And yet, in the other sense of the phrase, a lot that might have gone down didn’t. In the wake of the departure, in November 2010, of Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, a new administration seemed to hint at a new way of doing business: more open, more inclusive, less antagonistic. But Bloomberg, who had privately infuriated Klein by failing to push as hard as the chancellor wanted, kept up much of his rhetorical heat. The city also didn’t get a teacher evaluation deal, and that means the state will freeze turnaround funds that depended on an agreement.

The freeze means that close-and-reopen remains a ruling strategy. And there are still nearly two dozen schools the city deems too bad to redeem. Same as it ever was.

Here’s our annual review, in detail.

January

The year opened with the city schools in the black — Cathie Black, the former publishing executive whom Mayor Bloomberg had appointed to replace Joel Klein as chancellor in November. She started her tenure with a five-borough tour of successful schools, where she didn’t say much, and by the end of her first day, some pundits were already predicting a quick resignation. Midway through the month — in which she visited a single school slated for closure and was booed during her first public appearance — she had already made the first of several verbal off-color comments, suggesting that parents concerned about school crowding should try birth control.

As Black’s fumbles monopolized attention, policy battles that would dominate new post-Klein world took shape. At first, it seemed that not much would change, even with Klein gone to Newscorp. The teachers union lost a lawsuit designed to block the city from releasing test score-based teacher evaluations drawn up in the Klein days. Under pressure of a union appeal, the city defended its right to release the evaluations, and Bloomberg stepped up the pressure by assaulting “last in, first out” seniority layoff rules. New Gov. Andrew Cuomo made his once-mysterious education position more clear by creating a competitive grant program to reward districts with strong test scores. And the city tightened the screws on low-performing charter schools, ordering one closed and searching for new management for another.

But there were a few glimmers that the new players, led by Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky, might take a slightly different approach to running the city schools. Defending their decisions to close certain schools at public hearings, department officials responded to questions for the first time. The new interactivity didn’t make hearings any less contentious, though. And when Black stepped into the ring and attended a hearing, she managed to find one that drew no parents.

The closure votes were scheduled for marathon Panel for Educational Policy meetings, amid reports that schools risking closure had needier students and had been long projected to fail.

Other highlights: A “snaux day” gave way to a full-fledged snow day that caused Regents exams to be canceled. The DOE’s most senior educator resigned, leading to changes (again) in the way the department provided support to schools. But the show — in January’s case, a controversial student play that cast Klein as a villain — went on, and we were in the audience.

February

The month started with a sucker punch: Gov. Cuomo proposed rolling back city schools’ funding level by four years. Even as the city discovered extra pennies, Bloomberg used the cuts to reinforce his threat for thousands of teacher layoffs before releasing a list of cuts by school and proposing rules to replace seniority-based layoffs. Some young teachers backed the city’s proposal, and others stood behind seniority rights.

Thirteen duly live-blogged hours of PEP meetings about school closures followed, highlighted by 14 lessons learned, including a poetic case of people bridging the charter school/closed school divide via an anti-racism rap. One school approved for closure continued to fight for a lifeline, while another school was taken off the chopping block after a vigorous defense from the public advocate and others.

Teachers weighed in on new evaluations, parents weighed in on changes to federal education law, and principals weighed in on their own happiness — which was down since 2010. And that was before the city launched a bid to take back principals’ “rainy-day” funds.

Chancellor Black’s approval rating was 21 percent — about the same another grim new statistic: the college-readiness rate among city students.

March

With an end-of-the-month state budget deadline, talk was all layoffs, all the time. We outlined how Mayor Bloomberg’s layoffs plans would affect schools, even as some questioned whether he was exaggerating the situation. This raised a perennial question: Do city principals have a financial incentive to remove senior teachers from individual schools? The answer was a qualified yes.

Bloomberg, meanwhile, was once again pushing against “last in, first out.” He got backing from the State Senate and from Department of Education employees who had been asked, illegally, to lobby for policy changes. The problem, among others, was what would determine who got laid off, if not seniority. Gov. Cuomo said he’d rather wait for new teacher evaluations before changing the law to let layoffs depend on the scores.

Ultimately, a state budget deal kept large cuts and seniority layoff rules in place. So we refreshed our guide to layoffs from 2010, when layoffs were last threatened, and protesters hit the State Capital. As the city readied for big budget cuts, principals were gearing up for a spending spree — not their typical approach.

Meanwhile, some of Bloomberg and Klein’s key policy innovations got a second look. A study showed that a $75 million merit pay experiment didn’t boost student achievement, and months after the city’s “rubber rooms” were closed, two-thirds of former occupants had returned to the classroom. When we revealed that some cafeteria offerings fell short of the city’s nutrition rules, the DOE pulled nutrition facts off of its website.

April

A trickle of high-level departures from the Department of Education, with two top deputies leaving in the first week of the month, turned into a flood April 7. That’s when Mayor Bloomberg stunned the city — not the least our reporters, who were all at a conference in New Orleans — by announcing Cathie Black’s resignation. Her approval rating had been stuck at 17 percent. The same day, in another surprise and seemingly hastily planned announcement, State Education Commissioner David Steiner said he would leave at the end of June.

Bloomberg’s pick for Black’s successor, longtime deputy mayor Dennis Walcott, hit the ground running. He did yoga at P.S. 261, made waffles at P.S. 10, and checked in at his alma mater, Francis Lewis High School — all before Steiner awarded him a waiver to let him start his job. Walcott promised to reduce principals’ paperwork and advocated for civility in an often polarized climate. But Bloomberg told principals that nothing much would change, in a missive that didn’t mention Black.

But even as leadership changed, much stayed the same: The city put a $300 million price tag on avoiding layoffs and geared up for impeding school closures by creating a network to support phaseout schools.

May

With Cathie Black a distant memory, the city got back to business as usual — this year, the business of budget cuts, teacher evaluations, and school improvement strategies.

Mayor Bloomberg delayed his budget reveal by a day when President Obama came to town, but then said he would cut 6,100 teaching positions — just as he promised six months earlier. Gov. Cuomo pushed through a policy change to let test scores play a bigger role in new teacher evaluations, over the objections of researchers. And the city selected 22 schools to undergo federally funded overhauls, even though the union didn’t sign on to its preferred strategy, which would have required teachers to be fired.

The UFT was in no mood to negotiate. Instead, it took the city to court — twice: once to appeal the ruling allowing teachers’ ratings to be made public and again when it sued to stop 22 school closures in a repeat attempt of its successful 2010 lawsuit.

We reported that a Bronx charter school had been testing students for entry, in violation of state law, and highlighted a DOE employee who thinks more students should drop out. We also chronicled the start-and-stop-and-restart saga of badly botched elections for parent councils.

The spring weather brought people to the streets. Thousands protested the mayor’s budget cuts, charter school parents rallied against the NAACP’s involvement in the school closure lawsuit, and students at one high school that wasn’t picked to get extra funds marched for more support. One education event united the city in opposition: the state’s cost-cutting move to eliminate January Regents exams.

June

The month opened with the City Council pitching alternatives to layoffs and closed with a late-night deal to avert them. In between, the city’s budget watchdog said only 2,600 layoffs were needed, churches prayed for relief, negotiations grew contentious, and budget-less principals grew anxious about the future. Ultimately, schools had to cut costs by an average of about 2.5 percent, and the council also cut teachers’ discretionary funds.

Also updated: The city’s graduation rate and the number of students sent to summer school, which were both higher, and the first day of school, which was delayed to make way for Common Core curriculum training. Not open to revision, apparently, was the clerical error that cost a GED program its funding.

The UFT and NAACP’s school closure lawsuit chugged through the courts, but the real action was on the streets as a largely African American group of protesters marched in front of the NAACP’s headquarters, prompting an apparently desperate Hazel Dukes to make remarks that raised eyebrows .

Charter school advocates began searching for a successor to Mayor Bloomberg. But the big political story — Assemblyman Anthony Weiner’s Twitter account — had nothing to do with schools. Unlike Weiner, we closed the month with a tour of graduation ceremonies, where we caught up with top students on the brink of exciting futures.

July

In July, the city rushed to meet deadlines — and also planned ahead. After the state pressured the city to decide how to revamp schools, the city and union hammered out a deal on teacher evaluations that paved the way for improvement work at 33 struggling schools. And when a judge allowed closures and co-locations to go forward, the DOE threw a happy hour that afternoon and started construction within days.

Other efforts had longer-term consequences. We reported about possible unintended consequences of a looming overhaul of public daycare programs and noted when a public school parent, Tom Allon, waded into the 2013 mayoral race. The union said it wanted to defer further changes to teacher evaluations — especially after Mayor Bloomberg ratcheted up his criticism of tenure rights — and teachers had their tenure decisions pushed off in huge numbers.

Even during summer break, we found lots of action inside schools, from principals leading summer gym classes and filing budget appeals to teachers at a closing school crafting new curriculum materials to bedbugs swarming. The DOE cleaned house, replacing the head of the office that supervised botched parent elections, and so did a charter school where teachers had tried to unionize. Another charter school, which we had reported was skimming applicants, was placed on probation.

And two scandals that took place far from Tweed Courthouse augured consequences for New York City. In Atlanta, news broke of a massive cheating scandal, and in London, former chancellor Joel Klein was pulled from a News Corporation education project to head its internal response to its phone-tapping scandal.

August

August can sometimes be a slow time in the education world. But not this year — thanks to late-breaking test scores (which we analyzed), a renewed layoffs threat for school aides, and Matt Damon’s blue eyes and opinions about school reform (he stood with those who decry market-based ideas). Principals stayed busy appealing their slim budgets; funders pitched in to save January Regents exams; and teachers made a case for tenure even as Mayor Bloomberg declared it unnecessary. City Council members lobbied for delays to early childhood changes, faster toxin cleanup, and better bedbug battling.

We kept ourselves active, too, moderating a panel of education policy heavyweights and unpacking “Class Warfare” for our readers. We also visited charter schools on their first day of classes, an enrollment office stuffed with families seeking schools, and Tweed Courthouse in the aftermath of an earthquake (but before a hurricane).

Smaller seismic shifts were felt in the number of teachers given low ratings, the city’s strategies for helping young minority men, and in the state’s approach to combating cheating. But a fresh review of test security practices would not address ongoing allegations of improprieties in city high schools.

September

As principals tore through their start-of-school checklists, teachers practiced working with new curriculum standards and evaluation guidelines. Union officials started their school year at a formerly toxic school; we launched ours by visiting more than a dozen schools in five boroughs, with Chancellor Walcott and on our own; and the city started the year under the specter of 9/11.

Even as schools opened, city officials laid the groundwork to close some of them. They vowed to make new schools part of a middle school reform plan and redirected federal funds to help with long-planned closures. And after elementary and middle school progress reports came out using freshly tweaked formula, they put 20 schools on existential notice.

Talks to avert school aide layoffs looked hopeful but — despite protests that tugged at the heartstrings and the involvement of the City Council — ultimately failed.

We reviewed experiments in teacher training, intensive tutoring, and school “transformation” and met families looking for high schools, high schools looking for students, and graduates of a high school for new immigrants. State officials concluded their review of test security procedures by cracking down on cheating opportunities — though perhaps not as thoroughly as possible — and the city fire department cracked down on student art.

October

The same day that hundreds of school aides were laid off, the city promised more budget cuts. Chancellor Walcott urged schools to seek private funds to make up some gaps, while a leading advocate for funding equity said he would focus on persuasion after a lawsuit fell short.

Schools at risk of closure made the case, over and over and over, that they could have done better with more funding. After high school progress reports came out, complete with college readiness scores, the list of schools potentially on the chopping block swelled in size.

As the Occupy Wall Street protest movement emerged, tense meetings took place among position-less teachers, in Brownstone Brooklyn, and at an event about new curriculum standards that Occupy-aligned protesters derailed.

The union didn’t hold rallies about issues with the city’s special education data system and teacher evaluation rollout, but it protested them nonetheless. Despite difficulties implementing last year’s Race to the Top promises, the state applied for more federal funds — in part by promising new kindergarten testing. The city made promises of its own, for more bilingual programs and new initiatives to involve parents, including a training program used elsewhere.

GothamSchools was on a boat, in an innovative class for English language learners, and on top of the rumors that Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch could run for mayor.

November

In November, state officials charged that the city’s school reform policies had doomed many students to failing schools. Schools at risk of closure continued to wage protests against their “failing” designation, especially after the city added 27 more schools to the list. High school students got in on the action, and so did charter school parents, at a school where administrators had formerly rebuffed union involvement.

Other rallies took aim at charter school co-locations and state budget cuts. Despite rumors, Occupy Wall Street protests didn’t shut schools and a brief-but-furious bus strike threat turned out to be exaggerated. Less overblown, at least from one teacher’s perspective: the impact of school aide layoffs.

After we broke the story of a Queens high school struggling with massive scheduling snafus, we followed the saga to a PEP meeting, Walcott’s personal life, and promises of change.

Data dumps revealed the toll of budget cuts, the effect of anti-truancy efforts, and for the first time ever, the frequency of suspensions. The state lost a testing chief and got a test security investigator — who might do well to talk to some of the students we consulted on what cheating looked like at their school.

We sought students’ views on what makes good teachers great, peeked at teachers’ classroom wishlists, and launched a publishing partnership with El Diario to put out an all-points bulletin on the DOE’s AWOL “chief parent.” Also missing: city principals’ voices on a statewide teacher evaluation petition. Walcott played hardball on evaluation negotiations, which far outlasted his first marathon.

December

The year’s final month brought unseasonably warm weather, mixed news about city students’ performance on a national exam, parent insurgency at a troubled charter school, and the first co-location showdown of the school year.

In an annual occurrence, the city announced plans to close or shrink 25 low-performing schools — including one that was surprised by the news. We documented the range of reactions from principals (resistance, relief), teachers (resolve), and students and parents (confusion, anger). Our predictions for 2012: Many of the schools will start following the phaseout trajectory we charted at Christopher Columbus High School, and we’ll see more anti-closure protests like the one at Washington Irving High School.

Washington Irving was one of two schools undergoing federally funded overhauls to land on the closure list. But as the year wound down, that initiative came spectacularly off the rails as city and union negotiations over new teacher evaluations, required to keep the funding flowing, reached an impasse.

Evaluations are sure to stay important in 2012, as schools across the state are supposed to be using new ones by June 30. Also on the agenda for the new year: longer state tests, rescuing early childhood funding, a teacher retention report fueled by city teachers’ survey answers, and, presumably, efforts to boost Chancellor Walcott’s diminishing popularity numbers. Almost anything — except kindergarten tests, apparently, and probably not Mayor Bloomberg’s ideal scenario of doubled-in-size classes, either — is possible.

State Education Commisioner John King this week issued a strict ultimatum to New York and nine other districts: Agree on new teacher evaluations in a subset of low-performing schools by Dec. 31 or lose special federal funds for those schools. The city is receiving about $60 million in the funds, called School Improvement Grants, for 33 schools.

In July, the city and union agreed to roll out new evaluations in the schools, but they still had some details to finalize. They were locked in negotiations until today but threw in the towel this morning, citing irreconcilable ideological differences, particularly around due process protections for teachers who receive low ratings.

The impasse has potentially far-ranging consequences. The first is that the 33 struggling schools will stop receiving funds midyear, leaving them in the lurch to pay for programs, personnel, and nonprofit partners that are already in place.

“I am left with no choice but to suspend SIG funding” to New York City, King said in a statement this afternoon, hours after city officials essentially petitioned him to consider awarding the funds despite the impasse.

The high-profile breakdown in negotiations also bodes ill for another deadline, June 30, by which new teacher evaluations are supposed to be in place for all schools, in accordance with a state law passed in 2010 to help the state win Race to the Top funds.

The city has also canceled negotiations with the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators over new evaluations for principals. Today would have been the third day for those talks, according to CSA President Ernest Logan, who urged the department to return to the table.

That seems unlikely, according to a letter Chancellor Dennis Walcott sent King this morning explaining the impasse and suggesting that the city and state try to move forward on creating a new evaluation system without the union’s approval.

“This disagreement — regarding both policy and principles — leads me to conclude that we will not be able to come to an agreement on a fair and progressive teacher evaluation system,” Walcott wrote.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew union negotiators alerted him around 11 a.m. that two deputy chancellors had declared negotiations over and exited the room. Shortly afterwards, Mulgrew said, he received a copy of Walcott’s letter to King.

“I got the sense that the department never really wanted to get this done to begin with,” Mulgrew told GothamSchools.

The main sticking points appeared to be whether outside arbitrators would hear appeals of teachers who receive low ratings and, more broadly, whether the new evaluations are meant to usher weak teachers out of the system or identify struggling teachers so they can be helped to get better.

“We are hoping that we can have a system that will help teachers improve, because that’s the spirit of the legislation,” Mulgrew told GothamSchools yesterday. “The DOE, I don’t think they look at it the same way we do.”

In his letter to King, Walcott said the union was trying “to protect the very worst performing teachers” by insisting on outside review for teachers who received either an “ineffective” or “developing” rating under the new system. He also said the union has also thrown up roadblocks to dismissal proceedings for teachers the city is trying to fire, a separate issue from the new evaluations.

“Almost every step of the way, the UFT has insisted on conditions that I believe would undercut real accountability,” Walcott said in the letter.

But union officials said they had asked only for arbitrators to hear the cases of teachers who received the lowest rating and could lose their jobs as a result. Such a protection would guard against capricious and arbitrary low ratings by principals, they said.

Mulgrew said the city had not accepted the union’s suggestion that a third-party negotiator step in on sticking points.

In his letter, Walcott suggested to King that a solution might be found without the union’s consent.

“The city stands ready to continue discussions on this matter directly with the state, and I hope that you will consider the seriousness with which we are approaching this matter as a sign of our commitment to creating a meaningful teacher evaluation system for our schools,” he said.

City officials said they were discussing the possibility of recouping some expenditures or directing different funds to pay for others at the schools.

Walcott’s complete letter to King is below:

And here’s Mulgrew’s explanation of the impasse:

Discussions with the New York City Department of Education have reached an impasse.

Despite numerous negotiating sessions, we have been unable to reach agreement on key points.  Because the DOE refused to bargain in a meaningful way, we have offered to engage in binding arbitration over the remaining issues, leaving it up to an impartial third party to resolve these differences. (letter attached)

The DOE has refused our offer.

The UFT is seeking an agreement that meets the spirit of the teacher evaluation legislation in two important ways:

1)      The agreement must focus on creating a process to help teachers improve their performance by providing them with feedback on the specific classroom issues that need to be addressed, recommended strategies to address these issues and specific assistance from supervisors and other school personnel in implementing the recommended strategies.

2)      for teachers rated ineffective — an impartial outside review by a qualified and mutually-agreed-upon third party.

Teachers look forward to the opportunity to improve their practice.  If the DOE’s major focus is on penalizing its employees for their perceived shortcomings, rather than to devise a process that will help all teachers improve, it is doing a disservice to the schools and the children they serve.

In addition, the DOE’s position in these talks has been that principals’ judgment is always right and that they should be able to wield unfettered power over their employees.  Yet its own investigative arm has documented an instance of a principal urging her deputies to target teachers for dismissal even without observing their work (Fordham HS of the Arts);  another teacher had to go to court to get an “unsatisfactory” rating overturned after an independent investigator found that he and other teachers had been harassed by the principal (Bronx Science); and repeated allegations that teachers have been pressured by administrators to pass students who had not mastered course material or who barely attended classes (Herbert Lehman, A. Phillip Randolph).

It staggers the imagination to think that, given these facts, the DOE can continue to insist that no principal’s judgment can be questioned, and that no checks or balances are needed on their powers to destroy a teacher’s career.

And here’s what State Commissioner John King said this afternoon:

Sadly, the adults in charge of the City’s schools have let the students down.  SIG schools need to be fixed, and the best way to make that happen is to make sure there’s a quality teacher in front of every classroom and a quality principal at the head of every school.

A rigorous, transparent evaluation system grounded in evidence of effective practice and student learning is critical to providing quality professional development, identifying models of excellence, and raising student achievement.  Fair, sound teacher and principal evaluations are good for educators and vital for students.

The failure to reach agreements on evaluations leaves thousands of students mired in the same educational morass.  Until the grown-ups in charge start acting that way, it won’t be a very happy New Year for the students at the SIG schools in the City.

This is beyond disappointing.  The City and the unions have known about this deadline for many months, but there’s no evidence of any real progress. The New York City Department of Education must immediately cease obligating SIG funds in its Transformation and Restart model schools.  I am left with no choice but to suspend SIG funding for Transformation and Restart model schools in the City.

In a move that the state teachers union called “an arbitrary exercise of brinksmanship,” State Education Commissioner John King issued the threat today to New York City and nine other school districts that are receiving School Improvement Grants to overhaul their lowest-performing schools.

King said all but two had not met the requirements to continue receiving the funds — most notably, the requirement to hammer out agreements on new teacher evaluation systems. Those agreements are supposed to be in place by Dec. 31.

In July, city and UFT officials reached an agreement to roll out new teacher evaluations in 33 of the schools, known as “persistently low-achieving” schools. That agreement came a week after the state turned up the pressure on the city and just in time for the schools to receive nearly $60 million in federal funds.

But city officials said today that the agreement was only a “framework” that must be formalized by the Dec. 31 deadline.

If that doesn’t happen, a funding freeze would not only prevent new reforms from being put in place but also could threaten changes that are already underway. Yonkers is warning that SIG-funded teaching positions at some of its schools would effectively be terminated. Some New York City schools have “master teachers” whose salaries are paid out of the federal grant money.

City and union officials say they remain locked in negotiations — which are sure to be tense after a semester when relations between the groups grew strained over the new evaluation system’s rollout.

The stakes are also higher now because a deadline for all city schools to adopt new teacher evaluations is just six months away. King’s ultimatum today applies only to the 33 schools already being overhauled and 11 additional schools that the city must revamp according to federal guidelines. But a similar strategy in June could put hundreds of millions of Race to the Top dollars in jeopardy if new teacher evaluations are still not finalized.

Last month, Chancellor Dennis Walcott said the city would not strike an evaluation deal just to keep federal funds flowing. Today, he said city officials were in talks with the union but left the door open to stalemate.

“For months, we have been in engaged in discussions with the UFT around implementing a teacher evaluation model in the SIG schools,” Walcott said in a statement. “We continue to engage in discussions with the UFT, and all parties are cognizant of the deadline.”

UFT President Michael Mulgrew sounded a similar note in a statement today.

“We have been meeting with the DOE in an attempt to resolve these issues,” he said. “We have further meetings scheduled this week.”

The state teachers union, NYSUT, said a funding freeze would disproportionately affect schools attended by poor students. Instead of cutting off funding to struggling schools, the union said King should ask federal authorities for more time. More than a dozen states have already gotten extensions, according to NYSUT.

But King signaled that he planned to stick to the deadline, no matter the consequences.

“These funds are targeted to help troubled schools. The last thing the students need is to lose resources because the adults who run those schools won’t fulfill their responsibilities,” he said in a statement. ”The clock is ticking. When the ball drops at midnight on New Year’s Eve, the money drops off the table, and it will be difficult to get it back.”

The other districts at risk of losing federal funds are Buffalo, Yonkers, Albany, Schenectady, Roosevelt, Poughkeepsie and Greenburgh 11. Rochester and Syracuse have turned in materials for the state to review, according to SED. The Journal-News reports that Poughkeepsie is on track to meet the Jan. 1 deadline but that Yonkers cannot and would seek legal recourse if the funding freeze takes place.

Thanks to your support, the scrappy site we started in 2008 is now an institution that thousands of New Yorkers depend on for smart, trustworthy information. We want to keep up the good work in 2012, and also to get even stronger. As always, that will require help from our readers.

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Here’s a brief review some of what we were able to do in 2011:

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Happy holidays, and here’s to an even more informed 2012!

While reading up earlier this week on Washington Irving High School before attending a protest against its planned closure, I came across a news report that could have been ripped from today’s headlines: Students risked not graduating because a review found that they had been given credit even though they had failed required courses.

From the New York Times’ report about the scandal:

O’Neill Ellis, 17, learned Tuesday that he would not receive a diploma. He had failed an economics class, but [the principal] allowed him to make up the credits by reading 15 chapters of an economic textbook and writing an 11-page report. When Mr. Ellis heard that [the principal] had been removed, he suspected his diploma would be revoked, he said in an interview last night.

“I understand we might have messed up,” he said. “But I don’t see why they should have taken back our diplomas. It’s not like I did a little two-page project. It took 11 pages, it required thinking.” …

An English teacher, Linda Winkler, described a case involving a student in her class. She said the principal gave a passing grade to a student who had been absent from her class at least 50 times since February.

She said the student, whom she did not identify, did little homework and refused to take the final exam. She said she gave the student a 45, out of 100, which is a failing grade. She later found out, she said, that the principal had assigned the student an independent project that involved writing a book report on the novel “To Sir With Love.” The principal gave the student a 65 in the class. Ms. Winkler said this angered her because she had assigned four book reports to students during the term.

“I think it’s wrong to reward a student in that position,” she said. “In the past few years it has reached the point where the standards are so low that if things are barely legible, they are passable.”

In the comments, leave your guess for what year this story took place. Read the full report for the answer and more details about the episode, which predated recent allegations about improper use of “credit recovery,” including at Washington Irving.

Before quizzing his middle school students on the features of the Neolithic Revolution, C. Ross Flatt had them play handmade board games about it. Acting as leaders of a budding civilization, the students managed a flash-card supply of food, settlements and other key resources, and built an army to protect their territory — marked on a laminated map — from invaders.

Then, rather than ask them what struggles they think Neolithic societies faced, Flatt had them describe the scenarios that tripped them up during the game.

“Did you ever get in trouble during the play of game and realize you didn’t have a stable food supply?” he asked. One student said he experienced a drought, while another said a cold snap not only depleted her resources but left her open to raids from other starving players.

For Flatt, one of a dozen teachers at Quest to Learn, a Chelsea middle school, these game-centered classroom exchanges are routine. But they are also the result of behind-the-scenes tinkering from a fleet of non-teaching, in-house curriculum specialists.

I visited Quest to Learn, which is in its third year of operation, after touring its sister school, ChicagoQuest, during a conference about digital learning earlier this fall. I wanted to see how the model developed by the Institute of Play, a nonprofit that works on game research and development, looked here in New York City.

What I saw was that Quest to Learn is flooded with specialists, whom the school calls learning strategists and game designers, at a time when one trend in school management is to devote as much funding as possible to teaching salaries, even if it means scaling back on support staff. The specialists are helping the school pioneer a multi-tiered curriculum development approach that tailors technology and hands-on, multi-player games to individual classroom teachers.

The approach has yielded mixed results so far. Last year, the school got a B on its first-ever city progress report. But it is also providing a rare alternative for middle school students who learn best when they are learning independently and doing hands-on projects, according to Arana Shapiro, the school’s co-director.

“We don’t think the test scores are the be all and end all of what’s happening at the school,” she said. “We measure things like systems thinking, digital media tool use, social and emotional learning, collaborative skills, teamwork.”

In place of traditional class subjects like pre-algebra or English, Quest to Learn classes have names like “Being, Space and Place,” and “Sports of the Mind.” Assignments are called “quests,” and they add up to a completed “mission” at the end of each 10-week-long trimester.

In Lencey Nuñez’s eighth-grade science class, “The Way Things Work,” on a recent morning, students were working in small teams to map the topography of various cities using the computer game SimCity.

Eliza Spang, a learning strategist, said the project is building off a trimester-long unit on geology that began early this fall, when students played a scavenger hunt game on 18th Street outside the school, and later another board game.

But planning for the unit began in the late summer, when Spang met with Nuñez and Shula Ponet, a game designer, to outline the fall trimester’s “mission”—in other words, the final project that the classrooms lessons and assignments would build up to. From there they worked backwards to imagine what lessons to teach and how to integrate gaming into them. They met weekly, first to design the games and then to play them with each other and with eighth-grade students.

“They give us feedback on what worked, what didn’t work, what we’d change,” she said. “We have teacher feedback and student voice to create a game that is engaging to students. Teachers are super creative, but game designers bring a different view of the world.”

The Independent Budget Office yesterday said that rising costs for contracts, employee benefits, and charter school payments appear poised to cut into the funds that the Department of Education is free to allocate to schools. The IBO analyzed this year’s budget and Mayor Bloomberg’s November financial plan and determined that spending for classroom instruction and school administration could drop by $300 million in 2013, a 3.3 percent decrease.

That’s because funds would likely have to be redirected to other areas of the DOE where costs are soaring, according to the report: pre-kindergarten special education contracts with private schools are set to increase by 10 percent, to $100 million; fringe benefits for school employees are expected to increase 2.5 percent, to $68 million; and payments to charter schools, which are enrolling more students each year, will go up 5.6 percent to $46 million.

City officials disputed the IBO’s projections of next year’s spending as premature.

“It’s impossible to say what we’re spending next year because we haven’t put out a budget, for schools or any other agency yet,” said City Hall spokesman Marc LaVorgna. A preliminary budget for the 2013 fiscal year is expected in January or February.

The report’s drop in classroom spending did not appear in the DOE’s October cost-cutting plan, in which the DOE proposed to lop off about 6 percent from its projected 2013 budget. Unlike last year’s plan, which focused on eliminating teacher positions, cuts from this year’s plan focused on reducing contract costs and securing more aid from the state and federal governments.

In October, Bloomberg instructed all city agencies, including the DOE, to prepare for a 6 percent cut in the fiscal year that begins in July. Unlike last year’s cost-cutting plan, which focused on eliminating teacher positions, the DOE’s plan this year focused on reducing contract costs and securing more aid from the state and federal governments.

Cuts in next year’s budget would mean a fourth consecutive year that principals have less money to spend on their schools. This summer, principals said a 2.7 percent reduction meant their schools were stripped to the bone. As a result, class sizes increased, school supplies dwindled,  more principals filed for appeals, and some came up with other creative ways to save money.

“If they would give me another $10,000, I tell you, I could make some stuff happen here,” Diahann Malcolm, a principal at High School of Law Enforcement and Public Safety, told GothamSchools this summer. Malcolm was so restricted by her budget that she resorted to teaching summer school physical education classes for students who failed during the school year.

Citywide, the IBO report paints a slightly better economic picture than what Bloomberg projected in November. Job growth, fueled in part by more jobs in the private and higher education sectors, and tax revenue would be better than expected, the report estimated, and as a result, the budget gap would be about $800 million less than Mayor Bloomberg estimated for 2013 and $1.7 billion less for 2014.

Forecasting the economy is an inexact science. Two other budget monitoring agencies – the state and city comptrollers – have already projected that the deficit is actually wider than what Bloomberg estimated.

A number of factors could still swing education funding one way or the other. A proposal to reform the state aid formula would distribute more money to lower income districts, which would could bring in significantly more money to New York City.

And economic conditions are still shaky.  The IBO warned in its report of uncertainties surrounding the European debt crisis and the political stalemate in Washington that would affect how federal education funding. Given these factors, the report said, “it would not be hard to be thrown off course.”

2012 Department of Education Programs to Eliminate the Gap

Lisa Fuentes, principal of Christopher Columbus High School in the East Bronx, at work in her first floor office.

“How many of you plan to go to tutoring?” Lisa Fuentes asked the crowd of Christopher Columbus High School seniors trickling into the first floor auditorium on a recent morning.

As she surveyed the thin show of hands, her voice shook. “Maybe 10? So I put thousands of dollars aside so you can have tutoring, and a handful of you are attending?”

“If you don’t start taking this seriously, this is going to be the worst graduating class of the entire history of Columbus,” she said.

In her nine years as Columbus’s principal, Fuentes has had countless, similarly tough conversations with her senior classes to remind them about uncompleted college applications, looming Regents exams, and missing course credits.

But she said she feels even more urgency this year, because she knows she is running out of time to reach the many students who are failing courses, missing credits, and chronically late to school.

That’s because this year’s crop of seniors is the third-to-last that will ever graduate from Columbus. The school is in the process of being closed because of its low performance, despite valiant efforts to fend off the city’s decision that included hearings, lawsuits, and two attempts at charter school conversion. This year, no new ninth-graders enrolled, and Columbus is scheduled to graduate its last students in 2014. It is now just one of seven schools sharing space in the four-story stone building that once housed it alone.

Fuentes and other teachers said they are cautious not to let the impending closure overshadow instruction. But students say they miss the ninth-grade teachers who no longer have jobs at Columbus, and on several occasions teachers have stepped into Fuentes’s office to cry.

“A lot of my good good teachers have left,” she said. “I hate the term jump ship, because of Columbus … But they told me they didn’t want to wait until the end and risk going into the Absent Teacher Reserve pool,” where teachers who have lost their jobs rove from school to school as substitutes.

Several teachers say they passed up positions at other schools in order to stay at Columbus during its phaseout. Edward Barone, who teaches chemistry, is the most junior science teacher on the staff and expects to be cut loose at the end of the school year.

“I guess I’m concerned about it, but I’m doing the job the best I can,” he said. “I had an opportunity to move to a couple of the small schools in the building. But I felt like I was still good for Columbus. I hope I’m not making the wrong decision.”

Students, too, say they have mixed feelings about sticking by as Columbus turns into a shell of its former self.

Jesse Joseph, 16, a junior, said he came to Columbus to follow in the footsteps of two older brothers. But he said he has been dismayed to see several longtime teachers leave, including Steve Bonica, an earth science teacher who went to Bronxdale High School on the building’s third floor because Bronxdale would have a ninth grade and Columbus would not.

“The teachers I have classes with today say they might not be here, like Mr. Barone,” Joseph added.

He said he would transfer to another school if he could. But he said Columbus’s guidance counselors dissuaded him because the process of transferring would be time consuming, and he might only have the option to transfer to another large, low-performing school.

Zorana Vulevic, 16, has only been at Columbus for two and a half years but is taking extra classes this year so she can graduate in 2012. “This is not a real high school education,” she said. “Health and government had substitutes because the teachers were excessed.”

In its heyday, Columbus was able to offer regular and advanced-placement core subjects and electives in cooking, health, and French. By 2010, the school had lost those electives, along with Advanced Placement science courses, English, math, and language programs. This year, students who want to take advanced courses such as physics must “go upstairs” — shorthand for enrolling in classes offered by other schools at the Columbus campus.

That’s not an option for most students. Fuentes said many of Columbus’s 760 remaining students are not on track to graduate in four years, because of factors such learning disabilities, homelessness, or criminal backgrounds.

Two-third of Columbus students are eligible to receive free or reduced lunch, one quarter require special education services, and nearly 20 percent are considered English language learners.

Those proportions are sure to climb as the school continues to accept needy students, even as it grows closer to its final days.  This year, nearly 150 students were assigned to the school after classes started. Over-the-counter students are often some of the hardest to teach; many are English language learners or come from low-income families without permanent homes; some arrived in New York City just weeks before the start of school after long interruptions in their formal schooling.

Many principals balk at having their enrollments swollen by hard-to-educate students, but Fuentes said she was eager to accept them, both because they brought with them extra funding and also because she sees Columbus as a refuge for needy students.

“I’m a fool,” she said. “I take them all.”

Barone, who was one of the teachers involved in organizing the school community to defense Columbus, said the school’s closure would take away a vital opportunity for over-the-counter enrollees, particularly new immigrants, to find faculty responsive to their needs.

“We made so much progress with ways to approach this population of students. For them to be throwing that out with the bathwater is a real shame,” he said.

Fuentes said the metrics the city used when deciding that Columbus was too weak to survive didn’t capture many of the school’s successes.

“We believe in our kids and the progress they’re capable of making,” she said. “We really believed we could be successful, with the staff we had.”

Now, as the school and its staff dwindles, some remaining teachers are, like Barone, digging in.

“I feel like we work just as hard as we’ve always worked,” said Kanika Smith, who teaches AP English. “We tell the students, the school is closing, but you’re not. I’m also the coach of the cheer, step and dance team, and the senior adviser, so my goal is to keep the spirit going.”

With 10 years of experience at the school, Smith is one of its least senior teachers, and she expects to be excessed in June. But she is deferring the job hunt until then, she said, both out of a desire to defer the inevitable and out of dedication to her students.

“This building has been ‘closing’ for years,” she said. “I haven’t run away yet.”

But Vulevic, who is taking a leadership elective reserved for the school’s highest-performing students, said most students had set aside a fervor to fight for survival in favor of apathy.

“There’s not much we can do anymore,” she said. “It’s done.”

I also understand that while the majority of parents welcome sex education for their child, others are apprehensive. I would like to address the concerns and critiques that have surfaced since the mandate’s announcement.

One major concern is that teaching sex education in schools undermines values that parents teach at home. Critics of the mandate point to the “risk cards” used by the Reducing the Risk curriculum which compare the relative risks of sexual practices. They also cite homework assignments that require students to locate sexual health resources in their neighborhoods.

It’s important to keep in mind that nearly half the DOE-recommended curriculum lessons for high school students are devoted to abstinence, refusal techniques, delaying tactics, and ways to avoid high-risk situations. These teach our teens how to think critically about making healthy decisions. The risk cards and sexual health resource assignments arm them with medically accurate information that informs those decisions. It is well documented that having information about and access to contraception does not advance sexual activity. Knowing where to go for sexual health resources is a skill and safety measure that will protect them throughout their lives.

And early detection of potentially fatal sexually transmitted infections and HIV is critical for effective treatment and reducing transmission. A report just issued by New York University’s Silver School of Social Work on adolescent sexual health disparities for Bronx youth cites limited access to reproductive health services among adolescents as a key factor in their poor sexual health outcomes.

Keeping youth ignorant cannot be our strategy for keeping them out of trouble. And we would be naive to think that they aren’t learning about sex from other, less credible sources, such as TV, Facebook, YouTube, and cell phones. There is a need for objective, medically accurate information to be provided, and the opportunity for teens to reflect and problem-solve about that information. The logical question that follows is “who should provide it?” Is it the role and responsibility of families or schools?

I submit that both have a responsibility. When over 8,000 teenagers give birth to babies each year in New York City and statistics tell us that most teen mothers and their children have outcomes that limit their chances for successful, healthy lives, then schools, as a social institution, have an obligation to act. Does that undermine the responsibility of parents to act? Not at all. Parents have the largest responsibility, but when we see futures being derailed by risky sexual activity and premature parenting, then it is appropriate for multiple social institutions to respond.

Sexual development is an inevitable part of adolescent growth and human development. Children will grow into teens with new bodies that are capable of sexual behavior and reproduction. But teenage pregnancy is not inevitable. Reducing the number of teen pregnancies and youth with sexually transmitted illnesses and HIV is a responsibility of all of us.

Should parents be forced to have their children participate in comprehensive sex education if they believe it undermines their values? No. That’s why they can opt their child out. It is my opinion that we should not aspire to teach sex education without values. Its goal should be to teach young people that engaging in sexual behavior is complex and requires critical thinking about their health, values, identity, spiritual beliefs, culture, and goals for the future.

A public institution should share in the responsibility of educating its citizenry, particularly when there’s substantial evidence that their health and well-being are being compromised. The more than 8,000 babies born to NYC teen girls each year present serious public health and social welfare problems. And, as reported in the Silver School study, New York City’s HIV and STI rates among youth are significantly higher than the nation’s in four out of five boroughs.

Finally, I would like to address the fear that when we simultaneously teach abstinence and risk reduction, we are confusing youth through mixed messages. Does teaching teens about contraception imply that we have no faith in their ability to control their behavior and avoid sex?

I believe that we must respect the intelligence and integrity of our youth to make healthy decisions about sex when they have accurate information at their disposal. Moreover, it is our responsibility as adults and role models to communicate our values and our belief in their ability to make sound choices. If we trust that they are capable of doing so, why should we feel compelled to withhold critical information, an essential component to making any sound decision? They need not be ignorant to keep their innocence.

Linda Lausell Bryant is the Executive Director of Inwood House, a teen pregnancy prevention and teen parent support agency serving nearly 4,000 underserved youth annually, including at a number of city schools. Since 2009, she has been a mayoral appointee to the Panel for Educational Policy.

Fahari Academy Charter School and M.S. 246, Walt Whitman Middle School, held a potluck holiday dinner Wednesday in their shared gymnasium. The event, billed as a showcase for the schools’ working relationship, comes as the year’s fights over new co-locations start to heat up.

Fahari and Walt Whitman staff enjoying the food choices at a joint holiday potluck.

The walls were spruced up with red drapes, silver tinsel, and strings of lights, and long tables decorated with poinsettias and silver candelabras were set in a semi-circle to encourage mingling between the schools. A deejay kept a holiday playlist going as attendees selected from dozens of buffet options, heaping their plates with jerk chicken, baked ziti, and curried goat.

Catina Venning, Fahari’s executive director, and Bently Warrington, Walt Whitman’s principal, said they hope that the respectful relationship they have worked to establish will trickle down to staff and students. While this is the first shared holiday party, the schools have worked together on other initiatives, including a community cleanup last June.

The event was planned by a committee made up of two representatives from each school. The vision was a winter wonderland and the responsibilities were split between the schools: Walt Whitman took on most of the cooking and Fahari focused on the decorations.

Fahari opened in the M.S. 246 building in 2009. During the co-location’s first two years, as Fahari expanded from fifth to sixth grade, the schools experienced some kinks as the two leaders adjusted to each other’s styles and established protocols for divvying up common facilities. Fahari also experienced difficulties of its own, including a D on the city’s progress report and concerns about school culture that led to a successful unionization effort by its teachers.

“In the beginning, it was difficult, I’m not going to lie,” Venning said.

She said she had heard co-location horror stories and thought there had been “external parties driving a wedge” between the schools by spreading misinformation about Fahari’s impact.

Ultimately, she said, the principals made a “conscious, internal effort” to establish a positive relationship, adding that it helped that she understood Fahari was the newcomer.

“Coming in blazing like a maverick isn’t a good idea,” she said.

Warrington agreed that the politics of co-location were not as important as the community’s students that the schools were jointly serving.

“The bottom line is the kids,” he said. “It is irrelevant if it’s Walt Whitmam or Fahari, they have to attend school.”

Venning’s goal for this year is for the two principals to become so tight that they wear matching outfits by June. That collaboration is still up in the air.

A lease dispute between St. Michael’s Church and Sunset Park Early Childhood Development Center surfaced last summer, when the diocese landlord raised the rent to levels the day care center couldn’t afford.

That lease officially ended on Friday and the center was shut down until late January, when the 400-seat Head Start program will reopen in another church nearby, Our Lady of Perpetual Help. But the new facility needs renovations and does not have enough room for dozens of children with special needs.

Families of those children say they still don’t know where their children will attend school next month.

“That’s part of the issue,” said Maritza Arrastia, an Sunset Park organizer who is joining with parents and other community members today to rally in front of St. Michael’s. “It’s hard to get any information that’s clear.”

The DOE will start renovating St. Michael’s in January — months after a $1.2 million foundation-funded revamp meant for the day care program — and aims to open a new DOE school in the space in 2014, according to a department spokesman.

The relocation comes amid surge of policy initiatives that are threatening to reshape the state of early childhood education in the city.

City-funded child care centers, including more than 250 Head Start programs, are in the process of defending their value to the city. They must reapply for funding as part of an initiative called EarlyLearn, which is meant to boost the quality of early childhood offerings but has made operators of longstanding programs anxious about their futures.

EarlyLearn itself is newly in jeopardy. That’s because the city’s main provider of early childhood programs, the Administration for Children’s Services, was not on the list of “high quality” Head Start providers that the Obama Administration released this week. That means the city could lose out on $190 million in federal early childhood funding and remove Head Start from the portfolio of programs EarlyLearn is meant to assess.

From a report by Sarah Garland of the Hechinger Report for GothamSchools:

The potential loss of funding could disrupt a new initiative, EarlyLearn NYC, which is meant to streamline funding and improve the quality of the city’s early education programs. This fall, the city required all of its childcare programs, including the Head Start centers it oversees, to reapply for funding. But now that the city itself must reapply for its federal grant, “the implications could be pretty dramatic,” said Nancy Wackstein, executive director of United Neighborhood Houses of New York, a multi-service agency based in the city.

“If they don’t control the allocation of Head Start funds, then that would mean that they could not implement the EarlyLearn model,” she said.

Roadblocks to EarlyLearn’s implementation would be welcome news to some critics of EarlyLearn, including most members of the City Council, who say the initiative would likely shrink the city’s child care system, eliminate jobs, and disproportionately burden some centers that serve poor students.

Next week, the union that represents day care workers is planning to file suit to stop EarlyLearn’s rollout. According to a press release we received today, the union, DC 1707, will argue that EarlyLearn violates federal law.

Adding to the Sunset Park controversy is the fact that St. Michael’s recently finished renovations paid for by a $1.2 million Robin Hood grant that was intended for the Sunset Park Early Childhood Development Center. A spokeswoman for Catholic Charities said St. Michael’s was paying for a majority of the renovation fees that will be needed at their new facility.

“I don’t want to make it seem like they gave all the money back, but it works out that a bunch of the new renovations was paid for by St. Michael’s,” said Lucy Garrido-Mota.

Community members say it’s another example where they were not consulted about a public education decision.

“What clearly is happening, unfortunately, is a lack of communication with the community,” said Eddie Rodriguez, a Sunset Park resident and a District 15 Community Education Council member.

ACTVF juniors shooting their own Alfred Hitchcock films after school on Tuesday

The Academy for Careers in Television and Film is making use of all of them. Founding principal Mark Dunetz has Google-fied the school, using Google Apps for Education to create shared, streamlined systems that aggregate information and smooth operations.

When Dunetz started ACTVF in 2008, he said he faced a challenge shared by most non-selective high schools: “You accept in a range of students based on their interest in the program, who might or might not have had success in school.”

His solution to guarantee their success was to implement a slew of organizational systems to make the school “responsive and efficient” to students’ needs. The first class of students will graduate this year, and Dunetz projects a graduation rate over 90 percent – a rarity for a non-selective school.

“It would be inconceivable to do the work we’re doing, as successfully as we’re doing it, without the systems that we have in place,” he said when I visited the school last week.

The starting point for ACTVF was the free suite of Google Apps for Education, which includes Google Mail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and Google Sites. Dunetz leaned on the toolkit to create a shared document for staff to track parent outreach. But then the possibilities exploded.

“Once you get into it, you know what’s possible,” Dunetz said. “You start to really see everywhere the ways you’re wasting time doing things in an inefficient matter.”

Now, administrators, teachers, and students — who have different levels of access to the tools — use it for a large chunk of their managing, teaching, and learning.

New York State has an agreement with Google that allows teachers to get special Apps for Education training. But for the most part, enterprising educators such as Dunetz find ways to stretch the usages of the free suite on their own. Only when he can’t wrangle the system to match the school’s needs does Dunetz reach out to Google’s tech help.

“Every day I learn of a new way a teacher is using a tool in a way I didn’t think of,” said Jaime Casap, the Senior “Education Evangelist” on the Google Apps for Education team. He said he has seen teachers using Google Forms to replace paper reading logs and he’s seen them using Google Docs to chart student behavior from one class to the next.

“We love problem-solving,” he said, adding that Google’s engineers are responsive to the requests they receive and added 175 new features in 2011 alone. Casap sees the most promise for development in the Google Apps Marketplace, where third-party developers will be able to bring their expertise to the table.

With a few clicks, Dunetz can pull up detailed data about a single student or create a variety of charts and graphs to get sweeping, generalized views of his school: Pie charts of school spending, bar graphs of student lateness, line graphs tracking the frequency of teacher observations.

Teachers can also see more detailed trends, in shared Google Docs that track attendance, lateness, and grades. And Google Calendar makes scheduling and programming transparent and allows teachers to share materials. For example, the advisory curriculum is layered onto a shared calendar so when advisors select a date, they can immediately download all of the documents they’ll need to carry out the day’s lesson.

The apps also offer extra academic and emotional support for students. When a student is removed from class, the faculty member he reports to enters a note into a form that automatically sends an alert email to that student’s advisor and to the school social worker.

After school last week, Global Studies teacher Joel Kirkhart tutored a group of students for the Regents exam by having them revise essays on Google Docs. Kirkhart said he is still getting used to responding to student work directly on Google Docs but is finding that the suite makes it easier for him to track the revision process, communicate with colleagues, and keep tabs on students.

But he said having a constantly updated compendium of student and school data could be overwhelming sometimes.

“The volume of information that you get, the data that you have per kid, the trackable information — it allows you a huge amount of insight,” he said. But he added, “But are there enough hours in the day?”

Abraham Rodriguez, a junior, said that students make use of their school Gmail accounts to communicate with teachers and classmates and to keep on top of their grades. Sstudents receive an automated email each time their teachers update their virtual grade books.

Rodriguez said without the cloud, “people would start to fall back on their classwork; they wouldn’t know how to catch up in classes.”

Dunetz said that he had expected the students to feel oppressed by the system, given that teachers and administrators were collecting so much information on them. However, he’s noticed that most students, like Rodriguez, appreciate the structure.

“It creates this sense for the students that they’re known in really profound ways by the people working with them and supporting them,” he said.

But Dunetz cautioned that making use of Google’s Apps for Education isn’t a quick fix for a school with communication problems. In fact, he said, the apps are only as efficient as their users know how to make them.

“There is nothing wholesale to share,” Dunetz said. “What we have here is a set of tools that are extremely flexible — and free —that we are utilizing in creative ways.”

Students in Democracy Prep High School’s Korean classes typically learn words that boost their vocabulary and develop basic grammar — standard fare for introductory foreign language instruction. But this week the lessons took a turn for the geopolitical.

Youngjae Hur greeted his students yesterday with an unusual pop quiz in English and asked them to define words such as “despotism,” “denuclearize,” and “repressive.”

For Hur, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il’s abrupt death over the weekend offered the school a unique opportunity to infuse what students learn about the South Korean language and culture every day with the politics that have shaped life on the Korean Peninsula for decades.

“It’s important to let them know not just the skills to understand the language, but also the culture, the history, the politics,” said Hur, a first-year teacher who moved to the United States from South Korea three years ago. “Especially at this special moment.”

After the quiz, Hur transformed his eleventh grade class into a lecture during which he covered a broad range of topics related to Jong Il’s death: Communism, nuclear proliferation, diplomatic sanctions and human rights. Many of the students were enthusiastic about the lesson; others used the lecture-style format as a chance to catch a quick nap.

Korean culture and language is a prominent presence at the Democracy Prep high school. Passing the language class is mandatory to graduate and the country’s values are stressed in school culture.

Founder Seth Andrew, who once taught in South Korea, said that he built the language requirement into the curriculum in part because of the country’s emphasis on its education system, which ranks as one of the world’s best. For the last two years, Democracy Prep has partnered with the Fulbright scholarship program and other grants to send about 20 students to visit South Korea. This year, Andrew said, the school is planning its first ever school-wide trip and he hopes to bring the majority of the school’s 57 11th graders.

Some of Hur’s students had already visited South Korea as part of Democracy Prep’s trips and visited the 38th parallel, an area that separates the two country’s borders.

“There was a lot of tension,” said Trey Bonaparte, a student in Hur’s class. “How could they live right there and yet not have the same kinds of things as people in South Korea? I got mad.”

Hur’s specialty is in linguistics – he once taught Korean and English to American and South Korean soldiers before moving – but he seemed to revel in the opportunity to lecture on North Korean history. Hur served in the Republic of Korea Armed Forces and said most of his friends remained in active duty in the army, one of the world’s largest because of its history of conflict with North Korea. Hur said his grandmother was from North Korea and hadn’t seen her family in decades because of North Korea’s self-inflicted isolation from the rest of the world.

After the class, several students stopped to consider what was next for the Korean peninsula. Some expressed concern that upcoming trips to South Korea could be in jeopardy because of the uncertainty. Steven Medina, who had already visited but hoped to return, admitted he knew little about the Jong Il’s son, Kim Jong Un, who is the nation’s likely successor.

“It fills me with fear because we know nothing about him and probably won’t know anything,” said Steven Medina.

“I didn’t realize things could actually get worse,” Bonaparte added.

• Happy Hanukkah from us and the P.S. 22 Chorus, which performed “Mi Yimalel,” above. (YouTube)
• Digging down into the progress report metrics for Jamaica High School. (Gary Rubinstein)
• A hard look at whether No Child Left Behind waiver applications reflect feasible goals. (CAP)
• A founding board member of a charter school describes the interview phase. (Charter Notebook)
• On the Dorothy moment: When “black and white text switches to Technicolor.” (Core Knowledge)
• Dozens of city teachers are among 165 new National Board Certified teachers in the state. (NYSUT)
• Peripatetic schools chief Paul Vallas’s next stint will be in Bridgeport, Conn. (Connecticut Post)
• A DOE press officer offers a reality check on Newt Gingrich’s claim about janitors’ salaries. (FactCheck)