One year after announcing a pilot program to test a new Core Knowledge Early Literacy program in ten New York City Schools, Joel Klein Tuesday announced very strong early results. As a news release from the New York City Department of Ed puts it:
The progress of students in the ten participating schools was more than five times greater than the also-significant performance of students at ten peer schools with comparable student populations, and was reflected among students at all levels of literacy. Additionally, teachers surveyed as part of the pilot rated the program highly, and nine of the ten participating schools have selected to use the Core Knowledge program with their new kindergarten classes in addition to continuing the program with their first graders, who remain in the pilot.
Speaking at a press conference at a South Bronx elementary school — one of the pilot schools – E.D. Hirsch noted thatwhile the initial results were gratifying, the bigger payoff could come later, since the program is designed to build broad background knowledge across the curriculum, which pays off in improved reading comprehension in the years ahead:
Kindergarten is just a start. There is always the danger of fade out in later years, as we know from Headstart research. Elsewhere in the nation, and right here in New York, schools have made noticeable progress in raising reading scores in the early grades according to NAEP, the Nations Report Card. These improvements reflect better teaching of decoding. But the improvements in scores are still confined to the early grades. Verbal scores in the later grades of NAEP have stayed unacceptably low. Yet these later verbal scores are the ones that predict a student’s ultimate success in life.
The program consists of two strands: a phonics-heavy decoding strand, and a “listening and learning” strand to build content knowledge. “Assuming that we will get funding to develop materials for the later grades,” Hirsch noted, “I am predicting that even more dramatic results will show up further on. Instead of the current flat or even declining verbal scores among middle and high school students we will see in students who follow a program like this significantly higher scores, and we will see a narrowing of the language gap between races and ethnic groups. ”
More coverage of the pilot program results can be found here and here.
No real surprise, given the parlous state of the economy and employment, but NYC’s Department of Education has ordered principals to fill teaching vacancies with internal candidates only. The news has left would-be teachers, including those hired by Teach for America and the New York City Teaching Fellows scrambling for jobs, reports the New York Times. The city will hire about half its usual number of educators from TFA and the Fellows program.
New York schools–especially struggling schools–looking for new teachers will likely have to fish in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) pool, which consists of educators who are unemployed but still on the City’s payroll. In most cases, ATR teachers were working at schools that were shuttered or downsized. However, Gotham Schools notes a report by The New Teacher Project, which found that “teachers in the pool were six times as likely to have been rated unsatisfactory by a principal as teachers who hold positions.”
No matter how you slice it, the hiring pool from which principals can hire has just become reed-thin. “The fact remains that, if the city weren’t forced to pay ATR members indefinitely, perhaps a substantial percentage of teachers could still be new hires (or, maybe, the freeze wouldn’t have happened at all),” writes the New Republic’s Seyward Darby “In good economic times or bad, on financial, pedagogical, and political levels, the ATR is simply unsustainable.”
You’re sending little Tyler and Emily to public school? How cutting edge!
The New York Times, its radar ever attuned to the lifestyles of privileged Manhattanites, reports that the economic downturn is prompting many families to consider actually subjecting their progeny to public school. In a classic example of the kind of story that serves merely to remind most Americans why they can’t stand New Yorkers, the paper refuses to report it straight. Instead, it’s a trend piece. “In these financially fragile times,” says the Times, ”the new bragging rights begin with a P.S. The rush is on to live near the best.”
For some young families who bought during the housing boom, having it all meant an affordable brood-sized apartment in possession of a good public school zone. But other parents in pursuit of real estate never even thought about schools. They assumed they would send their children to private school, often because they too had followed that route. That was before the economic crisis. Now, as many would-be private school parents scramble for a good public school, there is a despairing recognition that in this respect, geography is destiny: With odds of being accepted into a popular school in another zone slimmer than ever, they either live in a neighborhood with a decent elementary or they don’t.
Shocking, right? What follows is a series of anecdotes of New Yorkers weighing their options–from moving to committing fraud–to get their children into the “right” school. “I will certainly consider some alternative way to game the system by gaining a different address,” says one anonymous parent. “This is my child, who is a really smart kid, and he’s not going to my crummy zoned school. That’s just not going to happen.”
The paper even discovers a couple who have decided to buy $1 million apartment solely because of its zoned school even though they don’t have children yet. I know, I know. Millions of couples plan their home purchses around schools. But this is different. This couple are Manhattan lawyers! Oh, I forgot the best part. This article about education ran in the Times’ Real Estate section.
I live in Manhattan. Please accept my apologies on behalf of my city and it’s paper of record.
High above Cayuga’s waters. And everyone else.
A court has ruled that a New York City teacher who called his class a “filthy animals who belonged in a f—ing zoo” cannot get his job back. Steven Clarke, a newly hired probationary teacher allegedly said in front of his class at the Global Enterprise Academy in the Bronx “my parents did not sacrifice for me to go to Cornell so I could take care of a bunch of animals.”
I’m guessing they didn’t send him to Cornell to become an arrogant lout, either.
New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg plans to seek a third term. One small problem, however, is that he’s term-limited to two terms. But he’s proposing an extension of those limits by a City Council vote. The impact for school reform is significant, since keeping the City’s sprawling school system under mayoral control is one of Bloomberg’s major issues. A third term for Bloomberg would also presumably extend the record-setting run of Joel Klein, who has enjoyed the longest run of any NYC schools chancellor. Klein has previously said he’s open to staying on as chancellor under Bloomberg’s successor.
Babe Ruth, Pedro Martinez and…Brett Peiser? Top ballplayers aren’t the only ones defecting to rivals in New York City. Boston “has quietly lost some of its top educators to the Big Apple,” writes James A. Peyser, a partner with NewSchools Venture Fund, in the Boston Globe. After years as a hot spot of education reform, especially in the charter school movement, “Boston is losing some of its best players, raising fears that public education may suffer its own curse of the Bambino.”
A little over three years ago, the founders of three nationally recognized Boston charter schools – Roxbury Preparatory Charter School, Academy of the Pacific Rim, and Boston Collegiate – helped to create an ambitious network of charter schools in New York and New Jersey. Last year, the head of City on a Hill Charter School, which has helped 100 percent of its graduates gain admission to college, moved to New York City to become Chancellor Joel Klein’s charter schools chief. And this fall, the founder of East Boston’s Excel Academy, which ranks among the state’s top five middle schools in eighth-grade math, is stepping down to explore new school reform opportunities in the New York metropolitan area.
“Massachusetts has distinguished itself as one of the nation’s leaders in school reform, and an important part of that success story has been its charter schools,” Peyser writes. “Nevertheless, as the charter movement has taken off in other states and cities, our leadership position has waned.”
There’s a good, in-depth interview on ednews.org with Dr. Matt Davis, the head of the Core Knowledge Reading Program, which will be piloted in New York City this year. He talks about the two major strands of the program: a unique phonics-based “Skills” strand, and a “Listening and Learning” strand that enables very young children to build up vocabulary and background knowledge, through read-alouds of classic literary selections, fairy tales and poems, as well as a non-fiction selelctions in history, science, art, and music.
“We think the two strands together will be a great one-two punch. The Skills Strand should teach the students to decode fluently, while the Listening and Learning strand should help ensure that they have the breadth of background knowledge they will need to understand what the words they decode.”
Davis also makes a good, if little appreciated point about Core Knowledge in general. “Although people have been slow to see this, it is a curriculum designed for social justice,” he notes. ”The well-off kids, the ones whose parents read to them, teach them about numbers and letters, take them to New York and Washington, DC in the summer, visit museums, listen to public radio, and so on – those kids are going to tend to soak up a lot of cultural literacy in the home environment, and they will be able to make sense of a lot of what they read. But other kids are not as fortunate. These children need to get their cultural literacy in the schools. These are the children the Core Knowledge Foundation is looking to help, and they are also the children we are hoping to help with the reading program.”
Richard Whitmire dropped a hint last week calling it “the biggest development in reading instruction that won’t make the front pages of any national newspaper. But it should.” Today came the announcement: a three-year, $2.4 million pilot project to test a new Core Knowledge Reading Program in New York City Schools. Chancellor Joel Klein made the announcement, along with Core Knowledge founder E.D. Hirsch, Jr., and Amida Gentile of the UFT. The DOE’s press release is here.
Lots to say about this initiative, but here’s coverage in the New York Times, Edweek, and New York’s WABC-TV.
Miracle of New York or smoke and mirrors? It’s Chris Cerf vs. Sol Stern over at Eduwonk.
The New York Sun this morning reveals that NYC’s Department of Education has created a “truth squad” deploying its press office staffers to read education Web logs and Web sites “in a hunt for factual errors and misinformation.” Sol Stern, Eduwonkette, Fordham’s Gadfly and A-Rus are among those on the DOE required reading list. Stern describes the practice as Orwellian.
I love a good controversy as much as anyone, but for better or for worse, this seems much ado about nothing. This, simply put, is what PR people do. It’s like getting upset at teachers for writing lesson plans. You could certainly raise questions about how government press offices have morphed from putative public information officers to functioning overtly as political operatives and image makers, and whether that’s a legitimate use of public dollars, but that’s been going on for a very long time now from the White House on down. If you have PR people on the public payroll, they’re going to do what PR people do–advocate aggressively for the programs, policies and people they serve.
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