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Description:
The Children First reform agenda focuses the school system on improving teaching and learning in individual schools and classrooms. The goal of the reform agenda is to give all of our schools, and the teachers and principals within our schools, the necessary resources and support to improve instruction. We want to ensure that students have the opportunity to fulfill their highest potential. Student achievement is the result of the work done everyday at each individual school by the principals, teachers, and staff who work with the City’s 1.1 million students.
There are four core elements of the Children First reforms:
- Adoption of a single, coherent system-wide approach for instruction in reading, writing and math that is supported by strong Professional Development.
- Establishment of a new parent support system to make schools more welcoming to students’ families and to give families the access and tools they need to be full partners in the education of their children.
- Development of principals as the key instructional leaders of their schools through unprecedented leadership development programs at the new Leadership Academy.
- Reorganization of the Department of Education’s management structure into a unified, streamlined system dedicated to instruction and designed to drive resources from bureaucratic offices into the classroom.
By focusing the school system on instruction in schools and classrooms, the Implementation of the Children First reform agenda will help realize the goal of creating a system of 1,300 great schools.
(http://www.nycenet.edu/Administration/Childrenfirst/CFAgenda.htm) Goal:
New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein announced the launch of Children First: A New Agenda for Public Education in New York City on October 3, 2002. According to the NYC DOE Press Release:
The goal of Children First is to improve achievement across all schools and to address persistently low performing schools by moving innovation and effective school change throughout the system. The Chancellor's team will examine best practices in instruction, management and budget analysis, supporting the core purpose of instruction. Concrete action items will address the challenge of spreading the effective practices of successful schools.
The goal of Children First is to create a system of outstanding schools where effective teaching and learning is a reality for every teacher and child. The Mayor and Chancellor believe that achieving this goal will require a common determination and effort by the Department and all New Yorkers. Children First includes a far-reaching engagement process to ensure widespread participation in the reinvention of the school system. Children First will involve listening to parents, teachers, principals, superintendents, students, community-based organizations, corporations, foundations, institutions of higher education, faith-based organizations, and public officials. Children First will include many opportunities for your voice to be heard, beginning Nov. 12th with the first of Chancellor Klein's outreach meetings with parents and community. (http://www.math.nyu.edu/mfdd/braams/links/cf-blueprint-03.html#summ) Approach:
Children First is defined in part by the two curricular reforms that it uses: Everyday Math and Month by Month Phonics.
K-3 Phonics: Month by Month Phonics
Phonics instruction is a way of teaching reading that stresses the acquisition of letter-sound correspondences and their use in reading and spelling. The primary focus of phonics instruction is to help beginning readers understand how letters are linked to sounds to form letter-sound correspondences and spelling patterns and to help them learn how to apply this knowledge in their reading. Systematic phonics instruction in the lower grades is recommended by the National Reading Panel because research has shown that it helps students decode, spell, and comprehend what they read.
Month by Month Phonics is part of a larger reading program that includes multiple components. New York City is adopting just the phonics piece of this program as a supplement to other planned instruction in reading and writing using classroom libraries. It is also well aligned with New York City and New York State literacy standards and the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind act. In New York City, Community School Districts 10 and 15 have had success using Month by Month Phonics as part of their approach to teaching reading and writing.
K-5 Math: Everyday Mathematics supplemented by Math Steps
Everyday Mathematics, published by Everyday Learning and developed over a twenty-year period by the University of Chicago Mathematics Program. The curriculum is based on the belief that children rarely learn new concepts or skills the first time they experience them, but fully understand them only after repeated exposure. Because of this underlying principle, skills and concepts are introduced and reintroduced as students experience three stages of mastery: beginning, developing, and secure. Everyday Mathematics promotes understanding of real-world applications through its partner and small-group activities, traditional word problems, and long-term investigations.
Everyday Math (aka Chicago Math) is a K-6 curriculum developed by the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project (UCSMP) and published by Everyday Learning Corporation, now part of SRA McGraw-Hill. Curriculum development for Everyday Mathematics started in 1983.
(Retrieved from http://www.nycenet.edu/Administration/Childrenfirst/CFAgenda.htm on 1-25-04 by Melissa Harris).
6-8 Math: Impact Mathematics supplemented by Hot Words Hot Topics
Impact Mathematics is a complete mathematics program that includes a full year of algebra by the end of grade 8. The program is created by the authors of Everyday Mathematics and builds upon the elementary math program Everyday Mathematics. The main premise is that conceptual understanding and the teaching of basic skills support one another and should be integrated.
New York Math A: An Integrated Approach is a rich and demanding high school mathematics program that is fully aligned with the New York State Core Curriculum for Mathematics A and provides test taking strategies and practice preparation for the Math A Regents examination. This program, published by Prentice Hall, emphasizes both the skills and Critical Thinking required for success on the Math A exam and in college-level mathematics.
Each lesson begins with a small group math investigation which requires students to compare their results with each other and often to develop conjectures. Students then are introduced to a discussion of the content being addressed and examples which describe how the concepts are applied. Students are guided through examples that they complete on their own and finally practice what they have learned through a variety of exercises. Each lesson also consists of a Mixed Review section which reinforces material previously learned. (http://nycenet.edu/press/02-03/CurriculumChoices.htm) Research:
A New York Times articles (Jan 24, 2003) quotes G. Reid Lyon and Louisa Moats:
"We can find no published research indicating that this program has been tested with well-defined groups of kids and shown to be effective," Dr. Lyon said. "And clearly one would want to know those kinds of details before incorporating any program into use."
[...] But Louisa Moats, who advises states on applications for federal reading instruction funds, predicted that Month by Month would not pass muster. "It's just not in line with what we know works," she said. (http://www.math.nyu.edu/mfdd/braams/links/cf-blueprint-03.html#curr)
January 5, 2004
Broad Overhaul of City Schools Causing Strains
By ELISSA GOOTMAN and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Four months into Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's historic overhaul, the New York City public school system is straining under the pressures of extraordinary change, showing sparks of improvement against a backdrop of widespread confusion.
Some changes seem to be serving children well: at Public School 30 in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, for instance, Lisa Ripperger, an assistant principal, said the new citywide literacy curriculum and classroom libraries were encouraging children to read, making it increasingly common for fourth and fifth graders to devour books about, say, Cam Jansen or the Polk Street Kids along with their school lunches.
But other changes have created a disarray that many veteran educators say is unprecedented. Ms. Ripperger, for example, said she did not get a regular paycheck until mid-November. And when it came, it was for the amount she would have earned as a teacher. Many newly hired teachers reported similar delays in getting paychecks and health benefits; like Ms. Ripperger, they had to rely on emergency school paychecks.
There have also been glaring problems with the disciplinary system, severe overcrowding in some middle schools and high schools and persistent complaints that six new Regional Operations Centers have been slow to respond to building maintenance and other back-office needs.
"It's hard to untangle what is the normal disturbance and chaos that happens with new stuff, and what is actually a systemic problem," said Jill Chaifetz, executive director of Advocates for Children, a nonprofit group that closely monitors the school system and draws financing from private foundations as well as the state and federal governments. "As people try and flex the muscles of this new system, we're finding that some things can't respond either as quickly or as well as we had hoped. The question is: Is that part of the growing pain?"
In interviews, educators, parents and students said they felt caught in a netherworld between the old system they knew and a new one that is not yet fully formed.
Among their concerns are these:
- Special Education services and evaluations have been delayed, parents and educators say, because of difficulties in finding records that were moved to new regional offices from the old community school districts.
- While the new parent coordinators at some schools are reaching out to parents who long felt neglected, in others they have yet to carve out a role. In the largest schools, officials acknowledge, the parent coordinators are overwhelmed. Whether they are worth the $43 million price tag remains to be seen.
- Queens high school principals say they feel so isolated in the restructured bureaucracy, which eliminated the boroughwide high school district, that they now meet informally over dinner once a month to exchange tips on the new system.
"We don't have the big picture of what's happening," said one principal. The new regional structure, which mixed high schools into smaller networks along with elementary and middle schools, has been unhelpful, this principal said, adding: "When we had 35 high schools together, the communication was constant."
The mayor's overhaul, called Children First, includes parts that cannot be fully assessed for months if not years, like a training academy for new principals and the new curriculums, which will be judged largely by standardized testing.
Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said the new system, while hardly flawless, was functioning well.
"If you look at the key things of Children First, they are working," Mr. Klein said in an interview last week. "Some of them, not surprisingly, have hit a few bumps. But they are working."
Most important, the chancellor said, the system has been transformed in little more than a year.
"There is no question that there are lots of people in the bureaucracy who will resist this kind of structural — more importantly, cultural — change," Mr. Klein said. "I think the good news is that it has happened."
Mr. Bloomberg is the first mayor in more than 130 years to hold direct control over the school system, the nation's largest. With Mr. Klein, he has sought to change virtually everything, from how most students are taught reading and math to how principals order supplies. He has bluntly told voters to judge him on whether the schools improve.
Mr. Bloomberg now appoints a majority of members of a weakened Board of Education, which he renamed the Panel for Educational Policy. Even members of the panel say it does little more than rubber-stamp the mayor's decisions.
True to Mr. Bloomberg's word, mayoral control has ended years of public squabbling among the mayor, chancellor and Board of Education. But relations between the administration and the teachers' and principals' unions have been icier of late than in recent memory. This came as a particular disappointment to private supporters, who have committed $160 million to the school system since Mr. Klein took over.
"We worked hard for reform, and for a while it looked like it was going down the drain as we saw City Hall and the teachers and principals all squabbling in the pages of the newspaper," said Kathryn S. Wylde, president and chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a business group that pledged $30 million to the Leadership Academy for principals. "It's hard for the business community to be enthusiastic when the educational community appears to be spending more time fighting with each other than figuring out how to improve the schools and educate the kids."
By far, the most spectacular failure of the mayor's centralization effort has been the breakdown in the Discipline process, which caused long delays in suspending and removing dangerous students from the schools and led a chastened Mr. Bloomberg to bluntly admit, "We've screwed up."
At the same time, this failure brought the potential benefits of mayoral control into focus. Mr. Bloomberg quickly took responsibility and developed a plan to flood the most dangerous schools with extra safety agents and to impose a "three strikes and you're out" policy for repeat offenders of the discipline code.
But not every problem leads to a mayoral proclamation, and some parents say the major reshuffling has had significant side effects.
Betty Stryker, vice president of the PTA at Intermediate School 2 on Staten Island, said the burdens of the new curriculums and newly required double periods of math and reading were sapping teachers' time and patience, leaving them with less energy to deal with individual students' needs.
"It's draining and I see it," Mrs. Stryker said. "I'm just not positive it's going to work."
Elementary School teachers are discovering that the new literacy program is less a curriculum than an approach, with rituals like guided small group reading and read-alouds, but little in the way of specific, designated content. It seems to be working best in schools where it was in place to some extent the year before.
At P.S. 30, for instance, teachers already used a balanced literacy approach. Even so, Ms. Ripperger said, some teachers are struggling to handle some aspects of the curriculum, like guided reading, in which a teacher works with one small group of readers while other small groups work independently. Ms. Ripperger said she felt confident that with time, teachers and students would get the hang of the new curriculum.
"We have to have some faith and keep going," she said. "I believe fundamentally in the concept of the reform."
Others disagree.
Lorraine Skeen recently resigned as a local instructional superintendent, a new position created by the mayor's overhaul that had her supervising 10 schools in the Bronx. She left in part because she lacked faith in the literacy program.
"My sense from the teachers is much of what they had before that worked for them has been taken away," Ms. Skeen said. "In certain cases, people are floundering, because it's a very very open-ended program, and it's not systematic."
In most schools, there has been more training this year than in years past, partly because of new literacy and math coaches as well as an extra 50 minutes of teacher training a week. Even so, some teachers and supervisors say the training has been more theoretical than substantive.
Megan Behrent, an English teacher at Franklin D. Roosevelt High School in Brooklyn who, under the new system, teaches two 90-minute literacy classes to ninth graders reading below grade level, said a week of training in the summer and two days in November were helpful but not sufficient.
"It's a lot of explaining how great this program is and how this program is supposed to work," she said, adding that when teachers have or anticipate problems, "those things are not dealt with as much."
Mr. Klein said in the interview that he was particularly pleased with the parent coordinators, the math and literacy coaches and the principals' academy. He also praised the New Beginnings centers, 16 mini-schools for disruptive (but not extremely violent) high school students.
The high schools that send students to the centers say they are also pleased with the program. As a result, four more centers are being created this spring. But some New Beginnings staff members say the program, like much else about the overhauled school system, is still getting its footing. Some sites have been sent students they are unprepared to handle, like violent or special education students.
David Raubvogel, an assistant principal at two New Beginnings Centers in the Bronx, praised the concept but acknowledged that starting them had been like "changing the wheel while the car is moving."
Ms. Chaifetz of Advocates for Children said it was too soon to draw firm conclusions about the New Beginnings centers or most other aspects of the new school system.
"I think you really have to wait for it to shake out," she said. "All you can see are some glimmerings."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
For specific information about Children First, visit the NYC Department of Education website at http://www.nycenet.edu/Administration/Childrenfirst/FAQs.htm#instruction
January 7, 2004
For U.S. Aid, City Switches Reading Plan
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Just four months after adopting a new citywide reading curriculum, New York City plans to abandon it in 49 troubled elementary schools so it can win $34 million in federal aid that is available only if the city uses a more structured program approved by New York State and the federal Department of Education.
Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has consistently argued that the city's choice of reading curriculum is superior to the more rigid programs endorsed by the Bush administration, and that the city needs a uniform approach to streamline teacher training and help students who move from school to school within the system.
Yesterday, he continued to praise the city's curriculum but said that the $34 million was too much money to give up.
"This is a significant amount of money for some of our really-highest-needs programs," Mr. Klein said in an interview. "It's a pragmatic decision."
The chancellor also for the first time criticized federal education officials, saying they should be more flexible. He said that recent national testing data showed that New York, Boston and San Diego — cities that use a so-called balanced literacy approach — were making better progress than cities using programs preferred by Washington as "scientifically proven."
"It's being done in the name of science," Mr. Klein said of Washington's restrictions. "And the question is: where's the science?"
New York City's current balanced literacy curriculum uses books from classroom libraries instead of basic readers and encourages students to read and write on their own level.
In its place, at the 49 schools, officials are proposing a more traditional program called Harcourt Trophies and a companion Spanish version called Trofeos.
The $34 million that Mr. Klein hopes to win is part of $129 million in federal Reading First money awarded to New York State in September. Applications from individual school districts must be submitted to Albany by the end of this week.
Other school systems using reading curriculums similar to New York City's have refused to bow to the federal mandates.
San Diego did not apply for Reading First money and Boston's application was rejected because the city refused to fully abandon its existing reading program, even in a small number of schools.
Boston is negotiating with Massachusetts officials to retain the core of its balanced literacy program and still qualify for Reading First money to be used in 10 of its 134 schools, said Thomas W. Payzant, the Boston schools superintendent.
"We would have had to make changes that were so dramatic it would have tossed out everything we had been working on for four or five years," he said, adding, "You don't want to turn down dollars, but by the same token, you don't just put in a program and in a year expect to see magnificent results."
In New York City, education officials declined to name the 49 schools that would get the new curriculum but said they were spread across the city.
They said the schools all had extremely low test scores — in most cases less than 40 percent of students are reading at grade level. The schools also serve impoverished communities and many have large populations of non-English-speaking students.
The Trophies program, published by Harcourt Education of Orlando, Fla., uses textbooks that include reading passages with built-in vocabulary and comprehension lessons and exercises.
Mr. Klein and other city education officials insisted that the Trophies program was very closely aligned with a balanced literacy approach, using real children's literature for reading material and many similar teaching techniques as well as employing classroom libraries along with more traditional books known as basal readers.
"The Harcourt Trophies program contains all the elements that our current comprehensive approach does," said Michele Cahill, the chancellor's senior counsel for educational policy.
She did, however, note a major difference between the Trophies program and the citywide curriculum.
"Our citywide approach does not have basal readers," she said. "We use the literature in the classroom libraries as readers."
Privately, some education officials acknowledged that the department was bracing for criticism that it was somehow backing away from the citywide curriculum and that the chancellor's decision might have been pragmatic but it was also hypocritical.
Dr. Payzant, who was an assistant secretary of education in the Clinton administration, said he agreed with Chancellor Klein that education officials in the Bush administration were too inflexible in their view of reading programs.
"The irony is you have got a Republican administration that normally champions local control and opposes any kind of federal involvement in setting prescriptive curriculum for school districts to follow," he said.
"There ought to be some flexibility in deciding what the best way is to get the results."
Chris Doherty, the director of Reading First, defended the program.
"We really don't feel the requirements are overly rigid at all," he said. "It's helping focus the funds on programs that have proven to work."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company Costs:
The first phase of Children First (January 2002-January 2003) was expected to cost $3.75 million. Funds were provided by the Broad Foundation and Robertson Foundation. The reform is expected to be completed over three phases. (http://www.nycenet.edu/press/02-03/n36_03.htm) |
                                                              
