GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

This has been popping up all over the internet, but what better video to post with Election Day fast approaching? If you’re still undecided, perhaps these students from the Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, Georgia, can help you. Here’s a taste of their lyrics:

Lower your Taxes - you know Obama Won’t
PROTECT THE LOWER CLASS - You know McCain won’t!
Have enough experience - you know that they don’t
STOP GLOBAL WARMING - you know that you won’t

And here’s the whole song, performed live.

Ron Clark, the school’s founding teacher, is the author of a best-selling book on teaching, The Essential 55: An Award Winning Educator’s Rules for Discovering the Successful Student in Every Child. Check out the blog of the American Prospect for some additional context about the school that might surprise you. Here’s a hint: the school isn’t free.

Simon Doolittle of AfterEd.tv interviews Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute about mayoral control in New York City.

Sometimes schools are a place for politics — when it’s students who are campaigning, and the seat at stake is president of the student council. Frontrunners, a documentary about the race for student council president at Stuyvesant High School, will be showing this weekend at the New Yorker Festival, and starting Oct. 15, at Film Forum.

On Monday, the Today Show spotlighted public school travel programs, including New York City’s Beacon School’s famous field trips to India, England, Venezuela, and many other parts of the world.

In honor of Constitution Day, which was Wednesday, we give you a little Schoolhouse Rock:

Teachers, what did you do to celebrate the Constitution in your schools?

Here’s a clip from CBS about the Nurse-Family Partnership mentioned in Paul Tough’s recent New York Times Magazine article, 24/7 School Reform. Learn more about the program model and studies of its impact from the Nurse-Family Partnership website. New York City program information is available from the Bureau of Maternal, Infant, and Reproductive Health.

From average to perimeter to speed, students at a school in Morocco practice mathematics in the context of the school’s small olive grove. This 15-minute documentary — too large a file to embed here — shows the ways one Moroccan math teacher integrates math and real-life experience for his students.

“I need to know how many olives you think we’ll get from one tree,” the teacher asks his students, and they go to work making predictions in small groups. Later, they help harvest the olives, observe how they are processed, and even help sell them at market. Along the way, they put a variety of math skills to use.

The video left me with many questions about how this ongoing project fits into the school’s overall math curriculum, and how typical this style of teaching is for Moroccan schools (here’s an overview of education in Morocco). I also wonder what equivalent projects teachers in New York City are doing or would like to do, and how they would square with the current standards and curriculum. Math teachers, any thoughts?

An Oscar-nominated take on teaching in NYC, and one of Sidney Poitier’s early films.

A little rock’n'roll as summer comes to a close…

A More Perfect Union from Andrew Sloat on Vimeo.

This moving civics lesson was filmed in the gym at St. Ann’s School, a progressive, private K-12 school in Brooklyn Heights. Enjoy your Fourth of July!