GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

It’s been a good year for GothamSchools. (We’ll have more to say about how 2011 treated the New York City schools next week, in our annual end-of-year review.)

Thanks to your support, the scrappy site we started in 2008 is now an institution that thousands of New Yorkers depend on for smart, trustworthy information. We want to keep up the good work in 2012, and also to get even stronger. As always, that will require help from our readers.

And so we’re asking you to consider making a donation to ensure that our reporting only gets stronger in 2012.

Here’s a brief review some of what we were able to do in 2011:

• We informed more than 500,000 people who visited GothamSchools directly. We informed more when our stories got picked up in media outlets, such as the New York Times, the WPIX nightly news, and the national radio show “This American Life.”  (more…)

Readers, we have some questions for you.

Should we export GothamSchools to other cities? Should we do more coverage out of Albany? Is the comments section a welcome forum for honest conversation and real accountability — or did reading that description make you laugh out loud? What about the Community section?

These questions and more are part of a new survey that we’d love for you to take. The survey, meantime, is part of our ongoing efforts to keep GothamSchools alive and well. Lately, we’ve been working with a partner in that endeavor: EdNews Colorado, a news site covering education in Colorado (think RockyMountainSchools-dot-org), and this survey is one of our joint efforts.

We believe strongly that we should not have any beliefs about education (and indeed, the last time we surveyed you, we found that a majority of you agree with us that we have succeeded at being objective). But the one belief that we and EdNews unashamedly share is that successful school improvement efforts will require high-quality, independent journalism. And we know that far too little such journalism exists today. But we need your help figuring out how to build up education’s Fourth Estate.

Please take the survey, and leave any other thoughts (as always) in the comments section.

Among the many changes going on in the New York City school world are some incredibly small (but significant!) ones here at GothamSchools.

From new guidelines for commenting to a Community section submission policy to bios of our new staff members, all the changes are aimed at having a more productive, transparent conversation.

You can find everything on our new “About” page, which we just updated. Among the new information:

• Biographies of the fantastic new staff members whose stories have populated GothamSchools in recent weeks. Meet reporter Geoffrey Decker and contributors Chris Arp and Sarah Darville.
• Explanations of how we put together our daily Rise & Shine and Remainders posts — and information about how to help us with them.
• Guidelines for commenters, which incorporate suggestions our readers made when we first proposed a comments policy in January.
• A submissions policy for the Community section, for the first time ever. Here’s how to contribute your voice: (more…)

Our comments section is about to get a little bit nicer.

Our comments section has its moments of glory, instances of brave citizens discoursing civilly despite a national education debate dominated by divisive misconceptions.

But too often, it’s ugly down there. Too often, comments include personal attacks and deliberate deceptions.

And so we embark on a niceness campaign. Down the road, we are open to making more major changes, such as asking commenters to log in with a registered verified identity or creating a community policing system where other commenters can vote comments up or down a la Gawker.

Another idea is to change the structure so you can respond right underneath other readers’ postings and flag comments you find inappropriate. We hope you will share more ideas.

For now, we have drafted a recommended list of principles to govern our most basic (and, at present, only) moderation decision: Do we allow a comment to be published, or do we delete it? (Right now, given our editorial capacity, every comment that the WordPress computers don’t flag as possible spam is published immediately by default. For more on the spam catchers, see #4 below.)

Most of these principles we already follow in an ad hoc way, but we want to codify them. The list is below. Please share your feedback. Once we’ve got something we all like — or at least, most of us like — we’ll publish it permanently on the site.

Draft GothamSchools Community Policy

We encourage vigorous debate and welcome constructive criticism of our coverage. However, we do reserve the right to moderate these discussions and occasionally will delete comments that violate our community policy.

1. No obscenity, vulgarity, profanity, racism or sexism. If you think something might cross the line, it probably does. Disagreement with people’s arguments is fine, but personal attacks — including on other commenters and GothamSchools writers and editors — will not be tolerated. We tend to agree with Jon Stewart that Nazi analogies are rarely appropriate. We reserve the right to judge what crosses the line. (more…)

We have the most devoted, party-happy readers. All the slots for our party next Wednesday have been filled!

So we’re no longer selling tickets, but you can still get involved. We’re looking for a small team of volunteers to help out with logistics like greeting guests, taking coats, and accepting donations. We’ll cycle you between tasks so that you also get a chance to mingle, eat, and visit the bar.

If you can’t come but would like to make a donation, please do so here. Don’t forget that, thanks to a challenge grant from a generous donor, every dollar we raise right now will be fully matched.

To sign up to volunteer, please e-mail our intern extraordinaire Kate Schimel at kschimel@gothamschools.org.

An excerpt from our report summarizing the results of our reader survey.

Most of you, dear readers, don’t fall neatly into either the Joel Klein or the Diane Ravitch camps on education, and even more of you don’t find GothamSchools ideological. (Phew! Not being ideological is our goal.)

These are among the findings of our first-ever nonscientific reader survey. You can read our full breakdown in this report.

Our aim is to use the survey findings as fuel for self-improvement. For instance, there seems to be something going on with the comments section.

On one hand, almost 30 percent of responders described the comments section as “very useful,” and a strong 41 percent of respondents reported commenting “every so often.” Among the silent readers, a few reported keeping quiet despite using the comments to shape an opinion. ”I visit Gotham to learn from others,” one wrote.

But most of the responders who didn’t comment said it was because of the tone of the comments that are posted. These people peppered their feedback with words like “vitriol” and “offensive.” “I love Gotham Schools but the commenters are nasty!” one wrote. “I’d never want to enter into that fray!”

A few more responses along those lines:

I find the comments are generally people with overly opinionated, yet unsubstantiated views that they want desperately to share but have nobody willing to listen.

I stopped. The comment section has deteriorated from thoughtful commentary to an arena of hysterics, mudslinging, and proselytizing. It degraded from NYT comments to Daily News comments.

Not a good forum for productive conversation–talking at people, not with them (more…)

Our amazing jobs board launched today. Peruse, post, and then send us feedback.

After encouragement from many readers (maybe you were one), we have launched a jobs board.

We hope this will be a great place to target job postings to the most intelligent, capable education workers in America — okay, at least New York City. And I won’t lie: We also hope that the jobs board can eventually help us pay the bills.

Right now you can post a job for $0 — as long as you grab one of the first 40 slots. (We did an early announcement on Twitter, so 10 of these slots are already taken.)

Also, big props to our industrious web developer Chris Abraham, who managed this project. Chris asks that you keep us all honest by reporting all feedback. What features do you want more of? What isn’t working? Send feedback to tips.

While the school system limps toward a new governance structure, we at GothamSchools are shaking things up, too. To mark our first anniversary, we’re adding new staff (have you noticed those shiny new bylines?), excessing old ones, paying the bills in a new way, and changing up our content delivery model. We also plan to throw a party, at which we hope you’ll help us celebrate our continued existence despite the tough times.

Finally — permit one more forced parallel? — this post marks a new era of transparency and reader input, because we are both telling you all about the changes and asking for your help in pulling them off.

Please begin by enjoying our revised design, in which we distinguish between shorter dispatches and full-blown, robustly reported daily news stories. The shorter dispatches are indented and touched off by arrows, as in the post below this one. The stories are in the same maroon-headed format that you’re used to seeing blog posts.

The goal is to hold ourselves to an even higher standard, truth-telling-wise, while still keeping you up to date on the minutiae of school news (who just went wild at a City Council hearing, what article we just read and recommend, a deep thought, a breaking news item). (more…)

We’ve said in the past that our long-term plan is to expand our Community section to include more voices. Today we’re taking a step in that direction with a contribution from Pedro Noguera, the New York University professor and co-chair of the Broader, Bolder project (the one that clashes with Rev. Al Sharpton and Chancellor Joel Klein’s Education Equality Project).

Noguera argues that David Brooks’ recent New York Times column on the Harlem Children’s Zone drew the wrong conclusion:

In most cases, these schools succeed not because they impart middle class values, (there is very little evidence that the middle class is the only group that values hard work and courteous behavior) but because of high academic expectations and a clear, coherent approach to educating children. Most importantly, these schools succeed because they also address social, health and psychological needs of the children and families they serve.

Read Noguera’s full commentary here. And please feel free to send your own commentaries. We’re building the Community section up slowly, but we are building it up.

GothamSchools' new Community section.

In time for Valentine’s Day, we’re getting a little makeover! You can find the changes both above, on the new tab called Community, and below, in the comments section. Both changes are designed to give more voice to you, our impressive and awesome readers.

In the Community section, we’re publishing voices other than our own, so that now we offer not just reporting but informed opinions, commentary, and pictures from inside schools. We have three Community posters to start: Aaron Pallas is a professor at Columbia Teachers College who also blogged with Eduwonkette under the name “skoolboy.” Jason Levy is an educator with 16 years of experience who is now the principal at CIS 339 in the Bronx, an innovative school that I profiled in the Village Voice. He blogs here, and we’ll be cross-posting with that site. Ken Hirsh is an education philanthropist and advocate who holds famous barbecues. He just started a blog with which we’ll be cross-posting.

For now, we’re starting with just these three white guys, but we plan to expand. Send us recommendations if you know someone whose insights ought to be aired.

The changes in the comments section give readers more of an identity. We’re asking every commenter to define him or herself by one of six roles: citizen, parent, student, teacher, principal, and wonk. (All comments made prior to now are being retroactively categorized as “citizen.”) We’re also now using avatars, images that represent who you are. Sign up for one here; if you use the same e-mail address at the Gravatar site and when posting at ours, the image you upload will appear. We don’t want to force anonymous people to unmask themselves, but we think knowing a little more information will enrich the conversation.

Please let us know what you think of the changes. As a reminder, our e-mail addresses are listed here. Braver and bolder folks, leave a comment!