No...not "Jon Stewart." I'm talking about John Stewart, Provost of John Muir College at the University of California, San Diego. I found out this morning that John Stewart, a man who had a profound affect on my life in college, died last year.

[I hope this post proves interesting. It was written by Edwize blogger natbell and crossposted from Edwize.]

The UFT has begun gathering input from the community about mayoral control of city schools and what it has meant for the city’s 1.1 million school children. The law that temporarily authorized centralization of the system has been in place for six years, and is scheduled to sunset in 2009.

A union task force is holding hearings in each of the five boroughs, where parents, community members and other stakeholders are evaluating whether the law should be continued, modified in some way, or allowed to expire. The community’s input will help the union develop its own position on the law.

[I hope this post proves interesting. It was written by Edwize blogger Leo Casey, and crossposted from Edwize.]

New York Measuring Teachers by Test Scores: so reads the headline on the front page of the New York Times which announces the NYC Department of Education's secretive pilot project to use value added statistical measures of student standardized test scores to examine the performance of teachers. The teachers and their schools will not be informed that they are the subjects of this study.

The DoE's "value added" project is a fundamentally flawed exercise which can not possibly deliver what it promises. It is being pursued, with the full knowledge of its flaws, because technocratic ideology trumps sound educational practice at Tweed. Moving forward with such a flawed project is extraordinarily irresponsible because "value added" -- the idea that one should measure how much academic progress students have made, rather than just their absolute academic standing -- holds promise as an useful tool in the repertoire of schools and educators. But the way in which it is being recklessly pursued by Tweed will cast discredit on the entire enterprise.

What is our role, the student's role, in our society?

As it stands now we are the constant object of the education discussion sentence. My english teacher told me (and mind you, this was last year... in my junior year of high school,) that a simple sentence contains three parts: the subject or actor, the verb or action, and the object or that which is acted upon

As in: "The Department of Education (that's the subject) puts (the verb) children(the object) first (I guess that's an adjective)."

In the American education debate, we are acted upon by many subjects: The Department of Education, who treats us like products, numbers that need to be manipulated so that they can look real good, the City, that treats us as criminals who need to be babysat by the NYPD for a couple of hours a day, and our Teachers, who people assume can snap their fingers and turn us into brilliant astrophysicists ready to herald in a new age of American economic glory.

I wouldn't want to hazard a guess as to what Joe Williams (of the horribly misnamed Democrats for Education Reform) set as his New Year's resolution, but he starts off the year with a post accusing New York City Councilman Robert Jackson of "pimping himself" (Jackson is also Chair of the City Council's Education Committee). Here's what Jackson said, that Joe Williams disagreed with.

Stay classy Joe

[I hope this post proves interesting. It was written by Edwize blogger Jackie Bennett, and previously posted on Edwize.]

What is going to happen in our New York City high schools now that Joel Klein has based 55% of the high school progress reports on the number of courses students take and pass. Consider this: if students don’t pass, the school’s grade will suffer, and punishment may follow. Klein will fire principals and close the schools.

And to make things worse, Klein has also sent out signals that it’s a good thing when schools find creative ways to give a student credit. For example, Klein instituted a policy of seat-time credit (credit recovery, as it’s euphemistically called) wherein students who fail a class because they didn’t do much work can hand in a project of some kind to a different teacher after the course is over, and have that grade reversed.

As of this year my younger brother is no longer a public school student. Like me, he attended public elementary and middle schools, however, when it came to choose a high school, he and my parents decided that he would do better at a private school. Fortunately, they made a good decision for my brother. He is now at a school that he loves, he really succeeds in and he feels does a good job in educating the students.

Out of curiosity, I asked him what the difference was between the public school he had attended and his current school in terms of educational value. His answer was quick and simple: the adults in the building have time to care about the students.

In the NYC education system, the first step to improving schools is creating a situation in which educators have time to care about the students. This can only come for significant reductions in class size and teacher load.

[I hope this post proves interesting. It was written by Edwize blogger Leo Casey, and previously posted on Edwize.]

On the Disney Company's corporate website, the reader will find a honor roll of teachers from across the United States who have been recognized by the American Teacher Awards, starting with the first class of 1990 and concluding with the last class of 2006. A close examination will reveal that there is no teacher listed as the 1992 honoree in the category of Social Studies. Two of the three Social Studies finalists are listed, but the teacher who was actually named Social Studies Teacher of the Year is missing.*

Chris Owens, son of my former Conrgessman and friend of the Daily Gotham editors, has landed a great sounding job and one he seems well suited for. He is NY Regional director for Building Educated Leaders for Life (BELL), an organization that provides after school programs for children. BELL describes their work as follows:

BELL, founded in 1992, is one of the nation’s leading providers of quality after-school and summer educational programs. It is committed to enhancing the educational achievements, self-esteem, and life opportunities of children living in low-income, urban communities. BELL serves more than 10,000 children annually in public schools throughout Baltimore, Boston, and New York City.

Heard some time back Chris had landed a great job for an educational organization, but didn't get the details until DG got a press release from BELL. From the BELL press release:

The key factor in both the transmission of knowledge and the growth of a student as an individual is trust. This trust is necessary to build the relationship between a teacher and student in order to achieve these goals. To run a school effectively, there must be an atmosphere of trust between teachers and administration. This principle of trust as the mortar that holds together our education system also applies to the relationship between the DOE, the City and the members of individual schools, specifically the teachers.

The City's new initiative to fire more teachers is a betrayal of this trust. The DOE's new Teacher Performance Unit, a group of five lawyers headed by a former District Attorney, has been given the goal of helping Principals create cases against tenured teachers and getting rid of young, unsuccessful teachers before they get tenure.