Dinowitz emphasizes need for DOE-funded professional development
Dinowitz says teachers have spent careers teaching to tests and will need extensive professional development. He hopes DOE is prepared and raises concerns about affinity contracts and private vendor costs.
Let me make it very clear.
We are not saying we're not doing anything and we're simply waiting.
We are very much taking the leadership.
In fact, much of what the state guidance and their hearings and their feedback processes leveraged the existing strengths that we have.
I also think, as the first deputy chancellor said, this is the right opportunity for us to be able to provide bold leadership with regards to what we believe is possible.
And a lot of this will be a commitment to communicating.
to be able to help people see those possibilities by virtue of intervisitations, but it is also leveraging our students, our student journalists, and others to be able to say, this is what we care deeply about.
These are the ways in which, through civic engagement, we can help shape the future of what is being expected of a New York City public school student.
And I know I've spoken a lot about principals and the support for principals and the teachers.
I don't want it to go unsaid.
The incredible amount of professional development that's going to need to be put into this, professional development that has to be from you guys, financially supported or created or administered by the DOE.
You know, when a teacher spends their college, sorry, their grad school, the first years, 10, 20 years of their career, teaching for one purpose, which would be great education at the end of the year to test.
There's a lot of teaching that needs to go into and a lot of development that needs to go into changing that assessment structure.
And I hope the DOE is prepared to do that.
I also want to note, I know it's not budget season, but we're always in budget.
It feels like we're always in budget season.
Last school year, or last budget cycle, the affinity contract was under consideration to be cut.
Like it was something that we...
had to fight for to get it restored.
And I also noticed in your testimony, you uplifted Affinity as one of these networks that supports this type of learning.
And so can we just commit to not putting the Affinity contract on the table for being cut if that is one of the networks that's supporting this very type of learning that is the future of our school system?