GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Teachers from Grady High School during a rally outside the Brighton Beach school on Wednesday.

Students and teachers at William Grady Career and Technical High School aren’t waiting until next month’s closure hearing to share what they think of the city’s plan to close the school this summer.

Students organized a week of protest last month, and teachers joined them with a rally and candlelight visit outside the school on Wednesday. Evelyn Katz, an English teacher, said teachers began the rally just after school let out at 3:09 p.m. and were joined at 5 p.m. by students who had stayed late for tutoring.

The rally came just hours after the school received a visit from a top state official whose assessment could influence whether State Education Commissioner John King endorses the city’s “turnaround” plan.

Multiple people who work at the school said Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the Board of Regents, spent several hours at Grady Wednesday morning. They said she toured the school’s vocational shops, which include culinary arts and automotive repair. (more…)

Student activists call for a greater focus on college readiness in city schools during a rally today.

For some city teachers and students, the big news this week wasn’t the release of teachers’ ratings but a slew of new policies meant to crack down on graduation rate inflation.

The new policies, which follow an audit that found errors and evidence of possible cheating at dozens of schools, change the way high school exams will be graded and limit the number of failed courses students can make up without repeating the class.

Today, high school students said tougher expectations are a good thing — as long as they are coupled with more support for schools.

The students were holding a rally and panel discussion at New York University Friday afternoon to draw attention to a campaign, spearheaded by City Councilmen Ydanis Rodriguez and Robert Jackson, and several advocacy groups including the Urban Youth Collaborative and the Coalition for Educational Justice.

For years, students affiliated with those groups have been urging the city to fund “success centers” inside schools where teens could get help preparing for college. And in 2009, CEJ began calling attention to a potential “looming crisis” posed by the state’s increasingly tough graduation standards  — something a top Department of Education official told GothamSchools this week threatens to roll back graduation rates far more than the policy changes.

The students I spoke to had not heard yet about new policies, which the department announced Thursday, and did not know how their schools might be affected.

But one said some of the city’s new policies could hurt school graduation rates in the short run by making it more difficult for students to make up credits for courses they failed. (more…)

The Department of Education is looking within itself for help creating instructional materials to go along with new curriculum standards.

The city is hiring 30 to 40 teachers and administrators with experience in curriculum development to devise literacy and math lessons that are aligned with the Common Core, the curriculum standards the state adopted this year. The “Common Core fellows” will serve as “a class of leaders,” evaluating current teaching methods and writing new instructional materials for schools to use, according to DOE spokesman Matthew Mittenthal.

The teachers who are selected will also get authorship credit when they produce new materials and overtime pay for attending workshops twice a month and during school breaks, according to a brochure soliciting applications. The program’s quarter-million-dollar price tag is being footed privately, Mittenthal said.

The department will also invite local and national curriculum experts who devised and studied the Common Core, which begins in preschool, to train the teachers on how to evaluate student work and devise good instructional practices, he said.

“The final product will be a portfolio of resources for all New York City public schools: tasks for students, best teaching practices, guidelines for evaluating a classroom, and sample student work,” Mittenthal said in an email.

Bernard Gassaway, the principal of Boys and Girls High School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, said he is not sure how useful those materials would be for his teachers. The main resource he needs to align instruction to the Common Core, he said, is on-the-ground assistance and time to integrate the standards slowly. (more…)