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Staff at the four KIPP charter schools in New York City are experimenting with a new way to improve their practice: Every Wednesday, they toss their Blackberries and their Gmail and go e-mail free.  KIPP calls the new tradition, part of a trend at businesses around the country, “Use of Time Wednesdays.”

KIPP is part of a group of elite charter schools that demand extra-long work hours of teachers along with other unique requests, like urging teachers to visit families at their homes after school hours. Supporters say the formula is responsible for the schools’ impressive test scores, but some worry it might not be sustainable as the teachers age and want to start their own families. Teachers at one KIPP school in Brooklyn, KIPP AMP, aired concerns about sustainability as part of their drive to organize into a union.

But KIPP’s co-founder and New York City superintendent, Dave Levin, said the e-mail abstinence days don’t have to do with improving what teachers call the “work/life balance.” He said the point is to enhance face time with students and between staff. “One of the key things to any organization being outstanding is everybody thinking really closely about how to use their time for the best benefit of the kids,” Levin said. “And, as you know, e-mail can take up a lot of time during the work day.”

The rule applies to teachers, who keep their famous cell phones on to stay in touch with parents and students, and to administrators, who have created automatic e-mail messages for themselves to explain why they won’t reply immediately. “KIPP NYC believes it is important to continuously evaluate what we do and how we do it,” an e-mail from one administrator reads. “To that end, each Wednesday is designated as ‘Use of Time Wednesday’, a day in which we focus on doing work away from e-mail.”

I wish Franklin were around to comment on this: The Department of Education’s director of food technology, a job I didn’t know existed, but now seems important, is letting principals know that DOE peanut butter is good, despite the expanding recall. Peanut butter chocolate chip cookies are not yet confirmed safe. UPDATE: Peanut butter cookies have now been declared safe, school officials tell me.

I think this counts as a good use of teacher e-mail/phone time, yes? Here’s director Paul Uffer’s note:

Subject: Peanut Butter Update
Importance: High

Please be advised that SchoolFood has confirmed that the PB&J Cutouts and the #10 containers of Peanut Butter used for our program are not affected by the recent peanut butter recall by The Peanut Corporation of America.

Listed below are the current peanut butter brands used in SchoolFood operations

#10 containers – Sunny Boy or Sunshine

PB&J Cutouts – Sunshine

Peanut Butter Cookies

Food Tech is still waiting on confirmation of the brand of peanut butter used in the Linden’s Peanut Butter cookies.  Until further notice, please put do not use the Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip cookies.  Please place any boxes aside and label “DO NOT USE“.  Further instructions will follow. (more…)

One of the free e-mail providers that could soon give an account to every New York City student and parent. (Via Flickr.)

Connecting with students over the phone may soon become totally passe. The Department of Education is looking for a technology company — think Google’s Gmail or Microsoft’s Hotmail — to create e-mail accounts for every public school student and parent, at no charge to parents or the city. Google already provides free e-mail services to the Los Angeles public schools, and Microsoft provides e-mail to students in Miami, according to Bruce Lai, the chief of staff for the city DOE’s division of instructional information technology.*

Lai said that e-mail addresses are meant to encourage teachers and principals to engage with parents and students outside of the classroom. He said the program is also an “equity issue.” While some schools pay companies to help them set up e-mail accounts for their students and parents (I know I had one at my relatively affluent public high school, in Maryland), other schools can’t afford the cost. “We wanted to make sure that all schools had the opportunity to engage parents as well as create a stronger home-school connection,” Lai said.

Companies have until March to write proposals pitching themselves as the best possible vendor. Lai said he doesn’t expect that the city would have to pay any fee to the vendors. The guaranteed exposure of students to, say, Gmail’s layout and product is enough of a value on its own to entice a company. Gmail and other free e-mail providers splash advertisements on the screens of regular users, but Lai said that city students and parents will see no advertisements when they use the e-mail servers.

*This sounds like a different title than the DOE’s technology staff had before. (Used to be the Office of Instructional Technology, as the web site still says.) I’m looking into it.