GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Some cohorts at Harlem Success 1 lost more than a third of their enrollment by last year. (Insideschools)
• An opinion writer suggests that Chicago secede and join Wisconsin to deny rights to teachers. (WSJ)
• Students from “turnaround” schools describe their feelings about the process. (World Socialist Web)
• More backstory on Brooklyn-Queens Day, the artifact that meant classes were out today. (Queens Beat)
• An organization that aims to bring table tennis to city schools held its first fundraiser. (SchoolBook)
• Brian Williams goes inside Harlem Village Academies to profile founder Deborah Kenny. (MSNBC)
• Steve Jobs’s subpar educational experiences might have been help by digital learning. (Hechinger)
• Andy Rotherham: Pension cuts without improved climates could threaten schools. (School of Thought)
• A teacher laments the annual onslaught of staff turnover at her school. (Miss Eyre/NYC Educator)

While students protested against testing and basked in the late-spring sun, educators across the city hunkered down to prepare for next year.

The first Thursday of June is a mandatory training day for city teachers. Hiring committees were set to meet at some schools up for “turnaround” overhauls, teachers offered voluntary tutoring sessions for high schoolers scheduled to take Regents exams next week, and some departments took educational field trips, according to GothamSchools readers who reached out to let us know how they were spending the day formerly known as Brooklyn-Queens Day.

Here are some of the responses we got on Twitter when we asked city teachers how they were spending the training day:

(more…)

Parents and children rally against the field testing.

The parents and children who attended the rally came from some of the 61 elementary and middle schools where anti-testing activists said families were boycotting “field tests” from Pearson, which began on Tuesday.

Over 400 parents and children protested Pearson’s field tests, which are intended to help design future tests.The company has a $32 million state contract to produce tests.

Parents at the protest — many from the Upper West Side, Brownstone Brooklyn, and Lower Manhattan — said they are fed up with the number of tests that their children have to take. Parent organizations such as Change the Stakes, Time Out From Testing, and Parent Voices New York helped build support against the field tests.

“We organized classroom by classroom, school by school,” said Michael Ravitch, a parent from P.S. 321 in Brooklyn. “Many of these parents haven’t been politically involved before but everyone shares this feeling and needed an outlet to express their disgust for these useless and meaningless tests that are eating up the resources of these schools and wasting our children’s time.”

“I thought maybe there’d be 50 people here,” said Ravitch, who is the son of vocal education activist, Diane Ravitch. ”I hope that this is just the beginning.” (more…)

Jennifer Stillman, author of today's installment of "Useable Knowledge"

New York City neighborhoods that undergo gentrification don’t always wind up with diverse schools.

In the Community section today, Jennifer Stillman explains her research into why — and her suggestions for how the city could tip the scales toward school integration in changing neighborhoods.

Stillman’s Community section contribution is part of “Useable Knowledge,” a GothamSchools feature that aims to promote policy based off of educational research. In the series, researchers present their research and findings, as well as policy implications that could inform education policy locally and elsewhere. And readers are invited to join the conversation.

Stillman studied the relationship between neighborhood gentrification and school integration as a doctoral student in politics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. She found that public schools in gentrifying neighborhoods offer the perfect opportunity for social mixing between people of different backgrounds — but that getting “gentry parents,” her term for upper-middle-class, white newcomers, to send their children to those schools is difficult. (more…)

Jason Westerlund and Yolanda Robinson review a colleague's Common Core-aligned sample lesson.

Fifth-grade teacher Jason Westerlund has involved his whole school in the process of developing guides to new learning standards, known as the Common Core.

Using funding from the city’s Common Core Fellows program, he and a handful of fellow teachers from P.S. 101 in Queens meet regularly after school to review lesson plans and “go into depth,” exploring the new elementary school literacy and math standards and comparing them to the old ones. And today, a required training day for all city teachers, Westerlund will present this work to the rest of the P.S. 101 staff.

The trickle-down effect was exactly what city officials hoped for when they hired Westerlund and 59 other city educators to design and refine Common Core-aligned curriculum materials and act as emissaries for the new standards in their schools.

Next year, when state tests will reflect the standards for the first time, the city is planning to have 240 fellows, quadrupling the program’s size and output.

But the search for funding to cover the overtime costs of the fellows and their colleagues has so far only turned up enough for the current crop of fellows. City officials say they are hoping Race to the Top winnings can pay for the expansion and will solicit private donations if that plan falls through. (more…)

• Brooklyn Tech HS alumni raised $21 million to boost offerings and start an endowment. (Daily News)
• A charter sector rally drew thousands of charter school parents to City Hall. (GothamSchools, Post, NY1)
• Planning for the rally surfaced simmering tensions within the charter school sector. (GothamSchools)
• The city education department announced it would collapse its charter schools office. (GothamSchools)
• Special education advocates are worried about the city’s special ed reforms readiness. (Daily News)
• Stuyvesant High School students held a “Slutty Wednesday” against a new dress code. (Post, NY1)
• The city and UFT are in talks to replace arbitrators who quit after not being paid on time. (WSJ, Post)
• A Queens City Councilman is giving schools in his district videoconferencing technology. (Daily News)
• Riverdale schools are among the many reevaluating their support network choices. (Riverdale Press)
• Chicago is challenging the integrity of its union’s strike authorization voting process. (Tribune)
• An alum of the private Horace Mann School describes a culture of sexual abuse in his time there. (Times)