GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

We publish a variety of content beyond our reported news stories. Here’s some more information about those features and how you can help maintain their quality.

Rise & Shine | Remainders | Community | Comments

Rise & Shine

The Rise & Shine feature is our morning roundup of the day’s news headlines, drawn from major local and national newspapers. We aim to include all news stories and opinion pieces appearing that day. A story’s inclusion does not imply GothamSchools’ endorsement of its content.

Notice something missing? Email tips@gothamschools.org.

Remainders

The Remainders feature is our day’s-end roundup of interesting pieces about schools that appear online. We include both news stories and personal blogs in this list. A link’s inclusion does not imply GothamSchools’ endorsement of its content. Unfortunately, we cannot possibly include every relevant post that appears online.

See something you think we should link to? Email tips@gothamschools.org.

Community

In the Community section we showcase the informed perspectives of teachers, parents, students, and others involved in the city schools. We aim to publish pieces that offer nuanced and personal insights into issues facing schools, teachers, families, and education policy.

Here is our submission policy for the Community section:

We welcome contributions from people with informed perspectives on the city schools. Readers are invited to submit ideas for one-time posts or ongoing diary-style series by contacting community@gothamschools.org.

We are more likely to accept submissions that draw on personal experiences inside schools or advance policy debates with new information or insights. We typically do not publish submissions from public relations professionals, anonymous posts, or responses to pieces that appeared on GothamSchools or elsewhere. We will not publish anything that is obscene or factually incorrect.

Community section posts are subject to editing for style, structure, accuracy, and argument. Writers retain final approval of posts before they are published.

Comments

We encourage vigorous debate and welcome constructive criticism of our coverage. We especially welcome comments that advance dialogue about education issues in thoughtful, substantive ways. However, we do reserve the right to moderate these discussions and will delete comments that violate our community policy.

Our condensed list of guidelines is that we will not tolerate comments that are obscene, off-topic, or spam.

An expanded explanation of our philosophy of commenting is below.

1. No obscenity, vulgarity, profanity, racism or sexism. If you think something might cross the line, it probably does. Disagreement with people’s arguments is fine, but personal attacks — including on other commenters and GothamSchools writers and editors — will not be tolerated. We reserve the right to judge what crosses the line.

2. Please DON’T POST IN ALL CAPS. Some sites will delete your comments if you do this and, while that seems a bit extreme to us, using all-caps does make you sound like a crazy person. Good spelling and grammar are also appreciated.

3. Do not impersonate a person you’re not and do not “sock-puppet.” We can see your IP addresses and e-mails when you post a comment, so we know if you’re doing this. If you post as Mayor Bloomberg or Dennis Walcott, we will delete your comment unless we can verify that you are actually Mayor Bloomberg or Dennis Walcott. We follow this definition of “sock-puppeting” as the New York Times defined it: “the act of creating a fake online identity to praise, defend or create the illusion of support for one’s self, allies or company.”

4. You’re welcome to post under a username that allows you to retain anonymity, but we encourage everyone to use his or her real name and e-mail address (which are not shared publicly). We feel the same way about this matter as does the New York Times, which writes in its comment policy: “We have found that people who use their names carry on more engaging, respectful conversations.”

5. If you have a correction or a criticism of our coverage, the fastest way to reach us is by email. We do read the comment threads (though often not immediately) and will occasionally respond, but commenting isn’t the most efficient way to get our attention.

6. We publish all comments that Disqus, our commenting technology, does not flag as possible spam or violation. We only take down comments that violate our policy after the fact. Help us flag violations! If you believe that another commenter has violated our policy, feel free to flag the offending comment or send us an e-mail.

7. We very rarely block a reader from ever commenting, but sometimes we have no other means of maintaining civility. Should you take it upon yourself to violate the comment policy multiple times, we will contact you and ask you to stop. If you continue, we will block you. We do not consider this censorship but rather our right and responsibility to police a site that we run and take ultimately reposnsibility for.