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Do you know that feeling of excitement-turned-nervousness, that rumbling in your gut before you take your driver’s license test, that fluttering before your blind date shows up or the results of your pregnancy test appear?

As the novice director of a college prep program in a high school with paralyzingly low SAT scores historically — between 660-720 on math and critical reading combined — and as someone who threw the sink at trying to move those numbers skyward, that’s how I am feeling today, when we find out the results of our students’ Jan. 22 SAT exam.

The decision to go all-out on SAT prep was not easy — on average, our 11th-graders read two to three years below grade level, and I considered whether their time (and our program’s money) would be better spent focusing on remedial skills than learning test-taking strategies and far-flung vocabulary words.

Yet the series of events that unfolded once I committed to sustained SAT prep and the challenges we subsequently encountered encompass larger themes present in the current state of urban, public schools that serve low-income students. Issues of differentiation, competency, fairness, accountability and ownership all came up in our preparation, and they will be issues I return to in future months in “The College Conundrum,” a biweekly survey of the landscape from my perch as a college prep program director at a small, traditional public high school in the South Bronx. (more…)

The Center for Education Reform's new journalism-rating site, The Media Bullpen, launched this morning.

A new website that will rate national and local news coverage of education issues — funded and run by advocates of school choice — launched this morning with vows from its publisher and editors to stay impartial.

Published by the Center for Education Reform, the Media Bullpen‘s stated goal is to promote better education journalism by judging news stories on their accuracy, balance and context, and to give readers additional information about the underlying issues.

The Center for Education Reform is a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that promotes charter schools and vouchers. The Media Bullpen site is also backed by funders — like the Gates, Walton, Bradley and Gleason Foundations — that have traditionally supported choice-based models of school reform.

The backers’ clear ideological origins earned raised eyebrows from journalists in December and January after the CER posted a preview of the site and began recruiting editors who, in the words of the job notice, both practiced sound journalistic ethics and held a “passion for education reform.” (The phrase “education reform,” though claimed by various groups, has been most closely associated with those that favor charter schools and are critical of teachers unions.)

But Jeanne Allen, the president of CER, said that though she will be the site’s publisher, it will have editorial independence from its parent advocacy organization.

“We don’t want folks who think they know the answer,” Allen said in an interview yesterday. “At CER, we think we know the answer, but that’s not what this is about.” (more…)

• The UFT’s Michael Mulgrew pulled the city from a federal union-district collaboration conference. (WSJ)
• Gov. Cuomo said he is in talks with Mayor Bloomberg about changing seniority layoff rules. (Daily News)
• State Chancellor Merryl Tisch said the state will craft a new teacher evaluation system this spring. (Post)
• A team that proposed a charter school for English language learners is trying again. (Daily News)
• Many PEP members lacked basic knowledge of the schools they voted to close. (Riverdale Press)
• The UFT filed papers challenging a judge’s ruling allowing teachers’ ratings to be released. (Post)
• The Daily News says it’s a relief that key officials support changing seniority layoff rules.
• More city students took and passed AP exams, but their rates still lag nationally. (GS, Post, NY1, WSJ)
• Nationally, passing rates on AP exams are falling even as more students take them. (WSJ)
• Kindergarten preregistration portends continued popularity for Manhattan schools. (Downtown Express)
• The teacher pushed to resign after revealing her sex worker past is making a career of it. (Daily News)
• Some city parents say they side with Michelle Obama on keeping kids off Facebook. (Daily News)
• California officials are trying to curb the law that lets parents pick charter conversions. (L.A. Times)
• Jay Mathews memorializes Harriet Ball, the Houston teacher who inspired KIPP. (Washington Post)

• A group of parents will appeal the court ruling that allowed Cathie Black to receive her waiver. (Observer)
• Bloomberg wants to change part of the Taylor Law that bars him from negotiating pensions. (NYT)
• Most NY school districts outside of the city have the money to cover cuts, a state ed report says. (WCBS)
• Laura Bush is announcing an initiative to boost grad rates by focusing on middle schools. (AP)
• The number of seniors who passed an AP exam in 2010 represents 15 percent of their class. (NYT)
• The Daily launches a five-part series with Klein, Duncan, Rhee and others on school reform. (The Daily)
• A founding member of Parents Across America outlines her objections to ed reformers’ agenda. (HuffPo)
• Leo Casey calls on Cuomo to also try to downsize high charter superintendent pay. (EdWize)
• A charter advocate takes a closer look at charters’ college-readiness data. (NYC Charter Center)
• Michelle Rhee challenged the blogger’s data that showed her to be an ineffective teacher. (Wash. Post)
• Baltimore’s former accountability chief says his data neither confirms nor denies Rhee’s claims. (WP)
• Texas school officials canceled an Arabic class over fears that students would learn about Islam. (Salon)
• A new Facebook app claims to predict students’ likelihood of being admitted to various colleges. (GOOD)

Via 10,000 Words

Dear readers: We love you. Let us (learn to) count the ways.

Inspired by the blog 10,000 Words’ Valentines for Journalists contest, we are launching a creative challenge of our own: help us come up with brilliant school-related valentines.

These can be messages for anyone from your wife to your principal to your least favorite GothamSchools commenter whom you want to kill with kindness. (Kindness!) They can be for that special someone on the opposite side of the ideological divide you’ve developed feelings for while battling in the trenches of the school reform wars, or something simple for your student to give to everyone in her class.

For inspiration, search Twitter for the #edupickuplines meme that caught fire back in December. My personal favorite: “Trust me, baby, there is nothing common about my core.”

Be creative, but keep it educational and PG-rated.

Send us your one-line messages of education-related love, lust, pining or passion. Submit entries by email, in the comments section below, or on Twitter — just make sure to tweet @gothamschools and use the hashtag #edlove. Then on Monday we’ll pick the best of the love notes and turn them into a digital valentine similar to the ones you see here.

New data from the College Board on last year’s class of graduating seniors shows that while more city students are taking and passing Advanced Placement courses, black students are still underrepresented in both groups.

From 2009 to 2010, the number of New York City high school seniors taking at least one AP test increased by six percent from roughly 13,697 to 14,522. That was matched by a slight increase of 6.8 percent in the number of students who passed at least one test during high school. It’s impossible to say what the overall passage rate was, as the city’s data doesn’t indicate how students performed on the exams they took.

Those gains have been made mainly by Asian and Hispanic students. Both groups are taking Advanced Placement tests and passing them at significantly higher rates than in the past, while participation and passage rates among white students have stagnated. (more…)

The teacher’s main responsibility is to bring the subject to the students in such a way that they learn it. If they take interest in it, so much the better. Some teachers live for that second part — sparking the students’ interest — but first and foremost, the students need to learn the subject.

That’s what a teacher does, period: Teach the subject to the students in as interesting and lasting a way as possible.

But the just-released New York State Teaching Standards expect teachers to fulfill a much broader range of responsibilities. Consisting of seven standards, each of which is broken down into numerous elements, the standards outline, for the first time, what all teachers in New York State will be expected to do.

According to these standards, teachers at all levels, all subjects, are supposed to understand and respond to each student’s background, psychological needs, and interests; integrate technology into the lessons; stay abreast of developments in their subjects and in pedagogy; cite research in support of their instructional decisions; show understanding of the school’s history and social context; bring multiple perspectives into their lessons; incorporate sound, movement, touch, images, and writing in their instruction; apply the lessons to real-life situations and students’ personal experience; help broaden students’ cultural perspectives; and much more.

None of these expectations is really alarming or new; teachers do combinations of these things all the time, and a set of Model Core Teaching Standards proposed by an interstate consortium last year set a precedent for overreach. The problem is that the nature of teaching depends largely on the subjects, grade levels, students, and teachers, and some of the items listed are more important than others. (more…)

• Not too many lawmakers seem excited about ending seniority layoff protections. (Daily News, NY1)
• Many of the high schools the city has decided to close met their predicted graduation rates. (Post)
• The city released a list of 12 new high schools it plans to open this fall. (NY1)
• School bedbug sightings are up three times over this time last year, including at PS 57. (Post, NY1)
• The city again delayed collecting unpaid lunch fees but said it would soon. (Daily News, NY1)
• Chancellor Black: Better tests, not higher cut scores, will boost college readiness. (Daily News)
• The Post says the state should get credit for releasing the readiness data, bad as it might be.
• The Daily News says admitting the results is the first step in a process that must end in improvement.
• The Post also says the new revelations lend support for Mayor Bloomberg’s favored policies.
• An arbitrator ruled that Michelle Rhee should not have fired 75 teachers in 2008. (Washington Post)
• U.S. News & World Report is grading teachers’ colleges, and the schools aren’t happy. (Times)
• Students who did not immigrate legally face consequences after becoming politically active. (Times)

• Michelle Rhee’s early test scores weren’t nearly as good as she claimed they were. (Class Struggle)
• NY is one of many states that have not spent any of the federal edu jobs money. (Ed Money Watch)
• Chancellor Black will testify on the state budget in Albany next Tuesday. (Daily Politics)
• Cuomo and Bloomberg are sparring over the budget and education spending. (Daily Politics)
• One of the Panel for Educational Policy’s student members had her own high school closed. (NYT)
• Peter Murphy: The Regents aren’t offering many ideas on how to cut mandated spending. (NY Ed Reform)
• Students accepted to specialized high schools will find out which school this week. (Insideschools)
• The U.S. DOE will publish a case study of school turnarounds this spring. (EdWeek)
• Art McFarland profiles a Bronx middle school that replaced one the city closed. (ABC)
• Support for capping school superintendents’ salaries is growing in Albany. (State of Politics)
• An ed group is holding a competition for the best video protesting Cuomo’s school cuts. (Observer)

Of all of New York City’s current reform efforts, its “Innovation Zone” is one of the most ambitious. The project — designed to cultivate experiments in personalized instruction, online learning, staffing and school time design — expanded from 10 schools last year to 81 schools this year. City officials want to bring the program to an additional 400 schools over the next three years, at a projected cost of $50 million.

But aside from a lightning-fast visit to one iZone classroom on Chancellor Cathie Black’s first day on the job and a profile of a rowdy 60-student first grade class, not much is publicly known about what the project’s new school models look like or how they are working.

Some clues can be found in a working paper released last month by researchers at the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education. The paper speaks to the first question — what the iZone looks like — and raises questions to follow as the pilot grows out of its infancy. It also points out challenges the city will face as it tries to increase the number of laboratory schools for structural and technological innovation.

Robin Lake, Associate Director of the CRPE and co-author of the working paper, said that scale and ambition of New York City’s investment in large-scale experimentation may be unique in the nation and will offer lessons for districts around the country.

“[City officials] want to be on the leading edge of this, and I think they are for sure,” Lake said.

Here are four interesting takeaways from the working paper, which can be found in full here. (more…)