NYC small schools in the news again

Ed Week has a new article this week on small schools in New York City. NYCSB is giving $45,000 for two years to hire a special education teacher.

Lyons Community School in NYC will open this year. It is one school that will receive funds to support 8 students with special support needs and 10 who require self-contained or inclusion support in the regular education classroom. I am so curious how they will staff this person in a 6-9 school.

"The Department of Education announced on Feb. 20, 2007, that Lyons is one of 10 new small schools to receive special funds to allow them to accomodate special education students in their first two years. The funds require that the school enroll at least eight students who require special education teacher support services (SETSS) and at least 10 who require a self-contained or collaborative team-teaching class."

New York’s Citywide Council on High Schools (CCHS) is involved and has filed a lawsuit with the Department of Education Civil Rights office.

Looks like the Gates foundation is also looking at the issue, but not specifically at the special education policy. They are looking at more of the population that has been low-performing or at-risk of receiving weak education. Maybe they should be looking more closely at the graduation rates related to ELL and Special ed students.

ELLs in Small Schools?!

EDweek article

I just entered a submission to the CES Fall Forum, a Principled Stand, which deals with the continuum of services that are or aren't being provided to students with specific learning needs (ELL or students with LDs). I am hoping that addressing the school design aspect will help other students who are lacking a full continuum of services and are stuck with fully including their students into the regular education classroom without appropriate supports because of the lack of budgeting for appropriate staff and/or instructional strategies. I know the issue is big in New York. In fact the article above references the first article that I read about the issue of small schools not allowing ELL students to come to the school for the first 2 years because of budget restraints. I guess the school could build itself up first and then once it was successful and had a core number of student admitted, it could then afford to hire an inclusion teacher.

Breaking up Big Schools

In a recent article in the New York Times, it was brought to my attention that there are programs for ELL and special ed students that are obsolete after large schools with these particular programs are broken up into smaller schools.

It says, ~Then, a few weeks ago, the department announced its plan for restructuring Lafayette, which now has about 2,100 students, beginning in September 2007. It would contain three new schools — one emphasizing sports management, another focusing on film and music, and a third offering “expeditionary learning” under the aegis of Outward Bound. None will offer bilingual instruction, at least at the outset.

“This is an absolutely unacceptable choice,” Mr. Chung said. “These three schools have nothing to do with our community. They’re forcing the immigrant students out of their own neighborhood. New York is an immigrant city, but I think the education policy is not for us.”

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The immigrant city and community should be taken into account. What do they want for their students? Do they want inclusion or do they want special programs? This is definately one of the areas that I feel is taken for granted when we think about breaking up our larger schools, or even when we create new small schools. And furthermore, when we create our small schools, how do we ensure that we are listening to all stakeholders as we create new instructional programs? We must listen to the community. What do they need and how can we meet their needs?

Students and Achievement

My current obsession is about students, of course. But how do we get all students, black, white, special ed, ELL, to connect to the content meaningfully. Yes, cater to their individual strengths. But there is more to that. In a full classroom with 24 students, each with their own background baggage, current identity, strengths and weaknesses, how do we connect topics such as the Civil War to these diverse middle school students trying so hard to connect with their own identity, let alone a story about an actual soldier in the Union army, for example.

Why reinvent the wheel when people have done the research? Attempt a new pedagogical practice and reflect on the results I think that is the research that I am doing now: Do classrooms really need three teachers?I am beginning to understand, through my experince as a "third wheel" in the classroom, that it doesn't take more teachers in the classroom, it takes establishing well researched pedagogical practices and routines into your teaching ___.

How do you connect teaching with activism and social change? Expeditions! CCPCS is an Expeditionary Learning School where this should already be embedded in the teacher's pedagogy.

So, let's examine this relationship: teaching for social change and expeditions. When planning an expedition, the main question one asks after "What content will I need to teach?" is "How will my students have a puposeful audience for their projects that are a result of the expedition?" If my co-teacher's and I had really thought about this, (and we "thought" about it, but didn't really act on it) we should have related the expedition on Slavery and the Civil War on meaningfully connecting the content to current social conditions.

"Our goals for ourselves and for our students are as complex, dynamic, and contested as we hope their goals will be as teachers of children: to learn to see students fully and fairly, as threedimensional creatures much like ourselves; to see ourselves as active agents of change in our schools and in our worlds; and to find practical application in public school classrooms for our commitment to social justice and human freedom." (Ayers, W., Michie, G., Rome, A., "Embers of Hope: In Search of a Meaningful Critical Pedagogy", Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2004, online google article)

CREDE - Center for Research on Education, Diversity, and Excellence has 5 Standards that establish another set pf principles that should guide insturction to individuals who are "at risk of educational failure due to cultural, language, racial, geographic, or economic factors." They are:
Teachers and students work together (collaboration between students and teachers)
developing language and literacy across all curriculum (integrated curriculum),
connecting lessons to students lives (meaningful, authentic, relevant connections to curriculum),
engaging students with challenging lessons (complex, higher-order thinking)
emphasizing dialogue over lectures (critical pedagogy, student-as-worker, teacher-as-coach (CES principle))

http://crede.berkeley.edu/standards/standards.html