World Education News

 

There are 12 district and 9 charter schools opening in the Bronx this fall, with each offering a different structure and specialty emphasis. They offer a clean slate for incoming students with several schools in the borough closing or phasing out. The degree of difference between them is stark as they cater to very specific interests and career aspirations. For example, three career and technical schools have closed in the Bronx, and the gap is being filled by the new School for Tourism and Hospitality opening on the Jane Addams campus. According to principal David Martin, students will be able earn front desk supervisor certifications from the American Hotel and Lodging Institute.

The passage of a compromise bill to deal with the public release of teacher evaluation information marks a victory for the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo. The proposal, which the governor said was a “take it or leave it proposition,” will make evaluation scores available publicly, but will not associate them with teachers’ names, except in cases when the parents wish to find out the scores of their kids’ current teachers.

A recent report by the New York Civil Liberties Union has criticized the quality of the sexual education curriculum used by districts all over the state of New York. Some of the curriculum materials — which the group characterized as “inaccurate, incomplete and biased” — didn’t cover topics such as condom use and safe sex, and fewer than half provided information on sexual orientation.

If Syracuse, NY’s education leaders have reviewed the latest research about the usefulness of recess, the new schedules designed for their elementary schools give no hints of it.

One of the requirements for the No Child Left Behind Act waiver granted to Minnesota was that the state develop a process to identify and label underachieving schools to subject them to corrective actions. The guidelines developed by the state, which identify roughly 213 schools as not meeting performance requirements in some manner, are much less stringent than those that would be applied under NCLB, which would have made more than 1,000 of the state schools subject to financial and administrative sanctions.

In February, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo famously claimed the title of ‘student lobbyist’ and heralded his breakthrough in holding the state’s teachers to standards of accountability.

When New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg first came into office, he promised that, as a service to the city’s students, he would work to end teacher “tenure as we know it.” If the numbers released by the Education Department this year are any indication, Bloomberg is well on his way to fulfilling his promise. Compared to 2007, when nearly 89% of all teachers who completed the three-year probationary period received tenure, this year saw nearly half of eligible teachers denied tenure.

As a result of the No Child Left Behind waiver received by New York State earlier this year, public schools that fail to meet performance targets set by the law will no longer have to provide tutoring services to their students. Still, principals who choose to continue offering it may do so — at least until the end of this school year.

The two-year pilot program experimenting with changes to the way special needs students are educated in New York City is set to conclude — and soon, nearly all the schools in the New York City public school system will begin adopting inclusion changes into their own academic program. The aim of the changes is to allow special needs students to integrate more fully into the regular student body. District officials are attempting to move away from the more traditional method of special ed instruction with segregated classes, and the city’s chief academic officer,Shael Polakow-Suransky, sums up the old programs that focus on “self-containment” as an academic death sentence.

Is the primary motivation behind the school reform movement financial? asks Carol Burris in an editorial for the Washington Post. A recent commercial released by former Washington D.C’s chancellor of public schools Michelle Rhee, claims that public schools trying to compete in the new academic marketplace is akin to a couch potato trying to stack up against Olympic athletes. Now Burris, the principal of the South Side High School in Rockville Center, New York, along with Harry Leonadartos, who is the principal of Clarkstown High School North in Rockland County, are asking if the derision often heaped on traditional public schools by eduction reform advocates is a good way to motivate them to improve.

Bonuses of $20,000 offered by the Obama Administration as an incentive for “master teachers” in mathematics, science and technology have been put out of reach for teachers in one of the nation’s largest school districts. Teachers employed by the New York City school district may not apply to receive the federally-funded money because the terms of the contract their union signed with the city prohibits any kind of financial bonuses for outstanding achievements in the classroom.

Students were mistakenly told that they failed a state exam and couldn’t graduate from their elementary or middle schools, instead attending summer school.

 

 Elementary and middle schoolers from all over New York City were blocked from attending their school graduations because a snafu at the NYC Department of Education had them marked as failing their end-of-year state exams. According to the New York Post, the Department realized its mistake after the exam results were released last week, but it was too late for most of the nearly 7,000 student affected since their graduation ceremonies had already taken place.