GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

KIPP New York City's logo, from its web site.

Middle school teachers at a KIPP charter school in Brooklyn asked the state this week to let them split from the city teachers union, more than a year after teachers at the same school voted to unionize. The union plans to fight the decision, saying that a group of teachers remain committed to becoming United Federation of Teachers members.

Sixteen staff members signed the petition to break from the UFT. The petition was spearheaded by a guidance counselor named Dameon Clay, his attorney said. Staff who signed the petition include classroom teachers as well as social workers, the dean of teaching and learning, an operations manager, and the office manager.

I couldn’t reach any of the teachers for comment, but Lyle Zuckerman, the attorney representing Clay, said the decision was a judgment about how the teachers could best help themselves and their students. “I think they’ve come to the conclusion that their goals and the educational mission of the school is just going to best be served by them having a direct relationship with the school’s administration,” Zuckerman said.

When they first voted to unionize, teachers at KIPP AMP said they wanted to “create a more sustainable culture so that we can better serve our students and reduce teacher turnover.” At least three teachers who had formed the initial organizing committee at the school are now signing the petition to break from the union. One is Kashi Nelson, a classroom teacher who also sends her daughter to KIPP AMP and who explained her reversal to Alexander Russo last year. (more…)

Where can you find the most bored children in New York?

Last week I visited P.S. 13 in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn, a school where you would expect to see some anxiety before the high-stakes English exam that will be given next Monday. Instead, I met a cast of bright and precocious students plodding through test prep worksheets with little supervision.

P.S. 13 has been a troubled school for years though its last city-issued progress report calls it a “B” school. In 2004, it managed to remove itself from the state’s list of schools at risk of being closed, but it’s now in danger of landing back on that list. Students know a lot is riding on their test scores. During my visit, many could rattle off the dates of the upcoming tests from memory.

Morning announcements over the loud speaker included test tips like encouraging students to get a good night’s rest and eat a full breakfast (84 percent of P.S. 13 students qualify for free or reduced lunch). In advance of the test, the regular schedule had been altered so that on Thursdays students only focused on reading and writing and Fridays were math-only days. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg and UFT President Michael Mulgrew got a lot of applause when they vowed to shut down the city’s infamous “rubber rooms” by December. But that might be an impossible goal.

The trouble hinges on the fact that the city has not ended the practice of granting a trial to all teachers accused of incompetence or misconduct. It has simply decided to speed up those trials, which take place in a lower Manhattan office building across from Tweed Courthouse, presided over by paid attorneys called arbitrators who act as judge and jury.

To speed up the trials, the city has promised to nearly double the number of arbitrators starting in September, and also to increase the number of days they work on teacher cases each month to seven from five. By doing this, the city and the union claim, all of the nearly 650 teachers still waiting for a verdict will get one by December.

But a GothamSchools analysis shows that, to meet this goal, the city will have to force arbitrators to cram multiple hearings into each working day — a rate that is now unprecedented. (more…)

The comments left on GothamSchools’ recent coverage of the Innovation Zone raised questions about the value of online learning similar to those we hear from our students and their families. As co-principals of the iSchool, a two-year-old school built around using online courses to individualize student learning, we thought it might be worthwhile to share the reasons we use online learning and how it works in our school.

Online learning means many different things at different schools. At the iSchool, we use the term to refer to courses where the content is delivered online only, and the teacher and student are not online at the same time. Each of our online courses is facilitated by an iSchool teacher, licensed in that content area, who designs the course, tracks student progress, and meets with students individually and in small groups when necessary. Our students spend about seven hours a week learning online at their own pace. Because of state regulations about awarding credit, these hours take place during the school day.

What does this look like inside our classrooms? Picture a traditional classroom with 34 students sitting in rows. Each student has a computer out on his/her desk and a notebook for taking notes. Each student is doing something different — some are watching a video of a teacher lecturing about the First Constitutional Convention (which students are pausing each time they take notes), some students are working on math problems, some are reading literature texts, and some are labeling the parts of a cell on a digital image.

We chose to incorporate online learning in our model for several important reasons:

1. Learning online is — and will continue to be — a reality for the world in which our students are growing up. Our students will be required to learn online during their college and graduate school experiences, as well as throughout their careers. If we are to prepare them to be successful in their future endeavors, we must prepare them to be successful online learners. (more…)

• Shouting ruled at the charter school hearing held by State Sen. Bill Perkins. (Daily News, NY1, Post)
• A minute-by-minute account of the all-day hearing contains all of the highlights. (GothamSchools)
• The state teachers unions charges against the schools focused on financial improprieties. (Times)
• Two pro-charter politicians took the hearing as an opportunity to challenge the teachers union. (Post)
• A columnist writes that Perkins’ anti-charter school stance makes him politically vulnerable. (Post)
• The Post says Perkins has “no legitimate place in public life” and should be voted out of office.
• The Daily News says the hearing was “an attempt to create public policy by raging non sequiturs.”
• In letters to the editor, Post readers weigh in on the most recent union-charter schools dust-up.
• A Queens teacher accused of molesting students has been investigated before. (Daily News, NY1)
• Parents in the East Village used Earth Day to campaign against schools’ use of styrofoam trays. (NY1)
• The city school board voted to let PAVE Academy stay in PS 15 for three more years. (Courier-Life)

• Charter school supporters found Sen. Perkins’ hearing gave too much weight to the anti-charter voice.
• NY’s teacher union and school board assoc. are suing Gov. Paterson for withholding school aid (again).
• The mother of an Achievement First Charter School student says the school is not what she signed up for.
• The Learning Environment Surveys are due tomorrow and Miss Eyre isn’t sure if she should fill hers out.
• The questions that a local charter school asks prospective teachers during job interviews.
• The “teacherpocalypse” is upon us, but Reason mag and Russo ask everyone to calm down.
• More than 270,000 teaching jobs could be saved under the proposed Education Jobs Fund.
• A community-college-focused news site by Joanne Jacobs is part of the new Hechinger Report.
• A twin study out of Florida is bolstering the research on differences between teachers.
• Bill Gates has taken the open courses that MIT offers. He might fund open courseware, too!
• The case for teacher-tweeting, by Quick and the Ed.
• And Ruben Brosbe, in his third year, is struggling to figure out why teaching is still hard.

In our quest to bring Meatless Mondays to more city cafeterias, we recently interviewed one of the people who’s helping that happen, Chris Elam. Elam is the program director of Meatless Monday, an organization dedicated to getting the word out about the environmental and health effects of reducing meat consumption.

Here’s what Elam had to say about the benefits of going meatless, how schools are making the change, and why it would be a big deal if New York City signed on.

EP & AR: When did Meatless Monday start, and what is its mission? 

CE: Meatless Monday, an initiative of the The Monday Campaigns, launched in 2003 in association with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Our mission is simple: to reduce saturated fat intake worldwide by encouraging people to cut meat one day a week. As a nonprofit public health initiative, we are dedicated to bringing Meatless Monday to homes, schools, campuses, offices and communities at large.

Why meatless? 

A broad range of studies suggests that excessive meat consumption may result in higher risks of the four primary chronic preventable diseases killing Americans today: heart disease, cancer, diabetes and stroke.

Why Monday? 

It’s the start of the week. Research shows that Monday is the very best time for people to start and sustain behavior change.

(more…)

State Senator Bill Perkins is currently convening his greatly-anticipated day-long hearings on charter school oversight. The hearings, which have been in the works for months, are set to focus on the schools’ finances. Anna is at the hearing now (I’ll trade places with her this afternoon) and we’ll post with live updates from the hearings throughout the day.

5:00 p.m. The room is starting to clear, but Perkins persists.

Perkins: “There are two areas that are going to fatally cripple whatever the charter school movement does…the corruption and the politicization are the Achilles heel of the movement.”

“The pimping, if you will, of the public dollar and the politicization which some people are turning a blind eye to” is what will kill charters, he said. “And I say that not as a curse or a wish but as a concern.” (more…)

Am I any good at this? Should I even be in the classroom? Am I teaching for the right reasons? What are the right reasons?

After last week’s soul-searching regarding my generally grouchy demeanor, things have improved. As they say, the first step is admitting you have a problem. Pausing a second to call myself out on my bad attitude gave me some focus and clarity. Since then I’ve remembered to rely on my system of consequences and rewards*, and that has taken a lot of the frustration and headache out of my teaching.

That said, I still manage to feel totally out of my element on a daily basis. I would like to chalk some of that up to the anxiety and all-around unnatural instructional style of test-prep. But I know it’s more than that. Many of my math lessons seem to get bogged down, and at the end it seems likely the kids learned anything. If my science lessons aren’t experiments, I’m pretty much lost. I rely too heavily on the textbook (using it for a shared reading) but as much as I try to tackle the vocabulary and draw upon real life examples, the kids don’t show any signs of comprehension. In our discussions all the vocabulary words mix to form nebulous nonsense.

In my second year I finally felt I had a handle on classroom management. I thought this year the final pieces of instruction would fall into place. As far as reading, writing and social studies go I think they have. But my confidence in those areas only heightens my frustrations in math and science, not inconsequential subjects.

According to some, as a third-year teacher I’m allowed to still be figuring things out. I’m still a “novice.” But this is unacceptable for me. As someone who isn’t sure that teaching is a career, each year, each day really, is a fleeting opportunity to make a maximum impact. But as with the my attitude problem last week, I think acknowledging my instructional frustrations is a good first step. It’s not like I’m clueless about why my lessons are struggling, or how to fix them. Many of my lessons, if I’m honest with myself, have been lackluster, and with better planning that won’t be the case.

It may be almost May, but 2 months is really a lot of time. I’m hoping I can find the focus I need to make the most of it, and in doing so find some positive answers to the questions I keep asking.

*Catching up on sleep may have had something to do with it too.