GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Earlier this summer District of Columbia school officials decided to ban chocolate milk from their schools. Proponents of flavored milk argue it’s the only way to get students to drink milk, which provides the calcium, protein and vitamin D that children need. But as Colorado school chef Ann Cooper has pointed out, “Saying we need to add sugar and flavoring to milk to get kids to drink it is like saying we need to feed kids apple pie if they don’t like apples.”

NYC Green Schools has proposed that New York City schools also get rid of chocolate milk as the daily consumption of sweetened drinks has no place in a child’s diet. Here’s the truth about the chocolate milk served daily to New York City’s schoolchildren: It contains 22 grams of sugar, which is more sugar than half a can of coke, and it is sweetened with high-fructose corn-syrup, which is listed as the second ingredient.

With 40 percent of city children either overweight or obese, why does the Department of Education’s Office of SchoolFood still insist on chocolate milk? The question is especially vexing because the city decided recently to eliminate sugary drinks from school vending machines, citing irrefutable evidence linking the increased consumption of sugary drinks with the rising rates of childhood obesity.

One SchoolFood official told us that the SchoolFood office is “in the business of food” and that chocolate milk sells. (more…)

Over the past four years, I have created, developed, and spread an annual History Day in my school, as part of the National History Day competition. All sophomores and juniors at Bronx Lab spend five weeks conducting in-depth historical research, which they then present to both our school and general community each February.

My school’s History Day is the accomplishment in which I take the most pride in my teaching career. It is the only event in the year that’s attended by the entire school and the only event at my school where parents and community members are invited to view the products of students’ learning. My former principal (Marc Sternberg, now a deputy chancellor) always told me that History Day was his favorite day of the school year.

Most significantly, it yields the greatest buy-in, interest, and growth in my students of anything I do. Students look forward to having the opportunity to learn about a topic in which they have interest and show off to the community. It has become a rite of passage. Over the past four years, I have had students complete research on a range of topics from the Missouri Compromise to the Spanish Civil War to Septima Clark, often yielding insights and understandings new even to me. It is the only time in our curriculum where students have the opportunity to complete in-depth, college-level research.

The students who go on to the city and even state levels of the competition have the opportunity to compete with and learn from the best students New York has to offer. It has been a transformative experience for my public school students, nearly all of whom are black or Latino, to see that their work is just as strong as that from the mostly white, private school students who enter our city’s competition.

I am very proud that in two of the past four years my students have won awards at the city level. But I am even more proud that four of my students have used their History Day papers as the writing samples that helped earn them full-tuition Posse Scholarships to elite private colleges. It meant the world to me, and their future to them, that they all felt that the best piece of writing they did in four years of high school was their work on the History Day project.

A beginning teacher cannot change his or her teaching personality at whim, at least not consistently. She cannot decide to “be more fun.” So, in order to make a classroom more fun, which is to say more engaging, more exciting and child-focused, a beginning teacher should change the classroom activities. The most straightforward change that I have seen is to make the classroom project-based.

This might sound like a “duh” idea, especially to more experienced teachers, but I mean to suggest that everything, everything be project-based. Take, for example, the curriculum outlined in Everyday Mathematics, used in most city elementary schools. The daily lesson plans have an attractive hands-on focus, but there is only one lesson per unit, entitled “explorations,” in which the students work together on larger projects. Now whether the project is group-based or individual, it seems intuitive to me that the entire math unit (be it shapes, number patterns or measurement) should be structured towards a larger goal. I have seen, and used, a unit-plan focusing on shapes that resulted in a class performance of “The Greedy Triangle” by Marilyn Burns. Some students worked on Hexagon and Octagon posters, drawing objects from life that conformed to those shapes, while others cut out and painted shape costumes. After a few lessons, my job became easy, walking between the tables, correcting students if they said “square” when they should have said “rectangle.”

During the independent reading block, we find that some students read while others pretend to read. This is because some students like to read and find it pleasurable, while others do not. Duh. And yet we still ask students to read silently for up to an hour, while we run from bored student to bored student using all of our imagination to keep their attention on their books. But I am done pleading with a student to enjoy reading, to have fun doing something he or she does not naturally enjoy. (more…)

As an elementary school teacher, I have always been afraid of fun. The noise, the energy and the constant excitement of play seemed too close to chaos. And, as I have written in previous posts, I was one of those new teachers who feared chaos more than anything else. I created clear, predictable schedules and hyper-articulated procedures. Every morning, we sang about the rules before the day began.

This summer I have had an opportunity, mostly with my nephews, to watch kids play. I am not their teacher and we were not in a classroom, and so I was able to sit back and, for the past two months, learn a thing or two about fun. These lessons will be invaluable in the coming year. Over the next two posts I will first discuss how why fun can and, in fact, must be used in a successful classroom. In the following post I will suggest ways in which teachers and administrators can create a fun elementary school.

It took me a while to recognize a basic feature of fun: it is not pleasure. This is clearest in organized fun, such as team sports. Very rarely do I see smiling on the baseball diamond or basketball court. Team sports rely on a competitive energy and a drive to succeed that are exciting in their own right, not merely as a means towards the sensation of victory. But it is also rare, in my experience, to see smiles on the jungle gym, where kids play in a non-competitive manner. Watch a group of kids play house, for instance, and you will find kids so engrossed in their make-believe that they don’t take breaks to laugh. Yet at the end of a day of make-believe, those same kids will certainly tell you that they had fun. Fun, in other words, is anything that is wholly engaging. (more…)

The path toward teacher certification is laden with demands that prospective teachers prove that they’re sensitive, socially conscious, and self-critical. If a national group of education agencies has its way, those demands could soon extend throughout teachers’ careers.

Teachers and others would do well to look at the “Model Core Teaching Standards: A Resource for State Dialogue,” released in July for public comment. Developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers’ Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (InTASC), the new teaching standards (separate from the Common Core State Standards that have been in the news recently) retain much of the language of the 1992 teaching standards, with some reordering and rewording to match the “new times.” Whereas the 1992 standards were intended for beginning teachers (and adopted by 38 states), the new standards are for all teachers.

The ten standards fall into four categories: The Learner and Learning, Content Knowledge, Instructional Practice, and Professional Responsibility. Each standard is broken down into Performances, Essential Knowledge, and Critical Dispositions. Like the 1992 standards, the Model Core Teaching Standards downplay subject matter knowledge while emphasizing the social processes of the classroom and the attitudes that teachers should have. Because these standards come so soon after the Common Core State Standards, they might influence how the Common Core standards are interpreted and implemented.

The 1992 document devoted the first standard to content knowledge; the new standards address content in standards 4 and 5. Two standards devoted to content seem like more than one, but neither standard addresses the need for specific knowledge. (more…)

While the precipitous decline in New York City test scores and re-widening of the achievement gap may have come as a surprise to some, it shouldn’t have shocked anyone who’s actually been in a classroom during the Golden Age of Accountability.  Reading The New York Times over the past few weeks has been both frustrating and redeeming, as it seems the truth behind New York City’s “miraculous” gains is finally coming to light. Today I finally had the chance to see how the new test scores affected my students and me personally. As you can expect, it wasn’t pretty, but then again, the truth often isn’t.

Before I talk about what the numbers mean to me and in general, let me first lay them out. Of the 18 students in my class who took the English language arts exam, six scored a 1 (below grade level), eight scored a 2 (approaching grade level), and four scored a 3 (at grade level). Of the 19 students who took the math test, five scored a 1, seven scored a 2, four scored a 3, and three scored a 4 (above grade level). That means 22 percent of my students who took the reading exam met grade-level standards, and 39 percent of my students met grade-level standards in math.

What do these scores tell me? First I will say that these scores are a much more accurate indication of my students’ performance levels than any scores I have seen before. While they are definitely lower than “expected,” those expectations were based on previous models of scoring, which as we now all know were deeply flawed. The scale scores and proficiency ratings are difficult to evaluate without any baseline assessment. Yes, there is Acuity data to compare them to, but those are far from a reliable assessment, especially for students reading two or more grades below level. Ultimately, I need to rely more on my own assessments like endlines, E-CLAS, and running records to determine my students’ growth. Except for a few surprises, the official test scores don’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.

What I do know is that at the beginning of the school year only two of my students were reading at grade level. According to this year’s assessment, four of my students met grade level standard on the reading test. That is an accurate assessment. (more…)

Teachers are panicked. I’m panicked. With the state’s new teacher evaluation system, I figure I have three years before I can be fired for factors beyond my control.

Next year I’ll be rated as usual. That shouldn’t be a problem — administrators who’ve judged me by what they’ve seen in my classroom have been pretty good to me. But come 2012 and 2013 they’ll look at my students’ scores. They depend not only on what I do, but also on what the kids do. I’ve been teaching teenagers for 25 years (and I have one at home). I know one thing for certain about teenagers — you never know what they will do.

On the brighter side, there are surefire ways to improve statistics. When you focus on that, you don’t need to worry as much about whether or not kids actually learn anything, or communicate in English (the language I’m paid to teach). Taking this broad view, it may be easier to create favorable statistics than actually teach. Instead of wasting time with actual classroom techniques, let’s examine a few individuals who’ve managed to look good under this up-and-coming paradigm. (more…)

This post is part of a series for Leadership Day 2010 that aims to help school leaders who need help with technology use in their schools.

Next fall, I will start leading three new learning experiences: I will be teaching both sides of an aligned English/Global History course on world history and literatures to 11th grade students; I will also facilitate a Peer Learning Group at my school for fellow teachers on Technology and Teaching. All three experiences will share one common understanding:

Technology is a tool.

In the history class, we will looks at how technologies have altered how people live and interact with each other, from the new agriculture techniques of the Neolithic Revolution through the Internet. In English class, we hope to help students to learn how to use the various tools available to them to support the writing and revision process. In both these classes, we will help students learn how to find information, sort through it all to identify what is useful, assess the information for validity and bias, and finally use it in some meaningful form. With my peers, we will explore how technology can make them better teachers, and how they can use technology to better help their students learn. I’m really excited to use all three venues to help students and teachers improve their practice.

However, in honor of Leadership Day, I want to focus on the converse of the above understanding:

Technology is not an end.

(more…)

As discussed here and here, the state released the results of the 2009-2010 Grade 3-8 Math and English language arts test results last week. The focus has been on the new, higher bar for passing the tests and the resulting large drop in the percentage of students judged as proficient. Charter schools, like traditional public schools across the city, saw their much-touted proficiency gains plummet. Barbara Martinez at the Wall Street Journal did a good job of summarizing charter schools’ results in New York City. In order to give a more complete picture, I analyzed the 2009-2010 results for charters to see which schools performed best and how the schools performed compared to their traditional public school counterparts. I also posted data on individual schools below and in this spreadsheet.

PROFICIENCY

I defined proficiency in the customary way: as the proportion of students at a charter school that scored a Level 3 or higher on the ELA or math tests. In order to look at overall school performance, I averaged the proficiency rate across grade levels broken down by subject, and then took the average of both the ELA and math tests to come up with a single “proficiency” number. The schools that had the highest average proficiency rates were Harlem Success Academy, Icahn Charter School 2, the Bronx Charter School for Excellence, and the Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School. (The other two Icahn Schools also scored in the top 10 of all charter schools.) To be clear, different schools serve different grades and comparing performance across grades can be misleading.

I’ve posted a chart below that lists the average proficiency rates as well as the ELA and math proficiency rates, for every charter school that posted test results during the 2009-2010 school year. Scroll over the name of the school to find out what grades the school services, which grades were tested, and other salient information relating to the school’s performance.

(more…)