GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

When her second-grade special education students produced a news broadcast about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Lizzie Hetzer wanted to share their work. After all, the project marked a welcome departure from the heavy focus on structure and routine that had defined the year, and her students had risen to the occasion admirably.

Sharing her enthusiasm wasn’t so easy. In the community section, Hetzer, who is moving from PS 12 in Brooklyn to PS 39 this fall, writes about what happened when she tried to find an audience for the news broadcast outside the school.

She writes:

I reached out to a few community news sources that expressed interest in featuring the broadcast. Sadly, my school administration did not support this move. It’s a shame that there seems to be so much red tape and so much fear of bad publicity that my special education students, even with parental support, cannot have the spotlight for a minute or so to share their good work. (more…)

Removing bad teachers from the city’s schools is no easy task, but then again neither is finding someone who wants to do that professionally.

In a job description posted online last week, the Department of Education advertises for an open position in the Labor Support Unit, which initially sounds sort of friendly. Members of the unit have to be certified principals or superintendents who’ve shown they can turn around poor performing teachers.

But when that fails, they also need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the teachers union contract and a district attorney’s knack for making a case against the offending teacher. (more…)

Structure and routine is a refrain that starting-out special education teachers hear incessantly. The right classroom management strategy creates the perfect classroom, we’re told.

Yes, my second-grade special education students at Brooklyn’s PS 12 needed some sort of structure and routine to thrive. Yet so often, it seems as though structure is equated to teacher control. Exact routines. Little freedom. No down time. I knew my students needed something more, something different. There were moments when they excelled and shined, but it wasn’t when they were doing desk work, sitting on the rug, or taking part in skill and drill curricula.

Our escape from a teacher-dominated structure began with a field trip to the New York Aquarium that coincided with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. After our visit, I posted a few links to site and articles about the oil spill on our classroom wiki and invited my students to look around the websites. They were riveted by the images of the dirty water and oil-covered sea creatures. One of my toughest and overage students sat in front of her laptop and said to herself, “This is so sad. I want to help.” We brainstormed a few ideas as a class. How could we help? We contemplated sending toothbrushes, collecting pet and human hair for the booms (yes, my second-graders know what booms are!), and sending supplies like paper towels and heavy-duty bags. Ultimately, we decided to put our effort in closer to home, by creating a news broadcast about the spill.

The link to our regular classroom activities came from comic books, which my students had been reading. One of my awesome educational assistants, Janice Pierce, suggested that we create superheroes who could help out on the Gulf Coast. Our team of superheros, the Superpsychics — Environmentra, Bubble Girl, Dragon Boy, Diamond Woman, Heart Girl, Rainbow Girl, Green Hulk, and Superboy — was born. The students were at last engaged in writing. I’d never seen them work so intently.

By late June, we had completed two major projects — a video and a comic book. (more…)

Common standards have only just arrived on the national scene, but they are already making their way to the city’s schools.

On Monday, New York State officially committed to adopt national “common core” standards for what students should be expected to learn, which were released in their final form in June. But city officials have been laying the groundwork to introduce the standards to schools since May, and principals and some teachers started getting their feet wet this week.

That doesn’t mean that students will begin to see drastic changes in the lessons they’re taught and the tests they take this year, however. Instead, city officials said this week that their plan is to use next school year to let network leaders, principals and teachers determine how far their current teaching is from the new bar and figure out the best way forward.

By doing so, they’re hoping that schools can avoid the kind of nasty shock that comes from abrupt changes to testing standards that state officials are warning will happen this year as the state makes its tests more difficult to pass.

“What we want networks to do is help schools figure out what their entry point is,” said Josh Thomases, the city’s deputy chief schools officer. “Some schools may need to wade in; some schools will just need to dip their toes in.” (more…)

• Many New York State school districts illegally ask about enrollees’ immigration status. (Times)
• A 14-year-old who allegedly killed his family had been suspended from IS 72′s summer school. (Times)
• The DOE has so far been mum on its staffer taped calling parents a racial epithet. (Queens Tribune)
• PS 72 in East Harlem got a new soccer field — on its roof. (NY1)
• Psychology professors say bullying can stop only if schools understand child development. (Times)
• A UPenn professor wants to start a business incubator for education entrepreneurs. (AP)
• Ex-New Yorker Ramon Cortines will step down as Los Angeles’s superintendent next year. (L.A. Times)
• There is growing concern that the United States’s college completion rate is too low. (Times)
• Restrictive contracting rules require California schools to overpay for construction. (S.F. Chronicle)
• Oakland, Calif., has a plan to improve scores by improving students’ social services. (Times)

• Want to learn sustainably? Buy 100% recycled three-ring notebooks. (GS Community)
• The House has proposed cutting the Promise Neighborhood Initiative by 70 percent. (Hechinger)
• What happens if you live in the Harlem Children’s Zone but don’t go to its schools? (Sara Mead)
• A former Run DMC member is helping the city argue against child violence. (AP)
• It’s not testing standards that are the problem; it’s the tests themselves. (JD2718)
• A pitch for “productivity” as the next big education thing. (Joanne Jacobs)
• So long to handing in assignments. Welcome to “publish it” teaching. (Innovative Educator)
• Be the new administrative assistant to new Deputy Chancellor Sternberg. (SimplyHired)
• Ray Cortines, who used to be chancellor here, is retiring from his LA post. (AP)

Union president Michael Mulgrew called on the public employment review board to reinstate the dismissed teachers.

Ending a relationship via e-mail is insulting, but doing it via FedEx is probably worse.

That’s how 11 staff members at a Queens charter school discovered they’d been fired last Tuesday. Now the city’s teachers union is asking the state’s Public Employment Relations Board to give the teachers their jobs back. Teachers claim that they were fired for protesting the school policies and calling for union representation.

Speaking at a press conference at union headquarters today, UFT president Michael Mulgrew said the firings violated the state’s Taylor Law, which protects workers against discrimination for unionizing.

In 2007, an overwhelming majority of teachers at Merrick Academy voted to make the United Federation of Teachers their exclusive bargaining agent. Merrick became the first of several charter schools to unionize as part of the UFT’s campaign to bring the typically non-union schools under contract. (more…)

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, speaking today on the steps of the Department of Education

When two courts halted the city’s plans to close 19 public schools this year, judges ruled that the city didn’t follow state law that requires it to engage parents and report the impact that the changes will have on students’ educations.

Now Public Advocate Bill de Blasio is arguing that the city is making the same mistakes when it decides to place multiple schools in the same buildings.

In a report released today, de Blasio charges that the city did not give parents enough information about how changes to space usage would affect instructional programs or about public hearings on the changes.

“They’re just doing the minimum amount of parent outreach so they can say they did,” de Blasio said today.

De Blasio’s office and the Alliance for Quality Education surveyed nearly 875 parents at 34 schools, about half of those that the city proposed moving into new, shared space last year. (Roughly half of public schools citywide currently share building space with other schools.) (more…)

As New York State grapples with improving its standardized tests, officials are asking the federal government for more time to make changes before schools are labeled as struggling.

In an interview on WNYC this morning, host Brian Lehrer asked State Education Commissioner David Steiner whether more difficult tests would mean more failing students and thus an increasing number of schools on the “In Need of Improvement” list. Schools land on the list if students’ test scores don’t increase by a certain amount for two years running. If the list grows, more schools could be closed or restructured.

Acknowledging that harder tests will be a new burden for schools, Steiner said the state was asking the federal government to withhold judgement until the changes are in place:

“What we’re asking them to do is give us a year or two to factor in the major change,” he said. ”We’re doing the same with academic interventions — that schools will have to give to so many more students — so that schools don’t have a huge unfunded mandate.”

If the U.S. Department of Education agrees to go a bit easy on New York schools, it’s unclear whether that would mean a temporary halt to “In Need of Improvement” designations.

Each day we come across inspiring people and organizations doing their part to stem the stream of waste in our public school system. Getting Tools to City Schools is one of these exceptional organizations that is trying to not only make our schools more sustainable, but also ensure that all students in New York City’s public schools have the tools they need to succeed.

Dennis Kitchen

Founded and directed by Dennis Kitchen, Getting Tools to City Schools sells eco-friendly 3-ring binders as a way to fund its charitable mission of providing free, basic school supplies to students in New York City’s low-income public schools. About two-thirds of the students enrolled in the city’s elementary and middle schools can’t afford lunch, much less basic school supplies. In fact, city teachers spend hundreds and even thousands of their own dollars each year to buy basic supplies for their students. So Dennis decided to start a charitable organization that would give these students the necessary supplies they need to perform well in school: a brand new three-ring binder, lined paper, pencil, pens, pocket divider folders and a pencil pouch.

As a way to fund the needed school supplies, Getting Tools to City Schools started selling eco-friendly 3-ring binders. The binders are made of 100 percent recycled paperboard, which is FDA-approved and FSC (Forest Stewardship Council)-certified. (more…)