GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

If the people on a panel Tuesday about teacher preparation didn’t convey the urgency they felt about improving teacher training, then a flash poll of the audience surely did.

More than two-thirds of the audience, made up primarily of young teachers, said they didn’t think their masters degrees had made them better at their jobs, according to electronic votes that were tallied in real time.

With that context, a five-member panel of advocates for alternative certification and training dove into a 90-minute discussion about how traditional theory-driven teacher training had failed the profession, particularly in high-needs urban schools. Research has shown that having a masters degree does not make teachers more effective, and local, state, and federal efforts are underway to re-imagine how teachers are trained.

Panelists largely agreed that many traditional education schools lack accountability, aren’t willing to share performance data for their graduates, and have a detached relationship with the public schools where their graduates eventually work.

“For too long schools of [education] have sat back and spun out academic theories of what should work in the ideal school with the ideal conditions,” said a panelist, Bob Hughes, president of the nonprofit New Visions for Public Schools, which trains and certifies teachers and operates 99 schools in New York City. “And they’ve been divorced from the reality of what happens in schools .” (more…)

Walee Ahmed says he is motivated by a love of learning.

The claim might sound like a stretch coming from a 18-year-old high school student in the midst of preparing for SAT subject tests and Advanced Placement courses. But Ahmed has interests that span far beyond the classroom.

This summer, Ahmed has his sights set on launching a technology blog that focuses on open-source programming. “Look at Firefox, where you had a ton of people working because they had passion,” he said, referring to the popular open-source web browser. “If you work for passion, it adds another level of sincerity to what you are doing.”

Ahmed’s passion has taken him to the top of his class at Hillcrest High School in Queens, where he will be a senior — taking four AP courses — in September. New Visions, the network that works with Hillcrest, recognized Ahmed by supporting his bid for the prestigious Annenberg Scholarship, which will provide a full ride to the college of his choice. (Last year’s winner, Karina Melendez, is headed to Columbia University this fall.)

Ahmed attributes his success in part to a habit of hard work that he learned in British-style schools in Bangladesh, where he lived until 2009. But in conversation it becomes immediately clear that Ahmed is motivated, above all else, by a wide-ranging curiosity. (more…)

New York State’s Board of Regents approved 15 new charter schools today that will open in New York City in the fall of next year.

Ten of those schools were authorized by the State University of New York’s Charter School Institute back in September and the remaining five were authorized today by the Board of Regents. The board also approved charters for three schools that will open in Mount Vernon, Rochester, and East Irondequoit.

Among the charter schools approved today is the New York City Montessori Charter School, the city’s first public Montessori school. Also on the list is Launch Expeditionary Learning Charter School, the first charter school opened by the Expeditionary Learning network in the city. Expeditionary Learning currently oversees ten district schools in New York.

The two charter schools that New Visions is opening in the South Bronx are the only typical four-year high schools in the group. Launch Expeditionary Learning Charter School will, at full size, be a 6-12 school, and the Urban Dove Charter School will admit students who are ages 16-18 regardless of what grade they’re in. (more…)

The city’s Department of Education, Teach for America and several city charter school management companies are angling for federal money designed to encourage cutting-edge educational strategies.

They’re among 145 New York State-based entities that applied for grants under a new federal program known as the Investing in Innovation Fund, or “i3.” Details about the 1,698 applications submitted last month went online yesterday.

Here’s a snapshot of some of the ways local groups are hoping to cash in:

• The city is asking for $40 million to open 150 new small middle and high schools in the next five years.
• The city also asked for $5 million to grow the School of One technology program and $4.5 million to boost the arts in special education schools.
• Other groups angling to open new schools include Eva Moskowitz’s Harlem Success charter network, which is seeking $25 million to open 13 in the next five years, and New Visions for Public Schools, which wants $26 million to create charter schools that serve 10,000 city students. (more…)

Karina Melendez, 17, junior at Bronx High School for Law and Finance

This is the second in a series of profiles of college-bound student recipients of scholarships administered by New Visions for Public Schools.

Last month, the principal of the Bronx School of Law and Finance, Evan Schwartz, called junior Karina Melendez to his office, but he didn’t tell her why.

Schwartz had a happy surprise, something that Melendez had long stopped expecting. She had survived bone cancer, homelessness, and foster care all before the age of eighteen, and so had trained herself to anticipate the worst.

“There was this fear and angst in her face” as she walked into Schwartz’s office, recalled Eva Lopez, a lawyer and Melendez’s mentor, who had been invited to the school for the reveal.

But when Melendez saw Schwartz, Lopez, her foster mother, and others who had gathered to celebrate her, with flowers waiting on the table, she was confused.  “Well, I know they didn’t get me that as a sorry gift,” she later remembered thinking. “What’s going on?”

As the news sunk in that she had won a full ride to the college of her choice, Melendez also realized that after years of misfortune, things were turning her way. “This changes everything,” she told the gathered crowd.

Listen to Melendez discuss how she overcame cancer and homelessness to land at the top of her class.

(more…)

Sharmin Mollick, a senior at Marble Hill High School for International Studies, works on a physics problem.

This is the first in a series of profiles of college-bound student recipients of scholarships administered by New Visions for Public Schools.

All it would take to keep Sharmin Mollick happy for life, it seems, is a good science laboratory.

Mollick’s school, the Marble Hill High School for International Studies, doesn’t have a fully-equipped lab. But for Mollick, even studying science publicly, in the daylight, has been a luxury.

That will change this fall, when 18-year-old Mollick heads to Cornell University to study biochemistry.

Listen to Sharmin Mollick discuss her studies and goals.

Mollick left Bangladesh with her mother and brother at 14, in part to avoid a marriage she said members of her extended family were trying to arrange for her. Like many Bangladeshi girls, Mollick attended primary school but was forced to drop out after seventh grade. (more…)

New York City has launched an experimental model of teacher training that pairs inexperienced newcomers to the city’s schools with seasoned pros.

Developed by Hunter College, New Visions for Public Schools, and the Department of Education, the Urban Teacher Residency program aims to give new teachers the skills they’ll need to manage classrooms full of high-needs students. It also coaches them along as they do. Residents spend four days a week in their classrooms and the fifth at the Hunter College School of Education, taking courses intended to make education theory practical.

Danielle Ruggiero, a mentor teacher, said she showed up at Hillcrest High School in Jamaica, Queens, six years ago, armed with a degree that taught her much about the theory of education but glossed over many of the practical concerns she faced on her first day.

“When I first started teaching, I was thrown into a class of 38 kids who were all behind in their reading skills and I was this 22-year-old,” she said. “You’ve got to get on-the-ball really quickly.” (more…)

For years, one pesky paper has stalked David Steiner, the man elected New York’s education commissioner this morning. The paper, published in 2003, while he was a professor at Boston University, attacked education graduate schools as intellectually weak and ideologically slanted, marking Steiner as a brave “maverick” among those critical of traditional teacher education — and enemy no. 1 among those who defend it.

Steiner, who was raised in England but was born in America and spent one year at P.S. 41 on West 11th Street, has shrugged off the to-do in the years since. He kept a reasonably modest profile as dean of CUNY’s Hunter College School of Education for the last four years. In conversations, he calmly insists that there is a middle ground in the fierce debate about how to improve public schools.

But the paper that marked him also foreshadows some of the innovations he has tested out at Hunter and the thinking he might bring to the state Education Department, where he is set to become commissioner Oct. 1, replacing Richard Mills, who announced his intention to retire last year. Mills had served in the position since 1995.

The position means Steiner will run the state Education Department, the large bureaucratic organization that enacts education policy set by the state Board of Regents and oversees both universities and public primary schools. (more…)

The organizations that schools can choose to affiliate with for bureaucratic support, like New Visions for Public Schools, the Knowledge Network, and the Empowerment network, are being graded this month for their effectiveness. The Department of Education’s accountability office is writing the grades of the “school support organizations,” and Chief Schools Officer Eric Nadelstern said the outcome will eventually be made public.

“It will definitely be public before schools have to make the selection as to which SSO they want to affiliate with next year, so that parents and teachers and principals can make that decision on the basis of all sorts of factors,” Nadelstern said yesterday.

The school support organizations were created last year as part of an overhaul of the school system’s bureaucracy. Rather than being forced to report to the superintendent in their neighborhood, schools can shop around among a set of support organizations to decide which bureaucracy they prefer.

This is the first year that the support organizations will be graded, since they’ve now amassed a year’s worth of a track record in student test scores. Nadelstern said that the accountability office, headed up by Columbia law professor Jim Liebman, is basing its grades on both schools’ progress report cards and on their quality reviews, written reports about schools based on in-person interviews and observations.

The report cards have come under heavy criticism for being statistically problematic, if not meaningless. (more…)

Eric Nadelstern will take on expanded duties. (Via Cody Castro)

A top schools official who spearheaded the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to allow private control of some public schools is leaving the Department of Education, in a reorganization that could save the department a significant amount of money — and might or might not signal a new direction for the school system. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced the change to school leaders in a conference call this morning.

The official, JoEllen Lynch, oversaw the department’s transition to allowing schools to affiliate with private management groups like New Visions for Public Schools and CEI-PEA, in lieu of the traditional bureaucracy. The groups, known as PSO’s, were the closest that the Bloomberg administration came to emulating other urban school systems’ privatization efforts, like one in Philadelphia where for-profit management groups competed for control of public schools. Lynch’s office will be headed by another top schools official, Eric Nadelstern, who will maintain his current portfolio of schools affiliated with the Empowerment network.

The reshuffling elevates Nadelstern’s position in the department, a promotion that could elevate his gadfly ideas, too. Officials are selling the change as a way to cut costs amid ballooning concerns about the city’s fiscal prognosis. But some people who work at PSO’s are worrying the change could also be a signal that PSO’s days are numbered, and that the Empowerment network Nadelstern champions as a very lean way to run public schools will overtake them. (more…)