A teacher describes the heart-rending aftereffects of a student’s poor high school choice. (Schoolbook)
A profile of Noah Gotbaum’s path to parent leadership on the Upper West Side. (West Side Spirit)
Weak college readiness rates are most worrisome because local diplomas are disappearing. (City Limits)
Chicago is also planning to use college-readiness data in school evaluations. (Curriculum Matters)
RiShawn Biddle: Teachers and principals must be prepared for parents to wield power. (Dropout Nation)
Were the city’s progress report scores really as stable as the city said? Maybe not. (Shanker Blog)
Chicago charter schools are jumping at the chance to take city funds to extend their days. (Catalyst)
A New Jersey offers a primer on the policies that make up “corporate school reform.” (Answer Sheet)
Andy Rotherham: Despite criticism, achievement gap-closing is still the right idea. (School of Thought)
A paean to the contributions of decades of teachers, from a young teacher. (Mr. Foteah)
The editor of the Texas Tribune laments the budget boon that high school dropouts provide. (Times)
Ladida
The number of typos in this post is egregious. Fix please!
NYCparent
Re the Schoolbook post about HS choice — the author doesn’t say how long the family has been in the country, but if it is less than 2 yrs, the student is therefore considered an ELL, (or if she has a Special Ed IEP) the new small high schools do not have to take her. Sick system, but that’s how it is. Bring back the neighborhood high schools!
Bad Choice (again)
Just imagine if your child somehow wound up at Bronxdale H.S. where they are following a “project based learning” style where no one knows what the heck is going on. This of course includes the principal who is still under investigation. What a wonderful “new” school that has opened up in a neighborhood high school. Send the 3rd grade teacher from Oneonta posing as a principal back home upstate. Poor parents, what ashame!
Project Based Learning at the High School level? That’s so funny to read. We do this on the elementary level each day at our school. No wonder these High Schools are tanking.
jeff S
Here’s the rub in this. Many of these immigrants are from countries in the Caribean where the naitive official language is…..English. Although they might be illiterate because there are no compulsory education laws, they are not eligible for ELL services because in theory they are English speaking. This is one of the reasons so many of the high schools in Brooklyn, for example, were labeled “failing.” Every September they took in a couple of hundred over the counter students from that region who in most cases (not all but most) were not attending school at ages as young as 14. You would test them and find they were reading and doing math at best on a 3rd grade level if that high but they were English speaking. The Superintendents would go around telling the Principals that since they were 14 years old, they had to be enrolled in high school level classes and of course with the usual nonsense, for example, they surely could learn algebra if their teachers were competent (didn’t matter they couldn’t multiply two numbers together). and so they were placed in Algebra classes (or Sequential Math Course I or Math A) depending when. And when invariably they failed, and the Regents results were 25% passing the first math Regents, whatever it was, the school was branded a failure. The Principal was berated, the teachers were called all sorts of name by the Superintendent (who like most didn’t have a clue) and eventually the school was branded a “failing” school. But nobody wants to hear about these kids. As far as the Kleins, Walcotts of the world they don’t exist, And so the wonderful new schools, the pride and joy of the Emperor, somehow see to it that these kids graduate by such devices as the fact that the new Algebra regents real passing grade is around 35% (28 credits out of 84) but then act surprised when it is shown the kids are not ready for college. Don’t ever let the facts get in the way of a good story of failure. Nothing sells the tabloid papers better than blamikng the Principals and teachers for this state of affairs.
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