News & Viewpoints
Current events and perspectives from the Eskolta team
Sparking an Interest in Student Mindsets and Watching It Grow
Every year, when confronted with the state exams, I.S. 126 Albert Shanker School for Visual and Performing Arts in Queens faced the same problem: students would give up before finishing. The problem with persistence and fear of challenge had become so great that...
Transfer School Accountability: Alternative Metrics for Alternative Schools
"Government accountability systems too often rush into assessing transfer schools by making a few tweaks to high school measures, an approach that inevitably over-identifies failure and under-identifies success, or simply gets it wrong." New York State Commissioner...
Developing a Sense of Belonging through Internships at Flushing International High School
When Gaby, a junior at Flushing International High School, was first assigned to interview her mentor at her internship, she hesitated and asked if she could interview another intern, saying Maria was “too busy and important.” But upon interviewing Maria, Gaby was...
The Turnaround: An Interview with Transfer School Alumnus Orlando Ramos
"I remember, I got to IDP and they asked me, 'What do you want to do?' I was like, 'Oh, I matter now! I exist! This is cool!' They didn’t do that in my old school… Now I had people stop me in the hall and say, 'You have such a good track record. You need to keep it...
Bringing Research to the Classroom
“It brought a whole new layer to our work and really deepened our thinking. Instead of just saying to kids, ‘Well, work harder. Do more work,’ we actually had ways to think about this – ‘Is this work valuable to students? Do they feel like they belong in class? What’s...
The Turnaround: An Interview with Transfer School Alumna Patricia Lucas
“The teachers would sit me down and say, 'You have someone depending on you.' It’s hard… You’re in a dark place and dealing with so many things in life, and people are telling you what you need to do—it can get annoying. But it is also good. It made me realize that...
Engaging Students in the Development of Their Own Growth Mindsets for Career Readiness
How can schools help students develop a mindset that will support perseverance and lead to long-term career success? During the 2015–16 school year, the NYC Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Readiness (OPSR) partnered with Eskolta to launch the Career Competency Fellows program that brought together a select group of eleven educators from schools exhibiting a promising approach to career development for all students.
Honoring Those Changing Education in NYC
“For far too long, the debate in education focused on the supposed deficiencies of the students who walk through the doors, instead of putting the focus where it belongs—on the schools. Schools need to know what their students need to be successful, and then create...
Building Value for Learning at High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology
Mounting evidence educational psychology research indicates that when students see the value of their schoolwork—how it relates to what they care about and can help them reach their goals—they become more interested in their classes and motivated to take on...
An Interview with High School of Telecommunication Arts and Technology Alumnus and English Teacher, Matthew Raphaelson
“What is it about what we are doing that is not reaching those students’ needs? How do we address those kids that keep us up at night?” This fall, 12 school teams from across New York City will come together for their first convening on October 11 as part of the...
Lessons from Metropolitan Diploma Plus: Higher-Order Thinking through Daily Academic Discussion
“The tools and strategies we developed and piloted have ensured that our students become stronger readers, writers, and thinkers.” What gets students more invested in their own learning? Many schools struggle to help students remain engaged in school, especially when...
Lessons from Bronx Arena: Improving Student Outcomes through Mastery-Based Learning
Why take on mastery-based learning? Success in college and beyond depends not only on a student’s skills and content knowledge, but also in her ability to independently take ownership over her learning. However, even for the most vigilant student or teacher, it can be...
Beyond Incentives: Three Years of Cultivating Teacher Leadership in Career Pathways
“I feel a lot of ownership in this school because I do feel like my work really matters here and makes a difference.” Teacher leaders can be powerful levers for school change. Yet in many districts, talented teachers must look outside the classroom to find positions...
Transfer School Conference 2017 Highlights
“The advocacy work of transfer schools goes beyond being in the classroom and running schools. Being in a transfer school means consistently being a revolutionary about the work.” On June 8, 2017, more than 950 district and organizational leaders, teachers, students,...
Lessons from North Queens Community High School: Strengthening Student Persistence in Mathematics and Beyond
Mathematics can be a challenging subject, especially for students who have fallen behind in school. When faced with difficult math problems, students may freeze up or express defeatist attitudes such as, “I’m just not a math person.” But a growing body of educational...
Eskolta Book Club: Reflections on the Challenge of Equity in Schools
It can be a challenge for any educator to navigate the diversity of experiences, cultures, and learning that students bring to their school environments, but doing so is an essential part of helping students develop a sense of belonging in school. Eskolta teams have...
Preparing Students for Their Future Careers through the Career Counseling Initiative
How can schools help students prepare for their future careers? Some schools have established promising practices to help students develop career readiness, but often this information is not documented or shared with other schools. This year, Eskolta is working with...
Connecting and Sharing at the Transfer School Conference: A Conversation with Kevin Daniels, Learning to Work Program Manager and Conference Advisor
This June 8, more than 1,000 educators from 36 schools will attend the seventh annual NYC Transfer School Conference in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. An initiative of the NYC Department of Education Office of Postsecondary Readiness in partnership with Eskolta,...
Eskolta’s 2016 Annual Report
We are excited to announce the release of Eskolta’s 2016 annual report. This report shares the details of our continued and growing impact working with reflective and empowered educators to solve problems collaboratively and spearhead meaningful change. In 2016, we...
Eskolta Celebrates Art of NYC Transfer School Students
On December 8, Eskolta welcomed teachers, counselors, students, and their family members to the Eskolta Transfer School Student Art Gala, an evening dedicated to celebrating the hard work and artistic talents of transfer school students. The show featured paintings...
The 2016–17 Advanced Academic and Personal Behaviors Institute
How can we help students to adopt strategies for keeping their head up when they want to shut down? This is the question that NYC teachers and counselors in the 2016–17 Advanced Academic and Personal Behaviors Institute are tackling. We all know the feeling of...
Lessons from Bronx Haven: How can feedback strategies support student learning?
Placing Student Feedback at the Center of Teaching and Learning: A School Redesign Model based on the work of Bronx Haven High School Teachers know how important feedback is for the learning process. Students need more than a simple test score if they are going...
A Conversation with Adonia Dale, Eskolta Transfer School Alumni Fellow
In September, Adonia Dale joined Eskolta as our first ever Transfer School Alumni Fellow, a one-year office position created specifically for recent transfer school graduates to gain experience in the workplace. Adonia is a recent graduate of Metropolitan Diploma Plus...
The Road to Standards-Based Grading Schoolwide
There are many steps that go into the development of a schoolwide standards-based grading system. At Murray Hill Academy, the Eskolta team has been working with department heads to launch a new system of rubric creation. In the past, every teacher in the building had...
Developing Student Self-Reflection in P.S./I.S. 268
"There were students we’d been trying to move for years but weren’t able to, that we were able to move this year with the [Academic and Personal Behaviors] pilot work." One major tenet of Eskolta’s mission is centered on encouraging a culture of...
Eskolta celebrates six years co-hosting the NYC Transfer School Conference
On June 9, 2016, Eskolta founder and executive director Michael Rothman celebrated the organization’s sixth annual transfer school conference. Successfully organized and funded in partnership with the New York City Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary...
Achieving School Success through a Distributed Leadership Approach
“When teachers are helping other teachers, it’s a little bit of a different feeling than when an administrator is working with a teacher. There’s a little more trust there. ” Much of Eskolta’s work focuses on helping New York City educators share best practices within...
Eskolta’s Leading Role at 2016 Carnegie Summit on Improvement in Education
Over 1,000 attendees from across the country gathered in San Francisco for the third annual Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s Summit on Improvement in Education. This summit, the largest to date, offered practitioners, researchers, and district and...
What works to make teacher leaders stay committed to education? Updates on Eskolta Studies of Teacher Leadership in New York City
Since Eskolta’s founding, we have worked extensively with the New York City Department of Education to understand the impact of City initiatives and policies on educators in the City. Our research study on a citywide initiative to increase teacher leadership...
Eskolta Releases 2015 Eskolta Annual Report
The staff and leadership team of Eskolta School Research and Design are pleased to announce the release of our 2015 annual report. In our collection of data and writing of this year’s report, we have learned many lessons in how to best convey the story of Eskolta’s...
New Eskolta Case Study Release
"They’ve heard it a million times: ‘Yeah, you’re going to say I’m smart; I’ve got the potential.’ They don’t believe it, and the ones that do don’t get how it translates. When you use effort language, it sends the message that it’s a process, that you’re not finished...
Interview with Michael Wolach, Eskolta Fellow 2016
As part of Eskolta’s inaugural fellowship, teacher leader Michael Wolach is honing his skills in project management, data collection and analysis, and design principles. Though this is his first foray in formally studying those skills with Eskolta, his exposure to our...
Eskolta Presents at the National Dropout Prevention Conference
Districts, educators, and researchers from around the country gathered in Austin, Texas this past October to share best practices and current thinking at the Annual Conference of the National Dropout Prevention Conference. The conference was the nation’s largest...
Metacognitive Learning at Metropolitan Diploma Plus
Metacognition, the awareness of and reflection on one’s own thinking process, is critical to student success. It is critical to adult success too. The story of Eskolta’s work with Metropolitan Diploma Plus is a story of how metacognition is helping schools improve....
Launch of Eskolta Fellows Program
This fall, Eskolta announced a new fellowship program designed to train school and district-based educators to lead the school change process. Through this program, a cohort of Eskolta Fellows is engaging in a unique learning experience focused on the methods and...
The Problem with Accountability
Nine years ago, I and others working with transfer schools sat with the NYC Department of Education staff responsible for creating the first progress reports. They generously listened to feedback on how to assess transfer schools and let the progress report evolve...
Three Questions We Have to Answer to Help Educators Succeed
After nine years of teaching, my wife gave up on the profession a few years ago and made a career change. She is now the deputy director of a government delegation to the United States, meeting with diplomats, engineering treaties, and giving speeches at the United...
Transforming Teacher Learning
A few years ago, I decided I would learn to play the mandolin. Even though in my youth I had adopted the refrain that “I’m not a musical person,” I figured I had changed as an adult. I considered myself a lifelong learner and had chosen a career (education) in which I...
In Schools We Trust…
Recently, the New York City Department of Education added a simple but critical element into its capacity framework for schools: Trust. Trust, of course, is important for more than only schools. As the philosopher Sissela Bok wrote: “Whatever matters to human beings,...
What Do Great Schools Produce?
Several years ago, I had the chance to visit a number of schools in Kenya that had been started specifically for impoverished children—Nairobi has an estimated 100,000 orphans living on the street, and these schools reached out to them. One school particularly stuck...
School Accountability after 2014
What does the year 2014 matter in the history of public education? For those who are keeping score, this is the year, according to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), when every student in America was supposed to have achieved proficiency. According to the law, which...
A Nation Still at Risk
Thirty years ago, the authors of A Nation at Risk told us: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to...
Recognizing the Importance of Feedback in Education
For years in education, when talking about what matters in classrooms everyone refers to the same power trio: curriculum, instruction, and assessment. But in doing so we often under-emphasize a critical fourth ingredient: feedback. Feedback merits the same level of...
Are Computers in the Classroom Tools or Diversions?
At some point early in the U.S.-Soviet space race, the two nations set out to solve a problem: How would space travelers write in the subzero weightlessness of outer space? Harnessing millions of dollars in resources along with the ingenuity of the same scientists who...
Peer Learning: Worth All Its Inefficiency
At first glance, democracy is not a very efficient system. Put a good dictator in charge and it would seem you can get a lot more accomplished a lot more quickly. But we have learned since grade school to recoil at such ideas in part because we know that the more we...
What Do We Value in Our Students?
Values: They’re the third rail of public education. You can talk about preparing students for college or career or learning basic skills, or you can talk about teaching dancing or drumming or DNA. Just don’t talk about teaching values. I can understand people’s...
How to Deal with Failures
What if you were repeatedly told you were a failure? Eventually, you would turn off, give up, drop out. This is, unfortunately, the experience of many students who struggle in New York schools, just a few of whom get back on track and end up in transfer schools. Five...
Making the Grade
It is virtually impossible to think about schools without thinking about grades and test scores. For many, they are taken for granted as the way to judge results. Test scores have many advantages. They feel reassuringly final: no wishy-washy changing them after the...
Adding Value: Let’s Be Careful About What We Measure
Are students learning? At a time when teachers’ unions are being bashed, budgets are shrinking, and the big funders are demanding that every teacher be measured by their test scores, it seems only fair to ask: What do the numbers tell us about student learning? Many...
What’s in a Name?
What’s in a name? “Eskolta” may be hard to spell, but here at Eskolta, it means a lot to us. Latin happens to have two very similar words for “listen” (ausculto) and “school” (schola); squashing them together, you get: Eskolta. It was important to me in naming this...