In the news today, there was widespread coverage of Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott's policy speech announcing new plans for the city's lagging middle schools.
Among the proposals, Mr. Walcott said he wanted to open 50 more middle schools in the next two years and would focus on the city's poorest neighborhoods. For an additional 10 middle schools that are already in existence and are struggling, the city plans to ask for federal money to replace teachers and leadership for the next two years.
Mr. Walcott's policy speech also included the announcement that an entire incoming class of the New York Teaching Fellows Program will be trained to work in hard-to-staff middle schools in poor neighborhoods. The Daily News writes that existing middle schools will get more resources, including new nonfiction textbooks.
The changes come after results on this year's state test scores showed that seventh and eighth graders were the only tested students to see their scores drop on the reading exam, the New York Post reports. NY1 also has coverage of the announcement here.
Michael Mulgrew, the president of the teachers' union, the United Federation of Teachers, said he was concerned that Mr. Walcott's plan addressed only structural problems in schools, not what was being taught.
As if the high school application process were not already difficult enough, The Daily News has an article on students who have to go through it multiple times if their middle schools decide they have to repeat eighth grade rather than move on to high school.
And in national news, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system, a growing and diverse district in North Carolina, won this year's Broad Prize, which comes with a $550,000 award. That money will be distributed among the district's high school seniors for college scholarships.
A fuller roundup of what is in the news Wednesday can be found in Gotham Schools' Rise & Shine post.
Around town Wednesday:
At noon, Chancellor Walcott will join Reading Partners, an organization that promotes literacy, to introduce a volunteer tutoring program at Public School 188 The Island School in Manhattan. This fall, seven Title I city schools across four boroughs will participate in the program.
Also at noon, education groups that have long opposed many of the Bloomberg administration's policies, such as the Alliance for Quality Education and Class Size Matters, will gather on the steps of Tweed to protest the most recent budget cuts. They will be joined by City Councilman Robert Jackson, who is chairman of the education committee.
At 7:30 p.m. the president of Learning Matters, John Merrow, will host a conversation with the Success Charter Network's chief executive, Eva S. Moskowitz, and David Levin, a founder of the KIPP network of charter schools. That will be at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, and tickets are $15 for nonmembers.
On the Learning Network: Inspired by both a recent article, “In Small Towns, Gossip Moves to the Web, and Turns Vicious," and a 2008 article about one school trying to wean teenagers off gossip, it is asking students: How much do you gossip?
And on The Choice yesterday, in case readers missed it: A Tip Sheet on making the break from being a helicopter parent.