On Monday, September 23, the Community Education Council of Brooklyn’s School District #16 (Bedford-Stuyvesant) voted to ask New York City to get rid of all Gifted & Talented programs as advised by the Student Diversity Advisory Group (SDAG). There was the by now familiar rhetoric of how District #16’s schools are not racially or socio-economically… Continue reading Follow the Money and See Where It Goes: NYC Schools Edition.
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?
New York City released elementary school test scores for the 2018-19 school year on Thursday, August 22, 2019. In the past, I’ve listed the Top 10 Schools by Test Scores for 2017, and the Top 25 Schools by Test Scores for 2018. While there is some juggling for placement every year, the top-scoring schools tend… Continue reading 10 NYC Public Schools Which Went Up In Test Scores in 2019 — And 10 That Went Down.
This is a guest post by Zachary Wright, a national finalist for the United States Department of Education’s School Ambassador Fellowship and 2013 Philadelphia Teacher of the Year. Now he is an assistant professor of practice at Relay Graduate School of Education serving Philadelphia and Camden. Prior to that, he was the 12th-grade world literature… Continue reading This Charter Supporter Gets Real about Success Academy. Will School Choice Opponents and Union Proponents Get Real Too?
Kindergarten Connect, the form New York City parents use to apply their children to public school Kindergarten for September 2019, is scheduled to close on Monday, January 14th, although on-going problems with the “new and improved” online Parent Portal may cause the deadline to be pushed back due to technical difficulties. To help parents know… Continue reading New Year, Old NYC School Argument
Last year’s post on NYC’s Top 10 Elementary Schools By Test Scores: What Makes Them Special – And How You Can Get In proved such a reader favorite, we’ve updated it! Because many schools make a return appearance, we’ve expanded our list to the top 25, and added details about how some of them get… Continue reading NYC’s Top 25 Elementary Schools for 2018 & How You Can Get In!
The mother below wishes to remain anonymous: My son was denied entrance by our local zoned public school. Here is my story. In November 2017, I visited my zoned school, The Manhattan Beach School (PS 195). We had been displaced by Hurricane Sandy. Our home was a ticking time bomb and we had to move… Continue reading NYC Mom Deliberately Blackballed From Zoned School!
Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story, The Lottery, is considered a classic of slow-building horror. A small town holds a lottery every year to decide which citizen will be ritually stoned in order to insure a good harvest. Everyone goes uncomplainingly along in the name of tradition, and, despite a few scattered grumbles, nobody outright says… Continue reading The Lottery: A NYC Schools Horror Story (With Apologies to Shirley Jackson)
This is a guest post by Kristin Damo, the founding principal of Success Academy Lafayette Middle School in Brooklyn. My father emigrated from the Philippines and raised me on his own. The promise he made to me as a child is that I would have access to a world-class education. Today, this is the promise… Continue reading Mayor de Blasio’s Diversity Problem
Last week, I dove into New York City’s plan to diversity Specialized High School admissions by scratching the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), currently the only method of admission, in favor of a model wherein the top 7 percent of all public middle school students would be accepted at an SHSAT school, as long as… Continue reading What To Expect When You’re Expecting a New SHSAT Plan [Part #2]: Who Will Win & Who Will Lose When It Passes
