by Liz Willen When I first visited the Lab School for Collaborative Studies three years ago, I hoped my oldest son, then a fifth-grader, would rank it first on his middle school list. Lab has always attracted top students and teachers, and in the classrooms we visited, students seemed engaged...
While it's high season for pre-K and Kindergarten applications, families of children with special needs are part of the admissions process, too, and want information on which schools will best serve their children. Particularly for families new to the city's schools, identifying solid schools...
As parents slog through the application process for the city's gifted and talented programs, today there's a chance to step back and consider the evolving definition of what 'gifted' means. EdWeek.org is hosting a conversation with three leading experts in the field, whose book, The Development...
Middle school families inclined to celebrate the next President's inauguration in Washington D.C. faced a mighty calendar conflict, as the tests are slated to begin on January 20th, Inauguration Day. The DOE has, in its wisdom, moved the middle-school ELA test dates back by one day, to commence...
After my dog Maggie graduated from the Good Dog training program for therapy animals last week, my husband and I were asked to choose her first volunteer project. As we scanned a long list of nursing homes and hospitals that use therapy dogs, we noticed several reading programs at public schools...
By unanimous vote, the UFT board approved a plan to put hundreds of teachers in New York City's Absent Teacher Reserve back to work. The ATR program, estimated to cost DOE (and thus taxpayers) about $155 million from 2007 through 2009, acts as a holding pool for teachers who've been 'excessed'...
In response to swirling confusion on this blog and other local parenting sites, here is the official, on the record, DOEsibling enrollment policy for prospective kindergarten students. Enrollment priority, in descending order: "Zoned students with siblings, Zoned students without...
In a climate where standardized tests are praised and vilified, depending on your point of view, comes a study from the State University of New York, showing a strong correlation between SAT score and eventual college graduation. Also notable is the graduation rate itself: At some schools, just...
by Jennifer Freeman, a member of the Community Education Council in District 3 Last Wednesday's Community Education Council meeting on school overcrowding in District 3, attended by hundreds of people, morphed into an impromptu rally about diversity. CEC3's process for addressing overcrowding...
In a procedural 180, DOE has revised its plans for centralized kindergarten admissions. In January, their intention was to centralize the process -- much as the pre-K process was centralized this year and last. Now, Elissa Gootman reports, applications will all follow a consistent calendar (which...
At the request of Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, the city's Independent Budget Officeundertook a review of DOEspending on accountability measures-- everything from the mythically plagued ARIS computer program to the progress reports. A summary is here, and the complete pdf is here, but short...
All the papers today cover the newly released high school progress reports. The Times has a good breakdown of grades and school size, the Newshighlights a significant bump in schools earning top grades this year, with 82% earning A's or B's, vs. 65% last year, and the Postrecaps the high-scoring...
Tonight's CEC 3 meeting might include a showdown between parents and administrators from two different schools that share one overcrowded building, wrote Insideschools.org alumna Philissa Cramer on Gothamschools today. A CEC 3 proposal released last week suggested that the Center School, a small,...
City schools have to trim 1.2% from their budgets by Monday-- and just now, Gov. David Paterson says the state will cut back on planned support for the public schools. While Paterson says his cutbacks aren't true "cuts" -- actual programs and services aren't going by the wayside, for the moment...
_ UPDATE: The high school progress reports were released today and can be found on the DOE website. For real data-heads, all of the statistics used to compile the progress reports are available in one spreadsheet. Analysis to come..._ For parents thick in the high-school search process, the...
At a Manhattan Institutebreakfast yesterday morning, held at the plush, posh Harvard Club, accountability bigwigs from the DOE, Columbia Universityand the Institute debated the effects of F progress reports on elementary and middle schools. For recaps of the meeting, see Gotham Gazetteand...
Last week I discovered that a friend of mine lives alone in an apartment in midtown Manhattan (at age 16) while the rest of her family lives in Pennsylvania. She gets along well with her mother and sister and misses them a lot, so I wondered why she wasn’t living with them. Her answer was totally...
A week of bad budget and economic news does not bode well for the city’s high schools. The New York Daily News reported that the city's newly downsized capital plan includes plans for just two new high schools—even though 59% of the city’s high schoolers spend their days in overcrowded...
In a new survey from Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum's office, school psychologists and social workers say they're struggling under the dual demands of the education bureaucracy and the needy students they're assigned to serve. Nine in ten mental-health professionals surveyed say that case...
Buried in yesterday's Times, there's news of an October 16 court decision that implicates the DOE for lack of environmental oversight on a long-beleaguered new school project, planned on a toxic 'brownfield' in the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx. With a new school construction budget...
The results are in! And it turns out that a Catholic school in Queens 'elected' the winning candidate... again. High school students in the South Bronx had been holding their breath earlier this weekto see who would win the presidential election. And on Wednesday, boys at Eagle Academy in...
Last night, parents crowded into a hot auditorium at PS 84 for the two Manhattan gifted and talented information sessions. With people sitting side-by-side and back-to-back along both aisles, cramming into the space by all four doorways, and squeezing next to the presenter in front of the stage,...
Late yesterday afternoon, with little fanfare and zero public pronouncement, the DOE released its new capital plan for 2010-2014. Remarkably lower-key than the splashy launch of the first capital plan, this pared-back version proposes $11 billion for 42 new schoolsto create 25,000 new seats....
For euphoric New Yorkers still dazed and reeling in the post-election coverage, news of the city's financial woes -- and the Mayor's new capital plan, expected to be released today-- comes as a bracing wake-up call: Grim financial times lie ahead, with cuts across all city departments, including...
In order to accommodate voting machines and long lines of voters, there was no school today for city students (although teachers and administrators had to show up for professional development). Early indicators suggest that a high turn-out of New York adults had the chance wait for hours inside...
By Jennifer Freeman A recent Daily News editorial dismissed the need for more open discussion of city schools’ capital needs. The editorial blast was aimed at a recent report, A Better Capital Plan (full disclosure: I am a contributing author). The report documented that more school seats were...
Comments made by Anna Commitante at aparent forum this weekin Brooklyn seemed to contradict the posted, published gifted and talented handbookin regard to DOE policy on sibling preference. For clarity: DOE officials say there is, in fact, sibling preference , in both district and citywide g+t...
Some spooky Halloween disappearing act (or perhaps a whisper from DOE?) may explain how a piece of investigative reportingvanished into thin air. Another surprise came from the UFT, in support of the Teaching Fellows - the groups haven't always had the coziest relationship, but now, the union's...
Hundreds of parents lined up at PS 58 last night in Brooklyn for information on gifted and talented programs. Info booklets, which were in short supply, describe the application and testing process and include a short practice test. They're available in bulk at local elementary schools and at...
by Liz Willen As a veteran of both middle school and high school tours (not to mention the many college tours I’ve been on as an education journalist), I'm getting really sick of the will-my-child-get-in question. It's become as annoying as the incessant "are we there yet?" mantra from the back...
The NYT story that was on line last night made today's front page, and a reader wrote in to mention Merideth Kolodner's coverage in the News. The apparent under-enrollment in G+T classes stands in sharp counterpoint to consistent overcrowding in the city's schools; read more here, or read the...
On theTimes website nowand in tomorrow's paper, read Elissa Gootman's analysis of gifted and talented enrollment for 2008-2009 -- and weep. With half as many students enrolled in G+T programs -- despite nearly three times as many applicants -- diversity plummeted, schools that had g+t programs...
At the NYC Student Union meeting today we discussed the somewhat obvious connection that education has with race, income and neighborhood. We talked about the way people are born onto education 'tracks' that are extremely difficult to change. We also found that the system works both...
If you know a great high-school science or math teacher -- someone who's been in the public school classroom for at least five years, and is teaching at least four periods a day -- the Sloan Foundation and the Fund for the City of New York want to hear from you. This year marks the inauguration...
Today's thunder and lightning may just be place-setters for the budget battle gearing up in Albany. Governor David Paterson is expected to testify this morning before the House Ways and Means Committee, in no small part on the looming $12.5 billion state budget gap, The new, revised estimate is...
As the high school search for my eighth-grader intensifies, I've been reading up on some interesting and relatively new schools. All are far from where we live and not at all convenient: Frank Sinatra High School of the Arts(which will soon move to Astoria); The Brooklyn LatinSchool in Bushwick...
It looks like the city and the schools might get four more years of Bloomberg and Klein; when push came to shove, the City Council’s Education Committee was proportionally more supportive of the mayor than the Council as a whole.On the other hand, 10 public school teachers filed a law suit on...
Parents of preschoolers will soon be aware, if they're not already, of the application and testing process for gifted and talented programs. Last year, the newly centralized process was plagued with logistical problems -- misread applications, missed deadlines, and general confusion about which...
by Jennifer Freeman The City Council hearings on school siting today should be lively. In some districts DOE says it sees a need for new schools but cannot find proper sites, while other districts have potential sites but DOE finds no current need. For people who seek truth in language,...
Just in time for this weekend's administration of the SHSAT (specialized high school admissions test) -- and perfectly poised to increase the anxiety of the nearly 30,000 students who'll sit for the exam (and their parents), a new study says that variations in the high-stakes admission test,...
On the national education front, the College Board has developed a test to assess college readiness -- in 8th graders. Described as a "low-stakes" instrument -- whatever that is -- the ReadiStep test is meant as a kind of early yardstick, to see whether middle-schoolers are on the college-prep...
Looks like early-grade testing will commence at 57 city schools. Parents may have issues with tender-years testing, but the schools participating in this DOE pilot all volunteered for the program. A full list of schools is forthcoming from the DOE; stay tuned.
In today's Times, a retired social studies teacher and very proud papa got in trouble at Brooklyn Tech -- fined and reprimanded, for his decision as school librarian to showcase a comic-book version of 'Macbeth'his daughter had illustrated. Whatever one feels about illustrated classics -- some...
It's axiomatic that steady attendance promotes steady learning: The more you show up, the more you learn. But attendance is more than a simple (if vital) predictor of learning, according to a new reportfrom the Center for New York City Affairs/Milano-The New School for Management and Urban...
Bringing academically talented children who are not native English speakers into the city's gifted and talented programs is a long-touted goal of the DOE, last year's mixed-bag testing results notwithstanding. Starting next week, the Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy is hosting...
Only a few days after the UFT sued the DOE for infringing on teacher's freedom of speech by forbidding them to wear political buttons on the job, the feds ruled against the union, satisfying Chancellor Klein: "Keeping politics out of the classroom was our primary concern here, and our position...
Everyone knows that the SAT is a pre-college ritual -- dreaded, anticipated, debated, and ultimately taken (and re-taken) by millions of high-school seniors. Now comes news from Baylor Universitythat students already admitted to the college are being encouraged AND financially rewarded for...
Glorious fall days -- brilliantine skies, blazing foliage, crisp breezes -- promise soccer games and bike rides, country hikes and apple-picking adventures. But families of eighth-graders should factor in an hour or two this weekend to attend a borough high school fair, especially if the pileup...
The NY Times picks up the NCLB threadtoday, with a close study of a solid California school that's shown steady, upward growth -- although not at the rapid rate NCLB and state planners agreed as targets when the law was written. Notably, state planners bet on the likelihood that the law would be...
As the stock market dips and swings, families at city private schools are considering switching to public schools, threatening to flood already-overcrowded schools. Officials in Riverdale, coping with an unexpected influx, have switched students out of their bursting-at-the-seams zoned schools a...
No Child Left Behind, the Bush administration's signature education initiative, comes up for Congressional review next year. The NCLB law mandates that schools make Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) on a range of variables -- and requires that all of America's schoolchildren achieve proficiency in...
