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Courtesy: KIPP

A few months ago, teachers from KIPP charter schools approached the network’s co-founder Dave Levin to say that they were restless with the training they were getting. Despite weekly observations and extensive support, the teachers wanted to talk to educators from outside the KIPP organization to find out what they considered best practices for classroom teaching.

Levin took that idea and developed it into the “What’s Works in Urban Schools,” a conference that took place Saturday at New York University. The purpose of the event, Levin said, was to forge better working relationships between district and charter school teachers.

“Too often the broader structural debate has nothing to do with the great things that are happening in classrooms across New York City,” Levin said. “Whether you teach in a charter school or a district school, good teachers have the same goals.”

On Saturday, hundreds of teachers braved inclement weather, an early morning wake-up, and a $35 entry fee to attend the event, which was sponsored by KIPP, Google, TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project), Teaching Matters, and Scholastic. (more…)

At the West Side Collaborative, a small middle school on the Upper West Side, teachers relish being in two places at once.

Their freedom from the time-space continuum is made possible by the school’s use of Google applications to let teachers share resources online. The tools, showcased in a video the school produced, last week won Principal Jeanne Rotunda the Elizabeth Rohatyn Prize for School Innovation from Teaching Matters, a nonprofit that helps schools integrate technology. (more…)

Next year, the state’s English tests could be missing one crucial component: writing.

That’s the conclusion that educators are drawing after the Board of Regents weighed a proposal earlier this month to eliminate the open-ended question section of the state’s standardized tests — the only part of the third through eighth grade testing regime that asks students to write out their answers in sentences.

The proposal is one of several ideas the Board of Regents, the state panel that sets New York’s education policy, is considering in order to speed up the test-grading process, following a new federal regulation ordering states to tell schools sooner whether or not they are meeting states standards. (State test scores play a large part in making that decision.) Changing the way the tests are graded could also cut costs.

The Regents have been studying how to meet the new federal requirement for almost a year. The prospect of scrapping writing first surfaced publicly when the Regents published the findings of a survey the board conducted to study the question. Of 22,000 parents and educators surveyed, 85% said the essay questions should remain. (more…)

The Department of Education created videos to explain the reports. View them here.

The Department of Education is moving to extend a program that judges teachers based on their students’ test scores — and it plans to start paying for the project with taxpayer dollars, at a projected cost of $1.5 million over the next three years. A formal request for vendor proposals released today indicates officials are also mulling an expansion of the program to more teachers.

The program, called the Teacher Data Initiative, launched quietly this school year after causing a politically explosive fight between the DOE and the teachers union the year before. The reports allow principals to track the “value” teachers add to students by looking at student test scores from one year to the next. The teachers union here has gone along with programs to judge entire schools based on test scores, but it drew the line at measuring individual teachers’ performance, arguing that so-called “value-added” models risk unfairly misjudging teachers. (Many academic researchers make this claim as well.)

After news of the effort surfaced, the union fought back by ushering a bill into state law that made it illegal for the city to use test scores when making decisions about job security. Both Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein decried the bill (Bloomberg called it a “special interest protection”), which the legislature passed with no public debate, and the data reports went out as planned. (more…)