GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The principal of the High School for Environmental Studies prepares to accept a check for her school's science program

On Wednesday, we highlighted seven math and science teachers who received awards for their teaching. They were formally honored on Wednesday night, and yesterday the Fund for the City of New York launched a tour of their schools. We joined the tour’s first day to ask students what qualities make a math or science teacher great.

At Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, juniors and seniors gathered in the library were told that math teacher Kate Belin had won $5,000. Several students whooped with glee and one shouted, “You could go to Africa with that!” Principal Nancy Mann rejected the students’ request to use the school’s $2,500 reward to build a second gym.

Next, at a highly selective school that the Department of Education does not manage, Hunter College High School, members of the math team praised Eliza Kuberska, their Math Team Advisor. Noting that Kuberska exhorts them to “do it for the love of math” and challenges them to tackle problems more complex than most high schoolers typically face, the students brought their teacher to tears.

At the High School for Environmental Studies in Manhattan, it was science teacher Marissa Bellino who made her students cry. Senior Alejandro Vinueza, who has Bellino as his teacher for the third time and traveled with her to Japan to learn about lowering carbon emissions, read a prepared speech but paused shortly after beginning to rub his reddening eyes. “Damn, I’m getting emotional now,” he said. Later, he told me how Bellino inspired him to pursue a science major in college and how she has opened his eyes to environmental awareness. “You know when someone says that they had an experience that changed their life forever? I didn’t believe that could happen until I went to Japan,” Vinueza said.

I asked students from the three high schools what makes for a great math or science teacher. Here’s what they said:

Fannie Lou Hamer receives a framed portrait of math teacher Kate Belin

Good teachers connect:

• “A good teacher understands that every student has their own problems and it takes that one on one interaction, that personal connection, for the students to learn in his or her own way.”
  Tulio Santos, senior, Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School

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At a time when the Obama administration is rewarding efforts to improve math and science instruction, seven city math and science teachers are being lauded for the work they already do.

For the third straight year, the Fund for the City of New York and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation are giving city teachers awards for excellence in teaching science and mathematics. The teachers will receive their prizes — $5,000 each — at an award ceremony tonight and their schools will celebrate the awards, and the $2,500 that their math and science programs receive, at a series of assemblies tomorrow.

The teachers were nominated by students, parents, colleagues, and administrators and then selected by a committee made up of representatives from local science museums and universities, based on their students’ achievement, their involvement in extracurricular activities, and their efforts to promote math and science inside and outside the classroom. The recipients’ high schools range from the city’s highest-performing to some of the weakest, including one that the city is trying to turn around using federal funding.

Here are this year’s recipients, along with a highlight about each that we pulled from longer biographies compiled by the Sloan Awards:

Teacher: Kate Belin
School: Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School
Subject: Geometry, Functions
Why her school thinks she’s great: Belin makes math relevant and interesting for students at Fannie Lou Hamer, where 90 percent of entering freshman are below grade level in math or English, by connecting math to the world outside the classroom. (more…)

When the state announced plans to push back the date of the annual tests, some teachers and administrators bristled. But now the change is complicating a rite of passage: figuring out which students are promoted to the next grade and which are going to summer school.

This year’s delayed testing schedule puts New York City in the awkward position of choosing which students to send to summer school without knowing whether they passed the state’s annual math and English exams. Currently, schools have their students’ raw test scores, but they don’t know whether the scale score passes the official state cut-off for passing, because the state hasn’t set cut-off scores yet.

In response, the city is working with the state to set their own cutoff scores months before the official results come out in August. (more…)

City schoolchildren will need to boost their test-taking endurance before next spring, when students in grades 3 through 8 take two state tests just four school days apart.

A revised exam schedule released by the state today dramatically condenses the testing timeline. It also halves the length of time alloted to scoring, eliciting concern from educators statewide about how schools will manage the new schedule.

The state announced last month that it would be moving state English language arts and math tests, previously given in January and March, closer to the end of the school year. City schools officials said then that they had lobbied for the change but hoped that the two tests would be separated by at least some time.

The schedule released today separates the two tests by just four school days. (more…)

A slide from the state's test score PowerPoint presentation

The results of the 2009 state math test are in, and state officials are welcoming them as a sign of overall, if modest, improvement.

More students across the state in grades 3-8 met the proficiency standards than in the previous four years, with 86.4 percent of them scoring proficient, compared to 80.7 percent last year and just 65 percent in 2006, when the state instituted a new math curriculum. In New York City, the percentage of students that met the state’s proficiency standard jumped to 81.8 percent this year from 74.3 percent in 2008.

Unlike with this year’s reading test scores, the math test scores showed similar increases in the percentage of students testing as proficient or better and the scale scores that students posted. Statewide, scale scores, which are considered the most statistically useful way to evaluate test score gains, rose by six points in 2009. New York City slightly edged out the rest of the state, with an 8-point scale score gain. (more…)

An effort to move state tests later in the year is gaining momentum, following a state Education Department survey that shows wide support among teachers for the change. More than 80 percent of nearly 23,000 parents, teachers, and school administrators the department surveyed this spring said they favor at least some rescheduling of the tests, and the state Board of Regents could implement a change as soon as the 2010-2011 school year, a member said.

Right now, students take English tests in January and math tests in March, but critics have said the timing doesn’t give teachers enough time to bring students up to grade level. The early testing also makes it difficult to use test scores to evaluate teachers’ effectiveness.

The Board of Regents, the state board that sets education policy, requested the survey. Betty Rosa, a Regents member from the Bronx, said that the Regents are likely to propose a change in the timing of tests for the 2010-2011 school year. “All the members have been very, very united on this front,” Rosa said.

Merryl Tisch, the new Regents chancellor, did not return several requests for comment. (more…)

Educators have been worrying about American students’ math performance for decades. 1939 saw the introduction of innovative teaching techniques to some New York City math classrooms: Rather than learning “to compute for the sake of computation,” students learned arithmetic by applying it to baseball statistics, electrical bills, and other real-life situations, “informal, human and vital.”

At the time, some claimed students’ failure in high school math classes could be attributed to Regents exams:

On the high school level, where algebra, geometry, and trigonometry are still rigid, formalized subjects, a 25 percent failure record still exists. Officials have blamed the Regents examinations, in part, for this condition.

The rest of the article is after the jump.

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About one in six secondary school classes in the United States is taught by a teacher who didn’t major in the subject and isn’t certified to teach it, a new report by the Education Trust concludes.

The problem is even worse in schools with a high percentage of poor students, where more than a quarter of classes may be taught by an “out-of-field” teacher. Middle school classes and math classes are also more likely to be taught by less-expert teachers, the report says.

This is worrisome because previous studies have found that secondary school teachers with more expertise in their content area get better results from students — especially in math.

Bringing it closer to home, New York State does better than the national average in making sure that classes are taught by teachers who know their subjects well, according to the Education Trust report.

Still, a look at more recent data shows that although it has narrowed somewhat, a teacher-qualifications gap persists in New York State. (more…)

Marrakesh - olives, by goofball12.

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?

After some back and forth between bloggers and the DOE press office, NYC has released scale scores and standard deviations broken down by race for the past seven years of English Language Arts and Math tests. In Eduwonkette’s analysis, they show that the racial achievement gap in the city has increased during the Bloomberg administration, and in 8th grade ELA, the one area where the gap has decreased, it’s because white and Asian scores have declined.

This note on the spreadsheet, coupled with concerns that the tests may have gotten easier, makes you realize just how tricky it is to get a clear picture of how the kids are doing:

As of 2006 the New York State Education Department expanded the ELA and mathematics testing programs to Grades 3-8. Previously, state tests were administered in Grades 4 and 8 and citywide tests were administered in Grades 3,5, 6, and 7. State tests at Grades 3-8 include both multiple-choice and extended response questions. Citywide tests were composed of multiple-choice questions only. As a result of the changes in the testing program, scale score results from 1999 to 2005 cannot be compared with scale scores from 2006 to 2008 because the state changed the scale scores and its corresponding ranges with the introduction of state tests in ELA and math in grades 3-8.

Personally, I’m hoping for some visuals to help bring the numbers to life… (hint, hint).