GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott wasn’t completely wrong when he said tonight’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting had met its goal of promoting conversation about curriculum standards.

The meeting was pushed off course within minutes when protesters aligned with the Occupy movement shouted down Walcott and the standards’ architect, David Coleman. Walcott sped the dissolution into small-group sessions rather than try to talk over the nearly 200 protesters.

Most protesters stayed in the auditorium, but about three dozen parents and teachers followed Walcott and Coleman upstairs for workshops about the new standards, known as the Common Core.

Speaking to close to 20 attendees in a third-floor classroom, Coleman explained that the Common Core, which has been adopted by 25 states since 2009, is meant to “make our kids competitive within this country and outside of it, and to close the gap between high school and college.”

The development of the standards, he said, “was a vast process where thousands of teachers and parents were involved around a shared question of what is the evidence for college and career readiness, and based on that, what are the standards that most determine that.”

Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, whose two children attend Manhattan’s P.S. 199, said she came to the event because she wanted to learn more about how the Common Core would affect her children and was blindsided by the protest. (more…)

The possibility of a public comment session evaporated just moments into tonight’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting, after nearly 200 protesters drowned out Department of Education officials.

The panel had convened for a special meeting about the city’s new curriculum standards. But as Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott and the standards’ architect, David Coleman, took the stage at Seward Park High School, protesters aligned with the Occupy movement launched a chorus of complaints via “the people’s mic.” (more…)

“The people’s mic” could drown out discussion of curriculum standards at tonight’s unusual Panel for Educational Policy meeting.

The Department of Education has convened an off-schedule and highly irregular PEP meeting just to discuss new curriculum standards that are being rolled out this year.

At most PEP meetings, panel members listen patiently, but mostly silently, to members of the public before signing off on the city’s education policy proposals. Tonight, the panel won’t be voting on anything. Instead, they’ll listen to presentations by the architect of the Common Core standards, David Coleman, and his chief champion at the DOE, Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky. They’ll also sit in on workshops where meeting attendees will practice the same skills city students are being asked to bolster this year. And they will answer questions from the public for 25 minutes.

The city is requiring attendees to submit questions on index cards, and officials say the questions that get read aloud will likely be limited to ones that relate to curriculum.

That won’t stop some attendees who have been planning since last week to apply the tools of the Occupy Wall Street movement at the PEP meeting. Activists in the “Occupy Public Education” outgrowth plan to bring “the people’s mic” to the meeting, which obviates an actual microphone because humans, rather than electronics, amplify what is said. (more…)

Yesterday’s high school progress reports release put 60 schools on existential notice.

Fourteen high schools got failing grades, 28 received D’s, and another 14 have scored at a C or lower since at least 2009 — making them eligible for closure under Department of Education policy.

In the coming weeks, the city will winnow the list of schools to those it considers beyond repair. After officials release a shortlist of schools under consideration for closure, they will hold “early engagement” meetings to find out more about what has gone wrong. City officials said they would look at the schools’ Quality Reviews, state evaluations, and past improvement efforts before recommending some for closure. Last month, they said they were considering closure for just 20 of the 128 elementary and middle schools that received low progress report grades.

The at-risk high schools are spread over every borough except for Staten Island and include many of the comprehensive high schools that are still open in the Bronx, including DeWitt Clinton High School and Lehman High School, which until recently were considered good options for many students. They also include two of the five small schools on the Erasmus Campus in Brooklyn and two of the three  small schools that have long occupied the John Jay High School building in Park Slope. (A fourth school, which is selective, opened at John Jay this year.)

They include several of the schools that received “executive principals” who got hefty bonuses to turn conditions around. (more…)

As a first year teacher in 2009, I’d tried to discuss themes of oppression and internalized oppression through short stories about teenagers in inner-city Manhattan and Brooklyn. My students’ discomfort was palpable and, at times, explicit. What I was doing, unintentionally, was setting them up to either defend or attack the issues in their own communities. While I wanted desperately to put aside my whiteness, it was my whiteness that made working meaningfully through the political implications of these texts impossibly uncomfortable for my students. I took a break from these issues for a year. In that time, I attended an “Undoing Racism” workshop and engaging in dialogue with several different groups of anti-racist educators.  I also realized might just have to pick a different text.

Last month, my classes read “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian,” a graphic novel by Sherman Alexie mostly based on his own experience growing up on the impoverished Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State. I chose the book because I hoped it would prompt discussions of racial issues that drew on my students’ cultural backgrounds without having to focus on those backgrounds in a negative light. Moreover, I love the sophisticated issues the book subtly brings to light — not just racism, but racism in its most insidious form: internalized racism, and the low expectations that youth set for themselves when they are too young to “undo” it.

The author, like his protagonist, left at an early age because he recognized the low likelihood of receiving quality education and support for professional goals if he stayed on “the rez.” His autobiographical character pays for his aspirations by being teased heartily by his fellow Spokanes, particularly being called an “apple” — red on the outside, white on the inside. There are similar words, Alexie points out, in other cultures: the oreo, the banana. It’s considered “white,” these taunts suggest, to be smart. To be successful. To have ambitions. Alexie makes this comparison in an interview we watched  while prparing to read the book. Students laughed at Alexie’s likeness to the dude from “Everybody Loves Raymond,” but the Oreo reference resonated. I know, from the chuckling in the room, that students knew the sneering sentiment of that term. I also knew better, in my third year of teaching, than to inquire about it. To do so would be to force them to unair something unsavory about their own culture, and they needed to do that if and when they were ready to trust me.

The first few pages of Alexie’s novel boast a comic strip of what the protagonist feels is parents would have looked like had someone “listened to their dreams.” He draws his mother as a well-dressed professor and his father as a cool musician. My student Sera, upon reading through these descriptions, commented, “They don’t look successful, they just look white.”  Immediately, she put her hand over her mouth. “Oh,” she said, “I just said something wrong.” (more…)

• Investigators: A Science Skills HS administrator improperly pushed regrading on Regents exams. (Post)
• New data paint a poor college readiness picture. (GothamSchools, Times, Post, WSJ, NY1, Daily News)
• The Daily News says new college readiness data raises uncomfortable questions about school quality.
• The Post says materials for the city’s new sex education curriculum are too explicit and suggestive.
• City private schools have been on a buying binge, purchasing new land to let them expand. (WSJ)
• Studies show that children under 7 are spending more time than ever in front of digital screens. (Times)
• Ex-DOE deputy and New Orleans chief John White could head Louisiana’s schools. (Times-Picayune)
• Across the country, schools are bracing for more budget cuts this year. (Time Magazine)

• Getting under the hood of progress reports to look at what hurt P.S. 84′s score. (Gary Rubinstein)
• An infographic that can answer the perennial question, “When will I use this?” (dy/dan)
• An education writer lists the “policy” books that she recommends most often. (Dana Goldstein)
• Watch a presentation that a critic of high-stakes tests delivered to city parents. (NYC P.S. Parents)
• An account of an Occupy Wall Street grade-in gone awry. (Ed Notes)
• Michigan’s Deborah Ball launched a new group to help teacher training programs. (Teacher Beat)
• Evidence that NCLB waivers are part of President Obama’s re-election strategy. (Politics K-12)
• A charter school teacher and founder muses on the role of the Common Core. (Charter Notebook)
• An extended interview with Brooke Hauser, author of “The New Kids.” (Learning the Language)

In the past, Department of Education officials have cheered when schools posted dramatic progress report gains. Today, they touted the scores’ stability.

Last month, DOE officials attributed new stability in elementary and middle school progress report grades to a refined formula that offered the most accurate portrayal yet of each school’s performance. They gave the same explanation today for why 90 percent of high schools kept the same grade from last year or changed by just one level.

Another 9 percent of schools varied by two grades, going, for example, from a D to a B. Just five schools’ grades changed by more than that.

Satellite Academy High School posted the most spectacular climb, jumping all the way from an F to an A. But DOE officials attributed the size of the gain to a technical change: Low-scoring Satellite Academy had been broken into multiple small schools, with one retaining the name and identification number. That small school received the A this year.

Four schools shot up or down by three letter grades.

Brooklyn’s School for Global Studies, which began federally-funded “transformation” last year, saw its grade rise from an F to a B. When GothamSchools spoke with Principal Joseph O’Brien last month, he said he attributed the school’s gains to spending on technology and teacher training, and to a new emphasis on test performance. (more…)

Although the city’s new college readiness metrics were not factored into high school progress reports this year, they will be next year—and schools that don’t prepare could see drops in their grades, city officials said.

The new data points are one of the Department of Education’s answers to increased scrutiny on how public schools are preparing students for college. Criticisms have mounted against city schools for graduating students who are not college-bound, or require large doses of remedial coursework when they get to college.

But Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief academic officer, said they will not be factored into the schools’ scores until next fall because the Department of Education wants educators to have time to adjust their curriculums to meet those standards.

Until the city completely rolls out new Common Core standards, he said, instructors will have to walk a fine line between preparing students for state exams, which often require broad but shallow knowledge, and simulating college-level work with more writing assignments and long-term projects.

“We’re not waiting for the state to change its assessments, but it is a real dilemma that teachers and students face until that change occurs,” he said. “You can play around with the cut scores, but until you actually change what you ask kids to do, until you ask them to do more writing, more critical thinking, more problem-solving, engage with more rigorous texts, you’re not changing the standard. That’s the real work.”

The department hasn’t decided yet how to factor the new data points into progress report scores, Polakow-Suransky said. But he said expected the college readiness metrics to bring many grades down next year. (more…)