GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

“Ama Nyamekye taught high school English in the New York City public
schools from 2004 to 2007 and now works as a communications consultant
for nonprofits.”Jeez, like giving credence to a 3rd year medical student who advocates the use of leeches to cure cancer. Speaking of leeches…..I’m amazed that Gotham and Ama don’t get it. The problem is not standardized testing but high stakes outcomes based on the tests. Ignoring the high stakes aspect is the ed deform way of deflecting what the issue is all about. GS must start defining these nuances. This is not about pedagogy but about politics.

Lord, ease up a bit, folks.  GS appears to have a whopping *three* staff members, who together do the site’s reporting, copyediting, and proofreading, write the headlines, make editorial decisions, and generally manage the web site (including the comments section).   They’re young, paid little, and don’t have employment contracts or pensions.  It may surprise you that generating a constant flow of well-written and interesting content is not easy.  So GS ”welcomes” (i.e., is practically begging for) columns from teachers, parents, students, or anyone else willing and able to type out several hundred words and send them in (to Ms. Cramer, who then has to edit the piece while doing the rest of the stuff listed above).  I’m sure they’d accept submissions from one of the scores of commenters with decades of experience teaching in the NYC public school system.

Be careful. That is the most over-stated piece of advice I’ve been given in my last three years of teaching and, frankly, is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve been given. Everything that you say or write, critical or not, CAN be used against you, depending on who’s reading the post and who’s using that info.

Currently, GS does NOT accept submissions of teachers for their Community section who refuse to use their full name in their posts. There are a host of reasons why some teachers of any number of years feel uncomfortable submitting any sort of criticism of the system, their school, or whatnot, be it a vindictive principal, administration, or staff overall. 

With the pushing of changing LIFO, removing tenure, and a host of other concerns, I can see why some teachers refuse to attach their full names to their writings. Why set yourself up to get fired over a blog post, no matter how truthful it may be? It doesn’t deter from the quality of their postings however. If GothamSchools allowed for pseudonyms, I can almost guarantee you there will be more writings posted by all sorts of teachers.

Thr PARCC Common Core assessments will totally change the testing landscape – check out the Common Core and PARCC websites … as far as Lazar is concerned: what does he mean by “really teach student how to think,” and how would we know it?  What evidence would we have?  There still are a handful of schools that have Regents waivers from the SED and use portfolios/roundtables … and they do as well or better in college!!

Printing submissions from teachers using pseudonyms.

“Youratroll,” thank you for your exemplary model postings demonstrating exactly what the definition of an internet troll is.