What Are We Doing to Support Great Teachers?

You can tell that Mrs. Obstgarten is a great teacher when you step into her classroom.

Walk in on the last day of school, a half-day when you’d expect kids to be bouncing off the walls, and you see every kid bright-eyed, eager to play a math game. Yes. On the last day. She is the kind of teacher that every parent wants, that every kid will remember. She is calm. She is in control. She is curious. She has this light in her eyes, this eagerness to learn, nothing you can measure or package, but there it is radiating from her, igniting the curiosity and creativity of her students.

In the past 12 years, as a children’s book author, I have seen more than 2,000 teachers at work. I have been in small and large, rural and inner-city, public and private classrooms from tiny Dover, N.H., to sprawling Phoenix. Schools bring me in for classroom workshops and all-school assemblies in which I share my passion and my process for...

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Gotham: Closing of Holy Spirit School Leaves Teachers Adrift

I sat last week in a hilly playground off University Avenue in the Bronx with Eloise Pescador Martinez, 58, and Richard DeZonie, 61. They have taught for three decades each at Holy Spirit School, down the street. “Long ago I came to the realization,” Mr. DeZonie said, “that I love that look in a child’s eye when you’ve reached him.”

Ms. Martinez nodded, emphatic. “I love it!” she said. “We’re family, generation after generation of family.”

Their family is being torn asunder. In a few weeks, the Archdiocese of New York will shutter their school, 1 of 25 to close this year. Their children will be dispersed. A few veteran teachers will find toeholds in a shrinking Roman Catholic system. Many will be cut adrift, middle-aged wayfarers in a bad market. For their decades of modestly paid work, the diocese offers this parsimonious going-away gift: Teachers can choose a $5,000 severance check or six months of health coverage. Not both.

So which will it be? Ms. Martinez’s daughter has asthma — she’ll opt for insurance. Mr. DeZonie’s wife teaches at Holy Spirit as well; he’ll take the insurance and she’ll take the money. “Man, it’s not much after three decades, no it really isn’t,” he said.

Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan projects a jovial official face of Catholicism in this city. He can crack a joke with practiced timing. At the recent conclave in Rome, where bishops and cardinals paraded about in glorious raiment, he was regarded as quite the comer.

Back home, the Catholic Church and the archdiocese give the appearance of an empire sunk in financial despondency. Church attendance and school enrollment has tumbled for decades.

Some of the financial problems are owing to the church’s own lies and omissions around the sexual abuse scandals involving priests.

Cardinal Dolan and his school superintendent, who declined to comment, twice cut the system close to the bone in recent years, eliminating nearly 60 schools. They have sold off and leased real estate, raising many millions of dollars.

The superintendent, Timothy J. McNiff, said recently that the diocesan schools were stable. There’s a survivor’s comfort to be had in that. But you wonder what becomes of those who have turned to the beacon that has been Holy Spirit, an elementary school that sits atop the bony spine of the Morris Heights neighborhood. Generational waves of immigrants, Italians and Irish, Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, Mexicans and Ghanaians, have come through its doors.

The tuition at Holy Spirit is a pittance compared with a Dalton or a Brearley. And the archdiocese deserves credit for subsidizing these costs. But for a Ghanaian immigrant working two jobs and pulling down $25,000 a year, that tuition looms as a mountainous sum.

Any talk of subsidy, however, must include the teachers. A parochial school veteran with 20 years of service and a master’s degree makes $60,000; that’s a touch above the starting pay for a public-school teacher. Nor are parochial school pensions remotely comparable to those of public-school teachers.

That’s O.K., sort of. Ms. Martinez, who first spoke to me one evening after choir practice, talked easily of their mission. But this is a city grown more expensive by the week, and the gap between the wealthy few and the middle-class many who scrape by gets wider.

Ms. Martinez is divorced and has twice dipped into her small retirement savings for her daughter’s tuition. She sprints paycheck to paycheck. “I always said I didn’t get into this for the money,” she said. “I guess I was right.”

Sacrifices are easiest when shared. No one likes to think of themselves as naïve. Last time, the archdiocese said it had set aside $7.4 million for a “teacher transition plan.” That was sophistry.

The diocese spent $600,000 on severance the last time it closed schools. It appears to have counted its payments into unemployment insurance to pad that package.

“I’ve told my landlord I’m facing a layoff,” Ms. Martinez said. “I want to know: Where’s that Catholic mission we have lived with all of our lives?”

We walked back down University Boulevard toward the Romanesque tower of the school. We passed children, who smiled, waved and shouted out her name. “I try to separate my faith from the institution,” she said slowly. “My faith now? It’s those children.”

E-mail: powellm@nytimes.com

Twitter: @powellnyt

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 6, 2013

The Gotham column on Tuesday, about teachers at Holy Spirit School, which is being closed at the end of the school year, misstated the name of a street near the elementary school in the Bronx. It is University Avenue (also known as Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard), not University Boulevard.

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The Learning Network: Teachers, What Are Your Thoughts on the Common Core Standards?

Michael Appleton for The New York Times A parent of a student at the Earth School in Manhattan wore a button protesting standardized testing based on the new Common Core standards.  Go to related article »

The work of this blog is to suggest ideas for teaching and learning with The New York Times. We don’t do original reporting, and we don’t offer opinions on education issues. Instead, like teachers everywhere, we strive to facilitate discussion on issues of the day rather than imparting our own points of view.

But as we have experimented with the new Common Core Standards over the last two years, we have also been aware of how politically charged their implementation has become.

For some, it’s not so much the standards as the inevitable related standardized testing that is the issue. Many, from Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers to the National Council of Teachers of English to the New York Times editorial page, have recently called for caution on testing until teachers and students have a chance to adjust to the new requirements.

For others, the standards themselves are the problem.

The Republican National Committee rejects them on federalist grounds. Others dislike them because of the way they have been adopted and implemented. Still others say that we need less standardization, not more, or that national standards are beside the point when bigger issues of inequality are the real issue. Many simply see them as part of a troubling wave of change around the direction of education policy in the United States in general.

Common Core defenders, however, say the standards are powerful and much-needed — as a way to help students compete in a global economy, and as a way “replace the mediocre patchwork of learning standards” that predates them.

We thought we’d both explain how this blog is approaching the Common Core and ask you about your own experiences and opinions as we plan for the next school year. Please join the conversation below.

What We’ve Done on the Blog So Far, and Why

One of the first things teachers noticed about the Common Core Standards was the fact that they require significantly more nonfiction, or “informational text,” across the curriculum.

Since the C.C.S.S. definition of “informational text” includes pretty much everything The Times publishes, we saw this as an opportunity to help teachers use Times articles, essays, infographics, videos and photographs alongside literature and other classroom materials to make connections between academic content, students’ lives and the world at large.

Of course, making those connections has been the chief focus of The Learning Network for our entire 14-year history, so this wasn’t a departure for us.

Standards or no standards, our work is to make the newspaper accessible for learners. It’s why the liveliest part of the blog has always been the daily Student Opinion question, and why we run features like our new photojournalism activity and our summer reading contest.

But to help teachers understand how what we do works for the Common Core, we also aligned our lesson plans this year both to the McREL Standards we’ve always used and to the new C.C.S.S.– a task that wasn’t hard given that we’ve occasionally been accused of overstuffing our lessons with so many complex activities and questions that some of them could serve as graduate seminars. Next year we may well add the new science standards to the mix.

But because the shift to more nonfiction is the subject of much controversy, this fall we also published a lesson plan inviting students to examine the standards themselves, and discuss the question “What should children read?”

Perhaps the most obviously C.C.S.S.-aligned experiment we did this year was our Friday “Common Core Practice” series, in which we collaborated with two teachers and their freshman humanities classes to post three standards-based writing prompts drawn from each week’s Times.

Their students have just created a video that sums up better than we ever could the benefits of reading the newspaper regularly.

For these teachers and students and for us, however, the focus on the Common Core was just a lens through which to see the work we would have done anyway. Yes, the prompts addressed the argumentative, informative and narrative writing the standards highlight, but the exercise was much more about the serendipity of discovery a reader can have paging through The Times, and about creating a culture of lifelong learning.

As the two teachers — Jonathan Olsen and Sarah Gross — say: “We’ve used newspapers in the classroom before the Common Core, and we’ll continue to use them if the Common Core disappears. Reading and writing with The Times works no matter what standards you’re following.”

We suspect that’s how many of you feel about what and how you teach, too. Several teachers have told us they will tweak the good work they’ve always done in order to address the standards more directly, but, like Mr. Olsen and Mrs. Gross, they already have a solid sense of what works with their own students.

This summer we’ll be thinking about where we should go with the standards for 2013-14 ourselves, and your thoughts will help. We hope you’ll weigh in.

Questions for You

We know that the answers to these questions are not simple, but please post briefly below in response to as many as you like:

What have been your experiences so far with the Common Core?How prepared do you think you, your students and your school are to begin addressing them during the next school year? What do you think of the standards themselves?What are your thoughts on how they have been implemented so far?How do you feel about what this blog has been doing around the C.C.S.S. so far? What else could we be doing? How can we help you?

Thank you, and happy summer.

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