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“The people’s mic” could drown out discussion of curriculum standards at tonight’s unusual Panel for Educational Policy meeting.

The Department of Education has convened an off-schedule and highly irregular PEP meeting just to discuss new curriculum standards that are being rolled out this year.

At most PEP meetings, panel members listen patiently, but mostly silently, to members of the public before signing off on the city’s education policy proposals. Tonight, the panel won’t be voting on anything. Instead, they’ll listen to presentations by the architect of the Common Core standards, David Coleman, and his chief champion at the DOE, Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky. They’ll also sit in on workshops where meeting attendees will practice the same skills city students are being asked to bolster this year. And they will answer questions from the public for 25 minutes.

The city is requiring attendees to submit questions on index cards, and officials say the questions that get read aloud will likely be limited to ones that relate to curriculum.

That won’t stop some attendees who have been planning since last week to apply the tools of the Occupy Wall Street movement at the PEP meeting. Activists in the “Occupy Public Education” outgrowth plan to bring “the people’s mic” to the meeting, which obviates an actual microphone because humans, rather than electronics, amplify what is said. (more…)

Dennis Walcott joined principal Annabelle Martinez (standing) and teachers at P.S. 124 in Sunset Park for training on the Common Core standards.

Huddled around tables in their school library, three dozen teachers at P.S. 124 in Sunset Park got a taste for how new standards being rolled out across the city would reshape their work in the classroom this fall.

Principal Annabelle Martinez handed out photocopies of student writing samples and asked the teachers to evaluate the work according to the new standards.

For a team of third-grade teachers, that meant looking at a short essay about weather and determining whether the author used “informative and explanatory text to examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly.”

At first, the teachers found strengths in the essay’s display of mechanics. One teacher pointed out that the student had used capitalization correctly.

“He knows his paragraphs,” another teacher said. “And he knows sentence structure too.”

Later, the teachers used a projector to present their notes to their colleagues. Under Martinez’s guidance, the teachers revised how they discussed the student’s strengths. Now, they called the essay “informative” and said it was organized well by topic and included a “clear introduction” and a “clear conclusion” — language that was more in line with the new standards.

Scenes like this were playing out in schools across the five boroughs this morning as part of an extra day of professional development given to staff before students start class tomorrow. (more…)

When it comes to new “common core” standards, theoretical language is giving way to hands-on practice.

The curriculum standards, accepted by 48 states, are being rolled out citywide this year after being piloted in 100 schools last year. Today, every teacher in the city is expected to get training on them.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott sat in on a training session this morning at Brooklyn’s PS 124, which took part in the pilot last year. But at many schools, today is likely to be the first time that teachers learn just how the common core standards are poised to change their jobs.

Some principals put together their own plans for today, but they can also draw on four 90-minute lessons the city devised. One session asks teachers to evaluate student work from their own school to see if it meets the new standards. In another, they will practice assessing teachers according to a new evaluation rubric. A third lesson focuses on connecting two overarching citywide goals: strengthening student work and teacher practice. And a fourth lesson asks teachers to examine student work from a school that adopted the new standards last year. The lessons are part of the Department of Education’s online “Common Core Library” of resources.

In a letter to principals last week announcing the lesson plans, Walcott laid out a timeline for schools’ common core-related accomplishments. This fall, he wrote, teams of teachers at each school should identify students’ shortcomings. In the winter, teachers should ask all students to complete two common core-aligned “tasks,” one in reading and one in math. Through it all, principals should be giving teachers frequent feedback based on classroom observations, Walcott wrote.

Walcott’s letter to principals is below: (more…)

As the city prepares to observe the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks that took place on Sept. 11, 2001, the Department of Education is making curriculum materials — and grief counseling — available to teachers.

“As educators and parents of children who grew up in the years before and after 9/11, we have a responsibility to help them learn that the attacks of 9/11 were an attack on all New Yorkers, our nation as a whole, our freedoms, and our way of life,” Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott wrote in an email to teachers today announcing the new materials.

High school seniors had just started second grade on 9/11, and most city students have “little or no recollection” of the day, Walcott noted in the letter to teachers. That’s one reason why a team of teachers and administrators at the DOE worked with the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, scheduled to open next year, to develop a collection of 9/11-themed lesson plans. Those plans went online today.

The lesson plans are meant to be used in social studies, history, English, and art classes across all grade levels. The 10 to 20 lessons for each grade level are divided across the themes of “historical impact,” “community and conflict,” “heroes and service,” and “memory and memorialization.”

Children in kindergarten through second grade might learn about bravery and examine mementos, now in the museum’s permanent collection, that children sent to firefighters after 9/11. Middle schoolers might analyze memorial songs released shortly after 9/11. And a high school class might study the recent history of Islamist extremism or develop museum exhibitions of their own. Each lesson is connected to new Common Core curriculum standards being rolled out this year.

The department is also planning to offer counseling services to teachers, staff, and students who need them, Walcott said.

Walcott’s letter to teachers is below. (more…)

A school on its first day of classes is, ideally, a well oiled machine.

Before teachers report for duty Tuesday and students for class on Thursday, computers must be upgraded, textbooks distributed, and lunch schedules set. Staff must be hired, instruction planned, and services put in place for students with special needs.

To help principals stay on top of all of the moving pieces involved in planning for the first day of school, the Department of Education has distributed a checklist of start-of-school tasks, similar to the compliance checklist that principals use to make sure they have completed required management tasks over the course of the year.

The 50-plus tasks on the start-of-school list fall into broad categories of staffing, school organization, physical environment and security, technology, and instruction. Elementary and middle school principals must also oversee student enrollment. (High school enrollment is managed centrally.)

Most of the jobs on the list must be completed perennially, but one is unique to this year. The checklist asks, “Are plans in place and materials ready for the September 7th Professional Development day for teachers?” That’s when all schools are supposed to offer training for teachers on how to bring new Common Core curriculum standards into their classrooms. The start of classes was pushed back one day to make room for the planning.

The complete checklist is below. (more…)

Classes will start a day later than planned in September so that teachers have more time to plan how to bring new curriculum standards into their classrooms.

The city’s school schedule had teachers reporting for duty Sept. 6, the day after Labor Day, and students were scheduled to arrive the following morning. Now, students will stay home an extra day while their teachers undergo training in the “common core” curriculum standards being rolled out citywide. The first day of school for students will be Thursday, Sept. 8.

The surprise one-day extension of summer break is the result of an agreement among the city, teachers union, and principals union. Chancellor Dennis Walcott, UFT President Michael Mulgrew, and principals union president Ernest Logan are sending a letter to families today explaining the change.

“While in many classrooms this work is already underway, next year teachers will challenge all of our students to think critically, to read and understand more difficult texts, to do more writing, and to apply the math they are learning in the real world,” the letter reads. “We have heard again and again from principals and teachers that they need more time to plan for this important new instructional work.”

The agreement to change the schedule at a time when the city and teachers union are feuding on several fronts, including over school closures and planned layoffs, signals that there is, as Walcott has said, “energy” behind the new standards. (more…)

The difference between being anti-testing and being anti-today’s testing regime can sometimes get glossed over. But the wide space between the two positions was demonstrated damningly in a paper published this spring.

Written by two vehement advocates for the national tests now under construction, the paper is mainly a blueprint for what a re-imagined national testing system could look like. But it begins with a succinct, damning description of what its authors call our current “testing bind”:

Though no one intended to do so, we have created a testing bind that, as it tightens, drives attention away from the intended standards. The effects are greatest in the poorest schools. The nation’s current approach to raising achievement and increasing equity in the education system is having an effect opposite from the intended one. It is trapping poor children in a basic‐skills teaching program that gives them little chance to acquire the deeper knowledge and abilities we seek for everyone. And it may be lowering the learning opportunities even for many more privileged children as schools turn their energies to the test‐based basic skills program.

The paper, “An American Examination System,” is written by two people who may very well have a hand in shaping the new testing regime: University of Pittsburgh professor Lauren B. Resnick, who helped draft the “common core” standards endorsed by President Obama and many states, and Wireless Generation CEO Larry Berger, whose company is likely to make a bid to build the technological pieces of the national tests that will be tied to those standards. (more…)

Students at 100 New York City schools will be among the first to take early versions of the new standardized tests being built with federal dollars.

The schools will test early versions of new third- through eleventh-grade exams that a consortium of 26 states — New York included — is creating. The same schools will get extra funding this year to pilot the new common core standards in their classrooms.

Because New York is a “governing state” in the consortium, its education officials have already agreed to begin using the new tests by the 2014 school year. It also means that New York officials, including city Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky, are helping design the new tests.

The PARCC group — Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers — won a $170 million federal grant yesterday, which it will use to build the tests.

The new exams will complement the new national education standards that New York has also agreed to take on. They will also completely overhaul the form that state standardized exams take, and when they’re given, Suransky said today. (more…)

School staff reviewed sample student work that meets the common standards for kindergarten writing. More sample student work that meets the new standards is available here (pdf).

What will national standards mean for New York City’s classrooms?

For the past few weeks, groups of principals, teachers and staff members have been gathering with their school networks to begin answering that question.

Last week, a large group of principals, assistant principals and teachers met in the cafeteria of P.S. 129 in Flushing, Queens. They came in teams of three from each school in a Children’s First Network led by Diane Foley.

The state won’t begin to use the core standards to test students until 2014.

But, as Foley and her staff reminded principals, the first group of students who will take the new exams — 2014′s fourth-graders — are entering kindergarten this fall. Foley’s goal was to nudge schools towards the core standards by helping them think of small changes they can make immediately.

“Let’s find one or two things that schools can do this year,” Foley said. “It’s about the little tiny steps you can take.” (more…)