Group items tagged

Harlem Renaissance High School is a place of last resort. It is filled with kids just out of jail, teenage mothers, immigrants who can barely speak English, special ed students and bright kids who have given up on themselves. They are clinging to the bottom rung of the public education system, and there aren't many places for them to fall. Now their school is fighting for survival, too.

The following open letter from UFT President Michael Mulgrew to New York City parents ran as a full-page ad in the New York Daily News on Jan. 9.

When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg delivered his first State of the City address in 2002, to a wounded city still shaken by the death and destruction of a terrorist attack, he vowed to rebuild Lower Manhattan, but he also trained his focus on the city's much-maligned school system. "We must strengthen teacher evaluation and training," Mr. Bloomberg said. "We must improve teacher retention by focusing compensation on those educators just starting their careers." Ten years later, having wrested control of the sprawling system and transformed it into a national laboratory for reform, Mr. Bloomberg devoted most of his penultimate State of the City speech on Thursday to education, which he hopes will form the cornerstone of his legacy.

The state expects to sign off on Mayor Bloomberg's dramatic new plan to ax half the teachers at 33 struggling schools, the Daily News has learned.

A crowd of about 200 community leaders, elected officials and N.A.A.C.P. members turned out Thursday night to oppose the city's plan to phase out the middle grades of Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Harlem. In an unusual display of force, members of the District 3 Community Education Council and the school leadership teams spent about an hour grilling the city's chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, about the controversial decision, before the public comment period even began.

Good grades do not a good school make. School Chancellor Dennis Walcott said the city is moving to massively overhaul seven schools it rated this fall with As or Bs because their high marks don't paint the full picture.

Disruption as a goal is not a positive one for education. I don't care what kind of school they're in, kids and their families, especially those with enough disruption, crisis, and loss in their lives already, shouldn't be forced to play musical schools to the tune of "Get Those Test Scores Up." If that's our idea of reforming education, we're in big trouble.

The education debate in New Jersey is increasingly becoming a debate about local control of schools. Governor Christie and ACTING Education Commissioner Cerf's emphasis on standardized testing, charter schools, and tenure reform are top-down policy edicts that take more and more authority away from local districts and put it into the hands of Trenton. What's emerged over the last year in response is a true grassroots resistance to the imposition of corporate "reform." Boards of education, parents, teachers, and concerned citizens are coming together in an effort to stop the destruction of New Jersey's outstanding public school system through state-wide fiat.

Diane Ravitch poses a dozen piercing questions on education and school policy. Some of them turn conventional thinking on its ear, and each could be a starting point for reporting on elections, from the presidency on down to local school boards.

Twenty years of reform efforts and programs targeting low-income families in Chicago Public Schools has only widened the performance gap between white and African-American students, a troubling trend at odds with what has occurred nationally.

The signature Bloomberg administration reform of shutting down failing schools and replacing them with new schools has - itself - failed thousands of city students, a Daily News analysis finds. The new schools opened under the mayor were supposed to have better teachers, better principals, and, ultimately, better test scores than the dysfunctional failure mills they were replacing. But when The News examined 2012 state reading test scores for 154 public elementary and middle schools that have opened since Mayor Bloomberg took office, nearly 60% had passing rates that were lower than older schools with similar poverty rates.

what better way to capture the Bizarro world of education reform than with a serious work of journalism, disguised as a comic? Our three-part series - published over the next three months - is not intended to be funny, but rather, to pull back the progressive propaganda disguising the neoliberal, corporate nature of education reform. Our goal is to expose the free-market policies that really make up "education reform"; how these policies threaten our public education; who supports these policies; and, ultimately, what we might be able to do about the "Disaster Capitalism Curriculum."

What educators have known for years is now obvious for all to see-this mayor has no regard for students, teachers or public education as an institution.  He has had a large-scale plan, which started at the beginning of his tenure and has now reached its apex. Here's how he did it

Nine takeaways from last night's raucous Panel for Educational Policy meeting, for those who don't have time for 5,000-plus words and minute-to-minute updates

"We are at a tipping point in Philadelphia. I say this as a teacher, fully committed to the promise of public education for all the young people living in this city I love, who has felt the repeated stab of the School District's systemic dysfunction and the State and City's structural abandonment. I say this as a teacher activist, who is engaged in the community-wide fight for public education.  I am a part of Teacher Action Group-Philadelphia (TAG) a member-run grassroots organization of educators working to strengthen our influence on the decisions that most affect us - how schools are run, funded, and governed - so that community control, equity, and fairness are back at the center of public education."

"...We readily recognize the consistent, ironclad law of association between poverty and educational achievement and attainment. However, we persist in school reform strategies that, despite success at the margins, regularly fail to address the factors associated with poverty that, on average, tend to impede student learning. While the past decade-plus of school reform has seen a necessary and laudable increase in emphasis on the need to improve curriculum and instruction for all students, we continue, for the most part, to look the other way when it comes to addressing out of school factors which get in the way of students benefitting from optimized curriculum and instruction..."

Two new studies show that the Philadelphia region is one of the most separate and unequal when it comes to neighborhoods and schools for blacks, whites, Hispanics and Asians.

Today, to mark the 224th anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, I and hundreds of others will gather at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia to remember a feat that projects the best of human potential to the far corners of the world. As we cheer our nation's creation, an important report will be issued: "Guardian of Democracy: The Civic Mission of Schools." It confirms what we suspected: We're failing our students on civics education, and, in the process, we are setting our country up for disaster.

"Death by a Thousand Cuts: Racism, School Closures, and Public School Sabotage, a stunning report released this week by Journey for Justice (J4J), cuts through the ideological babble on school "reform" and lets us listen as "voices from America's affected communities of color"-parents, students, and community leaders-tell us how school closures and privatization are affecting them, their neighborhoods, and their children."