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On a night when education leaders offered a spirited defense of the policies they are trying to implement, an unusual voice emerged as the dissenter: Paul Vallas.

The Bridgeport, Conn. superintendent — who has served stints in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans and earned a reputation as a turnaround consultant for struggling districts with big budget gaps — said reforms he backed were at risk of collapsing “under the weight of how complicated we’re making it.”

“We’re working on the evaluation system right now,” Vallas said of Bridgeport. “And I’ll tell you, it is a nightmare.”

The peripatetic schools chief’s self-proclaimed “Nixon goes to China” moment came during the high-profile panel at the launch of the CUNY Institute for Education Policy, a think tank that former New York State Education Commissioner David Steiner is directing. (more…)

Courtesy: KIPP

A few months ago, teachers from KIPP charter schools approached the network’s co-founder Dave Levin to say that they were restless with the training they were getting. Despite weekly observations and extensive support, the teachers wanted to talk to educators from outside the KIPP organization to find out what they considered best practices for classroom teaching.

Levin took that idea and developed it into the “What’s Works in Urban Schools,” a conference that took place Saturday at New York University. The purpose of the event, Levin said, was to forge better working relationships between district and charter school teachers.

“Too often the broader structural debate has nothing to do with the great things that are happening in classrooms across New York City,” Levin said. “Whether you teach in a charter school or a district school, good teachers have the same goals.”

On Saturday, hundreds of teachers braved inclement weather, an early morning wake-up, and a $35 entry fee to attend the event, which was sponsored by KIPP, Google, TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project), Teaching Matters, and Scholastic. (more…)

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott wasn’t completely wrong when he said tonight’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting had met its goal of promoting conversation about curriculum standards.

The meeting was pushed off course within minutes when protesters aligned with the Occupy movement shouted down Walcott and the standards’ architect, David Coleman. Walcott sped the dissolution into small-group sessions rather than try to talk over the nearly 200 protesters.

Most protesters stayed in the auditorium, but about three dozen parents and teachers followed Walcott and Coleman upstairs for workshops about the new standards, known as the Common Core.

Speaking to close to 20 attendees in a third-floor classroom, Coleman explained that the Common Core, which has been adopted by 25 states since 2009, is meant to “make our kids competitive within this country and outside of it, and to close the gap between high school and college.”

The development of the standards, he said, “was a vast process where thousands of teachers and parents were involved around a shared question of what is the evidence for college and career readiness, and based on that, what are the standards that most determine that.”

Michelle Ciulla Lipkin, whose two children attend Manhattan’s P.S. 199, said she came to the event because she wanted to learn more about how the Common Core would affect her children and was blindsided by the protest. (more…)

The possibility of a public comment session evaporated just moments into tonight’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting, after nearly 200 protesters drowned out Department of Education officials.

The panel had convened for a special meeting about the city’s new curriculum standards. But as Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott and the standards’ architect, David Coleman, took the stage at Seward Park High School, protesters aligned with the Occupy movement launched a chorus of complaints via “the people’s mic.” (more…)

“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…)

David Coleman presenting to principals. View his talk here.

A couple of weekends ago, with temperatures climbing toward 90 degrees, 1,400 school administrators stuffed into a non-air conditioned high school auditorium and listened to education officials talk policy.

“Energetic” isn’t the first thing that springs to mind from that scene, but that’s just how Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott and other attending principals characterized it yesterday.

“The energy in that room was off the chart. Truly off the chart,” Walcott said on NY1 last night. He and principals had described the event in similar terms at a press conference earlier in the day.

So what exactly went on inside Brooklyn Technical High School during the June 4 conference for principals?

Besides a virtuoso performance by an all-freshman string quartet to welcome the audience, much of the excitement surrounded a presentation by David Coleman, a charismatic and self-effacing speaker who helped write the new academic standards being rolled out by the Department of Education. (more…)