GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The principal of the High School for Environmental Studies prepares to accept a check for her school's science program

On Wednesday, we highlighted seven math and science teachers who received awards for their teaching. They were formally honored on Wednesday night, and yesterday the Fund for the City of New York launched a tour of their schools. We joined the tour’s first day to ask students what qualities make a math or science teacher great.

At Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School, juniors and seniors gathered in the library were told that math teacher Kate Belin had won $5,000. Several students whooped with glee and one shouted, “You could go to Africa with that!” Principal Nancy Mann rejected the students’ request to use the school’s $2,500 reward to build a second gym.

Next, at a highly selective school that the Department of Education does not manage, Hunter College High School, members of the math team praised Eliza Kuberska, their Math Team Advisor. Noting that Kuberska exhorts them to “do it for the love of math” and challenges them to tackle problems more complex than most high schoolers typically face, the students brought their teacher to tears.

At the High School for Environmental Studies in Manhattan, it was science teacher Marissa Bellino who made her students cry. Senior Alejandro Vinueza, who has Bellino as his teacher for the third time and traveled with her to Japan to learn about lowering carbon emissions, read a prepared speech but paused shortly after beginning to rub his reddening eyes. “Damn, I’m getting emotional now,” he said. Later, he told me how Bellino inspired him to pursue a science major in college and how she has opened his eyes to environmental awareness. “You know when someone says that they had an experience that changed their life forever? I didn’t believe that could happen until I went to Japan,” Vinueza said.

I asked students from the three high schools what makes for a great math or science teacher. Here’s what they said:

Fannie Lou Hamer receives a framed portrait of math teacher Kate Belin

Good teachers connect:

• “A good teacher understands that every student has their own problems and it takes that one on one interaction, that personal connection, for the students to learn in his or her own way.”
  Tulio Santos, senior, Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School

(more…)

At a time when the Obama administration is rewarding efforts to improve math and science instruction, seven city math and science teachers are being lauded for the work they already do.

For the third straight year, the Fund for the City of New York and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation are giving city teachers awards for excellence in teaching science and mathematics. The teachers will receive their prizes — $5,000 each — at an award ceremony tonight and their schools will celebrate the awards, and the $2,500 that their math and science programs receive, at a series of assemblies tomorrow.

The teachers were nominated by students, parents, colleagues, and administrators and then selected by a committee made up of representatives from local science museums and universities, based on their students’ achievement, their involvement in extracurricular activities, and their efforts to promote math and science inside and outside the classroom. The recipients’ high schools range from the city’s highest-performing to some of the weakest, including one that the city is trying to turn around using federal funding.

Here are this year’s recipients, along with a highlight about each that we pulled from longer biographies compiled by the Sloan Awards:

Teacher: Kate Belin
School: Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School
Subject: Geometry, Functions
Why her school thinks she’s great: Belin makes math relevant and interesting for students at Fannie Lou Hamer, where 90 percent of entering freshman are below grade level in math or English, by connecting math to the world outside the classroom. (more…)

The Department of Education’s Innovation Zone is poised to bring home millions of dollars in federal innovation funding for the second year in a row.

The Obama administration yesterday released a list of 23 Investing in Innovation grant applicants that it wants to fund. The groups, culled from nearly 600 applicants, will share a $150 million pool of funding. The groups have until next month to line up matching funds from other sources to secure their grants.

The DOE’s InnovateNYC program landed high on the list of applicants aiming to bolster science and technology education, putting it in line to receive $3 million in federal funding. The department will use the funding to connect its Office of Innovation with private partners and other school districts as it designs technologies for schools, according to Chancellor Dennis Walcott.

“There is so much potential for technology as a tool that helps students get on track for college and careers — but right now, engineers and developers need a better understanding of the challenges facing New York City and other urban school districts,” he said in a statement.

Last year, when the Obama administration made $650 million available, another city Innovation Zone program, School of One, won $5 million to develop its computerized math teaching program. (School of One is part of InnovateNYC.) But the city’s request for innovation funding for other purposes, such as to open new small schools, was turned down. (more…)

A screenshot from Kelly Vaughan's Digital Teacher Corps submission. (Click to view.)

A member of GothamSchools’ founding team, Kelly Vaughan returned to the classroom in 2009 — but she never abandoned the digital frontier.

Now, to augment her full schedule as a middle school science teacher at Brooklyn Prospect Charter School, Vaughan has applied to join a new program being offered by the nonprofit New Visions for Public Schools. The Digital Teacher Corps connects educators who are interested in digital learning with mentors who can help them design and implement technology-based “hacks” to solve problems in their classrooms.

Applicants to the Digital Teachers Corps are uploading short videos to YouPD, a months-old New Visions project that aims to serve as a YouTube for teachers. Throughout the year, New Visions will use YouPD to share developments within the Digital Teachers Corps, said Hsing Wei, New Visions’ senior innovation officer.

“Our philosophy is to be transparent and try to share out as much to the community as possible,” Wei said.

Vaughan’s application proposes the “Global Weather Protection Agency,” a game to teach students about abstract weather concepts. Applications from other teachers suggest using graphic novels to teach English as a Second Language students andpreparing videos to differentiate test preparation review.

New Visions will select six teachers to receive training and mentorship throughout the year, along with a $3,000 stipend. Applications are due Monday.

More than 60 percent of New York eighth graders scored below basic level on the 2009 NAEP science tests.

New York City fourth graders did about as poorly on a national science test in 2009 as those in other large American cities, but the city’s eighth graders lag behind their peers.

More than 60 percent of city eighth graders scored below basic on the National Assessment of Educational Progress science exams. Nationally, 38 percent of students scored below the basic level, and 56 percent of students in large city school districts did not meet that bar.

The city’s fourth graders fared better. Still, 44 percent scored below basic on the science tests. In other large cities, roughly the same percentage of students didn’t score above the “basic” bar.

The Department of Education’s Chief Academic Officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, said that the city was focusing on introducing national “Common Core” standards into classrooms as a strategy to boost achievement in science. The standards include a focus on reading and writing non-fiction and technical texts in subjects like science. (more…)

With eight weeks to go before the 2010-2011 school year begins, the city is letting principals hire more teachers from outside the school system.

An update to the city’s year-old teacher hiring freeze means that principals are now free to hire people who are licensed to teach earth science, middle school general science, English as a second language for grades 7-12, Chinese, and Latin, even if they aren’t already working in the school system. There are more open positions in these areas than there are teachers whose jobs have been eliminated, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Ann Forte.

Principals were already permitted to look outside the city for special education, speech, and some Spanish bilingual subject teachers. New schools are also allowed to bring on new teachers for up to 40 percent of their hires.

The most recent change suggests that the city might be starting to get a handle on how principals decided to staff up for the coming school year. (more…)

City schools are scoring higher on state math and reading tests, but they remain near the bottom of all districts statewide on science and social studies tests, a situation that schools officials attribute to budget cuts.

Although social studies and science scores rose last year, they remain very low compared to scores in the rest of the state. Only five of the city’s 32 school districts performed scored at better than the 10th percentile in science, meaning that 90 percent of districts statewide scored better than 27 city districts. In contrast, 18 districts scored at the 10th percentile or higher in math.

Even in high-performing districts, fourth and eighth graders perform poorly on science and social studies tests compared to other students in the state. For example, Manhattan’s District 2 outperformed 86 percent of districts in the state in math. In reading, District 2 students beat out students in 78 percent of districts. But in science, the district scored in just the 27th percentile, meaning that 73 percent of districts had higher average science scores. 

The discrepancy, highlighted in the test score comparison tool launched by the New York Times today, gives ammunition to critics who say the city schools have focused so much on math and reading that they have given short shrift to other subjects.

The early years of Mayor Bloomberg’s Children First reforms did focus most heavily on math and reading, a department spokesman said today. Now, the city is trying to boost science and social studies performance by introducing some of the same strategies that worked for math and reading, such as offering a standardized curriculum in each subject, said the spokesman, Will Havemann. (more…)

New teachers who have wanted to help the city address its severe shortage of science teachers can now be considered for jobs.

Until today, the teachers had been shut out of the system because of a hiring freeze that has limited principals to teachers already working in the city. 

Principals are still limited to current teachers when they hire biology teachers, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Ann Forte. In March, there were 35 biology teachers in the “excess pool,” for teachers already on the system’s payroll, but not hired at a school. The hiring restrictions, in place since early May, were meant to make it more likely for principals to hire teachers in the pool, including those whose positions were lost to budget cuts this spring. The department still has not released information about how many teaching positions were cut this spring.

Last week, the city gave the okay to new teachers whose licenses enable them to teach in District 75, which serves the system’s most disabled students. About 70 Teaching Fellows were affected by that change.

I Teach NYC, the city’s program to attract new teachers, posted about today’s change on Twitter just after 5:30 p.m.

A “bubble science” lesson at an after-school program put on by The After School Corporation at Thurgood Marshall Academy Lower School in Harlem.

Can you identify these pieces of science equipment? Julia Stiles says she couldn't when she was in public school. Via Flickr.

The actress Julia Stiles’ recent e-mail exchange with Chancellor Joel Klein started after she told him at an event that she hadn’t had any science classes in her public elementary school (Greenwich Village’s PS 3). Yesterday, New York Magazine’s Daily Intel blog published a message from someone who said Stiles fabricated the embarrassing story she told Klein, about how she couldn’t identify a beaker once she started at a fancy private school.

Could it be that Stiles really never had a science class in elementary school? A brand-new blog that purports to be by Stiles repeats the claim. And here’s another hint, from 1992, when Stiles would have been finishing fifth grade:

Schools Chancellor Joseph A. Fernandez unveiled a plan yesterday to drastically overhaul science instruction in New York City’s public schools, including adding an extra year of laboratory science to high school requirements and more than doubling the number of science periods offered to elementary school students. …

The plan, which comes at a time when the school system is struggling with overcrowded classes and a shortage of supplies, does not include any estimate of its cost. Nor does it have a timetable. Mr. Fernandez said a team of school officials would now begin studying those aspects.

Mr. Fernandez’s vision will also demand radical changes in how teachers are trained and recruited; right now high schools cannot find enough licensed high school science teachers and elementary schools are hiring teachers who may have taken no college science. …

How have things changed since Stiles was in school? As the chair of the City Council’s education committee, everyone’s favorite charter school operator, Eva Moskowitz, made the sorry state of science education a top issue, getting the Department of Education’s head science administrator to give her program a barely passing grade in 2005. The city launched a $60 million science curriculum in 2007. But the test that would have measured its success is now two years overdue.