Monday, July 7, 2014

NYC DOE and UFT Pick The Pro Se Schools For 2014-2015...All the Others, Fugetaboutit

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 7, 2014

N-01, 2014-15

CITY SCHOOLS AND UFT ANNOUNCE

2014-2015

PRO SE SCHOOLS

UFT Mike Mulgrew, NYC Mayor Bill De Blasio, Chancellor
Carmen Farina

62 Schools Selected as Part of the New Progressive Redesign Opportunity Schools for Excellence Program (PROSE)

link

NEW YORK – Chancellor Carmen Fariña and UFT President Michael Mulgrew today announced the schools selected to participate in the Progressive Redesign Opportunity Schools for Excellence (PROSE) program for the 2014 – 15 school year. The PROSE program was established as part of the new contract between the UFT and the DOE to allow schools to implement innovative plans that fall outside of the Chancellor’s Regulations or UFT contract. All 62 schools voted to implement innovative plans as part of the PROSE program for the 2014 – 2015 school year.

Staff members of these schools created a range of plans, including staggering the school day to meet student needs, changing contractually required student-to-teacher ratios to allow for a combination of small group learning and larger lecture-style classes, and using portfolios of instructional strategies to help rate teachers. In close collaboration with their teachers, school leaders in PROSE schools will drive continuous innovation as they look to change some of the basic rules and regulations under which they have historically operated.

"Real change happens when educators are empowered to develop the best, tailored strategies to help their students succeed," said Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina. "At dozens of schools across the city, these educators have come forward with new, innovative practices that can serve as a guide for all of our school communities and brighten the classroom experience for every child."

“I’m proud of the New York City public school system and all the schools that took part in the PROSE program,” said United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew. “Innovations like this will move education forward not just in New York, but around the country. Teachers, principals, parents, and the entire school community working together will truly advance education.”

“We are opening up dozens of schools to innovation. We want to empower school communities to work together and come up with new ways to reach students,” said First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris. “The teachers’ contract we secured this spring wasn’t just about respecting our educators, it was about transforming education in this city.”

Chancellor Fariña, UFT President Mulgrew and First Deputy Mayor Shorris launched PROSE by inviting all public schools to submit a letter of intent indicating their interest in applying. Following the May 1 contract deal, 107 schools submitted proposals to be part of the program. All proposals were reviewed by a joint panel comprised of representatives from the DOE and UFT. Proposals were voted on by UFT staff in those schools, and proposals receiving 65% or more votes were approved. Ultimately, 62 were approved.

The Department’s academic support teams will continue to work with these schools closely in the coming weeks to ensure that the proposals can be implemented successfully in a short time frame. Ensuring high quality learning environments is always the priority, and the Department will support these schools to make sure that any changes benefit teachers and students, and comply with all relevant State regulations.

Among the approved plans:

Community Health Academy of the Heights

Community Health Academy of the Heights serves grades 6-12 and provides a wide range of social services for their students and families and voted to create a schedule to match the developmental and practical needs of individual students. The staff also voted to explore innovative food sourcing options for their students, including purchasing from local and sustainable vendors.

“Community Health Academy of the Heights is excited to be a part of the PROSE initiative as it creates space for us to think outside of the box, try something new, something innovative, and ideas we have read about from colleagues throughout the US or internationally. The PROSE model gives us a chance, in a thoughtful way, to experiment with alternatives. We are excited to see the result of our new initiatives,” said Principal of Community Health Academy of the Heights, Mark House.

School of Integrated Learning

This middle school serving high-need students in Brooklyn voted to provide more individualized attention, particularly for its at-risk students, by changing student-to-teacher ratios to create a balance of small group instruction with large lecture classes.

“We are excited about this opportunity to create a learning environment which is flexible and which considers the best for our students and teachers. We anticipate a powerfully productive PROSE experience,” said Principal of the School of Integrated Learning, Monique Campbell.

The Brooklyn International High School

At this school for recently arrived immigrant students who are first-time learners of English, the staff is aspiring to make adjustments to the teacher evaluation system by developing a teacher portfolio that includes peer visits, formal observations, and professional development experiences—in essence a performance-based assessment system for teachers that mirrors the school’s innovative performance-based assessments for students.

“We are happy to be a member of the PROSE program and believe that it will allow us to support our teachers in their efforts to innovate and hone their craft, thus providing additional opportunities and benefits to our students,” said Pamela Taranto, Principal of Brooklyn International High School.

Complete List of Schools Selected

Brooklyn

Brooklyn Democracy Academy

Brooklyn International High School

Brooklyn New School

Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies

East Brooklyn Community High School

Expeditionary Learning School for Community Leaders

Gotham Professional Arts Academy

Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School

Lyons Community School

Mark Twain Intermediate

Olympus Academy High School

P.S. 188 - The Michael E. Berdy School

The International HS at Prospect Heights

The School of Integrated Learning

Bronx

Bronx Arena High School

Bronx Collaborative High School

Bronx Community High School

Bronx High School for Law and Community Service

Bronx Lab School

Bronx Park Middle School

Bronx Writing Academy

Community School for Social Justice

Comprehensive Model School Project

East Bronx Academy for the Future

English Language Learners and International Support Preparatory Academy

Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School

KAPPA International High School

Pan American International High School at Monroe

The Bronx Compass High School

The Highbridge Green School

Manhattan

Academy for Software Engineering

Beacon School

Castle Bridge School

Central Park East II

City as School High School

Community Health Academy of the Heights (CHAH)

East Side Community School

Essex Street Academy

Frank McCourt High School

Harvest Collegiate

Humanities Preparatory Academy

Innovation Diploma Plus HS

Institute for Collaborative Education

Manhattan International High School

NYC iSchool

PS 353 The Neighborhood School

Satellite Academy High School

The Earth School

The Ella Baker School

The Facing History School

The James Baldwin School

Urban Academy Laboratory High School

Vanguard High School

West Side Collaborative Middle School

Queens

Academy for Careers in Television and Film

International High School

Middle College High School at LaGuardia Community College

North Queens Community High School

PS71 Forest Elementary

The Flushing International High School

The International High School for Health Sciences

Voyages Preparatory South Queens

Contact: Chancellor’s Press Office (212) 374-5141

Deputy mayor, Anthony Shorris, announces 62 schools to participate in a program called PROSE.

62 schools approved for innovation program

BY LINDA OCASIO | PUBLISHED JULY 8, 2014

LINK

More than 60 schools have gotten the green light to innovate on such things as school schedules, student-teacher ratios or teacher evaluations under a new initiative established by the UFT contract.

The 62 schools are the first selected for the new Progressive Redesign Opportunity Schools for Excellence or PROSE program, which gives teachers a real voice in decision-making to try strategies that vary from certain contract rules and Chancellor’s Regulations.

“This is something I would have loved when I was a teacher,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said at a press conference Monday with Chancellor Carmen Fariña and Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris to announce the selected PROSE schools. “Innovations like this will move education forward not just in New York, but around the country.”

After the UFT’s June 3rd contract ratification, 107 schools met tight deadlines to submit PROSE proposals put together by teachers, principals, parents and community leaders. A joint panel of UFT and DOE representatives reviewed all of the submissions and selected proposals based on the quality of the plans and whether they were the product of collaboration at the school levels.

Proposals were then voted on by UFT staff in the schools, with only those approved by at least 65 percent winning selection to the program. At a third of the schools voting, the decision was unanimous in favor of the PROSE proposal. At half, 95 percent or more of staff approved the innovations. The vast majority had votes of 80 percent or more in favor.

Among the selected schools, the plans include: changing student-teacher ratios to allow for a combination of small group instruction and lecture-style classes; setting a later starting time for high school students; and using teachers’ portfolios of instructional strategies in teacher evaluation.

Mulgrew and Fariña praised the enthusiasm of teachers in the winning schools, noting that many spent their Saturdays working on the proposals.

Information about the schools’ progress with their innovations will be shared widely. “We want to communicate with other schools about how it works.”

Fariña said, “Real change happens when educators are empowered to develop the best, tailored strategies to help their students succeed.”

Shorris agreed. “The idea was to break the rules. We can create change that is meaningful to kids.”

Rob Karp, chapter leader at the Community Health Academy of the Heights where the press conference was held, said his school’s PROSE plan is to set up three lunch periods instead of two to better accommodate the school’s 600 students in grades 6 through 12. Starting times will also change — to 8:45 a.m. for the school’s high school students and 8 a.m. for the middle school students. Students will have the same dismissal time marked by one bell, not many.

“There will be no more distractions in the hallways with people leaving at different times,” Karp said. “It’s about providing stability and routine.”

In addition to the new schedule, Principal Mark House hopes to use the PROSE plan to encourage dietary changes for students. The school will explore new sources of nutritious food for the cafeteria, he said. “We should be able to go into our own kitchens to cook healthy food.”

PROSE schools

Brooklyn

Brooklyn Democracy Academy
Brooklyn International High School
Brooklyn New School
Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies
East Brooklyn Community High School
Expeditionary Learning School for Community Leaders
Gotham Professional Arts Academy
Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School
Lyons Community School
Mark Twain Intermediate
Olympus Academy High School
P.S. 188 - The Michael E. Berdy School
The International HS at Prospect Heights
The School of Integrated Learning

Bronx

Bronx Arena High School
Bronx Collaborative High School
Bronx Community High School
Bronx High School for Law and Community Service
Bronx Lab School
Bronx Park Middle School
Bronx Writing Academy
Community School for Social Justice
Comprehensive Model School Project
East Bronx Academy for the Future
English Language Learners and International Support Preparatory Academy
Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School
KAPPA International High School
Pan American International High School at Monroe
The Bronx Compass High School
The Highbridge Green School

Manhattan

Academy for Software Engineering
Beacon School
Castle Bridge School
Central Park East II
City as School High School
Community Health Academy of the Heights (CHAH)
East Side Community School
Essex Street Academy
Frank McCourt High School
Harvest Collegiate
Humanities Preparatory Academy
Innovation Diploma Plus HS
Institute for Collaborative Education
Manhattan International High School
NYC iSchool
PS 353 The Neighborhood School
Satellite Academy High School
The Earth School
The Ella Baker School
The Facing History School
The James Baldwin School
Urban Academy Laboratory High School
Vanguard High School
West Side Collaborative Middle School

Queens

Academy for Careers in Television and Film
International High School
Middle College High School at LaGuardia Community College
North Queens Community High School
PS 71 Forest Elementary
The Flushing International High School
The International High School for Health Sciences
Voyages Preparatory South Queens

Alexander Nazaryan: Using Balanced Literacy is Irresponsible

THE FALLACY OF BALANCED LITERACY

By ALEXANDER NAZARYANJULY 6, 2014
LINK

THERE was the student who wanted to read Tolstoy, but abandoned “War and Peace” after a bewildering day with the Russian aristocracy. There were the students who had just come from Albania, to whom a Harry Potter novel was as inscrutable as Aramaic. There were the students who needed special attention, which I could barely offer. And then there were the ones who read quietly and would have welcomed a discussion about “The Chocolate War.” I couldn’t offer that, either.

So went “independent reading” in my seventh-grade classroom in Flatbush, Brooklyn, during the 2005-06 school year, a mostly futile exercise mandated by administrators. On bad days, independent reading devolved into chaos. That was partly a result of my first-year incompetence, but even on good days, it proved a confounding amalgam of free period and frustrating abyss.

This morass was never my students’ fault. A majority of them were poor, or immigrants, or both. The metropolis of marvelous libraries and bookstores was to them another country. To expect them to wade into a grade-appropriate text like “To Kill a Mockingbird” was unrealistic, even insulting.

Writing instruction didn’t go much better. My seventh graders were urged to write memoirs, under the same guise of individualism that engendered independent reading. But while recollections of beach trips or departed felines are surely worthwhile, they don’t quite have the pedagogical value of a deep dive into sentence structure or a plain old vocab quiz.

Now the approach that so frustrated me and my students is once again about to become the norm in New York City, as the new schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, has announced plans to reinstate a “balanced literacy” approach in English classrooms. The concept’s most vociferous champion is probably Lucy Calkins, a Columbia University scholar. In her 1985 book, “The Art of Teaching Writing,” she complained that most English teachers “don’t know what it is to read favorite passages aloud to a friend or to swap ideas about an author.” She sought a reimagination of the English teacher’s role: “Teaching writing must become more like coaching a sport and less like presenting information,” a joyful exploration unhindered by despotic traffic cops.

Ms. Calkins’s approach was tried by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, but abandoned when studies showed that students learned better with more instruction. My own limited experience leads me to the same conclusion. But Ms. Fariña seems to be charting a course away from the data-driven Bloomberg years, perhaps as part of her stated plan to return “joy” to the city’s classrooms.

I take umbrage at the notion that muscular teaching is joyless. There was little joy in the seventh-grade classroom I ran under “balanced literacy,” and less purpose. My students craved instruction far more than freedom. Expecting children to independently discover the rules of written language is like expecting them to independently discover the rules of differential calculus.

Balanced literacy is an especially irresponsible approach, given that New York State has adopted the federal Common Core standards, which skew toward a narrowly proscribed list of texts, many of them nonfiction. Ms. Calkins is a detractor of Common Core; Ms. Fariña isn’t, thus far, but her support of balanced literacy sends a mixed signal.

I am somewhat prejudiced on this issue, for my acclimation to the English language had nothing balanced about it. Yanked out of the Soviet Union at 10, I landed in suburban Connecticut in the English-as-a-second-language classroom of Mrs. Cohen. She taught me the language in the most conventionally rigorous manner, acutely aware that I couldn’t do much until I knew the difference between a subject and a verb. Mrs. Cohen was unbalanced in the best possible way.

Two decades later, I became a teacher because it seemed a social good to transmit the valuable stuff I’d learned from Mrs. Cohen and other teachers to young people who were as clueless as I had been. After leaving the middle school in Flatbush, I went to a selective high school in Bushwick, where I taught Sophocles while rhapsodizing about semicolons and gleefully announcing vocab quizzes. My students were seeing the beams that support the language; they went on to write poems, papers, newspaper articles and personal essays that earned a number of them admission to the nation’s best colleges. If any of it was soul-crushing, I missed the cues.

The fatal flaw of balanced literacy is that it is least able to help students who most need it. It plays well in brownstone Brooklyn, where children have enrichment coming out of their noses, and may be more “ready” for balanced literacy than children without such advantages.

My concern is for the nearly 40 percent of New York City schoolchildren who won’t graduate from high school, the majority of whom are black and brown and indigent. Their educations should never be a joyless grind. But asking them to become subjects in an experiment in progressive education is an injustice they don’t deserve.

NYC Rubber Room Reporter and ATR CONNECT