GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Parents who are interested in knowing the exact ingredients or sugar content of the food their children encounter in the school cafeteria often run up against a brick wall: the Office of SchoolFood’s public website.

The site site lists nutritional information like calories, fat, sodium, protein and dietary fiber. It also assures parents that there are no trans fats or additives like artificial sweeteners and MSG in the food. But the site doesn’t tell parents what is in their children’s meals.

Until now. The Community Section’s “NYC Green Schools” columnist, Elizabeth Puccini, recently learned that James Subudhi, the environmental policy and advocacy coordinator at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, had discovered a back-ways route to the Office of SchoolFood’s directory of ingredients that is not accessible to the public from its main website. Puccini asked Subudhi to share instructions on how parents can access the information:

Because NYC Green Schools believes strongly that parents and students have a right to know the ingredients of the food served in our city’s schools —  that this transparency is a must to ensure the food in our schools is safe and nutritious — we invited James to write about his discovery.

Puccini told us that when she looked at the lists, she was startled to find potential allergens hiding in surprising places. For example, the city’s “fully cooked boiled beef patty” contains textured vegetable protein and caramel color — a problem for unsuspecting students who are allergic to soy. The city’s allergy policy is to offer students a variety of meals in component parts, so that students with allergies can pick and choose from foods that they can eat.

A quick look through the ingredient lists and nutritional food shows that there is a lot of healthy food offered. But it also shows that some products on the city’s cafeteria menus do not meet the nutritional guidelines the city established for bake sale goods last year. (more…)

Schools Chancellor Cathie Black is on the cover of this week’s New York Magazine, which carries an evenhanded-yet-damning profile of the Hearst magazine executive-turned-public schools chief.

Though Black’s public relations team has kept her on a short leash of late around the city’s education beat reporters, reporter Chris Smith was able to spend some time with the chancellor, gathering her reflections on her first Panel for Educational policy meeting in January and on whether she checked her Blackberry during it.

Smith’s piece, titled “Just Smile,” after a bit of advice Black offered students who were presenting their start-up business plans, contains some of the sharpest detail yet about her former magazine industry colleagues’ impressions of her. (She’s a good speaker. She’s an endless self-promoter.) It also has quotes from the chancellor that shed some light on how much she’s learned and how far she has to go.

Black tells Smith that she’s trying to empower public school principals and Smith follows up with a question about exactly what power principals currently lack. Black responds and gets tangled. She begins by talking about the power principals already have to control much of their budgets and ends several conversation stops away on the topic of public opinion. (more…)

Is the current mania around trying to turn around struggling schools and open high-quality new ones the best way to improve school systems? Marc Waxman isn’t sure.

In his latest missive in the “Deepening the Dialogue” exchange in the GothamSchools Community Section, Waxman argues that current policies give rise to an unsettling tension between what’s good for individual schools and what’s good for schools in general. He writes:

I believe our current dialogue about education is narrow in many ways. One way it is narrow is its focus on individual school improvement at the expense of, or with no thought of, systemic improvement.

For example, Waxman writes, limiting when and how many students enroll might enable an individual school to work effectively, but that kind of autonomy would have potentially damaging implications for other schools. He points out that the tension between specific and systemic success is present at many charter schools, like the one he’s planning to open, but is even more acute at many specialized schools, such as schools that serve only gifted students.

The GothamSchools Community section spent 2010 constantly growing, in the end featuring more than 220 posts from dozens of writers trying to elevate the conversation about public education.

On our Community page, editor Philissa Cramer rounds up the ground covered by our contributers last year. Teachers gave insights into daily classroom life, parents and teachers discussed how their schools affect their lives, and edu-wonks of all stripes dug deeply into policy questions and offered suggestions to improve the city schools.

Among the calls for change we published in 2010:

• Lawyer David Bloomfield advocated for an independent review of school closures.
• Teachers —  Arthur Goldstein and James Eterno at Jamaica HS and Alex Jones at Metropolitan Corporate Academy — made cases for keeping their schools open,
• High school student Khaair Morrison explained why he couldn’t handle looming Metrocard cuts.
• Mom Ebony Brown outlined her controversial reasons for supporting charter schools.
• Former CUNY dean John Garvey made an equity case for changing specialized high school admissions.
• And week after week, parent Elizabeth Puccini offered lessons for greening city schools.

If you — or your students — have something to say about the schools, e-mail us. We’re looking forward to a new year full of even more dispatches from classrooms and insightful takes on education policy.

On Sunday, NBC will launch a week-long series of events it’s calling “Education Nation.” The series is being touted as a nationally-televised conversation about how to improve American public education. But the events have also prompted protests from teachers and parents who feel their voices are being lost or ignored in NBC’s high-profile line-up of officials, politicians and philanthropists.

One panel during the week is designed to showcase the voices of teachers: a “Teacher Town Hall” that NBC anchor Brian Williams is hosting on Sunday. Teacher and GothamSchools contributer Stephen Lazar was invited to participate in the event, and he gives a preview of what he wants to say in the Community section.

The national conversation around education needs to change, Lazar writes, and he has a list of where to start. Among his suggestions:

[W]e need…a shift from talking about testing and accountability towards talking about curriculum and learning. There’s a ridiculous notion that bad teachers are bad because they are lazy, and if we could just hold their feet to the fire, they would improve, or leave. That’s simply not reality. Most struggling teachers simply don’t know any better. We need to begin conversations about what they should be doing in their classrooms before their students are assessed, and then figure out how to support teachers in doing this.

As one might expect, Teachers College professor — and frequent critic of the Obama administration’s education policies — Aaron Pallas has some issues with “Waiting for ‘Superman.’” But his concerns lie not only with the documentary’s evidence, but also with whether the movie will actually change schools.

In the community section and in his Hechinger Report column, Pallas writes:

Having seen the film and bought the book, I’m skeptical that the ”Waiting for ‘Superman’” propaganda campaign is going to have much impact on education policy, despite all of the buzz for and against the film. … ”Waiting for ‘Superman’” doesn’t really lead the viewer to take a particular action. ”We know what works,” “Text this number to help,” and “Get involved” are exhortations that confront the viewer at the film’s conclusion — but they’re hopelessly vague.

And even if one accepts the premise that the message of the film is to support expanding charter schools, or make teachers more accountable for how their students perform, the likelihood of the film actually provoking movement on these objectives is muted by the fact that the nation just went through a Race to the Top competition in which precisely these goals were rewarded. As many states have just passed laws supporting these things, it’s hard to imagine much pressure for even more.

The main action urged on New York City’s “Superman” website is to ask gubernatorial candidates to support Common Core standards — which the state already adopted, Pallas notes.

Stephen Lazar

Test scores are important. But so are skills that students can never demonstrate on a pencil-and-paper exam.

That’s the lesson Stephen Lazar has learned in his seven years as a city teacher. Writing in the community section, Lazar, a social studies and English teacher at the Bronx Lab School, outlines the non-academic standards he’s realized he wants his students to meet.

Here’s an excerpt from Lazar’s list:

• I want my students to have a set of tools to deal with conflicts other than fighting, yelling, or shutting down.
• I want my students to seek support or help for clinical depression and other mental illnesses. …

In other words, I want my students to be able to deal with the most challenging parts of the world in a healthy way. I want all that in addition to wanting them to be effective communicators, thoughtful readers, and active citizens working to improve the world.

When her second-grade special education students produced a news broadcast about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Lizzie Hetzer wanted to share their work. After all, the project marked a welcome departure from the heavy focus on structure and routine that had defined the year, and her students had risen to the occasion admirably.

Sharing her enthusiasm wasn’t so easy. In the community section, Hetzer, who is moving from PS 12 in Brooklyn to PS 39 this fall, writes about what happened when she tried to find an audience for the news broadcast outside the school.

She writes:

I reached out to a few community news sources that expressed interest in featuring the broadcast. Sadly, my school administration did not support this move. It’s a shame that there seems to be so much red tape and so much fear of bad publicity that my special education students, even with parental support, cannot have the spotlight for a minute or so to share their good work. (more…)

The city is full of teachers and principals who consider themselves progressive educators. But their unorthodox ideas are constrained by policies that put test scores first.

That’s the conclusion that Jessica Siegel, a former high school teacher who now teaches journalism and education at Brooklyn College, made after attending a 600-attendee-strong conference about progressive education in April. In the GothamSchools community section, Siegel writes about encountering intrepid educators who try, with mixed success, to blend the alternative approaches for which New York City schools were once famous with the accountability-oriented policies that are currently in vogue.

One of the people Siegel spoke to was Brady Smith, principal of Validus Preparatory Academy in the Bronx. Smith told her that he makes sure his students develop their skills in real-world contexts, such as by proposing land-use projects for the Port Authority, and that he wants to join a consortium of schools whose students don’t have to take Regents exams to graduate. But he also said that he doesn’t totally discount the value of data analysis. Writes Siegel:

“We use data quite a bit,” Smith told me. “But we have a broad definition of data. We look at student work quite a lot. My stance is — what does student performance look like? There are ways to measure it authentically … more than any one test.”

Gittleson compared the average suspension rates at district and charter schools in central Brooklyn, Harlem and the South Bronx.

How do the number of students suspended from charter schools compare to the number of students suspended from their district school counterparts?

That was the question GothamSchools contributor Kim Gittleson set out to answer this week by comparing the numbers of suspensions district and charter schools report to the state each year.

Overall, the two categories of schools suspend students at about the same rate, Gittleson found.

But suspension rates vary by neighborhood. In central Brooklyn, charter schools suspend a higher percentage of students than their neighboring district schools. In Harlem and the South Bronx, district schools suspend more students.

And the number of suspensions varies widely by charter school. Some schools didn’t suspend any students last year. Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant Charter School and Kings Collegiate Charter School, by contrast, both suspended nearly 40 percent of their student bodies last year.

You can read Gittleson’s full analysis here. Gittleson is employed by Ken Hirsh, who also helps fund GothamSchools.