Explore Charter School Tries Something New

IN A FIRST, NEW CHARTER TO ABSORB STUDENTS LEAVING CLOSING SCHOOL

01.13.11 / GothamSchools

According to GothamSchools, city officials are planning to replace a struggling Brooklyn elementary school with an unusual charter school next year — the first in the city to give admissions preference to students stuck in the closing school:

If the citywide school board, known as the Panel for Educational Policy, votes to phase out P.S. 114 in Canarsie, Brooklyn starting next year, two new schools will open in the building. One will be a typical zoned elementary school for all students in District 18. The other will be Explore Charter School — the first charter school in the city that will give admissions preference to students at the low-performing school it replaces.

When most New York City charter schools open, they typically give admissions preference to students who live in a certain district. These districts usually encompass several neighborhoods and a handful of public schools, allowing the charter to draw students from all over the region.

But Explore plans to operate differently.

Current kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade students at P.S. 114 will be given preference in Explore’s lottery, which means they have the best chance of getting one of 224 seats. If there’s still room, second preference will go to students who are zoned for P.S. 114, but attend other schools (this is about half the students in the zone). After them, preference will go to students throughout District 18 who are attending schools that are being phased out for poor performance.

“What’s very different about this is we’re saying to parents and kids in a school that’s failing, here’s an option that does not ask you to relocate or leave your community,” said Morty Ballen, CEO of the Explore Schools network. “It’s about you and your community; we’re staying right here.”

Many charter schools only admit students in the youngest grades, which means that they work with students who have never enrolled in a struggling school, or who only attended for one year. By contrast, Explore’s new school will open with kindergarten through third grade. That means many of its students will likely have spent several years at P.S. 114 and who may already be significantly behind grade level. It also means that students at the charter will begin taking state tests in the schools’ first year, so the school will have to boost student achievement quickly.

P.S. 114, which has gone through two principals in the last two years, saw its students’ test scores drop low enough last year to earn the school a D on its progress report. Parents and teachers who believe the school is being unfairly targeted for closure say that school has been burdened by the $180,000 debt left by a principal they asked the city to remove.

The other elementary school the city plans to open in the building next year, P.S. 521, will guarantee seats to P.S. 114 students who don’t apply for the Explore lottery, as well as those who do, but don’t make it in.

When You Live in a Melting Pot, Grab Your Ladle and Join the Party!!

So, Cathie Black has a preoccupation with Mandarin...  

An article published in the New York Times on January 4th highlights Cathie Black's obsession with NYC public school students learning a language, and her preferred language is Mandarin Chinese.  I thought the story was interesting and highlighted the importance of children learning a second language while they are still young and retain an aptitude for language.  Researchers believe that there may be a critical period, lasting roughly from infancy until puberty, during which language acquisition is effortless.  According to these researchers, changes occur in the structure of the brain during puberty after which it is much harder to learn a language.  

Today's world is shrinking rapidly and trade is increasingly global in scope, and the greatest reason for this shrinkage is technology.  Consumers and businesses now have access to products from many different countries and order to be at least competitive, if not successful, it is necessary to communicate in the language of the country that you are attempting to do business in.  

This article also brings to mind a fundamental difference between Americans and citizens of many other countries.  Most people in Europe, Asia, Africa and most of South America are not only bilingual, but multilingual, while Americans traveling abroad routinely struggle with rudimentary communication in the language of their host country.  People are more inviting when you are able to communicate with them in the language that they are most comfortable with.

There is a lucky group of second-graders at Harlem Success Academy 3 whose teacher realizes this and has managed to eek out some spare time from an already packed academic schedule and rigorous curriculum.  The second graders of Goucher College are learning Mandarin Chinese this year!  Kiss your brain Goucher College!  Huge firecracker cheer for Ms. Pan for helping to shape the worlds next generation of global travelers!         

Read the full NY Times article below:           

January 4, 2011, 3:58 PM

Focusing on Languages (Mainly Mandarin)

By FERNANDA SANTOS

During her visit to High School for Violin and Dance in the Bronx on Monday, one of the stops in five-borough tour that worked as her formal introduction to her new job, New York City’s schools chancellor, Cathleen P. Black, gathered around a table with students and alumni, discussing career paths, opportunities and plans.

One man told her he was studying architecture at State University of New York at Delhi. One woman said she was majoring in criminal justice at Hostos Community College. Another, who is graduating at the end of the month, described to Ms. Black how learning to play a musical instrument helped her learn new words.

Before she left the building, Ms. Black peppered the principal, Tanya John, with questions about college preparedness and the school’s curriculum. Then, she revealed what is starting to look like an obsession.

“I’m pushing for Mandarin Chinese,” she said. She was laughing, but foreign-language instruction seems to be serious business for Ms. Black — and Mandarin, the new Spanish.

Last month, before she traded a job running one of the world’s largest magazine publishing companies for a job running the nation’s largest public school system, Ms. Black was already making noise about the importance of learning Mandarin. And the noise only amplified on her first day on the job.

During a visit to Medgar Evers College Preparatory School in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, on Dec. 15, Ms. Black, who was then still chairman of Hearst Magazines, told students in a Mandarin class that maybe some day one of them would have “a good job at a magazine in China” and urged them to “keep studying” the language. On Monday, she suggested to a student at High School of Violin and Dance, “You should study Mandarin.” (Ms. John, the school’s principal, said that the school did not offer Mandarin, but that classes could be taken online.)

At her next stop on the tour, Democracy Prep High School in Harlem, Ms. Black stepped into a foreign language classroom, and an Asian language at that, though not Mandarin.

“Why Korean?” she asked the school’s founder, Seth Andrew, as the teacher, Jung Jin Lee, who is known as J. J., quizzed the students on the meaning of the letters projected on the wall.

Turns out there are many reasons, and one of them is this: A college scholarship application from a black or Latino student from Harlem is more likely to stand out if the student is fluent in Korean, Mr. Andrew told her.

In an interview on Tuesday, he said that was the explanation he gave to parents when the school started offering Korean in the fall of 2009 and made it a graduation requirement; he says it is the only high school in the country to do so.

That first year, “there was a lot pushback from the students and their families; they didn’t understand why they weren’t learning Spanish,” Mr. Andrew said. But in a school where 20 percent of the students are Latino (the other 80 percent are black), “by teaching a language that no one in our school had ever had before, everyone would be on equal footing when walking through the door,” he said.

He had more to offer Ms. Black. Korean is a phonetic language, he told her, so instead of having to memorize thousands of characters, as Mandarin would have demanded of them, the students had to learn only a few dozen letters.

“She really liked the idea,” said Mr. Andrew, who is the superintendent of Democracy Prep Public Schools, which operates two charters in three campuses in Harlem.

Whether that will prompt some new policy, directive or pilot program, it might be too early to tell; Ms. Black held her first cabinet meeting on Tuesday, and there are a lot of other issues she listed as priorities during Monday’s tour, including the budget.

Still, one of the students at Democracy Prep, Melia Douyon, 15, who is in 10th grade, told Ms. Black of the school trip she took to Korea last year with two of her classmates, and then squeezed in a little request: “If we had more funding per student,” she said, “we could send more kids to Korea.”

City Sued Over Cathie Black Waiver

The following article was published by NYTimes.com in the New York Region section on Wednesday, December 8, 2010:

December 8, 2010, 2:51 PM

Second Suit Challenges Waiver for Chancellor

By SHARON OTTERMAN

A group of public school parents and advocates, including a member of the Assembly, filed suit in State Supreme Court in Albany on Tuesday to stop Cathleen P. Black from becoming the next city schools chancellor.

The suit, whose plaintiffs include Hakeem Jeffries, an assemblyman from Brooklyn, is the second legal challenge to Ms. Black’s appointment. Last Friday, Eric J. Snyder, a Brooklyn parent and bankruptcy attorney, also sued for her appointment to be annulled.

The new suit argues that David M. Steiner, the state education commissioner, erred in interpreting the law or acted arbitrarily when he decided to grant Ms. Black a waiver that allows her to become the next chancellor without educational credentials.

In a compromise, Dr. Steiner granted the waiver after the city agreed to appoint a senior deputy with strong educational credentials to serve under Ms. Black. But the law, the suit argues, does not allow the commissioner to rely “upon the educational qualifications of the staff the candidate is to supervise” as a substitute for her own qualifications.

The suit also repeats an argument made by Mr. Snyder, stating that while the law allows the commissioner to excuse Ms. Black’s lack of teaching experience and graduate courses in education, she must still have a master’s degree of some sort.

Ms. Black, 66, a successful publishing executive, holds only a bachelor’s degree in English from Trinity University in Washington.

Norman Siegel, the civil rights lawyer who will be the lead counsel in the case, said he expected the court in Albany to consider his and Mr. Snyder’s suit together. Oral arguments in Mr. Snyder’s case are scheduled for Dec. 23.

A spokesman for the state Department of Education, Tom Dunn, said Tuesday that the department had been notified of the suit, but that he would not comment on pending litigation.

Among the plaintiffs are members of a group called the Deny Waiver Coalition, a collection of parent groups critical of how the mayor has managed the city’s 1,600 schools. They include Khem Irby, the former president of the Community Education Council for District 13 in Brooklyn; Lydia Bellahcene and Julie Cavanaugh, members of Community Advocates for Public Education; Mona Davids, the president of the New York Charter Parents Association; and Noah E. Gotbaum, the president of the Community Education Council for District 3 in Manhattan.

14 Schools Slated for Closure

Gotham Schools report:
http://gothamschools.org/2010/12/07/city-adds-14-schools-to-planned-closure-list-bringing-total-to-26/ 

Citing improvements the schools have made over the past year, the city is sparing four of the 19 schools the city proposed closing last year: the Choir Academy of Harlem, W.H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School, the Middle School for Academic and Social Excellence and the Business, Computer Applications and Entrepreneurship High School.

The city is proposing that most of the schools on its list stop admitting new classes next year and phase out over time. For two schools, KAPPA II and the Academy for Collaborative Education, the city plans to shutter all grades at once at the end of this year.

City officials culled the final list of 25 district schools to close from a larger list of 55 schools that they targeted for possible closure earlier in the fall. Of the 30 schools on that list that were spared today, 14 may still undergo one of two federally-approved strategies for school improvement.

One of those scenarios, known as the “turnaround” model, requires that the schools’ principals be replaced and its staff and teachers re-apply for their jobs; only half may be re-hired. The other model, known as “transformation,” relies on replacing the principal, bringing in outside support services and experimenting with new teacher training and school schedules.

The city and union are currently in talks over which schools might use each model.
Here is the final list of schools the city wants to close. The schools highlighted below were announced today.