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• A teacher who can’t find a job this year is contemplating offering to teach as a volunteer. (James Boutin)
• More than 50 Teach for America corps members visited with their Israeli counterparts. (JTA)
• A rundown of the changes afoot in New York State’s teacher education rules. (Teacher Beat)
• Mark Anderson contemplates the hidden curriculum of teaching behavior. (GS Community)
• Sociologist Aaron Pallas sheds light on what makes organizations susceptible to cheating. (Hechinger)
• Andy Rotherham teases seven books education buffs should check out this summer. (School of Thought)
• Identifying Matthew Sprowal’s story as yet another example of unproductive polarization. (Ruben Brosbe)
• Sol Stern praises a Core Knowledge literacy program but wonders if the city can sustain it. (Daily News)
• A turnaround nonprofit identifies the collective bargaining tips that would help its work. (Mass Insight)
• A timeline of the Wireless Generation contract under fire along with Rupert Murdoch. (NYC P.S. Parents)
• Randi Weingarten said reformers couldn’t teach for 10 minutes. How long did she last? (Joanne Jacobs)
• The next frontier in improving school quality looks to be principal evaluations. (EdWeek)

The most recent entrant to the 2013 mayoral race is a media publishing executive with no prior experience in government and a promise to run as an independent, business-minded pragmatist on a strong education platform.

But Tom Allon is no circa-2011 Michael Bloomberg, who was similarly green to politics when he became mayor in 2002. Instead, Allon, who operates a network of local newspapers that include politics-heavy City Hall and The Capital, is more of a community media mogul and his education proposals are more of a reaction — for better or worse — to the last nine years of Bloomberg’s leadership.

In an hour-long conversation at his small, cluttered corner office at Manhattan Media, Allon detailed his still-evolving education platform.

“I think Mayor Bloomberg has been an outstanding game-changer in education,” he said. “In the same way that Rudy Giuliani made this a safer city, I think that this mayor has pushed the needle dramatically and made education a priority. And for that he should be applauded.”

Winning mayoral control, lifting the charter school cap, and hiring Joel Klein to lead the city’s school system were among Bloomberg’s best accomplishments, in Allon’s opinion. Maintaining these policies, he said, are crucial to carrying that momentum into the next administration.

“You can’t neglect something and have it wither for 50, 70 years, which is what our public education system has done, and then expect that one man in 10 or 12 years is going to correct all those ills,” Allon said.

Principal Diahann Malcolm, at center, leads two students in rope-jumping drills during gym class.

Students who failed gym last year at the High School of Law Enforcement and Public Safety have an unlikely teacher in their makeup class this summer: their principal, Diahann Malcolm.

For 90 minutes on each of the school’s 27 days of summer classes, Malcolm is setting aside her considerable administrative duties to coax coach potatoes and class clowns into breaking a sweat.

Malcolm began her career three decades ago as a physical education teacher and she falls easily back into the role each day, donning a Nike tracksuit and showing off her own athletic abilities, honed through decades of distance running and competitive rope-jumping.

But it was budget cuts, not her love of fitness, that pushed Malcolm back into the classroom.

HSLEPS doesn’t look like a school in fiscal distress. The school occupies its own 7-year-old, six-story building in a low-slung section of central Queens. Inside the sun-drenched, colorful space, there are two large gyms, a library with a balcony overlooking Jamaica, a mock courtroom, gleaming science labs, and rooms of computers on every floor.

But like all city schools, HSLEPS is contending with its third straight year of budget cuts. Several years ago, Malcolm said, she could pay four teachers to offer summer classes. Now, she can only afford two. (more…)

This is the second post in a series exploring the concept and role of curriculum. Read Part I here.

In my first year of teaching, I was presented with a group of students with challenging behaviors. I had been notified of the students’ patterns of behavior during my interview for the position, and warned of their difficulty (I heard later that a teacher or two had come and gone as a result of this group). I willingly took up the challenge, because this is what I had become a teacher for. As a newly inducted member into the ranks of urban education in a self-contained classroom in a high needs school, though I’d had an inkling of what I was getting into, I really didn’t have a clue until I was immersed in the everyday reality. Every morning I was greeted with a student who told me he hated me and wanted to punch me in the face (this was just how he greeted me: imagine the rest of our day together); I and other students were cursed at daily and threatened both verbally and physically (think fifth-grade students are small? Think again); negotiated with chairs thrown and desks kicked, absolute refusals to do anything I asked, in addition to a whole wonderful slew of behaviors that I don’t really recall much anymore, as it recedes into a fog of traumatic amnesia.

I came into that classroom every day prepared to teach academic content to my students, but frequently found myself halting my prepared curriculum (most especially after lunch) to teach lessons on social skills, the differences between the rules of the street and the classroom, and self-control (as I discussed more in one of my last posts). As I reflected on this need to teach my students how to interact positively and methods of gaining self-control, I was amazed at how dire and obvious this need was, yet there was little inclusion of this material in any formally recognized curriculum or standards. I have since come to recognize that there is a name for this dearth in the unspoken skills requisite to navigating life, academics, and larger society: the “hidden curriculum.”

There are a couple of ways that the idea of a hidden curriculum has been interpreted. One is from the perspective of class or cultural oppression, in which inequity is perpetuated by the biases of a dominant culture through unwritten but clearly expressed social rules in schools. For example, a teacher may convey inadvertent stereotypical assumptions about the students she is teaching by reducing coursework or expectations. Another interpretation of hidden curriculum is from the perspective of developmental socialization, as in the “unwritten or implicit rules we were never taught but just seem to know.” In the first interpretation, the deficit lies in the adult, who enforces the biases of the dominant culture either blindly or coercively, while in the second interpretation, the deficit lies in the student, who fails to recognize implicit social or behavioral rules, whether due to disability or lack of early childhood exposure.

In either case, I think there is a middle ground to be found between these two interpretations of the hidden curriculum, in that it is the role and responsibility of the educator to render explicit what is assumed implicitly. (more…)

• Queens parents want to know why they were booted off of local councils after being elected. (Daily News)
• The state’s new online learning regulations will let students take courses their schools can’t offer. (Post)
• Some principals say the budgets they were given are just not enough to function. (GothamSchools)
• Some principals are planning to make ends meet this fall by filling teachers’ responsibilities. (WNYC)
• Connecticut’s test scores show that Gov. Dannel Malloy hasn’t yet fulfilled campaign promises. (WSJ)
• Nationally, just 16 of 800 schools eligible for federal turnaround funds have actually been closed. (AP)
• Opinion varies on the future of athletics at powerhouse JFK High School, set to close. (Riverdale Press)
• A reorganization of New Jersey’s education department has made space for new hires. (N.J. Spotlight)
• California’s school board refined rules that allow parents to revamp struggling schools. (L.A. Times)

• Every state but Georgia that won Race to the Top grants has altered its promises. (Politics K-12)
• The education reform movement doesn’t have a Rosa Parks-style figurehead. Should it? (Flypaper)
• One of the city’s largest school bus companies has filed for bankruptcy. (WSJ)
• Asked to create “outcomes-based assessments,” Collin Lawrence grew confused. (GS Community)
• A reminder: Even though American students don’t know some things, they do know others. (Larry Cuban)
• The mother of a child with autism confesses that she doesn’t care if he ever mainstreams. (Insideschools)
• A Boston charter school teacher is closely tracking alums’ college success. (Starting an Ed School)
• A rundown of Jonah Edelman’s comments about school politicking in Illinois. (Teaching in Dialogue)
• A teacher’s list of cringeworthy she said back in her first year in the classroom. (Mrs. Ripp)

A UFT organizer hands out a pro-union flier to Emily Samuels, an Opportunity Charter School administrators. To the left, Ana Patejdl, a teacher at the school.

For the first time since more than a dozen of their colleagues were abruptly fired last month, current teachers at Opportunity Charter School spoke publicly about the administration’s response to their efforts to join the United Federation of Teachers.

A small group of the teachers joined UFT organizers outside of the school in Harlem this afternoon, carried signs and distributed fliers to passersby. They said the schools used a draconian lateness policy as cover to terminate teachers who voted to unionize earlier in the year.

Of the 15 staff members whose contracts were terminated last month, all but one voted pro-union.

The firings had a chilling effect on staff morale, said Jennifer Mitchell, a fourth year teacher.

“People don’t feel safe here. They don’t feel appreciated,” she said.

Mitchell, one of the longest-tenured teachers at the school, which opened in 2004, said the school had drifted from its founding mission to serve high need students.

“The school has changed dramatically since I started,” she said. “Now I feel like I work for a company, not a school.” (more…)

The fight over the state’s new teacher evaluations has focused on the 40 percent to be based on student test scores. But the other 60 percent, based on subjective measures like principal observations, could be just as tough.

That’s according to one teacher reporting from a school piloting the city’s stricter guidelines for classroom observations.

Commenting in our Community section yesterday, a reader posting as HS Biology Teacher said that system “seems to be designed to make it extremely easy to rate any teacher ineffective if the principal wants to.”

The DOE has drafted a rubric for rating classroom observations, but it is very tough. To be rated effective (3), you need to really hit every competency on the rubric during each full-period observation… and that is extremely difficult given the language of the rubric. (more…)

Midway through my third year at the Brooklyn Arts Academy, not too long after our disappointing school quality review, the principal asked all teachers to read a long article on the limitations of “traditional” methods of assessments for underperforming students. The paper, written by a public school teacher from Chicago, detailed how one school increased student achievement by doing away with grades and report cards in favor of records assessing student performance in very specific areas. Our principal invited a guest speaker from this school to promote this form of assessment, and teachers were asked to join a pilot group on a voluntary basis.

I opted out of the pilot group, preferring instead to remain consistent with the system I’d had in place from the beginning of the year. I tallied grades according to student performance on exams, projects, daily class work and homework. This approach to assessment acknowledged many factors of student performance beyond particular learning goals. A student who worked hard and always turned in homework had a chance of receiving the same or better grade than a student who skipped classes but still demonstrated understanding of class material. By contrast, with an outcomes-based assessment system students need only demonstrate “mastery” or “proficiency” of specifically articulated “learning outcomes.” Students have multiple pathways to demonstrate such outcomes (essay writing, oral exams, etc) and can do so at any time in a given marking period. Class attendance, homework, and effort are not necessarily assessed.

At the end of that year at the Brooklyn Arts Academy, we were informed that all teachers would be required to use outcomes-based assessments the following year. I even heard that our school had paid $10,000 to a consultant to help set up an on-line computer program that would organize and track our student’s performance on each outcome (this program was decidedly not user-friendly, as I had to click from student to student when entering data, instead of being able to press tab like I could using “Gradekeeper”). The administration asked us to write 12-15 outcomes for our classes for each semester and encouraged us to align them with “key cognitive strategies” as outlined in David Conley’s book “College Knowledge”.

This task proved quite difficult. (more…)

Principals are famously told to “be creative” during school budget season. This year is no different, but with cuts to city, state, and federal funding all taking their toll, some school leaders are saying creativity isn’t enough.

Some of them are pushing back, filing appeals with the Department of Education to restore hundreds of thousands of dollars back into to their schools.

Joseph Nobile, a veteran principal at P.S. 304 Early Childhood School in the Bronx, said he and his budget liaison tweaked projections, shuffled funds, and excessed staff to stretch his $4.7 million as far as it could go.

“After all of the moving around, we were still down $350,000,” Nobile said. So for the first time in his 12 years on the job, Nobile said he had no choice but to file an appeal.

Nobile said the money he requested would go toward retaining the school’s lone curriculum coach, as well as four special education specialists. The additional personnel is especially important at P.S. 304 because it is part of a citywide pilot to move as many special education students as possible into mainstream classes.

Schools are feeling the pinch more than ever because of third consecutive year of budget cuts. Adding to that, the city made it tougher for some schools with large percentages of poor students to qualify for federal aid. (more…)