The culture of business reshapes the world of education, in Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s Children First reform efforts. If the news is as good as city leaders say, why are so many people worried?
Read more at City Limits weekly.
More than 30,000 students a year take the entry exam for the city’s prestigious “specialized” high schools. About 5,000 earn offers of admission. Why do these students’ ethnic and demographic makeup differ so dramatically from the balance of the city’s students? And why won’t the Department of Education permit evaluation of potential […]
Spend January 20, 2009 at the International High School at Lafayette, an all-immigrant high school in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, with students from more countries than the US has states.
Story and images at City Limits weekly.
The New York City Leadership Academy trains untested principals to take over, and turn around, struggling city schools.
Sandra Stein, CEO of the Leadership Academy, defends the reinterpretation of business practices for the education-leadership environment, in this question-and-answer featured in City Limits weekly.
The first round of Department of Education Progress Reports incited hot debate, in the City Council chamber and elsewhere, about how to define “progress” — and whether it’s possible to grade the city’s schools based on standardized test scores.
Read about a contentious hearing (and a beat-it-quick, side-door exit by the DOE’s accountability czar […]
New York City’s School Safety Agents are charged with school security — but are not under the direct supervision of the NYPD, which hires them, or school personnel, whose buildings and communities they serve. The New York Civil Liberties Union’s School Safety Act aims to address the accountability gap — but hasn’t yet been passed […]
In 1973, the National Committee on Excellence in Education’s report “A Nation at Risk” famously described “a rising tide of mediocrity” in America’s schools. A quarter-century later, the tide hasn’t fallen: Only 70 percent of the nation’s high-school students — and at best, 60 percent of New York City high-schoolers — are graduating. […]
Cost-conscious NYC Department of Education purchasing requirements mean that local publishers — including minority- and women-owned businesses who’ve worked with the DOE for a quarter-century or more — are prohibited from doing business with the DOE. Local laws, which govern city agencies, don’t pertain, because the DOE is neither fish nor fowl — neither a […]
In an archipelago of classrooms scattered around Washington Square, NYU offers more languages, including courses in translation and interpretation, than any other school in New York.
Part of New York magazine’s Best of New York 2007 cover story; read the original on line.
With more than 60,000 titles in its window-lit, two-floor space—66 shelves of fiction, 42 of picture books, and a center table loaded with prizewinners and staff picks—the Bank Street Bookstore is the mother lode for kids’ lit, with the largest variety, the best selection, and the most unusual and provocative books for young readers and the adults around them. Staffers are “voracious, passionate readers” who are paid to read weekly, says manager, buyer, and onetime preschool teacher Beth Puffer. Their breadth of knowledge puts chain stores to sorry shame, as does a well-edited selection of educational toys and games. Regular events include an ongoing reading series headlined by Cynthia Nixon and superstar kids’ author Jon Scieszka. Books come in seventeen languages, including Urdu, Bengali, and Vietnamese. In the market for Winnie-the-Pooh? Find it here three ways: in English, Latin, and Yiddish. Or snap up the hotly awaited The Talented Clementine, hitting the shelves on April 1.
Once hipsters discovered the working-class, immigrant area of Greenpoint, the developers weren’t far behind. It’s a familiar pattern and, like the booms in Chelsea and the East Village, it has its pluses and minuses. … On the housing front, rezoning in 2005 made the scruffy waterfront ripe for high-rise luxury condo-maximums. Two years in, a necklace of multistory buildings circles McCarren Park; it’ll yield more than 400 luxe homes. …
You knew what was coming in Williamsburg and Greenpoint. It’s a well-worn path: ethnic-industrial neighborhood turns artists’ haven, turns trend central and then turns developers’ cash cow. The grit and charm (not to mention the cheap rents and ample space) that lured exiled East Villagers are quickly being eroded by a sweeping development program that is heralded variously as visionary, exploitive or somewhere in between. While advocates tout the plans as an exemplar of positive urban revitalization, to dissenters who post on blogs like Brownstoner, it looks more like the Miamification of Brooklyn.
New York magazine profiled New York City’s established and rising movers and shakers, including this short list of the most influential voices in public and private education.
One of New York City’s much-heralded new, small high schools, struggling to retain students — and maintain order — in the face of daunting odds.
In a disused church school in a desolate stretch of Coney Island, aspiring athletes
– most possessed of more drive than sheer talent — take the lessons of sports to the classroom.
A seafaring school set in the landlocked heart of Brooklyn, within the time-worn edifice that once housed Bushwick High School. In November 2006, the Harbor School learned it will relocate to Governor’s Island, where it will have its own dock, boats, and ferry service to the Brooklyn “mainland.”
A hidden gem on the edge of New York City, Leon M. Goldstein is a public high school that feels nearly suburban, on the campus of Harvard-by-the-Bay, aka Kingsborough Community College.
Guidance for kids (and panicked New York City parents) facing a labyrinthine, daunting high school application process: Make smart choices that don’t feel like you’re gambling with your child’s entire future.
Help your kid become a happy, sound, and independent sleeper (eventually).
One of parenthood’s great joys is celebrating baby’s first holiday season. Candles sparkle a little brighter now, and the pine boughs smell even more pungent. But the season can mean extra demands, too, with lots of socializing, family visits, and travel away from home. Sound stressful? Read on.
Happiness is the Holy Grail of parenthood: Every parent wants their child to live a happy life. For help, parents often turn to experts, consultants, and parenting books, looking for ways to insure their child’s happiness. There’s so much advice out there that parents can feel overwhelmed — and like they’ll never get this ‘parenting’ thing right. If this sounds familiar, read on.
Say you’re driving on a four-lane highway en route to meet a friend. You spy a flock of baby quails trying to cross to the other side. Their parents swoop and dive all around them. What would you do?
For an existential rationale in favor of simple kindness, read more.
From Dean Street’s cracked sidewalk, hard by Triangle Sports and Bergen Tile, number 475 looks nondescript. It’s a nowhere sort of place, six stories of squat yellow-brick symmetry with tidy window frames painted green. But on the fourth floor of this generic industrial building, Samuel Zygmuntowicz, world-renowned master luthier, is at work creating something extraordinary. “It’s an artist’s space on the outskirts,” Zygmuntowicz explains. He says it with a hint of a smile, after offering up a soft-skinned handshake that could crush a small bird. …
Everyone knows that Brooklyn is crawling with writers and other artistic types. What may be surprising is how many of these creatives are making children’s books–and how deep the roots of children’s literature run under the brownstone-lined streets. Read the story that ran in BKLYN magazine.
Across cultures and centuries, certain narratives persist: stories of creation, of the battle between good and evil, love and hate, the righteous and the damned. This story is not universal but particular, a specific myth-that’s-not, a true legend peculiar to my family and rehearsed all the years of my childhood, as my mother told and retold her tale. It unfolds in four parts and reveals layer after layer of truth, received memoir and longing for a lost time, a lost world, a life less complicated and dark.
In part I, Cesia Dymetman and her family are living in the Warsaw Ghetto, during World War II. Rudolf Natter, a German officer, controls much of Ghetto life, enforcing a brutally random discipline, even as he turns a blind eye to smugglers and, occasionally, brings illegal weapons and identity papers into the Ghetto himself. Cesia and her father inadvertently survive the liquidation that sends her mother and sister to Treblinka, they secure false identity papers for Cesia from Natter. Father and daughter settle into a new daily routine, until circumstances force Cesia to make an instantaneous — and irrevocable — choice.
In every life, some things are known, and others, mysterious. This story, my mother’s, is strung together like beads on a long silk thread. It begins in the early months of World War II, in the Warsaw Ghetto, and traverses hundreds of kilometers and more than a thousand days. In part III, Cesia learns to survive the last years of the war by impersonating a Polish refugee.
Stories with clear narratives satisfy a real human craving for order and understanding; they unfold from their beginning, thicken in the middle, and resolve at the end. But stories from life often lack that linearity, looping from event to event with sometimes startling gaps in fact and logic — the contours of a lost terrain. In Part IV, Cesia returns to Warsaw.
A working-class Brooklyn community mourns a favorite son.
Some days fit the mold, others don’t. A few simply reinvent themselves, again and again.
Friendship, loss, and a fancy baking pan.
Sketch of New York City’s official mayoral homestead, for www. newyorkmag.com. Learn about Giuliani-era graffitti (shocking!) here.
Longing for winter in sunny Southern California: a story from a suburban childhood, via Warsaw. Read more.
THE TRUE STORY of the only all-male, full-drag Shakespeare company in a medium-security mens’ prison in the U.S., first published in American Theatre, and later the basis for the prize-winning Sundance documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars. Read a related essay here.
What happens when a well-intentioned guest gets robbed — inside a medium-security men’s prison.
An actor’s epiphany, thanks to mortality, Marc Blitzstein, and the emotional quicksand of new motherhood. Read more.
In a city where change is the only constant, a century-old synagogue endures. Read more.
The bond between grandparents and grandchildren is singular and precious. But as the older generation ages, youngsters can witness disturbing changes in their grandparents’ physical and cognitive abilities. Confusion, fear, and distaste for what they’re seeing can cause them to pull away. And ’sandwich generation’ parents can end up feeling torn.
This story, which was featured on CBS News and nominated for a Front Page Newswomens’ Award by Family Circle editors, explores how parents can keep kids and elders connected, when the double challenges of growing up and aging threaten to pull them apart.
Treatments range from teen and sensitive-skin facials and regimens designed for men to services for jet-lagged travelers (about half of Moonflower’s clients are visitors from Japan) and mothers-to-be.
Coney Island’s current resurgence began in the mid-eighties, with the efforts of Dick Zigun and the Coney Island Hysterical Society to preserve and restore the landmark neighborhood.