Better teachers in NYC: recruiting outsiders and retraining veterans

A New York Times article last week described how a young teacher in Brooklyn helped her students achieve test score improvements large enough to help get the school off the state's "registration review" list of failing schools. What's special about the teacher, Melanie Brown, is that she is a history and economics major who made her way into teaching through New York City's special recruiting and fast-track training program for talented career-changers, not through a traditional pre-service teacher-preparation program.  The article, by Anemona Hartocollis, describes the tremendous efforts of teachers like Brown and her mentor, Aissatou Diop, who met on Friday and Saturday nights throughout the year to plan for the coming week.  While Hartocollis portrays Brown as someone whose greatest strength may have been her mastery of the material she taught, particularly in math, the New York Post reported this week that NYC Schools Chancellor Harold Levy has proposed spending $9 million over three years to send city math teachers back to school to learn math, which is one of the recommendations of a commission he established last year. Critics of the proposal say that the money will be wasted if teacher training includes the "fuzzy math" of the new standards set by the state Board of Regents and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Read more in "How Troubled P.S. 307 Climbed Off the Bottom," by Anemona Hartocollis, The New York Times, January 16, 2002, (abstract only; the full article may be purchased) and  "School Woes Multiply," by Carl Campanile, New York Post, January 22, 2002.