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The roots of simmering conflict between teachers and administrators at the Bronx High School of Science are in pedagogy, not personnel, according to a new article in New York Magazine.

The article offers a case study in the pitfalls of principal autonomy without teacher support — and of increasing scrutiny on teachers at schools where almost all students are high-performing.

For years, teachers at Bronx Science, one of the city’s most selective high schools, have accused Principal Valerie Reidy of micromanagement and vindictiveness. They have filed mass union complaints, resigned in droves, and gone public with stories of unsatisfactory ratings they said were not justified.

Now, Reidy is telling her side of the story, and she says she just wanted to impose a pedagogical approach called “guided discovery,” in which teachers ask students a series of questions to help them arrive at answers themselves, to help Bronx Science’s high-performing students to do even better.

Guided discovery is used to some degree at many city schools, but Reidy wanted teachers to adopt it wholesale, and right away. From the article:

Reidy lights up when she talks about guided discovery; she believes it links back to the laboratory or “inquiry”-based learning encouraged by Bronx Science’s founders. But the method is highly scripted and can make teachers used to lecturing feel more like robots than educators. “What I find is when you have teachers with a lot of alphabet soup after their name, they take the college approach: ‘I’m going to come in and expose you to my brilliance,’ ” she says. (more…)

Offers of admission by borough. Data from the Department of Education

More than 6,000 eighth- and ninth-graders got good news today: offers of admission to one of the city’s nine specialized high schools.

For the 23,000 other students who took the Specialized High School Admission Test last October, the wait to find out about what school they’ll attend this fall will continue until the end of next month. They’ll find out where they’ve been accepted at the same time as the tens of thousands of eighth graders who did not try to get into one of the city’s most elite schools.

At eight city schools, including Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, admission is based on students’ scores on the ultracompetitive Specialized High Schools Admission Test, which 29,000 eighth- and ninth-graders took last October. Admission to the ninth school, LaGuardia, depends on music or art auditions and grades.

More than 100 more students were offered spots at LaGuardia this year, 1,041 compared to 936 last year. The school is graduating a larger-than-normal class this June and so extended more offers of admission than it has in the past, according to Andrew Jacob, a Department of Education spokesman. (more…)