When I sat down to write this post and found myself instead opening Facebook chat, gazing out the window, and experiencing a general lack of focus, I decided that “senioritis” was the most honest thing for me to write about. It seems that I am not the only one with senioritis on my mind — in Insideschools blogger Judy Baum’s last post, she responded to a parent concerned about her son dropping out as a senior.

I empathize with the student in question. As one senior friend of mine put it, “You’ve been doing the same thing for 12 years, you’re looking at these new exciting places to go and things to learn, and then you’re told that you should go and do more of the same thing. You can’t help but say ‘screw that.’” But, as Judy said, dropping out in senior year is still dropping out. And if kids are threatening to drop out just three months before graduation, something needs to change.

I changed my Facebook status to the following question: “I’m writing a post on an education blog about senioritis, can you take a second to answer this: how is senioritis affecting you? And can you think of a better way to do senior year?”

Though it was close to midnight, I got about 15 responses in the next few minutes. Many of them were something like: “Well I have a ten page paper due tomorrow and I’m on Facebook. Does that answer your question?” Many students voiced complaints such as “I have no motivation. I have a hard time getting myself to school, and if I do get myself there, it is past 10:00 a.m.” Students had a lot of ideas for alternatives, including internships, senior projects, and community service. And students are not the only ones thinking about trying something new.

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Last week, the New York Times reported on a bill just passed in the House of Representatives, to protect school children from certain forms of punishment, including restraint and seclusion (as in solitary confinement). If it becomes law, this legislation will cover children at all schools receiving federal funds.

I was astonished that such legislation was not already in place. Although it obviously covers extreme cases, the bill, and the fact that it came out in the midst of the Department of Education’s Respect For All Week (see this Insideschools post), got me thinking about discipline – the everyday variety that takes place among very young students, such as kindergartners.

How does a teacher keep a room full of five- and six-year-olds under control? They can be pretty active, and I can’t imagine having to manage 20 or more of them at one time. Remember Kindergarten Cop? I’m fairly sure more than one teacher has fantasized about going military on a wild class, but most of us expect a less heavy-handed approach from our teaching professionals. (more…)

All around the city, schools are embracing and thriving on green. Some are learning about climate change from teacher resources like Earth Day NY or Facing the Future. Others are building green roofs, using watt meters and composting food scraps.

The Green Gremlins of Grace Church school pairs middle school students with elementary schoolers to run green activities, which range from making used Christmas cards into valentines for people in a hospital, to recycling keys and used gift cards, or raising money for Haiti by selling old electronic games.

Seeds in the Middle, currently piloting at PS 91 in Brooklyn, teaches students how to grow, market, find and cook healthy food.

PS 333, the Manhattan School for Children, expects to break ground for a pilot greenhouse on the roof, this summer. When finished it will teach kids about environmental sustainability, food, and nutrition. (more…)

Mandy Hass is a parent at Lower Lab, as well as the director of marketing and business development for Insideschools.org.

Last week’s Village Voice cover story, Inside a Divided Upper East Side Public School: Whites in the front door, blacks in the back door, has succeeded in bringing two co-located Upper East Side schools closer together: virtually everyone in the building feels he got much of the story wrong.

Author Steven Thrasher focuses on two schools — Lower Lab, a “gifted and talented” elementary school open to top-scoring kids throughout District 2, and PS 198, a zoned neighborhood school — which have shared a building for 22 years.

When Lower Lab was founded, in 1987, PS 198 had underutilized space. At that time, few schools in New York City shared buildings. Today, according Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld at the Department of Education’s press office, there are roughly 740 co-located schools, and next year, that number is likely to rise to about 750. That’s about half of the schools in the nation’s largest school system. The reasons for colocation have to do with real estate realities and the trend in education reform to break large schools down into smaller communities, as well as New York’s decision to allow charter schools to have space in traditional public school buildings. (more…)

As continuing budget shortages force schools across the city to cut music programs, PS 55 in Queens is about to get a new one. Last spring, LaGuardia High School senior instrumental major David Charles was taking his sister to school at PS 55, when he realized that there was no music program at the school.

He went inside, found the principal, and offered to start one. In his words, “[The principal] warned me that it would require a lot of work and planning, but I told him I was ready for it. We exchanged contact information and I made the first lesson plan and showed it to him. We went over ….[the] cost… the schools budget…who would be interested. Then we handed out letters to the parents explaining what this was going to be about. Parents seemed really interested in the idea….

“Our purpose was to bring diversity to the school and promote musical understanding…. The school found a place (Laconia Music) to buy used instruments for very cheap… I’m going to have to come in before I go to school or after school. I have free periods in the morning and can move some things around.”

Wow. (more…)

Was your child born in 2005? 2006? If so, now is the time to register for a kindergarten or universal pre-kindergarten spot. If your child will be going into kindergarten, the application process began February 1^st; March 12 is the deadline to register. For upcoming pre-K’ers, registration begins today and runs through April 9. During this time, parents of prospective students can find an application, as well as a pre-k directory, online. Pre-k spots are given by lottery, with priority reserved for zoned siblings. Notifications will be sent out in early June.

Night Owl’s little sister is eligible for pre-K next year, so we’ll be first in line when the applications hit the PS29 office. As a zoned sibling, she’s supposed to be a shoe-in, but I can’t help but feel uneasy. The year we entered the lottery for Night Owl (2008) was the first year the lottery process had been centralized, and a glitch in the system caused even a few zoned siblings to fall through the cracks. I didn’t hear of any such snafus with the lottery last spring, but last year’s kindergarten registration was marked by overcrowding and kids being shut out of their own zoned schools, particularly on the Upper East Side. We can only hope the process this year goes more smoothly–at Night Owl’s school, the office does not report any unusual volume of kindergarten registrants so far.

Any reports from the registration front at your school?

Monday marked the 100th day of the school year. So in this week’s poll, we ask: how’s it going?

Some classrooms celebrate this milestone with special activities. This year, the 100th day fell on the first school day after winter break. Needless to say, many students were not in the mood to celebrate.

If you’re a parent, student, or educator, what’s your gut feeling about how your school is performing? Please take our poll at left, and share your thoughts below.

And if there have been significant changes at your school during the last 100 days — good or bad — please share the updates on your school’s profile page here at Insideschools.org..

“Mommy, will Insideschools miss you after you say a big goodbye?”

Sadly, Brooks’s question arose because last week, I left my position here as Web Developer. While I will continue to write this blog for as long as InsidesSCOOP will have me, my technical career is moving on to The Paley Center.

I have to admit that as excited as I am to begin my new professional opportunity, I am also truly saddened to leave Advocates For Children (AFC), Insideschools’ parent organization. I will sorely miss this small but feisty group of really smart and compassionate folks, many of them special education parents themselves, who work so hard for the interests of all public school children with educational challenges. It is no exaggeration to say that AFC has fundamentally changed the kind of special education parent I am.

When I started here two years ago, I was a tremendously grateful autism mom: my little boy’s life had been saved by publicly-funded programs. New York State’s Early Intervention Services (EI) and New York City’s Committee on Preschool Special Education (CPSE) had given Brooks 20 to 30 hours a week of intensive therapies that my husband and I would never have been able to afford privately. And Brooks had just secured a coveted kindergarten spot in the much-admired public school ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) Nest program.

Now, two years later, my son’s integrated program at P.S. 178 has more than lived up to its promise. Everyone — teachers, therapists, and students — understands on some level that Brooks is different, but they also completely and totally accept him. This finely-tuned inclusion environment not only benefits my son, but also his whole class and his whole school, since they are all learning first-hand to accept, value and, most importantly, befriend kids who aren’t exactly like them. To witness a New York City public school prioritize teaching kindergartners the value of diversity, right up there alongside academics, is nothing less than breathtaking. (more…)

I admit it: this time of year, my children don’t get enough exercise. It’s hard to drag them outside to play when we live in a northern, urban environment with no yard, and the playgrounds are sad and frozen.

There are only so many after school activities one can sign up for. The school does what it can, but its indoor facilities have limits, and if the temperature dips below freezing the teachers can’t risk frostbitten children. On not-so-bitterly cold days, the kids adjourn to the playground for recess, and I see them running around giddily, as though gulping fresh air for the first time.

When the weather’s too harsh to venture outside, the students sometimes watch a movie in the auditorium — to their intense delight. I don’t mind the occasional movie, but it’s no substitute for the kids moving their bodies. (more…)

Last week, the Department of Education announced that they would be seeking to develop “richer assessments of learning” over the next few years to complement the standardized tests. In his explanation, the DOE’s Director of Accountability, Shael Suranksky quoted President Obama: “It’s about being smarter about our assessments. It’s about measuring not only whether our kids can master the basics, but whether they can solve challenging tasks, do they have the skills like critical thinking and teamwork and entrepreneurship.”

Suransky went on to say that a new collaboration with the Gates Foundation will lead to more opportunities to engage in performance-based assessments (where students “perform” their learning in more open- ended ways).

At Arts & Letters we are already doing such assessments. In fact, on that same day, at Arts & Letters, we completed our third day of “Roundtables,” a practice adapted from many small schools across the city and the country.

Roundtables are based on a simple belief: students should have the opportunity to share, reflect on, and discuss the work they have done during the semester, and they should do it with an audience who knows and cares about them. Visitors should see what goes on all day in our public schools. This is one way that we show how deep and complex learning really is. (more…)

As I sat furiously answering emails from high school students around the city last night, on the phone with a student from Queens I’d never met, and trying to keep up with constant facebook notifications from strangers, I told my mother I thought the MTA’s proposal to cut student MetroCards was a blessing in disguise. I didn’t really mean it, of course, but it is clear to anyone working on this issue that the students of this city are uniting and mobilizing to make their voices heard.

There have been student organized rallies and protests, petition drives and press conferences. And the next phase begins this week: a MetroCard drive, organized by the NYC Student Union.

At the end of this week, first semester student MetroCards will expire. Student representatives from schools around the city will be collecting their classmate’s MetroCards, asking them to write a brief message on their card before handing it in. The message should be about how the MetroCard cut will affect them, or anything they want to say about the MTA’s plan. (more…)

I work with many adolescents who are highly truant. In my 7-plus years working in public middle and high schools, the number one thing they tell me is that school is boring.

I have explored and contemplated this concept of “school-as-boring” for countless hours, trying to figure out what exactly these kids feel is lacking. I wondered about how their capacity for engagement has been affected by a literal lifetime of being plugged in to television, video games and the internet.

Do schools like NYCiSchool and Global Technology Preparatory have the answer by creating a curriculum in which technology and computer use is absolutely integral? I am definitely a fan of schools that appeal to technology aficionados, but I feel more is lacking and causing far too many adolescents to disconnect from school. (more…)

Judging by the commentary on one of  Insideschools’  recent polls, heavy homework loads seem to trigger impassioned responses from both parents and students. Do nightly assignments in kindergarten fall into the “too much” category? Some parents think so. The fact that kindergarten homework was an oxymoron a generation ago may have something to do with this.

In this article from the New York Times, the author describes her quest to avoid a school where her kindergartner would spend precious after-school time on worksheets and drills, at the expense of play and fun. She laments the earlier focus on academic achievement and questions the worth of putting all this pressure on our kids.

In my own informal poll, most of the parents I talked to, at public and private schools, say their kindergartners don’t come home with much of anything regular, just the occasional project-meant to be fun and perhaps tie in with the week’s theme. From what I’ve been reading lately, though, I know there are plenty of exceptions–schools that pile the homework on the five-year olds every night. (more…)

Yesterday I had the privilege of serving on a panel at the new Urban Assembly School for Green Careers, listening to 9^th graders hold a debate. The topic was “Proposed: a new waste transfer station should be built in the South Bronx.”

The two teams represented the South Bronx and the Upper East Side.The students had visited a park right next door to a South Bronx waste transfer station that was very stinky, they said. The field trip had been hosted by Sustainable South Bronx.

The “Upper East Side” team argued against building the site in that neighborhood, noting that many minority and disadvantaged children live in the neighborhood, and 600 of them go to summer camp at Asphalt Green, where health would be threatened if garbage trucks were rumbling in and out all day. (more…)

After nine hours of parent, teacher, and politician testimony at a boisterous meeting at Brooklyn Tech last night, the Panel for Educational Policy rubber-stamped the decision to close 19 city schools.

Impassioned pleas to save neighborhood’s schools came from the far-reaches of all boroughs — Far Rockaway, Queens, the Northeast Bronx, Bed Stuy, Brooklyn and midtown Manhattan. Parents from PS 16 on Staten Island were there to protest the plan to split their school in half.

For the first time since Mayor Bloomberg took control of the city’s schools, parents — some 2000 strong — came together in a bid to keep their schools open. However, given that the PEP has previously approved all school closings, the schools’ fate appeared to be decided even before the meeting began.

The minimal checks and balances on mayoral control that were put into place by the state legislature last summer, were not enough to offset the mayor’s ironclad grip of the schools. Of the 13 members on the oversight board — the PEP — eight are appointed by the mayor and serve at his pleasure. (more…)

Our house, like any other with a 6-year-old, has its share of “No’s.” “No shoes on the couch.” “No getting wild in the house.” “No using the word ‘stupid.’” But there is also one that is autism-household-specific: “No talking about that anymore.”

For example, Brooks will ask: “Is MOMA like the Guggenheim? It’s similar, right? Is it similar? Not the same but similar.” And when we say “Yes, it’s similar. They are both museums,” he can easily go on for an unthinkably long period of time discussing the definition of similar and all the things he knows about that are similar, and he constantly wants us to chime in to validate his understanding of the concept.

We know that this is a combination of comforting himself with predictable facts, streamlining his sometimes disorganized thoughts, and simply his age-old habit of getting stuck in repetitive patterns. So we try to thin out our diminishing patience, and we remind ourselves that even though he still does this, he does it less and less, and that eventually, he will learn to stop talking in circles. (more…)

Q: How difficult is it to transfer to another college? Is it easier or harder than getting admitted as a freshman? Also, does the college you are applying to look at your high school record or just your college record?

A: The basic answer to all your questions above is: It depends.

Openings for transfer students are made possible by other students leaving the college. A school with a high retention rate will have fewer openings. In general, the more selective a college, the fewer places it will have. On the other hand, a less selective school which is also more affordable,  may be experiencing a higher demand for places — so it may be harder to be admitted as a transfer student there this year than it was last year. (more…)

 Have a question for Jane?  Search archives | Contact the College Counselor

Almost every year, we are faced with the task of finding — and hiring –new teachers. What makes a great teacher?  A school’s success depends on the quality of the faculty, and any school leader’s answer to that question will tell you much about the school.

For us, great teachers have three essential qualities. They must be 1) constant, and hungry, learners, 2) committed to knowing young people and their families well, and 3) supportive and collegial members of a professional community.

Why these three? (more…)

Someone asked me: do I worry my daughter will be “labeled” by getting an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) and switching to the CTT (Collaborative Team Teaching) classroom? That’s a good question, and if I had been asked years ago, hypothetically, I would have said yes. But right now, my answer is absolutely not.

I did most of my worrying in the days when everyone told us not to worry about Night Owl, yet we fretted because she struggled in the realms of word retrieval and spatial organization (puzzles, blocks, letters), among other little clues. It was my husband’s and my persistence that led us to more in-depth evaluations, and finally, the documentation we needed to get her services at school. Right now, if the label of a learning disability is what it takes to get the right kind of help for her, that’s a positive thing. (more…)

Actor Matthew Modine started a chat with middle school students at Brooklyn’s New Horizons School, MS 442 on Wednesday by turning off the overhead fluorescent lights to reduce energy. “I feel very strongly about empowering individuals to make a measurable, tangible difference to our community,” he said.

Modine was accompanied by several of the city’s sustainability bigwigs, there to demonstrate the city’s support for the students who will help schools save energy by participating in this year’s Green Cup Challenge, an annual, student-led challenge to measure and reduce schools’ energy use. Coordinated by the national non-profit Green Schools Alliance, the GCC’s first electric meter reading is this Friday, Jan.15, after which students will have a month to cut energy use.

At PS 166 in District 3, children are preparing for the Green Cup Challenge by making signs reminding everyone to “turn off the lights” and “power down computers.” A school-wide assembly made the whole school aware of the Challenge. Each classroom has designated two “climate captains” who will ensure that lights are turned off at lunch and recess, windows are closed, and unused appliances unplugged. School custodial staff have also been brought into the loop. (more…)

I have written many posts about how much I love PS 178, Brooks’s school. It is extraordinary. Period. This is not news.

But I thought it might be an interesting exercise to try to articulate what makes it so good, and for that matter what makes any school good. Especially at this juncture in New York City public education where 20 schools have proposed closing dates, based in large part on consistently low standardized test scores. Since I am skeptical about this kind of data being a reliable indicator of a good education, I wonder about alternative measurements. Is it possible to boil the essence of a good school down to a few bullet points? (more…)

A host of parental postings on this blog in recent weeks have included the following concern: “My child has so much homework and gets so little sleep that I feel really sorry for him/her.”

Often, this has come from the parents of freshmen at schools like Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science and Stuyvesant, large, highly sought after and filled with high expectations and high achievers.

High expectations mean that students will be expected to keep up with what in some cases might feel like a daunting work load, while adjusting to huge schools filled with ambitious classmates and teachers who may not have time to get to know them. (more…)

At 7 a.m.on Tuesday, I and 15 of my fellow students, stood on the steps of Martin Luther King Educational Campus shaking with cold and clutching signs that protested the proposed student MetroCard cuts. All of us have been to several student protests this year, and we know what to expect. They’re always smaller than we want them to be, always loud and impassioned, always inspiring, and rarely well covered by the press.

This one was different: we were standing quietly on the steps behind NYC Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who was holding an outdoor press conference to speak out against the MTA cuts (particularly to student and senior citizen fares). She criticized the MTA for not discussing this proposal with the City Council, and said that she was open to meeting and collaborating with them to find solutions to the budgetary problems.

A few weeks ago the Student Union received an email from Nick Rolf, the community outreach organizer for Christine Quinn’s office asking us to get 15 students to attend the press conference and stand behind Speaker Quinn. This was a rare and much appreciated attempt by the City Council to involve students in their actions. One facebook page later, we were there. (more…)

Recently, a friend and public school parent said to me that they were not sure they could expect their child to be known well in school, implying that such things cannot happen “in public school.” It reminded me of many conversations I have had with people—personal and professional—that assume that you can’t and shouldn’t expect too much.

I couldn’t disagree more. While NYC public schools have significant limitations in terms of money and space, we are increasingly able to hire the teachers we want (those who are hungry, constant learners—more on that in a future entry), to spend our funds in the way that we want, and to use our spaces to reflect our values about learning.

At Arts & Letters, we spend 92% of our budget on our faculty, so that we ensure that each child is known well. Every student has an advisor, who is a faculty member, charged with knowing their 15 (or fewer) students, and their families. They meet with them one on one, meet with their families, and as a group, they process social emotional issues they face.

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It’s Sunday, the last day of holiday break, and at 4:30 my daughter proclaims she’s ready for a bath.

“But what about dinner?” I ask. “You haven’t even eaten yet.”

“No dinner!” she insists, hopping up and down for emphasis. “I’m ready for bed. I want tomorrow to be here.”

This, from a child who normally uses superhero powers to stave off bedtime, is remarkable, to say the least. But she has a reason for wanting to fast-forward the night: in the morning, she’ll be switching to a new kindergarten class, and one of her best buddies is in it. (more…)

The holidays are my favorite time of year to check in with teacher friends, simply to hear what their students give them as gifts. For the most part the kids bestow endearing homemade cards and trinkets, with the usual array of baked goods.

Some private school teachers, though, receive jaw-droppingly expensive gifts. One reports getting gold jewelry from Tiffany more than once and, one year, a cruise. Another was presented with a giant porcelain ice bucket in the form of a top hat with a glove draped fetchingly over the brim. A pal who taught at a liberal-minded private school received no gifts at all, because acknowledgment of the holidays was taboo.

No such extravagance or holiday ban at my daughter’s school, PS 29 - at least not that I’ve witnessed. The PTA tries to eliminate awkwardness and the possibility of one-upmanship by encouraging a group gift (okay, according the the DOE’s conflict of interest rules). Parents chip in an amount they see fit. Often, a figure is suggested.This year in our kindergarten classes,  the recommended amount was $15 to $20 per family. Donations are anonymous and everyone signs the group cards. (more…)

A dozen teachers gathered round a table at UFT headquarters one evening last week to hammer out the details of their pre-Earth Day teacher’s fair. The fair, to be held in March, will help create “teach-ins” about sustainability and the environment — lessons that teachers can implement in their classrooms on April 22, Earth Day 2010.
The meeting was kicked off with presentations by Mary Most, the Department of Sanitation’s doyenne of school recycling, and John Shea, the CEO of the Division of School Facilities. Shea is the driving force behind many sustainability efforts in the schools. He noted progress in the network of sustainability coordinators now in place in more than 1,200 schools, and urged schools to sign up for the Green Cup Challenge energy reduction contest which starts in mid-January. (more…)

At Arts & Letters, we are embarking on a month of preparation for our Quality Review. For those of you who do not know, the Quality Review stands next to the Progress Report Card, those notorious A-F grades that appear in the newspapers. These are the Department of Education’s two most important measures of school success. While the Progress Reports mostly show a snapshot of a school’s progress and performance on state tests, the Quality Review seeks to provide a more holistic view of a school.

In truth, it has taken a while for the DOE to settle on a “rubric” or measure, that encapsulates as well what a “well-developed” school should look like. Nationally, and even locally, departments of education have hesitated to declare the qualities of a good school, but the research is resoundingly clear, and the NYC Department of Education is taking a stand. (more…)

I overheard a conversation this fall between a group of high school freshmen, comparing the weight of their backpacks, their teachers, and their overall adjustment.

Many spoke of going back to visit their middle school several times already, a telling clue. One described the juniors and seniors as “giants,” another said the hallways were so crowded he could barely walk. Another missed lunch because he couldn’t find the cafeteria. The number of exams seemed daunting, as did the competition to get on sports teams and in other activities. A performing arts student said she had spent so much time worrying about her tryout, she hadn’t thought about “the school part, and all the homework.”

All had a slightly glazed look in their eyes. I listened carefully (the conversation happened to take place around my kitchen table). In a suburban setting, the group would have moved together to the same local high school; here sat a group of friends who now represented five very different choices. (more…)

Calling all students, teachers, and administrators!

Join the New York City Student Union on Monday, Dec. 14t at 5 pm as we host our second Student Government Forum. The forum is being held at the UFT offices downtown (50 Broadway between Exchange and Morris.) We will bring together student representatives from around the city, as well as those who are trying to form new governments.

The goal is to establish a basis for an effective student government, help each other improve or create new entities, and connect our organizations with each other. This is essential to increasing student voice and power in our schools. The event is open to students, teachers, administrators and anyone else who wants to come. (more…)

Brooks found a new game he likes.

So after dinner, my husband and I now often hear “Simon says put your hands up in the air.” And we enthusiastically raise our arms. “Simon says put your hands on your head.” And we put our hands on heads. “Simon says stomp your feet.” And we stomp our feet. And then in his playful high-pitched voice, he sings: “Simon didn’t say-ay!”

He can read chapter books while some of his classmates are still working on identifying letters, but he doesn’t understand this simple game that his peers easily mastered long ago. He WILL understand it in time, with enough support and perseverance (both of which he thankfully has an abundance), but until then, how do we intervene? (more…)

Imagine your kindergartner arrived at school each day, tackled the fundamentals of reading and writing, listened to stories, and sang with her class…all in French.

At PS 58 in Brooklyn, this scene is reality. In the dual-language immersion program, now in its third year, the day is split between French in the morning and English in the afternoon. Half the students in two classes per grade are native English speakers admitted by lottery (they must be zoned for PS 58), and the other half are francophone children — meaning they speak and understand enough French to pass a proficiency test. Zoned francophone children have priority, but if any spots remain, fluent children outside the zone may test in.

The program has gained such popularity that, according to Parent Coordinator Joan Bredthauer, interested parents have phoned from Paris and Montreal. (more…)

Winter Recess begins December 24th. Some students will head home with a bookbag full of holiday homework, while others will have a lighter load.

In this week’s poll, we’d like to know how you feel about teachers assigning homework over the holiday break. Is it important to keep the momentum of the learning process moving during that downtime?  Or, do kids deserve a break?

Vote now to let us know how you feel about holiday homework.  Kids are welcome to vote too!

You’ll find this week’s poll near the upper left hand side of this page, and you can share your comments here.

Allison Gaines Pell is the founder and principal of a new, small public middle school called Arts & Letters, located in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. She lives in Brooklyn, and is a public school parent herself. We are pleased to add her contributions to our blog.

“Inspiration, hunger: these are the qualities that drive good schools. The best we [educators] can do is to create the most likely conditions for them to flourish, and then get out of their way.” — Ted Sizer, Founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools

Several weeks ago, I attended the Fall Forum of the Coalition of Essential Schools,an organization started 25 years ago by Ted Sizer, a great man who passed away in October. I was both inspired and saddened.

Saddened because I see the ways in which movements to create and sustain innovative places of learning can be marginalized due to the intense testing pressure that school leaders face. It takes much longer, and is much harder, to create a nurturing community of learners, and to change the beliefs and values of adults to create that culture, than it is to look at and analyze test scores.

Inspired because I saw the ways that so many educators across the city and the country continue to elevate the thinking and learning that takes place in our public schools. Too often, educational practices that lead to powerful and active learning opportunities (the kind we each can remember from our own lives), are reserved for the nation’s private or elite schools. This has to change. (more…)

We’ve recently submitted an application to the Knight News Challenge, which funds projects that:

1. Use digital open-source media
2. To distribute news and information
3. In a local community

With help from the Knight News Challenge, we can make Insideschools.org sustainable here in New York and replicable to other cities across the country. With help from you, we can make our entry better and increase our chances of winning! You can read our entry here, and register to rate our project and leave comments and suggestions.

While you’re there, you might also want to check out another idea we like called Showbus, which will allow parents to track exactly where their child’s school bus is along its route.

Let us know what you think!

Q: I understand the importance of the college essay, and how admissions people use it to get a sense of the whole applicant beyond the transcript and test scores.  But what’s the point of all those short essays?  Write p 277 of your autobiography!  Write a haiku about yourself!  Why are you applying to us? These short essays are annoying and I don’t see the purpose.  Don’t they already have enough information in the application to make a decision?

A:  I am sure that every other student working to submit an application by the deadline has been similarly annoyed and wonders the same thing.  But don’t kid yourself - these “short” questions are of the utmost importance!  Admissions officers have a tremendous amount of work to do; they are not making up extra questions just to give you and them more to do!  There is a reason.  For one thing, college admissions people know that the longer essay, which is usually considered to be “the” essay, may have been tweaked and edited and corrected by mom, dad, teachers, Uncle Fred, or even a paid advisor, and may no longer represent the genuine voice of the student.  And the genuine, natural voice is what they want to hear.  Dashing off - not being thoughtless, but being a bit more spontaneous - those short answers might reveal more of the unprompted writer.

Remember that an application should give a multi-dimensional picture of the applicant.  The short answers that you might think are trivial, actually add something to this portrait.

And if a college asks the question - “why are you applying to our college?” - please take this very seriously.  They are not looking for you simply to praise their school.  Neither are they looking for you to regurgitate information easily found on their website or publications.  So if you say “I want to attend X College because it’s ranked #3 in the nation for . . .” or “I want to go to your school because it’s only 20 minutes from Boston” or “X College is for me because it offers a choice of 38 majors” you will have failed the test.  Anyone can write those things.

They want to see that you have truly reflected on your choice.  In this way they may be able to tell the difference between a sincere applicant and one who wants to use them as a safety school or back-up.  If they have two applicants whose qualifications are very similar, but one applicant sounds sincere and the other sounds not fully interested, which applicant do you think they will choose?

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Kids who grow up in New York City don’t expect suburban amenities like backyards, basement recreation rooms, and their own bedrooms, and they’re used to thinking of shared parks and playgrounds as their own. When it comes to schools, the same mentality of sharing space often rules, although it seems the concept of sharing space is being stretched more than ever.

Today’s New York Times carried a piece highlighting the difficulties existing public schools are having sharing space with a growing number of charter schools, at a time when public schools are also squeezed. Last week Insideschools wrote about parents angry over charter school expansion on the Lower East Side. Gotham Schools highlighted stories in the Downtown Express about overcrowded elementary schools and a principal’s threat to leave for Westchester, while the New York Daily News reported that class sizes have grown.

My younger son’s excellent middle school, the Clinton School for Artists & Writers, has been told it must move out of top few floors it has occupied on top of PS 11 in Chelsea since its inception. Sharing it seems, is no longer an option. (more…)

This past summer I was assigned Henry Jame’s Portrait of a Lady and couldn’t read more than a page without getting a pounding headache and falling asleep. At first I attributed this to the complexity of the language, and assumed that I was having difficulty reading it because it was too challenging and therefore boring. As it turns out, it probably was too challenging, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was my eyes.

Like so many other people, I have vision disorders (in my case, tracking problems and convergence insufficiency) that make reading, computer work and other close-up tasks very difficult. Having convergence insuffieciency means that a person’s eyes do not work well at close distances. They often drift outward, causing that person to see double. The person naturally tries to pull their eyes back in to make the close object clear and single, causing a lot of strain on their eyes.

Fortunately my parents and I discovered the problems when I was in elementary school and I was sent to vision therapy, so I was able to recognize what was going on when the problems came back last summer. Many kids aren’t this lucky. (more…)

“What IS throw-up? Is it yucky like poop?”

Having only had the stomach flu once in his life as a toddler, Brooks managed to get it twice this past month. And as his expressive language skills improve and his thoughts get more organized, he has been “entertaining” my husband and me with his attempts to figure it all out.

Because sensory issues are a component of autism, we never quite know how Brooks experiences being sick. When he was much younger, he was sometimes able to block out pain the same way he blocked out people. His pediatrician was once perplexed at Brooks’ response to getting a shot—not only did he refrain from crying, he showed no sign of any discomfort! Although you could argue that this is a valuable skill, the downside is that he’s sometimes not very in touch with his own body. For instance, he can easily overeat and not stop until he finally gets a bad stomach ache. We suspect that because he doesn’t actually feel full, he doesn’t stop eating sooner. As a result, he complains that his stomach hurts and in the same breath asks for more chocolate ice cream. (more…)

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the middle school fairs. Several open houses and tours later, my family is taking on the seemingly impossible task of ranking schools. Schools that I thought would be among “our” first choices are now somewhat less impressive when viewed up close.

Although my son continues to grumble, he is learning what is important to him in a school and recognizing the signs of a potential “home.”  “J” is mainly concerned with technology and the arts. He prefers a 6-12 school so that he doesn’t have to go through this process again (until college, that is).  I am largely concerned with whether the students’ voices are heard and their input valued. A lack of student voice is the number one complaint amongst the kids that I work with.

Given your thoughtful questions and comments, I thought an update might be useful. Sonia wondered how to find unzoned schools, “Bronx Dad” asked about District 10 schools, and  “District 13 parent” lamented the lack of both true diversity and high quality citywide schools. (more…)

The Child Nutrition Act is up for reauthorization. All of the Untied States Department of Agriculture nutrition programs that fall under this legislation, including School Breakfast and School Lunch Programs, are scheduled to be updated in Congress; the last time was in 2004. This is a chance to make sure no children go hungry, but also the potential to change-and improve-what they are served in their school cafeterias.

Last week, the USDA reported that “food insecurity” rose last year-that is, more families were unable to consistently put food on the table (14.6% of families were food insecure in 2008, up from 11.1% in 2007). As a consequence, more children are going to school undernourished, so their cafeterias are often the best source of a complete meal.

In NYC, recession-related food insecurity may be compounded by the high cost of living. Yet, because of bureaucracy, many kids who should be eligible for free meals are not getting them. At the same time, 1 in 5 kindergarten students in NYC is obese, and Type 2 diabetes is at an all-time high. (more…)

Marriage is hard. I don’t know of any husband or wife who hasn’t, at some point or another, experienced this lifetime commitment as tiresome, uninteresting, and relentless. Even when you love your husband and he loves you and your relationship has already earned the depth of decades. And even without an autistic child thrown into the mix.

Raising an autistic child apparently increases divorce rates to 80%, although I have not been able to find a reliable source for this oft-quoted statistic. I’ve seen some of these marriage breakdowns first-hand, and I find them especially sad.

I am hardly cocky enough to claim that I know the secret to staying married, but since my husband and I both celebrated our birthdays recently, I have been thinking a lot about what keeps us together. And perhaps, more importantly, what fails to drive us apart. (more…)

Tomorrow, Night Owl’s kindergarten will finally receive the H1N1 vaccine, but for us, it’s too little, too late. My daughters were both ill two weeks ago with what their doctor described as “classic influenza” — most likely H1N1, she said, since that’s what’s making the rounds right now.

The vaccine had been elusive at the pediatrician’s office too — initial doses reserved for high-risk children.

After their days of fever, cough, and upset stomach (and for Night Owl, a side of mild pneumonia), they are back in school. But even if they’re now immune to this one virus, even if we decide to be doubly safe and vaccinate, I know the usual parade of seasonal horrors will still visit us. And believe me, some have been far more hideous than what we endured last week (the intestinal virus Night Owl spread to all 15 guests last Thanksgiving, for one).

In order to fortify my kids, I’ve been collecting information on boosting natural immunity during cold and flu season. Certainly, improving overall health can go a long way in fighting off infections and rebounding more quickly from them.

(more…)

The Department of Education is proposing changes in existing policies, called Chancellor’s Regulations, regarding promotion standards, and the way in which principals and assistant principals are chosen. It is also proposing a new regulation governing procedures for locating or closing schools or changing current building usage. The Panel for Educational Policy will vote on these measures at the Nov.12 meeting at PS 128 in Queens; in the meantime the public is invited to review the proposals and weigh in on them.

The revised state law governing NYC schools renewed mayoral control of the city school system, but modified it in an effort to increase parent input. The law explicitly requires announcement of PEP meeting agendas at least 10 days in advance. In this case, the DOE provided the information more than a month in advance. However, it is not clear how public comments (which are not actually being made public) will make a difference in the proposals or the outcome of the PEP vote. (more…)

Q:  My son is a junior at a high school in Queens.  He is an excellent student and would like to go to a prestigious college.  But his high school is huge and the college counselors don’t have much time for each student.  On the other hand, my cousin’s son goes to a prep school near Washington DC, and my cousin says their college counselors are known for getting kids into the best colleges.  What chance does my son have competing against applicants like that?

A:  I went to a very large high school myself, in Queens, many years ago.  There were about 1500 students in my graduating class.  Now I work at a private school, and yes, there is a vast difference in the amount of individual attention teachers and counselors are able to give to students.  But statistics confirm that students in each setting are successful in the college admissions process.

Going to a private school in itself does not guarantee acceptance to any college; nor does attending a large urban public school in itself, assure rejection.  Applicants are looked at in the context of their school environment, so your son will not be competing against his cousin.

I recently attended an admissions information session at an Ivy league university.  The admissions rep pointed out that if they accepted students who were all exactly the same in background and qualifications, the freshman class would be pretty boring.  To keep their school vigorous and stimulating, they admit students who come from a wide variety of schools, communities, and ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds who bring an array of interests and talents to campus.  To do this, they recruit widely at both public and private schools.  Colleges really do reach out, some more effectively than others. (more…)

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Before I say anything else about this hot-button topic, let me say this: I am not a doctor. I have no medical degree. And here on the internet, where anyone can claim to be an expert on anything, I want to make sure to clarify my qualifications.

I am, quite simply, an autism mom. This year, my husband and I decided to give Brooks the H1N1 vaccine, and I have a recommendation for all other parents. My recommendation is to make sure that you get reliable information about this vaccine. And all vaccines. From legitimate sources.

Start by reading Amy Wallace’s article, “Fear,” in this month’s Wired Magazine. I admire several aspects of her piece: it presents a litany of medical facts that are very difficult for any reasonable person to dispute; it reminds us that it is not the function of medical science to disprove that vaccines cause autism, but rather to prove that vaccines are safe; it warns us that while pharmaceutical companies have their fair share of corruption, we must not make the error of indicting them in every situation, without just cause. (more…)

It’s that “school search” time of year again and, if you have a special needs child, you’ll want to attend the Jewish Ccommunity Center’s 2009 Special Needs School Fair this week.

Last year I wrote about how helpful this event was for me and my family. That still applies! This year the fair will be held on Thursday, Oct. 29 from 5:30-7:30 p.m.

Do yourself a favor and add it to your calendar.

Recently, my cousin mused on her 20 years as a kindergarten teacher: “It has changed. It’s much more academic now than it was in 1989.” She loves her job but feels pressure to teach certain skills sooner, even if some children aren’t developmentally ready. This year, she opted for her son to repeat pre-Kindergarten and grow a bit, knowing firsthand the demands today’s kindergarten places on children.

The play-based kindergarten I remember is starkly different from even my daughter’s pre-K experience. Last year, “homework” began appearing in Night Owl’s mailbox some time around Thanksgiving. There were flash cards bearing her classmates’ names, so we could practice word recognition at home. Her teacher balanced the day with play and rest time, but I wondered if all this work was appropriate for four-year-olds (some still three). (more…)

The Department of Education  is beginning to focus on reducing energy use, mandating use of green cleaning products, and improving recycling rates at schools. These efforts are important because  the future of life as we know it is threatened by climate change, and New York as a coastal city is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

The next step is to bring children into this loop, so that we can help raise the next generation of climate stewards. Connecting children to ideas of how to sustain life on the planet, and why that is important, is called “sustainability education.” One entry point for sustainability is a newish concept called STEM education, which calls for renewed commitment to education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics  fields. President Obama has connected STEM education to “the progress and prosperity of future generations.”

Where does New York City get its water? What can kids do to help the planet? What is the difference between climate and weather? How does a green roof work? Why do we turn off the lights when we leave the room and why recycle? All these concepts relate to a concept called “sustainability education. (more…)

It was a warm, sunny afternoon about a week into this school year. As I walked to the bus stop from the high school where I work, I recognized a former student (let’s call him Jamal) sitting on the wall of the nearby park. Jamal was engrossed in his phone, probably an AIM conversation. Although he transferred to another school last year, he returned to his old school most days to pick up his girlfriend. I greeted him and he pulled away from the furious presses of buttons just long enough to flash his dazzling smile and say hello.

Moments later, a police van pulled up in front of Jamal and a couple of other young African American boys, none of whom appeared to be together, all of them similarly absorbed by electronic devices. Although none of the boys was acting suspiciously, the officer in the front passenger seat questioned each boy as to what they were doing. It was after school hours, so they shouldn’t have been suspected of truancy.

The officer demanded to know why they were there, repeating her questions with a hard tone when the answers were apparently unsatisfactory. My bus arrived, so I reluctantly left the scene. I later learned from a colleague that Jamal had been deeply shaken by the encounter, which had reportedly escalated to the point of the officer becoming angry with him for “having an attitude”. (more…)