Time For Some Investigations and Firings

The NY Daily News reports this morning that the NYSED isn't interested in finding out how or why the NY State test scores became inflated:

The state should investigate the school test mess, and heads should roll, outraged education reform advocates say.

But the new state education boss wants to move on - saying there's no point in finger-pointing over abysmal reading and math scores released last week for third- through eighth-graders.

"We all bear responsibility for the past," said Commissioner David Steiner. "Rather than go back...and try the impossible 'blame game,' what's crucial is to say, 'We need tests that test effectively.'"

Longtime critics of the state tests were less ready to forget past mistakes.

"If all these things are so bollixed up, why is the state's testing director still on the payroll?" said the Manhattan Institute's Sol Stern, a longtime education advocate. "There ought to be a legislative investigation."

Stern suggested a national search to replace David Abrams, the head of testing, who has been in office since 2004 and brings home $147,000 a year.

But Tom Dunn, a spokesman for Steiner, said Abrams "is an important element of a strong team that has implemented improvements."

Some education reformers stopped short of calling for anyone to be fired - but still pushed for a probe.

"I think you have to look back. That's how you prevent it in the future," said New York Charter School Association Policy Director Peter Murphy, calling for the next governor or the Legislature to seek answers. "How did we go so far off the rails? How do we stay the course?"

Stay the course?

Do you mean the course of adding tests to every grade at every level that are absolutely meaningless but sure do add lots of profits to your education management organization pals' profits, Peter?

NYC minority students now score BELOW where they did BEFORE Mayor Bloomberg and Klein grabbed absolute power.

Bloomberg and Klein have reorganized the NYCDOE four times, have closed hundreds of schools, thrown a couple of thousand teachers into the ATR pool while vilifying them in the press, changed curricula in math and English a few times (remember RAMP UP?) while paying off their cronies in corporate education with lots of no-bed testing contracts, and STILL there has been NO improvement in the system.

But rather than acknowledge that the "reformers" running things have brought the public school system to disaster, the op-ed writers at the Times and the Post and the News continue to say "Oh, no there has been much improvement since Bloomberg/Klein took over."

And Merryl Tisch and David Steiner at NYSED also continue to shill for Bloomberg and Klein, Tisch actually claiming at that anybody who can't see the improvement in NYC since Bloomberg and Klein took over must not be looking too closely.

The entire system, from the people at the NYSED who clearly need to stay on Bloomberg's good side by sucking up to the big bully to the cronies at the newspapers to the politicians in Albany and Washington who continue to parrot how wonderful the reforms in NYC have been and point to it as a model for reform nation-wide to the teachers union that does little to fight the mess, is corrupt.

Steiner, Tisch, Paterson, Cuomo, Bloomberg, Klein, Gates, Broad, Weingarten, Mulgrew, Duncan and Obama should ALL be fired for the mess they have created in New York City and elsewhere.

As for the owners of the Times, Post, and News and their puppets at the op-ed pages, they need to have their papers undergo a "turnaround" the way Obama and Duncan advocate for "failing" schools.

That would be accountability.

But silly reality-based educator, accountability is only for teachers, not for the politicians who put disastrous policies in place, the bureaucrats who carry those disastrous policies out, the press who shill for them in editorials on the TV, the computer moguls who fund those changes from behind the scenes, and the president who cheers them at speeches on CSPAN.