Chancellor Carmen Fariña speaks with East Flatbush Community Research School Principal Daveida Daniel during a visit of the Renewal middle school.
Every afternoon at a struggling middle school in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, sixth- and seventh-graders spend an extra hour at school improving their reading skills. But they can’t hide in the back of a classroom.
Instead, the students at East Flatbush Community Research School are sitting face-to-face with their peers and instructors. In one classroom this week, tutors worked with the school’s lowest-level readers in groups of four. In another room, eight students pulled out key words from a book (which on Tuesday happened to be about about a vampire bunny). Down the hall, the highest-performing students took an elective class focused on critical thinking skills.
The school is able to offer that intensive help because the adults working with the students aren’t all teachers. Many are tutors and social workers hired by University Settlement, the nonprofit partnered with the school through the city’s “Renewal” turnaround program. Read more.
Elodie Oriental, 15, (left), and her twin sister, Ismaelle, do homework after school at Brooklyn Generation School.
The 6 education stories that got New York talking in 2015
While some years have brought a flood of changes to New York City schools, 2015 was defined more by waiting and watching.
How would the city put its plan to turn around nearly 100 long-struggling schools into action? What should, or could, be done to integrate one of the most segregated school districts in the country? Would the aggressive push to limit testing yield results?
Some of those questions were answered. But many of the moments that defined 2015 — from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s new set of education goals to his fight to keep control of the city’s schools — will continue to hold our attention through the new year. Read more.
Nia Wallace, a current eighth-grader at Girls Prep Middle School, attends BEAM’s summer math camp at Bard College.
For seventh-graders with a ‘spark’ in math, the road to STEM careers starts at camp
Jennora Blair wasn’t about to miss her first real college lecture.
The 13-year-old middle school student from Brooklyn knew that “Darwin, Mendel and the Origins of Life” was about to start in Yale University’s William L. Harkness Hall. But as she walked quickly across campus, class schedule in hand, she didn’t know whether she was headed in the right direction.
“It’s like our first day of college. We don’t know where we’re going,” she joked.
Blair and her friend made it to watch the lecture on that recent Saturday morning, thanks both to a campus map and a growing nonprofit program that gives an extra boost to seventh-graders from low-income city schools with a certain “spark” for math.
Called Bridge to Enter Advanced Mathematics, or BEAM, the nonprofit launched in 2011 with a goal of shepherding promising students into careers in science, mathematics, engineering and computer science. Unlike other New York City-based programs that target black and Hispanic middle school students with a laser focus on getting them into a specialized high school like Bronx Science, BEAM is set on expanding students’ passion for math — and guiding them past high school into college and a career. Read more.
Sean Licata, who is starting his fourth year as principal of the School of Diplomacy in the Bronx, watched over his students on the first day of school.
The Richard R. Green campus is a drab, three-story brick building in the northwest Bronx. But this year, its metal fences are adorned with banners for each of the four schools inside and new flowers line the entranceway, where the doors have been painted bright blue and lampposts are now school-bus yellow.
The changes didn’t go unnoticed at the campus, which teachers say has a longstanding negative reputation in its Williamsbridge neighborhood. As students returned to school Wednesday, kids took photos of the new façade and parents danced to music playing near the entrance. A few students from one school even thought they were on the wrong floor of the building because the hallways were unrecognizable.
“The kids themselves have a different perception,” said Shamika Powell, a seventh-grade English teacher who just started her seventh year at the School of Diplomacy, one of the schools in the building. “You feel like you really want to be here.”
All four of the building’s middle schools are struggling to raise their students’ low reading and math proficiency rates, and three are a part of the city’s “Renewal” turnaround program. Schools in that program are expected to show academic improvements over the next two years, and at the start of this high-stakes school year, officials said they hoped the building’s new, welcoming environment would lay the groundwork for more comprehensive changes to come. Read more.