GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

GothamSchools loves visitors. So we were delighted when a group of ninth-graders and their teachers from the Renaissance Charter High School for Innovation stopped by our offices this afternoon.

We talked about how we spend our days as reporters; how strong writing can benefit students no matter what career they end up in; and how the students might start a newspaper at their school, which just opened this year.

Just a reminder: If you’ve got a journalism class or after-school club and want to come visit, let us know.

Three Brooklyn students — from left to right, 7-year-olds Olivia and Jai and 9-year-old Isabella — used their snow day to build a snow fort in Prospect Park today.

We know what high school teachers would have been doing if there had been school today: proctoring Regents exams. But we’re wondering what other teachers and students would have been doing today if 19 inches of snow hadn’t fallen.

For Jai Jaroslaw, age “seven and three-quarters” and a second-grader at Brooklyn’s P.S. 321, the unexpected day off meant getting to spend the morning in Prospect Park building a snow fort.

If it had been a normal day? ”I guess I would be doing math, and now I would have lunch,” he said. Jai’s father, Victor Jaroslaw, a teacher at Fort Greene’s P.S. 46, would have spent the day teaching science.

What would your day have looked like if school had not been cancelled, and how are you spending the day instead? Tell us in the comments.

Students from the Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School paid a visit to the GothamSchools team this morning to talk about journalism and the stories they’re writing about their own school. When they’re done, we’ll hopefully be able to share them with you in the community section.

If you’ve got a journalism class or after-school club and want to stop by, let us know.

Justin Wedes, a former city teacher who started an online petition asking State Education Commissioner David Steiner not to grant Cathie Black the waiver she needs to become chancellor, spoke on the steps of Tweed Courthouse Sunday. On the left was Michael Meyers, director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. To the right was civil rights attorney Normal Siegel.

Parents and civil rights advocates gathered on the steps of the Department of Education headquarters yesterday to protest Mayor Bloomberg’s appointment of publishing executive Cathie Black as the next schools chancellor.

Their objections to Black’s appointment were two-fold: firstly, that Black lacks the educational experience necessary to lead the nation’s largest public school system; and secondly, that the mayor that the mayor chose a friend and kept the selection process hidden from the public and much of his staff.

“This unlimited claim that Cathie Black is the best is unsupported and untested in any school setting, in any classroom, by any experience on her part as a teacher or a supervisor of teachers,” said Michael Meyers, the executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition. “Cronyism is not a synonym for the best.” (more…)

A group of city public school parents blasted NBC today for its week-long special programming on education, saying that the network has kept parents and skeptics of education reform off the air.

The network is running a series of televised interviews and panel discussions it is calling “Education Nation” all this week. Parents gathered today outside of the “Learning Plaza” the network has built at Rockefeller Center to complain about the series’ line-up of speakers, which is dominated by politicians, officials and philanthropists.

“Parents are offended about the way in which NBC has refused to invite a single NYC public school parent onto any of their panels,” said Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters. “Instead, the network has allowed wealthy billionaires once again to control the agenda.”

The group also criticized NBC for allowing Mayor Bloomberg to deliver a policy speech televised on the network Monday morning without taking questions from reporters.

Students and the mayor showed up at PS 111 in Long Island City, Queens last year for the first day of school.

The first day of school is chaotic, stressful, and exciting — all ingredients for an excellent photo opportunity. Amid the tumult of tomorrow, please take a few seconds to capture your students and children at their finest. They and their schools won’t look so polished until next year the next quality review, so send us your photos!  Email your back-to-school photos to tips@gothamschools.org

Three decades before he became a GothamSchools contributor, education lawyer David Bloomfield was a young teacher trying to organize his colleagues.

While working to unionize teachers at the New Lincoln School, a now-defunct experimental private school in Manhattan, Bloomfield got help from United Federation of Teachers founder and then-president Al Shanker. In the background of the photograph they took together is Paul Bradford, the UFT liaison assigned to New Lincoln who now heads the union’s retiree chapter on the West Coast of Florida.

Bloomfield sent us the picture after coming across it before the New Lincoln reunion held last weekend. “To go back and see my once-third-graders grow into adulthood and to be thanked for work done 30 years ago is a ‘Wonderful Life’ experience that, perhaps, only comes from teaching,” Bloomfield wrote in an email. “I felt like Mr. Chips!”

City teachers from all five boroughs gathered at City Hall and down Broadway to protest the mayor's planned budget cuts to education.

Thousands of teachers and members of other municipal unions rallied today to protest planned cuts in Mayor Bloomberg’s city budget for next year. Proposed cuts to the city’s school system were a major focus of the rally, which stretched more than four blocks from City Hall down Broadway to Federal Plaza. The Department of Education is trying to fill a projected $750 million shortfall for next year.

“We are getting very close to a repeat of 1976 in our school system, where they cut it so deep it took 30 years to recover,” said United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew.

Teachers from all five boroughs traveled to attend the protest. “I think some cuts are probably necessary, but I think the one’s they’re proposing are too severe,” said Chris Calabrese, who teaches at the Bronx’s C.S. 57. The school has already lost a science teacher and will likely see its after-school programs eliminated as well, she said.

“Cutting a teacher is tantamount to asking the students to fail,” she said.

Volunteers from the insurance company New York Life visited the Bronx earlier this month to help fifth-graders at P.S. 78 plant a garden outside their school. The visit was coordinated by the nonprofit after-school provider BELL, which has a new partnership with New York Life. A BELL representative sent us the photo. Send us pictures from your school.