GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Camsie Matis

A teacher at a Manhattan secondary school is one of 103 teachers across the country — two from New York State — to win a federal award for math and science teaching.

A math teacher at East Side Community School, Camsie Matis, today received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching, which comes with a $10,000 check. Matis has taught math and science for a decade and helped open the Bronx’s New Day Academy before returning to teach at the Lower East Side school. She’s currently on leave for a year serving a fellowship at the National Science Foundation.

Jason Raymond

A New York City high school teacher is one of three fellowship winners who, come Monday morning, will begin new jobs in Washington, D.C., as full-time employees of the Obama administration’s Department of Education.

In the middle of June, Jason Raymond, who has taught English and journalism at the High School for Law and Public Service for seven years, learned that he had been chosen for the department’s Teaching Ambassador Fellowship. He quickly packed up and moved to D.C., where he will be part of a program created by the previous secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, to bring teachers into the rooms where education policy is crafted.

Raymond, 38, whose expertise is in adolescent literacy, college readiness, and urban schools, said he will be working in the office of elementary and secondary education.

“I’m going to be bringing my teacher voice to policy,” he said, explaining that he would sit in on conversations about certain grants the DOE planned to distribute. As a Washington fellow, it will be Raymond’s job to point out proposed ideas that may not work well in the classroom and suggest alternatives, but the scope of his influence will be limited.

“It won’t be that I’m sitting in a room with other policy experts and saying you know here’s what I think we should do,” he said, noting that the details of what he’d be focusing on were still be worked out. (more…)