GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

iSchool senior Bria Lewis explains her film adaptation to attendees at the Schools For Tomorrow conference.

Attendees at a conference today about the future of education spent their morning imagining classrooms with beefed-up digital offerings — until students from an innovative New York City high school showed up.

During lunch at the New York Times Schools of Tomorrow conference, a small group of students from iSchool, a centerpiece of the Department of Education’s Innovation Zone, filed into a basement room to demonstrate how they are already using technology in their classes.

In a class called “#disastercamp,” Chanel Mowatt dreamt up a mobile phone app that allowed people find loved ones using geotagging technology after an earthquake or a hurricane destroyed communication infrastructures.

“If I really want to make a difference in someone’s life, I need a tool that’s going to help me actually do it,” said Mowatt as she paged through her SlideShow presentation.

In another class, called “Sixteen,” students chronicled the lives of 16-year-olds from around the world. Using Skype and other multimedia tools, the students connected with their contemporaries living in London, Australia, Utah and even Nigeria. (more…)

Blue Engine Teaching Assistant Alexandra DiAddezio helps 10th-grade geometry students Kelvin Perez, 15, Oliver Batlle, 15, and Ian Smith, 14, with a project.

How does the shape of a polygon change as one of its angles widens? What is an “acute angle”? Do you need help using a protractor?

These are questions Aisha Chappell wishes she could individually ask each of her 33 tenth-grade geometry students when they split into small groups to perform a hands-on project about angles and symmetry.

In the past, it would have been a challenge for Chappell to circle her classroom at the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School and address each of her students’ needs during individual or group work time. But this year Chappell has three teaching assistants to navigate the room with her.

The teaching assistants come through a year-old nonprofit called Blue Engine, which trains recent college graduates to help teachers push their students with more personalized attention. Founder Nick Ehrmann, who previously taught through Teach for America and founded a youth mentoring nonprofit, conceived of Blue Engine as a strategy to address a major problem identified in high-performing high schools: that too many students graduate from high school and start college, but founder once they get there.

One theory, held by KIPP charter school officials and others, is that “no excuses”-style schools need to do a better job of teacher character traits, such as resilience, that successful college students possess. Ehrmann has a different theory: The students simply need to learn more in high school.

“The strongest predictor in completion of college is the academic rigor of your high school coursework,” he said, citing research from the National Center for Educational Statistics.

That’s where Blue Engine’s 26 teaching assistants, known in the classroom as “BETAs,” come in. In addition to overseeing the small groups, they also support the full-time teaching staff by grading assignments and identifying and analyzing trends in student work. All of this amounts to what Ehrmann calls “high-dose tutoring.” (more…)

John Elfrank-Dana, UFT chapter leader at Murry Bergtraum High School, says his history classes have as many as 37 students.

After three years of budget cuts, the city’s schools started the year with more oversize classes than at any time in the last decade, according to data collected by the United Federation of Teachers.

Union members reported that on the sixth day of the school year, nearly 7,000 classes had more students than the teachers contract allows, mostly in high schools and a large number in Queens. That was almost a thousand more oversize classes than they reported at the same time last year.

The union will soon file a grievance against the contract violations, and many of the classes will shrink as schools shuffle students around in the coming weeks, as typically happens at the beginning of the school year. But union officials said it appears that for the fifth year in a row, average class sizes have inched up again.

“Our worst fears have now been confirmed,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew at a press conference announcing the numbers today. He urged Mayor Bloomberg to protect the city schools from additional budget cuts in the coming year.

Now, nearly a quarter of all city students are spending all or part of the day in overcrowded classes, according to the UFT. The contract limits classes to 25 students in kindergarten; 32 students in elementary school; 33 students in middle schools and 30 students in middle schools with many poor students; and 34 students in high schools. (more…)

• Ex-state ed chief David Steiner took a trip Pearson paid for; it later got a state contract. (Daily News)
• Social studies teachers are not the only ones who are leaving Bronx Science in droves. (Riverdale Press)
• A student was stabbed at Long Island City High School; four students were arrested. (Post, NY1)
• Seven schools, including three charter schools, are getting reading volunteers from the city. (NY1)
• A bus bringing disabled students home disappeared and didn’t deliver students until 9 p.m. (Post)
• Catholic high schools in Brooklyn have enrolled several students recruited from China. (Daily News)
• The small-schools feel created at Truman High School has Truman’s principal up for an award. (Post)
• The Los Angeles arts school that a city principal turned down will get a leader from D.C. (L.A. Times)
• An international network of Teach for America-inspired programs, Teach for All, is growing. (Times)
• The Chicago schools that voted for a longer school day will start the new hours on Monday. (Tribune)

• Among winners of a community journalism grant: A watchdog for New Orleans charter schools. (Knight)
• A concrete example of how the “gamification of society” and schools could pay off. (Talking Points Memo)
• A charter school that Oprah Winfrey supports is accused of not serving disabled students. (Bloomberg)
• The turnaround process at one Philadelphia school included five principals in a year. (Notebook)
• Children who came here illegally do worse in school than other immigrants. (Inside School Research)
• Members of the Absent Teacher Reserve who requested a UFT meeting are getting one. (NYC ATR)
• A teacher dusts of his high-school Spanish to communicate with parents during orientation. (Mr. Foteah)
• An argument that fixing schools will require substantial changes to housing policy. (Matt Yglesias)
• Evan Osnos: China isn’t ready to embrace failure, but it’s less obsessed with achievement. (New Yorker)
• The rock band R.E.M. announced it’s breaking up today, 10 years after a “Sesame Street” gig. (YouTube)

A Brooklyn charter school with a floundering English-language learner program and poor English marks had its charter renewed, but only on a probationary basis.

State charter authorizers who reviewed Achievement First Bushwick for its charter renewal found that the school had an inadequate ELL program, according to a renewal report earlier this year. The school also failed to meet English language arts test scores goals since it opened in 2006, which prompted the authorizers to decline the school’s request for a five-year renewal.

Last week, the state Board of Regents supported the report’s recommendations in an official vote at its monthly meeting. The school now has just three years to fix its problems — or close.

The school’s authorizer, SUNY Charter School Institute, recommended the short-term renewal only on the condition that the school address problems with its ELL instruction before this school year began. The main problem was that ELL students were getting services more appropriate for disabled students, on an ad hoc basis. The services were “ineffective given the absence of a formal ELL program for what is a sizable ELL population,” the authorizers found.

(more…)

A second-generation iPad displays an application on the Common Core standards.

This month, 9,000 Teach For America members are trading in their post-it notes for iPads thanks to a donation from Apple.

They are joining the growing ranks of educators who must decide how to use new iPads in their classrooms. It’s an open question facing teachers across the city who received iPads from their principals this year or bring their personal iPad to school from home.

Teach for America distributed iPads to its new teachers stationed in 43 regions of the United States, including New York City, over the past three weeks. The tablets, mostly refurbished first-generation iPads turned in by owners eager to upgrade when new models came out this spring, were donated to TFA by Apple earlier this year.

“Through this opportunity, corps members will explore ways iPad can be used as a powerful teaching tool in the classroom,” Danielle Montoya, a TFA spokesperson, said over email.

Teachers say they received the new technology without any specific guidance from TFA officials on how to use it. (more…)

Protesters rally against state budget cuts

Things got personal on the steps of Tweed Courthouse today as parents, advocates and elected officials protested budget cuts by sharing stories and photographs of specific children affected.

Summer Lord said her two children were “sandwiched in like a sardine, elbow-to-elbow with 34 other students” in over-capacity classrooms at P.S./I.S. 217 on Roosevelt Island. Millie Vargas’s daughter is passionate about the violin, and according to Vargas, a looming cut of approximately $150,000 to P.S. 73 threatens her daughter’s music class.

And Angela Courtney told me her daughter came home two days ago crying that an after school baking class she had joined at P.S. 35 had been abruptly cut.

These mothers were among the crowd of protesters waving black and white photographs of their children and neon posters markered with sayings like “What happens in Albany doesn’t stay in Albany” and “School cuts hurt.” (more…)

L-R: Kenny Leon, Samuel L. Jackson, Katori Hall, and Angela Bassett speak to students at Brooklyn High School of the Arts

On Monday morning, Brooklyn High School of the Arts teacher Camille Russ tried to be in two places at once.

In the school’s freshly painted auditorium she sat with theater students as they discussed a new Broadway play with two of its stars, Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett. At the same time, on the other side of the Boerum Hill school, she lectured her Advanced Placement English class about author’s voice in Jamaica Kincaid’s biography, “Girl.”

When Russ found out that the playwright, director, and cast of “The Mountaintop,” a new play about the night before Martin Luther King was assassinated, would be visiting BHSA, she used her brand-new MacBook Air to film herself delivering the day’s lesson. That way, AP English students who are not part of the school’s theater program could move on with the curriculum while their classmates enjoyed the artists’ surprise visit to the school that Principal Margaret Lacey-Berman calls “the best-kept secret in Brooklyn.”

In charge since 2008, Lacey-Berman said she encourages teachers to integrate arts and academic instruction whenever possible — something she hopes will boost achievement. The school received a C on last year’s city progress report, with a D for academic performance but higher marks for the progress students made over the course of the year.

Before the actors’ talk, students read the speech King delivered the night before he was killed, which tied into the school’s goal, set out in the new “common core” standards, of exposing students to more non-fiction writing, Lacey-Berman said. (more…)

• Students who repeat eighth grade say the city isn’t setting them up for success after that. (Daily News)
• The city plans to overhaul its middle schools. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News, Post, NY1, WSJ)
• One piece of the middle school plan has the UFT weighing a new deal on personnel. (GothamSchools)
• Union employees and their backers held another protest against looming layoffs of school aides. (NY1)
• Michael Goodwin: The city’s black and Hispanic students haven’t seen their SAT scores rise. (Post)
• The Times says the state’s plan to prevent cheating is on the right track but requires state funding.
• The school district in Kansas City, Mo., has lost its accreditation and faces state takeover. (Times)
• Its former schools chief was hired to fix Detroit’s schools and is set to start next week. (Detroit News)
• Boston is the latest city to have its district and charter schools agree to collaborate. (Boston Globe)
• Some of the money Mark Zuckerberg donated to Newark’s schools will go to innovative teachers. (WSJ)