For the past three years, Katie Ward and Melanie McIver have worked as a team at Public School 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, teaching a fourth-grade class. But on the reports that rank the city's teachers based on their students’ standardized test scores, Ms. Ward’s name is nowhere to be found.
Melanie McIver, a teacher at Public School 321 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with Elizabeth Phillips, background, the school principal. Both women have seen issues related to the city’s system of ranking teachers, which is at the heart of a lawsuit in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.
“I feel as though I don’t exist,” she said last Monday, looking up from playing a vocabulary game with her students.
Down the hall, Deirdre Corcoran, a fifth-grade teacher, received a ranking for a year when she was out on child-care leave. In three other classrooms at this highly ranked school, fourth-grade teachers were ranked among the worst in the city at teaching math, even though their students’ average score on the state math exam was close to four, the highest score.
“If I thought they gave accurate information, I would take them more seriously,” the principal of P.S. 321, Elizabeth Phillips, said about the rankings. “But some of my best teachers have the absolute worst scores,” she said, adding that she had based her
I’m almost halfway through Winter Break.
After spending the last few days in New York with the family, we escaped what may become a major blizzard that is anticipated to drop as much as a foot and a half of snow on the city.
New York schools are closed anyway tomorrow, so there will be no Snow Day.
What a waste of a perfectly good blizzard.
As the storm followed closely behind us, Anne and I spent the day heading north up the Taconic Parkway then
GIVEN the importance of California's public schools, you'd think the critical decisions that affect the education of our children would be debated and vetted with all due diligence in Sacramento. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
Votes on education policy are often determined by a single question asked in back rooms: Does the CTA support it?
Apparently, the unwritten rule is that if the California Teachers Association supports an education bill, then the Democrat-controlled Legislature can pass it. The reason? Money, lots of it. CTA is one of the biggest spenders on lobbying in Sacramento in the past decade, according to the California Fair Political Practices Commission. If the powerful CTA opposes a bill - or a candidate - it has the money to make sure it goes away.
So says termed-out state Sen. Gloria Romero, who championed education reform such as the Parent Trigger Law while serving as chairwoman of the Senate's Education Committee. She should know; she was pounded
“…and there’s a cold wind blowing.”
An insightful group of students from Jamaica High School and Queens Collegiate recently wrote a play about school reform in New York City, inspired by the Greek tragedy “Antigone.” The students were all set to stage their production, but administrators– worried about the implications of their powerful critique of local “reform” efforts– decided to ban the play. So much for the First Amendment…
You can read reports of the situation at The Huffington Post and on The Answer Sheet. Full text of the play is included below.
Declassified: Struggle for Existence (We Used to Eat Lunch Together)
Conceived of by students from Jamaica High School and Queens Collegiate High School
Chancellor Joel Klein of New York City has implemented a school reform strategy that aims to exchange large, underperforming schools with smaller schools. To date, 26 schools with high dropout rates have been closed and, since, graduation rates in the city have risen 10 percent.
Despite some of the strategy's successes, there are many who are discontented with the outcome -- hundreds of high school students left without a school to attend. Students who were left out in the transition -- including international and special education students -- were then forced to move to the few remaining high-capacity schools, only passing on the original problem.
Chancellor Klein, who retires in January, says that change is controversial, and that there
First Posted: 12-26-10 02:49 PM | Updated: 12-26-10 02:56 PM