Notes from the Field
Submitted by Frank Murphy on, Nov. 2, 2010
The purpose of City School Stories.com is to tell the story of urban public education in America from the perspectives of the principals and teachers who daily work and live in city school communities. These are the people who best know what is taking place in any particular school. Yet they are seldom offered the opportunity to describe or explain their work to the general public.
Now that this site is established, I invite readers to share your stories concerning your own classrooms and schools.
Guest posts to this blog will be published under the category titled Notes From The Field. If you are not ready to author a post but want to be heard, send an e-mail to mailto:f@cityschoolstories.com in which you briefly describes how the school year is unfolding at your school. I will select quotes from your e-mail, which I will then publish. In your e-mail tell me how you wish me to attribute the quote (anonymous, a pseudonym or your actual name.)
If you teach in an empowerment school, talk about your experiences so far with the new scripted instructional program.
Stories from teachers who are staffing the new Promise Academies would be of great interest.
If you are teaching at a school that is piloting the new weighted funding formula, talk about any effect this new budgeting process has had on your school.
Are you in one of the one hundred or so schools that have received a new principal, if so how well is the leadership transition taking places?
New teachers what kinds of supports are you receiving in your new positions?
You could talk about student management, parent involvement, and colleague collaboration. You decide what story to tell or comments you make.
We daily accomplish our mission of educating the youth of our society and we need to let the world know of our successes. Your comments and personal stories will help to tell the general public of our challenges and rewards as urban educators. Most importantly, by creating a forum to collectively tell our own stories we say that we will not continue to be passive victims of ill-conceived school reform strategies. We instead insist on being recognized and treated as the knowledgeable professional educators that we are.
Send your stories, story ideas, or comments to mailto:f@cityschoolstories.com
I hope to use excerpts from e-mail correspondence in order to put together a fairly regular briefing as to how well the Imagine 2014 agenda is playing out at schools across the district.