York City Public Research Articles

Microteaching: An Introspective Case Study with Middle School Teachers in New York City Public Schools

The purpose of this study was to investigate the potential impacts of microteaching on experienced teachersparticipating in the Community Enterprise for Restoration Science (CCERS) Teaching Fellowship at Pace Universityas part of a National Science Foundation-funded research project on the education model known as the Curriculum andCommunity Enterprise for Restoration Science (CCERS). The program builds a learning community of teachers in thefellowship program as they participated in monthly workshops in cohorts and continuously interact with each otherduring the two years of the program. Each teacher in Cohort 1 of the CCERS Fellowship was required to provide a brieflesson that they have used in the classrooms from the CCERS curriculum. Generally, the Teaching Fellows’micro-lessons contained appropriate objectives presented to the class aligned well to the objectives of the CCERSinitiative, which focused on harbor restoration learning within a STEM context. By conducting field studies atrestoration stations that students set up near their schools, students across all schools learned about the biology,chemistry, ecology and history of the Hudson River. In addition to teaching science content, all teachers incorporatedlessons on helping students to develop literacy strategies to build vocabulary. The microteaching modules allowed forteachers to gain insight as to how the curriculum was being implemented into other teachers’ classrooms. It permittedfor teachers’ exposure to the various teaching methods and resources being used to assist underrepresented studentsand students where English is a second language.

Prevalence and Correlates of Smoking among Low-Income Adults Residing in New York City Public Housing Developments-2015.

To guide targeted cessation and prevention programming, this study assessed smoking prevalence and described sociodemographic, health, and healthcare use characteristics of adult smokers in public housing. Self-reported data were analyzed from a random sample of 1664 residents aged 35 and older in ten New York City public housing developments in East/Central Harlem. Smoking prevalence was 20.8%. Weighted log-binomial models identified to be having Medicaid, not having a personal doctor, and using health clinics for routine care were positively associated with smoking. Smokers without a personal doctor were less likely to receive provider quit advice. While most smokers in these public housing developments had health insurance, a personal doctor, and received provider cessation advice in the last year (72.4%), persistently high smoking rates suggest that such cessation advice may be insufficient. Efforts to eliminate differences in tobacco use should consider place-based smoking cessation interventions that extend cessation support beyond clinical settings.

The 2015 New York City Legionnaires' Disease Outbreak: A Case Study on a History-Making Outbreak.

The 2015 New York City Legionnaires' Disease Outbreak: A Case Study on a History-Making Outbreak.

Welfare Impacts of Spay/Neuter-Focused Outreach on Companion Animals in New York City Public Housing

ABSTRACTSpay/neuter (S/N) programs aim to reduce shelter intake and euthanasia. However, there is little published evidence of a causal effect between S/N programs and shelter intake or euthanasia. To uncover any ancillary effects of S/N, this study examined the impact of S/N door-to-door outreach on welfare-related outcomes and attitudes around S/N in underserved areas of New York City. There was no significant difference between a group receiving intensive outreach and a comparison group on whether they had rehomed a companion animal in the last year. There was a significantly higher level of saturation of S/N in the intensive-outreach area. A significantly higher percentage of those in the intensive-outreach group reported knowing at least 1 way to get help for their companion animals and that the caregiver-defined general well being of nonhuman animals in their neighborhood was better during the previous year. These data suggest that intensive S/N outreach has an impact on the level of saturation of S/N, the perceived efficacy of caregivers to find help if needed, and the perception that animal welfare is being improved.

Relationship between Recreational Resources in the School Neighborhood and Changes in Fitness in New York City Public School Students.

Physical fitness in children has many beneficial effects, including the maintenance of a healthy weight. The built environment may influence youths' physical fitness by encouraging physical activity. This paper assessed whether higher density of parks, playgrounds, and sports facilities around a school is related to improvements in fitness in middle school boys and girls. Fitness scores and other student covariates collected as part of NYC FITNESSGRAM between the 2006-2007 and 2010-2011 school years were linked with school neighborhood data on characteristics of the built environment for NYC public school students in grades 6-8. Data were analyzed in 2015. Medium, but not high, density of recreational resources in the area surrounding a school was associated with greater annual improvements in fitness for both boys and girls. This association appeared to be driven mainly by the presence of parks. Findings for sports facilities and playgrounds were inconsistent. Overall, few associations were observed between recreational resources near a school and changes in student fitness. Future studies of school influences on student fitness should consider the influence of school resources and the home neighborhood.

Introduction: Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton: An American Musical and the Early American Republic

IntroductionLin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton: An American Musical and the Early American Republic Catherine E. Kelly By now, we all know the story: In 2008, Lin-Manuel Miranda, a twenty-eight-year-old composer, lyricist, and performer, fresh from his Broadway hit In the Heights, took Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton on vacation to Mexico. The 800-page biography of the first Secretary of the Treasury might have seemed like strange candidate for a beach read. But the sympathetic study, which recounted the personal and political ascent of a West Indian émigré from a nondescript childhood to his death in a duel, resonated. Miranda, himself the child of Puerto Rican immigrants who had achieved professional success in the United States, saw in Chernow's book a distinctly American story, an immigrant striver's story. The following spring at a White House event celebrating poetry and the arts, Miranda performed "My Shot," a song that serves as Hamilton's declaration of intent. By 2015, when Hamilton: An American Musical opened at New York City's Public Theater, "My Shot" had become the opening salvo to a projection of the nation's origins and its identity, set to the cadences of hip-hop and R&B, and performed by actors of African American and Hispanic descent. Nearly three years and countless performances, awards, and YouTube video views later, Miranda's masterpiece has secured a place in contemporary culture. Following the cast's post-performance message to Vice President Mike Pence in the tumultuous aftermath of the 2008 presidential election, it also secured a place in our culture wars. Just as Hamilton: An American Musical made its way to the center of popular culture, it pushed its way into conversations among U.S. historians, who took to print and social media to debate the production's accuracy and its politics. The 2016 meeting of the Society for Historians of [End Page 251] the Early American Republic devoted two sessions (including the presidential plenary and a videotaped interview with Miranda) to the phenomenon. At their most fruitful, the conversations at SHEAR focused on how we might connect Miranda's show to our scholarly practice. How can historians work with Hamilton? How can they teach it? Five of the following essays represent revised and expanded versions of those contributions; Marvin McAllister's essay was solicited separately. Our aim in publishing them here is to provide a view of the musical that is both longer and deeper than even the best punditry affords. ________ Joanne Freeman and Andrew Schocket situate the musical in different historiographical contexts. Freeman acknowledges that Miranda's Hamilton ("a flawed but charming master rap-battler with an almost superhuman work ethic") emerges partly from the historical record and partly from Miranda's imaginative engagement with the present moment. But as she reminds us, American scholars have been figuring and refiguring Hamilton for well over a century. Rather than looking back at previous generations' depictions of Hamilton, Schocket looks at the culture industry's fascination with the founding. He explores this emerging entertainment industry genre (the "American Revolution Rebooted") to consider what its formulaic conventions tell us about the current moment. Readers of this journal might be especially interested to think about Hamilton from the perspective of theater history. As Heather Nathans observes, Miranda is hardly the first actor to play Alexander Hamilton. Recovering a mostly forgotten collection of plays dating back to the turn of the nineteenth century, she demonstrates how artists used Hamilton to consider "critical moments in the nation's passionate and often painful debates about race, citizenship, and belonging." If Hamilton the character has a long history, so too does Miranda's color-conscious casting. Marvin McAllister situates one of the musical's most controversial elements in a far longer tradition of "whiting up." Starting at least with William Brown, African American performers have whited up for multiple and contradictory reasons ranging from social satire and career advancement to the exposure of the "unrelenting terror wrecked on black bodies." The forum comes full circle by assessing Hamilton: An American [End Page 252] Musical as history in general and as a distinct form of popular, if not precisely public...

Reading Publics: New York City's Public Libraries, 1754–1911

Reading Publics: New York City's Public Libraries, 1754–1911

Closer to the Finish Line? Compulsory Attendance, Grade Attainment, and High School Graduation

High school graduation rates are a central policy topic in the United States and have been shown to be stagnant for the past three decades. Using student-level administrative data from New York City Public Schools, I examine the impact of compulsory school attendance on high school graduation rates and grade attainment, focusing the analysis on ninth and tenth grade cohorts. I exploit the interaction between the school start-age cutoff and compulsory attendance age requirement to identify the effect of compulsory schooling. I find that an additional year in compulsory attendance leads to an increase of 9 to 12 percent in the probability of progressing to grades 11 and 12, and raises the probability of graduating from high school by 9 to 14 percent, depending on the specification.

Making a Difference: Reshaping the Past, Present, and Future Toward Greater Equity

Justin Garrett Moore, AICP, the executive director of the New York City Public Design Commission, examines the role of ReUrbanism in promoting equity. As stated among the 10 principles that guide the initiative, only cities that work for everyone can be successful, because everyone has stories and places that matter. To that end, the practitioners who plan, design, build—and preserve—our cities should be "redesigned." Not only do they need the tools and training to work effectively with the communities they serve but they also must themselves reflect the economic and racial diversity of those communities. Shaping the built urban environment is a critical avenue for promoting social justice and equity—the cornerstones of thriving communities.

School Wellness Programs: Magnitude and Distribution in New York City Public Schools.

Public schools provide students with opportunities to participate in many discretionary, unmandated wellness programs. Little is known about the number of these programs, their distribution across schools, and the kinds of students served. We provide evidence on these questions for New York City (NYC) public schools. Data on wellness programs were collected from program websites, NYC's Office of School Food and Wellness, and direct contact with program sponsors for 2013. Programs were grouped into categories, nutrition, fitness, and comprehensive, and were combined with data on school characteristics available from NYC's Department of Education. Numbers of programs and provision of programs were analyzed for relationships with demographic and school structural characteristics, using descriptive statistics and multiple regression. Discretionary wellness programs are numerous, at 18 programs. Little evidence supports inequity according to student race/ethnicity, income, or nativity, but high schools, new schools, co-located schools, small schools, and schools with larger proportions of inexperienced teachers are less likely to provide wellness programs. Opportunities exist to further the reach of wellness programs in public schools by modifying them for high school adoption and building capacity in schools less likely to have the administrative support to house them.

Disseminating Trauma-Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Intervention in New York City Public Schools

Disseminating Trauma-Focused Cognitive-Behavioral Intervention in New York City Public Schools

City-As-School: Internship-based Learning in New York City Public Schools

City-As-School: Internship-based Learning in New York City Public Schools

Reading Publics: New York City's Public Libraries, 1754–1911

Reading Publics: New York City's Public Libraries, 1754–1911

School Food Policies and Practices in New York City Public Schools

BackgroundThe Healthy, Hunger‐Free Kids (HHFK) Act was created to improve child nutrition in the school environment. Studies have shown challenges with implementation of the HHFK Act, but little is known about implementation in urban school districts.ObjectiveThe objectives of this study were to assess the school food policies and practices in a sample of New York City (NYC) public schools, to identify variation in implementation of the policies, and to determine barriers and consequences of implementing the policies.Design and SettingThis study consisted of direct observation of school meals, structured interviews, and document collection in eight public schools in NYC.ResultsFoods offered to students were consistent with the school district menus. Free water was made available via water fountains and water jets, but not all grade levels were permitted to use the water jets at some schools. The amount of time students have to eat lunch varied across schools, within schools, and by participation in the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). Healthy school meal practices often required increased time and staff inputs. Common challenges to school food policy implementation included lack of food storage space, limited staff, time constraints and utensil restrictions.ConclusionsThe nutrition standards required by the HHFK Act were implemented successfully in the sampled schools in this study, but unregulated aspects of the school meal environment (e.g., lunch line collection method, school staffing during meal periods, time available for lunch) influence the success of this policy. Interventions to counter mealtime constraints, improve lunch line efficiency, and promote unfamiliar healthful foods and beverages may better assist the HHFK Act and other school food and nutrition policies to achieve their goals of improving child nutrition in the school environment. Further research is needed to evaluate how challenges with HHFK Act implementation change over time.

Bravo! Using Library Dance Collections to Recreate Historical Ballets

ABSTRACTRecreating a kinesthetic art form is not easy. For ballets created in the modern age, film, videotape, and dance notation aid in the reconstruction. For historic masterworks, the process is akin to a detective story, as the dance reconstructors hunt for clues to the missing information. They comb through notated dance and music scores, choreographers’ notes, pictures, libretti, reviews, sketches, and eyewitness accounts. These archival materials are commonly housed in libraries’ special collections. The Jerome Robbins Dance Collection at the New York City Public Library for the Performing Arts is the foremost collection in the United States, but there are many other excellent collections, including at the Library of Congress and in university libraries. The authors explore one of the great reconstructions of the 20th century—Robert Joffrey’s remarkable 16-year effort to recreate Nijinsky’s lost choreography for the 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring.

Enough Blame to Go Around: The Labor Pains of New York City's Public Employee Unions

Book Review| February 01 2016 Enough Blame to Go Around: The Labor Pains of New York City's Public Employee Unions Enough Blame to Go Around: The Labor Pains of New York City's Public Employee Unions. Steier, Richard. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014xx + 281 pp., $24.95 (paper); $24.95 (e-book) Ruth Milkman Ruth Milkman Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2016) 13 (1): 158–160. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-3342839 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Ruth Milkman; Enough Blame to Go Around: The Labor Pains of New York City's Public Employee Unions. Labor 1 February 2016; 13 (1): 158–160. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-3342839 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2016 by Labor and Working-Class History Association2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Epinephrine Use in the New York City Public School District

Epinephrine Use in the New York City Public School District

Performing the Return of the Repressed: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Artistic Interventions in New York City's Public Space

This essay discusses two projections by Polish-born artist Krzysztof Wodiczko carried out in Union Square in the city of New York. The Homeless Projection: A Proposal for Union Square (1986) and Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection (2012) address major ailments of modern society: homelessness and the psychological effects of war. By casting images on the statues of American heroes, the artist clashes the official historical-political narrative with that of the unrepresented or repressed. In the two projections carried out in Union Square, Wodiczko makes use of the public space to performatively re-enact social protest in a culturally salient locus. The article presents the subversive potential of the two projections and discusses their inherent problematics, referring to observations by Jurgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, Rosalyn Deutsche, and others.

High Tuberculosis Strain Diversity Among New York City Public Housing Residents.

We sought to better understand tuberculosis (TB) epidemiology among New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) residents, after a recent TB investigation identified patients who had the same TB strain. The study population included all New York City patients with TB confirmed during 2001 through 2009. Patient address at diagnosis determined NYCHA residence. We calculated TB incidence, reviewed TB strain data, and identified factors associated with TB clustering. During 2001 to 2009, of 8953 individuals in New York City with TB, 512 (6%) had a NYCHA address. Among the US-born, TB incidence among NYCHA residents (6.0/100,000 persons) was twice that among non-NYCHA residents (3.0/100,000 persons). Patients in NYCHA had high TB strain diversity. US birth, younger age, and substance use were associated with TB clustering among NYCHA individuals with TB. High TB strain diversity among residents of NYCHA with TB does not suggest transmission among residents. These findings illustrate that NYCHA's higher TB incidence is likely attributable to its higher concentration of individuals with known TB risk factors.

Culturally Responsive Education: Developing Lesson Plans for Vietnamese Students in the American Diaspora

This article focuses on the application of the philosophical principles of John Dewey and Culturally Responsive Education in the creation of lesson plans for Vietnamese students in the American Diaspora. Through a Fulbright-Hayes Program a group of teachers from the New York City Public School System and Long Island spent six weeks in Vietnam studying the language and culture in order to develop lesson plans that would address the needs of Vietnamese students in their classrooms. This study demonstrates the importance of teachers connecting with their students through the incorporation of sociocultural elements that translate to a culturally responsive curriculum, not just for students in the Vietnamese Diaspora but for all students.