The Common Core standards’ tougher tasks for kindergarteners are inducing anxiety in some. (Post)
A man who was removed from the classroom in the late 1990s is still in the rubber room today. (Post)
High school decision letters, delayed by Sandy, won’t come until private school tuition is due. (WSJ, NY1)
Even as they are under pressure to serve healthier food, schools are buying more pizza than ever. (Post)
The city plans to open new schools inside two large Queens high schools it failed to close. (Daily News)
Parents and children are still under pressure as the city’s school bus strike enters its third week. (WSJ)
Mayor Bloomberg brokered a bus strike talk for today that he won’t attend. (Post, WSJ, SchoolBook)
A plan to have students with disabilities ride buses with other students is raising concern. (Daily News)
Seniority rights, whose intended end prompted the strike, are important in bus drivers’ culture. (Times)
In court, a 9-year-old confronted the former P.S. 87 teacher’s aide charged with abusing him. (Post)
A Memphis educator accused of running a teacher certification fraud ring rejected a plea deal. (Times)
Manhattan’s private Ideal School is set to launch a student-created Civil Rights Museum. (Daily News)
Ellen
The link on the WSJ article takes you to a subscription page, not the article.
Jake “the snake”
Common Core? I keep hearing this term, like for the past 2 years. After teaching almost 20 years, I was never formally told what it really means nor do my administrators know. We had plenty of PD on it but it just seems like papers n papers on a topic that doesn’t really exist. The truth is, there could never be Common Cire because everyone does something different. It’s the truth, sorry, there is no Common Core.
juniper1991
It strikes me that these Common Core standards are written assuming kids aren’t entering K until they have already turned 5, which is the case in most of the country. Yet NYC, which is so eager to adopt them, keeps forcing parents to enroll kids in Kindergarten that are months away from turning 5. The 12/31 cutoff dates to a time when Kindergarten was nothing but blocks, coloring, and naptime.
http://twitter.com/BNiche B
Just wanted to post some of the Common Core standards in kindergarten for ELA and Math, but I’m sure there are others you all could post. Mind you, teachers are asked to introduce the vocabulary within the standard for “full understanding”. Are some/most of these standards just too much for a 5-year-old to understand?
CCSS.Math.Content.K.OA.A.3 Decompose numbers less than or equal to 10 into pairs in more than one way, e.g., by using objects or drawings, and record each decomposition by a drawing or equation (e.g., 5 = 2 + 3 and 5 = 4 + 1).
CCSS.Math.Content.K.NBT.A.1 Compose and decompose numbers from 11 to 19 into ten ones and some further ones, e.g., by using objects or drawings, and record each composition or decomposition by a drawing or equation (such as 18 = 10 + 8); understand that these numbers are composed of ten ones and one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, or nine ones.
CCSS.Math.Content.K.MD.A.1 Describe measurable attributes of objects, such as length or weight. Describe several measurable attributes of a single object.
CCSS.Math.Content.K.G.A.3 Identify shapes as two-dimensional (lying in a plane, “flat”) or three-dimensional (“solid”).
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.K.1 Participate in collaborative conversations with diverse partners about kindergarten topics and texts with peers and adults in small and larger groups.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.K.4b Use the most frequently occurring inflections and affixes (e.g., -ed, -s, re-, un-, pre-, -ful, -less) as a clue to the meaning of an unknown word.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.K.1f Produce and expand complete sentences in shared language activities.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.K.8 With prompting and support, identify the reasons an author gives to support points in a text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.K.4 Ask and answer questions about unknown words in a text.
Jake should be fired
Jake, You are quite misinformed. Not only are there Common Core standards, but all students in grade 3-8 are tested this year against the set. All it takes is for you to become familiar with the standards, easily accessible by a Google search. They are not challenging to understand. This is the 21st Century, and as a professional you are expected to know how to access these standards and adjust your teaching so that your students demonstrate proficiency against them. If you are a public school teacher in NYS (Yes, including NYC) this is now part of your job description.Of ocurse, it is your option not to “deal with” the CCLS, as there is no law that states you must remain a teacher in NYS.
Larry Littlefield
The Governor proposes to drastically underfund the state pension funds, which also cover local government (and school) employees in the rest of New York State, and make up the money later. Comptroller DiNapoli had pushed through a proposal to do the same a few years ago, but the higher payments from that deal are now due. Now Cuomo wants to pay for yesterday’s pensions over up to 45 years, with disaster if optimistic assumptions do not come true. For reality, read the comments from outraged taxpayers and public employees, not just the article.
I guess the kind of tax burden we have, and declining quality of services we have, in New York City (for the second time) is not acceptable in the rest of the state.
So what is the end game? Have the state cover a share of the local government contributions outside the city, with taxes collected in part in the city, even as city services re-collapse under the second big “screw the newbie, flee to Florida, leave the city in ruins” the unions have arranged? Does NYC get to cut its pension contributions in half, for now, instead of increasing them too?
Here is what I don’t get. The NYS pension funds are considered among the best funded in the country. Not just by liars like our politicians, unions leaders, and the corrput actuaries they hire, but by disinterested third party observers who used the same rules and assumptions for all the funds. The same disinterested parties who say that the NYC pension plans are little more than half funded, despite drastically higher taxpayer funding over 30 years, So why are they doing this? Is the goal to have the state pension in a death spiral too?
Remember, while NYC taxpayers have paid more than anyone else in the country for public employee pensions to the detriment of services, except for a couple of years under that union/Giuliani deal in 2000, the taxpayer contribution rate in the rest of the state was ZERO for several years in the 1990s. The winners moved out or, if they are public employees retired and now get tax-free income. The losers are not happy about holding the bag. So why not make it even worse in the future?
Former Turnaround Teacher
Dear Flushing and Newton,
I regret to inform you that the DOE has chosen to slowly weaken and destroy you over time. First you lose some electives and staff through excessing. Then your union, and community ties are weakened. Finally you get and F and the DOE decides to phase you out. Same thing happened to all of the large schools that are currently/slated to phase out. Co location/reduced enrollment is just the first step. If they really wanted to help they would reduce enrollment WITHOUT co location so the students would not be in a severely overcrowded building, and have to fight for resources and space.
Philip Nobile
· A man who was removed from the classroom in the late 1990s is still in the rubber room today. (Post)
Gotham is an aggregator, not a site of record. Accordingly, you should show discretion in your Post links. As you know, the Post is a shabby, often libelous sheet, that routinely smears teachers.Yesterday, the Post’s Susan Edelman, the sleaze server who brought us the contemptible Betsy Combier/Joy Hochstadt low blow hit of Mulgrew for his unproven sexcapade at Grady High School, vomited up yet another story about teacher “pervs.” I know the subject of her story well. We sat cheek to jowl for several weeks exiled in a DOE tool shed. Whatever may have happened in the long ago—Edelman omitted mitigating details of course—he is a solid citizen and family man. Instead of hounding him and other persecuted “pervs” who have been totally exonerated, the Post should expose the malpractice of DOE HR and SCI gumshoes. But that would be honest journalism. I urge Gotham to do the ethical thing—delete the link. Otherwise you amplify the Post’s crud.
P.S. It behooves me to mention another Post lowlight: Edelman’s equally sleazy colleague Chuck Bennett wrote that that I lied about a Regents cheating ring at the Cobble Hill School of American Studies in Brooklyn, a case substantiated by a brave OSI investigator who followed the cover-up trail all the way to Tweed. Although SCI cited me 600+ times in 67 pages, the agency was unable to dig up an untruth. When I complained to Bennett, he hung up on me. In contrast, The Chief retracted the same claim.
Larry Littlefield
It appears that we may also get some truth out of the Syracuse Mayor, who may be sacrificing her career as a member of the tribe by telling it.
Wow, I feel bad for Newtown and Flushing. Especially Newtown, because according to the DOE they’ve made substantial progress with their newly acclaimed B. Either way, the DOE is strictly determined on crushing these two schools no matter what. They couldn’t close them for numerous years, and just last year they couldn’t, once again. So the DOE has given up on closing these two schools and has found a way to do it “behind the counter” by limiting space and resources at the schools and cramming in schools in the same building while enrollment drastically reduces, that’ll create a worse environment (plus the metal detectors that’ll, of course, remain) and eventually Newtown and Flushing will get F’s and phase out. A damn shame and disgrace. The same thing will be going on in the Bronx. While Bronx Science students rejoice (except the teachers who are controlled by a manipulative principal), on the other end, the long troubled DeWitt Clinton will also have a reduction in its enrollment, will have new schools in their building, will be out of resources, and eventually will suffer a silent death. Goodbye public education in New York City!
Jake “the snake”
I don’t teach grades 3-8. I’m in a high school that has 9 schools within it. There’s so much confusion that we don’t really know who’s in charge, let alone what Common Core really is. It’s probably a joke because nO one ever questioned me on it.
Jake “the snake”
Oh …….. And by the way, I can’t be fired, I have 19 years of “S” ratings in a row.
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