Jan. 16, 2012, 9:24 a.m.
Good morning. SchoolBook is still reveling in the wonderful WNYC event at the Brooklyn Museum on Sunday to mark the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
The event, hosted by WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, gave the editors of SchoolBook a chance to meet many teachers and parents, as well as to hear some great historians, educators and very talented students on the subject of education and civil rights. And the musical performances were pretty impressive, too.
Later today we’ll have highlights of the event and more from those students. Meanwhile, you can still respond to our query on the subject.
And our sister blog, The Learning Network, is still looking for ways to freshen up the civil rights curriculum, in time for Black History Month
As the city and state struggle to put a teacher evaluation system in place, the people who would implement such a system -- New York's principals -- keep adding their names to a letter that objects to what the state has done.
For teachers, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday comes with some heavy challenges. How do you make an annual lesson plan fresh each year, especially one loaded with issues of race and class? Six teachers from different types of schools in New York City discuss how they make the civil rights leader and his legacy meaningful to students today.
A highly touted new study by researchers from Harvard and Columbia found a correlation between teacher effectiveness and students' success in life when it comes to earnings, going to college and teenage pregnancy. But Michael Winerip reports in his On Education column that the data comes from the 1990s, a pre-testing era. “It is a key limitation of the study,” Raj Chetty of Harvard, one of the three researchers, acknowledged in an interview.
A day after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said he would circumvent the teachers union to create his own teacher evaluation process, the union is trying to force the city back to the negotiation table.
Teachers call in to WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show in response to the mayor's State of the City address. Many of them, says the host, told WNYC that the idea of merit pay was "good in theory, wouldn't work in practice.''
An assessment of education plans and pledges in Mayor Bloomberg's State of the City addresses through the years.
In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Day, the dean of the UCLA School of Law looks at the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education and Dr. King, and writes: "Without a strong sense of how liberty shapes our personhood and dignity, equality can mean little more than a race to the bottom for the unfortunate and disadvantaged."
Characterize his proposals however you will, but one word can describe Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's state of the city speech on Thursday: chutzpah. Called groundbreaking and ambitious -- or stale and failing -- the mayor's proposed ideas have set off a passionate discussion. The New York Post declares: "It's war."
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg laid out an ambitious agenda for the city schools. The reaction has been flying via Tweets, e-mails and Facebook posts. What do you think about his proposals?
