GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• A teacher recognizes that he’s in a honeymoon period with his class and plans to milk it. (Jose Vilson)
• A Schenectady teacher was named the state’s 2011 teacher of the year. (Albany Times-Union)
• New numbers show a rise in poverty statewide, and almost certainly in New York City, too. (Wonkster)
• Jay Mathews wants to know: Has parent rebellion ever yielded improved performance? (Class Struggle)
• A new book chronicles longstanding conflicts over teacher selection in New York City. (Notebook)
• Diane Ravitch says she penned a 100-page paperback “Death and Life” epilogue. (Bridging Differences)
• More on the surprising paucity of states using erasure analysis to detect possible cheating. (ProPublica)
• The House offered bipartisan backing for states to get federal aid to create charter schools. (Politics K-12)
• Reporting from an overcrowded city school, Miss Eyre says class sizes have risen. (NYC Educator)
• Comedian Jimmy Fallon’s creation of the #myteacherisweird Twitter tag made us LOL. (Twitter)

First, for four years, Collin Lawrence lived the tumultuous life of a teacher at a small high school with spotty leadership. Then he relived it — in the GothamSchools Community section.

Today, Lawrence concludes a yearlong chronicle of his tenure teaching history at an arts-themed school in Brooklyn, which he named “Brooklyn Arts Academy.” In the final installment, he summarizes the myriad issues the school faced and ponders their roots, and their potential remedies.

He writes:

Even with certain structural limitations of the small school model and the pre-existing challenges facing many students, the Brooklyn Arts Academy should have achieved much greater success. In general, the small school model does help foster a sense of community and allows teachers to form more personalized relationships with students. Moreover, the concept behind this school in particular — to empower and impassion students through art and music — was inspiring. But a concept, just like so many ideas on paper, is not enough to make a successful school.

Spoiler alert: Lawrence, who spent the 2010-2011 school year teaching in China, is now back in New York City and teaching again. His new principal knew about his GothamSchools blog when she hired him.

As a Bronx elementary school principal, Drema Brown routinely encountered students who were struggling to complete schoolwork without adequate health care, a stable address, or even electricity.

Challenges like those held Brown back from boosting academic achievement. Even worse, she said, she couldn’t solve the problems wrought by poverty, either.

“I might take it for granted that I can just take my daughter to an eye doctor’s appointment and I have insurance that is going to get her that $300, $400 pair of glasses. But sometimes in a school something as simple as that could languish for an entire school year,” said Brown, who headed P.S. 230 in the South Bronx’s District 9 from 2003 to 2007.

Now a top official at the Children’s Aid Society, the 158-year-old social services provider, Brown is leading an experiment in integrating health and social services into a school setting. Children’s Aid is set to open its charter school in the Morrisania section of the Bronx next fall. The Board of Regents formally approved the school’s charter earlier today.

Plans for the school have been in the works since 2009, when Richard Buery became Children’s Aid’s president and CEO. Buery, who has a background in law and education non-profit management, asked CAS staff who worked with community schools to think about how a community school operated by CAS could have a longer-term impact than the agency’s usual school partnerships.

The group already works with city schools to deliver social services and connect after-school programs. And since 2000 the group has run a full clinic in Morrisania, offering preventive services and a meeting place for families whose children are in foster care. But the new project marks Children’s Aid’s first venture into school management.

The clinic “is a visible presence in the community with lots of welcoming faces,” Brown said. “Our mission now is to a establish a school that feels the same way for kids and their families so that education becomes more attractive and a welcoming experience.”

That’s a sentiment that hasn’t always been present in the South Bronx, which has a longstanding reputation for poverty, crime and lackluster public schools. (more…)

Collin Lawrence is a former — and now present again! — New York City teacher who is recounting his four years working at a Brooklyn high school. Read Collin’s previous posts.

This writing project stems from a conversation I had with my colleagues at the Brooklyn Arts Academy toward then end of my final year there. We were walking back from lunch one day, marveling at how crazy our school might seem to an outsider, and one of my colleagues said to me, half-jokingly, that I should write a book about it. Though I am not so ambitious, I did, upon reflection, agree that our experiences should be documented, and that I was just the guy to do it.

I had stayed on at the school longer than most and had witnessed a lot. I also have a reputation for being diplomatic, and although was disappointed by the school or the administrators more than once, I did not leave embittered or vindictive. While I do not know if my former principal has read my blog, I am sure he would find a lot to criticize. But for my part, I have set out to describe my four years of the Brooklyn Arts Academy fairly and dispassionately.

I’ve often wondered if the Brooklyn Arts Academy is representative of many struggling small schools in the district or if it is more of an aberration. Having written this blog, the answer remains elusive. What I do know is that as long as I was there, the school never came close to achieving its potential. It has certainly improved, but the progress has come haltingly and with a lot of collateral damage along the way. Even with certain structural limitations of the small school model and the pre-existing challenges facing many students, the Brooklyn Arts Academy should have achieved much greater success. In general, the small school model does help foster a sense of community and allows teachers to form more personalized relationships with students. Moreover, the concept behind this school in particular — to empower and impassion students through art and music — was inspiring. But a concept, just like so many ideas on paper, is not enough to make a successful school.

Administrators often imply that when students misbehave, it is because teachers are doing something wrong. By the same token, if the teachers at the Brooklyn Arts Academy were not staying long enough to provide a consistent educational experience for the students, the administration must bear some fault. I believe we would have been much more successful had teachers felt more supported and appreciated for their efforts. Instead, their calls for help when dealing with discipline issues were too often ignored and some were even pressured to leave.

To step back even further, if this same administration felt driven to maintain appearances but lacked creativity to address other problems at their roots, that says something about the challenges of providing oversight in a school district where the number of schools have proliferated, even as control over those schools has centralized under the mayor. Concerns expressed by teachers were met with pleas to keep negative feelings within the school and the sometimes heavy-handed leadership of the principal marginalized dedicated educators.

But despite the challenges I faced at the Brooklyn Arts Academy, I stayed year after year. (more…)

• Student interest and ability dictate the curriculum at Swedish-inspired Innovate Manhattan Charter. (NY1)
• Counselors and Dennis Walcott visited Murry Bergtraum HS, where a student-athlete was killed. (ESPN)
• Staten Island’s high-performing Petrides School is set to host a suspension center soon. (S.I. Advance)
• The state Board of Regents voted to move forward on tightening test security. (GothamSchools, Times)
• Just 20 states and Washington D.C. conduct erasure analysis on all tests that students take. (USA Today)
• Brooklyn’s troubled School for Global Studies hopes “transformation” yields enrollment. (GothamSchools)
• At least 26 states now hinge teachers’ ratings on value-added calculations devised by statisticians. (WSJ)
• Publishing giant McGraw Hill is splitting in two and spinning off its education division. (Times)
• A proposal to tweak New Jersey’s school system would add charters and cut some tests. (Star-Ledger)
• A school district in Minnesota is divided over how schools should handle homosexuality. (Times)

• Knowing a little Chinese helped a teacher engage an immigrant student. (No Sleep ‘Til Summer)
• Stuyvesant’s student body president from 9/11 is in the Army; the VP is in a rap group. (Atlantic)
• Mark Anderson: The debate over teachers’ scores shows “bipolar” views of teachers. (Education Nation)
• Report: Sweden’s schools marketplace, in place since the 1990s, hasn’t boosted scores. (Guardian UK)
• In New York, class size is in some ways just another occasion for an education politics fight. (NY Mag)
• Handicapping the entrants in the second round of Race to the Top. (Politics K-12)
• Spike Lee’s 9/11-themed State Farm ad featured former members of PS 22′s chorus. (P.S. 22 Chorus)
• Experts and commentators offer a range of views on how to combat cheating. (SchoolBook)
• Usually when Obama talks about teacher jobs, he also talks about quality, but not now. (Dana Goldstein)
• Teachers choose their jobs for money and other reasons, just like other professionals. (Eduwonk)
• A newly excessed teacher describes ATRs as “ronins,” medieval Japanese “floating men.” (NYC ATR)
• A member of the ATR pool landed a job — replete with parking spot — through persistence. (NYC ATR)
• Charter school networks and other groups are starting to run their own teacher training. (Teacher Beat)
• An interview with New Orleans schools chief John White, days before he left NYC. (Education Next)
• The New York Civil Liberties Union is recruiting 20 teens to join its youth advocacy corps. (NYCLU)

ALBANY — Members of the Board of Regents today endorsed an independent review of the state’s procedures for investigating cheating.

The independent review is a first step in a complete overhaul of the state’s test security procedures that a State Education Department task force recommended last week. The Regents are reviewing the recommendations at their monthly meeting today and tomorrow.

Today’s vote to pursue the independent review came from the P-12 Committee, which supervises education from preschool through high school. With the committee’s endorsement, the measure is expected to pass easily when the entire board votes on it tomorrow.

Approval will trigger an “immediate” review, just as soon as the state finds an entity to conduct it. Education Commissioner John King said the state would look for entities to participate in the review at low or no cost to the state.

That review is likely to generate ideas for how SED can expand its investigative arm, which officials characterized as muddled. (more…)

School for Global Studies "master" teacher, Natasha Blakley, prepares for the start of school in the Brooklyn school's new computer lab, purchased with federal funds.

To Joseph O’Brien, principal of Brooklyn’s School for Global Studies, there is no clearer indication of how new federal funds have led to higher achievement than Room 326.

The classroom-turned-computer lab, outfitted with 35 Apple computers purchased last winter, is being used by students to recover credits toward graduation and study languages online, and by parents who lack Internet access at home. In addition to two laptop carts and new smartboards for a dozen classrooms, the lab replaces the school’s once-meager technology offerings, which included aging classroom computers hampered by viruses and two broken smartboards.

“For the first time, our students were able to have a dedicated room where they could use the computer on their own time, whether after school or on their lunch hour, with staffed personnel,” he said.

Tasked with raising the school’s graduation rate when the Department of Education appointed him to run Global Studies last year, O’Brien sees the new lab as a main tool. He paid for the lab with $170,000 of the $890,000 in federal School Improvement Grants awarded to Global Studies because it landed on the state’s list of lowest-performing schools last year—requiring the city to overhaul it.

For Global Studies and 10 other schools on the list, the city chose “transformation,” meaning they would receive new principals and nearly $2 million in School Improvement Grants over three years to buy extra supplies and support. The city is starting to overhaul another 33 schools this year under three improvement models.

As the 6th through 12th-grade school enters its second year of transformation — bringing it a second infusion of cash — O’Brien said change is already being felt.

“We are no longer the school that we once were,” he said. “This school is really becoming an oasis of learning.”

Now he just has to convince families that that’s true.  (more…)

• The renewal of Lower Manhattan post-9/11 has put crowding pressure on downtown schools. (NY1)
• Anecdotal reports suggest that more schools seem to be facing a space crunch this year. (Daily News)
• A star of Murry Bergtraum HS’s girls basketball team was murdered yesterday. (Post, Times, WSJ)
• The city is trying to fire Liciaga Altagracia, a Brooklyn principal who put students at safety risk. (Post)
• Michael Winerip: Students in storm-ravaged Vermont are taking a forest highway to school. (Times)
• A new report says that nationally, middle-class schools are falling short on key measures. (WSJ)

• A visual library of books that teachers in training at a Boston charter school read. (Starting an Ed School)
• Reactions to President Obama’s education jobs plan, which Ed Sec Arne Duncan explained. (Hechinger)
• America’s official Teacher of the Year says Chinese teachers always ask her about creativity. (HuffPo)
• A classroom scene in which students learn to use online search tools responsibly. (Dana Goldstein)
• Just as reformers have changed over time, so too have the defenders of the status quo. (Larry Cuban)
• A principal gives an overview of the Common Core teacher training at her school. (Soaring Seagulls)
• An interview with one of the Stuyvesant High School alums trying to make it more diverse. (The Local)
• Chicago’s mayor and teachers union are telling different stories about the school day length fight. (CNC)
• And a compendium of 9/11 news coverage and school resources, on the 10th anniversary. (EdWeek)