A. Times)
• Jay Mathews says schools should take parents’ suggestions more seriously. (Washington Post)
• Thomas Friedman suggests giving federal tax cuts to teachers. (Times)
• A Washington Post columnist looks at how Michelle Rhee’s tactics are playing out at one school.

• Australia’s Julia Gillard says she doesn’t want to copy Joel Klein, exactly.
• A Michigander says Detroit’s schools should be more like New York City’s.
• Testing for admission to gifted programs is happening this weekend, snow or shine.
• Meet a Barnard College student who plans to revamp the city’s public schools.
• No need to read anything more about school reform: Norm Scott has all the answers.
• Day care could be making kids fat.
• A WaPo columnist says it doesn’t take toughness to turn around schools; Eduwonk says it does in D.C.

Dozens of first-year teachers originally slated to lose their jobs in early December have only three more weeks to secure a permanent position or be fired, a state labor arbitrator ruled today.

According to the ruling, the new teachers, most of whom were hired through the Teaching Fellows program, will go off the Department of Education’s payroll on Feb. 2 if they have not been hired by a principal by then.

The ruling concludes a months-long fight by new hires who entered a tighter-than-usual teacher labor market this fall. Facing a hefty bill for teachers who weren’t actually filling empty positions, the DOE planned to fire unplaced new teachers on Dec. 5, in accordance with a contract the teachers had signed when they accepted their spot in the Teaching Fellows program, which places unlicensed teachers in hard-to-fill positions. But the United Federation of Teachers filed a grievance contending that the teachers were protected by the job security clause in the union’s contract with the city and so should say on the DOE’s payroll.

When the issue went to arbitration in December, the union was hopeful that the teachers’ jobs would be protected through the end of the school year, UFT spokesman Ron Davis told me. (more…)

Something not often included in discussions of administrative reorganizations and mayoral control is what actually sets New York City classrooms apart from those in other school districts. One defining characteristic: Teachers here are pushed to encourage “accountable talk” in their classrooms by requiring students to justify their claims and relate them to statements made by others.

The conversation strategy, which is available for school districts to purchase as a set of professional development tools, is meant to teach children who don’t have complex conversations in their homes how to discuss ideas in a respectful, academic way. But the approach has its shortcomings, at least according to a teacher at Brooklyn’s PS 108, Diana Senechal. On the Core Knowledge blog, Senechal writes that accountable talk can actually stifle conversation:

In education, “accountability” suggests a wrongdoing: we are made “accountable” so that we can no longer slip by with poor practice. Why, then, must a good class discussion be called “accountable”? Shouldn’t it be driven by something deeper, like desire for truth, curiosity about the subject, and respect for others? Accountability should not be our highest ideal; it has value and meaning only when higher principles are in place. Those principles present, a class discussion needs no special name. Accountable talk could help us out of a bog; but once we can breathe and walk, we should make full use of our faculties, using the words and phrases that seem best. One does not have to be “accountable” at every moment; there is room, in a good class discussion, for exclamations, tangents, and incomplete ideas.

Senechal’s entire essay, which includes riffs on trademark law and clumsy language, is worth a read.

Angelica is one of two students who are writing occasional columns for GothamSchools on their experiences attending a New York City public school. Read her previous post.

Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist who is set to change schools as we know them in NYC, claims that every student could be an A-student. That is, as long the right incentive is applied.

Fryer plans to pay students for every A they get. He thinks they would work more diligently if they were paid for good performance. He is presently testing the idea in some schools in New York City.

Honestly, would I work harder at school if I were getting paid? Duh.

That basically goes unsaid. When I asked my classmate at NYCiSchool, Kyjah Coryat, if she would put more effort into her grades if given money, she was quick to say she would. “Obviously. That would give me something more to strive for,” she said. Realistically, few teenagers would refuse the money given the chance; it’s common logic.

Undoubtedly, Fryer’s method could be effective. However, whether it is ethical is another issue. (more…)

Ted Sizer

The final chapter in “Those Who Dared,” which I’ve been excerpting all week, is by Ted Sizer, the education policy giant whose influence was palpable during my stint at Brown University’s education department, where he held an appointment for many years as the head of Brown’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform. Sizer also founded the Coalition of Essential Schools, a national network of progressive schools that includes two dozen schools in New York City.

In his essay, Sizer consolidated his life’s work into four major lessons learned, and I am sharing those. For those who are concerned that yesterday’s announcement of an internal reshuffling at the city Department of Education is a sign of trouble ahead, keep in mind Sizer’s third lesson:

Lessons learned? First, that an idea, or ideas, can drive reform and the practice that reflects that reform. One does not need specific “practices” that are to be learned and “put into place” (in unlovely contemporary jargon).

Second, that there is both joy and challenge in this sort of effort to knock off soem of the professional barnacles that all of us professionals inevitably get. (“This is what we do. We must do it. If we do not do it, we will jeopardize our jobs and may tangle with our union contract.”)

There can never be a permanent “pure” design of a school (or school system). All must be in movement, gathering the best of emerging experience and new research.

Fourth, that strong organizations can ally with other such enterprises sharing common commitments.

• Workers at PS 3 in Greenwich Village found a 90-year-old time capsule at the school. (The Villager)
• More on the plight of math teachers at Bronx Science, with video. (NY1)
• A new study about how to get kids ready to read has some surprises. (Christian Science Monitor)
• A Queens principal was arrested and charged with assault. (Queens Chronicle)
• The founders of KIPP set some education priorities for the Obama administration. (Washington Post)
• A lawsuit says staff at a Queens school allowed a second-grader to be abused. (Daily News)
• President Bush says NCLB is working and should be renewed. (Washington Post)

• A high school student is psyched to watch Obama’s inauguration at school.
• Richard Simmons taught kids in Chinatown how to work out. Yes, there’s a picture.
• A District 2 parent has a summary of Tuesday’s night’s Joel Klein-Al Sharpton appearance in Harlem.
• A teacher wonders why some of her colleagues aren’t more supportive of their students.
• The National Review: Maybe budget cuts will be good for schools!
• President Bush, in his last policy address, praised NCLB and education secretary pick Arne Duncan.
• Alexander Russo suggests questions for Duncan’s confirmation hearing next week.

A Teaching Fellows ad in the subway in March 2007. Photo via NYC Daily Photo.

I’ve reported before that the Department of Education has hundreds of teachers without permanent positions and that it took a judge to stop the department from firing dozens of new teachers last month.

So I was surprised recently to see recruitment ads in the subway for the DOE’s Teaching Fellows program, which places recent college graduates and career-changing professionals in high-need classrooms throughout the city. (Similarly startled by the ads, Pissed Off Teacher is, well, pissed off about them.)

In fact, the DOE has scaled back advertising for the Teaching Fellows program by more than a third since last year.

This year, the department spent $140,000 to advertise the program in subway cars and $75,000 to promote the program online, DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte told me. In contrast, she said, the program’s advertising budget last year came out to between $300,000 and $400,000, and had spent even more in previous years when it bought advertising in print publications. (more…)

John Goodlad

In the fourth essay in “Those who Dared,” John Goodlad writes about his career, which included stints teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in Canada and at American universities, spent promoting the notion of schools as places where children can learn from each other in a nurturing, age-integrated setting. Goodlad’s description of what he thinks inspired educators ought to be doing to schools presents another option, or two, for GothamSchools’ ongoing name-those-reformers contest:

School reform is a nasty concept; reform is defined by my Webster’s dictionary as “amendment of what is defective, vicious, corrupt, or depraved.” What an insult to throw at the stewards of schooling! My conception of school renewal, which aims at improving our educational institutions, is vastly different.

School reform will never give us the schools our democracy needs. Reform is a companion of the mechanistic, Industrial-Age, command-and-control model of organizational behavior that has been challenged again and again by thoughtful analysts for its dehumanization of the workplace and, indeed, work itself. Renewal is a radical departure from that model, fitting more systems, complexity, and perhaps chaos theories, which have been discouragingly slow to enter the schooling enterprise. Business leader Dee Hock has coined the word chaordic in describing the emerging age of chaos, complexity, and necessary order in which “the second digital” decade Bill Gates talks about will be only a part, admittedly an important one. …

The common practice of trying to replicate some existing, perceived model, whether or not it is mandated, is doomed to fail — even if bits and pieces of it come into being. The major goal in renewal is to establish the right chaordic circumstances — primarily cultural.

The University of Washington, where Goodlad is a professor emeritus, recently announced that it would create the Goodlad Center for Educational Renewal.