School staff reviewed sample student work that meets the common standards for kindergarten writing. More sample student work that meets the new standards is available here (pdf).

What will national standards mean for New York City’s classrooms?

For the past few weeks, groups of principals, teachers and staff members have been gathering with their school networks to begin answering that question.

Last week, a large group of principals, assistant principals and teachers met in the cafeteria of P.S. 129 in Flushing, Queens. They came in teams of three from each school in a Children’s First Network led by Diane Foley.

The state won’t begin to use the core standards to test students until 2014.

But, as Foley and her staff reminded principals, the first group of students who will take the new exams — 2014′s fourth-graders — are entering kindergarten this fall. Foley’s goal was to nudge schools towards the core standards by helping them think of small changes they can make immediately.

“Let’s find one or two things that schools can do this year,” Foley said. “It’s about the little tiny steps you can take.”

The first step last week was to figure out how far current writing instruction is from what the new standards dictate. One of Foley’s staff members, Debbie White, laid out three styles of writing assignments: persuasive opinion writing, explanatory texts and storytelling. She then asked each table to estimate what percentage of the writing that students at each school complete falls into each category.

“What does writing instruction look like in your schools?” White asked.

At one table, the principal, assistant principal and reading coach from Queens’ I.S. 93 huddled together and talked over their eighth grade writing assignments. At first, principal Ed Santos worried that his eighth graders don’t spend any time writing persuasive arguments. “There’s nothing,” he said.

Foley encouraged Santos and his staff to think about the writing students did in all of their courses, not just their English Language Arts classes. That increases the percentage a bit, Santos said, but not by much. When the groups re-convened, staff at other schools echoed Santos: their students write a lot of stories, but spend little time building arguments.

“We do a lot of essay writing, but I don’t think it really reaches what an argument is,” said one teacher. “I think it just scratches the surface.”

White then made the big reveal: Under the new standards, fourth graders should be spending nearly a third of their writing time constructing arguments. Narrative and explanatory writing should make up 35 percent of their assignments each. By the senior year of high school, 40 percent of writing assignments should be persuasive or explanatory writing. Only 20 percent of students’ time should be spent writing straight fiction and non-fiction narratives.

The new reading standards will prompt a similar shift. Principals and their staff compared the amount of time their students spent reading fiction and poetry to the time spent reading informational texts, like scientific articles and instruction manuals. The overwhelming amount of time was spent reading literature, principals agreed.

But under the new standards, fourth graders will be expected to spend half their time reading more instructive texts. By twelfth grade, only 30 percent of the texts a student will be expected to read should be literary, the common standards say.

That kind of shift won’t happen immediately at any school. But Foley and her staff encouraged the principals and teachers to think about small changes that will make the shift easier.

Staff at one school suggested that they add more magazines, articles and non-fiction to their elementary classroom libraries and add more non-fiction books to suggested reading lists. As students learn to read, schools can more actively encourage parents to have them read everyday signs and nutrition labels at the grocery store, volunteered a teacher at another school.

Schools can also begin to re-adjust the grade levels when they introduce many common books to students. Foley said. Her example: the novel “Sarah, Plain and Tall” is now thought to be written on a fourth or fifth grade reading level. Under the new standards, it will be considered a third grade-level book.

And schools should think about how to explain the changes to parents, Foley said. “Parents are going to have to understand, ‘why is my child coming home with more informational articles in her backpack?’” she said. “You need to come up with a clear reason.”

The answer, she said, is the common standards’ emphasis on building practical skills for college and careers. “I think parents are really going to relate to, ‘my child really needs to get a good job at the end of this, and what are we going to do to get her there,’” Foley said.

The shifts required by the new standards will be greater at some schools than at others. But Grace Sears, I.S. 93′s assistant principal, said she was encouraged by the new standards’ clarity.

“I think this will be better,” she said. “I think it will be useful for the teachers; I think it will be useful for the administration. We’re going to know exactly what should be going on in the classrooms.”

On Monday, New York State officially committed to adopt national “common core” standards for what students should be expected to learn, which were released in their final form in June. But city officials have been laying the groundwork to introduce the standards to schools since May, and principals and some teachers started getting their feet wet this week.

That doesn’t mean that students will begin to see drastic changes in the lessons they’re taught and the tests they take this year, however. Instead, city officials said this week that their plan is to use next school year to let network leaders, principals and teachers determine how far their current teaching is from the new bar and figure out the best way forward.

By doing so, they’re hoping that schools can avoid the kind of nasty shock that comes from abrupt changes to testing standards that state officials are warning will happen this year as the state makes its tests more difficult to pass.

“What we want networks to do is help schools figure out what their entry point is,” said Josh Thomases, the city’s deputy chief schools officer. “Some schools may need to wade in; some schools will just need to dip their toes in.”

The state doesn’t plan to roll out the common standards until 2011-12, and new tests based on the standards won’t come until the spring of 2012.

But the city began to train district superintendents and network leaders on the common core in May. Over the next two months, groups of Department of Education staffers spent about a week examining how the new standards will change what teaching and student work will need to look like. And starting this week, those staff will be taking their message to groups of principals, assistant principals and some teachers.

All of the city’s principals will receive training this summer, Thomases said. And over the course of the school year, all teachers can expect to attend several professional development sessions that will introduce them to the new benchmarks.

City officials also expect about a fifth of their data inquiry teams — groups of teachers and administrators who examine student coursework and test scores to drive curriculum — to delve further into the standards.

In addition to that training, around 100 schools chose to participate in a common core pilot where they will receive extra funds for more intense work.

Some national proponents of the common core, including American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, have publicly worried that states that don’t receive Race to the Top funds will struggle to pay the costs of implementing the new standards. New York State officials are hoping to win a pot of that federal grant money to help them pay to write both new curriculum and new tests based on the standards.

For this school year, the city is paying for teachers’ training with state Title I funds. A DOE spokesman is checking to see how much the city expects to spend this year; I’ll update when I hear.

“The heart of that money is paying for teacher and administrators…to work on this themselves,” Thomases said. “The truth is that the common core is so recent that there are very few experts on it.”

Number of schools receiving A-F letter grades this year

Defending this year’s school progress reports at a news conference this morning, Chancellor Joel Klein said the high marks given to an overwhelming majority of city schools did not mean the grading system had lost its value.

The reports, which the Department of Education began issuing two years ago, use a complex formula to assign each school a letter grade, allowing parents to compare schools and principals to see what areas need improvement. This year, the city gave 84 percent of elementary and middle schools A’s, while only 13 percent received a B and 2 percent received a C. A total of five schools were given D’s, and two were given F’s. (Philissa has some snapshots of the data here).

Last year, 38 percent of schools were given an A. In 2007, when the reports were first issued, 23 percent received that rating.

Responding to reporters’ questions about whether giving 97 percent of schools A and B’s had rendered the progress reports meaningless, Klein said that the grading system still served a purpose. He explained that the reports only measure whether a school has met the city’s goals for it, not whether it is above average.

“We want to make it clear that that [grade] reflects that they met their progress targets, not that they don’t have a lot of improvement ahead of them,” Klein said at a news conference held at P.S. 189 — a school that received an A this year and a B rating last year.  “This school, even though it’s up considerably, still has a lot of work to do,” he added, referring to P.S. 189.

He added that next year, schools will have to work harder to receive A’s, as the city will increase the cut off scores for the progress reports and Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch has been outspoken about making the state tests more difficult.

The dramatic increase in the number of schools receiving A’s could be a double-edged sword for the chancellor. In previous years, the DOE has relied on the reports as one of several factors used in closing low-performing schools and swapping out principals. Klein said he planned to continue school closings this year, though only seven received D’s or F’s citywide and several schools that the city is fighting to close were given A ratings.

President of the teachers union, Michael Mulgrew, told reporters that this year’s reports showed that those schools — P.S. 194, 241 and 150 — should remain open.

Using this year’s reports could also prove difficult for parents.

The chancellor said that parents attempting to compare schools should look at the scores schools received, not just the letter grade. “There’s a big difference between a 68 and a 98. Parents will be able to make a determination,” he said.

Jennifer Jennings, an assistant professor at NYU whose analysis of state math tests showed that the questions have become repetitive and easier than in previous years, said the high number of A grades given out will make it more difficult for parents to differentiate among schools.

“The stated purpose was to give a strong signal of A to F so you don’t need the Excel file,” Jennings said. “It’s supposed to be a bright line kind of finding. Only some very interested parents will pull down that Excel file and think about that.”

Mulgrew said it was imperative that parents go beyond the progress reports and visit the schools in person. “You can look at the scores and all of that, but this is always our recommendation: go to the school. It’s about matching your child with the culture inside of a building,” he said.

P.S. 189′s principal, Theresa Luger, said she was proud of the school’s A rating, attributing it to increased individual attention and teachers using more informal assessments throughout the year.

An assistant principal in Brooklyn was less sure what to make of the grade. “We’re happy we got an A, we’ll be able to trumpet that A — but the fact that schools we know that aren’t so good also got A’s makes you think,” he said.

Cut scores (out of 100) for this year's letter grades.

One of the questions given to a council member on Wednesday. (GothamSchools, Flickr)

Like Elizabeth, I was surprised to see a representative of the teachers union hand City Council members pre-printed cards with questions to ask during yesterday’s hearing on charter school expansion. Apparently, council members were taken aback by the move as well.

Organizations frequently provide information and suggestions for council members to use during hearings, according to a spokesman for Simcha Felder, the councilman who shared the cards with us. The spokesman, Eric Kuo, said Felder doesn’t think there is anything improper about the United Federation of Teachers and other groups suggesting questions to council members as one of their advocacy strategies.

But Kuo did say that the union took the strategy to a new level yesterday. “During the last hearing, it was more aggressive than before,” he said.

At the hearing, Felder drew uncomfortable looks from union officials sitting in the front row of the audience as he shared the cards with GothamSchools. Still, he even got up from his seat to collect the UFT’s question cards from his colleagues and pass them over to Elizabeth as well. Kuo said Felder shared the cards out of a commitment to transparency. “He doesn’t think it should be a secret” what council members have on their desks, Kuo said.