GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Michael Mulgrew’s email to UFT members about the lawsuit denies all of the allegations. (NYCDOEnuts)
• A frequent critic of Mulgrew’s leadership says he doubts blackmail was behind concessions. (Ed Notes)
• Tonight is the deadline to vote for Erasmus Hall building to restore its stained glass windows. (PIP)
• Twelve city high schools, some specialized and some not, make a national top-1,000 list. (Newsweek)
• A design firm won an award for sketching New York City with schools atop each skyscraper. (Curbed)
• Katie Campos, N.Y.’s 26-year-old deputy education secretary, makes a 40 under 40 list. (City & State)
• A British schoolchild is documenting and critiquing her sparse daily school lunches. (Never Seconds)
• Leo Casey bullets some of the contents of the Joel Klein charter school emails the UFT sought. (Edwize)
• After her son’s SAT score was cancelled, Liz Willen criticizes the test-industrial complex. (Insideschools)
• Ravitch takes the Klein-Condoleezza Rice education report to task for IDing the wrong issues. (NYRB)
• A father mocks the city’s renaming of 24 schools with a letter to a student-turned-scholar. (Insideschools)
• A teacher offers a suggestion for helping students create “concept cards” to take notes. (Coach G’s Tips)
• A city teen explains and extols his choice at attend a lower-cost college to avoid debt. (Learning Network)
• Staten Island Tech’s principal says he adds “the salt and pepper” to teachers’ gourmet meals. (DNA Info)
• A satirical letter-to-a-teacher’s-file lambastes the Common Core’s non-fiction mandate. (NYC Educator)
• Eight experts and pundits tackle the topic “Is integration back in U.S. public schools?” (Room for Debate)
• If you haven’t already, don’t forget to take our reader survey and help GothamSchools survive and thrive:

Danielle Boone at work in her U.S. History class.

Danielle Boone’s U.S. History class at Olympus Academy High School had just begun, but she didn’t need a teacher to tell her what to do. The glowing screen looking back at her told her everything she needed to know.

Boone typed out the final section of an assignment on immigration – “a FIVE-sentence summary paragraph (including analysis sentence) about immigration and urbanization” – which she emailed to her teacher, sitting nearby, for grading. She then watched a short video online about the Civil War to research her next assignment, an essay on the Transcontinental Railroad.

Boone will continue knocking off these assignments on her school-issued Mac computer at her own blistering pace until, finally, she’s completed what is required to pass the course and earn a credit. The day after she completes the last assignment for the U.S. History class, she’ll start working on another course she needs to pass to graduate.

“I’m a student who works fast and this school helps me get credits,” Boone said during a brief break in her work. “The faster you go, the faster you get credits.”

Boone is the kind of self-starter that city officials envisioned when they tasked Olympus Academy, a transfer school, with creating an online learning model in its school for its over-aged population two years ago.

Olympus is part of the iLearnNYC initiative, a division of the city’s Innovation Zone. Until now, the initiative, which included 124 schools this year, mainly provided technological resources to schools that were devising ways to mix traditional classroom instruction with online curriculum, an approach known as blended learning. (more…)

A Kurt Hahn student reads his personal story to a resident of a Brooklyn nursing home as part of a project aimed at building students' "fluency" in English.

Jes Kruse, an English as a second language teacher at a Brooklyn high school, wanted to boost her students’ “fluency” — their ability to read and write accurately, quickly, and with comprehension.

So she turned to the topic her students know best: themselves. Students wrote personal essays, many drawing on the disasters or conflicts that led them to the United States. Then they read the essays aloud to senior citizens living in a local retirement home and wrote “reflection” papers about their conversations.

Kruse has shared some of the essays and reflections today in the GothamSchools Community section. Here’s a taste of what Emmanuelle Desmourses, an immigrant from Haiti, wrote in her reflection:

While I was at the nursing home I read aloud and asked” does my story affect your life”?  One of them said, yes your story affected my life because when you finished reading it I felt so much pain about the event that happened to you. After I heard it I felt like it was me who was there during the earthquake. I asked one questions again “how did my story change your life? One of them answered me, yes your story change my life because after you read to us your story and you say how this moment was struggled for you and how you have courage to survive after that.

Kruse’s students will be reading aloud from their personal stories at the Crown Heights Library on Tuesday. They are also selling copies of a book of their essays, ”Stories That Changed Us Forever.” Proceeds from book sales will go into a scholarship fund for the students who worked on the project.

We love featuring students’ work. Let us know if you have students whose work deserves a wider audience.

• A teacher’s suit accuses UFT chief Michael Mulgrew of making concessions to hide a sex scandal. (Post)
• The lawyer who filed the suit making the allegations was fined for filing a frivolous lawsuit before. (Post)
• Many schools are taking the option to cancel two class days in June, but a third day is required. (Times)
• An arbitrator will referee the city and unions’ “turnaround” contract dispute. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• A Queens high school principal is under fire for marking up the cost of students’ uniforms. (Daily News)
• Lehman High graduates who attend selective colleges reflect on their closing school. (Daily News)
• Like New York, Newark might also try to offer buyouts to teachers without permanent positions. (WSJ)
• The Daily News says the city buyouts show the UFT would rather reward weak teachers than good ones.
• The Post says the city’s latest teacher quality policies are weak but made necessary because of the UFT.
• Several protocol problems plagued a private school where students’ SAT scores were tossed. (Times)
• Chancellor Dennis Walcott runs, cooks, and sings in a church choir on typical Sundays. (Times)
• A student has sued the city, charging that an injury in M.S. 51′s gym derailed his sports ambitions. (Post)
• David Kirp: Racial integration yielded academic and social benefits but has been abandoned. (Times)
• Michael Winerip profiles a gifted student who will attend a South Carolina boarding school. (Times)
• Los Angeles still offers health classes and employs health teachers as others make cuts. (L.A. Times)