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Joining State Senator Velmanette Montgomery (center) are four students from Bard Early College High School (from left: Daphney Sanchez, Aishah Scott, Dwight Hodgson, and Lenina Mortimer). Behind them is Martha Olson, Dean of Administration.

Students taking part in new early college high school programs got a glimpse of their future yesterday at Long Island University’s Kumbel Theater and liked what they saw.

Staring back up at them were four success stories who graduated from one of the city’s first early college schools, Bard High School Early College in Manhattan: an admissions coordinator, a doctoral candidate in political science, a bioengineering student, and a multimedia producer.

“It’s one of those things that doesn’t make sense to you right now and that’s fine,” said Dwight Hodgson, who started at BHSEC when it opened in 2001. He is now back at his high school as an admission coordinator. “But there’s going to come a time very shortly where you’re going to sit back and say, ‘Wow, that was a life-changing experience.’”

Hodgson was speaking to new students in four early college programs crafted in BHSEC’s mold as part of the Smart Scholars Early College High School program, a state initiative to bolster partnerships between high schools and colleges.

Bard and City Polytechnic High School of Engineering, Architecture, and Technology, which has a relationship with New York City College of Technology, became the city’s first Smart Scholars schools in 2010 and this year they were joined by three other schools: Boys and Girls High School (with L.I.U.), Medgar Evers College Preparatory School (with Medgar Evers College), and Pathways in Technology Early College High School, or P-TECH, (with NYC College of Technology).

Each school is getting more than $400,000 from the state and the Gates Foundation, which provided the original Smart Scholars grant in 2009. The Smart Scholars initiative aims to bring the early college model, in which students take college courses while they’re still enrolled in high school, to low-income and minority students. (more…)

A Bank of America employee, a fashion industry veteran, and a 311 operator are among the newest additions to the city’s teaching corps.

They are among 26 people being eased into the classroom through a new city program designed to train – and retain – high-quality teachers specifically for the city’s worst-performing schools.

Launched with little fanfare this summer, the NYC Teaching Residency for School Turnaround is the city’s latest effort to attract talent using an alternative certification program. But unlike the city’s NYC Teaching Fellows program, the residency isn’t throwing its trainees straight into the classroom. Nor is it quickly relieving them from their obligation to the city.

Instead, the program requires them to make a lengthier commitment, but only after they’ve spent a year working as assistants to in the classroom.

The teachers-in-training have been dispersed into two schools undergoing federally-funded “transformation” — Queens Vocational and Technical High School and J.H.S. 22 Jordan L. Mott — and are part of an experimental effort to overhaul schools deemed “persistently low-achieving” by the state.

Borrowing heavily from models that preceeded it in recent years, the program comes amid a growing nationwide focus on improving both the teacher quality and retention rates in high-needs urban schools. (more…)