Come Work at Harvest Collegiate
The school I’m currently planning, Harvest Collegiate High School, is looking for excellent teachers to help plan and build our school. Full information is bellow. Please share widely.
Harvest Collegiate Open House This Monday
Harvest Collegiate will be holding an open house for prospective students (those currently in 8th grade) this Monday, from 5pm-7pm, at the school, 34 West 14th St. Hope to meet lots of people there!
Inside Schools Recommends Harvest Collegiate
Update: Harvest will hold an open house at the site of our school, 34 West 14th St on Monday, March 12, from 5-7pm. Hope to meet you there!
I had a new experience Saturday, as I represented the school I’m helping to plan, Harvest Collegiate, at a high school fair for 8th graders who did not receive a match in the first round of high school applications (for those not familiar with NYC schools, there are very few zoned/community high schools in NYC, and non in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn; 8th grade students have to choose schools, and are placed centrally through the city). It was very exciting to see our idea take one step closer to being a reality, but it was more thrilling to meet over a hundred students and their families who were eager to find an incredible education.
It’s a little nerve-wracking sitting back now, and hoping to be chosen, so it made my day yesterday to see Harvest get our first positive piece of press from Inside Schools, who had us on their list of “picks for high schools that still have room“:
Harvest Collegiate is a new school opening in the Legacy building 14th Street that promises lots of class discussions, hands-on activities and trips around the city. It has a well-developed website, a clear vision and an experienced principal.
Their fuller write-up captures just a few of the exciting things we have planned for our students:
Lots of planning has gone into the school, scheduled to open in the fall of 2012 with a 9thgrade class. While other brand-new schools were still scrambling to plan their curriculum and hire staff in the spring of 2012, Harvest Collegiate already had a well-developed website, a clear vision and an experienced principal with an impressive resume.
The school plans to offer lessons in Modern Africa and the Middle East as well as Spanish, piano, literature, jazz and genetics. Other activities will include theater, robotics, a girls group, basketball, soccer, volleyball, cooking and sailing. Tenth graders will develop service projects in conjunction with the Action Center to End World Hunger, where young people are taught ways they can join the efforts to end hunger and poverty. Plans are to have students visit the Irish Hunger Memorial and soup kitchens to learn about hunger in New York City.
Plans call for a two-week intensive in January for travel and learning beyond the classroom, beginning with a trip to Washington D.C. Burch hopes to take students o Central American in the future. Students will have the opportunity to visit Stone Barns, a nonprofit farm and education center north of Manhattan. Every week teens will spend half a day exploring in age-appropriate ways: 9th graders will explore the city, 10th graders will develop a service project, 11th graders will learn more about college and 12th graders will do career internships.
Big News: I’m Helping to Open a School
Updates: Harvest will hold an open house at the site of our school, 34 West 14th St on Monday, March 12, from 5-7pm. Hope to meet you there!
Also, Inside Schools Recommends Harvest Collegiate
I am humbled and incredibly excited to share that I am going to be part of a team that opens Harvest Collegiate High School, a new NYC public school. We will open our doors to about 100 freshmen next September, and grow over four years to serve students in grades 9-12. More information about the school, which is completely inline with my educational philosophies, is below.
I am very excited that the school will allow me to continue my relationship with the Institute for Student Achievement, which I have been a part of at both Bronx Lab and the Academy for Young Writers. I am also extremely excited to be founding a school that will be part of the Coalition of Essential Skills, ten years after reading Ted Sizer’s work convinced me to become a teacher.
A mutual acquaintance introduced me to the school’s founding principal, Kate Burch, who has been a teacher and director of professional development at Humanities Prep in Manhattan. We instantly hit it off. I will be the school’s founding humanities teacher (pending the official hiring process in the Spring), as well as a partner in much of the planning of the school, its curriculum, and its day to day operations.
I am looking forward to sharing the joys and challenges of this journey in the coming years as I get the opportunity to implement many of the lessons I’ve learned from so many thus far in my career.
Three Things I Used to Think About School Reform
Two months ago, Nancy Flanagan wrote a great piece about changing her mind when it comes to school reform, which inspired me to do the same at the New York Time’s SchoolBook:
I used to think that if I didn’t know the solution to the problem, I could figure one out. I now think some problems are so complex that there can never be a silver bullet.
I used to think we needed to create model schools that could then be replicated. I now think that it is so hard to sustain a model that each school needs to be invested in its own unique vision.
I used to think our goal should be to create systems of great schools. I now think great schools are so hard to create and maintain that our goal should be to create good and sustainable ones.
Democracy and Possibility
Two quotes to start the week:
The first, a recent one, from Deborah Meier:
In all these years we have never seriously confronted society with the question of “why?” Do we really want schools to undo our class divisions? Do we want them to produce adults who are members of a shared and commonly cherished adult world—with inequities that we could all imagine living with? With adults who more or less equally appreciate and utilize democracy for their own self-interests, have more or less equal access to the media, to political influence, with fair and equal protection of the law?
I’d like, Diane, given the obvious reality of the above (it’s said harshly, but isn’t it the simple truth?), to suggest we shift the discussion. Maybe it’s time to think together about what schooling could be if we truly saw it as the bedrock of democracy—if we imagined we cared enough for the future of democracy to put everything we have into using schools toward such an end. We need something to fight FOR, not just against. The billionaires’ reforms take us backward, so what would forward look like?
The second, a much older one, from the philosopher Hannah Arendt:
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
~Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1968), 196.
Democracy and possibility? That sounds like something worth fighting for to me. Let’s get to this first period, tomorrow morning.
