GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

For the principal of Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School, getting his seniors to graduation may require keeping track of them all, one by one.

As part of The Big Fix — the year-long series we’re doing in partnership with WNYC — WNYC’s education reporter Beth Fertig is following Chelsea High School as its teachers and staff try to boost their students’ performance. During a recent visit to the school, Fertig saw how Chelsea’s principal, Brian Rosenbloom, is charting his students’ paths to graduation:

The “war board” is a giant dry erase board where Rosenbloom tracks the progress of his juniors and seniors. Next to each name, in bright-colored ink, he’s written how many Regents exams and credits the student needs to graduate. The right side of the board has about 110 seniors. When they started as ninth-graders, there were about 200 of them. Some are still juniors or sophomores. Dozens dropped out or transferred.

“When I got here, an inordinate, inordinate amoung of those kids didn’t pass the Regents. A huge number of kids had zero to two credits,” Rosenbloom says.

The number of students Rosenbloom has to keep track of has been falling. Five years ago, the school had more than 1,000 students and when Rosenbloom arrived at the school two years ago, it had 952 students. Now, enrollment has dropped to just over 540 students. As the city has scaled down Chelsea’s enrollment, it has also opened new small schools in the same building.

Listen to Fertig’s complete radio story on Chelsea High School here.

In what’s become a teaching tradition as venerable as my class meetings or ending my nights with scotch on the rocks, it’s now time for me to introduce my classroom characters. With 28 students this year, there are plenty to meet, so forgive me if I do this in installments…

Baby Face: The true heir to ALP (originally AM), Maverick and Mastermind, Baby Face could fool any outside observer as a cute an innocent kid. This is fair I suppose, since he’s only eight years old. That said, he is mischief incarnate and has found plenty of opportunities to cross the line from playfulness to outright bullying. He is of course, my biggest challenge, and tragically a giant vacuum of time and energy in my classroom community.

I don’t resent him though. Nor do I wish he wasn’t in my classroom. He embodies the non-academic challenges of teaching in a high need school. In his short life he has witnessed and experienced things I couldn’t imagine. So, his behavior is an expected response. Some students can’t read or write. Some students can’t control their actions.

It’s funny the way kids like Babyface can turn me into a pull-string doll. (more…)

This school year, GothamSchools and WNYC reporters will follow three New York City high schools as they try to improve. The following is an introduction to one of those schools: William E. Grady Career and Technical Education High School.

For years, Brooklyn’s William E. Grady Career and Technical Education High School struggled to break free from its reputation as simply a trade school.

“The ‘vocational school’ stigma continues to be a deterrent to students who see themselves as college bound,” the school’s leadership team wrote in its educational plan for the 2008-09 school year. Staff laid out strategies to make the school more challenging — and posted some gains — but the school continued to limp academically. About a fifth of the school’s 1,300 students were absent every day last year, and at the end of the year, not even half of the school’s seniors graduated.

Now, the city is hoping that millions of dollars in federal aid and a new principal will finally jumpstart Grady’s renaissance.

Earlier this year, the city announced the school would undergo the federal “transformation” model of school improvement. That meant the city had to replace Grady’s principal — Carlston Gray, who had headed the school since 2006 — and adopt new class schedules and bonuses for teachers who help their colleagues. In exchange, Grady would get as much as $2 million in federal funds per year over the next three years.

For a new leader, the city turned to Geraldine Maione, who had been principal at Brooklyn’s 3,500-student Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School. (more…)

• An earlier deadline to sign up for free tutoring could shut some families out. (Daily News)
• Dozens of city schools are experimenting with blending technology into teaching. (WSJ)
• More eighth-graders applied to Queens’ Townsend Harris HS than to any other school. (Daily News)
• Despite how she’s portrayed, union president Randi Weingarten actually favors change. (Times)
• The most popular snack in city schools’ health-ified vending machines is a pineapple spear. (Post)
• Brooklyn’s PS 216 is the city’s first affiliate of Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard program. (CBS, NY1)
• Legal advocates distributed pamphlets last week about students’ rights in school. (NY1)
• The city has fired three teachers who interacted inappropriately with students on Facebook. (Post)
• Installation has begun on Alfred E. Smith HS’s green roof, the first for a city school. (NY1)
• First-graders at Manhattan’s PS 290 visit the 2nd Avenue Subway construction site weekly. (NY1)
• Readers including James Liebman and Deborah Meier weigh in on flaws in state tests. (Times)

• The Gates Foundation’s press investments may imperil quality journalism. (CJR)
• Equality Charter School in Co-op City has hired officials’ partners — with good results. (City Limits)
• A study of Montgomery County, Md., finds economic integration helps learning. (EdWeek)
• In a sympathetic Randi Weingarten profile, Steve Barr is quoted criticizing “Superman.” (NYT)
• What if parents picked their children’s teachers, speed-dating style? (Mike Goldstein)
• Superintendents in Buffalo, Sacramento, and Philly turned Joel Klein down. (Answer Sheet)
• A Staten Island high school prepares students to become insurance salesmen. (NY Teacher)
• How to inform, recruit, and gain the trust of your students’ families. (Notebook)
• After suicides, David Paterson tells LGBT youth “you are not alone.” (Capitol Tonight)

This school year, GothamSchools and WNYC reporters will follow three New York City high schools as they try to improve. The following is an introduction to one of those schools: Christopher Columbus High School.

Christopher Columbus High School sits on a quiet street in the Bronx that’s actually a no man’s land in the middle of a policy war.

The city’s Department of Education has been threatening to close Columbus since 2003. Mayor Bloomberg has called it, and other schools like it, “failures” and warned parents against enrolling their children there, saying the students would “probably never recover from it.” About 300 ninth-graders enrolled in the school regardless, but the school’s future is still precarious. Caught in a fight between the city and the teachers union, it is being starved while other struggling schools are getting help.

Among the changes at Columbus this year are a freshman class that has shrunk by more than a hundred students, a budget that is down by more than $1 million, and widespread uncertainty over whether the city will succeed in closing the school on its second try.

But unlike some of the other 18 schools saved from closure by a union lawsuit, Columbus is still fighting. Its principal of eight years, Lisa Fuentes, applied to convert Columbus into a charter school focused on serving high-needs students. Its teachers and students are already planning rallies in the school’s defense. (more…)

More than 30 schools across the city are about to embark on an experiment to rapidly boost student performance. In a plan endorsed by President Barack Obama, the city will use millions of federal dollars to either resuscitate the schools, or shut them down and open new ones.

This year, we’ll be following three of these schools.

A Brooklyn high school sees almost half its freshmen drop out before their senior year and struggles with safety, but staff hope that new leadership will revive the school. Another in SoHo draws students from all over the city and has a graduation rate of just 50 percent, but both teachers and students are optimistic that a longer school day and more training for teachers can forge a better future. At a third high school in the Bronx, the staff is fighting to keep the school open despite threats from Mayor Bloomberg, who urged parents not to send their children there.

Those students who showed up this year anyway “will get a terrible education that…they’ll probably never recover from,” Bloomberg told reporters.

Together, the three high schools serve over 3,000 of the city’s neediest students. They are part of a group of schools targeted by both the mayor, who calls them “failing,” and President Obama, who calls the worst among them “dropout factories.” Both men describe the schools’ resuscitation as crucial to solving poverty and improving the economy. But how should the schools get fixed? And what role should Obama’s team in Washington, D.C., play?

In this project, a collaboration of GothamSchools and WNYC that launches formally on Monday, we will follow three efforts to change three struggling schools. (more…)

Something has been happening the past month without me realizing. My kids have been learning! When I met them in September I was shocked by what I saw as gaps in their knowledge and behavior. But I knew that was partly because I was juxtaposing them with my memory of my third graders in June, not September. Similarly, I was blinding myself to the slow and gradual progress they were making. Until yesterday.

I have a tendency to jinx myself in these situations, but yesterday was one of those almost-perfect days. I didn’t feel rushed and I didn’t feel completely frustrated. Looking around, I saw small clues of the growth my students and I have made since school started. The students and I made it through every lesson with minimal interruptions. When I needed to redirect a student, I didn’t raise my voice, I lowered it. It’s hard to see sometimes, but when I looked closely I realized even Baby Face has made strides in improving his behavior.

We ended the day with the classic baking soda and vinegar experiment to cap our introduction to the scientific method. The facts that we made it through the potential chaos of that experiment AND everyone participated AND everyone had hysterical fun are definitely positive signs. As I cleaned up during my final period prep I felt a mix of relaxation and pride.

It wasn’t until I was getting ready to leave my room at the end of the day though that I fully realized what had been taking place in my room. I had stayed after school to complete the long overdue task of hanging up process charts from various lessons. Walking out the door I looked around the room and saw my posters on how to give a book talk, tools and units of measurement, how to tell time, personal narrative traits and many others. Who knew? We’ve learned a lot.

• A judge gave a teacher his job back after finding the city botched its investigation. (Daily News, Post)
• The federal gov. is giving NYC organizations $12 million to spend on sex ed. programs. (NY1)
• City names a new Bronx campus after two firefighters who died in 2005. (Daily News)
• P.S. 119 grads meet 50 years later, marry, and give back to the school’s current students. (Daily News)
• Ocean Hill-Brownsville showed that demonizing teachers unions doesn’t work. (Daily News)
• Three Long Island students were arrested for beating up a classmates on the bus. (Wall Street Journal)
• Duncan and teachers union leaders announced plans for an edu summit. (Washington Post)
• D.C.’s new teachers contract will be wasted if the city doesn’t manage its talent. (NY Times)
• Rick Hess lists three lessons learned from Rhee and Fenty’s exit. (Daily News)
• The NEA and other unions are spending more on elections than in the past. (Wall Street Journal)
• For-profit education companies are facing declining enrollment, falling stock. (Post)

• Duncan, Van Roekel and Weingarten called for a summit on labor-management relations. (WashPost)
• The speeches of Albert Shanker have disappeared from the AFT’s website. (Huffington Post)
• The New York City DOE’s food services are so big they “dictate the rules of the game.” (Insideschools)
• Valerie Strauss has a round-up of the most “quintessential” Michelle Rhee quotations. (Answer Sheet)
• Justin Cohen thinks schools might need a “Middle Management for America.” (Mass Insight)
• A teacher gives some advice for taming a trouble-making class. (EdWize)
• Yesterday’s mystery UFO sightings were more likely balloons released by a Westchester school. (DN)
• A Pa. school district might ban staff and students from talking to reporters without permission. (SPLC)
• And a California Congressional candidate wants to do away with public schools. (Mother Jones)