GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Jose Vilson: Teachers need an “Occupy the Classroom” movement to retake their profession. (GOOD)
• High school admissions season is upon the city, and with it comes great stress. (Insideschools)
• Introducing himself, a teacher says he doesn’t like to take credit when students learn. (GS Community)
• In Los Angeles, even kindergartners are included in experiments in blended learning. (Hechinger)
• Deconstructing the numbers behind New Orleans’ vastly improved schools. (Gary Rubinstein)
• The city’s hiring freeze doesn’t extend the DOE’s fundraising wing, which has a new head. (GS Twitter)
• The country’s two teachers unions are so far undecided about Tom Harkin’s ESEA bill. (Politics K-12)
• The bill would require states to reform teacher evaluations, a new federal frontier. (Teacher Beat)
• A documentary about student poets at University Heights High School is getting rave reviews. (Times)
• A growing body of research suggests that extracurricular activities shouldn’t be cut. (Education Next)

P.S. 144 students share their vision of the 2050 classroom

For only $55, students of the future will be able to buy the Notebook 5X, which includes a fingerprint-activated lock, an optional keyboard, and wings for when students’ backpacks just can’t fit another thing.

The fanciful design was unveiled today by Rory Corcoran, a fifth-grader at Queens’ P.S. 144, during a presentation about “The 2050 Classroom” at the New School’s weeklong MobilityShifts conference on learning in the digital age.

Corcoran and her classmates have been imagining the educational tools that their children and grandchildren might use in school, and the presentation today marked the culmination of their work. Seeing the other designs in action, Corcoran said, “Wow, I think my brain can’t stand all this awesomeness.”

P.S. 144 was one of two schools to work this fall with The 2050 Group, a team of arts experts who are developing new ways to integrate the arts into public schools. The 2050 Group tapped two designers – Hsing Wei, of Pixelated Learning, and Katie Koch, of Project: Interaction/pixelkated – to work with students at P.S. 144 and New Design High School.

“Aside from just re-imagining the classroom and thinking about how technology integrates into their futures, they’re thinking about their own power as designers,” Wei said. “How many of them in the future will end up being a different kind of Steve Jobs?” (more…)

The city will launch 125 new bilingual programs under the terms of a required plan to improve the treatment of students who are classified as English language learners.

Test scores and high school graduation rates for ELLs lag far behind the city average, and last summer the state told then-Chancellor Joel Klein to produce a “corrective action plan” for how to serve the students better.

That plan, released today and posted below, sets out an ambitious remediation schedule — and also highlights just how much the city has lagged in providing legally mandated services to ELLs.

In the plan, the city promises to reduce the number of ELLs whose teachers are not trained to work with them and to punish schools that fail to provide services to which ELLs are entitled.

It also promises to launch 125 new bilingual programs by 2013, including 20 this school year, on top of the 397 that are already open. The new programs will open in districts with many ELLs and where parents say they prefer their children placed in classrooms where instruction takes place in two languages, rather than in English-only classes with extra help for non-native speakers. The city has hired Ernst & Young, an auditing group, to monitor whether parents’ choices are honored.

Some of the new programs will open in high school campuses where no bilingual instruction currently takes place. When he approved several school closures in July, State Education Commissioner John King expressed concern about whether new high schools would serve the same students who attended the schools that closed. The plan commits to opening new programs when existing ones phase out along with their schools. (more…)

Panelists discuss a slate of new papers about school funding in New York at Teachers College Tuesday night.

Michael Rebell led the Campaign for Fiscal Equity’s landmark school finance lawsuit for 13 years, but for a long time the lawyer was conflicted about the case.

He believed what he ultimately convinced the courts: that the state had given New York City schools less than their fair share of funding. But he was also persuaded by a counter-argument that he heard during the litigation: that more money wouldn’t help schools whose biggest problem was poverty. And the lawsuit itself wasn’t helping him reconcile the tension.

“We have this adversary system for dealing with legal matters in our courts, where two warring sides take firm and opposite opinions,” he said. “The truth is sometimes more complicated than that.”

Now, months after CFE laid off its last employee and the state trimmed the equity dollars for the second time, Rebell is trying a different approach to advocate for poor students. As the director of the Campaign for Educational Equity, a think tank housed at Columbia University’s Teachers College, Rebell is setting out to win not a legal victory but the hearts and minds of policymakers.

His first step: To solicit a set of academic papers, released this week and discussed at Teachers College Tuesday night, that make the case for what he calls “comprehensive educational equity.” A main point of the papers is, as the CFE lawsuit contended and the New York Times reported earlier this week, that the state should give more to its schools — $4,750 per poor student, to be precise. But they also sketch out a policy platform that Rebell said could help close racial and class achievement gaps. (more…)

Confession: I didn’t like high school. I went to a good school, in a highly ranked district on Long Island. I liked some of my classes, I had some great teachers and some good friends, but on the whole, school was not something that I enjoyed.

Mostly, I just resented having to be there. I liked reading, I liked learning, but I didn’t like being told when and where to do these things. Like many teenagers, I wanted to make my own decisions about how to spend my own time. I didn’t like math; I didn’t like biology. Spending my days trudging from classroom to classroom, studying subjects that I had no interest in and having adults tell me it was all somehow good for me. … I just wanted to be outside, or back in bed.

Still, I learned. History, English, biology, calculus: I retained stores of knowledge in all of these areas, despite my best efforts to resist. It sounds corny, but there’s something magical there. Some part of the mind wants to learn, even when other parts want to do anything but.

Now I’m a high school special education teacher. Every day, I watch tired, distracted students study Homer’s “Odyssey,” the principles of trigonometry, the French Revolution. Some of these students are not simply battling their teenaged willfulness and the rush of hormones in their bodies; they’re struggling with autism, dyslexia, or attention deficit disorder. Yet for the most part, they learn. Even the students who forget or refuse to do the work will surprise me with an insightful comment about Napoleon’s fall from power, or a comparison between Odysseus and Harry Potter. (more…)

• The first program of the city’s Young Men’s Initiative focuses on literacy for low-level readers. (NY1)
• To boost diversity at the city’s specialized high schools, alumni are tutoring prospective students. (Times)
• Teachers at a school for new immigrants let students guide their own learning. (GothamSchools)
• The City Council held a tense hearing on school aide layoffs. (GS, Times, Daily News, Post, WSJ, NY1)
• The city briefly put numbers up online that showed school budgets quadrupling this year. (Daily News)
• In honor of National Coming Out Day, advocates asked the DOE to add LGBT history to schools. (NY1)
• Outside of New York City, about 3 percent of teachers in the state were laid off last year. (AP)
• For the first time since 2002, a bill to overhaul federal education law reached Congress. (Times)
• After a civil rights probe, Los Angeles is changing how some students are taught. (L.A. Times, WSJ)

• Off from school yesterday, some city students spent day at the Occupy Wall Street protest. (City Room)
• An interactive map showing what has students and teachers in the streets around the world. (Hechinger)
• A teacher says his colleagues should thank the UFT for weathering recession and reform. (DOENuts)
• The founder of a forthcoming charter school explains her authorization process. (Charter Notebook)
• Looking deeper at charter middle schools’ subscores on the city’s progress reports. (Edwize)
• An ATR teacher says everyone at her first-week’s school is nice but not using her effectively. (NYC ATR)
• Sen. Tom Harkin’s proposed NCLB rewrite eliminates AYP and renews Race to the Top. (Politics K-12)
• Is Harkin promoting local school authority on one issue when he wouldn’t on another? (Eduwonk)
• Joe Williams, DFER’s executive director, married a DOE official in charge of principal recruitment. (Times)
• Students from Mark Twain Intermediate School are helping save endangered salamanders. (Times)
• The principal of a top-notch D.C. school is joining the New Schools Venture Fund. (D.C. Schools Insider)
• A Teach for America survivor offers advice for corps members on the verge of quitting. (Gary Rubinstein)
• A N.J. charter school given federal funds hasn’t actually gotten state approval to open. (Star-Ledger)

Finance Committee Chair Domenic Recchia, Jr. was among Dennis Walcott's (left) vocal questioner today.

On the first day back to work since 672 school aides were laid off, City Council members unloaded criticism on Chancellor Dennis Walcott for what they said was an intentional failure to notify them about the layoffs.

In several tense exchanges with Walcott, Finance Committee Chair Domenic Recchia, Jr. repeatedly claimed that council members were kept in the dark about the layoffs. If they’d known the layoffs were possible, Recchia said the Council would have acted to stop them, just as it did for teachers this summer.

At one point, Recchia ordered a staff member to hand deliver a budget document to Walcott, seated 30 feet away at the testimonial desk, and asked him to read it.

“Nowhere in the executive budget did you say you were going to lay off school aides,” Recchia said. “We would have done something about it and you didn’t tell us.”

But in his testimony and in subsequent exchanges, Walcott pointed out that Recchia and his colleagues in the Council actually signed off on a budget agreement that “made clear” that an additional 1,000 non-uniform and non-pedagogical employees could lose their jobs.

Echoing previous statements, the Chancellor said the layoffs did not show up specifically in the executive budget because they were cuts made by principals in July to reduce individual school budgets by an average of 2.4 percent. (more…)

Students Marek Smolenski and Alexis Lamb and iSchool teacher Christina Jenkins listen as they learn they have won IdeaPaint's whiteboard contest.

A school that prides itself on being at the cutting edge of innovation is bringing back a standby of the 20th-century classroom.

Students at the iSchool, the Manhattan high school that is a showpiece for the Department of Education’s Innovation Zone, learned today that they won a contest to have the school’s multipurpose room transformed into a giant whiteboard.

Within weeks, they’ll be able to use dry-erase markers to jot down ideas on the walls and tables of the fifth-floor “commons” — an open space that students and teachers use as a lounge, meeting space, study hall, and classroom.

“I’m actually speechless. I have no idea what to say here,” senior Marek Smolenski told Bob Munroe, the CEO of IdeaPaint, which typically outfits office space with surfaces meant to facilitate creative collaboration. The company picked two schools to make over from more than 30 applicants from across the country.

Christina Jenkins, an iSchool teacher who bought IdeaPaint for her classroom with donations last year, said the temporary nature of whiteboard writing encourages ideas to flow more readily. For students who might worry about making mistakes, “paper can be more intimidating,” she said, pointing to a wall in her room where students had jotted down ideas for their senior projects.

Smolenski said students already used the dry-erase tables for brainstorming sessions and peer essay editing in Jenkins’s design and creative thinking classes, which include cartography, comic book design, and disaster relief.

“It’s not ordinary paper,” said Alexis Lamb, one of the students who put together the school’s contest entry video, posted below. “Plus, kids just like writing on the tables, I think.” (more…)

Blendi Brahimaj, Wilis Hernandez and Reyson Rosario working together

On a recent day at High School of Language and Innovation earth science teacher Katie Walraven did very little.

Walraven’s choice to take a back seat to her students was strategic: She was letting her students, who are almost all recent immigrants, do most of the teaching.

Her approach reflects one answer to a tricky question: How to teach high school students grade-appropriate content — while at the same time teaching them English. It’s a question that teachers at newcomer high schools such as High School of Language and Innovation or International High School in Prospect Heights, the subject of “The New Kids,” a new book by Brooke Hauser, confront daily.

For help addressing the tension, High School of Language and Innovation’s founding principal, Julie Nariman, turned to Learning Cultures, a curriculum designed by New York University education professor Cynthia McCallister. The basic philosophy of Learning Cultures – which is used in a dozen other city schools – is that students learn best through social situations. “The social interaction is what allows the writing to happen, the reading to happen, the learning to happen,” McCallister said.

While Learning Cultures is not specifically designed for ELL populations, Nariman says it is the perfect fit for them because it allows students to pool their knowledge of English and content to help each other. Nariman is well-versed in the needs of ELL students, having previously been assistant principal of English as a Second Language at Long Island City High School, and having taught English as a Second Language in Korea.

“This really spoke to me,” she said about Learning Cultures. “It’s a system of teaching students to work interdependently in the classroom and to use independent work time effectively. The content is still all there but in order to get to that content we are first working on social practices.”  (more…)