GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Looking for a racially diverse school, a mom sees only segregation — then discovers PS 261. (HuffPo)
• A suggestion that what’s paying off in Houston is not KIPP’s techniques but MATCH’s. (Mike Goldstein)
• The Harlem Success teacher who burned out speaks out, with some surprising opinions. (Russo)
• Tom Vander Ark defends digital learning against the New York Times’ analysis. (Getting Smart)
• David Sirota: The rise of education technology is a tool of the corporate “Shock Doctrine.” (Salon)
• Mark Anderson: New standards are “an extremely useful guide” for teachers. (GS Community)
• A call for proponents of the Common Core math standards to please show themselves. (Rick Hess)
• Being a chef is newly prestigious. What can teaching learn from cooking? (Rock the Boat)
• Weighing the impact — positive and negative — of criticizing the teachers union from within. (Ed Notes)
• Did the UFT’s newspaper bury a story because the subject was from the wrong political party? (Ed Notes)
• Michelle Rhee and Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson were finally married over the weekend. (AP)
• And our congrats to the New York Times, which officially launched its new education site, SchoolBook.

The city is getting a total of just under $60 million in federal grants to help dozens of struggling schools.

The grants, which the State Education Department formally announced today, are hardly unexpected. In July, the city and teachers union hashed out an eleventh-hour deal on teacher evaluations to clear the way for 33 low-performing schools to receive them.

The surprise is that 11 school closures — many of which the city had planned since 2009 — are being chalked up to “turnaround,” an overhaul model that the city said it was dropping.

Turnaround requires a new principal, most teachers replaced, and organizational changes — all hallmarks of the city’s longstanding closure program, in which low-performing schools phase out and new schools open in their place. But for months, the city had not mentioned turnaround as an option.

In fact, back in May, when it looked like the city would have to filed its grant application without the UFT’s support, the city said it was abandoning its plan to use the turnaround model and would instead adopt the less-invasive “restart” approach. (more…)

The city should rethink the money used on outside consultants to save the jobs of the school aides, health workers, and parent coordinators who help schools function from the inside.

That was the message delivered by members of DC-37, parents, teachers, activists, and elected officials during a protest on the steps of Tweed Courthouse today against the impending layoffs of nearly 800 school workers, most of them DC-37 members. The cuts – announced Aug. 15 – are slated to take effect in October.

Noah Gotbaum, who is on the District 3 Community Education Council and a parent of three public school children, said the loss of parent coordinators is a significant setback. “One of the only things Bloomberg did right is creating the position of parent coordinator, and now he’s kicking them off,” he said.

Other parents said they were most concerned about how the layoffs would affect their children. “What about  the safety of our children in the lunchroom? In the courtyard? In the hallways? On the buses?” asked Muba Yarofulani, a parent activist who has a chld and the parent of an eighth grader. “Safety is very important and the less school aides we have, the less schools are safe for our children.”

Chancellor Dennis Walcott with PS 40 teachers during a training session.

Teachers at Manhattan’s P.S. 40 played students this morning, engaging in role plays, “turn-and-talks,” and “sharebacks” to learn about the new way they will be evaluated this year.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott joined the teachers for a training session about Charlotte Danielson‘s “Framework for Teaching,” the teacher evaluation model that principals are supposed to start using this year.

Without an agreement between the city and teachers union on new teacher evaluation rules, teachers will still be judged as “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” at the end of the year. But the city has instructed principals to follow Danielson’s framework — which divides teachers into four categories, from “highly effective” down to “ineffective” — when they conduct observations throughout the year, in conjunction with the rollout of new “common core” curriculum standards.

“We’ve worked out some pieces with the UFT around the evaluation, but right now, my goal is to make sure we’re having the training take place around the Common Core,” Walcott said.

A group of five P.S. 40 teachers acted out a scripted classroom scene, with one “teacher” pushing her “students” to think critically about a nonfiction reading on Polynesian settlement in Hawaii. Walcott and the rest of the staff watched on and consulted yellow photocopied evaluation rubrics to see if the “teacher” should be judged highly effective, effective, developing or ineffective. (more…)

Dennis Walcott joined principal Annabelle Martinez (standing) and teachers at P.S. 124 in Sunset Park for training on the Common Core standards.

Huddled around tables in their school library, three dozen teachers at P.S. 124 in Sunset Park got a taste for how new standards being rolled out across the city would reshape their work in the classroom this fall.

Principal Annabelle Martinez handed out photocopies of student writing samples and asked the teachers to evaluate the work according to the new standards.

For a team of third-grade teachers, that meant looking at a short essay about weather and determining whether the author used “informative and explanatory text to examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly.”

At first, the teachers found strengths in the essay’s display of mechanics. One teacher pointed out that the student had used capitalization correctly.

“He knows his paragraphs,” another teacher said. “And he knows sentence structure too.”

Later, the teachers used a projector to present their notes to their colleagues. Under Martinez’s guidance, the teachers revised how they discussed the student’s strengths. Now, they called the essay “informative” and said it was organized well by topic and included a “clear introduction” and a “clear conclusion” — language that was more in line with the new standards.

Scenes like this were playing out in schools across the five boroughs this morning as part of an extra day of professional development given to staff before students start class tomorrow. (more…)

Families from the nonprofit New York Communities for Change stand behind teachers union president Michael Mulgrew at a press conference to criticize how the DOE has responded to the threat of toxins in schools Wednesday morning.

Weeks after the city announced that students at a Bronx elementary school had been exposed to toxins for years, parents and lawyers from New York Lawyers for the Public Interest are renewing their call for city officials to protect students against another toxin found in schools: PCBs, which are present in older light fixtures. (more…)

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

In my last post, I discussed how leaving the critical components of emotional/social literacy and character development out of our curriculum (the so called “hidden curriculum”) furthers inequity. I believe that inequity is also perpetuated by leaving what we teach our children up to chance, when we know quite firmly that there are foundational core components of academic knowledge. In national discussions and debates on public education, both reformers and their opponents are busy focusing on external factors such as poverty, human capital mechanisms (hiring & firing), and accountability. We have been largely ignoring one of the most easily and cheaply modifiable components of education: the curriculum. And this is the component that has arguably the most immediate and direct impact on a student.

When I began teaching fifth grade two years ago, though I knew I would be working with students presenting significant academic delays, I was still taken aback by how drastically far behind my students really were. I recall the moment in September of my first year when I introduced students to their fifth-grade Everyday Mathematics student reference books to review use of a table of contents and index. I was then awakened to the fact that the majority of my students not only did not know where a table of contents was located — nor even what a “table of contents” referred to — but furthermore had difficulty locating information in alphabetical order (not simply due to a difficulty with decoding words but more fundamentally from a difficulty alphabetizing). I had many such revelatory moments in my first year, in which I realized that I had to delve far back into the essential foundations of academic knowledge to provide access to our curriculum, such as via teaching phonemic awareness and phonics, or how to line up numbers for addition and subtraction using place value.

Teachers know that there are essential foundations underlying content knowledge that is requisite in advancing towards mastery. That’s what we teachers are paid to do, after all: break down complex subjects into the foundational procedural and/or conceptual components required for students to gain access to content and render these components memorable and imminently applicable to our students. I don’t know if folks who have not actually taught something understand just how difficult doing this kind of task analysis and explicit teaching can be. (more…)

When it comes to new “common core” standards, theoretical language is giving way to hands-on practice.

The curriculum standards, accepted by 48 states, are being rolled out citywide this year after being piloted in 100 schools last year. Today, every teacher in the city is expected to get training on them.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott sat in on a training session this morning at Brooklyn’s PS 124, which took part in the pilot last year. But at many schools, today is likely to be the first time that teachers learn just how the common core standards are poised to change their jobs.

Some principals put together their own plans for today, but they can also draw on four 90-minute lessons the city devised. One session asks teachers to evaluate student work from their own school to see if it meets the new standards. In another, they will practice assessing teachers according to a new evaluation rubric. A third lesson focuses on connecting two overarching citywide goals: strengthening student work and teacher practice. And a fourth lesson asks teachers to examine student work from a school that adopted the new standards last year. The lessons are part of the Department of Education’s online “Common Core Library” of resources.

In a letter to principals last week announcing the lesson plans, Walcott laid out a timeline for schools’ common core-related accomplishments. This fall, he wrote, teams of teachers at each school should identify students’ shortcomings. In the winter, teachers should ask all students to complete two common core-aligned “tasks,” one in reading and one in math. Through it all, principals should be giving teachers frequent feedback based on classroom observations, Walcott wrote.

Walcott’s letter to principals is below: (more…)

• A new poll shows that most New Yorkers don’t approve of Mayor Bloomberg’s school policies. (Times)
• A Bronx mother wants her son, who has special needs, to be held back, but the city says no. (Daily News)
• With their budgets cut, schools seem to be asking parents to buy more school supplies. (WNYC)
• Since 9/11, the city’s school safety protocol has expanded to include new kinds of emergencies. (NY1)
• Parents in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, are protesting pre-K cuts that closed promised seats. (Daily News)
• Comptroller John Liu reviewed the Absent Teacher Reserve and found shortcomings. (GothamSchools)
• Today is the last day of summer for city students. Classes start tomorrow. (Daily News)
• The Daily News says New Yorkers are right to be confused by school’s too-late start.
• Stuyvesant High School alums are allowed to use the school for a 9/11 commemoration after all. (WSJ)
• A Newark official with charter school ties is set to be Connecticut’s schools chief. (Times, WSJ)
• A change to D.C.’s evaluation system reduces observations for some teachers. (Washington Examiner)
• Chicago’s teachers union lambasted the city for pushing a longer day without union support. (Sun-Times)

• “Twas the eve of the school year, and all through the town, no teacher was sleeping …” (Mr. Foteah)
• A teacher’s advice about how to address race in the classroom starts with being prepared. (Jose Vilson)
• A Bronx teacher advises colleagues to hope for the best but prepare for the worst this year. (JD2718)
• A city teacher says she’s glad she doesn’t have a letter from her former self to refer back to. (Miss Brave)
• A teacher explains why she is alone in not establishing a list of rules on the first day of school. (Mrs. Ripp)
• A teacher’s plan for a new start includes setting class goals and going paperless. (No Sleep ‘Til Summer)
• A database of city high schools’ college readiness rankings, complete with caveats. (NYC P.S. Parents)
• Children who were in kindergarten at PS 150 on 9/11 reflect on their experience 10 years later. (NY Mag)
• On the composition of the Panel for Educational Policy, the city’s “fake school board.” (Brooklyn Rail)
• Jay Mathews says “good riddance” to new national standards just as they start to arrive. (Class Struggle)
• Reviews of the two competing sets of Common Core “content frameworks.” (Flypaper 1, 2)
• Educators say they’re hungry for resources to help them teach to the new standards. (Curriculum Matters)
• A Philly principal is shocked by the idea that educators can collaborate in just 2 days. (Practical Theory)