GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Bolstered by the city’s unflinching plan to close John Dewey High School this June, students from the South Brooklyn campus added a walk-out to their growing resumé of protest actions this afternoon. (more…)

Most eighth-graders at the Bronx’s P.S./I.S. 218 tore their high school admissions envelopes open well before dismissal on Thursday. But a small group waited patiently until 2:30 p.m. to find out their fates.

The holdouts were about 20 participants in an after-school program that had coached them through the admissions process. They gathered in the library after school for a letter-opening ceremony with the staff of Project STEP (Students Toward Educational Promise). (more…)

A disagreement over how to protest last night’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting spilled onto the sidewalk less than two hours before the event started.

In the video above, Brian Jones, a teacher activist affiliated with the Grassroots Education Movement makes a last-ditch effort to form a unified front with the teachers union against the city’s policy of closing schools. He confronted Leo Casey, a vice president in the United Federation of Teachers and asked him why the union had refused to join his group.

The UFT planned to hold their own policy meeting at a school down the road and said they would not even attend the PEP. GEM, on the other hand, was joining a larger protest that included Occupy DOE factions and students organized by the Coalition for Educational Justice. The plan was to remain in the Brooklyn Tech auditorium for the event’s entirety and disrupt it through the ‘people’s mic.’

“All of your allies are coming to our plan, so what’s the point sticking to [your plan]?” Jones asked Casey, as dozens of protesters behind him began chanting that they would not walk out. “The NAACP is going to be inside with us. Why are you going to be outside?” (more…)

Students criticized the city’s plan to relocate Cambria Heights Academy in a video published Thursday, saying “We are very comfortable to continue to grow our school here, in our home district.”

Under the plan, the high school would move from its spot on 91st Avenue in Queens’s District 29 to Junior High School 72 in District 28 in June. The schools are roughly three miles apart, and some students say the change would double or triple their commute times.

At a Parents Advisory Board meeting last week, parents and students said they worried the new location, which CHA would share with a middle school, would be unsafe, too far to travel to, and too crowded. DOE officials said the school may have no choice but to move because the city’s lease is up at the current building, which once housed a Catholic school.

In October, we reported that students at the iSchool had won a contest to have the surfaces of their school — walls, halls, and even tables — turned into interactive whiteboards.

Now, the glossy white paint is up, and the company that ran the contest, IdeaPaint, documented the process in this video.

Here’s how a teacher told us the paint job would influence learning at the school:

Christina Jenkins, an iSchool teacher who bought IdeaPaint for her classroom with donations last year, said the temporary nature of whiteboard writing encourages ideas to flow more readily. For students who might worry about making mistakes, “paper can be more intimidating,” she said, pointing to a wall in her room where students had jotted down ideas for their senior projects.

“I was raised on TV / Movies and magazines / Mama told me to believe/ I could be everything …”

That’s the opening verse to “Where Does the Time Go?,” a song co-written by 10 students at East Fordham Academy for the Arts in the Bronx. Fueled by coffee and nerves, the students, all middle school girls, took turns crooning into microphones at a recording studio in SoHo this afternoon.

According to sixth-grader Katherine Ocasio, the song is about their expectations for the future.

“It’s about how we feel and what we want to do,” she said. Each student was paired with a lyric about how they might envision a satisfying life to sing for the recording. “What I said was, ‘maybe I’d live in Paris.’”

When it was her turn to step into the recording booth and sing that line, Ocasio’s heart started to beat a little faster. She remembered her music teacher Zach Rifkind’s advice — keep your shoulders pulled back, and breathe from the diaphragm. (more…)

Watch the full episode. See more Metrofocus.

We’ve written about two interesting exchanges during Thursday’s “On Education” panel discussion, but there were many more over the course of the discussion’s 102 minutes. Now you can watch them all — at least until Hurricane Irene cuts your power out.

Of particular note: Prospective mayoral candidate William Thompson’s prognosis on teachers contract negotiations (starting at 27:40); Success Charter Network CEO Eva Moskowitz on her efforts to deal with “the burnout factor,” which include giving teachers 11 weeks of paid vacation (36:55); Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch decrying exaggeration in the city’s claims of improvement (1:09:00); and UFT Vice-President Leo Casey and Moskowitz debating whether schools should be run like businesses (1:12:00).

Manhattan Media organized the discussion, and City Hall News and GothamSchools moderated it. The video is provided by Metrofocus, a new project of WNET.

Fifth graders in P.S. 22′s famous chorus have been asked to sing at the Academy Awards next year.

Actress Anne Hathaway, who is co-hosting the ceremony, visited the students at their Winter Concert last night to deliver the invitation in person. The students are, naturally, delighted. They just about die with excitement. They’re also singing at DOE headquarters this afternoon for Chancellor Joel Klein’s goodbye party. Last January, the chorus sang Jay-Z’s “Run this Town” at Mayor Bloomberg’s inauguration.

You might want to turn down the volume before listening.

Some of the chorus’s hits: (more…)

I confess: I’m gripped by whether the fictional McKinley High School glee club will win regionals. But right now I also love a short documentary that finds a similar real-life drama closer to home — will Brooklyn Tech’s girls step team ever win a competition?

“Step Brooklyn” follows the high school team through the 2008-09 school year as steppers audition, balance rehearsals with heavy course-loads, and try to win for the first time in years. It’s fascinating, and it’s currently up for a Webby award. (Full disclosure: “Step Brooklyn” was produced by three former classmates of mine, so I’m partial.)

Here’s a teaser from the documentary. You can watch the full half-hour video here.

Last month, New York’s Race to the Top delegation traveled to Washington, D.C. to pitch its case for why the state deserved a slice of the $4.3 billion competitive federal grant pool. We already know the result, of course: New York was second-to-last among finalists, and was one of just three states that lost points after the interview round.

But today the U.S. Department of Education posted full videos of the presentation and the subsequent question-and-answer session, so we can now see precisely how the judges framed their questions and how the state defended itself. Many of the judges’ concerns are likely to drive how the state revises its application for the next round of competition. (more…)