Crown Heights, NY – To most educators, 60 elementary-school kids in one classroom would sound like a nightmare.
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To founding New American Academy Principal Shimon Waronker, it’s the new way forward.
Waronker, a Spanish-speaking Hasidic Jew who earned his stripes turning around one of the city’s most violent middle schools in The Bronx, will open a trilingual elementary school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in September. The kids will all graduate fluent in Spanish and French, in addition to English.
The innovative public school will put 60 kids in a classroom with four teachers, who will stay with those same students from kindergarten all the way through fifth grade.
The students will sit around oval tables in giant 1,200-square-foot rooms.
Waronker, who hopes to open as many as 50 replications of the school by 2012 if the model takes off, believes the unusual set-up will help build deep relationships among teachers and students and will allow instructors to target their lessons to kids’ specific learning styles.
He’s also introducing student-initiated learning — in which kids help decide the subject matter of each course. The method is the hallmark of elite private schools like Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, whose principal collaborated on the venture.
“The model of teaching and learning that he’s proposing is a very different model from the one that I think has the most currency right now,” said Dr. Richard Elmore, Waronker’s adviser on the project at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
“It’s one that empowers kids to be active agents in their own learning.”
The New American Academy will also be the first school in the city to introduce what’s known as a “career ladder” for teachers, where promotion from one title to the next is based on merit, not length of service.
It’s a departure for the United Federation of Teachers, which has generally opposed merit-based pay scales but which has been an active member of the school’s planning committee.
Although city Department of Education officials said they were still hammering out the contract details, an agreement would mean that the four teachers would be earning different salaries, ranging from a first- or second-year “apprentice,” who averages $50,000 a year, to a “master,” who makes up to $120,000.
“This is an entirely different structure,” said Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.
“Here you’ve got basically four [career] levels and an ability to really leverage the talent of your top people and to develop the people coming after them.”
Among the major themes students will learn at the academy — where kids will granted admission by lottery — are keyboarding in kindergarten, computer programming in first grade, as well as how plumbing, electricity, refrigeration and motors work in the later grades.
All these new farkrimte shites a couple of million dollars & we have a bunch of illiterate kids graduating high school
Shimon Waronker, is, I believe a graduate of Touro College!
maybe a yeshiva can harness this guy’s experience and ability…although that would cost money, and chalilah teach something.
i think this is exciting and innovative and i am so proud of rabbi waronker. what a kiddush Hashem!!
Our Yeshiva’s administrators should contact this principle to implement this method in our Yeshivas.
What happened to the day when the immigrant had to learn OUR language???
This is sooooo backwards!
Reply to #3
Your a genus, when it costs the Yeshivos money who’s pocket do you think it will really come out of?
I love it when i hear people say things like this. Its as if you think the Yeshivos are corporations trying to save money to increase their profit.
keep up the amazing work – make Hashem proud! keep on truckin’ Chabad!
New approach? Ain’t nothin new under the sun.
When i was in grade school — public school — we had grades 3-5 in one large room with two teachers and two teaching assistants. There were 70+ students in one room.
We established close relationships with these teachers. To this day, i think very highly of those two teachers and how fantastic they were as educators. They truly cared about every student.
If only yeshiva bochurim could be trilinugual: English, Yiddish, and Loshon Koidesh.
Most public schools simply don’t work unless one thinks that producing a class of drones to do the dumb-work in our economy is what schools should be for. The idea that all students should and can be taught has long gone from public education despite the lip service given to it.
Sorry, with multiple teachers, nobody will get to know the student as well. Give me a small classroom and one teacher any day. I had 36 students one year and don’t wish that on any child.
That’s what the gerrer rebbe did in his yeshivos with hebrew studies-plus he gives the same tests in all yeshivos so he can see which school is not preforming well. By the way his kolel yungerleit get a bonus if they don’t have a.cellphone. Also they can only stay in kollel as long as they r getting credits based on tests
This principal has done miraculous work in one of the most violent schools in the Bronx. He has done the impossible. I think we should take his suggestions very seriously. He is a phenomenal educator.
I attended the winter program in Morristown NJ for 8 days. This guy came to a farbeigen there and he spoke, he is a big kiddush Hashem and an amazing individual.
why the —- should we have to press 1 for english
What happens to the students who are at the bottom rung b/c not all teachers are fair– face it, teacher’s pet is a term that resulted from such a situation — Nebech on those kids who have to be stuck through fifth grade without a chance for a new chance with changing teachers each year.
A teacher has the aibility of making or breaking a child.
He is a Lubavitcher and is a super master educator but unfortunately because our yeshiva system has many political factors involved in it’s eduational management system, he refuses to work with ANY frum schools
not sure about the 60 kids in a room idea but student-initiated learning works very well and it’s a shame that it’s not done on such a large scale.
That’s what the gerrer rebbe did in his yeshivos with hebrew studies-plus he gives the same tests in all yeshivos so he can see which school is not preforming well. By the way his kolel yungerleit get a bonus if they don’t have a.cellphone. Also they can only stay in kollel as long as they r getting credits based on tests
there are many yidden who are afraid or uncomfortable with Baali Shuvah, but look, what treasures come from opening up to them …..wait, “them”? Look I’m guilty of it too. They are US, and we can be really proud that he is one of us. What nachas.
how can i contact him?
we were wating for souch news for a long time to fix up this courupt system
What a wonderful idea. Now there will be sixty children who will not know how to read in English, Spanish and French !!! I am sure they will know how to say “I want to go to the bathroom” in all three though. Will they be able to add, subtract and multiply and divide? Will they be able to read a book in english?
If a Yid can learn a blatt of gemarah they can learn ANYTHING.
Student-led learning? I can see where kids can get excited about learning. But what about the checks and balances that make sure cliques don’t rule the classroom? And what is done to make sure the kids learn their 3Rs?
The reason why the chedarim, Talmud Torahs, and yeshivos are such failures and are so resistant to creative change (with 50% or more of graduates unable to read and translate Loshon HaKodesh, Aramaic, or Yiddish) is because they are in the hands of the Erev Rav.
The Erev Rav are empowered to inhibit (Rachmana litzlan!) the coming of Moshiach and Geulah. What better way to ensure their success than to confuse young Jews from understanding Torah and connecting to Hashem Yisborach?
Stop your rationalizing, Yidden, You are in denial. The Vilna Gaon and others have told us what’s going on and what to do about it.
“Whoever does not oppose the Erev Rav is aiding the Erev Rav. It is better that he should never have been born.”
His ideas on education are phenomenal and I wish him all the luck in the world.