Tagged: schools

    Statistically speaking, most of our youngsters will continue to be educated in mainstream public schools. The good news, as Education Writer David L. Kirp reveals in Improbable Scholars, is that there's a sensible way to rebuild public education and close the achievement gap for all students. Indeed, this is precisely what's happening in a most unlikely place: Union City, New Jersey, a poor, crowded Latino community just across the Hudson from Manhattan.

    Tonight at 7:30 PM in their Club B10, MASS MoCA will screen Brooklyn Castle as part of their Winter/Spring 2013 documentary film series, Compete!, celebrating films about winning, losing, and how you play the game.

Brooklyn Castle is an engaging and heartwarming doc about the championship winning chess team at IS 318 - a below-the-poverty-line public school in Brooklyn. The film focuses on 5 incredible kids and their coaches and teachers as they battle their opponents as well as recessionary budget cuts that threaten all extracurricular activities at their school.

The film won an Audience Award at last year’s South by Southwest Film 2012 Documentary Spotlight and was one of the top 10 Audience Favourites at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.

Filmmaker, Katie Dellamaggiore, will do a Q&A via Skype after the screening of Brooklyn Castle tonight at MASS MoCA and she joins us to talk about the film.

School districts across New York are pulling out all the stops as they struggle to delay anticipated fiscal insolvencies. Embattled districts are considering mergers in order to continue to provide quality education.

Voters in Central New York have approved combining the neighboring Ilion and Mohawk districts. Ilion superintendent Cosimo Tangorra points out that his district had been disenfranchised by the state aid formula for a number of years.

Advocates for early childhood education lobbied Monday at the Capitol in support of Governor Andrew Cuomo's proposal to expand pre-K programs in New York's school districts.

A big push for pre-K funding in Albany as parents, educators and law enforcement officials voiced their support for Governor Andrew Cuomo's 25-million dollar proposed budget allocation for pre-K that would establish full-day programs in high need districts.