(This is a guest post by Joseph S. Lento, a licensed Teacher of Orchestral Music and School District Administration. In 2014, President Obama named him a National Teacher of Arts and Humanities. Joseph also has commendations from Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. In 1999, he was named NYC Public Schools Bronx County… Continue reading COVID -19: A Dark Knight for Educational Equity?
New York City public high schools are constantly changing their admission procedures. For instance, Beacon High School, which used to have an interview, doesn’t anymore. Frank McCourt High School got rid of their group activity that they used to sort students. School of the Future stopped asking for portfolios this year. These schools are putting… Continue reading NYC High Schools Need a Better Admissions Method: Why Not Try This?
This week, a veteran teacher on Long Island gave an assignment to her students that required them to create “funny captions” for Reconstruction Era photos from United States history. The teacher is white and, yes, that is very important to note. The assignment would have gone unchecked, had it not been for the grandmother of… Continue reading In This District, Teachers and Administrators Are Complicit in the Mental and Emotional Destruction of Black Students
This is a guest post by Hannah Inglut, Assistant Principal at Success Academy Springfield Gardens. She has been working with Success Academy since 2013, when she started as a kindergartner associate teacher at SA Harlem 1. She won an ETHOS Excellence Award in 2017 and has held a variety of roles throughout her time at… Continue reading How Does This Success Academy School Leader Transforms a Kindergarten Classroom Into a Family?
Teachers! What are they good for? Very little. In the beginning, schooling served a purpose. The British Empire needed to produce people who could keep the empire functioning by being cogs in its bureaucratic machine. Nowadays we keep the same system but without the purpose. What I propose is based on the work and research… Continue reading If You Want Kids To Learn, Get The Teachers Out of the Way, Says This NYC High School Student.
I sent out the following tongue-in-cheek email to my family and a few friends on my last day of teaching: Did you hear about the disturbance that took place in Harlem at 11:45am today? Apparently there was this teacher dancing down the streets in celebration. He walked out of the rear door of his school… Continue reading Why Was This Teacher Doing The Funky Chicken On 116th Street in Harlem?
Why is it a problem for some when academic spaces are comprised of more Black teachers than White teachers? I continue to be baffled by the resistance to this change, especially from White teachers. The reality is that many Black teachers function in predominantly White academic spaces for the entirety of our careers, often without… Continue reading An Impassioned Plea For The Purposeful Hiring of More Black Teachers
How exactly do superintendents get evaluated? After all, holding our top school district leaders is, in my experience, just as important — if not more so — than how teachers and other staff get evaluated. These questions led to my nterview with Dr. Constance Evelyn, Ed.D.author of Evaluating the Superintendent: The Process with Collaborative Compromises… Continue reading “Working Shoulder to Shoulder with Teachers, Parents, and the School Community Builds the Trust To Move To Excellence and Equity”: An Interview with an Expert.
School suspensions are a part of the childhood experience for some students. That’s nothing new. Much has been written about the overabundance of Black and Brown students — especially male students — who are funneled through this early entry point of the school-to-prison-pipeline. However, it appears that the tides are changing and, according to the… Continue reading If We’re Under-Reporting School Suspensions, That May Be the Perfect Antidote.
(Photo credits to Finlay Mackay) On March 15, 2019, Springpoint, whose mission is to enable all students, regardless of environment or background, to succeed in high school, college, and beyond, held a dinner to celebrate the Opportunity by Design initiative. Launched in 2013 and catalyzed by a challenge paper from the Carnegie Corporation of New… Continue reading How One NYC School “Does School Differently.”
