Results tagged “chancellorklein”

Today, Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Klein released the "first-ever" public school progress reports with letter grades. The reports are meant to give educators and parents a snapshot of how well schools are doing and empower them to keep improving. Mayor Bloomberg said, "With these Progress Reports, parents no longer have to navigate a maze of statistics to determine how their child's school is doing and how it compares to others. And our educators now...

Back in March of 2003, Mayor Bloomberg opened up the City Hall Academy at the Tweed Courthouse. The school offered two-weeks "residencies" for students, giving them an "inter-disciplinary approach" to learn about NYC and its history. Mayor Bloomberg, who made education reform one of the cornerstone of his mayoral platform (it's a big part of his "national" persona, too!), had said, "The opening of City Hall Academy demonstrates our commitment to excellence, achievement, and innovation in the public school system. City Hall Academy will provide New York City children and their teachers a unique opportunity to study and participate in the cultural and historical fabric of the City.”

Mayor Bloomberg, Schools Chancellor Klein, City Council Speaker Quinn, and other city and school officials celebrated the first day of school yesterday with an appearance at P.S. 53 in the Bronx. P.S. 53 was selected because it will be receiving almost a half million dollars more in funding, due to Bloomberg's "fair student funding reforms."

If you have kids, we sure hope they like taking tests. Not only do they face regular tests in classes, but the city is set to expand their regimen of periodic tests for the 1.1 million students in the city's public schools. The tests, which the city is paying $80 million over five years for, will be administered 5 times a year for students in the grades 3-8 and four times a year for high schoolers. Students in the 3-8th grades are only taking periodic tests 3 times a year now, while high school students don't take them at all. While the tests currently cover only math and English, they will be expanded to include science and social studies. The new system will also allow for faster feedback on student performance and for administrators to track teacher and student progress.

President Bush visited New York City yesterday to encourage Congress to reauthorize his No Child Left Behind program. Bush gave a speech at the Harlem Village Academy school and praised its founder, faculty and students and emphasized the importance of the NCLB Act. Bush made it a point to visit all eight classrooms and shake every student's hand, prompting one student to tell the Sun, "I think it was the best day of my life," and a teacher to ask Bush for more money to be added to NCLB.

One of the 40 new schools the city is opening in the fall will be the first public school dedicated teaching the Arabic language and culture. The NY Times reports that half of the classes at the Khalil Gibran International Academy will eventually be taught in Arabic. It will be located in Brooklyn, though it's unclear where yet. Principal Debbie Almontaser says the school will start out with just sixth graders, but will eventually have 500-600 students. She said, "We are wholeheartedly looking to attract as many diverse students as possible, because we really want to give them the opportunity to expand their horizons and be global citizens."

In week 2 of the NYC Department of Education's busted school bus route changes, parents are still complaining and the media is loving it. There's 5 year old Michelle Baum in the Post today, waiting outside in the freezing weather for her bus. And the hotline the DOE has been directing parents to seems to be just as bad: In yesterday's Daily News, there was 11 year old Eleanor Shanahan whose family was told a bus would return to take her to school earlier, versus dropping her off 45 minutes late - only for her dad to find out from the school bus hotline that she would be "unrouted."

Way back when Bloomberg finally killed the Board of Education and replaced it with the Department of Education we had high hopes for our city's schools. Finally, we imagined, the city was in a position to cut back on the bureaucracy that plagues the system. One part of that hope was founded on the introduction of public charter schools into the mix. And so we were in agreement with Chancellor Klein, who we've had a lot of problems with otherwise, when he started pushing last year to lift the arbitrary 100 charter cap in the city.

It's an ending fitting for Broadway, except in this case, Broadway is East Tremont Avenue. The students at Lehman High School will be able to perform their high school musical, Chicago, when city officials intervened on their behalf. Their sob story about being served a cease-and-desist by the guardians of Chicago's rights and licensing struck a chord in the hearts of many who realized it would be a great press op: Saving the drama club hearts of youngster pitted against Broadway money men. We love a good story, too, but Lehman High School's actions seem more disingenous, for example, their 24 year old drama teacher Anthony Cerini transcribed the movie - plus found some stuff on the Internet and wrote some of the script on his own - for them to use in the musical. Well, then, hey, that's original material - but poor Fred Ebb must be rolling in his grave (hey, someone needs to get a quote from John Kander!) And just where is the music coming from? After we conducted an informal straw poll of drama club geeks, they were shocked and upset that Lehman never asked for permission, as that's what makes and breaks many high school productions each year (and why lots of schools do Peter Pan).

Bloomberg, beginning his final election push, yesterday announced the creation of seven new specialized high schools to take the run-off from the 28,000 students who annually apply to attend Stuvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. The well-timed proposal came less than twenty-four hours before the first round of the city's eighth-graders took the exam to get into those highly selective schools (good luck!). To really rub in his point Bloomberg even pulled out the old statistic about how getting into the specialized schools is as hard as getting into an Ivy. Which is nice and all except that the new schools don't sound much like the old ones. Firstly, they will be a fair amount smaller and secondly they will almost all be affiliated with local colleges and universities (not that there is anything wrong with that, we're just saying). This second point was emphasized by the fact that the announcement was made at Columbia and one of the proposed schools would theoretically go on Columbia's proposed Manhattanville campus (which raises the question: didn't Columbia just start another school? Wasn't the plan for that to grow into a high school?).

- When you eat at Ninja, you may get a bonsai tree style dessert

Also in the school news, five schools were taken off the most dangerous NYC schools list, including Washington Irving High. A pregnant woman walking along Irving Place was hit on the head by a stool that was thrown out of the school two years ago. With a 43% reduction in major crime, and given the Mayor's school security initiatives, this too will become a statistic the mayor uses a lot this year.

The NY Times has some heartbreakingly cute pictures of elementary school students returning to school with captions like (a photo which reminded Gothamist more than a little bit of ourselves circa 1982). The Times article also mentions that Chancellor Klein impressed student by "sinking a three-point shot" in the gym; check out this clip from NY1 and, towards the end, you'll see Chancellor Klein seriously freak out from excitement that he was able to make the shot in front of reporters and cameras.

Yellow school buses and more kids on the subway tells all of New York that school is back in - much to the relief of some parents who have had to watch their kids for an extra four days, with the later-than-usual school year start. The sweeping changes that Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Klein have made will be tested this year, but issues like student safety and trying to transferring children from bad city schools, not to mention overall budget issues for the country biggest school system. The City Council has called for an anti-bully measure at schools, but the Mayor thinks it's a stupid idea, saying it's the teachers' and principals' call, not a judge's, when "horseplay gets out of hand...You cannot force the teachers or the principals to follow some script. They are professionals, and you have to leave it up to them to do it." But Gothamist thought that the Mayor was trying to get teachers to follow a script with other measures, like ending social promotion. But have faith, kiddies, it turns out Mayor Bloomberg was a C-student in the fifth grade.

There are a few other great quotes in the article:

- Veterans more accustomed to interoffice mail were suddenly confronted with hotshots who seemed to have been designing PowerPoint displays since birth and were inseparable from their wireless messaging devices.
- "They are so committed and they are so rah-rah-rah, and they are so completely clueless," said Jill Chaifetz, the executive director of Advocates for Children, a group that monitors the school system.

Other education news: The good - more kids are passing the Regents exams. The bad - the results show a gap between white and minority children. The Times reports that Chancellor Klein finds the news "troubling" and will use it as why social promotions had to end.

With news that the New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is letting fired employees re-apply for positions, I'm waiting for The Times, Daily News, Post, or Village Voice to do an in depth analysis of budget and salaries of the Board of Education. The concept of change for the city's school is great, but so little gets done with the bureaucracy. Do things like Chancellor Klein's sweeping instructional changes for schools, except the top 200 city schools, really have legs?