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An open question about top Department of Education deputy Shael Polakow-Suransky is to what extent he is a protege of Joel Klein — and to what extent he is a product of his distinctly progressive, anti-testing education at Brown University.

A new story in Brown’s alumni magazine argues that Polakow-Suransky’s chief influence is Ted Sizer, the progressive educator who chaired Brown’s education department for many years — and was Polakow-Suransky’s thesis advisor.

Sizer, who died two years ago, founded the Coalition of Essential Schools, to which more than a dozen city schools still belong, and the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. That institute, based at Brown, supports the city’s Coalition for Educational Justice, which has lobbied against school closures and budget cuts.

From the article:

For his senior thesis — Sizer was his adviser — Polakow-Suransky compared the South African school in which he’d volunteered with the Providence-based group Direct Action for Rights and Equality, which fights for greater access to public education. Again, Polakow-Suransky focused on the role of schools in transforming society, or, as he describes it, “How do you use an educational process to shape a process of change?” (more…)

First, for four years, Collin Lawrence lived the tumultuous life of a teacher at a small high school with spotty leadership. Then he relived it — in the GothamSchools Community section.

Today, Lawrence concludes a yearlong chronicle of his tenure teaching history at an arts-themed school in Brooklyn, which he named “Brooklyn Arts Academy.” In the final installment, he summarizes the myriad issues the school faced and ponders their roots, and their potential remedies.

He writes:

Even with certain structural limitations of the small school model and the pre-existing challenges facing many students, the Brooklyn Arts Academy should have achieved much greater success. In general, the small school model does help foster a sense of community and allows teachers to form more personalized relationships with students. Moreover, the concept behind this school in particular — to empower and impassion students through art and music — was inspiring. But a concept, just like so many ideas on paper, is not enough to make a successful school.

Spoiler alert: Lawrence, who spent the 2010-2011 school year teaching in China, is now back in New York City and teaching again. His new principal knew about his GothamSchools blog when she hired him.

Since Lehman High School added scanning last year, students at every large high school building in the borough must go through metal detectors before they can get to class.

That’s not the case at Hyde Leadership Charter School, a five-year old Hunts Point secondary school that emphasizes character education. I got a press release earlier this week about the school’s move into its own brand-new building this year.

“Hyde-Bronx administrators, teachers and parents made the decision not to have students enter through metal detectors, the way most other public schools do,” the release said. “Although Hyde-Bronx is located in the significantly disadvantaged Hunts Point neighborhood, the school believes that students need to feel respected and responsible.”

Today in the Community section, Hyde teacher Mark Fusco reflects on the differences he sees between his school and other charter schools, and about his efforts to teach his junior English students about social justice.

“I’m thankful that Hyde stands apart from most charters,” Fusco writes. “The theme of my school is social justice, a label rarely worn with pride in these times when schools are not measured by the content of their character but by the strength of their test scores.”

It’s a common refrain: Teachers say that high-stakes tests constrain them in the classroom.

At our “On Education” panel last week, high school history teacher Stephen Lazar said he would would trade a higher salary for freedom from the Regents exam his students must pass to graduate.

“I would give up any raise in a second if you told me that once I showed that I can get my kids to pass the Regents — which I’ve shown over the past six years — that I can throw [the tests] out the window … and then I can really teach [students] how to think,” he said.

But what if the exams aren’t as limiting as Lazar and other teachers say? What if they’re actually useful? That’s the argument that Ama Nyamekye, a former city schoolteacher, makes in the Community section today.

In “A Teacher Finds Good In Testing,” Nyamekye describes what happened when she stopped resisting the Regents exam and started learning from it. She writes:

I once dismissed standardized testing for its narrow focus on a discrete set of skills, but I learned that my self-made assignments were more problematic. It turned out they were skewed in my favor. I was better at teaching literary analysis than grammar and punctuation. When I started giving ongoing standardized assessments, I noticed that my students showed steady growth in literary analysis, but less growth in grammar and punctuation. I was teaching to my strengths instead of strengthening my weaknesses.

Read Nyamekye’s complete essay, which originally appeared yesterday in the Commentary section of Education Week.

Two teachers say their experiences facing harassment after engaging in union activity are the surest sign that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is wrong about the need for tenure.

On Friday, Bloomberg said during his weekly radio appearance that tenure is a vestige of an earlier time, the McCarthy Era, when teachers and others were persecuted for their political views. In the Community section today, Peter Lamphere and Rachel Montagano argue that teachers can still face unofficial sanctions for their politics or identities, making tenure just as vital now as it was in the 1950s.

In February, Lamphere wrote in the Community section about his experience receiving unsatisfactory reviews for the first time after lobbying against an administrator at the Bronx High School for Science. Montagano is currently embroiled in a battle of her own to keep her job at MS 216 in Queens, where she faces incompetence charges leveled for the first time after she stepped up her union leadership.

Lamphere and Montagano write:

As two New York City teachers who have both been targeted with unsatisfactory ratings because of our union activity, we know from firsthand experience that tenure is one of the few protections for whistleblowers and teacher advocates. (more…)

Sometimes the simplest explanation might well be the most accurate.

That’s the conclusion that Ruben Brosbe, GothamSchools’ longtime Community section contributor, drew after finding out whether he would be given tenure last year.

Brosbe was at the front edge of a trend last year when he had his probationary period extended. This year, he joined a large number of new teachers when his probation was extended again. But while some teachers who did not receive tenure said they could see no justification, Brosbe concludes that he didn’t get tenure because he hadn’t yet earned it.

In the Community section today, Brosbe writes:

For a while I looked for something to blame it on, other than myself. I hadn’t taken criticism well in a meeting late the previous year. Had I poisoned my relationship with my principal? Was something written on my blog misconstrued as critical or unprofessional? Was I still red-flagged by the DOE? I thought and I thought, until I came to an important realization: I wasn’t ready for tenure.

While I know I made significant improvement in certain areas of my practice, and took some exciting risks this year as a teacher, I knew that I still had room to grow.

Lisa Nielsen: Students should be free to opt out of school.

The city Department of Education has adopted a laser-like focus on sending its graduates to college. But that doesn’t mean all of its employees are on board.

Lisa Nielsen, who works in the DOE’s office of educational technology, is advancing the idea that not only is college not for everyone, neither is high school. In the Community section today, Nielsen explains why she put together a guide to help teenagers figure out how to “opt out” of high school and continue learning and developing on their own.

She writes:

Despite outdated constraints involving issues like seat time, student funding, and resource allocation, we are making progress toward bringing more personalized and engaging learning opportunities to students through a handful of efforts, such as the iSchool and the Innovation Zone. But while students are doing better in a more innovative climate, ultimately we are just using updated tools to meet narrow and outdated measures on which our students, teachers, and school leaders are judged.

It is not enough to personalize learning for everyone to go down the same path — to college, without consideration of what comes next. Instead, schools need to embrace the many alternatives to the traditional college route that would better meet the needs of many learners today. What is missing at the DOE is the important work of letting students discover, define, and develop their own passions, talents, and interests and determine personalized, meaningful, and authentic measures of success.

Nielsen, who writes the blog The Innovative Educator, told me she hears frequently from teachers who say they fear they are boring students by teaching a test-driven curriculum. But when she tries to talk about the issue with other administrators at the DOE, she told me, it’s usually dismissed. (more…)

In next week’s staging of “Guys and Dolls” at South Bronx Prep, the role of Nathan Detroit will be played by the understudy.

That’s because the theater teacher’s first choice to play Detroit was recently tossed from the charter school, according to the teacher, Kate Quarfordt. Among several vignettes from the lead-up to the play that Quarfordt describes in the Community section today is one that offers a nuanced view into a controversial aspects of charter schools: their ability to expel troublesome students.

Quarfordt writes:

The expulsion hearing for the young man who plays Nathan is emotionally devastating. All 10 people in the room are openly weeping pretty much the whole time, including the principal and the head of school, the teachers who have come to testify on the student’s behalf, the student’s mother, and the student himself.

In a heart-rending apology delivered with shaking hands and quavering voice, the young man admits that he’d gone against his instincts and committed an illegal action on a school trip in an effort to impress one of his alpha-dog friends who had challenged him to do something he knew was wrong.

His other teachers and I speak, each one us acknowledging this student’s otherwise stellar record of community service and school spirit. We wrestle with the excruciating clash between the value of zero-tolerance tough-love and the importance of judging young people’s actions with flexibility and nuance.

When the verdict is announced and the young man is asked to clean out his locker, his mother collapses with grief.

I’m late to rehearsal because I can’t stop crying.

Quarfordt is chronicling the run up to the play, which will be staged May 24-26, in three parts. Read the first and the second. The third will appear next week.

So far, New York City hasn’t tried a turnaround, the most dramatic of the four school revamp strategies being pushed by the federal government, in which the principal and half of teachers are replaced. But next week, when the city is set to announce its revamp plans for 43 struggling schools, Green Dot Public Schools could get the green light for local turnarounds.

Green Dot, a charter school operator whose teachers work under a contract, launched its most prominent turnaround endeavor in 2008, when at teachers’ request it took over a failing high school in Los Angeles. A new book by Alexander Russo, “Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors: Fighting for the Soul of America’s Toughest High School,” looks at what happened inside Locke High School after Green Dot arrived.

Russo, an education journalist who runs two news blogs, This Week in Education and District 299, about Chicago’s schools, followed Locke’s teachers, students, and administration closely after the turnaround began. He chronicles a slow improvement in school culture and an even slower uptick in academic performance. Ultimately, “Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors” makes clear that no one should expect a school undergoing turnaround to, well, turn around, at least not immediately.

Visit the Community section to read an exclusive excerpt from the book, in which Russo describes the role of the teachers contract at Locke once it became a charter school. On Monday, Russo will participate in a discussion on “charter schools, teacher unions, and the state of education reform” hosted by the group Democratic Leadership for the 21st Century.