New York Family Education Guide 2014

newyorkfamily.com

THE 2014-2015

ULTIMATE GUIDE TO

EDUCATION THE NEW DOE

Where Things Are, Where Things Are Going

THE

SECRETS OF

HIGHLY EFFECTIVE

TEACHERS & SCHOOLS

FULL

STEM

AHEAD

SPEAK EASY

Early Language Immersion In NYC

BEST SCHOOLS GUIDE THE BLACKBOARD AWARDS

THE 2014-2015

ULTIMATE GUIDE TO

EDUCATION

pg. 20

2 | Schools That Rock Journalist Amanda Ripley wrote an engaging book about how other countries educate their children to great success—and the problems and possibilities of an American education 6 | Full STEM Ahead What a quality STEM program really looks like in the classroom 10 | The New DOE: Where Things Are, Where Things Are Going Chalkbeat New York gives us the scoop on Mayor de Blasio’s key education policies 14 | Top Of The Class What every parent needs to know about NYC’s Gifted & Talented programs pg. 6

16 | Gaining Admission Applying to nursery and private schools in the city requires parents to do their homework, and consider what kind of schools would be a good match for their child 20 | Live Locally, Teach Globally An in-depth look at the blossoming trend towards global education with seven NYC schools 24 | The Multilingual Movement Two local experts discuss the benefits, misconceptions and logistics of bilingual instruction 26 | Tutor City A quick guide to navigating NYC’s tutor landscape 28 | The Craft Of Teaching The case for making teacher education the priority for improving America’s schools 33 | The 2014-2015 Blackboard Awards For Schools And Principals Honoring educational excellence in local public, private, charter, and parochial schools

pg. 33 pg. 16

CONTACT US EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Eric Messinger, emessinger@manhattanmedia.com PUBLISHER: John Hurley, jhurley@manhattanmedia.com, 212-268-3086 SENIOR EDITOR: Mia Weber ASSOCIATE EDITOR: Lauren Vespoli ART DIRECTOR: Holly Morrison For more education trends and stories, visit newyorkfamily.com and sign up for our free weekly e-newsletters. Manhattan Media LLC, 72 Madison Avenue, 11th Floor, New York, NY, 212-268-8600 N E W Y O RK F A M I L Y ULT I M A T E GUI D E T O ED UCA T I O N 201 4 -201 5 • 1

SCHOOLS

THAT ROCK

By Following Three American High School Students Studying Abroad, Journalist Amanda Ripley Wrote An Engaging Book About How Other Countries Educate Their Children To Great Success—And The Problems And Possibilities Of An American Education

By Anna Boisseau Before journalist Amanda Ripley began researching international schooling for a magazine article, she wasn’t entirely convinced that she wanted to write about the topic. “I didn’t say so out loud, but education stories seemed, well, kind of soft,” she admits in the prologue of her book, The Smartest Kids In The World: And How They Got That Way. But Ripley’s insightful book, accessible to parents and educators alike, is far from the soft journalism she feared. Though the book explores the far away school systems of Finland, South Korea, and Poland, it hits close to home with its observations on why the American education system continues to face major problems. Using American teenagers who are studying abroad in those countries as “amateur anthropologists,” Ripley explores the human element behind the muchdiscussed Program for International

Student Assessment (PISA) results which place American students behind many of their developed world peers. And yet, by better understanding the successful educational approaches of other countries, it is also a book of hope to anyone seeking ideas for improving our schools—and the odds of our children succeeding in a global future.

What first piqued your interest in writing a book on education?

I had written a variety of stories on education in the US, and I kept coming across this research that was showing that a very small number of countries had managed to do what we had not, which was to educate virtually all their kids to high levels of thinking in math, reading, and science...and I didn’t really believe it!

If it’s true, that these countries have done the seemingly impossible...how did they do it?

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You focused on three American high school students (Kim, Eric, and Tom) as they each spent a year studying abroad in respective countries. How did that come together?

Every year there are about 30,000 teenagers who either come to the US to study or leave the US to [study] abroad, and there are organizations that help arrange those exchange programs. I reached out to some of those and asked for volunteers from the countries that I knew had compelling education stories. I was able to find students who would make good storytellers and [also] who would help me see more clearly, because I’m too old, really, to remember what high school is like… Kids [doing an international exchange] think all day long about what is different between their host country and their home country. They have strong opinions on it, but most of the time nobody asks them.

Had you already chosen to focus on the school systems of Finland, South Korea, and Poland at that point, or was that more something that came along with the kids that you chose?

I had [already] zeroed in on those three countries for different reasons.

Finland because it’s sort of the utopia, where the kids aren’t overly fixated on testing or tutoring but they are still getting really good results. Korea because it’s the extreme manifestation of the Asian pressure cooker model where kids are fixated on test results, [are] going to tutoring, and are working incredibly hard. And then, Poland, because they had dramatically improved just in the recent past...and they had a high level of child poverty, about 16 percent... In some ways Poland was more comparable to the US, [or] at least individual states.

continued on page 4

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When you first began researching your book, what were your goals and did they shift as you found out more about other education systems?

I was hoping I could eject out of the US debates on education. I wanted to do something totally different because when you look at international data, the debates we have seem mostly irrelevant. The main thing that changed though was that following [Kim, Eric, and Tom] turned out to be much more important than I had realized. Honestly, I just thought they would make the book more interesting. I didn’t realize how important it is to listen to kids and what they talk about. Kids talk about other kids... [that’s] the most powerful influence on their day-to-day attitude towards education. So that really helps you remember what it’s like to be in high school and not get swept up into things that are important but not central to real kids’ lives. [Without the kids], I wouldn’t have focused on the rigor as much as I did, or on student drive, or on parents. There were many things that I didn’t expect to be important and they were.

What do you think the pros and cons are of using a system like the PISA to compare school systems? Do you think that it is a good barometer?

I did look at other tests, but I ultimately concluded that the PISA is the best measurement that we have at the moment. What I like about it is that it’s really designed to look at kid’s abilities to think for themselves, to make an argument, to solve a problem they’ve never seen before...

It’s a measure of what you can do with knowledge… I [took] the PISA test... and you were graded based on the lucidity and specificity of your argument, which is how I’m judged in my actual job.

By PISA’s standards, the educational systems in South Korea and Finland have been more successful than the American one. What do you see as the biggest challenges in the American education system? What are the biggest successes of Finland and South Korea?

I mean, that is the question, right?

What have they got that we don’t and how can we get it? I think we’d want to borrow some things from each, but there’s no exact model that’s perfect in every way for us. But, the number one lesson, overriding everything else I’m about to say, is that, it’s possible.

It can be done. In places like South Korea, the student drive and parental focus on education is really the engine behind their success...and that’s something we can learn from... This is a country where on the day when the

kids take the equivalent of the SATs, the stock market opens an hour late so there won’t be traffic for the kids trying to get to the testing centers.

This sends a message to kids about how [important] education is.

Poland has done something that we have not, which is to...delay the year at which they separate kids into vocational and university tracks until age 16...In the US we track kids differently but we do it aggressively and at a young age through things like gifted programs, honors classes, and AP classes. The next thing you know, you’re taking totally different content than the kid you sat next to in kindergarten. All around the world, that is a recipe for inequity and for inefficient education systems.

So, reducing tracking, removing inequity, boosting student drive, and investing most of our energy in selecting and training teachers more carefully… Instead of educating twice as many teachers as we need, at teacher colleges of widely varying selectivity and quality, it would make more sense to educate the actual number of teachers we need, select them carefully, train them rigorously, and give them the skills they need to teach higher order skills.

“We don’t want to push our kids too hard in school, we don’t want them to think that they are dumb. But there’s a difference between shaming kids and being honest with them.”

It seems that, according to PISA results, math, over, say, reading or science is the subject that American students struggle with the most.

Why do you think this subject poses such difficulties in the American school system?

You’re right, in math we are performing below average at every socioeconomic level... There have been studies of teachers, and their math levels are mediocre for the developed world. So that again goes back to [the importance of] the selection and training of teachers...

We’ve gotten serious about reading and you see the results—we’re doing much better internationally in reading than in we are in math. We can do just as well in math if we take it seriously...if we teach kids that math isn’t something that you’re good or bad at. It’s a skill, like reading. If you aren’t doing well it means that you need more help and you need to work harder.

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One thing that you observed in your book was how parenting style can affect a kid’s school performance.

Do you think American parents push their children enough? What kind of barometer should parents use to know how much pressure they should put on their children?

In the countries with the best performing education systems, parents are not more or less involved, they’re differently involved. They’re more involved at home in education than they are at school. Both are valuable. Parents get a lot out of sports teams and PTAs and so do kids...but those things don’t lead to learning. There was a study of parents in 13 very different countries... and what they found was the more time parents spent volunteering in extracurricular activities and attending PTA meetings, the worse their kids actually performed on a test of critical thinking and reading by age 15. But, the more time parents spent reading to their kids when they were little, and talking to them as they got older...about the news of the day, about books that they’re reading, about movies they’ve seen...the better their kids were in reading at age 15, even after you control for economic background and other things.

For me, as a parent of a publicschool child in D.C., this was like a breath of fresh air. It’s helped me prioritize because I don’t have a lot of free time... Now, if my kid’s school is asking me to do six things in a given week, I now rank those things based on where I can be most impactful.. which by the way, is not fundraising.

As much as upper income schools in America love to fundraise, that is not typically associated with more learning. I wish it were.

Something you seemed concerned with was when parents put too much pressure on their children to perform—the so called “tiger mom” mentality that was a big factor in South Korea.

I think the seriousness with which South Korean parents take education is very impressive and something we could learn from. It is almost identical... to the pressure and mindset that I see among some American parents towards sports...

So I don’t think American parents are any less intense, they’re just intense about different things.

I think we do worry a lot...we don’t want to push our kids too hard in school, we don’t want them to think that they are dumb. But there’s a difference between shaming kids and being honest with them...I think kids are capable of hearing the truth…

Photo by Brooke Bready

continued from page 2

Amanda Ripley

American kids rank number one in the world for [saying] that they routinely get highest grades in math but then below average for the developed world...in actual math. So, we’re not really being honest with our kids.

I think if you have that mindset of South Korean parents that you can always do better if you get more help and work harder, and you’re honest with kids, those two things together are really powerful. But one or the other alone isn’t as good.

Educators and education advocates from very different perspectives have praised your new book. Is your book a testament to everyone’s interest in finding what works best or do you think that differences in personal beliefs will always lead to big divisions in our educational bureaucracy?

I’d like to think that the book manages to transcend some of the usual infighting and ideology, and that’s why it has received attention from all kinds of people. But I am not so sure. It is so tempting for people to pick and choose with the international research, plucking up only the bits that validate their own world views. I tried to avoid that trap in the book—by following what the evidence and the students told me, even when it led me away from my own pet theories. But I’m not sure I always succeeded. Ironically, it’s hard to keep an open mind when so much is at stake... When it comes to education, people disagree with the best of intentions. Everyone wants to do the right thing, and righteousness results. Personally, I find that talking to students is the only thing that prevents me from getting hypnotized by the bickering of adults.

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SciTech Kids

FULL STEM AHEAD What A Quality STEM Program Really Looks Like In The Classroom

E

ven though schools have been teaching science, technology, engineering, and math for about as long as these subjects have existed, suddenly everyone seems to be adding a big dose of STEM to their schools. To find out what STEM’s all about, we turned to two great sources. Kim Magloire, the founder of SciTech Kids, which offers enrichment classes in science and technology for children from 3-12, and Eric C. Nastasi, Esq., director of advancement at the Smithsonian Science Education Center, whose STEM-based curriculum is used in schools across the country, and locally at the Alexander Robertson School. We also spoke with educators at two local schools— the Hewitt School and the Rodeph Sholom School—to get a sense of what STEM really looks like in the classroom.

What does STEM commonly mean?

Kim Magloire: STEM is an acronym that stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Traditionally, math and science have been taught separately and most of the time are independent from each other. A STEM curriculum combines science, math, engineering, and

technology into an integrated learning experience. Basically, students participate in projectbased, collaborative activities that require them to apply STEM topics to understand and solve real-world problems.

Why is STEM important?

Eric Nastasi: We live in an era of constant scientific discovery and technological change.

STEM education equips us with opportunities to improve life for people across the world, and chances to be better stewards of our natural resources. As our economy increasingly depends on these revolutionary new advances, many new jobs will be created in STEM fields. If we are to stay competitive as a nation, then we need to build a scientifically literate citizenry and a bank of highly skilled, STEM-literate employees. In 2011, 26 million US jobs (about 20 percent of the workforce) required in-depth knowledge in at least one of the STEM fields.

However, these STEM jobs are not just growing for those with higher educational degrees. In a report titled “The Hidden STEM Economy,” the Brookings Institution states that: “Half of all STEM jobs are available to

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workers without a four-year college degree, and these jobs pay… 10 percent higher than jobs with similar educational requirements.”

KM: There is a strong push from politicians and the business sector to have more students be versed in STEM. According to the results from the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), American students ranked 31st in math and 24th in science internationally. This statistic is alarming because about 80 percent of the jobs created in the next decade will require STEM skills.

Science and technology companies are concerned they will not have the qualified workforce to fill the growing technical positions. One solution to improve student achievement and the United States’ global leadership and economic competitiveness is to bolster STEM education at the elementary and secondary level.

When implemented correctly, a STEM education will provide students will the skills to successfully enter STEM fields.

Is one of STEM’s overriding impulses a feeling that, beyond early exposure, subjects like science and

technology can be better taught to children, and made more inviting, relevant, and fun?

KM: Absolutely! Research shows that, by the time children reach the third grade, many are turned off to science because they find it difficult, dull, or confusing. Suddenly science involves the rote memorization of facts and is no longer fun or relevant.

Young children need to experience science and math as an engaging, collaborative process of inquiry and discovery. When children are placed in the role of an investigator, and immersed in hands-on activities that draw upon their sense of curiosity, they learn these subjects better.

EN: Children are so curious about STEM topics. Whether they can’t put their tablet down or they are asking questions about the sky, the subway, or dinosaurs… STEM offers the topics kids want to learn about.

That wanting to learn, that curiosity; it might start with wanting to know about newts or airplanes, but it leads to reading, observing, recognizing patterns, calculating, recording, and collaborating. STEM at an early age provides the gateway to better continued on page 8

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and ongoing support. And does the school have outside partners such as learning across all fields and disciplines universities, STEM-based companies, or businesses? and harnesses curiosity in a way that can lead to a lifetime of intrinsic EN: Parents should know what sort motivation: wanting to know for the of professional development is being sake of knowing. We can’t predict the provided for teachers, administrators, future, but we know that we are well and support specialists in the school… into the information age and against The pedagogy, learning science, that backdrop, people who love to cognitive sciences that inform the learn are people who will thrive. teaching of STEM take years of practice and mentorship to master How’s a parent to know whether and that body of research is growing a school or program is doing a all the time as well. Educators need good job of introducing STEM or time to learn, plan, implement, and is just kind of riding the trend in a collaborate. In this respect the greatest superficial way?

KM: As a parent, the key to identifying sign of a healthy STEM program is a a high-quality STEM program is to ask quality program for professional and leadership development. Parents also the following questions: Are students need to know that they are critical encouraged to explore and come in ensuring quality STEM education. up with ideas? Does the program When you see a school or district with engage students in the scientific or a thriving, fruitful STEM curriculum, you design process? Do students address can bet that a community of active and a real-world problem? Do they work passionate parents is behind it. in teams to solve this problem? Are there multiple possible solutions? And For more on SciTech Kids, visit are the principles of STEM (critical sci-techkids.com; for more on the thinking, asking good questions, Smithsonian Science Education Center, observation, and exploration) truly visit ssec.si.edu. at the heart of every discipline? If so, you are dealing with a quality STEMbased program. Another question to STEM IN ACTION ask would be if the teachers received From Chris Weaver, the STEM any professional development coordinator and chair of the science continued from page 6

department at the Hewitt School: “We like to teach [STEM] in a way that brings the disciplines together and encourages students to solve real problems. One great example with younger students was a school day in which parents were invited into the lab to work with the third grade students. The students were given simple circuits, lights, batteries and other basic components—including art supplies—and were asked to make things. They were the leaders, the parents were their assistants.

Well, they made helicopters, kinetic sculptures, one girl made something we called a Confetti Shooter. And though it was all good fun, it was also a wonderful experience in STEM learning—engineering, design, science—and problem solving.”

From Laurie Piette, the director of studies at the Rodeph Sholom School: “STEM is infused throughout our curriculum. We’ve even changed the name of their science fair to a STEM Expo, requiring projects that reflect range of skills that STEM requires. The idea is to use technology to deepen the curriculum in ways that expand our students’ understanding of topics (not to mention their 21st-Century skills at presentation). At the same time, we’re very concerned about

digital citizenship, and digital misuse.

There is a difference between mindless screen time and developing concrete ideas through technology that help children learn productively.”

From Scott Heifetz, the founder and director of Launch Math & Science Centers: “At Launch, kids explore STEM through engaging coding workshops that teach computer languages such as Scratch, App Inventor, Python, and Java. By learning to code, kids gain a better understanding as to how today’s world works. Whether it’s the family car on the road, or video games on the computer screen, code is everywhere. Engineering and math skills, plus a solid understanding of logic, provide the foundation for computer programmers to create the complex list of instructions that we call code. Scratch (ages 6+) and App Inventor (9+) are introductions, while Python (9+) and Java (9+) are more advanced languages that kids learn at Launch as they dive into the world of coding and STEM.” For more on the Hewitt School, visit hewittschool.org; for more on the Rodeph Sholom School, visit rodephsholomschool.org; for more on Launch Math & Science Centers, visit launchmath.com.

Five Important Ways Technology Is Impacting Education

By Angelique LeDoux There is no denying the rapid transformation resulting from technological innovation unfolding in education right now. While digital natives take the lead, teachers and education administrators are figuring out how to best apply these tools in and out of the classroom. Here are five trends to note, as well as tools and programs to make them happen.

1. BLENDED, HYBRID & FLIPPED LEARNING It sounds like a James Bond cocktail preference, but the blended, or flipped, classroom model of teaching has shaken and stirred the classroom by using recorded lectures and other online tools to deliver the content—viewed outside of the classroom—while devoting classroom time for discussing, rather than presenting, the day's lessons.

Tools & Programs: Evernote, EdModo, Blackboard, Moodle, Schoology

2. PERSONALIZED, SELF-PACED & ADAPTIVE LEARNING By now, we all know the Khan Academy model of personalized learning—basically, you’re weak in algebra and your Uncle Sal sends you a targeted video lesson to improve your skills. But adaptive learning takes this to another level, by shifting and adjusting content according to sophisticated data analysis of a student’s strengths and weaknesses.

Free class anyone? For young— and even lifetime—learners who want to learn at their own pace, MOOCs—which stands for massive open online courses—are free and have unlimited enrollment, providing access to courses taught by top scholars and industry experts at the world’s leading universities, like Harvard, Stanford, and MIT. Tools & Programs: coursera. org, udacity, EdX.org, DreamBox Learning, Books That Grow, Think Through Math, Knewton 3. GAMIFIED LEARNING & NEW LEARNING TOOLS Gamification is the 21st Century version of the Spelling Bee—a

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competitive, motivating, challenging, and game-based approach to learning content. Digital, shareable flashcards, 3D printing, and augmented reality are great learning tools, allowing students to improve retention, visualize and realize their inventions, and create hands-on prototypes of complex concepts.

Tools & Programs: Kahoot!, Brainscape, ClassDojo, Raspberry Pi. Honorable Mention: Quest to Learn (Middle School and High School) 4. ONLINE COLLABORATION & MENTORING Students are collaborating a lot more lately with the help of Cloud computing, GoogleDocs and class blogs, and class discussions on Twitter and other social media—not to mention Skype and Facetime. These new opportunities to work together can lead to deeper learning experiences that transcend the classroom, allowing students to look into medical labs, third world countries, and more.

Tools & Programs: GoogleDocs,

ThinkBinder, Edmodo, Storybird, mind42, Skype in Education, Prezi, ePals, MentorNet, STEM Mentoring, Fellowship, iMentor 5. ASSESSMENT-AIDED LEARNING, LEARNING ANALYTICS & COMMUNICATION Imagine learning monthly or quarterly that your child isn’t grasping the math concept, or better yet, that your child has aced the pre-assessment for a much higher level math than her peers! It would be extremely helpful to make changes in what they’re learning more quickly.

Assessments, learning analytics, and better communication across all stakeholders are potentially one of the biggest game-changers of Ed Tech. Juggling the implications of assessments and analytics and keeping student data safe will continue to be a balancing act.

Tools & Programs: EnGrade, FreshGrade, ClassMessenger ANGELIQUE LEDOUX can be contacted at angeliqueledoux@ me.com.

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Chalkbeat New York Gives Us The Scoop On Mayor de Blasio’s Key Education Policies

By Sarah Darville Editor’s Note: When he was campaigning for office, Mayor Bill de Blasio promised a course correction on a number of the Bloomberg administration’s key education policies. It’s now been a year since he took office, which seemed like a good time to ask Chalkbeat New York (a news organization covering educational change in New York City schools) Bureau Chief, Sarah Darville, for an overview of Department Of Education policies under de Blasio’s appointee, Carmen Fariña—and what we can expect ahead. –Eric Messinger UNIVERSAL PRE-KINDERGARTEN Where Things Are: The city relentlessly pushed its pre-K expansion this summer, and things have gone smoothly so far. About 50,000 4-year-olds are in full-day pre-K programs this year at a public school or through a community organization. It didn’t all happen the way Mayor de Blasio wanted it to— through a tax on New Yorkers making more than $500,000 a year—but it got done, thanks to $300 million from the state.

Where Things Are Going: The city plans to add about 20,000 more full-day seats next year, with the promise of providing a pre-K seat to any city 4-year-old who wants to take advantage of the program. There’s sure to be more scrutiny of the

Chancellor Carmen Fariña

programs as they continue to expand—especially around how they’re dealing with students who don’t speak English and who have disabilities—whether the programs are finding the right mix between play and getting kids prepared for Kindergarten, and whether all of the quickly-approved programs are safe and well-staffed.

CHARTER SCHOOLS Where Things Are: Mayor de Blasio isn’t a fan of charter schools, which he sees as siphoning resources from traditional public schools. But he doesn’t have control of their growth, and 17 more were recently approved to open in the city. He also lost a major political and public relations battle in the spring, when an attempt to keep three Success Academy Charter Schools out of public-school buildings led to new state legislation which now requires the city to provide space, or funding for space, to charter schools.

Where Things Are Going: The de Blasio administration has to make a number of big decisions. Number one: Will the city allow most of the new charter schools to open inside of publicschool buildings, setting up even more co-location tensions, or will the city pay millions of dollars in subsidies for private space instead? And if the city decides to allow the charter schools to open in public spaces, will there be strings attached to require schools to share resources or enroll certain high-needs students?

CHANGES IN THE CITY’S ELITE SELECTIVE HIGH SCHOOLS’ ADMISSIONS POLICIES Where Things Are: Mayor de Blasio has been extremely critical of the admissions processes for the city’s elite high schools, including Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech, which admit students based on their performance on a single standardized test. But the city has yet to announce any changes to the

admissions criteria, which in a few cases will require the help of the state legislature.

Where Things Are Going: Mayor de Blasio could change the policies for five of the schools immediately to include factors like attendance and grade-point averages. It’s likely that the de Blasio administration will look to enlist state lawmakers to come up with a solution for all of the schools in time for the next admissions round. But it’s not clear if the Mayor has the support he needs, since he faces strong opposition from the schools’ alumni groups and many city and state politicians.

SCHOOL REPORT CARDS Where Things Are: A-through-F letter grades for schools have met their end, Chancellor Carmen Fariña announced in October. That’s tied to de Blasio’s promise to reduce the emphasis on competition among schools and to reduce the stress caused by state test scores, which made up a large portion of a school’s rating. Instead of a progress report with a prominent letter grade, each school got two reports in mid-November—one for families and one for educators—with survey and school-observation results along with test scores and graduation rates.

Where Things Are Going: As parents begin to use the reports to help make admissions decisions, it will become clearer if the reports offer enough straightforward takeaways. But the reduced emphasis on test scores has been well-received so far.

LOW-PERFORMING SCHOOLS Where Things Are: Mayor de Blasio recently announced a plan aimed at improving 94 schools that are struggling with low graduation rates and low test scores. The core of the plan is turning each school into a “community school” that offers a variety of extra services like English classes for continued on page 12

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Patrick Wall/Chalkbeat NY

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parents and mental-health services meant to address students’ and families’ out-of-school needs. Each of the schools will also add an extra hour of instruction to the school day and receive funding for extra afterschool programming, summer programs, and additional teacher training.

Where Things Are Going: The schools are now tasked with coming up with an improvement plan, and the city is facing the big task of making dozens of new partnerships work between schools and community organizations. The mayor’s three-year plan includes new accountability measures for schools, which will be expected to meet new standards or face staff changes, reorganization, or closure.

COMMUNITY SCHOOLS & AFTERSCHOOL PROGRAMS Where Things Are: Beyond pre-K, the de Blasio administration has promised two other major education initiatives. One was afterschool programs for every middle-schooler, which is rolling out now.

The other is an expansion of community schools, which offer wraparound services for students, parents, and local residents, like health services or job training. The city has already announced plans to turn 40 schools into community schools, and another 94 will get those services as part of de Blasio’s “renewal schools” plan.

Where Things Are Going: It’s still unclear how enrollment at the after-school programs looks this year. Getting 12-year-olds to stay at school longer than they have to isn’t always an easy sell, and the success of the programs will depend on students actually taking part. Coordinating the community-

schools push, especially at schools that are already struggling, will be the city’s next big challenge.

COMMON CORE/TEACHER EVALUATIONS/ TEACHING TO THE TEST Where Things Are: Mayor de Blasio and Fariña support the Common Core, a set of reading and math standards that New York State adopted in 2010 that in many cases require teachers to adjust their instruction and students to take on more challenging assignments. The city’s move to quickly tie state tests to the new standards and to a new teacher evaluation system led to backlash from many parents and educators, though. State lawmakers have already hit the pause button on using teacher evaluations to punish teachers, and the city is no longer using state test scores as the primary factor in most school admissions or grade-promotion decisions.

Where Things Are Going: Teachers are still trying to figure out how exactly to change what they do to align to the Common Core, a big remaining challenge for the administration. And as they try to de-emphasize state test scores, there is still little the city can do to actually reduce the number of tests students take.

OTHER PARENT-FOCUSED EFFORTS Where Things Are: Fariña has connected almost every one of her policy changes to increasing “parent engagement,” something she says the last mayoral administration neglected. The new teacher’s union contract includes time that teachers are required to spend calling or interacting with parents, and she’s insisted on longer parent conferences, among other initiatives.

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Where Things Are Going: We’re about to see the city start rewarding schools for making sure parents feel involved. This school year will be a good test of whether navigating the school system feels different to parents, or if other frustrations (like the city’s delay in updating middle school admissions criteria, for example) get in the way.

FARIÑA VS. HER PREDECESSORS Where Things Are: Fariña is at a decided advantage when talking to teachers and principals: She’s a lifelong educator who is intimately familiar with the city’s school system.

That has engendered a high level of trust among educators—see the standing ovations she got when taking over the school system earlier in the year. She also has made a habit of offering specific (often extremely specific) recommendations to teachers and principals about everything from teaching history to classroom decorations.

Where Things Are Going: Some educators seem hungry for more specific long-term plans. But her credibility when it comes to instruction isn’t going away anytime soon.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering educational change efforts in the communities where improvement matters most.

The network has bureaus in New York, Colorado, Indiana, and Tennessee (so far). For more Chalkbeat coverage, visit chalkbeat.org.

You can contact Sarah Darville at sdarville@ chalkbeat.org.

MA FULL PAGE AD-d3_MA-FUL-PAGE-AD 12/1/14 4:01 PM Page 1

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TOP

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What Every Parent Needs To Know About Gaining Admission to NYC’s Gifted & Talented Programs

By Hillary Chura

T

he process for applying for a spot in one of the city’s Gifted & Talented (G&T) programs can seem daunting, what with the testing of your young child and the miserly placement rates. But many parents, even ones zoned for high-performing neighborhood schools, pursue it because they think a G&T program would be the best option for their child.

By far, the biggest entry point is in Kindergarten, though you can apply through third grade for the gradeschool programs. Later on, there are entry points for a few citywide middle school gifted programs, and then there are the selective high schools.

For applications, the time to pay attention is early fall, when the Department of Education (DOE) announces the application schedule for that year. This year, for example, the deadline to submit a “Request for Testing” form was November 12, though it changes from year to year.

Visit the DOE website (schools.nyc. gov) to review the process, and note the important dates. You can submit a request for testing form either on the website, or in person at an enrollment office, or at your child’s public school. Testing takes place in January and February. Parents will be asked to select a preferred date and test location.

Children must score in the 90th percentile to be considered for placement in a district elementary school for local children, and a 97 percent or higher to be eligible for citywide programs that draw students from all five boroughs. Competition for the most elite programs has been so stiff that not even all 99-percenters receive a citywide offer. The bottom line is that there are not enough G&T spots for the number of students who qualify for one.

Of the 38,028 children who took the G&T test for K-3 admissions in 2014,

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only 13 percent were offered spots, according to DOE statistics.

Applicants take two multiplechoice tests—a verbal aptitude portion called the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test (OLSAT), and the nonverbal Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test (NNAT2) aptitude test that uses pattern completion and spatial visualization. A proctor reads multiple-choice questions to younger students in a one-on-one setting.

It’s recommended that parents go over sample test questions from the DOE website with children a few times before the test. While the NNAT2 was designed especially to measure innate ability—i.e., be tutorproof—lots of parents see test prep books and test prep courses as a way of giving their children a leg up.

After their child is tested in January or February, parents learn of their child’s eligibility in April, and then must immediately apply for actual programs, ranking the programs in order of interest. They will receive a notification letter in late May indicating whether they’ve been offered placement, and can weigh that option against their neighborhood public school and any other school options—public, private, charter, or parochial—they may have.

The DOE process covers all public school G&T programs except for the renowned Hunter College Elementary School, which is administered by Hunter College rather than the DOE, and has different application policies.

Again, visit their website in early fall to find out the application procedure and dates for the year (hunterschools.org). Initially, children applying to Hunter have to meet with an approved tester and complete a modified Stanford-Binet V exam. It costs $350, but there are fee waivers for qualified families. Applicants who make the cutoff score then enter a second round, which includes an inperson interview.

There are many elite independent schools in the city whose programs are capable of addressing the needs of gifted students. Among them, the Speyer Legacy School (speyerlegacyschool.org) is solely devoted to gifted education; and the Lang School (thelangschool.org) is devoted to the “twice gifted” (i.e., students of exceptional academic ability who also have special challenges like Asperger’s Syndrome, anxiety, or dyslexia).

As with many school admissions processes, there are a few lingering controversies with the city’s G&T testing and admissions policies. For many years, the city’s G&T programs were largely administered at the district level, with a variety of different programs and testing procedures.

Then it became centralized at the DOE, with one test for all. The relative percentage of minority students in the gifted programs has never been that high, but once the system became centralized, their numbers went down even further. There have been several attempts to try to remedy this, by making tutoring more widely available and by changing the exams themselves, but the percentages of minority students in the programs are still very low compared to their overall numbers in the system. There has been occasional talk of disbanding the G&T program, but many parents favor its existence as an attraction and bulwark of the school system, if not the city itself.

The de Blasio administration has indicated that it will maintain the city’s commitment to G&T programs, while doing more to raise the overall quality of schools.

The consensus among the experts who create IQ tests is that they actually don’t have much predictive value when applied to 4-year-olds, who are the primary group being tested for the G&T programs in NYC. Apparently, they’re just too young to have their academic potential reliably evaluated. But here’s the paradox: while the test may not be reliable as a predictor of a specific student’s potential, they do seem to work overall, because on average the G&T programs have much higher reading and math scores than neighborhood-based schools.

Two problems: what about students whose academic promise becomes apparent in first or second grade (or later) when the G&T spots are mostly filled up? And what about students who secured a G&T spot because of their score at age 4, but in time have shown that they really aren’t that type of learner? Some wonder if the G&T process should begin in second or third grade, but it’s hard to imagine the city undergoing that kind of bureaucratic tizzy when they have so many other education challenges to wrestle with.

Ultimately, G&T candidates are not ranked according to their specific scores, but rather by what percentiles their scores fall into.

So, for example, you could have a student who scores at a true genius level (in the farthest reaches of the 99th percentile), and that student might end up randomly being ranked below another student with a much lower score within the 99th percentile—and ultimately the one with genius potential might not get a seat in one of the city-wide programs, even though they are the students who arguably may most need an environment attuned to their exceptional potential.

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GAINING

ADMISSION Applying To Nursery & Private Schools In The City Requires Parents To Do Their Homework And Consider What Kind Of Schools Would Be A Good Match For Their Child; Applying To Boarding & Country Day Schools Is All About The Fit Between The Child And The School

By Eric Messinger As the editor of New York Family, I field a lot of questions about local school admissions. To keep my job, I put in a lot of time to gather good answers.

What follows are questions that, for the purposes of this article, are editorialized to reflect areas of deep concern or confusion to parents about applying to independent schools (i.e. private schools), whether for nursery school or ongoing school. To clarify, this isn’t going to be a step-by-step guide. We have those online, at newyorkfamily.com, if you need them. Instead, I’m going to focus on some of the most important topics.

PRIVATE SCHOOL How many schools should a family apply to?

The short answer is 6-8. The long answer is 6-8, too, if you’ve really done your homework and are not just applying to the most competitive schools.

Most importantly, you want to apply to schools that you’re really jazzed about being a part of, not only because they are a good match for your child’s learning style, personality, and interests, but also because you think you’d enjoy being part of the school’s community as a parent. The schools will read you as well as your child. They’ll assess whether they think your family will be a good fit at the school. That’s why you want to truly focus on schools that you really would like to be a part of.

And like when you’re applying to college, to increase the odds that you’ll end up with an appealing spot somewhere, you’ll want to include few schools that aren’t the most competitive to get into.

If you don’t already know, how can you learn which schools are the most sought after?

Even though you may only be applying to

Kindergarten, the most competitive schools to get into are typically the ones with an outstanding record for having graduates attend elite colleges and a reputation for outstanding academics. These include Trinity, Dalton, Horace Mann, Collegiate, and Brearley, to name a few. But keep in mind that the concept of a “safety school” is a little more elusive than at the college level, because many, if not most, established independent schools have far fewer available spots than the number of applicants seeking those spots. For that reason, the “safer” schools tend to be the newer schools: which may be outstanding, and have a great future ahead of them, but don’t get the same number of applicants because they are still unproven in the eyes of some parents.

When do the applications need to be submitted?

I don’t want to freak you out, but the right answer for a popular school is September, or as close to September as possible. The reason is that many popular schools will just stop accepting applications after they receive a certain number—a number which they know from experience can lead to a full class. Beyond that, they don’t really have the capacity to process all of the applications they receive. I remember betting shut out of applying my son to an all-boys private school because I hadn’t gotten the application in on time and it was only mid-October. At the same time, there are many schools that accept applications up to their posted deadline, and some schools, especially newer ones, may officially or unofficially have “rolling admissions,” accepting applications year round as long as there are spots available.

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Can having a lot of money help?

Yes, but unless you are super rich, why worry about it? As it was explained to me, at some schools, a small percentage of the total number of families contribute a good deal of the schools’ endowment and special fundraising efforts. And, yes, if you have that kind of money, chances are your child will be a very appealing candidate to almost any school. It’s the same at the college level, so why be surprised that it happens at lower levels? But whether or not you have the ability to make a significant contribution to a school’s endowment, what you really want to focus on is identifying a school setting that your child would thrive in.

What about connections?

You might say there are good connections and bad connections, and it’s worth discussing the difference.

A good connection would be someone presently affiliated with the school (like an active parent or board member) who knows you (and ideally your child), and would be truly happy to send in a note on your behalf. But be real here: Is this person someone you like and respect? If not, other people might not like them either. A bad connection, believe it or not, would be someone who is famous but isn’t really affiliated with the school and doesn’t really know your child. Like a recommendation from the President of the United States, for example. Sounds impressive, but it’ll mark you as pretentious.

How does one research private schools to determine whether a school might be a good fit for your child and family?

For starters, when you’re still doing research to continued on page 18

continued from page 16

determine which schools to request applications from, you can look to school websites, Victoria Goldman’s Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools and Selective Public Schools (she has another guide for nursery schools), the Parents League, (which offers some admissions counseling as well public seminars and school fairs), and trusted friends and acquaintances who have children at schools you might be interested in. If you have a child at a private nursery school in the city, then chances are that the school offers dedicated ex-missions support, provided either by the head of the nursery school or another school official. Usually, this is a fortunate thing. The nursery school official will not only help you hone a list of schools to apply to, they’ll ultimately act as a kind of intermediary between families and on-going school applications, helping to insure that the best matches take place. Now, if for any reason you don’t feel like you’re on the same page as the person at the nursery school who is representing you, that’s a tricky situation. You may be justified in thinking that the school doesn’t really get your child; or in fact, they may be giving you good advice, but you’re not ready to hear it. In situations like that, it’s probably wise to turn to a private admissions consultant for additional guidance.

What’s the most influential part of the admissions process? The student interview, the parent interview, the applications, or something else?

The thing with private school admissions, unlike public school admissions or even nursery school admissions, is that it’s a really involved process. It entails a number of visits to each school, because in addition to the school tour and the interview, some schools will host special nights to highlight specific virtues—one occasion I remember, for example, was a parents’ panel to discuss a school’s commitment to diversity. And here’s the thing: It’s all evidence-gathering not only for the parent but also for the schools. They’re trying to figure out whether your child and your family would indeed be a good fit for their school community—and they put a lot of time into this because these are long and expensive relationships. They want them to be good relationships. That said, obviously, the interviews are of primary importance. Children should not be overly prepped for them to the point of being anxious and self-conscious, but you may want to include some gentle and brief information about what to expect, and encouragement about being polite and enjoying yourself. Parents should come prepared and be on good behavior—like an interview for a job that you really want. Come with a few of your favorite anecdotes to share about your child; better to share those than just generalizations about their intelligence or charm. If you’re part of a couple, make sure both parents take turns sharing. Avoid gestures that smack of entitlement or inconsideration, like being late, not turning off your cell phone, or checking your email in the middle of the interview when someone else is talking.

know whether to play by the rules or not. In its place, a few schools are adopting another IQ test, but most schools are formulating their own tests. “Test” is a funny word though, because the assessment often will amount to a series of activities that most children will recognize as fun, such as telling a story about a picture they are shown, or identifying a pattern within a list of common objects. Should you provide your 4-year-old with formal prepping in the hope of preparing them for the kinds of activities they may encounter? Familiarity can be helpful, and there are books you can find at Barnes & Noble with these kind of age-appropriate exercises. But keep it fun, and, really, they are not a necessity. I always liked the idea that young children who grow up being read to and exposed to all sorts of play and amusements are probably as ready as they should or can be.

In the end, should you send a first-choice letter?

It’s recommended that schools not require them of parents. Still, it’s a good idea for a family to give a very strong indication of their interest to the schools they are most interested in. That message may be conveyed by your emissary from your nursery school, but if that option is not available to you, you may need to convey it yourself.

Ultimately, how should you decide which school is your favorite?

You’ll probably start the admissions process with certain ideas about what kind of school you’re looking for and the factors that are most important to you. Then you’re going to see a bunch of schools and hear from other sources, and your priorities may change—or not. But if you do the work, by the end of the process you will almost certainly have a gut feel for which schools, all in, are on the top of your list, and which do you want to include to make sure you have options.

NURSERY SCHOOL Do all these questions about private school admissions apply to nursery school admissions?

Yes, for the most part. But let’s also be real: If you’re applying for a nursery school spot for when your child is 2, that means he or she is only a 1-year-old at the time that you’re submitting the application and going on nursery school interviews. Usually there’s a parent interview, which may be conducted as part of a group, and a play session in which the child is observed by the school’s teachers. Try not to stress out too much about any of this; the schools don’t expect 1-year-olds to act anything other than the way 1-year-olds act.

What about a nursery school’s educational philosophy?

It can get a little confusing when you first encounter ideas and phrases like Montessori or “play-based” or “child-centered,” and try to think about what would be best for your child, who may only be a 1-year-old when you’re applying. Later on, when you’re applying for ongoing school, you’ll have more evidence of your How does the demise of the ERB change things? child’s personality, interests, and learning style—and The ERB was shorthand for the IQ test that private you may have a stronger and clearer sense of the schools used for many years to get more evidence of kind of school that would best suit your child. But a child’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s been dropped when applying to nursery school, it’ll be easier to because so many parents started hiring private focus on some tangibles, like whether the school tutors to prep their kids that it no longer seemed like seems like a well-run and happy place with animated a reliably objective measure, and its use became a and caring teachers and bright and cheery rooms source of much anxiety among parents who didn’t and hallways; whether you like the director; whether

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BOARDING SCHOOL OR COUNTRY DAY SCHOOL

By Lauren Vespoli Sending a child away from home for some of their most formative school years—even just for the day— is a big decision. In choosing a school, you want to ensure that the institution is as supportive as it is enriching, both in and out of the classroom. Boarding and country day schools, with their emphasis on creating nurturing intellectual communities, can be a wise choice for parents who are looking for a school that provides more than the typical schoolday experience. With a more diverse student body, drawn from across the country and even around the world, boarding school students have a lot to learn from each other and countless opportunities to do so, from the athletic fields to the dinner table.

Additionally, because teachers also serve as coaches, advisers, and dorm parents, students are provided with uniquely personal adult mentorship and advising opportunities. Similarly, country day schools incorporate many of the best elements of a prep school education sans residential life—strong academics, individualized attention, and mentorship from teachers, a rich slate of extracurricular options— though some do offer boarding options. Needless to say, the focus on fit—on identifying a school that’s a really good match for your child’s intellectual and emotional needs—is paramount when it comes boarding and country day searches.

parents who go there give it a thumbs up and why; and, yes, whether you like the ideas behind the school’s approach to learning.

Is nursery school worth the money? Is private school worth the money?

Only you can decide that for yourself, of course.

But I can share my sense of what’s valuable about these experiences. Chances are, a nursery school will provide your child with his or her first regular group of friends and will help him socialize with others and discover lots of fun interests. For many new parents especially, a nursery school also provides their first community of parent friends—which can be quite wonderful. With their community of trained and nurturing educators, I’d also say that nursery schools are often a kind of early-alert system for picking up on your child’s strengths and weaknesses, and the presence of any special needs that may not be as apparent to you. As for private school, I would start with two observations: Most parents I know with children in private school are very pleased with their education; I, myself, have children in public school, one in a good neighborhood school and one in an elite G&T school. I feel like private schools, with their smaller classes and student-teacher ratios, are more likely to not only understand the nuances of a child as a learner, but also be able to nurture that child in a more dedicated fashion. Then again, I will tell you that my children have always had teachers who got them, who cared about them, and who did a good job of moving them in the right direction—and so far, I feel very good about their experience with public education in the city. Children who have the ability and disposition to thrive in large classes can do very well in an all-around solid public school— but you have to know your child and you have to know the school.

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diversity and collaborate, which is made even more exciting when it’s shared on one of the world’s finest stages,” says Alistair Hamilton, the school’s music director. dwight.edu

INNOVATE MANHATTAN CHARTER SCHOOL

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LIVE LOCALLY

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GLOBALLY An In-Depth Look At The Blossoming Trend Towards Global Education With 7 NYC Schools

By Jennifer Kelly Geddes

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Back when many of today’s parents were kids, songs in Spanish and a pen pal from Denmark were how schools illustrated the larger world. Today, exposing modern students to different ways of life has gone far beyond having the cafeteria serve tacos on Tuesdays. The following seven schools are at the forefront of international education in our city.

DWIGHT SCHOOL Dwight’s core principals are clear: Cultural sensitivity, proficiency in more than one language, and global mindfulness—all of which culminate in an International Baccalaureate awarded in the primary and middle years, and a diploma program. Four campuses (London, Vancouver Island, Seoul, and Shanghai) facilitate crosscultural learning and more than a dozen languages are offered, including Mandarin, Russian, Japanese, and Arabic. “First-graders study morals and myths from around the world to understand how they reflect a particular culture,” reports Martha Hirschman, head of the lower school. And fifthgraders dig deeply into subjects like child labor or the definition of art in other communities, and then present their findings in a year-end project.

Global connections enhance Dwight’s multicultural life and are almost too numerous to count. An annual highlight is the all-campus concert at Carnegie Hall, with students from England, Korea, and the US.“ Our kids are encouraged to explore

The first of its kind in North America, this Lower East Side middle school of about 170 kids is based on the Kunskapsskolan method, a Swedish model of education, and boasts a network of over 50 locations in the United Kingdom, India, and Sweden.

Innovate Manhattan’s goal is to personalize learning, with one-onone coaching, goal-setting, and a global exchange of ideas. “Many international links are available to our middle schoolers, including visiting experts from around the world, a web-based curriculum, and a network of 20,000 kids from communities in Stockholm and rural India,” explains head of school Dr. David Penberg.

Students might Skype together to discuss themes like the worldwide use of water, or what it means to be a citizen. Afterschool and Saturday activities include writing for a digital journal, learning Aikido, and robotics. Innovate students also have the opportunity to travel, with a two-week science and humanities program planned for next summer in Sweden. “Some of these kids have never left the city, so understanding, empathy—everything will be expanded for them,” Penberg says. innovatemanhattancharterschool.org

PINE STREET SCHOOL This Financial District private school is literally brand new: it joined Battery Park Montessori as the second school in the Green Ivy School group this fall, enrolling 50 students in grades pre-K-1. Pine Street marries the Montessori method and the International Baccalaureate, which makes it only the second school in the world to offer the combination.

“We’re extremely focused on developing an international curriculum and the Spanish language plays a big role,” explains Green Ivy School founder Jennifer Jones, adding that when students learn another person’s phrases and jokes, they gain empathy. Little learners at Pine Street are taught by staffers from four different Spanish-speaking countries. They enjoy music, stories, and theater, as well as cooking in their own kitchen, complete with two professional ovens. Pine Street is growing, with a middle school planned for next year that will include travel to a Spanish-speaking nation continued on page 22

continued from page 20

to participate in a community service program. “Our kids are becoming real change makers,” Jones says. greenivyschools.com

AVENUES: THE WORLD SCHOOL The name says it all: This private school, which opened in 2012 in Chelsea, is slated to become part of a 20-campus group worldwide (a Beijing location is currently under construction). The class of 2016 will be the first to graduate, and over 1,200 students are enrolled this year, from nursery though high school. Travel and language are two important components of an Avenues education, says Ty Tingley, chief academic officer. “When students enter school as 3-year-olds, their families select a second language (Spanish or Mandarin Chinese), and for the next seven years, 50 percent of the child’s day will be conducted in immersion classes,” he says. Avenues also teaches a curriculum called the World Course, whichincludes history and geography in the early years, and conflict resolution, economics, and public health in high school.

Exposure to different cultures and peoples is achieved via a growing travel program—so far to Costa Rica, China, and Morocco—as well as through the school’s community. avenues.org

WORLD CLASS LEARNING ACADEMY

THE BRITISH INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF NEW YORK

LÉMAN MANHATTAN PREPARATORY SCHOOL

A Lower East Side private school of about 120 kids in preschool through grade 6, World Class Learning Academy (WCLA) is member of Nord Anglia Education, a 31-school consortium in 13 countries, and teaches a program of study modeled after England’s national curriculum. A mix of city and international students (from all over the UK, Greece, Norway, France, and Hong Kong this year), along with teachers trained in the British system, contributes to this school’s global outlook. “Our younger kids may study recycling and our responsibilities as world citizens, while older ones might delve into the topic of water as a precious resource,” explains Lillian DiazImbelli, director of admissions and marketing at WCLA. Interacting with diverse groups is at the heart of this school’s mission.

“An integral part of our curriculum is conversation and guidance around character,” Diaz-Imbelli says. WCLA students also participate in an artists-in-residence program: Local professional artists have studio and practice space in the school building, and collaborate with teachers to enhance art classes. wclacademy.org

The British International School of New York benefits from a diverse dialogue with pupils who help each other—and the faculty—to see other cultures in a new light, with students from New York, Jordan, Liberia, and Scotland (to name a few). “From my experience, global awareness and 21st-Century skills need to be driven into the curriculum—the curriculum needs to be sculpted to represent the diversity of culture,” says headmaster William T. Phelps.

“We don’t just study history or geography—we study ‘Individuals in Society,’ as this helps to break down the lines drawn on a map. Our English lesson becomes ‘Language Acquisition...’ These are statements of intent which underline our belief that a school’s curriculum should meet the needs of this changing world.”

The school also prides itself on a sense of vibrance, thanks to inspiration, initiative, and insight drawn from both pupils and faculty. “Our faculty is an engaged Continuous Learning Community, [where] meetings are led by passionate educators who want to share their insight,” Phelps explains.

“We want the same from our children, to engage and live in the moment.” bis-ny.org

As the only independent, pre-K-12 school in New York with a high school boarding program and sister campuses across the globe, and one of four Manhattan schools offering the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program, Léman Manhattan;s mission is to prepare students to become engaged global citizens of the world.

“We want our students to know they can personally make a difference in adressing the major challenges facing the world today,” says head of school Drew Alexander. “We encourage them to see the world as their classroom, because learning should be unrestricted by borders.”

Léman’s youngest pre-K-3 learners receive twice-weekly Mandarin language instruction, and in Kindergarten students study Mandarin, French, and Spanish. Students in grades 1-8 focus on one primary foreign language, adding a second in grade 9.

Léman also provides opportunities for students to collaborate with peers at sister schools across the US and in Switzerland, China, and Mexico.

In high school, students participate in study-abroad programs at other Léman campuses in Asia and Europe. lemanmanhattan.org

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HudsonWay Immersion School

able to support their child’s learning if they don’t speak the language.

SH: We see young English-speaking monolingual children (many as young as 2) transition very easily into our full Mandarin immersion environment. Parents sometimes fear that having all the instruction 100 percent in Mandarin will be too intimidating or too difficult, when in fact at this age—because the brain is naturally wired to acquire language—the learning process comes very naturally. Children can be just as happy learning social skills in Mandarin as they would in an English preschool. The benefit, though, is that exposure to a second language stretches their brains in ways that monolingual children do not experience. Another misconception parents have is that their children will fall behind in knowledge of English and be at a disadvantage applying to Kindergarten. In fact, research supports the opposite to be true, since skills and content from one language are transferable to another, and the process of learning two languages sharpens executive function skills—which schools are beginning to use as a criteria in admissions.

THE

MULTILINGUAL MOVEMENT Two Local Experts Discuss The Benefits, Misconceptions & Logistics Of Bilingual Instruction Bilingual early education programs are becoming increasingly widespread in New York, as parents seek to capitalize on their intellectual benefits.

We spoke with experts from two of the city’s leading programs to learn more about the benefits, misconceptions, and logistics of bilingual instruction. Sharon Huang is the founder of the pre-K-5 HudsonWay Immersion School (formerly Bilingual Buds), which offers a full immersion program in Mandarin for 2-year-olds, and 80 percent instruction in the second language for grades K-2. Nancy Schulman is head of the Early Learning Center at Avenues: The World School, where students start Spanish or Mandarin from age 3, and receive 50 percent of their instruction in the second language through grade 4.

What’s primarily motivating the growing interest in early language education: Is it parents wanting to prepare their children for a future in which the world is more and more inter-connected, or to provide their children with the intellectual and cultural benefits of growing up bilingual?

Nancy Schulman: I would say that both of these factors are equally motivating for parents.

Sharon Huang: We have found the primary motivation to vary depending on the experiences of the parent. Those who work in business may want

their children to be multilingual for more career opportunities. Those in academia and who have researched brain development know that immersion develops children who are smarter and can think critically. Others who are culturally diverse want their children to be able to view the world from at least two different lenses, because it makes them a broader thinker. Finally, those who have a connection [to another language] through heritage may want their children to be able to use language to speak with family members and have a deeper understanding of their culture.

“Exposure to a second language stretches the brain in ways that monolingual children do not experience.”

Even though many children (and especially children of immigrants) have been growing up bilingual forever, I know that some parents are a bit intimidated by the proposition. So what’s it like to be in a bilingual nursery program, and what are some of the big misconceptions that parents have?

NS: A couple of misconceptions parents have are that a child or family has to already have second language experience, that children will fall behind in English language areas, and that parents will not be

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In your respective schools’ particular approaches, what does immersion look like? Teaching-wise, how does one alternate between the languages, if at all? Why do you take this approach?

SH: We have based our model on the learnings and research of other successful immersion programs.

We teach English language arts daily, and every other week we also teach math in English. The rest of the subjects—Chinese, language arts, math, science, and social studies—are all taught in Mandarin. The fact that students stay longer in the target language forces the brain to work in that language, thus creating the “cognitive stretch” that creates faster and more accurate brains. The field is fascinating, and we are privileged to be part of shaping the future for our students.

NS: Children start on either a Spanish or Mandarin Chinese track from age 3 through grade 4. This means that 50 percent of school content is taught in a second language. Students are in two paired classrooms with two English language teachers and two target language teachers.

Alternating days are spent in English and immersion. Teachers work collaboratively to plan their curriculums, and when they are in the immersion classroom, the teachers are speaking to the children in either Spanish or Chinese. The teachers use games, songs, visuals and body language and gestures to make the language comprehensible. [The students] are not being taught the language but are being taught “in” the language. The immersion classrooms have books, materials and environmental print in the target language. The classrooms in either language look very much the same otherwise… Children​who begin in our Nursery program (3’s) will have seven years of immersion through grade 4. They will continue in grades 5-8 with that same language in immersion-type daily classes, so they will have 11 years of the language by high school.

To learn more about the HudsonWay Immersion School, visit hwis.org; and to learn more about Avenues: The World School, visit avenues.org.

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TUTOR CITY

A Quick Guide To Navigating NYC’s Tutor Landscape

By Eric Messinger

✓

1. Ask around for recommendations. Other parents whose children have, or have had, similar needs can be great resources. So might teachers you know, and the Parents League.

✓

2. Interview a prospective tutor. Discuss their expertise and experience, and your concerns and goals. Cover practical matters like hours, location, and cost. You should have a sense that your child would like working with them, and that they have a reasonable approach to addressing your child’s issues.

✓

6. Establish clear goals. Did your tutor perform a formal or informal assessment? By definition, tutors should be able to identify your child’s strengths and weaknesses and provide achievable goals.

✓4. Observe a mini-lesson if

7. Trust your gut. You should feel like you’ve chosen a partner whom you can comfortably check in with, who understands your child, bonds well with him or her, and, most importantly, is helping.

possible. There’s no better way to get a feel for a tutor’s style than by observing them in action.

✓

5. Pick an appropriate place in your apartment for the lesson (if it’s not in a tutoring center). Either way, there should be other adults around.

A SAMPLING OF LOCAL TUTORS Bee Tutored: Bee Tutored is a boutique tutoring service comprised of a select group of certified teachers and highly qualified tutors. Serving families since 2007, they provide assistance to students in all academic subjects K-12. They offer support to students who will benefit from reinforcement to their current school’s curriculum by helping with organization, homework planning, and managing academic schedules. Bee Tutored specializes in G&T test prep, grades 3-8 NYS ELA/MATH prep, and ISEE/SHSAT prep. beetutored.com EBL Coaching: EBL Coaching specializes in providing one-on-one tutoring for students in grades pre-K-12 using research-based, multi-sensory techniques. Their learning specialists help students with reading, writing, math, time management, organization, and study skills. EBL’s director, Dr. Emily Levy, starts by personally meeting and assessing each student to determine his or her strengths and weaknesses, and then hand-matches the student with a specialist. EBL also

✓

3. Get some references. As with any individual spending a significant amount of time with your child, you should get a sense of their personality, professionalism, and record of results from those they’ve worked with in the past.

offers specialized programs for students with learning disabilities and ADHD. eblcoaching.com Fusion Academy: Fusion Academy and Learning Center is an alternative school that serves students primarily in grades 6-12. Every class is taught with just one student for every teacher, so their classes are very hands on. A positive, productive rapport between students and teachers is fostered and utilized as the medium through which education occurs. Their Learning Center serves all ages, providing one-on-one enrichment and tutoring. Their one-on-one academic model creates a very customized and supportive learning environment for each student, based on their emotional, social, and academic needs. fusionacademy.com ibidPREP: ibidPREP offers group and individual tutoring, test prep, and college guidance, with courses and programs custom-designed to fit their students. While they do a great deal of general academic tutoring, many of their

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✓

✓

8. Your child should be learning how to handle the materials independently. Meaning they

students in grades 4-12 seek to strengthen skills specifically for admissions testing— be it the NYS ELA/MATH tests, tests for specific honors middle schools (the SHSAT, ISEE, and SSAT), or the ACT, SAT, SAT2, and APs. ibidPREP.com

shouldn’t become dependent on the tutor to do the work.

✓

9. Don’t behave desperately.

Never let any test prep company make you feel like you’re woefully behind or in need of over-thetop measures to improve your student. Their goal should be to reduce your anxiety, not raise it!

✓

10. Get help early. Keep in mind that it’s best to get help early on—as soon as you recognize that your child is struggling.

private instruction to students in grades K-12. mathnasium.com

Kumon: Founded in Japan in 1958, Kumon has 26,000 centers in 48 countries and regions, and more than 4 million students studying worldwide. Kumon is an afterschool math and reading enrichment program that unlocks a student’s potential so they can achieve more on their own.

Kumon’s individualized approach helps children progress by ability, rather than age or grade. kumon.com

Princeton Review: While best known to many parents as a test-prep company for college entrance exams, the Princeton Review, which was recently bought

by Tutor.com, also has a community of academic tutors who help middle school through high school students excel in specific subjects. Expert tutors can help students with everything from pre-Algebra to AP Physics. Coming in January 2015, the Princeton Review will also offer no-appointment online homework help and tutoring with their expert tutors, 24/7. princetonreview.com

Mathnasium: Mathnasium’s mission is to get kids “crazy about math” by teaching them to think like natural mathematical thinkers do. When you step inside a Mathnasium Learning Center (there are three in NYC), you’ll find a positive and motivating environment filled with kids who are excited to learn and are happy to be there. Their core program offering is their semi-private Enrichment Program, geared to children in grade 2 through Algebra 1. They also offer

Test Prep Authority: Test Prep Authority is a free online college and SAT/ACT prep resource center built by Anthony-James Green, a highly-regarded SAT tutor in New York City. Parents and students can use Test Prep Authority to plan for college, enhance their SAT and ACT scores using TPA’s affordable online courses, and download free resources, including Green’s new book, Why You Get Rejected. testprepauthority.com

THE

OF

CRAFT

TEACHING The Case For Making Teacher Education The Priority For Improving America’s Schools

By Eric Messinger Elizabeth Green, education journalist and cofounder and CEO of the education news organization Chalkbeat, believes that to fix America’s education system, we must focus on our most valuable resource: Teachers. We sat down with Green—whose respect for teachers became transcendently clear—to discuss her book, Building A Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (And How To Teach It To Everyone).

Tell us about your background in journalism and education. How did you come to write this book?

I’ve always covered education as a journalist, and that came out of my social justice concerns beginning when I was in high school in the DC area. My school was like Stuyvesant put inside a large, struggling high school. It was very class and race segregated, and I became fascinated and troubled by the gaps in my own high school and became interested in the politics of education, especially race and class issues. Then in 2009, I was assigned to write about this new, big political issue: Teacher quality… As I got into the story, I realized we were all thinking about this fundamentally the wrong way, because while there are a lot of politics at play, the bottom line is education, and how teachers and students work together in schools. I came to see everything I had covered in a different light...and that’s why I was determined to write this book. I want to help other people see how teaching really works and what it really takes, because then we can start a conversation about what it will really take to improve schools.

To me, the book is a social history of effective teaching innovation and where it took hold, where it didn’t, and the challenges it’s faced along the way.

Yes, and I was surprised to find that there’s a fascinating story of people trying, over the last century, to treat teaching as a craft and being repeatedly foiled in that effort. I want to help readers see what great teaching looks like, and can look like, and the way our innovation efforts are stymied.

Do you think that the teachers who read your book will be surprised by your findings?

I’ve been excited to see teachers’ early responses to the book, because until now the dialogue about teaching and teachers has been infused with political rhetoric that is so detached from the dayto-day reality of what that job entails, and that disconnect is responsible for a lot of justifiable anger from teachers today. There have been two main policies being promoted to try and change [teaching]: One is the idea of accountability—that teachers aren’t trying hard enough, that if we put consequences on the line, then they’ll really start to try. The other policy is [to give them more] autonomy… [because] teachers will choose to do what’s best for their students. There are 3.8 million teachers in this country, and you could count on your hand the number of them who are deliberately lazy. But if they’re completely free to do whatever they want, that’s its own form of insanity. To me, teaching is such challenging and important work, nobody should be recreating the wheel on their own. There’s a [need] for a new conversation that’s not just about accountability or autonomy. What we need is support to do the work so we can really help kids.

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“What teachers need is not unlike what students need. They are learners of another kind, and like students, need some kind of common experience.”

One of the most powerful experiences you had was in Japan. How is a Japanese classroom lesson structured differently than an American lesson?

In most American math lessons and most school lessons, the structure is what teachers call I/We/ You. So I do, we do, you do. The class starts with the teacher saying: “Today we’re going to learn about long division, I’ll show you the steps for long division.

I’ll give you a sample problem and walk through the steps.” Then the next part is trying an example together…and the final part is: “Everyone open up your textbook, we’re going to go through practice problems.” So I’m going to do it, you’re going to do it together, and then you, the student, will do a bunch of practice problems. In Japan, the structure of a lesson is radically different. Instead of I/We/ You, it’s structured in what I call You/Y’all/We. The class starts with a problem assigned to all students to work through on their own. Instead of many problems, throughout the course of the lesson, there’s only one problem for the class… If you use a really good problem, you can get a lot out of it. If you use a small problem you repeat in multiple ways, you’re just repeating the same simple idea multiple times. A bigger problem can help kids dig in… After they work on a problem (you), they work on it together (y’all), and then there’s a classroom discussion, and these are amazing, beautiful pieces of art. You take the group nature of the classroom and turn it into an advantage. continued on page 30

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continued from page 28

Elizabeth Green

How do the teachers teach each other there?

You found that it was hard for a Japanese master teacher to explain the difference to his American cohorts because we don’t have a word for it.

Japanese teachers begin from the premise that teaching is a craft, and something they need to get better at over time. If you’re going to do that with teaching, one fundamental thing is required—you need to see other people teach, and have other people watch you teach. In the US, teachers rarely have anyone see them work, other than their students… [In Japan], there’s a culture of regularly having public lessons that other teachers come to see... Because of the structure, Japanese teachers become kind of famous among each other. The more famous teachers will attract a thousand people to their lessons, and these lessons will be held in an auditorium… In Japan, they say: “I’m going to present to you the thing I’m struggling the most with.” The public lessons are the kinds of pedagogical ideas that are the most challenging.

They’re creating a laboratory... The master teacher is trying out something new and different in front of his peers so everyone can figure out together what’s going on.

One of the themes in your book is that teaching largely is something that can be taught.

A few reasons I came to think that is that a lot of research has been done to isolate the personality trait that is connected to effective teaching, and

despite thousands of studies—it’s not extraversion, not warmth, there’s nothing. On the other hand, there’s the fact that researchers studying great teachers have found that they have a special kind of knowledge and skill set. When the same researchers give tests on this knowledge to professionals—like a mathematician getting tested on the knowledge that a third great teacher needs to teach addition and subtraction—the professionals will fail those tests.

Reading this book as a parent, it occurred to me that a lot of parents who take an active interest in their kids’ schooling and homework really may not be helping them learn.

You’re getting to the most amazing thing that great teachers do. Great teachers are able to guide students without doing it for them—they do that by constructing great experiences for kids to have… The whole point of education is that kids aren’t going to learn it all on their own. There’s something we think we can accelerate in their learning—socially and academically, by having them be taught. But if you do it for them, and you don’t have them thinking, there’s not much gained. They won’t retain what they were working on, they won’t learn to think. That is why teaching is a craft… The hardest thing for teachers is the same thing that’s hard for parents—how do I walk that line so that I’m truly guiding them without over-guiding them? There are ways to do that that teachers can learn. What parents can do is try to think of their children as learners, and be curious about their children’s minds. If you can find ways to look inside your child’s mind, that’s the beginning of what any great teacher is doing.

You have to start by understanding what the student knows and understands and that opens a lot of possibilities.

“Great teachers are able to guide students without doing it for them—they do that by constructing great experiences for kids to have.”

Why is it seemingly impossible for teacher education that works in other countries to work here?

One of the characters in the book is a researcher, David Cohen, and he studied the American school system and compared it to other school systems like Japan’s. He realized that what teachers need is not unlike what students need. They are learners of another kind. Like students, teachers need some kind of common experience... In American schools, we have at least three different levels of governance telling schools and teachers what to do, often all in conflict: The federal government level, the state level, the district level, the school level and even, in some cases, the department level... As a result, it’s hard for teacher education to prepare teachers to go into a field with any number of random sets of things they are expected to do. In Japan, there’s a single national course of study, which you would think might restrict freedom or something, but in fact it unleashes creativity. Coherence is totally absent in the US. We have many sets of standards, different sets of assessments, different sets of teacher education policies, and different textbooks, and

30 • N EW YO RK FA M ILY ULTIM ATE GUID E TO E DU C A T I O N 2 0 1 4 - 2 0 1 5

so the teacher is left to cobble together her own approach, because the resources she has to learn from are incoherent.

Is Common Core a response to that?

Common Core is an attempt to create coherence in an American system that’s built against coherence.

You can even see that in the challenge of getting Common Core adopted by states… The hope of the reformers who put together the Common Core is that we get aligned assessments and curriculum and textbooks, and there can actually be a coherent thing we’re all doing as a country, so teacher education can prepare people to do something concrete. Then, teachers can learn from each other, whatever state or school or district they’re in.

How do you make sure that Common Core tests are good, and that teachers don’t feel like they have to spend all their classroom time teaching to the test? How could we create a more coherent system?

I find that one helpful example to look at is a small group of high-performing charter schools who create their own governance and systems, create their own teacher evaluations and assessments, and they put a lot of resources into helping teachers learn... I think we’ve learned all the wrong lessons from charter schools. We assume it’s a corporate sort of model…But the best businesses treat workers as learners, so it’s really important to have accountability, but it’s also really important to have ways to help teachers learn how to do what they need to do.

Give me the ideal scenario: How does the world of teaching change? And then what’s the more realistic scenario?

The ideal scenario starts with people changing the way they understand the profession of teaching, so that nobody ever again says: “She must be a natural-born teacher.” That idea is completely gone, and we create a culture where teachers are given the opportunities they need to learn this amazing craft. So there are public lessons digitally and otherwise where people can attend other teachers’ classrooms and learn from each other. And students all begin to get the chance to learn at the highest levels… And the coherence would exist—we’d have a clear idea of what we’re trying to accomplish, and then ways of constantly improving those coherent goals. The best teachers would be writing the textbooks and helping each other learn to teach... The realistic scenario is that change takes a lot of time. We have deeply embedded American ideas that are opposed to what it will take to accomplish the changes that I’ve just described. We reject ideas that we think are kind of anti-individualistic. We want teachers to have autonomy to do their creative thing. We don’t want anyone to be telling anyone what to do, and we don’t want to have common standards or goals that we’re trying to accomplish together, and that’s going to make it harder.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT CHALKBEAT AND ELIZABETH GREEN’S WORK, VISIT CHALKBEAT.ORG.

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By Lauren Vespoli

Many parents want more than a school—they want a place like Williamsburg Northside, where their children are not simply taught, but encouraged to explore their passions as they develop a strong academic foundation.

Founded in 1999, Williamsburg Northside Schools is comprised of three core programs. The Infant and Toddler Center, at 70 Havemeyer Street, provides daycare and early childhood education up to age 2. The Preschool, located at 152 North 5th Street, encompasses the 2s and 3s program. The pre-Kindergarten program is housed with the Lower School for K-4th grade at 299 North 7th Street, a new and beautiful location, which includes large terraces, a science lab, and a middle school-sized gym.

Though the schools are housed in different buildings, the Reggio Emilia philosophy of education unites them with its thoughtful and caring approach to education. Reggio Emilia emphasizes a child’s agency in the learning process—they are encouraged to explore what interests them, developing their passions and collaborative skills through project-based learning. Additionally, teachers might supply provocations to children to help stimulate interesting investigations.

“A core value and critical component to the mission of our school is to be respectful of children. We believe they are strong and capable in their own right,” says Gina Farrar, head of all the Northside Schools. Farrar began her career in education as math teacher at a New York independent school, and has a PhD in psychology, and more than 15 years of experience as a school administrator.

Classes are small, in order to maximize individual student attention. Within the Lower School, which encompasses K-4th grade (and next year, 5th grade), classes are generally no larger than 20 students. At the new 299 North 7th Street building, the classrooms are warm and welcoming, carefully arranged and curated by both the teachers and their students, as the Reggio Emilia philosophy believes that the environment is the third teacher.

“That’s a huge part of the Reggio Emilia philosophy,” says Teresa Smith, Northside’s admissions director. “It’s the romantic Italian [ideal]—children should be surrounded by beautiful things in organized spaces that are inspired.”

Williamsburg Northside is especially unique is its application of Reggio Emilia, famous in preschools and early childhood programs,

Williamsburg Northside Lower School students.

to an elementary school setting.

Project work is incorporated into the curriculum in the Social Studies course, starting in Kindergarten.

“Usually the teacher spends a good bit of time observing the children and figuring out what they are interested in, so that they can make a project out of it,” Smith explains. For example, a 1st grade class might work through a unit on the “needs and wants of community” by choosing to study food and visiting an organic farm.

As students grow older, enrichments are also added to their days— pre-K students enjoy library time, art, PE, and music; Spanish and science are added in Kindergarten.

“Our goals are slightly different with different age groups… but we do want to challenge and inspire our children in our Lower School to really be excited about learning, and to delve deeply and learn to think abstractly and critically,” Farrar says.

The caring Reggio philosophy, combined with Northside’s individual focus on ensuring each child’s success, provides its students with the skills to achieve wherever they may go next. “I think what I love most is that children come through this program and end up going to a variety of different places, all being very successful,” Smith says.

What also remains constant, from infancy through 4th grade, is Northside’s warm community. Teachers from all three schools meet at least once per week, and look for opportunities to engage all of the programs with each other, such as a shared snack or holiday potluck.

And, like the students, Northside parents have built their own vibrant support network.

“I started here a year ago, and the first day that school opened, the parents were just excited to see each other as the children,” Farrar says.

“The inspiration, the philosophy, the quality of the teaching staff, and how we maintain group sizes, those are the things that families are coming here for,” Smith says. “And also the environment—the environment is really important. Parents can see their child living here, five days a week in this beautiful classroom that looks like a little home set up just for them.”

For more information, visit willnorth.org.

2014

THE 2014-2015 BLACKBOARD AWARDS FOR SCHOOLS PRINCIPALS

&

Honoring Excellence In Local Education In Public, Private, Charter, And Parochial Schools

N E W Y O RK F A MI L Y ULT I M A T E GUI D E T O ED UCA T I O N 201 4-201 5 • 3 3

BASIS INDEPENDENT BROOKLYN PRINCIPAL: ROSALIND THOMPSON K-8 (Eventually K-12) 15 Snyder Avenue, Brooklyn (Interim) basisindependentbrooklyn.com

Marcus Photography

AWARD: NEW & NOTEWORTHY

Describe your school’s core educational philosophy.

BASIS Independent Brooklyn provides a Liberal Arts curriculum with a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) focus. We help students reach their full potential by raising our academic standards to higher levels for each grade, and then fully supporting students by hiring teachers who are experts in their subject areas, and who often have advanced degrees and realworld experience in that subject.

We encourage students to love the learning process, and to appreciate the acquisition of knowledge not just as a means to an academic end, but for its own sake.

What’s new?

One of the things that I am most proud of during these initial months of operation is, indeed, our faculty.

Our teachers are diverse in culture, background, and professional experience—and yet they share such a passion for their students. Our teachers have come together as a high-performing team, helping each other, discussing possibilities to the great benefit of the students, and expending effort and energy to reach and teach entire classes, or individual students, ceaselessly.

What do you love about your school?

I love to be in the classrooms watching the students… What is not to love about being a principal, when you can walk into a Kindergarten or 1st grade class and be bowled over with hugs and iterations of facts-just-learned or activities-to-come; when you can slip into a 7th or 8th grade classroom and watch a spirited, high-level debate amongst students? I love the students abuzz in the morning, through the day and at the final bell. I love all of my interaction and communication, the meetings about today and the planning for the future. I love the ideas, the pedagogy, the progress. I love the pure passion about what we do. I love this job!

CENTRAL QUEENS ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOL PRINCIPAL: ASHISH KAPADIA 5-7 (5-8 In Fall 2015) 55-30 Junction Boulevard, Elmhurst & 88-24 Myrtle Avenue, Glendale centralqueensacademy.org

What’s new?

CQA just opened a second, beautiful campus for our 7th graders. It will hold grades 7-8 next school year. We are also beginning to plan out and explore CQA High School!

What do you love about your school?

What do you see as its biggest challenges?

CQA scholars are wonderful. They inspire all of us to work as hard as we can every day to be the best educators and role models we can be. They are eager to learn, help each other, and become great people.

To be of service to this group of scholars and families is a privilege.

Our school’s biggest challenge is that there are not enough hours in the day! Another challenge that we face is communicating effectively with families and caregivers in a multilingual environment. CQA’s students speak more than 20 home languages, and we welcome this as a wonderful challenge in bringing everyone together in support of our students.

CHILDREN’S ALL DAY SCHOOL DIRECTOR: SUSAN BIRNBAUM Pre-Nursery & Preschool 109 East 60th Street cadskids.org

AWARD: RISING STAR

34 • N EW YO RK FA M ILY ULTIM ATE GUID E TO E DU C A T I O N 2 0 1 4 - 2 0 1 5

Describe your school’s core educational philosophy.

Central Queens Academy’s educational philosophy is to provide a warm, safe environment where we personalize the academic, social, and emotional learning for our highly diverse scholars so that they are prepared with the content knowledge and skills to succeed in high school, college, and beyond. CQA opened in 2012 with a focus on English Language Learners as the first charter school to serve New York City’s most diverse neighborhoods in Queens.

Tell us about a few of the school’s achievements or distinguishing programs.

Our school is proud to have helped many of our scholars who entered middle school below grade level become proficient in English and mathematics. We credit the great work of our entire school community, particularly our teaching staff and many founding members of CQA’s team.

AWARD: OUTSTANDING NURSERY SCHOOL Describe your school’s core educational philosophy.

Our school is based on a developmental, interactive approach.

We believe that young children learn

Andrew Schwartz

Tell us about a few of the school’s achievements or distinguishing programs.

We have a student body that truly loves school—and thanks to our teachers, that’s been the case since the beginning of the school year, our first in Brooklyn. Our students are engaged, and have developed a strong love of learning while building from scratch a student community and culture that belies the fact that the students are all new this year, and from many different neighborhoods and schools.

Andrew Schwartz

T

he Blackboard Awards were founded over ten years ago

by New York Family’s parent company, Manhattan Media, as a way of giving back to school communities in Manhattan and around the city.

The Awards have two primary goals: To honor and celebrate excellence in local education, and to serve as an ongoing resource for parents.

Over the years, the Blackboard Awards have evolved into two special ceremonies, celebrating schools and principals in the fall, and teachers in the spring. We honor excellence in all education sectors (public, private, charter, and parochial), and all grade levels (nursery through high school).

Parents are welcome and encouraged to nominate their beloved schools and educators, and we typically hear from several thousand local families in the course of the year.

We also have a board of advisors, experts in local education, who make recommendations as well. If you would like to nominate your school or principal or child’s teachers, please visit blackboardawards.com.

best by doing, and what they love to do is play. So we structure our play with goals and objectives in mind, including being able to problem-solve and critically think about the world around them. We also see approaches, such as the Reggio Emilia and Project Approach, as a way to focus our play-based activities, allowing children to have a voice and time to explore.

Tell us about a few of the school’s achievements or distinguishing programs.

One of the greatest achievements of Children’s All Day School is how our teachers stay and do not leave.

The average teacher has been here 17 years. Our staff is dedicated both to the craft of teaching the youngest of children as well as to the school itself. We are truly a family here.

What’s new?

We have some exciting new ventures here at Children’s All Day School.

We have a brand new, interactive website. Children can watch their favorite music teacher playing their favorite songs, or listen to their teacher read their favorite stories.

We also have a visiting author program now, where published authors come and read their book to each classroom. We also have a second music program now. Our second music teacher comes to us from Church Street School for Music and Art, and she incorporates literature into her music program.

What do you love about your school? What do you see as its biggest challenges?

What I love the most about Children’s All Day School are the dedicated, loving, educated, expert teachers that care for each child as if they are their own, and the way the staff puts all adults aside, including me, to tend to the needs of the children. The staff also cares continued on page 36

Journal ad 2014_BlackboardNEW 12/1/14 12:59 PM Page 1

The City University of New York congratulates

The 2014 Blackboard Award Winners DECEMBER 9, 2014

BENNO S CHMIDT

CHAIRPERSON, BOARD OF TRUSTEES

1-800-CUNY-YES

JAMES B. M ILLIKEN CHANCELLOR

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continued from page 34

Andrew Schwartz

AWARD: OUTSTANDING PRINCIPAL

Describe your school’s core educational philosophy.

Our outstanding core of teachers forms the foundation of our pedagogical success. From preKindergarten all the way through the high school years, our talented, kind, and energetic faculty reflect our belief that personality and patience are equally valuable as intellectual strengths in educating the whole child. Immersed in the nurturing and vibrant environment of CGPS, our students excel academically, socially, and emotionally to become confident and creative life-long learners. We are also strongly committed to supporting various differences by recognizing and appreciating learning styles, interests, abilities, and personal strengths.

Tell us about a few of the school’s achievements or distinguishing programs.

Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School has grown in dramatic ways over the last three decades, with many notable achievements along the way. We have tripled our enrollment to become, along with Dalton, the largest school in Manhattan. Our physical plant has grown from 36,000 substandard square feet to over

THANK YOU! The Blackboard Awards would like to thank our Board of Advisors for their insight and information about excellent schools and educators in New York City. The Board includes Inside Schools, the New York City Charter School Center, the NYC Private Schools Blog, School Search NYC, and Smart City Kids.

Century through an education that develops creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication…

Corlears employs a pedagogical approach that views the world from multiple perspectives, and seeks to build an economically and culturally diverse community that reflects the vibrant life of New York City.

We recognize that students are interested in exploring differences as well as commonality…and we strive to create an atmosphere of respect and appreciation.

What’s new?

We have just had yet another capital project approved by NYC, giving us 17,000 additional square feet of space. This building will house our new middle school.

What do you love about your school?

First and foremost, I have deeply enjoyed being part of CGPS’s growth and renewal over the past threeand-a-half decades. We were able to celebrate this past year our 250th year of continuous existence as a college preparatory school in New York City… We can all take pride in the fact that we are now one of the most successful and sought-after schools in NYC. And, as any head of a K-12 school can attest, watching children grow and develop from Kindergarten to graduation and then off to college is a uniquely rewarding and fulfilling experience.

Tell us about a few of the school’s achievements or distinguishing programs.

A new program that we introduced this year is Project Time, a dedicated block built into students’ schedules for interdisciplinary problem-solving across the grades 3-5. The first trimester is an elective period that allows students to focus their interest in classes like Literary Performance or News Reporting… The second trimester will be collaborative problem solving of weekly STEAM challenges… Our final trimester will ask students to work in small groups to find solutions to community-based problems.

THE CORLEARS SCHOOL PRINCIPAL: DAVID EGOLF N-5 324 West 15th Street corlearsschool.org AWARD: OUTSTANDING NURSERY & GRADE SCHOOL

Describe your school’s core educational philosophy.

Corlears believes in partnering as a community to raise leaders in the 21st

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What’s new?

Our school’s approach to interdisciplinary, student-centered, and collaborative learning is quickly becoming the model for 21st-Century education... We are leveraging what we have always done to reflect the interests of our students and the changing times. For example, at the start of this year, I sat with our pre-K-2 teachers to discuss how we could introduce second language learning to the daily routines of their classrooms. The teachers embraced the challenge, worked with the Spanish teacher, and found ways to bring a partial immersion Spanish program to these grades.

What do you love about your school?

Corlears embodies that love of creativity and celebrates the unique

points of view and approaches to learning from all our students. It couldn’t be a better fit for me and my passions. I don’t have a classroom anymore, but I still find ways to connect with students, and these are the most joyful moments in the week.

I greet families at the door every day, welcome students to our assembly, and whenever possible, meet with students to get their feedback.

EAST SIDE MIDDLE SCHOOL PRINCIPAL: DAVID GETZ 6-8 331 East 91st Street esms.org AWARD: OUTSTANDING PRINCIPAL

Andrew Schwartz

COLUMBIA GRAMMAR AND PREPERATORY SCHOOL PRINCIPAL: DR. RICHARD SOGHOIAN PK-12 5 West 93rd Street cgps.org

200,000 new or fully-renovated square feet. We are able to provide over $6.2 million in financial aid on a yearly basis, and we have the highest starting teacher salaries among all schools, public or private.

We have a physical plant valued to $300 million today with no debt whatsoever! And lastly, we have had the only and oldest program within the larger school program for bright, learning-disabled children—the Learning Resource Center. None of these children, without this program, would have been able to complete a highly rigorous college preparatory program and move on to college after graduation. We have on average 65 out of 1,300 students in the Learning Resource Center each year.

Andrew Schwartz

for the school in the same way they care for the children—the decorations for holidays, the Halloween costumes they make with the children, the trips to stores for materials and supplies on their own time, are all above and beyond their job descriptions. The most challenging part of my job is the feeling I need to really live up to the standards set before me. To serve such a staff requires me to work as hard as my teachers do.

Describe your school’s core educational philosophy.

Our first goal at East Side Middle is to give each of our students the opportunity to develop the thinking skills that will be necessary for them to become successful adults and engaged citizens. Our second goal is to help our students discover and develop their “element,” which Ken Robinson defines as “the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion.” We believe these talents, skills, and interests will help our students lead vibrant, rewarding and creative lives. Our third goal is to help our students develop the empathy that will enable them to appreciate the lives of others and continued on page 38

The United Federation of Teachers Salutes

The schools and principals honored with this year’s

2014 Blackboard Awards We join in celebrating the honorees and their contributions to building the caring school communities dedicated to excellence that our city needs.

Michael Mulgrew, President 52 Broadway, New York, NY 10004 www.uft.org

continued from page 36

What do you love about your school?

I love going to work every day. I love sitting in the classrooms of our teachers and participating as a student and a coach in their lessons.

I love planning with our teachers and learning from them. I love working with our student council on their various projects, and I love watching the Rocket Club members build a robotic arm and program it in my office. I love working with our terrific parents and leading our book clubs.

I love facilitating our Principal’s student book club and our teacher book club. I love our weekly cabinet meetings and working together to make this school such a vibrant, creative community.

JEWISH COMMUNITY PROJECT PRINCIPAL: SHARON SHOROFSKY MACK Early Childhood Center: Grown Up & Me-PK; Hebrew School Project: PK-7 146 Duane Street jcpdowntown.org AWARD: OUTSTANDING PRINCIPAL

Describe your school’s core educational philosophy.

JCP Early Childhood Center is committed to supporting growth and to encouraging a love of learning…

Teachers recognize “access points” in each child, respecting them and encouraging their interests and ideas.

Our process-oriented approach to all aspects of education allows for focus not only on an end-product, but on the process of growing, creating and learning. Jewish values are interwoven throughout the curriculum including weekly in-class Shabbat celebrations and Tzedakah (Righteous Giving)/ outreach in every class.

What do you love about your school?

I love the respect that is part of our school culture. Walking into a classroom, the respect that the teachers and children have for each other is obvious. I love having worked with my colleagues to build a place that is making a meaningful difference in the lives of so many families. When our school comes together for our all-school events there is a magic that is palpable. Siblings, cousins, and friends wave from across the room or spontaneously hug in delight.

Likewise, our children learn to greet each other at our weekly Shabbat celebrations and turn to one another offering a handshake wishing each other “Shabbat Shalom.” These moments of affirmation of enjoying each other’s presence are truly touching.

MILLENIUM BROOKLYN HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPAL: DR. LISA GIOE 9-12 237 7th Avenue, Brooklyn millenniumbrooklynhs.org AWARD: OUTSTANDING HIGH SCHOOL

Tell us about a few of the school’s achievements or distinguishing programs—as well as its challenges.

We are especially proud of JCP’s Specialist Program, the Resource Collaboration Model, recently featured in the Parents League Review. The program is a unique approach to supporting development using a team of specialized professionals who work directly with families, teachers, and administrators… Additionally JCP offers an outstanding Arts Appreciation Curriculum with visits from professional artists throughout the year. Children converse with artists about the creative process and develop appreciation for the arts as they observe, create, and explore music, dance, drama, and visual arts. JCP recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary and our greatest challenge is our growth!

The Early Childhood Center is one part of our growing organization and space continues to be a challenge.

We are in the process of exploring opportunities for space that will allow further growth and expansion.

Describe your school’s core educational philosophy.

The mission of Millennium Brooklyn is to create a rigorous academic program with a strong emphasis on writing across disciplines, critical thinking skills, and project-based learning fostering college and career readiness. Our vision is to facilitate a community-centered environment that fosters achievement for all students through rigorous academics and college preparation; cultivates a community of learners and leaders; and builds dynamic partnerships with all members of our community.

What’s new?

JCP continues to work very closely with all of our families as they research opportunities for Kindergarten in ongoing schools.

Our goal is to help families find the

Tell us about a few of the school’s achievements or distinguishing programs.

We are proud of our school’s Research and Internship Program, designed to support students in

Sarah Torretta Klock

What’s new?

Our rocket club, which is a studentrun engineering program that is currently building a robotic arm; our international cookbook program, which is bringing students and their families together to share recipes from around the world; our afterschool program; and our Kenya Mom’s Alliance program, which pairs mothers from our school with HIV+ mothers in Kibera.

Andrew Schwartz

Tell us about a few of the school’s achievements or distinguishing programs.

Our academic program helps our children develop the habits of mind of the disciplines they are studying. Our students learn to think as members of the disciplines they are studying.

They practice making decisions as epidemiologists, mathematicians, historians, professional writers, theater directors, visual artists, constitutional lawyers, archaeologists, and Spanish speakers. Our athletic program is both rigorous and inclusive and extensive, offering a wide variety of opportunities for students to develop their athletic skills, compete, and learn how to be a member of a team… We also offer a wide variety of opportunities for our students to engage with and make a positive impact upon their world.

acquiring the ability to apply realworld skills in various workplace settings. Tasks assigned will support students’ understanding of the multi-dimensional efforts that go into making a workplace effective and the necessity of synthesizing several skill sets for the creation of a quality work product. …We are [also] proud of our ASD Nest Program, created for higher functioning students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), based on the successful ASD Nest elementary and middle school (MS 447) inclusion models. [The program’s] goal is to teach students how to function well academically, behaviorally, and socially, both in school and within the broader community.

What’s new?

This year our founding class of students will be graduating. At this point we have received notice of two early decision college acceptances, and are knee-deep in the application process. So far, all seniors are on track for graduation.

What do you love about your school?

I guess the one challenge in creating a new school comes with the growing pains of being in transition with faculty and increasing facilities needs over a four-year period as you add on a new grade each year. The tone and the feel at Millennium Brooklyn is truly unique. We are like one big family…I have put a lot of pressure on myself as the founding principal to make sure that our founding class had as many opportunities and positive experiences as students in fully-established high schools had.

Our founding faculty really gave 200 percent towards providing a wellrounded high school experience…

Our founding class provided a lot of feedback to faculty—they paved the way for future Millennium Brooklyn graduates. It’s an amazing feeling to see your vision come to life.

PS 51M - THE ELIAS HOWE SCHOOL PRINCIPAL: NANCY SING-BOCK PK-5 525 West 44th Street ps51manhattan.com AWARD: OUTSTANDING GRADE SCHOOL

Marcus Photography

right match for their child and we feel fortunate to have been continually successful in those partnerships.

to engage with others in their communities to make the world a better place.

continued on page 40

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most creative ’s y it C rk o Y w e N Learn how lent, intellect, ta s e h s ri u o n y it rs unive and potential.

ege Eugene Lang Coll r Liberal Arts / The New School fo hool for Design / c S w e N e h T s n o Pars c Engagement / li b u P r fo l o o h c S The New ool for Music / h c S w e N e h T e g e Mannes Coll r Drama / The New School fo porary Music / m te n o C d n a zz a rJ The New School fo f Invention o rs e w o P r u o Y r ve Disco du/nyc24 www.newschool.e Institution Equal Opportunity

continued from page 38

What’s new?

In 2013, PS 51 was recognized as Inside Schools’ Pick. In 2014, PS 51 has been recognized as having a stellar arts education that will be highlighted in the Annual Arts in Schools Report.

What do you love about your school?

I love that we provide a small safe and nurturing learning environment where we are truly a family and close-knit community. We have families from around the world! I love that we instill a passionate love of learning through our creative approach to teaching, where students have meaningful, engaging experiences to excel at what they are, can, and will be in the future as citizens of our society and the world. Children do shine in so many ways. Coming to school every day and seeing a child excel in reading, writing, math, singing, playing an instrument, creating an artwork, dancing or acting, collaborating with other students on a science experiment, or a project on Native

What’s new?

A few years ago, the PS 89 School Leadership Team initiated the Liberty Walk as a way to involve the entire community—students, staff, and parents—in a service project. This all-school walk-a-thon is a one-mile walk around nearby Rockefeller Park, often accompanied by music and/ or dance performances. For the first couple of years, the donations for the Liberty Walk supported an elementary school in Haiti, which had been hard hit by an earthquake, through Partners in Health.

PS 89 PRINCIPAL VERONICA NAJJAR PK-6 201 Warren Street ps89.Org AWARD: OUTSTANDING GRADE SCHOOL

Describe your school’s core educational philosophy.

At PS 89, learning is infused with inquiry and collaboration. This emphasis encourages independent thinking and a respect for differences and traits that nurture both life-long learning and social responsibility.

Social Studies form the core of PS 89’s project-based learning, with each grade engaging in two extended studies during the year.

The integration of all areas of study, including our art, music, and dance programs, creates a rigorous curriculum. The administrators and teachers at PS 89 work with the students to create a socially and emotionally supportive community.

Tell us about a few of the school’s achievements or distinguishing programs.

[One achievement is in] Special Education. Our philosophy on inclusion and diversity is reflected in our Integrated Co-Teaching program. PS 89 was one of the first NYC public schools with an Inclusion program, which started in 1999.

We teach a diverse population of learners, whose needs are met by our experienced pedagogues, who are always reflecting on and improving upon their practice. A model for inclusion, PS 89’s program is visited by educators from around the city and as far away as Holland and Denmark. [Another achievement is

40 • N E W YO RK FAM ILY ULTIM ATE GUID E TO E DU C A T I O N 2 0 1 4 - 2 0 1 5

Tell us about a few of the school’s achievements or distinguishing programs.

Our community embraces diversity, and our families and children build relationships that are strong, deep, and caring. Our project-based social studies work in grades pre-K-8 has changed our academic landscape completely. Our students are being challenged and engaged through curricula that includes deep research, problem solving, purposeful writing, focused reading, and response through art, drama, and music.

What do you love about your school?

I love ringing the bell every morning in the schoolyard. I’ve been doing it since the school opened in 1998— same bell. I love greeting the parents, watching the students line up, and seeing my team of dedicated educators come through the doors, eager to begin the day. PS 89 would not be the school it is without the expertise, professionalism, and passion that the staff brings to their work every single day… A school should serve as an anchor in the community, and I believe that PS 89 has achieved that.

What’s new?

The staff is working very hard and with great collaboration to design CCSS aligned Social Studies units of study. From the in-depth study of apples in Kindergarten, through the remarkable and sophisticated study of urban parks in second grade, and ending with an unbelievable 8th grade study of the Lower East Side— our school has been remaking itself academically... Our MAT staff hosted the staff of the Smiodden School for two days. The teachers from Norway prepared presentations of current units they taught. Our staff advised them in three areas: Differentiation, Assessment, The Why (Purpose) of the Study, and Close Reading opportunities. We also presented our units of study and then hosted the teachers in the classrooms to observe instruction. Bad Bunnies, a kids’ rock-and-roll band and chorus, is an example of the creativity and devotion of our teachers… The 50 students write and perform songs!

The teacher in charge has a friend who is a musician and volunteers to compose the music with the students.

PS 126 - MANHATTAN ACADEMY OF TECHNOLOGY PRINCIPAL: JACQUI GETZ PK-8 80 Catherine Street ps126mat.com AWARD: OUTSTANDING GRADE SCHOOL & MIDDLE SCHOOL

Andrew Schwartz

Tell us about a few of the school’s achievements or distinguishing programs.

We are fortunate to have many arts partnerships that we offer our students. Though a partnership with Rosie’s Theater Kids Foundation, all students are provided with tap dancing instruction for grades pre-K-3 and Musical Theatre Instruction for grade 5. Through a new partnership with ING Financial, students receive creative writing experiences from the Teachers and Writers Collaborative in grades 1-2, and ballet instruction from the New York City Ballet in grades 3-4, and Art Farm for all students.

Describe your school’s core educational philosophy.

Within a nurturing, safe environment, PS126/MAT staff members actively engage all students in the learning process and teach students to become critical thinkers, problemsolvers, and life-long learners. Our theory of action is centered on creating a school where teachers feel free to take risks, share student work, and open up their practice.

We use the phrase: “Assign work that matters,” as we design units of study with the belief that cognitive challenges can be met by all students given appropriate supports.

our] social studies curriculum. Social Studies form the core of learning at PS 89. Students engage in extensive project-based studies that teach them to construct an understanding of the world around them.

Americans, or an inquiry study on parks, or the pride a student has from being a member of the student council, or a peer mediator, and doing community service brings joy to me as an elementary school principal. We are helping students build their self-confidence and helping them realize their own strengths, abilities, and talents.

Andrew Schwartz

Describe your school’s core educational philosophy.

PS 51, the Elias Howe School, is a small public elementary school with 350 students grades pre-K-5, located in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen in a beautiful new state-of-theart building. We strive to provide a holistic education, ensuring that every student is successful academically, artistically, and socially. We are a family of learners that provides a safe and nurturing environment where we provide a wide range of meaningful learning opportunities enabling students to shine in many ways through the rich arts programs we offer, inquiry-based learning modeled after Reggio Emilia, and integrated project-based learning.

What do you love about your school?

Where do I start? If I start with the staff, I must explain how hard they continued on page 42

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Hawthorne Valley Waldorf School offers students a Waldorf curriculum from Early Childhood through grade 12. Each year’s curriculum is designed to meet the unique needs of the developing child or young adult. The curriculum is highly interdisciplinary, blending academics with lessons in the fine and practical arts. The aspiration of Hawthorne Valley Waldorf School is to develop the full creative potential of each individual.

Day students Pre K — grade 12 and grade 8 — 12 boarding students 518-672-7092 x 111 info@hawthornevalleyschool.org

WALDORF SCHOOL | www.hawthornevalleyschool.org 330 County Route 21C, Ghent, NY 12075 | 518-672-7092

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What do you love about your school?

I love that I have a committed faculty.

They have risen to the challenges of learning a new curriculum in both English language arts and math so as to meet the needs of our students, and the rigor of the Common Core Learning Standards. We enrich their lives of our students daily through meaningful curriculum… Walking into classrooms and viewing the great work students are doing daily is one of the joys of this job. It is amazing to see firsthand the quality of instruction that goes on in classroom, and to interact with students in an academic setting. Our students are so insightful, and speaking with them always brightens my day.

STATEN ISLAND TECHNICAL HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPAL: MARK ERLENWEIN 9-12 485 Clawson Street, Staten Island siths.org AWARD: OUTSTANDING HIGH SCHOOL

Tell us about a few of the school’s achievements or distinguishing programs.

We are a Teachers College Reading and Writing Project School. As a TCRWP school, we ensure that we are meeting Common Core Learning Standards across all grades, and that students are writing and reading

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Courtesy of Mark Erlenwein

Marcus Photography

AWARD: OUTSTANDING GRADE SCHOOL

Tell us about a few of the school’s achievements or distinguishing programs.

This school year we roll out year two of the 1:1 iPad Digital Education Initiative with both 9th and 10th graders participating, in an effort to continue in SI Tech’s tradition of providing students with the most current and cutting-edge technology education advantages.

Our schools is transitioning away from textbooks and traditional education materials to a methodology that allows for digitized curriculum and resources that are engaging, interactive, collaborative, differentiated, and provide measurable feedback in real-time. [Also], our school’s new Career and Development Center is buzzing with numerous opportunities, offering students of all grade levels the opportunity to explore career pathways, via our “Backpack to Briefcases” series, featuring daily presentations from guests, as well as job shadowing and internships.

What’s new?

This past summer SI Tech launched our first summer internship program, funded by the Summer Youth Employment Program. Over 125 Students who identified “career interests” were matched with internships that closely matched the experiences and necessary skill sets related to the careers they indicated. Other students were placed in camp sites and school settings that provided challenging and exciting work experiences, while also building important soft and professional skills while earning an income.

What do you love about your school?

I vividly remember 26 years ago starting the 1988-1989 school year as a freshman in SI Tech. Therefore, it was surreal and the absolute deepest honor for me to be named the principal in 2013… Now serving as our school’s Educational Leader and Lead Imagineer, I’ve been working over the past many years with an incredible team of teachers, students, parents, and community leaders in building the framework necessary to continue soaring skyward in all of our school’s future endeavors.

SUCCESS ACADEMY BRONX 2 PRINCIPAL: VANESSA BANGSER K-4 450 St. Paul’s Place, The Bronx successacademies.org AWARD: OUTSTANDING GRADE SCHOOL

Marcus Photography

What’s new?

We are really excited about our Math Centers! In grades K-5, students are engaged in Early Childhood Assessment of Mathematics centers.

Teachers use an assessment to identify students’ independent level in several math topics. Once their level is determined, students engage in math centers to practice the skill that they need work on so they can move to the next level. Students play games to help them practice, and teachers confer with students giving feedback.

PS 166M - THE RICHARD RODGERS SCHOOL OF ARTS AND TECHNOLOGY PRINCIPAL: DEBRA MASTRIANO K-5 132 West 89th Street ps166.Org

Describe your school’s core educational philosophy.

Our core educational philosophy is to shape a vision of academic success for all students based on high standards. We aim to cultivate leadership in our teachers so that they can be an active part of the instructional process. We believe in frequent professional learning opportunities that will increase educator effectiveness for all teachers, and in turn, our students…

We want students and staff alike to approach each day with a growth mindset, ready to take on new challenges, and to learn and grow.

Describe your school’s core educational philosophy.

Staten Island Technical High School, established in 1988 as a magnet school for students interested in pre-engineering, was granted status in 2005 as one of New York City’s eight Specialized High Schools (joining Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Technical High School) in serving the needs of New York City’s most gifted and talented young men and women.

SI Tech is a nationally renowned liberal arts high school with one of the most highly acclaimed college preparatory experiences across the curriculum, with an emphasis in STEAM, parent engagement, and premier college and career readiness programs, producing the nation’s finest scholars, problem solvers, innovators, and athletes.

in range of genres. Our teachers engage in data-driven instruction that targets students’ specific strengths, and growth areas. In math, teachers are provided with weekly staff development to grow their conceptual understanding of the Common Core Math Standards and Common Core Shifts.

work, how much they respect and love children, how collaborative and intelligent they are as they design curriculum. I must brag about the time they give on their own at lunch and afterschool to support struggling learners. I must brag about how they create a safe and caring environment—how we are a family. If I start with the children, I must explain how resilient and determined they are to learn and to achieve… I must brag about how they blend together in a diverse and beautiful community.

If I start with families, I must explain how they come together in easy and hard times to support our school and children and staff... This is a remarkable school and I am lucky.

Describe your school’s core educational philosophy.

Success Academy Bronx 2 embodies joyful rigor. The high bar for academic expectations our teachers have for scholars is balanced with a true love of learning and sense of fun and possibility. We strive to develop the whole child and help all scholars meet and exceed their potential in every aspect of schooling. We value their ability to strategize as mathematicians just as much as their ability to engage in meaningful conversations with each other, and as much as their love for playing in the snow during recess! We believe in making school a magical place— so much so that we constantly ask ourselves: If school were not mandatory, would all our scholars still attend?

Tell us about a few of the school’s achievements or distinguishing programs—as well as some of its challenges.

Our scholars are among the highestachieving students in the state of New York! They ranked third in the continued on page 44

Rethinking Learning Reigniting Lives Gow is a college preparatory, boarding and day school, grades 7-12, for students with dyslexia and related language based learning disabilities.

2491 Emery Rd • South Wales, NY 14139 • P 716.687.2001 • F 716.687.2003 • gow.org

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What’s new?

This year SA Bronx 2 expanded. We now have a middle school, and we are already looking ahead to high school!

We are also very excited about the joint student council between SA Bronx 2 and our co-located school PS 55. The two student councils are joining together to form a building council, which we think will lead to many exciting programs for both schools.

What do you love about your school?

At SA Bronx 2, we are a family.

As parents and educators, we are collectively raising beautiful, brilliant children together and inherently that makes us family. I truly love not only the children but also the adults I get to interact with every day. They are passionate, dedicated,

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the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Our central vision is that students learn best by working closely with others who are different from themselves…We choose our student body with an eye toward a range of different learners from a mix of educational backgrounds.

fiercely intelligent people who push the school to be better tomorrow than it is today. I walk the hallways feeling energized and challenged in a way that I can’t even explain. We laugh together, cry together, and love together. I wake up every morning both thankful and humbled by the fact that I have a job that inspires and excites me every single day.

TOMPKINS SQUARE MIDDLE SCHOOL PRINCIPAL: SONHANDO ESTWICK 6-8 600 East 6th Street tsmsonline.org AWARD: OUTSTANDING MIDDLE SCHOOL

Andrew Schwartz

state for math scores with 99 percent passing and 82 percent achieving the highest score of level 4…

Success Academy Bronx 2 scholars work hard, and often have many challenges to overcome: 88 percent of our families are poor enough that their children receive subsidized lunch; 7 percent are English Language learners—yet another 5 percent were ELL, but have achieved proficiency since joining us!

Describe your school’s core educational philosophy.

Tompkins Square Middle School is a progressive public school serving a diverse community of students on

focus this year. Students are being taught explicit connections between making mistakes and neuroscience, helping to support students in their risk-taking and perseverance.

What do you love about your school? What do you see as its biggest challenges?

I feel so lucky to be the principal of TSMS. Professionally, I have never worked with a group of people as brilliant, dedicated, and caring as the staff at TSMS. Something that has always struck me about TSMS is how happy the students are to come to school. I not only witness it in their faces, but also hear about it from parents and guardians outside the school at dismissal every day… A major challenge built into the structure of the school is how to meet and push students academically in heterogeneous groupings across such a wide range of learners. This requires a great deal of attention from the staff in order to craft curriculum with multiple entry and exit points. We also put a substantial amount of work into processing and meeting the social-emotional needs of our early adolescents, as we believe that, without this crucial piece, middle schoolers are not able to fully engage academically.

Tell us about a few of the school’s achievements or distinguishing programs.

The depth of collaboration across the school, be it student or staff, is something that is particularly noteworthy. Students are digging into inquiry-based work in groups or partnerships throughout their day. The staff is deeply collaborative as well, across grade levels and departments, in team teaching partnerships, and via the TSMS model of authentic shared decision-making, in which all our school stakeholders are involved in school initiatives.

What’s new?

This year we have widened our inter-grade connectivity, bringing together 6th and 7th graders several times already to discuss reading notebook skills and share personal memoir projects…I am excited about the Growth Mindset work that the math department is piloting as a

EDUCATION RESOURCES FOR NYC PARENTS

INFO ON NYC SCHOOL SYSTEMS FOR NURSERY SCHOOL AND PRE-K The Independent School Admission Association of Greater New York (ISAAGNY) isaagny.org The New York City Department of Education (DOE) schools.nyc.gov The Parents League of New York parentsleague.org Victoria Goldman’s The Manhattan Directory of Private Nursery Schools victoriagoldman.net Many neighborhood enrichment centers offer preschool alternatives.

FOR PUBLIC SCHOOL Chalkbeat chalkbeat.org Clara Hemphill’s various guides to NYC public schools clarahemphill.net

Class Size Matters classsizematters.org DOE (see left) Gotham Schools gothamschools.org Insideschools insideschools.org

New York City Charter School Center nyccharterschools.org

FOR PRIVATE SCHOOL (INDEPENDENT)

Archdiocese of New York archny.org

ISAAGNY (see left) The NYC Private School Admissions Handbook nypeas.com NYC Private Schools Blog nycprivateschoolsblog.com The Parents League Of New York (see left) Victoria Goldman’s The Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools and Selective Public Schools victoriagoldman.net New York Association of Independent Schools nysais.org

FOR CHARTER SCHOOL DOE (see left)

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FOR PAROCHIAL SCHOOL

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For other faith-based schools, contact local organizations affiliated with your religion.

FOR BOARDING SCHOOL Boarding School Review boardingschoolreview.com The Parents League Of New York (see left)

SCHOOL ADMISSIONS CONSULTANTS Education First nycedu1st.com Private Education Advisory Service

(PEAS) nypeas.com The Rymac Group therymacgroup.com School Choice International schoolchoiceintl.com School Search NYC schoolsearchnyc.com Smart City Kids smartcitykids.com

NEW YORK FAMILY

RESOURCES The Blackboard Awards blackboardawards.com The Ultimate Guide to Education newyorkfamily.com/ category/education Weekly Scoop Newsletter newyorkfamily.com/newslettersign-up

PHYSICAL ACTIVITY: GOOD FOR THE BODY. GREAT GRE FOR THE BRAIN. As The New York Times reported in October, “Exercise boosts young brains ... especially the particular thinking skills that most affect academic performance.” With programs including basketball, indoor track, volleyball, flag football, pre-season baseball training and more, we at Yorkville are doing everything we can to help stimulate the brilliant minds of tomorrow just by having a ton of fun today.

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