East Side Community

East Side Community is located in Manhattan, and I visited in January of 2016.

Highlights

Intervention and extensive literacy supports are provided during heterogeneously grouped double-period English class in 9th and 10th grade rather than in separate intervention classes.

Details:

East Side Community, a school that has received an “A” since New York started rating schools, has a strong reading culture and an independent reading program that has been “emulated across the city, state and country.” They have no separate intervention class in the high school and instead embed reading development in all the classes and in particular in their double period English classes. During this double period reading class, they use reading and a reader's/writer's workshop approach (Teacher's College).

Students are required to read sixty minutes every day outside of school, and the outside reading program is supported through in-class activities and time as well. In every classroom I visited, English teachers had extensive classroom libraries. The image below is of a classroom library at East Side Community. Every classroom I visited had an extensive classroom library organized by genre.

I observed the reading workshop, and students were engaged and lively. When I spoke with students informally in the hallways, they spoke positively about the school.

Their outside reading program is the most well-developed and exemplary of any outside reading programs I observed or read about. A few of the teachers at the school wrote Authentic Assessments for the English Classroom, which includes many concrete examples of how they implement their outside reading program. Please see the Assessment tab to read more about their assessments for outside reading.

The school’s website includes an excellent description of their work. The excerpts below are from the “Why East Side” webpage. I have included attributes directly or indirectly related to literacy. Please see this link for the full description.

We have received an “A” on our Middle School and High School Report Cards each year grades have been assigned.

Our Advisory system (12 – 14 students) provides for frequent communication with families, which ensures that no student is overlooked.

Our 6-12th grade comprehensive college-preparatory curriculum ensures that students begin their college and career readiness from their first days of middle school.

All students develop graduation portfolios in the core subjects. Students present and defend their work to committees twice a year through our portfolio roundtable presentations. Students cannot graduate without completing this rigorous process.

All students graduate by completing performance-based assessment tasks, such as, a college-level history research paper and a student-designed science experiment.

Our independent reading and literacy program has been a model emulated across the city, state and country

Our College Bound program provides personalized and intensive college counseling, awareness and preparation to each student in grades 6-12. Over 90% of our high school graduates attend college.

We have an average class size of 18-24 students and an 8 to 1 adult to student ratio

We are a highly collaborative professional learning community. All teachers receive extensive professional development, support and common prep/planning time.

We handpick and selectively screen all of our teachers in order to provide one of the strongest teaching staffs in New York City. Teaching matters, and we hire only the best.

We are a New York University partner school, a Columbia University-TCR&WP mentor/model school, a Facing History in Ourselves model school and a New Visions model school visited by hundreds of educators from around the city, state, country and world every year.

We offer an extensive and free academic, arts, athletics, service and social extra-curricular after-school and Saturday program for all students and families.

We are named one of the city’s best public schools in the books Public Middle Schools: New York City’s Best and New York City's Best Public High Schools: A Parent's Guide by Clara Hemphill.

This school does not have a high number of ELs, but I think many aspects of their model would be applicable to Long-term English Learners.