GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

As Elizabeth noted, it’s high school admissions season in New York City. The test that determines who gets into the city’s elite high schools happened back in October, and yesterday eighth graders submitted their lists of high school choices.

I wonder how many of today’s students know that only 40 years ago, Stuyvesant High School was boys-only? It wasn’t until 1969, when a young woman named Alice De Rivera successfully sued, that the ultra-competitive school admitted girls. I also wonder where De Rivera ended up. (Brooklyn Tech was the last of the three original exam schools to go coed, in 1972.)

The hardships of the Great Depression marked the beginning of the end for a Thanksgiving tradition of children dressed as beggars going to door-to-door seeking handouts (although in some neighborhoods it lived on into the 1960′s).

These days, you’re much more likely to read of children collecting money or food for others on this holiday. Hundreds of New York City schools participate in the annual Penny Harvest around this time of year, gathering pennies which they later donate to a cause of their choice.

Whatever you’re doing to celebrate, we thank you for reading and contributing, and wish you the best — Happy Thanksgiving!

Yesterday, Elizabeth posted a letter from Comptroller William Thompson urging city officials to use millions of dollars earmarked for reopening a Brooklyn jail instead to build new schools.

But the comptroller isn’t the first to use the Brooklyn House of Detention as a pawn in an argument about schools.

Way back in January (Yes, it’s been a long year!), City Council member David Yassky, who represents the jail’s neighborhood, supported a plan that would renovate the building to include a new middle school, in addition to shops and jail cells. But after a sharp outcry from parents and other community members, the city killed the proposal quickly.

National standards and tests: New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein “strongly support[s]” them. Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools founder Mike Feinberg is in favor. Education historian Diane Ravitch agrees. A recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll shows mixed feelings among the public (62% say we should have “common expectations” for all children, but 63% are satisfied with their own state’s standards).

And now, the Gates Foundation plans to advocate for national standards and offer free standards and tests to the states.

But will they succeed where others have failed? When then-President Bill Clinton pushed for national tests in the 1997, the New York Times reported broad public support for national standards and testing, but when it came to implementation, deep divisions over whose standards, what kind of tests, and how results would be used:

Still, the whole concept of standards was still relatively new back then, and the federal government played a fairly small role in education policy. Now, children in every state take yearly standards-based exams, and under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, schools are judged on the results. In this new climate, will states embrace the Gates Foundation’s standards and tests? And, as bloggers Aaron Pallas (a.k.a. skoolboy) and Alexander Russo have asked, is the Gates Foundation the right organization for the job?

This week we asked you to share your experiences with voting at your neighborhood school. But schools haven’t always been polling places. In 1914, New Yorkers had to vote in delis, noodle shops, undertakers’ offices, and other “dingy, inconvenient shops,” the New York Times reported. But some New Yorkers wanted that to change, arguing that moving voting booths to schools and other public places would save the city money, model citizenship for children, and clean up elections, both literally and figuratively.

New York Times, Oct. 29, 1905

From today’s report about overcrowding and capital planning:

A capital plan designed to alleviate current overcrowding and reduce class sizes to the City’s own target levels, based on the current need, should aim to provide at least 167,842 new school seats. While this is clearly a large figure, approximately 100,000 school seats were added from 1902-5 …

What was happening during those years? The city embarked on a construction spree so that it could fulfill the mayor’s 1903 pledge to provide a school seat for every child in the city for the first time. In just two years, 90,000 seats were constructed and bids were awarded for the construction of 93,000 more.

Judging from a table included in a 1905 New York Times article about the building boom, the city was aiming for an average class size of 50 in those new schools:

Before there were “chronically absent” children, there were “truants.” And truants were dealt with as criminals, with the city allocating funds to build detention centers for them even when it couldn’t afford to build enough schools for all the city’s children.

Enter progressive education official Julia Richman, who in 1905 launched a kinder, gentler model of truant school. In a full-page profile of the school late in its first year, The New York Times called the Lower East Side school “one of the most important experiments in sociology ever undertaken by the New York Board of Education.” Under the leadership of Principal Olive Jones, a woman whose “casual appearance [gave] no indication of her concentrated strength of character,” boys enjoyed small classes, intensive counseling, group activities, and, most of all, fairness.

Olive Jones on admitting a new student: (more…)

In 1971, with the United States fighting in Vietnam, the New York State Senate voted to allow high school ROTC military training programs during school hours, over opposition from those who felt the military had no place in the schools.

“The soldier who obeys his superior officer without question except in the most extreme circumstances is essentially different from the citizen who prizes his freedom to think dangerous thoughts and to challenge even legally sanctioned authority,” wrote Irwin Stark of the American Civil Liberties Union in a 1979 New York Times column, arguing for the continued separation of the military from the public schools.

Junior ROTC programs are now a fairly common but still controversial program in schools across the country. More controversial right now is military recruitment in public schools — and the NY Civil Liberties Union, students, and lawmakers object to a new DOE policy of providing military recruiters access to students’ contact information on a centralized, rather than school-by-school, basis.

Small rewards are all that’s necessary to motivate children to learn more, researchers found after a pilot study in four New York City schools. Students who were rewarded with the equivalent of 75 cents in today’s money for learning more spelling words learned to spell better than children who did not receive rewards, although the magnitude of the gains was not reported. Still, researchers cautioned that these results should not be applied too broadly until more research on motivation had been done:

When was this groundbreaking research done? Guess the year — and no googling!

Preceding Roland Fryer by more than 70 years, the New York City school board voted in 1936 to create “a ‘laboratory’ to analyze teaching methods and curricula,” according to a New York Times article from that year. Unlike Fryer’s Educational Innovation Lab, which will be funded by the Broad Foundation and other philanthropic organizations, the 1936 lab was part of a reorganization of the Board of Ed’s Bureau of Reference, Research, and Statistics. And while Fryer’s effort will cost $44 million, the board member offering the 1936 resolution requested only $156,000 — about $2.3 million in 2007 dollars.

The laboratory was to focus on experimenting with new teaching methods and promoting the sharing of successful strategies, though no details were given as to what new methods were being tested. Fryer intends to start out by testing motivational strategies like those he piloted in New York City’s Million Motivation Campaign, now discontinued for lack of funding.

More on the 1936 ed innovation lab after the jump. (more…)