Helen Zelon

Best of New York: Language School

hzelon — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:35:37 +0000

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—25 tongues, including the newly booming Mandarin. “It’s the new Arabic,” says director Milena Savova, citing 300 percent growth in 2006. It’s also the only place in town with Hindi and modern Greek, and the only one on the East Coast that teaches Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Many instructors, mostly native speakers, have been with the school for ten years or more. Students in these small, intensive classes (from $495) are equally committed: Most come to advance their careers, burnish a grad-school application, or earn one of the school’s well-regarded certificates.

Best of New York: Kids’ Indie Bookstore

hzelon — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:19:50 +0000

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.

Point Counterpoint

hzelon — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:10:40 +0000

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. ...

The War for Brooklyn: Williamsburg/Greenpoint Waterfront

hzelon — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:10:33 +0000

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.

The Influentials: Education

hzelon — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 01:30:17 +0000

Published in: New York, May 15, 2006

Joel Klein
Chancellor, New York City Department of Education
Klein has brought a corporate ethos to the New York public schools. When Mayor Bloomberg dismantled the community school boards and consolidated power in the Department of Education, Klein used his newly minted authority to make sweeping changes: Elementary education was overhauled and a new universal curriculum was put in place, social promotion was abolished, principals were given greater autonomy, and Klein successfully negotiated a new teachers’ contract that brought city educators’ pay to near parity with their suburban peers. It’s too early to grade Klein’s ultimate effectiveness, but at the very least, Bloomberg and Klein have done for the New York public-school system what no one had done for some time: They’ve restored a sense of hope.

John Sexton
President, New York University
Sexton is an educational impresario, and he’s made NYU the most exciting three-ring university in the country. When Sexton was named president of NYU in 2002, the school rated maybe a B on the national college-excellence curve. Today, it’s considered an A-plus, beating out its hometown rival, Columbia, and all the other Ivies for the past two years as the country’s top “dream school,” according to a Princeton Review survey of high-school seniors. The Brooklyn-born Sexton, who was the dean of NYU’s Law School before becoming president of the university, engineered the transformation by investing $350 million in the arts and sciences, launching a seven-year, $2.5 billion funding drive, and wooing teaching talent away from the Ivies. In the process, he’s brought a renewed intellectual luster to the city. He’s also attracted higher-caliber students—students who figure to go on to reshape New York and the world.

Arun Alagappan
Founder, Advantage Testing, Inc.
Like it or not, high-end, one-on-one academic tutoring is a fixture of contemporary New York, and Alagappan is the father of the business. Twenty years ago, Alagappan, a Princeton philosophy major and Harvard Law grad, left the white-shoe law firm Sullivan and Cromwell to found Advantage Testing, a boutique tutoring service for college-bound high-school kids. Today, Alagappan and 100 fellow tutors work with up to 2,000 kids each year in subjects ranging from core academics and essay writing to SAT prep. Despite law-partner rates (Alagappan charges $685 for a 50-minute hour, although staff tutors charge less), a year’s wait is not uncommon for Alagappan’s services. Alagappan insists he doesn’t track test scores; regardless, Advantage has inspired dozens of high-priced imitators, and, for better or worse, transformed the precollege landscape.

Randi Weingarten
President, United Federation of Teachers
The leader of 140,000 active and retired teachers, Weingarten has the power to stop education reform in its tracks, or at least slow it to a virtual halt. The Brooklyn-born former high-school history teacher and Cardozo-trained lawyer has used her position to oppose everything from schools chancellor Joel Klein’s focus on standardized testing (in contrast to “true learning”) to his proposed principal-accountability plan. She’s railed against private-school tax credits and the Department of Ed’s increased funding for charter schools at the expense of traditional schools. That said, Weingarten isn’t beyond compromise. She agreed to a longer school day and more tutoring—key planks in the Klein reform platform—in exchange for better pay for her teachers. As head of both the UFT and the Municipal Labor Commission, a union coalition with more than 365,000 members, Weingarten has influence that reaches beyond the schools: She can swing close to a half-million votes.

Robert Hughes
President, New Visions for Public Schools
Hughes’s archipelago of small, highly focused public high schools is spearheading the changes in the city’s secondary-education system. One of Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein’s key second-term experiments is developing small, specialized schools that use a single focus—social justice, urban planning, sports management, fine arts—as a fulcrum for learning. Hughes’s New Visions has helped create 112 small middle and high schools, and is the DOE-appointed overseer of Klein’s New Century High Schools Initiative, a multiyear, multi-million-dollar project funded by, among others, Bill Gates, George Soros, and the Annenberg Foundation. The operating theory of New Visions schools is that the smallness keeps kids from getting lost and the specialization makes learning more engaging. Graduation rates for New Visions seniors, most of whom would have attended overcrowded, understaffed local schools, beat city averages by up to 30 percent.

Geoffrey Canada
CEO, Harlem Children’s Zone; founder, Promise Academy Charter School; and co-chair, Mayor’s Special Commission on Poverty
Canada is proving that poor African-American kids can succeed, despite grim socioeconomic odds and traditionally low academic achievement. Canada’s 60-block-square Harlem Children’s Zone, a web of programs that serves more than 9,000 kids, integrates after-school enrichments like tutoring, chess, and music; family support services like housing and legal advocacy; and social programs like child-rearing classes. Since 2004, the Zone has also included Canada’s charter school, the Promise Academy, a K–12 DOE–approved school with a school day that’s an hour longer and a school year that’s a month and a half longer than the city’s standard public schools. Canada grew up poor in the South Bronx and flirted with petty crime, but a teacher took the time to set him on the right track, and he eventually graduated from Bowdoin and earned a master’s in education from Harvard. He started the Zone with the help of Soros’s Quantum Fund manager and fellow Bowdoin alumnus Stan Druckenmiller (who, along with other private, corporate, and government sources, funds the program). The Promise Academy has produced remarkable results. In September 2004, only 11 percent of the kindergarten kids, all chosen by lottery, tested above grade level. By June ’05, that number had risen to 80 percent.

Clara Hemphill
Founder, InsideSchools.org
Empowering parents. When Hemphill couldn’t find the information she needed to choose a public school for her young son, she set about finding it for herself, then sharing it with the rest of New York. Today, her Website, InsideSchools.org, offers an educational mix of information about New York’s 1,500 public schools. The Website’s school profiles detail test scores, of course, but they also describe the culture of each school, giving prospective families insights on teaching styles, homework, and discipline. There are also policy papers, parent alerts, and nuts-and-bolts guides to school admissions, testing, and other education essentials. InsideSchools.org doesn’t pull punches; you’re as apt to read about barren science labs at a given school as you are to read about a great principal.

See this article on New York Metro’s site >>

School Profile: Bronx Health Sciences HS

hzelon — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 01:25:55 +0000

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.

Read the complete profile at InsideSchools.org.

School Profile: The HS for Sports Management

hzelon — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 01:25:23 +0000

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.

Read the complete profile at InsideSchools.org.

School Profile: The New York Harbor School

hzelon — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 01:24:45 +0000

Like a small, sturdy ship plying an ocean’s large swells, the New York Harbor School is a vessel of considerable integrity, facing daunting challenges.

First, the school is miles from the water, an essential element to its curriculum and mission. Second, the students, many of whom arrive unprepared for high school, can be overwhelmed by the expectations of rigor, discipline, and commitment that characterize Harbor. That said, the school’s dynamic, charismatic leaders–Principal Nate Dudley and founder Murray Fisher–lead a crew of devoted young teaching professionals, whose energy both in the classroom and the field has the power to transform young lives.

The school, one of three new schools in the Bushwick High School building, was established in 2003 with a 9th grade and is adding one grade a year until it has a full 9th-12th grade program. The school was set up with funding from New Visions, an education reform group which has launched a series of new small schools, each with a community organization as a partner. It also has the support of Urban Assembly, led by Richard Kahan, a non-profit organization dedicated to creating small public high schools in underserved areas of New York City.

The core of the school is its curriculum, which uses the city’s waterfront location as a way to probe numerous academic disciplines. Literature, math, science, history, and art are all related to the nautical experience. Ocean murals line the hallways, and students take fortnightly water excursions, competing eagerly on these outings to gather information, exchange thoughts, and get into the water. They do water sampling, investigate environmental preservation, learn about oyster farming, row on the river, or sail on the 1893 schooner Lettie G. Howard thanks to a partnership with the South Street Seaport Museum. For budding marine biologists and environmental scientists, the school is a paradise of opportunity.

Many kids, though, arrive at Harbor without a strong passion for the water–and often, without the academic foundation required to master the high school curriculum. Part of this is stems from the school’s youth, says the principal; as it becomes more established, more students will select the school during the application process, and the standard of achievement will likely rise, he argues. This has been the case to date, with each incoming class, according to Dudley.

Students at Harbor have daily “advisories”–small groups of students meeting with a member of the faculty–which help the kids with organization, homework management, and other matters. But throughout the day, we saw teachers engage with numerous students, in classrooms and hallways, and take an active, genuine interest in their lives.

The goal of preparing children well for college seems within reach for some students, woefully elusive for those with faltering basic literacy and math skills, according to teachers we spoke with. Students wear simple uniforms — a Harbor school shirt with jeans or trousers — to school; some teachers do, too, as a sign of solidarity and, as one said, because it solves the problem of “what to wear every morning.”

Some of the teaching we observed was outstanding. One 11th-grade math class began by looking for math patterns in the film Pi, discovering references to the Fibonacci sequence, the golden ratio of geometrics to fine art, and the numerical equivalents of the Hebrew alphabet, where letters stand for numerals, too. A science class held a lively “gum lab,” during which kids chewed vigorously for 30 seconds, then sketched the “specimen,” and answered a series of observation- and inference-based questions. But in other classes, kids were disengaged, talked back to teachers and to each other, and generally resisted instruction.

Notably, the typical body language of the urban teen fell away when the students were in the field. We traveled with one class to the aquarium on Coney Island, and the students’ engagement, enthusiasm, and sheer pleasure of learning and doing was palpable–and contagious. Whether identifying native species, sifting the sands of the beach, or arguing about who gets to wear the waders and head out into the ocean, these kids cared about what they were doing.

The school is steadily increasing the academic challenges it offers, adding an Advanced Placement course in environmental science in 2006-07, and planning to add Regents-level Spanish and biology as well. According to Dudley, New York Harbor posted the highest passing rate on the Regents exams, over 70 percent, of the schools in the Bushwick building. (The others are: Bushwick High School for Social Justice, Academy of Urban Planning, New York Harbor School, and Academy for Environmental Leadership.)

Often, students do not have strong parental support; many live in single-parent homes, and a significant portion are in foster care or live with extended family. Community involvement in the school is low.

Teachers made home visits to 50 9th-graders’ families in the summer before school began to introduce themselves and bring a gift of a school-uniform shirt. Going the extra distance is expected of Harbor’s staff; many teachers invest extra hours in preparation and mentoring, and say they feel a deep allegiance to the school’s mission.

Ninth graders learn to swim in the school’s Olympic-sized pool. Students in the 10th and 11th grades take college tours with the school. It’s the first exposure to higher education for many kids, and teachers are careful to say “when” you go to college, not “if.”

Special education: Harbor offers “collaborative team teaching” (CTT) classes–two teachers, one a specialist in special education, oversee a class of both general education students and students with special needs. Individual students also may receive support in their classrooms.

English as a Second Language: About a third of students receive ESL support.

After school: Numerous activities, clubs, and building-wide varsity teams offer students varied choices. About half of Harbor students participate in after-school programs like step dancing, peer tutoring, student council, an anime club, and a river-keeper/harbor corps.

Admissions: Students select New York Harbor on their application form. There are no academic or standardized testing requirements. (Helen Zelon, November 2005)

Read the complete profile at InsideSchools.org.

School Profile: Leon Goldstein HS for the Sciences

hzelon — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 00:54:10 +0000

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.

Read the complete profile at InsideSchools.org.

How to Rank a High School

hzelon — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 00:43:29 +0000

How to rank your high school choices

Small school or large? Close to home or far away? A well-rounded academic program or a school with a theme? Tens of thousands of 8th graders are grappling with these questions as they fill out high school applications, due December 1. Our advice: Be very careful drawing up your list of high school choices. You will be assigned to a high school based on how you rank the schools — and how the schools rank you. You may list up to 12 choices, but you will receive only one offer. (Unless you have taken the exam for the specialized high schools or auditioned for LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and the Performing Arts. In that case, you may have a choice — between one of those schools, should you be accepted, and your list of 12. There are also a few charter schools to consider which have a separate admissions process, done by lottery.) Apply only to schools you are willing to attend. If you get assigned to a school you hate — after you have listed it as a choice — it will be very hard to appeal.

Here are some questions to consider:

Small school or large? Small schools usually offer more personal attention and a sense of community. Teachers are more likely to get to know you, and fewer kids get lost. Small schools tend to be safer. However, large schools tend to have more sports teams, more foreign language offerings, and more Advanced Placement courses. Large schools may also have more diversity — not only economic and racial diversity, but also a range of kids of different abilities (and classes designed to accommodate them.)

Fast-track or laid-back? Some schools pile on the homework, and the kids are very serious, hard-working and a bit competitive. Other schools are more laid back and encourage kids to relax a bit. There’s no right answer here. Think about what’s best for you. Do you want to have the most rigorous academic experience possible? Or do you want to have a chance to excel in a less-demanding school?

New school or well-established? It’s nice to go to a school with a proven track record. And most of the new small schools don’t have well established guidance offices for college admissions or relationships with college admissions officers. However, when faced with the choice of an overcrowded, failing neighborhood school, and a new untested small school, in general, our advice is go with the small one, if you feel comfortable with the theme and the leadership. You‘ll get much more personalized attention and a chance to shine. (See our article on how to judge a new school.)

Theme school or well-rounded curriculum? This may sound obvious, but don’t go to a theme school if you’re not interested in the theme. If you’re not passionate about the arts, don’t try for LaGuardia. Also: some of the themes are gimmicks — and exist in name only. Be sure the academics are solid, whatever the theme.

How long is the commute? Be sure to take a subway (or bus) ride to the school before you submit your application to see if the commute is doable. Think about what it will be like in the rain and snow. Way too many students find after a few days of school that a school is too far away.

What is the quality of teaching? Look for teachers who seem to like their work and the school. Look for a balance of experience and youthful enthusiasm on a faculty, and a sense of collegiality among the staff.

What is the school culture? Is there a lot of pressure to conform, fashion snobbery, or social pressure to drink or take drugs? Parents have to realize that sex and drugs are in every high school in the city, if not in the country. But if you find a school where kids are interested in learning, you’re more likely to steer clear of trouble. More tips: Talk to older students. Kids will tell you if a school has a lot of drugs, if kids cut class, if being a good student is cool or shunned. Kids will know whether teachers care, and if counselors know their names.
Now for the rankings…

Your favorite should come first. You don’t need to play guessing games or set up an elaborate strategy. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by ranking your top choice number one on your list because schools won’t see how you ranked them.

However if you are applying to a school for which you do not qualify - say you want to apply to a school that accepts only Manhattan residents and you live in Queens - you are wasting a spot on your list if you put it down. Likewise, if a school looks for students with an 85 average or above and your GPA is 70, your chances of getting accepted are slim.

What about the schools that tell you, you must put them first, or they won’t consider you? According to the Department of Education, that policy was done away with two years ago. Schools no longer see who lists them first, and they have to come up with their own ranking of students from 1st to last.

More tips

Don’t be talked into applying to a school that you do not want to attend. Make sure your parent signs off on your list and don’t allow the guidance counselor to add other choices without consulting your parent.

Don’t list 12 schools if there are not 12 schools or programs that you want to apply to. However, the more choices, the better your chances of making a match.
Many large schools have several programs. If you really want to attend a certain school, say, Cardozo or Francis Lewis, both in Queens, apply to more than one program.

If you have a zoned school (Manhattan does not, Staten Island does, as do parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens) you are not guaranteed acceptance there unless you list it as one of your 12 choices. If it’s your first choice, put it first and you’ll be matched. If it’s your last choice, put it last, and you will go there if you are not matched to a school that is higher on your list.

What if you and your parents disagree? We think parents should get involved in the selection but in the end it’s the kid who has to go to the school. Try to talk it through until parent and kid both come to the same conclusion.

–Pamela Wheaton and Helen Zelon, November 15, 2006

From InsideSchools.org.