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PLACE NYC is proud of this 100th edition which also marks another milestone – our fourth year of advocacy for high quality curriculum and excellence in education for all NYC public school students.
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Top Stories
NYC HS Offers Out
High school match day: NYC’s eighth-graders get offers 3 months earlier
Chalkbeat, 3/9/2023
New York City’s eighth-graders were awash in jitters and excitement Thursday as they awaited their long-anticipated high school admissions offers.
The annual rite of passage for the city’s 13-year-olds caps a notoriously complex, monthslong application process that requires students to select 12 top choices from a list of over 400 high schools across the city.
…The parent advocacy group PLACE NYC, which pushes for more academic screening and accelerated programs, described this year’s changes to screened admissions as an improvement over last year, but said the changes don’t “go far enough,” and pushed for the reintroduction of test scores as an admissions metric.
Advocates Corner
Press Statement
PLACE NYC Responds to High School Admissions Placements
3/9/2023
HS Survey Results Request
Participate in the 2023 NYC HS Admission Lottery Results
3/9/2023
If you are a parent of an 8th grader applying to high school, please help Amelie Marian, the parent who deciphered the lottery admission numbers, with her research by filling out her survey. She has been using past data to identify the cutoffs and odds of admissions.
ICYMI
School Funding Conversation with Professor Dr Marguerite Roza
CEC 2, 3, 20, 24, 25, 26 & CCHS, 2/28/2028
Election News
Is the Asian American Realignment Permanent?
Ross Barkan, Substack, 3/9/2023
Clash Looms Between Council and Mayor Adams as Speaker Sets Her Agenda
NY Times, 3/8/2023
Senate Blocks D.C. Law Over Crime Concerns, as Many Democrats Side With GOP
Wall Street Journal, 3/8/2023
Where New York’s Asian Neighborhoods Shifted to the Right
NY Times, 3/5/2023
City sued over new redistricting lines
Queens Chronicle, 3/2/2023
Other Headlines
Asian-American parents latest group to rally to increase NYC charter schools
NY Post, 3/9/2023
Supers’ Hot Seat
An inside look at meetings where superintendents are in the ‘hot seat’
NY1, 3/9/2023
Last week, superintendents and other top education officials gathered in an ornate conference room, and Sean Davenport, the superintendent of District 5 in Harlem, was in the hot seat.
No, really, that’s what they call it.
NYC Council to invest $3 million in arts programs at selected schools
NY Daily News, 3/9/2023
Ditching Grades for ‘Mastery’
As Schools Embrace Mastery Learning, and Confront Challenges of GPAs and College Admissions, Consortium Creates New ‘Bridge’ Transcript
The 74 Million, 3/9/2023
Creators of a grading system that ditches traditional A-F grades for a new “mastery” transcript know that’s too big a leap for some schools to make, so they’ve created a “bridge” that can ease students, parents and college admissions officers into the shift.
最早的一次…紐約市高中放榜 PlaceNYC籲改回成績篩選
World Journal, 3/9/2023
State officials consider new rules on restraint and seclusion in school
Times Union, 3/8/2023
SF War Over MS Algebra
SFUSD’s delay of algebra 1 has created a nightmare of workarounds
SF Examiner, op-ed by R. Ridgeway, 3/8/2023
All parents want opportunities for their children to excel academically. However, reaching the top in math at San Francisco Unified School District, is like climbing a cactus tree. It’s going to hurt.
At SFUSD, a math curriculum limiting student advancement currently exists; especially hindering socio-economically disadvantaged students from advancing in math. This is counter to what parents expect from a school district.
NY teacher at center of pronoun lawsuit called class ‘little sexist children’: ex-student
NY Post, 3/8/2023
How a Teachers Union Promotes Critical Race Theory
Wall Street Journal Editorial, 3/8/2023
Expanding CRSE
As Some States Restrict Black Studies, New York City Expands It
NY Times, 3/8/2023
New York City will launch a new Black studies curriculum next fall that could eventually be used across hundreds of schools, part of a local effort to embrace lessons on race and culture that have sharply divided school districts around the country along political lines.
Over 500 NYC parents, students rally at City Hall in effort to lift charter school cap
NY Post, 3/7/2023
Teachers Explain Why Letting Students Redo Assignments Is Problematic
EdWeek, 3/7/2023
New York schools continue to face fiscal challenges
NY1, 3/7/2023
City probing anti-white texts linked to black superintendent
NY Post, 3/4/2023
Inflection Point?
The Moral Case Against Equity Language
The Atlantic, 3/3/2023
The sierra club’s Equity Language Guide discourages using the words stand, Americans, blind, and crazy. The first two fail at inclusion, because not everyone can stand and not everyone living in this country is a citizen. The third and fourth, even as figures of speech (“Legislators are blind to climate change”), are insulting to the disabled. The guide also rejects the disabled in favor of people living with disabilities, for the same reason that enslaved person has generally replaced slave : to affirm, by the tenets of what’s called “people-first language,” that “everyone is first and foremost a person, not their disability or other identity.”
Defending Its Rankings, U.S. News Takes Aim at Top Law Schools
NY Times, 3/3/2023
Millions Mispent
Audits of Covid-19 Aid for Schools Find Millions of Dollars Misspent
Wall Street Journal, 3/3/2023
Millions of dollars in Covid-relief funds sent to school districts, colleges and state governments for education have been spent on questionable or potentially fraudulent expenses since 2020, federal and state auditors have found. The U.S. Education Department’s Office of Inspector General examined a sampling of the spending attached to more than $280 billion in federal pandemic funds, and identified faulty awards, double payments and improper contracts, according to reports recently released by the office.
Jamaica elementary school teacher busted for allegedly assaulting 8-year-old girl: NYPD
QNS, 3/3/2023
A 10-year-old wrote a score. Musicians around the world are performing it.
Washington Post, 3/3/2023
ICYMI
Columbia University permanently drops SAT, ACT admissions requirement
NY Daily News, 3/2/2023
Columbia University will no longer require SAT or ACT scores in undergraduate admissions, making it the first Ivy League college to implement the pandemic emergency measure as its official policy.
Schools Still Pouring Money Into Reading Materials That Teach Kids to Guess
The 74 Million, 3/2/2023
New SHS for Queens?
Parent board hears about SCA projects
Queens Chronicle, 3/2/2023
The Queens Borough President’s Parent Advisory Board meeting on Monday covered ongoing and upcoming School Construction Authority projects as well as concerns about a proposed Richmond Hill elementary school and demands for specialized high school seats.
…the Borough President’s Office is in talks with the SCA for a new building, not an extension, for the Queens High School for the Sciences at York College.
Lawmakers appoint three new members to Board of Regents
PoliticoPro, 3/1/2023
Identity Crisis
Double Crossed: Organizations that claim to represent minority groups are really working for the managerial elite
Tablet, 3/1/2023
New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, the crown jewel of the city’s public education system, was once 90% Jewish. By the time I entered Stuyvesant in 2013, it was 70% Asian. In the black-and-white photos that adorned the walls, rows of Steins and Cohens looked upon the newest crop of children from working-class immigrant families. Asians are ascendant in many once heavily Jewish domains: specialized high schools; elite colleges; medical schools.
…The same thing is happening in America’s fights over access to education. High Asian enrollment at New York City’s specialized high schools like Stuyvesant has become a problem for the city’s progressive politicians.
Why are young liberals so depressed?
Slow Boring, 3/1/2023
Shrinking Accelerated Seats?
New York City schools to create working group on phasing in smaller class sizes
City & State, 3/1/2023
Starting today, parents, school leaders and others can fill out a survey to express their interest in joining a working group where they’d have a front row seat to weigh in on a new state law that will gradually phase in stricter limits on New York City class sizes beginning next school year.
… The general consensus among researchers is that smaller class sizes are indeed more effective, but individual study findings are somewhat mixed. Opponents argue that there are more cost-effective ways to improve educational outcomes. There’s also some New York City parents who oppose lowering class sizes given how doing so would reduce the number of seats at some of the city’s most popular schools.
A Teachers Union Smears Asians as Communists
Wall Street Journal op-ed by W. Chin, 3/2/2023
Far too many NYC high schools are utter frauds
NY Post Editorial, 2/28/2023
Charter School Rift
Top NY pols rake in thousands in donations from teachers union while bashing charter schools
NY Post, 2/28/2023
In a stunning display of how New York politics work, two of the state Legislature’s most outspoken opponents of charter schools are also among the biggest recipients of campaign cash from New York’s teachers’ union and its political action committee.
State Sen. John Liu (D-Queens), chairman of the New York City Education Committee, has raked in $33,300 since his first Senate race in 2018, putting him in the No. 3 spot behind Sen. John Mannion (D-Syracuse), who got $35,100 during the same period.
NY teacher forced girl, 9, to use male pronouns — causing suicidal thoughts: suit
NY Post, 2/28/2023
Parents, students on the impact of school closures three years later
Fox News, 2/28/2023
A Slow Bleed
The End of the English Major
The New Yorker, 2/27/2023
The crisis, when it came, arrived so quickly that its scale was hard to recognize at first. From 2012 to the start of the pandemic, the number of English majors on campus at Arizona State University fell from nine hundred and fifty-three to five hundred and seventy-eight. Records indicate that the number of graduated language and literature majors decreased by roughly half, as did the number of history majors. Women’s studies lost eighty per cent.
A ‘unique partnership’: New York Hall of Science providing new pathway to careers for children in greater Corona neighborhoods
QNS, 2/23/2023