Archive for July, 2010
On Thursday, Aug. 19, at 6:30 p.m., the Museum of the City of New York will host a panel discussion on the Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike of 1968.
The Strike That Changed New York: Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the Politics of Education, & Race Relations in New York City, will feature Clarence Taylor, professor and author of Knocking At Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools, and Jerald Podair, professor and author of The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis, who will discuss the crisis and its aftermath with the Reverend Herbert Oliver, Chairman of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville local school board, and other participants from both sides of the struggle. Presented in conjunction with the exhibition America’s Mayor: John V. Lindsay and the Reinvention of New York. Reservations required. $6, museum members; $12, non-members; $8, seniors and students. Purchase tickets »
“Balanced literacy,” as any literate person exposed to it realizes, is neither “balanced” nor is it “literacy.” The entrepreneurs and contractors who coined the phrase, concocted the notions, launched the fad and marketed the hoax, parlaying it into an empire of a thousand cash cows and classroom straitjacketing schemes, are minor-league mischief makers compared to the peddlers of “Balanced Education for Everyone.”
According to the Denver Post, “Balanced Education for Everyone” is a “national campaign linked to an unsuccessful effort to remove the teaching of man-made global warming.” Its advocates are convinced that global warming, if it exists at all, is totally unrelated to any human behavior. More »
Yet another report has just been released which shows that charters have extremely uneven effects on student test scores — and, in some cases, may actually have a negative impact on the scores of certain types of students. This study has some of the same limitations as earlier work comparing charters to district schools (including a failure to distinguish between high-needs special education students and those with fewer challenges, and the merging of students who receive free lunch vs. reduced price meals). In general, however, it is a worthwhile addition to a growing body of research which documents this pattern of uneven performance, and calls into question arguments that the charter school model should be rapidly expanded without further exploration into whether or not it truly improves student achievement. More »
Labor Arts’ most recent online exhibit is a pair of photo galleries documenting District 75 schools.
This exhibit features two series of revealing photographs taken by long time documentary photographer Gary Schoichet. The photographs depict New York City teachers who may have the most difficult jobs in the city: in Bayside, Queens they teach children and teens recovering from traumatic brain injuries; in East Harlem they teach children who are “medically fragile” — one label among many which is inadequate to describe their truly overpowering disabilities.
Many of these photographs originally appeared in two articles written by New York Teacher reporter Ellie Spielberg.
Here’s a round up of last-day-of-school posts from some of our New Teacher Diaries contributors:
