GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Earlier this week I shared my teacher data report with several co-workers at an academy meeting (my school is divided into four “mini-schools” or academies) and the readers of GothamSchools. Why did I share this somewhat private information, especially when it was so unflattering? I decided to share my data report because I really believe it is meaningful. I also decided to share my data report because I really believe it is meaningless. Let me explain.

The teacher data report is meaningful because of what it says about my performance as a teacher, and even more so, what it says about the dominant movement in education reform. With regards to my performance my data report shows that my students did not show the expected level of growth in one year. Regardless of my misgivings about the formula behind this calculation or the test itself, I have to concede that every other teacher in the city whose students took the grades 3-8 math and reading tests was evaluated by this same standard and therefore comparing poorly to my peers is cause for reflection.

Furthermore, while I have my qualms with the reading test, I do believe that a good reader can and should pass the test with a 3 or a 4. No matter where my students started the year, it was (and is) my goal to turn all my students into good readers. Therefore it was my goal, no matter how unrealistic, for all my students to pass with 3′s or 4′s. Falling short of this goal means I need to reflect and reevaluate my practices and how to help all my students become good readers. (more…)

• Bedford-Stuyvesant’s Head Start preschool program is being closed for mismanagement. (Daily News)
• The state is again proposing to cut the budget for administering GED tests. (Daily News, Post)
• District 22′s parent council head speaks out about possible new budget cuts. (Brooklyn Courier-Life)
• A Brooklyn community board said a charter school’s building plan was unsafe. (Brooklyn Courier-Life)
• A teacher at a Bronx charter school is being sued over accusations that he bullied students. (Post)
• More D.C. families than ever tried to get into schools outside their zone this year. (Washington Post)
• Kansas City’s drastic school closures reflect longtime mismanagement. (Times, Wall Street Journal)
• Critics say it’s not right for a high school in a diverse N.C. town to be 99 percent black. (NPR)
• Schools in the Chicago area are bracing for enormous budget cuts. (Times)

• 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)

• Students at Brooklyn’s P.S. 24 embraced the message of the city’s “Respect for All” week.
• Seeing the letters A or F just before taking a test can influence how students perform, a study says.
• A first-year science teacher learns that complaints of “I’m bored” usually signal something deeper.
• A lawyer-blogger questions Arne Duncan’s new focus on fighting racism in public schools.
• Jay Mathews argues that national standards will eventually mean national standardized tests.
• Rick Hess posts the guidelines RttT finalists were given for next week’s presentations in D.C…
• …While the Aspen Institute is helping coach some finalists through dry runs of their pitches.
• James Merriman argues competition from charters leads district schools to connect with parents.
• While Teachable Moment thinks we’re taking the wrong lesson from charter-district school competition.
• And GothamSchools won a National Award for Education Reporting from the EWA today.

Since helping Mayor Michael Bloomberg win his third term last fall, former deputy schools chancellor Chris Cerf has almost completely disappeared from the New York City education landscape.

Perhaps he wanted warmer weather — Cerf is now the head of the new American arm of a Brazilian science curriculum company.

The company, Sangari Brasil, currently sells an elementary and middle school science program to school districts in Brazil and Argentina. It’s part of a larger international group that promotes science education, and recently donated $1 million to help the National Science Teacher Association build a science education center in Northern Virginia.

The position is in some ways a return to Cerf’s roots. Before his stint masterminding the politics of the mayor’s sweeping and frequently controversial education reforms, Cerf headed Edison Schools, Inc. (now called EdisonLearning), one of the United State’s largest for-profit school management companies. (more…)