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Pedro Noguera and Karen Sprowal talk after the "Miseducation Nation" panel ended.

Panel members at an event critiquing current school reform policies last night criticized  testing, large classes, and charter schools — and also a university professor sharing the stage with them.

More than 100 people filled a school auditorium in Manhattan to attend the four-member “Miseducation Nation” panel, which was convened in response to – and got its mocking namesake from – NBC’s “Education Nation” summit, a two-day event that wrapped up earlier that day at Rockefeller Center.

Pedro Noguera, an NYU professor who studies urban education, was invited to speak on the panel and for most of the evening, he was on the same page as his fellow panelists, historian Diane Ravitch, Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters, and teacher Brian Jones of the Grassroots Education Movement. They all criticized policymakers for adopting reform ideas that they said were not working – and ignoring alternative ones, such as smaller class sizes and culturally-relevant curriculum, that they said would improve schools.

The panel also criticized the media coverage, which they characterized as biased toward current reform policies. The event was hosted by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, a national media advocacy group. ”We feel beleaguered and we feel there is only one story told repeatedly in the mainstream media,” Haimson said.

More than 100 people, many of which were teachers and parents, packed into the auditorium at P.S. 66 School of the Future.

When moderator Laura Flanders opened up questioning to the audience, criticism quickly turned on Noguera, a board member of the SUNY Charter School Institute, which oversees many of New York City’s most prominent charter schools.

Veteran teacher Michael Fiorillo first brought up the subject when he asked Noguera to explain how he could support opening charter schools, while at the same time being such a vocal opponent of closing the ones that they replace. (more…)

In his first major policy speech, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott called for major changes to the ctiy's worst middle schools.

To shake middle schools from mediocrity, the city is turning to school reform strategies it considers tried and true.

In the next two years, the Department of Education will close low-performing middle schools, open brand-new ones, add more charter schools, and push more teachers and principals through in-house leadership programs, Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced today in a 30-minute policy speech, the first of his six-month tenure.

For 10 schools, the city will ask for $30 million in federal funds to try a new reform strategy set out by the federal government, “turnaround,” in which at least half of staff members are replaced, Walcott said.

The efforts—which the city plans to pay for with a mixture of state and federal funds—are meant to boost middle school scores that are low and, in the case of reading, actually falling.

“People have tried and struggled with the complicated nature of middle schools for decades,” he said. “But the plan I’ve laid out is bolder and more focused than anything we’ve tried here in New York City before.”

Experts and advocates who helped engineer the last major effort to overhaul middle schools, a City Council task force that produced recommendations but short-lived changes at the DOE in 2007, disputed Walcott’s characterization. They said Walcott’s announcement reflects a change in style but not substance.

“Much of what he said is not new,” said Carol Boyd, a parent leader with the Coalition for Educational Justice, which has long urged more attention for middle schools. ”There is a definite party line, except Joel [Klein] wasn’t able to deliver it with the same believability that Chancellor Walcott does,” she said. Boyd sat on the task force.

“There’s nothing new [or] interesting about this plan,” said Pedro Noguera, the New York University professor who chaired the council’s task force and has spoken out against school closures. “It sounds like more of what they’ve been doing, shutting down failing schools.” (more…)

Since becoming chancellor in April, Dennis Walcott has made many public appearances but few policy pronouncements.

That’s set to change tomorrow morning, when Walcott is set to deliver the first policy address of his tenure, a speech at New York University titled “Why We Can’t Rest: How To Move the Middle.”

The city is mum on what exactly the speech will be about, but it’s clear that Walcott has spent some time talking about middle schools in the last week. On Thursday, he met with roughly a dozen principals of high-scoring middle schools — both district-run and charter — to ask them a question that has long bedeviled educators and policymakers: How to curb the performance drop-off that takes place after students leave elementary school.

The 2011 state test scores released last month told a familiar story: Middle school students scored proficient at a far lower rate than students in the elementary grades.

“We still need to increase our focus on those years,” Walcott said at the time.

It wouldn’t be the first time that the city has made improving middle schools a priority.  (more…)

Last December, Community Board 12’s executive committee was discussing charter schools when committee members realized something: There were almost as many different perceptions of  charter schools as there were people in the room.

This epiphany, recalled board chair Pamela Palanque-North, was the inspiration for a forum the board held Saturday to give Washington Heights residents the basic facts about charter schools.

“This is an opportunity for us to have something called an educational intervention,” Palanque-North said in her opening remarks at the forum, titled “Our Children, Our Choices: An Informative Discussion on Public and Charter School Options.” About 35 neighborhood residents attended the event, which was organized by the board’s youth and education committee and translated live into Spanish.

The panel included charter school advocates and also critics, such as sociologist Pedro Noguera and the public school teacher who directed a new movie that takes aim at the idea that charter schools can fix all educational ills.

But perhaps as notable as who sat on the panel was who did not: a representative from the city Department of Education. Community Board 12 had advertised that Chancellor Dennis Walcott would speak on the morning’s first panel, although DOE officials said Walcott had never agreed to appear. (more…)

When singer John Legend agreed to talk on a Teach for America panel about his views on education, he probably thought he’d get a warm reception. After all, he supports charter schools, a longer school day, and vigorous standardized testing, all policies championed by the education reform movement Teach for America helped fuel.

But things didn’t go his way last night.

One of six panelists at the event, “Men of Color and Education: A Discussion on the Pursuit of Excellence,” Legend met with more criticism and more boos than he’d bargained for. At first, the audience of mostly black and Latino teachers — most of them TFA members — praised Legend’s support for putting good teachers in front of high-need students, but the cheers soon turned to boos when he advocated for testing. (more…)

The city’s drive to open new small high schools has taken a serious toll on older, larger schools, and there are signs that the new schools’ success could be short-lived, according to a report being released today.

The report, an analysis of the small schools bonanza by the Center for New York City Affairs, concludes that the city must do more to support large high schools, which continue to enroll the vast majority of city high school students despite the proliferation of small schools, and which are straining under the burden of enrolling the system’s neediest students. 

At the core of the report is the finding that as small schools opened, large schools nearby suffered huge jumps in enrollment, especially among low-performing students and students with special needs. Those schools have seen attendance decline, disorder increase, and graduation rates drop, according to the report. In some places, these shifts have caused the city to restructure the newly troubled large schools, displacing at-risk students once again, the report concludes.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein told researchers that he understands that his strategy of closing low-performing schools and replacing them with new options could inflict some collateral damage on large high schools. “This is about improving the system, not necessarily about improving every single school,” he said about the strategy at the center of his reforms since he took office in 2003.

The report backs up the city’s claim that the small schools graduate their students in higher numbers, but it raises questions about how long the schools can sustain their success. (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.

Elizabeth reported yesterday about a conversation she had with NYU professor Pedro Noguera about PS 28, a Brooklyn school that he said is succeeding despite serving a challenging set of students. In that conversation, Noguera objected to what he said is the commonly held idea that “the KIPP way” is the only way to run an urban public school.

Today, after reading comments defending the KIPP charter schools, Noguera clarified his objection in an e-mail to GothamSchools:

I support KIPP, Achieve[ment] First and any school — charter, private or traditional public — that serves children, especially poor children well. However, I reject the notion that there’s one way to educate poor kids or the idea put forward by David Whitman that you must treat their culture as a problem. I also reject the idea that schools should focus narrowly on achievement and ignore the other needs — social, emotional, etc. PS 28 does it all with a high-need population and even though children do not walk the halls in silence they still receive a good education. 

In his 2008 book, “Sweating the Small Stuff,” David Whitman lauded what he termed “the new paternalism” in urban education: The trend of highly structured schools, such as the KIPP charter schools, teaching not only academic content but a way of behaving that Whitman says represents “traditional, middle-class values.”

Pedro Noguera and Joel Klein appeared at a panel together last month about the achievement gap, sponsored by Channel 13. (GothamSchools)

Pedro Noguera, the NYU professor and all-around authority on urban schools, had lunch with Chancellor Joel Klein the other day. The two aren’t natural candidates for a lunch date: Noguera is a co-founder of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, a national effort to rival Klein’s Education Equality Project. But they had recently spoken on a panel together and found that they agreed about a lot. So they decided to have lunch.

There, Noguera urged Klein to visit an elementary school in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, PS 28, which Noguera said epitomized his thoughts on what makes a strong urban school. Noguera said that its extended school day (some children stay until 5:45 p.m.), social services, professional development for teachers, and focus on emotional as well as academic growth have helped it become an impressive school, despite being challenged by serving a large number of homeless students.

Klein visited the school “the very next day,” Noguera told me in a telephone interview. It made an impression on him, too, and soon he wrote a memo to all principals in the city urging them to visit PS 28 (The memo was included in the April 7 Principals’ Weekly newsletter, and is reproduced below.)

But Noguera told me on the telephone that he was struck by what Klein’s memo emphasized about the school — and what it did not say. Namely, Klein talked about the importance of a strong principal and of analyzing students’ test scores, but not about addressing children’s non-academic needs, the focus of the other programs Noguera admired. (more…)

Chancellor Klein, right, with Pedro Noguera at a panel discussion today

If Joel Klein is nervous about his future as chancellor, he wasn’t showing it this morning.

After participating in a panel about the achievement gap at a conference sponsored by Channel 13 today, Klein was swarmed by audience members who wanted to thank him for the opportunities his leadership has given them.

Three of the well-wishers I encountered were people who have risen to leadership positions under Klein’s administration: Mercedes Qualls, who in 2003 took over a failing school in Queens that has since stabilized; Jackie Boswell, currently ushering Lafayette High School through its final years; and Robert Armond, who is training right now at the city’s Leadership Academy to join his wife as a principal in the city’s schools.

Klein was all smiles and hugs as he listened to one fan after another. After hearing a particularly effusive expression of gratitude, Klein joked about his reported unpopularity. Laughing, he said, “I’m staying here next year!”