As New York this week became one of the first states to unveil a set of exams grounded in new curricular standards, education leaders are finding that rallying the public behind tougher tests may be more difficult than they expected.

Complaints were plentiful: the tests were too long; students were demoralized to the point of tears; teachers were not adequately prepared. Some parents, long skeptical of the emphasis on standardized testing, forbade their children from participating.

Maya Velasquez, 14, an eighth grader at the Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering in Upper Manhattan said she had done well on tests in the past. But when a teacher on Wednesday informed her class that only 15 minutes remained in the exam, she knew she was in trouble. She had only written an introduction to her essay.

“All the kids were, like, open-mouthed, crazy-shocked and very upset,” she said.

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As myriad court battles pitting the Occupy Wall Street movement against New York City proceed, protesters claimed a victory on Tuesday, based not on how they were treated, but on how their books were mistreated.

The City of New York and Brookfield Properties agreed to pay more than $230,000 to settle a lawsuit filed last year in Federal District Court asserting that books and other property had been damaged or destroyed when the police and sanitation workers cleared an encampment of tents and tarps from Zuccotti Park in November 2011.

The books, along with computers, shelves and other items, had been set up in the northeast corner of the park soon after the Occupy protests began in September 2011. Called the People’s Library, the collection, organized and maintained by protesters, included novels, history books and poetry collections.

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New York’s highest court rejected arguments Thursday by two Internet retailers that they should be exempt from collecting state sales tax.

Amazon.com, the biggest online store, and its much smaller competitor Overstock.com had separately sued to challenge a 2008 state law that required online retailers to collect sales taxes on purchases made by New York residents. That served effectively to raise prices on the sites by nearly 10 percent, reducing their competitive advantage against brick-and-mortar retailers.

In a statement, Amazon denounced the New York Court of Appeals ruling as conflicting with precedents by the United States Supreme Court and decisions by other state courts. Overstock said it was considering appealing to the federal Supreme Court.

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The New York Public Library (NYPL) and Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) will integrate their tech services departments, the libraries announced last week, saving BPL $2 million per year and NYPL about $1.5 million.

Christopher Platt, Director of Collection & Circulation Operations of NYPL, will lead the combined operation, christened Book Ops. Charlene Rue, Director of Collection Development of BPL, will be deputy director of collection management, and Salvatore Magaddino, Deputy Director of Collections and Circulation Operations at NYPL, will be deputy director of logistics. Book Ops will be jointly operated and governed by both systems. Governance details are still being finalized, Platt says.

The plan was developed at the behest of New York City, which initially called all three of the city’s library systems together and tasked them with finding ways to cooperate and share money, Platt told LJ. But while the Queens Public Library was part of the original conversation, ultimately it implemented separate cost savings instead, so it will not be part of the Book Ops project.

» via Library Journal

Forcing teachers to pass a kind of bar exam, like the ones aspiring lawyers and doctors must sit for. Extending the number of hours and days students must spend in school, to break with academic calendars formed in an agrarian age. Consolidating school districts; making schools a hub for health care and social services; and giving 4-year-olds in the state’s poorest areas access to full-day prekindergarten.

Those were among a slate of recommendations that the New York Education Reform Commission outlined in an address to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and cabinet members in the State Capitol on Wednesday.

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There is no official soft drink of the Brooklyn Bridge. The surface of Lady Liberty’s crown is not brought to you by a cellphone provider. And even the New York Yankees, corporate behemoths of America’s favorite pastime, have refused to sully at least one piece of real estate at their new ballpark — the name at the top of it.

But on Wednesday, New Yorkers learned that one of New York City’s emblems is not immune from the siren song of advertising dollars.

For the first time, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced that it would offer advertising space on the front of its MetroCards.

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There is a quote by John Milton engraved over the entrance to the main reading room at the New York Public Library’s stunning Beaux-Arts building on Fifth Avenue: “A good Booke is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

But now, 101 years after the library was first dedicated, up to 3m of those precious books are to be removed from the central library and shipped to two off-site storage facilities, prompting a chorus of complaints from authors and scholars who say that the institution is threatening its own claim to be “one of the world’s pre-eminent public resources for the study of human thought”.

Researchers will still be able to access the books, but only after a wait of up to 24 hours. The qualities which inspired the names of the two marble lions that guard the entrance, Patience and Fortitude, have been in little evidence.

» via The Guardian

This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream of Mike Zamansky, the highly-regarded CS teacher at New York’s elite Stuyvesant public high school. It was jump started when Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures, promised to get the tech community to help with knowledge, advice, and money.

» via Joel on Software