Epañol-

El PTA (Asociación de Padres y Maestros) de la escuela Castle Bridge
será el anfitrión de su primer Epectáculo Multicultural y Feria
Gstronómica el dia 17 de Mayo del 2013. La Feria de comidas
multiculturales será de 5 a 6 de la tarde y el Epectáculo es de 6 a 8
de la noche.  Este gran evento se dará lugar en el Auditorio de la
escuela PS 128. La entrada está localizada en la calle 169 y la
avenida Saint Nicholas.  Para llegar tome el tren A hasta la estación
168 Street ó el tren #1 hasta la estación 168 Street.
Donación: Adultos y Niños 7+ años: $5.00
Menores de 7 años: $2.00

Insideschools review- Castle Bridge School

Castle Bridge is a happy place, where students learn through play and exploration. Patterned after Central Park East Elementary School in East Harlem, Castle Bridge combines a progressive approach to teaching with dual language instruction in English and Spanish.

About half of the students speak Spanish at home; the other half speak English. Teachers spend a half-day speaking to their students in one language and then switch to the other, so kids end up learning each subject in both Spanish and English. Founding Principal Julie Zuckerman said that, to her surprise, students particularly excel at speaking their non-native language during math lessons.

Classrooms can get loud and messy, but rules are clear and teachers always maintain control. Children play in groups of two to four with blocks, LEGOS, sand tables, dolls and dress-up corners–learning to get along with one another as well as building their academic skills. During our visit, when one girl accidentally knocked over her classmate’s intricate wooden-block ramp, the teacher brokered an apology, complete with a hug and a joint effort to rebuild the ramp.

Students develop strong relationships with each other and also with adults, giving the school a familial atmosphere. Classes combine children in two grades; kids stay with the same teacher, in the same classroom, for two years. Adults go by their first names. Instead of report cards, teachers write multiple-page “narratives” for each child twice a year.

Zuckerman, former principal of Central Park East I, believes playtime is crucial to learning. She even participates in daily gym class, acting as both referee and playmate as her kids let off steam and run around.

Classes have about 22 children and at least two adults (sometimes as many as seven, including parent volunteers and student teachers). Because teachers know each child so well, they can assign individual and group work tailored to their kids’ strengths and weaknesses.

Parent involvement is strong. Moms and dads often drop in to help out in the classroom. Families also join students in a weekly Monday morning school-wide sing-a-long (for which the principal plays guitar) and weekly Wednesday afternoon ice-skating in Central Park.

The youngest children have a nap after lunch–with optional teddy bears. Teachers also use the teddy bears in certain lessons, such as talking about feelings.

Parents who are looking for a traditional education—with learning based on textbooks and an emphasis on standardized tests—will be disappointed.

But the parents we met on our visit were happy. “Everything is worked into the curriculum so you don’t have to do music or art lessons after school,” one mother, Emma Frank, told us, calling Castle Bridge her “dream school.” She said her child even gets public speaking practice during weekly “oration” lessons.

Castle Bridge shares space with the popular PS 128 Audubon, close to the 168th Street A, C and 1 subway stop and across the street from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

Castle Bridge opened with kindergarten and 1st grade classes in fall of 2012 and will add a grade each year until it grows to a K-5 school with 200 students.

Special education: Castle Bridge is an “inclusion” school, meaning children with disabilities are included in all of the school’s activities. Each classroom has two teachers, at least one of whom is certified to teach special education or ESL.

Admissions: School tour and application available at the school for K & up; pre-K admissions are through the DOE. English-dominant kids are not accepted after 1^st grade. The school is committed to serving a diverse population, says Zuckerman, and has set aside 10 percent of its seats for children with parents in the prison system. (Anna Schneider, February 2013)

Commentary

Language Education We Can Use

As the global nature of work and life in the 21st century becomes clearer by the day, calls for a greater focus on international education and language learning are growing louder. Leaders from the education, business, and national security communities are agreed: International understanding and second-language proficiency are critical to individual and national interests—and our K-12 system must do more to promote them.

But with respect to international education and language learning, more of what we are doing today wouldn’t be better. In fact, it might be worse.

For too many years, we have maintained a language-learning strategy that simply does not work. In programs using outdated pedagogies focused on grammar and translation and coupled with low expectations, students take foreign languages with goals that seemingly include everything except actually learning to speak the language. If graduates of our high schools regularly reflected that, after four years of mathematics, they couldn’t solve for an unknown variable, we would be outraged. But we share a laugh when someone says, “I took four years of a language, but I can’t really speak it.”

As a nation, we seem unconcerned by students’ wasting years in language programs with instructional approaches that have no chance of helping them achieve meaningful levels of proficiency. Students are neither learning to speak in large numbers nor at high levels because the traditional platform cannot possibly deliver enough intensity or time in the target language. As a result, everyone understands that putting Spanish or French or Mandarin on your resume simply means that you took it, not that you speak it.

But what is the goal of traditional programs if it is not learning to speak the language? Teachers and administrators will tell you that there is much more to language classes than just oral proficiency. There is cultural awareness and sensitivity, global knowledge, and exposure to the target language.

They are absolutely right. And these objectives would be well worth the investment if traditional world-language programs were actually set up for those outcomes. Unfortunately, they aren’t. They continue to operate with the primary goal of increased proficiency and a secondary goal of increased global knowledge. The result? We achieve neither.

But we could. To do so, however, we will need to part ways with our traditional one-size-fits-all approach to language instruction.

Let’s start with increased global knowledge. Rather than perpetuate the fiction that world-language classes can result in advanced proficiency, it is time to convert existing courses to a classroom experience that provides a combination of introductory language exposure, cultural studies, and deep, experiential learning about the countries that speak the target language. These middle and high school language courses would have the following three components:

• Specific, real-life language instruction narrowed to focus on survival travel skills and with the goal of teaching a subset of the current language curriculum to greater depth and understanding—with relevance and utility as guiding principles;

• A cultural-studies framework that teaches students how to understand a country’s cultural identity and to compare and contrast countries; and

• Global knowledge through the study, comparison, and contrasting of countries that speak the target language.

To be clear, students will not leave these classes with advanced language proficiency. What they will obtain, however, are the language skills needed to travel in countries that speak the language, an understanding of other countries and cultures, and an awareness of the global issues that impact both those countries and our own.

For the students who seek to achieve proficiency, classrooms with dual-language instruction will provide the route. In these classrooms, the target language is not taught as a separate subject; it is the language in which instruction is delivered. Students master the curriculum objectives in all subject areas, while becoming highly proficient in a second language. A recently released book by the renowned dual-language-education researchers Wayne Thomas and Virginia Collier, Dual Language Education for a Transformed World, provides ample evidence that not only is dual language a best practice for second-language acquisition, but it is also the “most powerful school reform model for high academic achievement, whatever the demographic mix!”

There are different models of dual-language education, including 50/50 two-way (in which half of instruction is presented in English and the other half in the target language), and 90/10 full immersion (in which nearly all instruction is conducted in the foreign language being taught). Communities with native Spanish-speaking, Mandarin-speaking, or other English-language-learner populations can benefit from the 50/50 model—a program that promotes academic achievement through enrichment, rather than remediation. In 90/10 programs, native English-speaking students benefit from the academic rigor inherent in learning nearly all content through the target language.

For students who enter these programs in the elementary years, school districts and states would develop companion middle and high school coursework that would build their language skills and ensure high-level proficiency by high school graduation.

No doubt, it will be difficult to wean our schools and districts from their traditional language approaches. But these approaches seek to teach language to 100 percent of the students with a success rate of 1 percent. Instead, we should aim for 10 percent participation in dual-language education to achieve 100 percent success, and support the remaining 90 percent of students with courses that will build survival language skills, cultural understanding, and global knowledge.

The good news: We can redeploy the existing world-languages course platform, teaching positions, and support resources to implement a language-learning and international education agenda that will actually achieve results.

In doing so, we will be in tune with the demands of states, businesses, and parents to better prepare students for the global world in which they will live and work.

Vol. 32, Issue 15, Pages 28-29

Come play a night of games with your kids, grandkids, nephews, nieces or other younger ones!!!

Friday, December 14 5-8pm
Location – Castle Bridge Cafeteria PS 513
560 West 169 Street Manhattan

Games will be provided and we’ll be teaching kids a wide variety of games, including Hisss, Rat-a-Tat Cat, Scrambled States of America, Forbidden Island, Zingo, Rush Hour, Rory’s Story Cubes and many others. These are from companies like GameWright and Think Fun which focus on creating games that are fun, challenging and even educational (shhhh, don’t tell the kids). These are aimed at roughly ages three to ten (3 to 10).

All game play is free.

There will also be food provided for sale.

And with Christmas coming, we’ll have the games for sale as well. The game publishers provide a special deal to schools, so half the retail price will go to support programs at Castle Bridge Public School. Castle Bridge is a just opened elementary school dedicated to providing a progressive, bi-lingual education to children in northern Manhattan.

Come to the cafeteria in the school and join in!

The school is located right at the 168th St. subway stop, which is easily accessible on the 1, A and C lines.

Feel free to just drop in, but if you can RSVP at nathan@nathannewman.org, that will help us plan table setup and volunteer support.

See you then!

We invite you to join us.

Dates: Friday October 12  to Sunday October 14

I am going to give a very detailed description so there are no surprises.

The cabin is  a very rustic log cabin in Tuxedo NY picture below. Camp Jefferson is a one cabin camp on a piece of property an hour north of the city. The camp was bequeathed to Broadway Church (incorporated in 1925) before the surrounding land was deeded to the state and became what is now Harriman State Park. The cabin sits on a hill overlooking Lake Stahahe. I have been given access to the cabin and have been using it for the last 14 years and  I have sat on the board.

There is a solar shower, and a separate bathrooms (male and female) The cabin has a kitchen (with a stove, running water, refrigerator)

a dressing room and one large room.

There are several cots and mattress, so you will have the option of :

1) sleeping family style in the main room

2) sleeping on the screened porch

3) or pitching your own tent on the grounds

There are 2 rowboats, the activities will be semi organized tie dye, scavenger hunt, hiking, fishing (catch and release with nets no hook and rod) and swimming if weather permits.

This is a group trip so we will all  be eating the same foods unless special diet or allergies ( I have a set menu and will send details later).

If you have your transportation let me know and let me know if you have room in your vehicle for others.

The cabin is accessible via public transportation but, you will need to be picked up from the train station.

Depending on the number of responses I may rent a 15 passenger vehicle.

The cost of the trip will include:

food, transportation if needed, and the donation to the cabin, the total cost will be determined by the number of families going.

Girls in the Girl Scout troop can come without parent if you think that your child can handle it, all others need a parent or guardian on the trip.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Best,

Crystal

WASHINGTON HEIGHTS — The Department of Education (DOE) approved a plan to house a new selective elementary school at the same location as P.S. 128 Audubon in Washington Heights Monday night.

The DOE agreed to allow Castle Bridge School, an application-based elementary school for children in kindergarten through fifth grade, to share space inside of P.S. 128, a Pre-K through fifth grade zoned elementary school located at 560 West 169th Street in Community School District 6.

Castle Bridge School would admit students through a school- based application process, with preference to District 6 residents, according to the DOE.

The decision was voted on during a Panel on Educational Policy (PEP) hearing held in Queens.

Although some parents at PS 128 have said they were concerned about their children sharing space with another school, many would-be Castle Bridge students have lauded the DOE’s move to bring a progressive non-charter school to Washington Heights.

“Castle Bridge is just what I am looking for for my son and I am keeping my fingers crossed that it comes through,” wrote one parents on an uptown local parenting email list.

Castle Bridge, called a “choice admissions elementary school” by the DOE, was originally slated to share a space with P.S. 115 at 586 W. 177 St. in Washington Heights. Instead, earlier this year the DOE gave the space to KIPP Charter School, one of the largest charter school chains in the country. Parents were angered by the DOE’s decision and began an online campaign fighting for space for Castle Bridge.

At a PEP hearing on the matter held last week Councilmember Ydanis Rodriguez, who represents the district where the school is located, said he supported the introduction of progressive public schools in the district.

Julie Zuckerman, the proposed principal of the Castle Bridge School and current principal at Central Park East I Elementary School in East Harlem, said she believed the two schools could successfully share space, since the proposed student body at Castle Bridge is much smaller in size than many schools that have previously shared a space with other local public schools.

Last summer, City Councilman Robert Jackson said that he supported the Castle Bridge plan, which he said would have great benefits to the Upper Manhattan community, but remains wary of the DOE’s practice of placing new schools at existing schools. Jackson is generally opposed to the practice he said has been shown to have a negative impact on children at the existing school.

Although Jackson does not represent the district, he serves as chair of the education committee.

DOE officials said that P.S. 128 has a student enrollment of 78 percent of its full capacity and argued the cohabitation would not create an overcrowded school.

In the first year, Castle Bridge would enroll approximately 60-70 students in kindergarten and first grade classes while enrollment at P.S. 128 would remain more or less the same, bringing the total building enrollment between 696 and 796 students.

Lissette Urena, a representative at PS 128 argued that although the school is not filled to capacity, classrooms are overfilled with students.

“[District] 6 needs more school options that reflect students’ needs but co-locations are NOT the way to achieve this goal,” wrote Washington Heights parent Tory Frye on the Community Education Council District 6 Facebook page.

The two schools will share the same space for two years, beginning during the fall of 2012, until a new site for Castle Bridge is located.

By Carla Zanoni, DNAinfo.com

By MICHAEL WINERIP

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Joel I. Klein, the former schools chancellor, are strong supporters of charter schools. Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein have repeatedly told principals at New York City’s traditional public schools that a new age of reform has dawned, that charter schools are the cutting edge and that if these principals want traditional public schools to survive, they must learn to compete in the educational marketplace.

And so, last summer, Julie Zuckerman, the principal of a highly regarded public elementary school — Central Park East 1 in East Harlem — applied to open a new elementary school on the other side of Manhattan, in Washington Heights. Her plan was to create something truly rare: an urban school not focused on standardized testing.

Ms. Zuckerman, who worked in education as a principal and teacher for nearly 30 years and has a doctorate from Columbia, was given preliminary approval for the school in October. On Jan. 6, she was one of 30 people invited to the Education Department’s headquarters at Tweed Courthouse, where Cathleen P. Black, the current chancellor, congratulated them for being chosen to run new schools.

On Jan. 19, Ms. Zuckerman was informed that her school — to be called Castle Bridge — would be located in a vacant space at Public School 115 in Washington Heights. “We are all systems go,” wrote Elizabeth Rose of the Education Department. On Jan. 27, Ms. Zuckerman was informed by Alex Shub, another department official, that she would be getting $40,000 in start-up money. “Sounds like you are doing all the right things,” Mr. Shub wrote in a Feb. 14 e-mail.

And then, a few days later, Ms. Rose called to say that everything had changed. Ms. Zuckerman would not be getting the space at P.S. 115. Instead, Marc Sternberg, a deputy superintendent, had decided to award that space to KIPP, the biggest, richest charter school chain in the country.

That set off sparks. There is a quiet but fierce battle going on in education today, between the unions that represent the public school teachers and the hedge-fund managers who finance the big charter chains, between those who trust teachers to assess a child’s progress and those who trust standardized tests, and occasionally it flares out into the open over something as seemingly minor as the location of a school.

On one side is KIPP, a nonprofit organization with 99 charter schools nationwide, including seven in New York City. It is a favorite of the Broad, Gates and Walton foundations; in the last four years, KIPP has raised $160 million to supplement the public funds it receives ($13,527 per student in New York).

On the other side is Ms. Zuckerman, who has followed in the footsteps of Central Park East’s founder, Deborah Meier, one of the best-known education innovators in America.

When Ms. Zuckerman was told the earliest she would be getting a site for her school was 2012, her supporters were furious, but not too surprised. “Everyone knows the D.O.E. favors charters,” said Kevin Guzman, who, along with his wife, Melissa, runs a preschool in Washington Heights and has circulated petitions on behalf of Ms. Zuckerman’s school. “It was David versus Goliath.”

Ms. Zuckerman refused to comment for this article. However, interviews with her supporters, including fellow principals, teachers, parents, community activists and elected officials, made it possible to piece together her story.

I also obtained e-mails that Education Department officials sent to Ms. Zuckerman.

They were provided by a staff member of an elected official. The staff member was sympathetic to Ms. Zuckerman but did not want to be named because of fear of retaliation.

Mr. Sternberg also did not respond to requests for an interview. But he wrote in an e-mail, “We can always improve our process around planning,” and added, “KIPP has run some of the best schools in New York City for 15 years, and we think this school is going to be an excellent option for Upper Manhattan families.”

He denied there was any favoritism.

There are major differences between Central Park East 1 and KIPP schools. Central Park East is known as a progressive school. Learning is often done through group projects. Instead of survey courses, students are encouraged to go deeper on fewer topics. There is little test prep.

The KIPP chain is famous for long school days that end at 5 p.m., as well as Saturday school. Performance on standardized tests is a central focus, and test prep is extensive. Courses tend to cover more ground, but do not go into as much depth.

There are also similarities between Central Park East and the four KIPP schools serving elementary-age children in New York. Both Central Park East and the KIPP schools have similar poverty rates: 74 percent of Central Park East students get subsidized lunches; two of the KIPP schools have higher poverty rates and two have lower rates. Academic performance is comparable. Two of the KIPP schools scored better than Central Park East on the 2010 state English tests; two scored worse. In math, KIPP is considerably stronger with three of the four KIPP schools doing better than Central Park East on state math tests.

Both are in demand. KIPP has 2,000 students on waiting lists for its seven schools, said Steve Mancini, KIPP’s spokesman.

At Central Park East, 180 were on last year’s waiting list for 12 openings. The Guzmans, whose preschool, the Small Idea, also follows a progressive philosophy, say that for several years many families with children at their preschool have applied to Central Park East, but none have been lucky enough to be selected in the school lottery.

When it comes to resources to open new schools, Central Park East is badly overmatched. According to its most recent tax forms, KIPP had a $1.7 million school expansion budget for New York in 2008. KIPP also has many well-paid executives working on new-school development, including David Levin, the KIPP New York superintendent, who makes $296,751 a year; eight other New York staff members earn $104,299 to $150,950.

At a public hearing in Washington Heights in February, Mr. Levin brought along two busloads of supporters dressed in KIPP T-shirts.

There were five people from Central Park East, including Ms. Zuckerman, at the same meeting. Ms. Zuckerman had no money or paid staff to fill out the abundant paperwork required for a new school. She did the planning in her spare time and got help from parent volunteers.

The Guzmans, who live in Washington Heights, have been the primary neighborhood organizers for Ms. Zuckerman’s school. They are volunteers who make a combined salary of $42,000 from their preschool and live in a back room of the school.

KIPP officials appear confident that the space in P.S. 115 is theirs. Though the decision will not be final until an April 28 vote by the city’s Panel for Educational Policy, KIPP posted recruiting flyers making it sound like a done deal: KIPP Star Elementary/Washington Heights/Now enrolling kindergarten/Housed within the P.S. 115 building.

Mr. Mancini, the KIPP spokesman, said that as soon as they realized the mistake, flyers were changed to say “proposed location.” (He provided a photo as confirmation.)

It took Ms. Zuckerman two weeks to get an appointment with Mr. Sternberg to ask why he had taken away her school site. She brought along three people for support: Mr. Guzman; Celia Oyler, an associate professor from Teachers College at Columbia University; and Marcia Sells, a lawyer who has a daughter attending Central Park East. At one point, Ms. Zuckerman asked to have the vacant space in nearby Intermediate School 90 — a school that had been mentioned earlier in the year as a possible location — if she could not have P.S. 115. She was told that I.S. 90 was being kept vacant for at least a year, so KIPP could eventually use the space to expand its school.

Castle Bridge was supposed to serve 200 students, including 10 percent who have a parent in prison. No other school in the city is known to seek out this group of children.

Several elected officials, including Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, have lobbied the chancellor to reverse the decision. Mr. Stringer spoke with Ms. Black twice last week. “She owned up to the fact that mistakes were made,” Mr. Stringer said. “She said she was looking for ways to solve the problem — I was pleased.”

A spokesman said the chancellor declined to comment. However, Mr. Sternberg did appear to get more focused last week.

He said he could not find space for September but promised Castle Bridge would open. “The best long-term solution for Castle Bridge,” Mr. Sternberg wrote, “is to make sure it opens in 2012 with permanent and adequate space.”

Ms. Zuckerman’s friends have urged her to get any promises in writing and counseled caution, reminding her how much the Department of Education’s word is worth.

E-mail:
oneducation@nytimes.com