GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Ed Week has a cool map of the Race to the Top finalists and info about their applications.
• Rick Hess says Arne Duncan and Diane Ravitch are missing the point of accountability, charter schools.
• City Council is holding a hearing this Friday on how MetroCard cuts will affect education.
• The application deadline to run for seats on two citywide councils has been moved to March 19th.
• The EVP of Wireless Generation has some tips for Race to the Top finalists on their data systems.
• Sherman Dorn writes that Kristof’s latest column makes it important to remember that TFA is not scalable.
• Diane Ravitch’s new book should make reformers think twice, writes Sara Mosle in Slate.
• The UFT election is coming up and Norm says district reps are intimidating the opposition groups.
• Texas is accusing Fox News of inaccurately reporting on its revisions to state social studies standards.
• A teacher gets “awesome” results on her data report and wonders what effect these reports have on peers.
• Parents in the Mission District, CA aren’t any happier about school turnaround plans than ones in NY.
• More than 100 middle schoolers took part in the Daily News New York spelling bee that began today.
• Two parents are planning a bake-in at City Hall to protest new bake sale policies.
• When he brought data-driven methods into his classroom, he lost his spark, a new teacher writes.
• And Room for Debate takes up the question: how does the size of a school affect its students?

The names of the five people who will make the final pitch to federal officials in New York’s bid for coveted Race to the Top funds are due at noon tomorrow. But state education officials are still finalizing who will take the field trip to D.C.

It’s an important decision. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said that the competition’s judges are looking to see whether states’ representatives are capable of carrying out the reforms they’re promising. That could make all the difference in determining the winners, he has said.

Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch will be appointing members of the team, she told GothamSchools today, but she said she was still in conversations with possible representatives.

States can bring up to five people “with a deep knowledge” of the application and may not bring consultants, according to the rules USDOE officials sent to finalists. “State teams may include elected officials, State education executives, district superintendents, teacher leaders, and others with ongoing leadership roles and deep knowledge of the State’s application,” the guidelines state.

Other states are reportedly breaking out the big guns for the presentations. For example, the governors of North Carolina, Georgia, Delaware and Tennessee are definitely planning to make the trip, Education Week has reported.

So who are New York’s big guns? (more…)

Teachers unions, school district officials, and lawmakers have all weighed in on New York State’s Race to the Top application with varying degrees of skepticism and enthusiasm, but few have given any thought to the legal issues behind the experiment.

Last night, students at Columbia Law School held a panel discussion on Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s competitive grant program that, in its first round, will award several states hundreds of millions of dollars to adopt the Obama administration’s education policies. The question put before the panel is one any federal initiative like Race to the Top is apt to bring up: Is this experiment stepping too heavily on states’ policy toes?

The panelists included Marcus Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Deborah Meier, a columnist for Education Week, James Liebman, a law school professor and the NYC Department of Education’s former accountability chief, Richard Iannuzzi, president of the state teachers union, and Dan Weisberg, a vice president at The New Teacher Project. (more…)

I recently had a discussion with my students about how my classes have changed over the course of my first three years of teaching. It began when I shared with them a question I had been wondering about: Were my classes better my first two years than they are this year?

I began thinking midway through this year that my classes were not the same as they were when I was fresh, and that the change was not for the better. The students responded eagerly to my question, and their feedback confirmed my suspicion: “Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Fullam, I still love your class,” one student remarked, “but sometimes the spark is not there.”

My progression as a new teacher is unique in this sense. I began strong with a lot of “spark.” My strategy was to create the curriculum as we went along, introducing texts from literature, philosophy, and the social sciences according to the students’ emerging interests. I encouraged the students to think about how one unit related to the next, how everything fits together. The students wrote questions about the texts and spent entire class periods sitting in a circle, freely discussing those questions — and we did this often. We also wrote poems and journals, published a school literary magazine, produced a video documentary about the achievement gap, and even managed to squeeze in some preparation for the English Regents Exam.

Everything I was doing in the classroom during my first two years was based on an approach I learned when I was studying to be a teacher in college: critical teaching. (more…)

Most parents in the New York City public school system don’t realize how much power they have to initiate change at their schools, especially when it comes to food and sustainability issues. With childhood obesity an epidemic and sustainable living an imperative as we move into the 21st century, as parents, we can’t afford not to act.

At our children’s schools, the Children’s Workshop School and East Village Community School, we’ve already started to enact change. Our schools, which share a building in the East Village, were also the first in the city to adopt “Meatless Mondays,” after we shared information with our principals and fellow parents about how beef being served in our public schools is treated with ammonia. One of us, Elizabeth, was the only parent to testify before the Panel for Educational Policy when it voted to approve a new regulation limiting school bake sales to packaged, processed foods.

And now we’re planning a “bake-in” at City Hall for March 18 to protest the regulation, which bans home-baked goods from school fundraisers and mandates that parents sell Doritos, Frito Lays and Pop Tarts instead. The bake-in will demonstrate the difference between packaged, processed foods and home-baked foods cooked with love for our children and care for their health. We’re expecting hundreds of parents to join us.

We’ve done a lot, but we want to do more. (more…)

• A judge in the school closure lawsuit ruled that high school decisions shouldn’t go out yet. (Daily News)
• Students and parents in Riverdale are fighting off a dress code for a second time. (Riverdale Press)
• Proposed national standards would guide what all students learn in reading and math. (Times)
• The Daily News says the proposed national standards will raise the bar for all students.
• Nicholas Kristof says the world needs a new of Teach for America — in developing countries. (Times)
• Doug Lemov, from Elizabeth’s Times article, describes his “Taxonomy of Teaching.” (NPR)
• Kansas City will close half of its schools after this year for budget reasons. (Times)