GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

After months of relative quiet, students and staff of Newtown High School are joining the chorus of opposition to the city’s “turnaround” plans — with a heartfelt video produced by four engineering students. (more…)

A contingent of New York teachers joined thousands of protesters from across the country in Washington, D.C. on Saturday to march against the Obama administration’s education policies.

Joining them was actor and budding philanthropist Matt Damon, who railed against “corporate reformers.” In an interview with GothamSchools, Damon exhibited a familiarity with New York City education politics, criticizing co-locations of charter schools and district schools and calling out the Success Charter Network in particular.

The march was the main draw of a four-day event called “Save Our Schools,” which included a conference and a film festival. A coalition of more than 100 teachers came down from New York City, including groups from the United Federation of Teachers (this reporter embedded with a UFT-sponsored charter bus) and the Grassroots Education Movement. GEM also hosted a workshop at the conference and showed its documentary film The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting For Superman to an audience of about 250.

More than a dozen speakers – including Diane Ravitch, Jonathan Kozol, Deborah Meier – spoke at a rally that directly preceded the march. The lineup featured songs, performances, poem readings, in addition to a pre-taped message from The Daily Show host Jon Stewart (here’s an excerpt). (more…)

A panel discussion that featured officials on each side of the teacher evaluation stand-off was halted abruptly last night after a disagreement escalated. The disruption did not stem from the teachers union and Department of Education official on the panel, but from a small group of audience members protesting the event itself.

“Okay, I’m going to cut it off,” said moderator Evan Stone, following a crescendo of interruptions that built up for nearly five minutes. Stone is a founder of Educators 4 Excellence, which hosted the event. “Clearly, we’ve broken a lot of norms of respectability.”

The interruptions came from at least three people in an audience of more than 100, most of them teachers. They began in response to Stone’s handling of the panel and then escalated into an airing of grievances that targeted Educators 4 Excellence and its teacher evaluation recommendations, released yesterday, which the protesters said did not reflect their views.

“I am a teacher and I have never been asked what I thought,” yelled out Stuart Kramer Kaplan, one of the protesters.

(Click here for video of the exchange.)
(more…)

Here’s where you can watch video of the mayoral control panel I moderated at the Queens Civic Congress last night, uploaded by David Bellel. Here’s video of the question-and-answer session.

And here are the full recommendations the teachers union is set to endorse, describing how the union would like the mayor’s power over the schools curtailed.

A colleague drew my attention to this fascinating video, tied to The New York Times Magazine’s screens issue. It plays a series of young people’s faces captured while they played a video game.

I wonder what would it look like to videotape the same kids in class.

(For more on the notion that schools have something to learn from video games, see this Times story, this story I wrote for the Village Voice, and this Web site, the home of Marc Presnky, an educational consultant who has made a career out of the idea.)