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Small rewards are all that’s necessary to motivate children to learn more, researchers found after a pilot study in four New York City schools. Students who were rewarded with the equivalent of 75 cents in today’s money for learning more spelling words learned to spell better than children who did not receive rewards, although the magnitude of the gains was not reported. Still, researchers cautioned that these results should not be applied too broadly until more research on motivation had been done:

When was this groundbreaking research done? Guess the year — and no googling!

At the kickoff rally of A Better Capital Plan campaign this morning, elected officials offered up two giant sacks stuffed with thousands of signed postcards calling for alleviation of overcrowding that currently affects hundreds of schools and improvements to the DOE’s planning process.

The officials were joined by dozens of parents, mostly from Manhattan’s District 2 and District 3, and children from PS 3 in Greenwich Village, who held aloft colorful posters asking “Are we students or are we packing peanuts?” and calling for “No more cramped schools!”

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, whose “Crowded Out” reports and overcrowding task force have have given momentum to the recent surge in anti-overcrowding activity, led off the rally by demanding “the strongest, biggest capital plan we can possibly create.” The School Construction Authority is due to present a new five-year capital plan next month. (more…)

Preceding Roland Fryer by more than 70 years, the New York City school board voted in 1936 to create “a ‘laboratory’ to analyze teaching methods and curricula,” according to a New York Times article from that year. Unlike Fryer’s Educational Innovation Lab, which will be funded by the Broad Foundation and other philanthropic organizations, the 1936 lab was part of a reorganization of the Board of Ed’s Bureau of Reference, Research, and Statistics. And while Fryer’s effort will cost $44 million, the board member offering the 1936 resolution requested only $156,000 — about $2.3 million in 2007 dollars.

The laboratory was to focus on experimenting with new teaching methods and promoting the sharing of successful strategies, though no details were given as to what new methods were being tested. Fryer intends to start out by testing motivational strategies like those he piloted in New York City’s Million Motivation Campaign, now discontinued for lack of funding.

More on the 1936 ed innovation lab after the jump. (more…)

In her response to the mayor’s announcement of a first round of economy-induced budget cuts, Randi Weingarten cautioned, “We must not repeat the mistakes of the 1970s when the city cut education so deeply that it took our school system decades to recover.” What happened to the city’s schools in the 1970s?

By the middle of the decade, worsening budget conditions forced the school system to adopt a budget that the Board of Education president warned would be “educationally irresponsible and probably illegal.” Indeed, in the fall of 1975 students returned to schools with huge classes, fewer teachers, and dramatically scaled down sports and activities programs.

Slashing nearly $50 million from a nearly $2 billion budget, the 1975 budget reflected a 2.5 percent cut, the same proportion the mayor is now asking the DOE to cut. And $2 billion in 1975 dollars is about $7.5 billion in today’s dollars — almost exactly what the DOE currently receives from the city.

The whole article is after the jump. Look for more on 1970′s budget cuts to city schools in next week’s Wayback Wednesday.

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A committee of 11 outside experts hired by the city gives a series of tests to New York school children. The experts insist that their tests are different because they measure growth of individual children on a specific set of skills, and tout their study as “the most successful attempt at scientific measurement in education.”

The results show that the schools are “inefficient” in educating the students, whose abilities vary greatly. The report calls for differentiation:

Only 40 percent of 4th graders performed at an “average” level on the standardized math tests. Furthermore, in all areas except speed, they compared poorly to students in other cities.

Sound familiar? Guess the year in the comments — and no Googling! We’ll post the answer next Wednesday. Complete article is after the jump… (more…)

It’s Fashion Week in New York, and at GothamSchools, we’re inspired to take a look back at school uniforms in the city.

Although fashion designers exported the jumper from the classroom to the runway in 1968, uniforms for public school students didn’t hit the papers often until 20 years later, when Mayor Ed Koch got an offer from a clothing manufacturer to provide free uniforms for all students at Harlem’s PS 175/IS 275.

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The GothamSchools Time Machine

With Chicago schoolchildren in the midst of a three-day school boycott, I thought the GothamSchools time machine might take a jaunt through school boycotts in New York City’s history.

The biggest boycotts took place in 1964 to protest racial segregation in the city’s schools. After school officials produced an integration plan that rejected busing as an option and lacked a timeline for implementation, civil rights leaders called for a one-day school boycott. To organize the protest, black leaders tapped Bayard Rustin, fresh off organizing the March on Washington at which Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” address. On Feb. 3, 1964, 464,362 of the city’s 1 million schoolchildren stayed home, making the boycott “the largest civil rights demonstration in U.S. history,” Time Magazine reported at the time, noting that black leaders initially considered the protest “a whoopee success” while at the same time the president of the city’s Board of Education disparaged it as “a fizzle.”

A smaller boycott in March, which only some of the first boycott’s organizers supported, drew about a quarter of all students in favor of integration. About the same number of students also boycotted the start of school that fall — but they were spearheaded by Parents and Taxpayers, a group that opposed busing and the dissolution of neighborhood schools. Over the summer, the U.S. Supreme Court had released its landmark Brown v. Board of Education opinion, but because New York’s schools were segregated because of residential segregation, not an official city policy, the ruling barely registered in the ongoing boycott saga. Ultimately, not even the city’s limited integration plan ever went into effect.

The 1964 school boycotts were certainly the largest, but they weren’t the first, the last, or the most effective. (more…)

Outside the registration center at Brooklyn Tech

Most of the kids who started school today spent last week enjoying the waning days of summer vacation. But those who moved to the city this summer or hoped to transfer from one city school to another spent at least some time at a DOE registration center figuring out where to report for classes today.

The 13 temporary centers, located in schools in every borough, range in size and tone, with some centers struggling to assist a huge volume of families each day since opening Aug. 25 and others with such sparse attendance that DOE officials are able to offer each family in-depth personal attention.

On Friday afternoon, about a dozen families sat scattered throughout the auditorium at the South Bronx Educational Campus, waiting to be called to register or apply for transfers for their children. Norma Nonis, director of borough enrollment for districts 7, 9, and 10, said the registration process was working quickly and painlessly at the site, which opened last year, in part because it serves comparatively few families. Before last year, the 75 families that the South Bronx site registers each day would have had to travel to Manhattan to register their children for school.

At other sites throughout the city, the process was not moving so fast when we visited last week. (more…)

Maurice Jordan with his children on the first day of school.

“If you know where your kids are, step up to your responsibilities and be a man,” Maurice Jordan, father of Shakim, 13, and Muneerah, 5, said this morning, as he accompanied his children to school. Fatherhood, he said, is “an easy job, it’s a fun job.” Jordan, who says he got custody of his children last year, believes his involvement in their education has led to academic success. “Between these two, I think it’s like thirty awards and certificates last year.”

To promote this kind of involvement, organizers from churches, community organizations, and the Office of Children and Family Services encouraged fathers — and other male relatives — to walk their children to school today as part of New York City’s Million Father March. The march, sponsored nationally by The Black Star Project, the Schott Foundation for Public Education, and other organizations, aimed to highlight the importance of fathers in their children’s education.

At C.S. 133 in Harlem, parents arriving with their children were greeted warmly by school administrators and teachers, event organizer Melvin Aston of the Office of Children and Family Services, and City Council Member Inez Dickens.

Dickens said that fathers must be encouraged to step out from their traditional behind-the-scenes roles and play a more public role in their children’s lives. “We need to show them, it’s all right for you to bring your child to school instead of the mother, it’s all right for you to bring them to a doctor’s appointment.” Both boys and girls benefit from having an involved father, she added.

The movement focused on one school in each borough this year, although fathers throughout the city were encouraged to walk their children to school, according to Deb Jenkins, Senior Pastor of the Faith @ Work Church, who organized the Bronx event.

“When a father is present, we see that the academic outcomes are greater,” Jenkins said. (more…)

Francesca Martinez, left, and Alexis Noa

While many teens spent their summer vacations relaxing, Francesca Martinez and Alexis Noa manned the phones and filed purchase orders at the employment office of the Henry Street Settlement, a comprehensive service provider on the Lower East Side.

Noa, a senior at Manhattan’s High School for Leadership and Public Service, and Martinez, a junior at Millennium High School in Tribeca, were among the 43,000 young people who this spring won an annual lottery: a job through the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development‘s Summer Youth Employment Program.

Nearly three decades old, SYEP is more popular than ever — this year receiving more than 100,000 applications for 43,000 positions — and a model for summer employment programs in cities around the country, even as DYCD officials refine the program’s structure here in New York. (more…)