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I was confused by the concept of Differentiated Instruction. My students have different needs, especially when it comes to reading. Yet creating work for each group of kids created a fragmented environment in which there was little sense of communal learning or a common goal. I spoke to Ms. OldSchool, one of the finest, most experienced teachers in the building.

“Mr. Arp,” she said, “What you have to understand is that Differentiated Instruction is another word for what I’ve been doing for 20 years.

“In fact,” Ms OldSchool added, “every new idea they come up with is just another word for things that I have always done.” She told me to forget about my auditory learners and visual learners, my lesson plans that catered to the kinesthetic or experiential students. She also, importantly, told me to forget about my data.

“Data,” she said, “is important for the big picture. You know you need to incorporate problem areas, such as short vowel sounds or digraphs, into the unit. But making a day’s lesson about short vowels is going to be boring.” The secret to Differentiation, in her view, was to keep all students interested in the lesson. “If they are excited,” she said with authority, “they are learning.”

So I put on a play. (more…)

• State officials want to strengthen Regents requirements and how the tests are graded. (WSJ, Daily News)
• A solid middle school turnaround strategy won’t be replicated because of budget cuts. (Daily News)
• Students from a Brooklyn middle school built their own boats and set sail yesterday. (NY1)
• A new report says the city’s progress report grading system has problems. (GothamSchools, NY1, Times)
• An electrician in Queens stole more than $1 million from schools, an investigation found. (Post, Times)
• PS 188 in Coney Island is set to get a gym for the first time in 85 years. (Post)
• Education Commissioner David Steiner and others weigh in with letters about test scores. (Post)
• Teachers rallied against school budget cuts yesterday. (GothamSchools)
• Randi Weingarten says D.C.’s new teacher contract actually doesn’t offer much to New York. (DN)
• Nationally, high schools are making a special effort to recognize military-bound students. (Times)
• Some experts and educators are trying to crack down on kids’ “best friend” culture. (Times)
• Anti-teacher layoffs advertisements are sweeping the airwaves all over the country. (USA Today)

• After a year without a playground, Ruben Brosbe’s students get one. (GothamSchools Community)
• A young boy with autism interviews his mom for Story Corps. (Via Insideschools)
• Proposed alternatives to bake sales-gone-healthy, from the DOE. (WNYC)
• A manual for parents showing how to transform their children’s school. (Catalyst Ohio)
• Arne Duncan sparks challenges in Congress; ESEA’s chances: bad. (EdWeek; EdWeek)
• Philly’s all-education news site is a modern-day one-room schoolhouse. (Notebook)
• Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are campaigning for billionaires to give more. (Reuters)
• A researcher finds that the “persistently dangerous” category is flawed. (EdWeek)
• How can the government help young children develop “soft skills”? (American Prospect)
• Communities start applying for Promise neighborhood grants. (Paul Tough)

The Gates Foundation’s thousands of grantees told the foundation it’s not easy to work with in a survey, the foundation’s CEO, Jeff Raikes, reported in a letter yesterday.

The foundation did receive good marks on improving “knowledge, policy, and practice” in its funding areas. But pretty much everything else was bleak — and even bleaker than the average response that the group administering the survey, the Center for Effective Philanthropy, usually sees.

Reports Raikes:

Many of our grantee partners said we are not clear about our goals and strategies, and they think we don’t understand their goals and strategies.

They are confused by our decision-making and grantmaking processes.

Because of staff turnovers, many of our grantee partners have had to manage multiple Program Officer transitions during the course of their grant, which creates more work.

Finally, they say we are inconsistent in our communications, and often unresponsive.

Raikes also said the foundation plans to make changes in response to the feedback, which came from about two-thirds of more than a thousand grantees.

I don’t need to remind our readers that the Gates Foundation is a ginormous giver to education causes, investing more than $4 billion in the last decade. Anecdotal reports suggest the foundation is also one of the major producers of grumbling nonprofit heads and development directors, which may or may not be correlated.

Two years ago, I wrote about the foundation’s decision to rethink its education giving strategy, shifting from small schools to teaching quality.

City teachers from all five boroughs gathered at City Hall and down Broadway to protest the mayor's planned budget cuts to education.

Thousands of teachers and members of other municipal unions rallied today to protest planned cuts in Mayor Bloomberg’s city budget for next year. Proposed cuts to the city’s school system were a major focus of the rally, which stretched more than four blocks from City Hall down Broadway to Federal Plaza. The Department of Education is trying to fill a projected $750 million shortfall for next year.

“We are getting very close to a repeat of 1976 in our school system, where they cut it so deep it took 30 years to recover,” said United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew.

Teachers from all five boroughs traveled to attend the protest. “I think some cuts are probably necessary, but I think the one’s they’re proposing are too severe,” said Chris Calabrese, who teaches at the Bronx’s C.S. 57. The school has already lost a science teacher and will likely see its after-school programs eliminated as well, she said.

“Cutting a teacher is tantamount to asking the students to fail,” she said.

When a judge ruled in favor of keeping open 19 schools that the city had targeted for closure, it appeared that the teachers union had won its case. But for at least one of the schools, under-enrollment could spell closure anyway.

Jamaica High School in Queens is currently looking at an incoming class of 23 ninth grade students, according to minutes taken during a meeting between the school’s principal and union chapter leader. If more students don’t enroll, the high school will not be able to offer a ninth grade next year, which is what would have happened under the city’s original plan to phase out the school.

A portion of the minutes reads:

Mr. Acham said that our expected number of students for the fall would be between 850 and 900 pupils and not close to 1400 that we currently are enrolling.  He added that the number of incoming grade nine students who have made a full commitment to Jamaica High School for this fall was only 23 and this number was down from a potential incoming class of merely 60. Therefore, the Principal concluded that we do not have a sufficient number of freshmen to run our programs.

A spokesman for the Department of Education, Danny Kanner, said Jamaica’s enrollment numbers would likely go up, but would not offer an explanation of how this would happen or how many students had been matched with the school’s ninth grade next year. (more…)

Two elementary schools in the South Bronx, P.S. 161 and P.S. 277, are half a mile apart. They are both mid-sized, high-poverty elementary schools serving mostly Hispanic students. Last school year, both schools had similar percentages of their students passing state exams in math, reading, and science.

But under the city’s progress report card grading system, P.S. 161 was ranked in the top fifth of schools, and P.S. 277 was ranked in the bottom fifth.

Why? The reasons are highlighted in a new report whose authors examined each school in-depth.

Visiting P.S. 277, the report’s co-author Clara Hemphill found engaged students and energetic teachers. But its well-rounded curriculum — which teaches skills that are part of state standards but not tested on standardized exams — isn’t weighted heavily in the city’s report card accounting. The school also has a high poverty rate and lots of homeless kids, but the progress report system doesn’t count those students when determining whether the school serves a challenging population. (more…)

A little over a year ago, I was profiled in a New York Times article. I wish that my claim to fame had been a little more glamorous than the fact that I was out of work. However, it did focus on the fact that I was a career-changing pre-service teacher and substitute that was deeply affected by New York City’s teacher hiring freeze.

One of the many factors that brought me into education was that I could change careers fairly seamlessly. The career change program at St. John’s University allows for people to take classes at night while still working in their other careers. Halfway through the master’s degree program one can qualify for an alternative certification and teach with a full paycheck while completing the remainder of the degree. My plan was to reach that halfway mark by this time last year and be teaching English full time by September 2009. But life doesn’t always go according to the plan.

I started working as a substitute teacher in the fall of 2008 after leaving the photo industry. I specifically chose to work at schools that I knew were growing and adding teachers. I wanted to network and understand the city’s vast school system better. I had only anticipated doing it for one school year. (more…)

Our school recently cut the ribbon on a brand-new playground. It was one of the more joyful occasions of the entire year. The kids anticipated it the way they anticipate birthdays and Christmas, which may seem a little absurd at first, until you realize they’ve been kept inside all year.

Of the many injustices I’ve witnessed in just three short years in one of the country’s poorest communities, it’s the playgrounds that somehow hit me hardest. They seem the perfect symbol of the contrast between the haves and have-nots. And while I’ve made my peace for the most part that American society is built on this inequality, it doesn’t seem right that kids should be subjected to such a system of inequity. Having a chance to play is a vital part of childhood, if not the defining part of childhood.

Sadly, the students at my former school had access to this integral part of childhood only half the year (weather permitting). The students at my new school have had no playground all year, because the yard was under construction. In the end, for their sacrifice, they were rewarded with a beautiful new playground, but I can’t help but wonder, would schools on the Upper West Side or Upper East Side permit their kids to languish in the auditorium for months on end? No, I imagine accommodations would be made.

In any case, that’s not necessary for my students anymore, and watching them while I eat my lunch on the park benches has been informative. (more…)

Chancellor Joel Klein’s strategy of empowering principals while holding them more accountable for results helped struggling schools get better. But his A to F grading system is “deeply flawed” and needs improvement.

That’s the message of a new, incredibly detailed report from the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs.

The report is the result of a study of hundreds of schools, including in-depth interviews with principals and school visits. The authors focused especially on the Bronx’s District 7.

The report is being released this morning at a panel discussion featuring Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch; the Department of Education’s accountability chief Shael Polakow-Suransky; John Garvey, until recently the City University of New York’s liaison to the public schools; and MS 223 principal Ramon Gonzalez.

We’ll have more details after the panel. For now, here’s the report: (more…)