Perdido Street School

News Corporation, FOX 5 Have Habit Of Hiring Sleazebags And Criminals

2012-01-27T06:54:00.003-05:00

The Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post never misses an opportunity to use the misdeeds and/or crimes of a handful of teachers to smear all 75,000 New York City teachers.

Currently they are running a series called CUOMO'S CHALLENGE in which they write about a few teachers who have either engaged in inappropriate behavior or have committed crimes and use those stories to insinuate that there are thousands of others in New York City schools just like this but the city cannot fire them because the teachers union acts as protector.

It's jive, of course - the overwhelming majority of New York City school teachers do not engage in criminality, do not act inappropriately with students, do not steal. and should not be under suspicion by the New York Post or anybody else.

But reality never stopped any Rupert Murdoch-owned media outlet from using the stories of one or two people to push through a political agenda - which is EXACTLY what they are doing with this CUOMO'S CHALLENGE series.

But as I have pointed out already in previous posts, if any organization or institution seems to have an inordinate share of criminals and sleazebags, it is actually the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corporation.

Twenty News Corporation employees have already been arrested in the phone hacking scandal in Britain on crimes ranging from phone hacking, computer hacking, conspiracy to cover up a crime, destroying evidence of a crime, bribing police and lying to police.

This list of the arrested includes the former chief editor of the now-closed News of the World tabloid and aide to Prime Minister David Cameron, Andy Coulson, and the former chief executive of News International, the British wing of Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire, Rebekah Brooks.

Former publisher of the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, Les Hinton, and Murdoch's son, James, are also being scrutinized by investigators in the case and may be arrested in the near future.

In addition, News Corporation has recently settled with some of the victims of its wide-ranging phone hacking, in the process acknowledging “that senior employees and directors” of the company “knew about the wrongdoing and sought to conceal it by deliberately deceiving investigators and destroying evidence.”

So here is the News Corporation-owned New York Post tarring ALL New York City teachers with the crimes or misdeeds of a few when a huge percentage of its executives and directors have engaged in criminal activities.

That takes chutzpah, doesn't it?

But it gets better.

Let's not forget that Murdoch also owns FOX 5 here in New York, a station that currently is dealing with the allegations that one of its on-air personalities and anchors, Greg Kelly, raped a woman.

According to NY1, the woman claims Kelly got her drunk, attacked her sexually, and impregnated her. The woman says she later had an abortion.

Kelly, son of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, denies attacking her but does not deny having sex with her. He says it was "consensual."

Police sources have told the newspapers that the woman is a credible source.

Kelly has taken a voluntary leave from FOX 5 to deal with this scandal.

He is not the first FOX 5 personality to be embroiled in scandal.

Don't forget that former FOX 5 reporter Charles Leaf was arrested on child molestation charges in 2010 after he sexually attacked a four-year old girl in New Jersey.

Leaf's sister, Susan Gaudet, told the New York Daily News that Leaf had previously molested family members (including a three year old) back in the 1980's over the course of six years and told the newspaper:

"I'd like to see them put him away for the rest of his life," fumed Gaudet, one of Leaf's three sisters, from Jacksonville, N.C. "I am so full of rage. If I had the opportunity to spit in his face and hurt him, I would do it."

Gaudet told the News that Leaf admitted to his family that he had molested his female relatives but was never prosecuted for those crimes.

So here FOX 5 hired a man who had admitted molesting family members in the past, who once again was molesting the children of neighbors, to work as a reporter.

Can you imagine if such a person had been working as a teacher? What would the New York Post have published about that? How would they have tarred ALL teachers for the crimes of one, how would they have used that story to push for stronger evaluations of teachers?

Because if one of these guys, these dirty rotten criminals, got hired, then more must have!

And yet, when it is their own News Corporation employees, when it is FOX 5 employees who are accused of behavior and crimes that are BEYOND THE PALE, we hear nothing from the Post reporting how this shows a pattern of criminality in News Corporation, how if 22 News Corporation employees have been arrested over the last two years on various crimes, then maybe ALL News Corporation employees need to be scrutinized.

Any other rapists or child molesters at FOX 5, Rupert?

Hedge Fund Manager/Education Reformer Fined $7.2 Million Pounds For "Insider Dealing"

2012-01-26T11:12:00.000-05:00

The crimes involving teacher bashers just don't stop today.

First I posted earlier how twenty employees of the teacher-bashing News Corporation have been arrested over the last half year in various charges ranging from phone hacking, computer hacking, conspiracy to cover up a crime, destroying evidence of a crime, bribing police and lying to police.

Now comes word that famed hedge fundie/education reformer/DFER advisor David Einhorn has gotten in trouble with the law as well:

Hedge fund manager David Einhorn, whose short selling famously helped to bring down Lehman Brothers bank, has been fined £7.2m for insider dealing by the UK regulator.
Einhorn, the owner of Greenlight Capital, engaged in "market abuse" in relation to a fundraising by pub group Punch Taverns in June 2009, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) has ruled.
According to the City watchdog, Einhorn was told by a corporate broker acting on behalf of Punch Taverns that the company was preparing a significant equity fundraising. Moments after the telephone conversation ended, Einhorn gave instructions to sell all of Greenlight's holding in Punch.
At the time these instructions were given, Greenlight held 13.3% of Punch shares. Over the next four days Greenlight sold 11,656,000 Punch shares, reducing its holding in Punch from 13.3% to 8.89%.
On 15 June 2009, Punch announced a fundraising of £375m, after which the price of its shares fell by 29.9%. Greenlight's trading had thereby avoided losses of approximately £5.8m for the funds under its management.
The fine is a major blow for Einhorn's reputation. His career has been built on a talent for spotting wrongdoing in other firms. In a statement the hedge fund boss called the decision "unjust and inconsistent" and said the company had paid the fine rather than continue the "arduous fight"

...

Tracey McDermott, the FSA's acting director of enforcement and financial crime, said: "Einhorn is an experienced professional with a high profile in the industry. We expect someone in his position to be able to identify inside information when he receives it and to act appropriately.

"His failure to do so is a serious breach of the expected standards of market conduct. It is highly damaging to market confidence when privileged shareholders commit market abuse, and the high penalty reflects the seriousness of his breach

I breathlessly await the New York Post to do a story about David Einhorn's breach of ethics, his moral failings and the need to remove him from the Board of Advisors of the Democrats for Education Reform since nobody who shows this kind of moral failing ought to be involved in education.

Of course since every other member of both the Board and the Board of Advisors for the DFER's is a Wall Street criminal and since the New York Post actually admires the kind of criminal activity these people engage in, I better not wait too long for that Post story.

NY Post Bashes "Criminal Teachers," Ignores Crimes Perpetrated By Its Own Executives And Directors

2012-01-26T07:49:00.002-05:00

More teacher-bashing by the NY Post today in a running section they call CUOMO'S CHALLENGE - they allegedly reviewed almost 100 disciplinary hearings involving teachers in 2011 and found that "only" a "paltry" 31% of the 70 charged with misconduct were removed from their jobs.

Never mind if those charged with misconduct who weren't removed from their jobs were "falsely" charged or if the charges did not warrant removal from their jobs - the Post editors see all teachers as criminals and all in need of removal by the city.

Meanwhile back in News Corporation Land, a broadening criminal scandal has seen 20 News Corporation employees arrested - including the former chief editor of the now-closed News of the World tabloid and aide to Prime Minister David Cameron, Andy Coulson, and the former chief executive of News International, the British wing of Rupert Murdoch's newspaper empire, Rebekah Brooks - for crimes ranging from phone hacking, computer hacking, conspiracy to cover up a crime, destroying evidence of a crime, bribing police and lying to police.

The former publisher of the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal and long-time right-hand man to Rupert Murdoch, Les Hinton, and Murdoch's own son, James, are also in the sights of criminal investigators.

News Corporation settled with a few of the people its employees hacked and in the process acknowledged “that senior employees and directors” of the company “knew about the wrongdoing and sought to conceal it by deliberately deceiving investigators and destroying evidence.”

The investigation is ongoing, more arrests are expected, more hacking victims are suing News Corporation over the criminal activity, more settlements are expected by the legal teams leading those suits.

You rarely if ever hear about this Watergate-sized scandal embroiling News Corporation if you only read the News Corporation-owned New York Post.

They never mention how 20 of their companies employees were arrested in the hacking scandal, how more are expected to be arrested, how Rupert Murdoch's son, James, and his right-hand man, Les Hinton, may be on that list, how the more investigators dig into the scandal, the more News Corporation sleaze they dig up.

Nope - all you ever hear about is "bad teachers" and the city's and state's need to fire them.

This from a news organization that is so criminal and corrupt, you need a very large scorecard to track all the arrests of and all the crimes perpetrated by the people who work for it.

Obama Lies About His Education Policy

2012-01-25T06:58:00.005-05:00

The lies about education came fast and furious from Obama last night during the State of the Union speech:

For less than one percent of what our Nation spends on education each year, we’ve convinced nearly every State in the country to raise their standards for teaching and learning – the first time that’s happened in a generation.

But challenges remain. And we know how to solve them.

At a time when other countries are doubling down on education, tight budgets have forced States to lay off thousands of teachers. We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000. A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance. Every person in this chamber can point to a teacher who changed the trajectory of their lives. Most teachers work tirelessly, with modest pay, sometimes digging into their own pocket for school supplies – just to make a difference.

Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.

What?

Stop bashing teachers?

Stop making teachers teach to the test?

Who do you think has put in place an education policy "for less than one percent of what our Nation spends on education each year" that institutionalizes bashing teachers and forcing them to teach to the test?

Who do you think leads the charge toward destroying the teaching profession AND public schools by forcing states to tie teacher evaluations and pay scales to test scores?

Who do you think is forcing states and districts to add tests to every subject in every grade, K-12, and putting such high stakes on them that teachers will do nothing BUT teach to the test?

Who do you think is forcing states to take money out of the classroom and put it into test development, data tracking systems, PD classes, outside education consultants and other jive that robs children and teachers of the necessary classroom materials needed for a quality education?

Who put in place the policy that brought about the firing of all those teachers in Central Falls, Rhode Island and is now bringing about the policy that allows Bloomberg to shutter 33 "persistently low-achieving" schools in NYC and fire 1,750 teachers?

Who is STILL blaming teachers in his SOTU speech by ending all of his education drivel with this: "let’s replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn."

The truth is, the evaluation mechanisms you have helped to put in place are not going to tell you whether the teachers you fire are ones who "aren't helping kids learn."

They will help districts and states shed expensive teachers, however.

Which is the point.

Obama invited an educator from Pennsylvania to sit with Michelle Obama in her box for the speech.

The teacher was part of a group who continued to work even after the district could no longer afford to pay them.

The message from Obama on that is clear - teachers are missionaries who MUST give everything of themselves, even their livelihoods, if they want respect from the establishment.

The Obama policies are certainly helping states to do just that to teachers.

Had I been that educator, I would have spent the entire time explaining to dear Michelle just how full of crap her husband is, how he lies every time he opens his mouth on education, how his education policies are so destructive they are starting to make the Bush education policies look like Waldorf schooling.

I would have made her regret inviting me to that box to play teacher public relations figure for an administration that is the most anti-teacher, anti-education in history.

And it would have taken all of my effort to not stand up during Obama's speech and shout "You lie!" when the president spoke all these lies about teachers and education.

Bloomberg Wants To Close "A" and "B" Rated Schools

2012-01-24T07:37:00.004-05:00

From the NY Post:

Seven of the 33 schools where the city is seeking to fire half the staff were rated an “A” or “B” on their latest city-issued report cards, a review by The Post found.

That means roughly 260 teachers are slated to be cleared out from schools that were celebrated just last fall for making significant gains.

The mayor plans to close and reopen the schools this summer.

Although the city’s grading system rewards progress more than performance — meaning highly rated schools aren’t necessarily above average — no “A” or “B” school has ever been shuttered.

“When you decided that you would close a school that got an ‘A’ on your own bloody school progress reports . . . you lost all legitimacy in the eyes of the people of New York,” a fiery Leo Casey, vice president of the United Federation of Teachers, testified at last week’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn.

...

Last week, Mayor Bloomberg announced that the 33 schools would be shifted to a federal program that’s never been tried in the city — one that doesn’t require a teacher-evaluation agreement but mandates the staff replacements.

The move was viewed as falling somewhere between political payback against a defiant union and a necessary purge of subpar educators.

A Department of Education spokesman would not explain the agency’s rationale for flagging schools it had rated highly, but noted that they had been labeled “persistently low-achieving” by the state in 2009 or 2010.

He said a more detailed explanation would soon be available in applications to the state Education Department, which administers the federal program.

Yet documents the DOE submitted in June 2010 show officials did not necessarily see poor teaching as the culprit in some of those schools.

“Global Studies is fortunate to have a staff that is committed, strong, dedicated, and hardworking,” the DOE gushed over the Brooklyn School for Global Studies in Cobble Hill, which catapulted from an “F” grade in 2010 to a “B” in 2011.

When even the teacher-bashing New York Post publishes a report saying Bloomberg is closing schools not because they are full of "sub-par teachers" but simply to close them, that in fact the DOE's own progress report for one school bragged that the students are fortunate to have teachers so "committed, strong, dedicated, and hardworking," you know there is a problem in the school closure process.

In fact, one might say that the NYCDOE is suffering a "crisis in accountability" in how they are going about all these school shutterings.

Nonetheless, the Panel for Educational Policy is loaded with Bloomberg shills and you can bet that if Bloomberg wants 58 schools closed, 58 schools will be closed.

And the mostly compliant corporate media will cheer lead these closings, publishing the mayor's propaganda about "bad teachers" wrecking the system.

The governor, who never lets the facts get in the way of a good TV moment, will thunder how teachers think they are above accountability, but he's going to show them they are WRONG.

And the NYSED and the USDOE, filled to the gills with Gates Foundation appointees whose primary purpose in life is to get teachers fired, bust teachers unions, change teacher compensation to base + bonus, and send teachers pensions the way of the horse and buggy will rubber stamp whatever Bloomberg wants.

The fix is in, folks, and the teachers unions, supposedly so powerful, are meekly letting all of this happen, sending out leaders who are unwilling, unable or too inarticulate to fight the p.r. battle that is needed at the very time the union is facing a threat to its very survival.

This is the END GAME.

If Bloomberg gets away with closing "A" and "B" rated schools that his DOE raved over in last year's progress reports, then ANY school can be closed.

If they want your building, if they decide they don't like the principal, if one of the teachers speaks out on NY 1 and calls them on their horseshit, if Eva likes your assistant principal's corner office - watch out, your school might be next on the list to be closed.

This insanity needs to stop, but the politicians - from the president on down to the governor - are all on board with this.

The media, rather than tell truth to power and actually report the reality of this simply act as stenographers for the Bloomberg and Obama administrations.

And the meme is out there - all these problems in education, indeed in the country at large, stem from "bad teachers" and "powerful teachers unions."

Something needs to give.

I wish that my union, the United Federation of Teachers, would actually fight an articulate, coordinated battle against the insanity of test-based accountability, school closures, and the charterizing of the school system.

Instead, Mulgrew says he agrees with Cuomo on policy and makes believe like Bloomberg is the only problem, and once they get rid of him all will be well again.

Instead the NYSUT and the UFT agree to allow Cuomo to break the law and base 40% of teacher evaluations on test scores.

Instead the unions let corporate shills like Nicholas Kristo blather on about "bad teachers" and the need for a strong evaluation system when the actual system the NYSED and the NYCDOE are putting into place is riddled with error and instability.

I have 102 juniors taking the ELA Regents today.

Our tutoring sessions have been down 50% over the past few years.

Students are fed up with hearing how the exams are life or death and don't seem to have the same urgency over the scores that we who work in the school do.

I have little doubt that as the state and the city add more tests to the school year in order to evaluate teachers, that student ennui over testing is only going to get worse.

And of course the politicians, the media, and the business people will continue to blame teachers for this instead of seeing the real culprit here - the insanity of the test-based accountability system and the law of diminishing returns.

NYSED Commissioner John King - Hypocrite Extraordinaire

2012-01-23T17:35:00.003-05:00

First, statements made by NYSED Commissioner King today about school district insolvency:

State education commissioner John King said a number of districts risk insolvency in the next few years. He said increasing costs, particularly employee costs such as health care, could make some district budgets unsustainable in just a year or two.While school districts cannot legally declare bankruptcy, they can essentially hand the keys off to the state if they can not meet all their required financial obligations.
King said he was particularly concerned about “programmatic insolvency,” where districts are not able to provide a quality education because they have cut back on academics so much. He said some districts have already lost advanced placement classes and early education programs and that their students are at risk.

Now let's take a closer look at the part where King claims he's concerned because some districts "have cut back on academics so much."

I bet spending millions on new tests that the state plans to add into every subject in every grade, forcing districts to come up with alternate assessments for subjects that will not have state tests (such as gym, music, art, etc.) and forcing them to spend millions more on outside professional development consultants and programs to help "bad teachers" will really go a long way toward helping districts with budget problems to stop cutting back on academics like a.p. classes and early education programs.

Hey, John, wanna help struggling districts to maintain a.p. classes and early education programs?

Stop forcing them to spend money on bullshit mandates like adding new tests into every subject in every grade, forcing them to come up with alternate assessments for subjects that do not have state tests and forcing them to spend millions more on outside professional development consultants and programs to help "bad teachers".

King knows this already - he's just shucking and jiving at the hearing to make believe like the NYSED and the Regents have nothing to do with the strain districts are under.

To be clear, the NYSED and the Regents do not bear total responsibility for the budgetary strains districts are facing.

But the mandates the NYSED and the Regents are shoving onto every district in the state sure do not alleviate any of it.

The Neo-Feudal Economy

2012-01-22T12:54:00.003-05:00

When the president or the captains of finance and industry blame education for why companies do not manufacture or make anything in the United States anymore, do NOT believe them.

This is why they don't manufacture or make anything in the United States anymore:

Apple has become one of the best-known, most admired and most imitated companies on earth, in part through an unrelenting mastery of global operations. Last year, it earned over $400,000 in profit per employee, more than Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or Google.

However, what has vexed Mr. Obama as well as economists and policy makers is that Apple — and many of its high-technology peers — are not nearly as avid in creating American jobs as other famous companies were in their heydays.

Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.

“Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.

“If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

But while Apple is far from alone, it offers a window into why the success of some prominent companies has not translated into large numbers of domestic jobs. What’s more, the company’s decisions pose broader questions about what corporate America owes Americans as the global and national economies are increasingly intertwined.

“Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

Businesspeople blame education for the problem - they say that Americans are not trained in the mid-level skills that are needed at factories, so that's why they go overseas to make their products.

But take a look at just how the workers are treated overseas and ask yourself if THAT isn't the reason:

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.

...

An eight-hour drive from that glass factory is a complex, known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.

That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.

Foxconn employs nearly 300 guards to direct foot traffic so workers are not crushed in doorway bottlenecks. The facility’s central kitchen cooks an average of three tons of pork and 13 tons of rice a day. While factories are spotless, the air inside nearby teahouses is hazy with the smoke and stench of cigarettes.

Foxconn Technology has dozens of facilities in Asia and Eastern Europe, and in Mexico and Brazil, and it assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung and Sony.

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni, who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night, according to the former Apple executive. That’s when managers woke thousands of workers, who crawled into their uniforms — white and black shirts for men, red for women — and quickly lined up to assemble, by hand, the phones. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.

Foxconn, in statements, declined to speak about specific clients.

“Any worker recruited by our firm is covered by a clear contract outlining terms and conditions and by Chinese government law that protects their rights,” the company wrote. Foxconn “takes our responsibility to our employees very seriously and we work hard to give our more than one million employees a safe and positive environment.”

The company disputed some details of the former Apple executive’s account, and wrote that a midnight shift, such as the one described, was impossible “because we have strict regulations regarding the working hours of our employees based on their designated shifts, and every employee has computerized timecards that would bar them from working at any facility at a time outside of their approved shift.” The company said that all shifts began at either 7 a.m. or 7 p.m., and that employees receive at least 12 hours’ notice of any schedule changes.

Foxconn employees, in interviews, have challenged those assertions.

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Ah, yes - the vaunted "More than a High School, But Not Quite a College Degree" engineer.

Can't remember the last time I heard Arne Duncan or Barack Obama talking about churning out tens of thousands of those.

Well, the U.S. could find lots of them anyway, train them pretty fast too - but companies like Apple prefer to hire these kinds of workers in China:

Middle-Class Jobs Fade

The first time Eric Saragoza stepped into Apple’s manufacturing plant in Elk Grove, Calif., he felt as if he were entering an engineering wonderland.

It was 1995, and the facility near Sacramento employed more than 1,500 workers. It was a kaleidoscope of robotic arms, conveyor belts ferrying circuit boards and, eventually, candy-colored iMacs in various stages of assembly. Mr. Saragoza, an engineer, quickly moved up the plant’s ranks and joined an elite diagnostic team. His salary climbed to $50,000. He and his wife had three children. They bought a home with a pool.

“It felt like, finally, school was paying off,” he said. “I knew the world needed people who can build things.”

At the same time, however, the electronics industry was changing, and Apple — with products that were declining in popularity — was struggling to remake itself. One focus was improving manufacturing. A few years after Mr. Saragoza started his job, his bosses explained how the California plant stacked up against overseas factories: the cost, excluding the materials, of building a $1,500 computer in Elk Grove was $22 a machine. In Singapore, it was $6. In Taiwan, $4.85. Wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities. Rather it was costs like inventory and how long it took workers to finish a task.

“We were told we would have to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays,” Mr. Saragoza said. “I had a family. I wanted to see my kids play soccer.”

Modernization has always caused some kinds of jobs to change or disappear. As the American economy transitioned from agriculture to manufacturing and then to other industries, farmers became steelworkers, and then salesmen and middle managers. These shifts have carried many economic benefits, and in general, with each progression, even unskilled workers received better wages and greater chances at upward mobility.

But in the last two decades, something more fundamental has changed, economists say. Midwage jobs started disappearing. Particularly among Americans without college degrees, today’s new jobs are disproportionately in service occupations — at restaurants or call centers, or as hospital attendants or temporary workers — that offer fewer opportunities for reaching the middle class.

Even Mr. Saragoza, with his college degree, was vulnerable to these trends. First, some of Elk Grove’s routine tasks were sent overseas. Mr. Saragoza didn’t mind. Then the robotics that made Apple a futuristic playground allowed executives to replace workers with machines. Some diagnostic engineering went to Singapore. Middle managers who oversaw the plant’s inventory were laid off because, suddenly, a few people with Internet connections were all that were needed.

Mr. Saragoza was too expensive for an unskilled position. He was also insufficiently credentialed for upper management. He was called into a small office in 2002 after a night shift, laid off and then escorted from the plant. He taught high school for a while, and then tried a return to technology. But Apple, which had helped anoint the region as “Silicon Valley North,” had by then converted much of the Elk Grove plant into an AppleCare call center, where new employees often earn $12 an hour.

There were employment prospects in Silicon Valley, but none of them panned out. “What they really want are 30-year-olds without children,” said Mr. Saragoza, who today is 48, and whose family now includes five of his own.

After a few months of looking for work, he started feeling desperate. Even teaching jobs had dried up. So he took a position with an electronics temp agency that had been hired by Apple to check returned iPhones and iPads before they were sent back to customers. Every day, Mr. Saragoza would drive to the building where he had once worked as an engineer, and for $10 an hour with no benefits, wipe thousands of glass screens and test audio ports by plugging in headphones.

...

“We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive said. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”

What’s more, Apple sources say the company has created plenty of good American jobs inside its retail stores and among entrepreneurs selling iPhone and iPad applications.

After two months of testing iPads, Mr. Saragoza quit. The pay was so low that he was better off, he figured, spending those hours applying for other jobs. On a recent October evening, while Mr. Saragoza sat at his MacBook and submitted another round of résumés online, halfway around the world a woman arrived at her office. The worker, Lina Lin, is a project manager in Shenzhen, China, at PCH International, which contracts with Apple and other electronics companies to coordinate production of accessories, like the cases that protect the iPad’s glass screens. She is not an Apple employee. But Mrs. Lin is integral to Apple’s ability to deliver its products.

Mrs. Lin earns a bit less than what Mr. Saragoza was paid by Apple. She speaks fluent English, learned from watching television and in a Chinese university. She and her husband put a quarter of their salaries in the bank every month. They live in a 1,080-square-foot apartment, which they share with their in-laws and son.

“There are lots of jobs,” Mrs. Lin said. “Especially in Shenzhen.”

And why do Apple executives and the other captains of finance and industry prefer to hire overseas?

Very simply - money:

As Apple’s overseas operations and sales have expanded, its top employees have thrived. Last fiscal year, Apple’s revenue topped $108 billion, a sum larger than the combined state budgets of Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts. Since 2005, when the company’s stock split, share prices have risen from about $45 to more than $427.

Some of that wealth has gone to shareholders. Apple is among the most widely held stocks, and the rising share price has benefited millions of individual investors, 401(k)’s and pension plans. The bounty has also enriched Apple workers. Last fiscal year, in addition to their salaries, Apple’s employees and directors received stock worth $2 billion and exercised or vested stock and options worth an added $1.4 billion.

The biggest rewards, however, have often gone to Apple’s top employees. Mr. Cook, Apple’s chief, last year received stock grants — which vest over a 10-year period — that, at today’s share price, would be worth $427 million, and his salary was raised to $1.4 million. In 2010, Mr. Cook’s compensation package was valued at $59 million, according to Apple’s security filings.

If Apple or some other company wanted to begin to manufacture back in the United States, wanted to begin training Americans to do the technological jobs they need them to do - they could.

But they don't want to pay them a living wage for this - or at least, not what is a living wage in the United States.

So instead they lay off Americans and go abroad to hire cheaper.

This is the shame of America, the consequences of globalism and free trade agreements and the increased power of the corporations - we live in a corporate state.

What is good for the corporation is now seen as what is good for America.

Even if tens of millions - indeed, hundreds of millions of Americans - are being hurt by this.

And the politicians in BOTH parties - bought by corporate money, owned by the captains of finance and industry - are aiding and abetting the feudalization of America.

The only way this stops is if millions of Americans finally stand up and say no to it.

The Occupy movements looked like the beginning of that.

Thus the response from the Obama administration, the corporate-owned media, and politicians in BOTH parties to quash that movement as quick as possible.

It is quite clear to me that the current trajectory of "innovation" in the economy is not sustainable - not economically, not environmentally, not socially, not politically.

But we'll see how long we have to go before these assholes running things - whether it's the assholes in Washington, the assholes on Wall Street,or the assholes in Washington State and Silicon Valley - get the message that squeezing Americans this way is not going to end well.

So far, they're not getting the message.

Indeed, the arrogance of a prick like Steve Jobs - who I dearly hope has been reincarnated as an Apple employee at FOXXCONN - shows why most of these assholes are not going to get the message until their absolutely hit over the head with it.

They believe their own propaganda, their own mythology about their greatness as 'innovators" to see that they are simply acting like feudal lords, plantation owners and slave masters.

Hey Cuomo - Here's Your "Crisis In Accountability"

2012-01-21T13:02:00.003-05:00

And guess what?

It isn't in public education:

Wall Street stocks and profits took a beating in 2011. But there is one corner of the Street that took a lighter hit: the compensation paid to chief executives.

Three big banks disclosed on Friday what their top executives will receive in deferred stock for their work in 2011. Such stock is expected to make up most of their bonus as banks are increasingly paying employees more in deferred stock. Those awards to top bank executives are coming as lower-level employees are finding out that their own bonuses will be much smaller than a year ago.

Brian Foley, a compensation expert in White Plains, said that for top executives, he would have expected “the belt to come in a few more notches” this year given the banks’ lackluster stock performance. He added that executive suite pay packages this year might further lower morale inside the banks.

“A lot of people in the middle took big hits this year,” he said. “It could create some big ‘us versus them issues’ as to why the rank and file are taking a bigger hit than the senior executives.”

It seems the people running the big banks - you know, the zombie banks that were so loaded down with debt that they had to be bailed out with billions in federal money and billions more in 0% interest free "loans" from Uncle Ben Bernanke and his Merry Fedsters - are still partying like it's 1999.

Bad year at the bank?

So what - I'm getting my big bonus and pay, says Jamie Dimon:

Shares of Citigroup’s rival, JPMorgan Chase, also had a rough year, falling almost 22 percent. Still, JPMorgan’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon, was awarded $17 million in equity-linked stock for his work in 2011, according to a regulatory filing. Last year Mr. Dimon received $17 million in equity awards around this time of year and his total pay for the year came to $23 million. His total pay is expected to be roughly the same this year, according to a person close to company but not authorized to speak on the record.

Where's the accountability there?

Ah, there is none.

This is very simply about people in power squeezing all the profit and productivity they can out of those under them and paying themselves lavishly no matter how their companies do.

The next time Cuomo says teachers are unaccountable, somebody in the press who doesn't have his or her lips around Cuomo's ass ought to ask our good governor what about accountability for the banksters?

UFT, NYSUT Sell-Out On Evaluations Gets Closer

2012-01-20T17:38:00.003-05:00

This showed up a bit ago at the Daily News political blog:

Warring factions over the creation of a teacher evaluation system just reported “significant progress” toward a deal.

State Education Commissioner John King and Richard Iannuzzi, president of the state teachers union, reported the movement in a joint statement released just now.

The two said that “negotiations going on since October are now making significant progress and continue in earnest towards settlement.”

You can bet the Regents, the NYSED, Cuomo and Bloomberg aren't compromising on anything, so just imagine that this is going to be as bad you think it is - 20% of the evaluation from the city test VAM, 20% from the state test VAM (or 40% from state test VAM for districts that cannot afford their own locally created tests) and 60% from observations, but if you're declared "ineffective" on any part of the VAM, you're given an "ineffective" rating overall.

And of course Walcott will have the final say on appeal.

That's what the reformers want and you can almost bet that's what the reformers are going to get.

Well, at least teachers in Obama's home state of Hawaii told him to go screw.

Bloomberg Puts "Children First" By Axing After School Programs For 27,000

2012-01-20T06:36:00.004-05:00

Because the mayor is all about helping the children:

MANHATTAN — The city's plan to chop after-school programs in half will leave tens of thousands of children with nowhere to go after school, endangering working families and putting children at risk, youth advocates and members of the City Council said Thursday.

The free five-day-a-week after-school programs currently serve about 55,000 elementary and middle-school children, providing much-needed childcare so parents can work, advocates and city officials said. The programs also offer homework help, academic enrichment, recreational and cultural activities, and, often, the child's only hot meal of the evening.

Council members and nonprofit directors at a City Council hearing Thursday slammed the city for cutting nearly 200 after-school programs that serve about 27,000 elementary and middle school students across the five boroughs as of next fall.

"That is not a budget cut — this is an atrocity," said City Councilman Lewis Fidler, who led Thursday's Youth Services Committee hearing.

This week Bloomberg said teachers only care about themselves and their job security while it is he who really cares about kids.

And slashing after school programs for 27,000 kids really shows how much he cares about children, doesn't it?

To rephrase something the mayor said about teachers this week, it shows that he doesn't give a shit about kids at all.

News Corporation Acknowledges Executives Deliberately Deceived Investigators in Hacking Case, Destroyed Evidence

2012-01-19T16:39:00.005-05:00

Gee - this kind of thing would be a front page story at the New York Post if it were a teacher admitting it:

LONDON — The actor Jude Law, the soccer star Ashley Cole, and Lord Prescott, a former British deputy prime minister, were named Thursday on a list of 36 victims of phone hacking who have reached settlements totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars with Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

A statement by lawyers representing hacking victims said that Mr. Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers, which published the now-defunct News of the World tabloid, had agreed to pay substantial damages on the basis “that senior employees and directors” of the company “knew about the wrongdoing and sought to conceal it by deliberately deceiving investigators and destroying evidence.”

While not explicitly admitting or denying those claims, the company agreed to set compensation on the basis that it was true. In doing so, it acknowledged, lawyers said, that it had deliberately covered up both the existence and the pervasiveness of The News of the World’s phone-hacking operation, lied about it to the police and Parliament, and destroyed evidence in the case.

Hmm - lying to police, lying to Parliament, destroying evidence, and covering up criminal activity - it sure sounds like Rupert Murdoch has a lot of bad, bad people working at News Corporation.

In fact, some of those bad people are right in his own family.

Like his son, James, who just might be next on the list to get arrested in the phone hacking case.

And yet, tomorrow we will not see a word of this News Corporation story about widespread criminal activity, conspiracy and cover-up in the pages of the News Corporation-owned New York Post.

We will, however, inevitably see a couple of articles about why teachers need to be fired.

Because you know how how a teacher forging a jury duty note is absolutely the worst crime ever, but News Corporation executives and directors lying to police, lying to Parliament, destroying evidence, and covering up criminal activity is just another day at the News Corporation office.

And just in case you think this Jude Law hacking case is the only one Murdoch is going to settle, here's what the lawyer in the case said:

Mark Lewis, a lawyer for many of the phone-hacking victims, said in an e-mail that the claimants’ fight against the Murdoch media properties was not over.

“It is important that we don’t get carried away into thinking that the war is over,” Mr. Lewis said, according to The Associated Press. “ There are many more cases in the pipeline.”

He added: “This is too early to celebrate, we’re not even at the end of the beginning.”

Wow - they're not even at the end of the beginning of this.

You can imagine what more will come in these cases.

Indeed, The Guardian reports today that a judge in another civil trial has ordered News Corporation to make available computers and laptops upon which News Corporation employees destroyed evidence of hacking:

News Group Newspapers has been ordered to allow a search of computers alleged to contain evidence that News of the World executives deliberately destroyed damning phone-hacking evidence.

During legal discussions on Thursday before a civil trial scheduled for 13 February, the company failed to convince Mr Justice Vos that the search of three laptops assigned to senior employees and six desktop computers was "disproportionate".

...

He said there were compelling questions about whether the paper had engaged in a campaign of deliberate destruction of evidence, had lied, deliberately concealed evidence, made payments to police, or had "actively tried to get off scot-free", including by destroying a "very substantial number of emails" and computers of journalists.

There we go again with more allegations of News Corporation employees destroying evidence, lying to authorities, conspiring to cover up criminal activity and offering bribes to police.

Offering bribes to police?

Wow - that's even worse than forging a jury duty note!

No wonder 20 former and current News Corporation employees - including the former editor of News of the World and aide to Prime Minister David Cameron, Andy Coulson, and former News International chief executive Rebekah Brooks - have been arrested in the case.

I keep writing the New York Post to ask the editors how they can pontificate about "bad teachers" who should be fired all the time from the op-ed pages of the Post when it is increasingly clear that the company they work for, News Corporation, is only slightly less criminal than an organized crime family like the Gambinos (but only slightly.)

They never write back to say.

They do, however, pontificate about a teacher who forged jury notes to get extra days off and how she should be fired.

I wonder when this hacking investigation is all through, how many of the News Corporation employees who worked on the FIRE TEACHERS stories in the Post will eventually end up in jail for criminal activity, cover-up, conspiracy, bribery, perjury, forgery and/or tampering with evidence in what has become a widespread case of corruption and rot at the core of Rupert Murdoch's media empire.

UFT, NYSUT Set To Cave In Evaluation Impasse?

2012-01-19T05:53:00.006-05:00

Sure sounds like the sell-out is coming:

In the long-simmering debate over how to judge the quality of New York State school employees, there is one thing all sides agree on: a system should be in place.

...

The sides are not as far apart as their public posture would indicate. Three weeks before Mr. Cuomo set the deadline, the union had already acceded to one of the state’s key demands. It agreed that most of the 60 points teachers could earn on subjective measurements should be based on classroom observations — something the state’s education commissioner, John B. King Jr., had been pushing for. Of the total score of 100, results from student testing would account for the other 40 points.

...

At issue is the process by which teachers would be able to appeal a poor rating. The city proposed forming a three-person committee consisting of one representative from the city, one from the union and one who would be jointly selected by both to issue an advisory decision to the schools chancellor, who would then make the final call.

Mr. Mulgrew objected. He said the administration had forced teachers to go to court to have bad ratings reversed.

...

The appeals process will be a crucial issue for the union once the teacher evaluation standards go into effect. The new law scraps a “satisfactory/unsatisfactory” scale that has been used to judge teachers for decades and introduces a four-tiered rating: “ineffective,” “developing,” “effective” and “highly effective.” Teachers who are rated “ineffective” for two consecutive years could lose their jobs within 60 days. Under the current system, less than 3 percent of the city’s teachers are rated “unsatisfactory,” and it can take more than a year to fire a teacher.

...

The disagreements that remain are, by and large, the subjects of the lawsuit by the state teachers’ union. For example, 40 points on the annual reviews for teachers statewide would come from students’ test scores. The union wants only half of those points to be based on standardized tests, but the Board of Regents, which sets state education policy, allowed districts to base all of the 40 points on standardized tests.

The law specifies that 20 points of the evaluation must be based on the state tests and the remaining 20 points on other exams, to be developed by local districts. The discrepancy between the Regents’ regulations and the legislation is the reason the union sued, Mr. Iannuzzi said.

“We never challenged the law. We only challenged their interpretation of the law,” he said.

What is not said in the Times article is whether the unions are going to agree to allow teachers to be declared "ineffective" overall if the value-added measurement they use on student test scores comes up with an "ineffective" score.

You'll remember that Cuomo allegedly wrote a letter to Regents Chancellor Tisch stating he wanted just that in the new evaluation system, meaning if a teacher is declared "ineffective" on either the city test VAM (20% of the evaluation) or the state test VAM (20% of the evaluation), that teacher would be declared "ineffective" overall and subject to firing in 60 days if it happens two years running.

Norm Scott has posted that Cuomo hadn't actually written that letter, that Tisch and NYSED Commissioner John King had actually written it and Cuomo simply signed his name to it.

Whether that deception is true or not, it is quite clear to me that the fix is in on these evaluations, that the unions are just looking for a graceful way to cave in to Cuomo, the Regents, the NYSED and Bloomberg while making it look to their membership like they were truly fighting for their members.

Cuomo, the NYSED and the Regents are going to get their way on this and teachers are going to be subject to an overall "ineffective" rating if they come up "ineffective" on either the city VAM or the state VAM.

Given that the city and the state are going to add new standardized tests to every subject in every grade in order to carry out this new evaluation system, it's not too difficult to see that students are just going to stop caring about high stakes tests after a while (seriously, after 10-20 high stakes tests a year, why wouldn't they stop caring?)

That's why the appeals process for the "ineffective" rating is so important.

If the chancellor has the last call on the process, as the mayor wants, then no teacher will ever get a fair hearing and anybody who gets declared "ineffective" on any measure of the eval - the 20% city VAM, the 20% state VAM or the classroom observation, can just about kiss their job goodbye.

An appeals process that allows the chancellor to have the final say is like a PEP meeting on co-locations - the outcome is pre-decided.

I know this. If I am declared "ineffective" on either the city VAM or the state VAM, I am not going to rely on the appeals process as my sole measure of defense.

I am also going to sue the city and/or the state on the grounds that the value-added methodology they use is highly flawed, has wide margins of error and wide swings in stability.

That is already proven by the VAM the city uses for 4th-8th ELA and math teachers now.

I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if I will truly have a case on that or not, but I am going to tell you one thing - I sure as hell will see.

This new "tough" evaluation system is meant to bludgeon teachers, bust the union and allow districts to rid themselves of expensive veteran teachers.

Both the UFT and the NYSUT have collaborated with the NYSED, the Regents, the governor, the mayor and the education reform movement to bring this system to fruition.

They have already ceded ground on the validity of the VAM's. They have yet to get the message out that value-added measurement are about as reliable as any other call made by economists using one of their complex computer models (i.e., they're highly flawed and I wouldn't bet the mortgage on them.)

They have yet to tell the public how students are going to have to take tests in every subject in every grade - both state and city tests - in order for this system to be carried out. Students are going to be subject to taking 10-20 high stakes standardized tests every year that will matter a whole hell of a lot to teachers (if not exactly all that much to students).

Indeed, if Cuomo gets his way and a teacher is declared "ineffective" on either portion of the VAM, city or state, two years running, they can be fired - after being humiliated in public by having their rating published in the papers, of course.

You can bet the FEAR that will be added to the system over this is going to turn schools into nothing but test prep factories.

I don't think the public yet knows this.

It sounds good on the surface, using student performance to evaluate teachers, but doing it the way the city and state plan on doing it is going to destroy a lot of careers and reputations.

And that, of course, is the point - this is about management getting a leg up on labor, pure and simple.

The consequences of this are going to be very stark.

This new system is going to destroy the education of every student in this state when schools go All Test Prep, All The Time.

Now it is starting to sound like the unions are set to cave on the appeals process for the new system and give the "deformers" what they want on that too.

They have already caved on the VAM and the 10-20 new standardized tests a year.

The Shock and Awe destruction of the system is almost complete.

If this system is allowed to play out the way it is designed by the "reformers," in five years time tens of thousands of teachers in this state will have been fired for being "ineffective."

Only a tiny portion of those fired will actually be "bad teachers."

The rest will be expensive vets who will be the victims of district downsizing and budget squeezing.

By agreeing to this, the UFT and the NYSUT have collaborated on the destruction of the teaching profession and the ruin of tens of thousands of individual teachers.

My advice to teachers out there is to save every piece of paper relating to your VAM and your classroom practice.

Make sure you have attendance records, your syllabi, copies of student work.

Take videos of your teaching and interactions with students.

You're going to need that material to protect yourself and your reputation when the inevitable "ineffective" rating comes down.

This may not work or hold up in a court of law, but let's be honest here - better to protect yourself as best you can if you intend to stay in education rather than rely on the NYSUT or the UFT to do the protection for you.

So far, they've done a very poor job indeed.

Jerry Brown Calls For Less Standardized Testing While Cuomo Calls For More

2012-01-18T17:45:00.004-05:00

In this Era of Accountability, when every politician in sight seems to have bought into testing as the sole measure of school and teacher accountability, it sure is refreshing to see the governor of a large state not only call for less tests, not more, but actually say something nice about teachers.

Seriously - that happened just today in California when Jerry Brown gave his State of the State speech:

“I want to say something about our schools. They consume more tax dollars than any other government activity and rightly so as they have a profound effect on our future. Since everyone goes to school, everyone thinks they know something about education and in a sense they do. But that doesn’t stop experts and academics and foundation consultants from offering their ideas — usually labeled reform and regularly changing at ten year intervals — on how to get kids learning more and better. It is salutary and even edifying that so much interest is shown in the next generation. Nevertheless, in a state with six million students, 300,000 teachers, deep economic divisions and a hundred different languages, some humility is called for.

“In that spirit, I offer these thoughts. First, responsibility must be clearly delineated between the various levels of power that have a stake in our educational system. What most needs to be avoided is concentrating more and more decision-making at the federal or state level. For better or worse, we depend on elected school boards and the principals and the teachers they hire. To me that means, we should set broad goals and have a good accountability system, leaving the real work to those closest to the students. Yes, we should demand continuous improvement in meeting our state standards but we should not impose excessive or detailed mandates.

“My budget proposes to replace categorical programs with a new weighted student formula that provides a basic level of funding with additional money for disadvantaged students and those struggling to learn English. This will give more authority to local school districts to fashion the kind of programs they see their students need. It will also create transparency, reduce bureaucracy and simplify complex funding streams.

...

“No system, however, works without accountability. In California we have detailed state standards and lots of tests. Unfortunately, the resulting data is not provided until after the school year is over. Even today, the ranking of schools based on tests taken in April and May of 2011 is not available. I believe it is time to reduce the number of tests and get the results to teachers, principals and superintendents in weeks, not months. With timely data, principals and superintendents can better mentor and guide teachers as well as make sound evaluations of their performance. I also believe we need a qualitative system of assessments, such as a site visitation program where each classroom is visited, observed and evaluated. I will work with the State Board of Education to develop this proposal.

“The house of education is divided by powerful forces and strong emotions. My role as governor is not to choose sides but to listen, to engage and to lead. I will do that. I embrace both reform and tradition — not complacency. My hunch is that principals and teachers know the most, but I’ll take good ideas from wherever they come.”

Imagine - a governor calling on people to have "humility" when approaching education reform and policy, proposing to give back power to the districts and the schools, to listen to principals AND teachers instead of berating them, to talk with respect about teachers rather than treat them like garbage.

How refreshing.

Quite the contrast to anti-teacher thug Andrew Cuomo.

If The Economists Can't Get The Economy Right, Why Should We Trust Them On Education?

2012-01-17T17:54:00.002-05:00

The FOMC transcripts from 2006 are out and they show how clueless and idiotic the people running economic policy in this country are:

WASHINGTON — As the housing bubble entered its waning hours in 2006, top Federal Reserve officials marveled at the desperate antics of home builders seeking to lure buyers.

The officials laughed about the cars that builders were offering as signing bonuses, and about efforts to make empty homes look occupied. They joked about one builder who said that inventory was “rising through the roof.”

But the officials, meeting every six weeks to discuss the health of the nation’s economy, gave little credence to the possibility that the faltering housing market would weigh on the broader economy, according to transcripts that the Fed released Thursday. Instead they continued to tell one another throughout 2006 that the greatest danger was inflation — the possibility that the economy would grow too fast.

“We think the fundamentals of the expansion going forward still look good,” Timothy F. Geithner, then president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told his colleagues when they gathered in Washington in December 2006.

Some officials, including Susan Bies, a Fed governor, suggested that a housing downturn actually could bolster the economy by redirecting money to other kinds of investments.

And there was general acclaim for Alan Greenspan, who stepped down as chairman at the beginning of the year, for presiding over one of the longest economic expansions in the nation’s history. Mr. Geithner suggested that Mr. Greenspan’s greatness still was not fully appreciated, an opinion now held by a much smaller number of people.

Meanwhile, by the end of 2006, the economy already was shrinking by at least one important measure, total income. And by the end of the next year, the Fed had started its desperate struggle to prevent the collapse of the financial system and to avert the onset of what could have been the nation’s first full-fledged depression in about 70 years.

The transcripts of the 2006 meetings, released after a standard five-year delay, clearly show some of the nation’s pre-eminent economic minds did not fully understand the basic mechanics of the economy that they were charged with shepherding. The problem was not a lack of information; it was a lack of comprehension, born in part of their deep confidence in economic forecasting models that turned out to be broken.

“It’s embarrassing for the Fed,” said Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “You see an awareness that the housing market is starting to crumble, and you see a lack of awareness of the connection between the housing market and financial markets.”

“It’s also embarrassing for economics,” he continued. “My strong guess is that if we had a transcript of any other economist, there would be at least as much fodder.”

These morons have a deep, abiding and arrogant confidence in themselves and their economic models, only it turned out their models were WRONG and they didn't know what the hell they were doing.

And yet these people are still in power, still running things, still, as Cunning Realist noted, "failing upward."

What's worse, they're now bringing their economic models - you know, the ones they were certain were absolutely correct in gauging the economy in 2006 but turned out to be horribly, horribly flawed - to public education by forcing value-added measurements of teachers using student test scores.

We already know that these value-added models have huge margins of error and wide swings in stability, but nonetheless the VERY SERIOUS PEOPLE in this country - from Obama to Cuomo to Bloomberg to Gates and the rest of the corporate criminal class - are promoting these models as absolutely essential for improving public education.

Never mind the margin of error.

Never mind the wide swings in stability.

Never mind that we'll have to add new standardized tests to every grade in every subject to pull this off.

Never mind that tying teacher jobs to these scores means the only thing kids will be doing in schools is either prepping for the tests or taking the tests.

Never mind that the algorithm they're using to measure teachers is so complex NASA scientists have trouble explaining it.

Never mind that the one state already doing this kind of system has discovered it's an absolute mess.

You see, this is SCIENCE they're using in their value-added models and they're going to be able to tell who's a good teacher and who's a bad teacher using these models just the way they can predict future inflation or unemployment rates.

And let's face it, who doesn't trust these guys when they're predicting future inflation and unemployment rates?

Oh, right - they were wrong about that.

Completely wrong.

Oh, well - don't worry, they're going to get this right.

Trust them.

How is it our society continues to listen to economists who are WRONG about almost EVERYTHING, who have DESTROYED people's lives and life savings with the bad calls they have made on the economy in the past and are now are telling us to trust the education and care of children to them through the value-added models they plan to use on teachers?

This is EXACTLY what Cuomo , Obama and Bloomberg are doing by promoting a test score-based evaluation system using a value-added model as the major measure of the evaluation - trust the economists to tell us who is a "good" teacher and who is a "bad" teacher.

I'm sure this will all turn out well - just the way the stewards at the 2006 FOMC meeting made sure things turned out well for the economy at large back in 2007 and 2008.

Cuomo Will Cut Aid To Districts That Do Not Tie Teacher Evaluations To Test Scores

2012-01-17T04:08:00.000-05:00

And he's calling Shelly Silver a teachers union shill in a broadside attack against the Assembly Speaker via Cuomo's favorite venue for political attacks - the Murdoch-owned NY Post:

In one of his most dramatic moves since taking office, Gov. Cuomo will use the budget he makes public tomorrow to impose union-hated teacher evaluation systems on 700 school districts throughout the state, The Post has learned.

The popular governor will do so by including language in the budget that ties receipt of 4 percent state aid increases promised to the districts in last year’s budget — some $800 million — to adoption of the teacher-evaluation system developed by the state Education Department, which has been blocked from city schools by a teachers-union lawsuit, a source close to the situation said.

All the systems, including the New York City schools, will have until Dec. 31 of this year to adopt the teacher-evaluation systems or lose the money, the source said.

...

Cuomo’s tactic will be based on a controversial set of Court of Appeals rulings that date from 1998 to 2004, finding that governors could change state laws and, in effect, adopt new ones by including language to do so within the budget.

“Shelly and the teachers union will likely go ballistic,’’ was how one source close to the Cuomo administration put it about the governor’s plan, referring to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan), a teachers-union ally.

Notice three things here.

First, Cuomo is back in Rupert Murdoch's good graces now that's he returned to union-busting and teacher bashing.

Last week Murdoch nicknamed Governor 1% "Chicken Cuomo" for failing to impose a test score-based teacher evaluation system on teachers like Bloomberg wants.

But now that Cuomo's doing Murdoch's bidding on education reform once again, Post reporter Fred Dicker is back to slobbering all over Cuomo in the newspaper, writing about how "popular" the governor is and helping the governor by attacking Cuomo's enemies in the paper.

Also notice the preliminary strikes Cuomo lobs against both Assembly Speaker Silver and Senate Majority Leader Skelos as teachers unions shills through Dicker.

Cuomo is serving notice that he's going to smear anybody who stands in his way of his corporate education reform agenda as "harming the kids" or shilling for the unions - even though common sense says pushing through a massive new evaluation system that imposes new city and state standardized tests in every subject at every grade level might just be, you know, an idea that should be slow-walked.

But not in Governor 1%'s mind - state and city tests in every subject in every grade and teacher evals tied to those scores - that's just the ticket to improve public education in the state.

Last point - notice how Dicker changes the phrasing of Cuomo's "I'm going to be the chief lobbyist for students" from last week's State of the State speech to "Cuomo is the chief advocate for students."

A Siena poll released today showed people didn't like that term or idea - too close to the phrase "corporate lobbyist," I guess.

So leave it to Fred Dicker and the Murdoch Post to rebrand Cuomo "Chief Advocate."

Cuomo's a chief advocate all right - for the interests of the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, Pearson Education, and News Corporation.

When this new evaluation system goes into place, it will be interesting to see how parents in places like Scarsdale and Great Neck react to it.

Remember, this is a value-added system - teachers MUST add value to every student's test scores, even the high-scoring ones in Scarsdale and Great Neck.

The chaos that we have in New York City with school closures and firings and the like - that's going to come to Great Neck, Scarsdale and other wealthy suburbs too.

Not to mention all those new standardized tests they're going to add into all the subject in all the grades.

What will Cuomo's poll numbers look like after a year where parents see new city and state standardized tests added to every subject in every grade and teachers doing nothing but test prep for all these tests because if they don't "add value" to the scores, they're going to be rated "ineffective," humiliated in the local papers when they publish the individual teacher scores, and eventually fired?

Crowd To Bloomberg At MLK Jr. Day Celebration: "You Suck!"

2012-01-16T19:05:00.005-05:00

Bloomberg got beaten up over education policy at BAM today:

Mayor Bloomberg got booed and heckled as he made the rounds at African-American groups touting his new education initiatives.

At the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Hizzoner was jeered Monday as he introduced Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, highlighting his administration’s successes with education policy.

“The civil rights movement transformed America for the better, and now it is up [to us] to continue the work, especially in education, Every day for the past ten years, improving the city schools has been hands-down my number one priority, and it’s going to remain my priority,” he said, receiving boos from the crowd and even calls of “You suck!” from protesters critical of the mayor’s policy of closing schools.

Bloomberg then went uptown and got booed again:

Later in the day, Bloomberg was met with more of the same.

His face flushed red when he was heckled by a Harlem crowd after being introduced by the Rev. Al Sharpton.

"There are still too many kids, killing kids with guns," Bloomberg told the packed audience at the National Action Network’s MLK Day Public Policy forum. "There are still too many of our schools who aren't giving our kids the tools they need to choose college and a career over crime and the streets."

One crowd member yelled, "Let black people in the Fire Department! It's 94% white!"

Bloomberg replied, "We’re working on the Fire Department — this is about something else."

Hizzoner calmly finished the rest of his address.

On his way out, another heckler yelled, “Stop stop and frisk!”

It is interesting to see the public outcry Bloomberg was met with when he took his reform policies and education record to the people.

Up until now, the story on the education initiatives Bloomberg called for in his State of the City address - including firing 1,700 teachers, closing an additional 33 schools, opening 50 new charter schools and replacing salary increases for teachers with merit pay - has been framed in the media as "Mayor vs. UFT".

We see today at the MLK Jr. Day events that the framing ought to be "Mayor vs. Public."

Cuomo Links Test Score-Based Teacher Evaluation System To MLK

2012-01-16T12:01:00.003-05:00

You knew he would, wouldn't you?

Gov. Cuomo this morning linked his school reform effort to Martin Luther King Jr.

Addressing hundreds attending an MLK Day event near the state Capitol, Cuomo said he sees school reform as a continuation of “Dr. King’s struggle.”

"I believe as we gather here today, one of the greatest challenges for us, one of the greatest injustices to right is the failing of our public education system, period," he said.

...

“It started in 1954 Brown vs Board of Education, the nation stood up and said everyone, everywhere should have a quality education system. And we’re not there yet.”

“The great equalizer that was supposed to be the public education system can now be the great discriminator. Because if you have to go public school in a failing public school, you may never catch up, you may just be left behind by society and never catch up….”

“And government here is actually part of the problem because we have lost focus on what it is all about. We have created an education bureaucracy and now it is about the education bureaucracy perpetuating the education bureaucracy.”

Cuomo again said the system has become about the "business of education" more than the "achievement in education."

“We have to realize that our schools are not an employment program for the superintendents, and the principals and the teachers. They are an education program for the students. It is this simple. It is not about the adults it is about the children. The children come first.”

“I want to fund performance. And I want to shift the focus to the students…”

Cuomo is expected to tie a teacher evaluation system to a portion of school aid funding in his budget plan he is scheduled to unveil tomorrow.

Cuomo also used the event to bring rare unsolicited praise for President Obama, who he credited with the Race To The Top program.

He said the Obama administration is set to take away hundreds of millions of dollars from the state if a teacher evaluation system in not put in place.

"And the $700 million is going to come from the poorest school districts in this state. And I’m not going to let that happen."

"We’re gonna put an evaluation system in place that represents the students interest first .

We’re going to have the governor of the state of New York as the lobbyist for the students and the parents as the advocates and together we are going to change education once and for all.”

Yeah, Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream - a dream that all teachers would be evaluated using a value-added measurement tied to student test scores with a margin of error as large as 36% and stability swings wider than the gash in the Titanic's hull.

I'd say it's unbelievable that Cuomo is tying MLK to value-added teacher measurements and adding twenty new tests a year to the school curriculum in order to pull off that new evaluation system, but the truth is - it's not.

This is EXACTLY what these corporate reform people do - drape themselves in the language of civil rights and sanctimony while decrying the adults who work in the education system as the ones hurting students.

As if it's teachers slashing school budgets, increasing class sizes, cutting classroom materials so money can be spent on no-bid contracts for testing companies, narrowing the curriculum by adding new high stakes standardized tests in every subject in every grade and tying teaching jobs to the scores so that the only things kids will do in school anymore is prep for tests and take tests.

TWU President Tells Cuomo To "Shove It"

2012-01-16T08:02:00.005-05:00

The unions - from CSEA to PEF to the UFT and the NYSUT - have fallen all over themselves to stay on the good side of Governor 1% (or "Chicken Cuomo" as he's known to his patron, Rupert Murdoch.)

This weekend one union leader finally told the union-busting, union-hating Cuomo what he can do with himself:

As the MTA’s contract with the Transport Workers Union Local 100 was set to expire at midnight last night, hundreds of workers gathered in the bitter cold outside the negotiations at the Sheraton Hotel in midtown for a raucous rally where they were joined by several local politicians.

“I’ve been bargaining for the better part of the last 48 hours,” TWU Local 100 President John Samuelsen said. “I’m going to go back into that hotel and I’m going to tell the chairman of the MTA, I’m going to tell the governor to take their petty demands and shove it.”

As the state faces a looming deficit, Mr. Samuelsen said Governor Cuomo and the MTA are attempting to balance the budget “on the backs of Local 100 members” by taking five vacation days, creating part-time bus operators, limiting overtime and not granting a pay raise, among other sticking points.

Politicians who support working people, politicians who see that American society cannot be the 1% getting it all and the 99% getting the shiv, came out to support working people over the governor and the MTA:

Prior to Mr. Samuelsen’s appearance at the rally, which also included a tribute in honor of Martin Luther King Day, the crowd heard statements of support from City Council members Melissa Mark-Viverito, Ydanis Rodriguez and Tish James.

“We are here to support the leadership of TWU and to support all of you, because this is the best way to continue Martin Luther King’s dream,” Councilman Rodriguez said.

Both Councilwoman Mark-Viverito and Councilwoman James invoked the Occupy Wall Street protests in their speech to the TWU crowd.

“You keep this city running and we want to make sure that we support each and every one of you,” Councilwoman Mark-Viverito said. “The 99% is kicking, the 99% is saying, ‘We’re not going to take it anymore, we’re not going to give back anymore.’”

“We have to give homage to Occupation Wall Street who talked about the growing disparity in the city of New York and throughout this nation,” Councilwoman James said. “Those discussions are out front and it’s because of all of you working families, working individuals in the city of New York who deserve a fair contract, who deserve a living wage to sustain your families. That is why we are out here this evening in the cold and I’m glad its cold out here because it reminds us of our struggle.”

As a member of the UFT, I have watched my union leadership fall all over themselves to stay on Cuomo's good side.

As a member of the AFT, I have watched my union leadership fall all over themselves to keep their "seat at the table" in the Obama administration's discussions of education policy.

While they have been doing all of this groveling, both Cuomo and Obama have been pushing anti-teacher and anti-union measures meant to bust our unions, scapegoat teachers for all the problems in the public education system, give local districts the power to fire any teacher at any time for any reason and promote testing, testing, testing over true education.

My union leadership - Mike Mulgrew at the UFT and Randi Weingarten at the AFT and Richard Ianuzzi at the NYSUT - ought to be telling Cuomo and Obama they can "shove it" when they come around with these measures and policies.

They ought to be telling the American people and the people of the State of New York that the test score-based evaluation system pushed by Obama is NOT getting rid of the odious provisions of No Child Left Behind, as Obama and his Secretary of Education Privatization, Arne Duncan, like to say.

Rather this Obama policy is doubling down on the very measures that Americans hate about the Bush law - the narrowing of the curriculum, the erasure of any measure of skill or proficiency in the system except for test scores, and the destruction that the emphasis on scores has done to children, teachers and schools.

The UFT and the NYSUT and the AFT and the NEA ought to be telling Obama to shove his Gates Foundation-funded education policies, shove his 2012 re-election, and shove that idea he has that working teachers who are being scapegoated by this administration are going to vote for Obama again.

They ought to be saying "Remember Central Falls!"

Instead they offer endorsements of the president a year and a half before the election, as the NEA did.

And when the teacher-hating Andrew Cuomo declares New York State is suffering a "crisis in accountability" because teachers refuse to agree to a test score-based evaluation system with wide swings in stability and a margin of error larger than Andrew Cuomo's ego, the UFT and the NYSUT ought to be attacking Cuomo back and arguing that if there is a "crisis in accountability" in this state, it resides at the Regents and the NYSED where state officials are promoting corporate-friendly education "reform" policies while taking money, jobs and trips from corporate education reform companies like Pearson Education and News Corporation.

They ought to be arguing that the "crisis in accountability" in this state resides at Tweed Courthouse and City Hall in New York where the mayor and his Gates Foundation-funded education reform cadre push reforms like merit pay, school closures and test score-based evaluation systems for teachers that will make the education system WORSE while their own policies over the last ten years have resulted in a stagnation in test scores, phonied up graduation rates and chaos and destruction in the system like we have never seen before.

They ought to be arguing that if there is a "crisis in accountability" in this state, it resides with Governor Cuomo himself, who allowed the crooks on Wall Street (many of whom promote this corporate education reform stuff in their spare time when they're not raping investors and ravaging pension funds) to steal billions when he was attorney general, declining to criminally prosecute any of the architects of the 2008 financial collapse.

They ought to be telling Cuomo to shove his "I'm a lobbyist for students" jive by pointing out his kids go to private schools where teachers are NOT evaluated by test scores, where FEAR is NOT the rule of the day, where schools are NOT constantly under threat of closure if they don't show improvements in their quarterly test score results, where endless test prep and endless testing do NOT replace real learning.

They ought to point out that the self-appointed lobbyist for children is hurting students by promoting nothing but testing upon testing in the education system around the state.

Instead, the UFT urges us to call 311 and complain to the operator about Bloomberg.

And so, on this Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, when Obama will point to himself as the culmination of King's dream and when Cuomo will claim he is the guy on the right side of the civil rights/education issue, I say both Obama and Cuomo - Goldman Sachs-funded and corporately-co-opted politicians - can shove their corporate education reform policies, their union-busting, their teacher-bashing and their water-carrying for the 1%.

The dream I have today is that my union leadership at the UFT, the AFT, the NYSUT and the NEA wake up from their slumbers and join me in telling these corporate-owned politicians to shove it too.

King might have used difference language in this struggle against the union-busting, corporate-reform movement, but you can be sure he would stand with us today in this fight.

Bloomberg Declares War On Teachers

2012-01-15T14:28:00.000-05:00

The UFT responds with a brilliant plan.

Call 311:

Since Mayor Bloomberg has decided to use smokescreens to hide his decade of disastrous leadership over our public schools, we are encouraging all members to call 311. Tell the mayor to stop bashing teachers, start taking responsibility for not properly supporting schools and help us give children the quality education they deserve.

Oh, yeah - that'll work.

Reminds me of another crack squad that went to war:

Mulgrew's going to award himself the "Firefly Medal" for that 311 plan.

The "Crisis In Accountability" in New York Starts With Andrew Cuomo And His Wall Street Cronies

2012-01-15T05:51:00.000-05:00

The New York Post reports the following:

It’s your toxic mortgages at work.

Goldman Sachs investment banker Jeffrey Verschleiser, accused in lawsuits of illicitly profiting from bad mortgages that led to the 2008 meltdown, is spending $1 million to take over a swanky Aspen, Colo., hotel for his Upper East Side daughter’s bat mitzvah, sources said.

Verscheisler is taking over the luxury Hotel Jerome for the entire weekend, and perks for the guests reportedly include autographs from pro skiers.

The Aspen Daily News reports that Verschleiser also rented out the city-owned Aspen Recreational Center, which will close at 4 PM today instead of the usual 9 PM so that the Verschleiser party can take it over.

Gonna be a nice weekend for the Verschleiser family.

And why wouldn't it be?

When you see how much money this crook stole with impunity on Wall Street while the authorities - including then Attorney General Andrew Cuomo - stood by and watched, how could it be otherwise?

So how did Jeffrey Verschleiser get into this position where he could buy up half of Aspen for his daughter's Bat Mitzah?

Matt Taibbi takes up the story from there:

The story begins at Bear Stearns, where Verschleiser used to work, up until the company exploded, in large part because of him personally.

Back in the day, you see, Verschleiser headed Bear’s mortgage-backed securities operations. Toward the end of his tenure, his particular specialty began with what at the time was the usual industry-wide practice, putting together gigantic packages of crappy subprime mortgages and dumping them on unsuspecting clients.

But Verschleiser reportedly went beyond that. According to a lawsuit later filed by a bond insurer called Ambac, Verschleiser also masterminded a kind of double-dipping scheme. What he would do is sell a bunch of toxic mortgages into a trust, which like all mortgage trusts had provisions written into their pooling and servicing agreements (PSAs) that required the original lenders to buy the loans back if they went into default.

So Verschleiser would sell bad mortgages back to the banks at a discount, but instead of passing the money back to the trust, he and other Bear execs allegedly pocketed the funds.

From the Atlantic story by reporter Teri Buhl:

The traders were essentially double-dipping -- getting paid twice on the deal. How was this possible? Once the security was sold, they didn't have a legal claim to get cash back from the bad loans -- that claim belonged to bond investors -- but they did so anyway and kept the money. Thus, Bear was cheating the investors they promised to have sold a safe product out of their cash. According to former Bear Stearns and EMC traders and analysts who spoke with The Atlantic, Nierenberg and Verschleiser were the decision-makers for the double dipping scheme.

Imagine giving someone a hundred bucks to buy a bushel of apples, but making a deal with him that he has to buy back any apples that turn out to have worms in them. That's what happened here: Bear sold the wormy apples back to the farmer, but instead of taking the money from those sales and passing it on to you, they simply kept the money, according to the suit.

In an email one Bear exec called the bonds Bear was hawking "sacks of shit."

Mmm - but that was lucrative shit for Jeffrey Verschleiser, wasn't it?

But it gets worse.

Back to Taibbi:

So did Verschleiser himself know the mortgages were bad? Not only did he know it, he went so far as to tell his colleagues in writing that it was a waste of money to even bother performing due diligence on the bad bonds:

Jeffrey Verschleiser even said in an e-mail that he knew this was an issue. He wrote to his peer Mike Nierenberg in March 2006, "[we] are wasting way too much money on Bad Due Diligence." Yet a year later nothing had changed. In March 2007, Verschleiser wrote to Nierenberg again about the same due diligence firm, "[w]e are just burning money hiring them."

One of the ways that banks like Bear managed to convince investors to buy these bonds was by wrapping them in bond insurance through companies like Ambac, commonly known as “monoline” insurers. Investors who knew the bonds were insured were less worried about default.

Verschleiser, seeing that Bear had gotten firms like Ambac to insure its “sack of shit” bonds, saw here a new opportunity to make money. He first induced the monolines to insure the worthless bonds, then bet against the insurers! (Is it any wonder this guy ended up hired by Goldman, Sachs?) From the Atlantic story again:

Then in November 2007, Verschleiser wrote to his risk committee that he knew insurers for mortgage securities were going to have big financial problems. He suggested they multiply by ten times the short bet he'd just made against stocks like Ambac. These e-mails show Verschleiser's trading desk bragging to firm leadership that he made $55 million off shorting insurers' stock in just three weeks.

So in essence, Verschleiser was triple-dipping. First he was selling worthless “sacks of shit” to investors, representing them as good investments. Then, he kept the money from the return sales of the wormy apples. And then, on top of that, he made money by betting against the insurers he was sticking with these toxic assets

Surely New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo or the SEC or some other regulatory body stepped in to put handcuffs on this man until he could be tried for fraud?

Nope.

As the NY Times reported April 14, 2011, not one major participant in the financial collapse of 2008 has been criminally prosecuted and sent to jail.

That holds for Jeffrey Verschleiser.

As Taibbi writes,

We all know what happened from there. Bear, Stearns went under, thanks in large part to insane schemes like Verschleiser’s, and all of us were forced to pick up at least part of the tab as the Fed spent billions subsidizing Bear’s emergency takeover by JP Morgan Chase. In subsequent litigation, Chase has steadfastly refused to buy back the bad mortgages dumped on investors by the likes of Verschleiser, and has even fought tooth and nail to prevent the information in the Ambac suit from being made public.

Ambac went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2010 for a variety of reasons, some of which had nothing to do with its losses in deals like these. But certainly Ambac and other monoline insurers like MBIA suffered for having insured worthless mortgage bonds sold onto the market by the Verschleisers of the world. Ambac in its suit asserted that it paid out over $641 million in claims related to the bonds from the Bear deals.

With all of this, though, Verschleiser landed happily on his feet. He reportedly heads Goldman’s mortgage division now. And after cutting a mile-wide swath of losses through the American economy, helping destroy two venerable firms in Bear and Ambac, bilking the taxpayer for untold millions more (he is also named in a lawsuit filed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency for allegedly speeding bad loans onto securitization before they defaulted), Verschleiser is now living the contented life of a proud family man, renting out a 94-room hotel for three days for his daughter’s Bat Mitzvah.

Andrew Cuomo said this week there is a "crisis of accountability" in New York.

He was talking about the school system and was alleging that public school teachers are unaccountable because they refuse to be evaluated by a system that utilizes student test scores and a value-added measurement with a large margin of error and wide swings in findings from year to year.

Pointedly, he was NOT talking about a justice system that allows a Jeffrey Verschleiser to criminally triple-dip his way to a very wealthy and lucrative lifestyle with impunity.

Taibbi writes:

Anyway, given that much of Verschleiser's questionable behavior is in writing, his case sure seems court-ready. But for whatever reason, he has not been indicted.

One can almost understand a regulator not wanting to take on the whole circular securitization scheme -- Bear lends money to corrupt mortgage firm, mortgage firm makes bad loans, Bear packages bad loans and sells to investors, then takes the proceeds and creates more bad loans -- because it is so complex and difficult to prove.

But in this case there are simple issues of fraud and theft that could be taken on without having to prosecute broader crimes related to securitization. But prosecutors, apparently, just blew those off. In the current environment, regulators even miss the layups.

And therein lies the REAL crisis in accountability in New York and the country at large.

Andrew Cuomo himself, along with the other regulators who let these crimes go largely uninvestigated and entirely unpunished, need to be held accountable, as do crooks like Jeffrey Verschleiser.

Why An Investigation Into Hacking By News Corporation Employees In The U.S. Matters

2012-01-14T10:35:00.008-05:00

The NY Post used one teacher who forged jury duty notes to take time off with pay as a reason for why New York State must pass stringent teacher evaluations based upon test scores and value-added measurements:

New York City teachers don’t need meaningful proficiency re-evaluations?

Meet Mona Lisa Tello, an about-to-be-former 13-year bilingual-science teacher at the High School of Graphic Communication Arts in Hells Kitchen who was busted this week on three felony counts of forgery.

It seems that Tello faked a jury-duty letter to get paid time off from work.

But the real problem isn’t just that Tello — who, like all teachers, gets multiple mini-vacations every year, plus three months off in the summer — tried to steal even more paid time off.

It’s that such a stunningly stupid, barely literate woman was teaching in the first place.

Certainly it was easy to prove her letter was forged: It was riddled with spelling mistakes.

...

Tello received tenure in 2003, meaning that for nearly a decade, her students — in a bilingual program, yet — were being educated by someone who seemingly can’t write coherently herself.

How many other Mona Lisa Tellos are in the school system — maybe not so greedy, but scarcely able to spell their own names?

United Federation of Teachers President Mike Mulgrew doesn’t want you to know.

And that’s why he and his union are fighting real teacher evaluation.

It’s just that simple.

Using this logic of the Post editors, if one tenured teacher has forged notes with spelling errors in them, then ALL New York City teachers must be suspect for being crooked, greedy, and barely literate or proficient at their jobs too.

This is interesting logic, because the New York Post is owned by Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation, a conglomerate currently undergoing an intense investigation into criminal practices in Great Britain involving phone hacking, computer hacking, tampering of evidence in a criminal case, bribery, extortion and criminal conspiracy and cover-up.

The case has seen 17 current or former News Corporation employees arrested for various crimes, including the former chief executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks,
on phone hacking and bribery charges.

A former executive chairman of News International and the former editor of the Wall Street Journal, Les Hinton, has resigned from his post as chief executive of Dow Jones as fall-out from the scandal. Hinton has been Rupert Murdoch's right hand man for many years.

Hinton has not been arrested in the case yet, though the official inquiry into the scandal has been targeting Hinton for actions taken once the extent of the phone hacking was known by News International brass.

Also, former News of the World editor and communications director to British Prime Minister David Cameron, Andy Coulson, has been arrested on allegations of corruption and conspiring to intercept communications.

Coulson is currently suing News International to get them to continue paying his legal expenses in the case.

News International had been paying the legal expenses of former employees in the case until concern was raised that this constituted a potential cover-up strategy.

The latest arrest came last week when Brooks' former personal assistant, Cheryl Carter, was taken into custody on suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice.

Carter is expected to give evidence that police are looking to use against her former bosses:

LONDON — Scotland Yard’s arrest of a former personal assistant to Rebekah Brooks, a former chief executive of the British newspaper arm of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, appears to reflect the investigators’ intensifying focus on the possibility of a cover-up by executives, editors and others of the extent of illegal phone hacking and other criminal wrongdoing at the The News of the World, which is now defunct.

...

Ms. Carter’s arrest drew attention for several reasons, including a Scotland Yard statement that said that she had been questioned on suspicion of trying to pervert the course of justice, a line of inquiry that has not been specified in police statements on most of the other arrests in Operation Weeting.

In addition, Ms. Carter appeared to have had a close personal and professional relationship with Ms. Brooks, the most senior executive in the Murdoch hierarchy to have been arrested in the affair. Former News of the World employees who spoke on condition of anonymity said Ms. Carter had worked as a personal assistant to Ms. Brooks for 19 years, starting when Ms. Brooks was deputy editor of The Sun, another Murdoch-owned tabloid in London, and continuing as Ms. Brooks became editor of the The News of the World, editor of The Sun, and later chief executive of News International, overseeing all of the Murdoch titles in Britain.

James Murdoch, Rupert's son, is on the hot seat as well for statements made before a Parliamentary committee about payouts to phone hacking victims that former News International employees say were lies.

So let's sum it all up - we have Rupert Murdoch's son James, Rupert's former right hand man Les Hinton, his former "imposter daughter" Rebekah Brooks, and at least 16 other current or former News Corporation employees involved in criminal activities that would put the Gambino Crime Family to shame and the investigation into hacking and the cover-up is still in its early stages.

What more will they learn in Britain about the criminal activities of News Corporation?

What more will we learn about the criminal activities of News Corporation here in America?

There was a published (but unsubstantiated) report back in the summer that News Corporation employees hacked into the phones of 9/11 victims and their families here in the U.S.

The DOJ opened an official inquiry into the allegation last summer.

We have learned precious little about that inquiry from the Obama administration, though the New York Times reported on January 2, 2012 that family members of 9/11 victims had good reason to believe someone was hacking into their phones and answering machines:

Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, relatives of some of the victims began suspecting that someone was eavesdropping on their telephones.

Some heard mysterious clicking sounds on their home and mobile phones. The fiancée of one man who died at the World Trade Center remembers listening to snippets of someone else’s conversation on her line. A husband of another victim recalls hearing somebody remotely accessing his home answering machine, which still held the final, reassuring message left by his wife shortly before the crash of Flight 93. Others say they are baffled as to how details about their loved ones appeared in British tabloids within days of the attacks.

Relatives of 9/11 victims have heard nothing since meeting with Attorney General Holder in August. They wonder if the Obama administration isn't slow-walking this investigation for reasons unknown to them.

I wonder about that too.

What we do know is that many family members of 9/11 victims saw details about their families and loved ones in Murdoch's papers that were so personal and so private, they did not know how Murdoch's reporters could have learned them so quickly after the attacks or indeed, learned them at all.

Here is one example:

Patricia Bingley, a British citizen whose son, Kevin Dennis, a 43-year-old trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, worked on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower, said she was stunned to see, in the Sept. 18, 2001, issue of The Sun, a photograph of her son reading a bedtime story to his two sons, which she did not give to the paper.

The story also contained details about her son that she said no one from her family had provided to The Sun. “It never made sense to me,” she said, adding that she suspects hacking or worse by the paper. “I’d like very much for the government to tell us whether this happened or not. Celebrities seem to have no trouble finding out.”

There were others:

Jodi Westbrook Flowers, a lawyer at a South Carolina firm that represents more than 6,700 relatives of Sept. 11 victims, said she and her colleagues had scoured the British tabloids and found scores of details about the victims. Relatives were not certain how the tabloids found out so much so quickly after the attacks.

One of the relatives, whom she declined to identify, said that five days after Sept. 11, The Sun published the words from a voice mail message left on his cellphone by his son, who was aboard one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center. (British authorities are also investigating whether hacking occurred at The Sun, which, like The News of the World, is owned by News Corporation.)

In late September, Ms. Flowers, of the Motley Rice law firm, sent Mr. Holder phone numbers of two dozen relatives of victims and asked that Scotland Yard run them through the 12,000 pages of documents seized from the home of Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator responsible for most of the hacking by the now-shuttered News of the World. She said at least 100 of her clients, in both the United States and Britain, now want similar information.

...

Ms. Flowers added, “If there was no hacking, it is wildly coincidental that so many people describe similar experiences.”

We know that Rupert Murdoch's newspapers in Britain were a bastion of criminal activity and corruption, that Murdoch's editors used their newspapers to punish politicians and other officials who didn't do what News Corporation wanted, that they tried to buy police off the case and were first successful at that until the The Guardian report that News International employees had hacked into the phone of a murdered 13 year old girl finally forced the police to re-open an inquiry into the scandal.

We also know that Murdoch moved many of his British employees over to his U.S. papers, most famously his right hand man (and the man who is now a target of the official inquiry into the case) Les Hinton.

It is reasonable to assume that if News International employees in England engaged in criminal activity with impunity overseas, they wouldn't change those habits once they got here in the U.S. and took up work at the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal or other News Corporation media outlets.

It is reasonable to assume, too, that if many of the family members of 9/11 victims who wound up in stories in Murdoch's newspapers have questions about just how Murdoch's reporters got their details, that it's likely Murodch's people were engaging in criminal activity like hacking over here too.

And so, using the New York Post's own rationale for stringent teacher evaluations based upon the case of one teacher who forged jury notes to get out of work with pay, I say it is now time that we have an official investigation into ALL News Corporation employees here in the U.S. for the same kinds of criminal activities their News International comrades overseas have engaged in - phone hacking, computer hacking, bribery, extortion, criminal conspiracy and tampering with evidence.

This is especially so in the case of 9/11 victims' families.

It has been alleged by me that the Obama people are slow-walking this investigation so as not to unduly anger Rupert Murdoch before the 2012 Presidential Election, kind of a quid pro quo between Obama and Murdoch.

You don't go too hard on us, we won't look too hard into the hacking thing.

Given that Murdoch often made such quid pro quo deals with the police and politicians in Britain, it is quite plausible this kind of deal has been made here.

So I don't expect the Obama DOJ to go too hard in this case or actually come up with anything unless they're forced to because of evidence found overseas by the British.

Nonetheless, given the preponderance of evidence against Murdoch's company in Britain, given the reasonable concerns that 9/11 victims' families have that they were hacked after the attacks, given how often Murdoch moved his media personnel from Britain to America, it is logical to assume that if Murdoch's people engaged in criminal activity with impunity over in Britain, they tried it here as well.

This is why a phone hacking investigation - a real one, not slow-walked by the Obama DOJ looking to sit on it until after the November election - must be done on ALL News Corporation employees at the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, FOX News and other FOX outlets.

If the Post editors truly believe that one teacher guilty of forgery means ALL teachers are suspect, then surely they must believe that 17 arrested News Corporation employees, dozens more under investigation, and three members of the Murdoch brain trust including Murdoch's son, his former right hand man and his former "imposter daughter" either arrested or under investigation for criminal activity in the phone hacking scandal means ALL News Corporation employees, including themselves, are suspect as well.

Rupert Murdoch Talks, Andrew Cuomo Listens (and Snaps To Attention!)

2012-01-13T07:04:00.004-05:00

Rupert Murdoch offered the following via Twitter yesterday after Mayor Bloomberg's State of the City speech:

Bloomberg’s bold teacher proposals today terrific. How will chicken Cuomo respond? If UFT refuses this money good teachers will scream.”

Now Cuomo, who needs and wants Rupert Murdoch's respect and love (and press) even more than he needs and wants air, could have responded two ways.

He could have responded the way he usually does when someone attacks him (or he even thinks somebody attacks him) - with a rhetorical sledgehammer.

This is what he did to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver this week.

Or he could bow down to almighty Rupert's wishes and back Bloomberg up on his teacher bashing.

Which is EXACTLY how he responded a half an hour later after Rupert's "tweet":

“I commend Mayor Bloomberg for outlining a positive vision for New York City’s future and the most important part of building that future, our students. The State and City’s education system is facing a crisis in accountability and performance. Our continuing pattern of being number one in the nation on spending in education and thirty-eighth in graduation rates hurts our students across the State, including the over 1.1 million public school students in New York City.

As I said in my State of the State Address, and Mayor Bloomberg reiterated in his State of the City today, we need an education system that puts students first. Both the Mayor and I agree that this starts with implementing a teacher evaluation system that holds teachers accountable for their performance. I look forward to working together to create an accountability system that puts the interests of students ahead of the interests of the education bureaucracy."

It is interesting how Cuomo says New York teachers are unaccountable while he does the work of a newspaper mogul/media oligarch who somehow has skirted the law in a scandal in Britain involving phone hacking, computer hacking, bribery, extortion, evidence tampering and conspiracy to cover-up a crime that has seen 18 of his employees arrested, including his number 1 deputy in England, and may yet see his son, James Murdoch, taken away in cuffs.

Yet somehow Cuomo ignores all of that mess (that "lack of accountability") to back Murdoch and Bloomberg up that teachers are unaccountable and until this "crisis in accountability and performance" in New York public education is fixed, New York's school system will continue to suck (even though as ED WEEK and the business channel CNBC both showed this week, none of this stuff Cuomo says about the New York State school system is true.)

So Andrew Cuomo is a chicken, all right - a chicken who snaps to attention when his patron and surrogate daddy Rupert ""Phone Hacking" Murdoch says a cross word to him.

Whatever Rupert wants, Rupert gets - from "Chicken Cuomo".

Fortunately the Daily News reports that Shelly Silver and the Assembly are no longer going to defer to the governor on policies that are harmful to New York State, as they did last year.

That's important, considering "Chicken Cuomo" seems to be in the business of doing the bidding of a corporate criminal like Murdoch who stands to make billions off the teacher accountability measures Cuomo and Bloomberg want to enshrine into law.

Cuomo And Bloomberg Say New York Has Education Crisis, CNBC and ED WEEK Say "Not So!"

2012-01-12T18:17:00.004-05:00

First, here's Governor 1%'s reaction to Bloomberg's straight up attack on teachers and the teachers unions in today's State of the City speech:

“I commend Mayor Bloomberg for outlining a positive vision for New York City’s future and the most important part of building that future, our students. The State and City’s education system is facing a crisis in accountability and performance. Our continuing pattern of being number one in the nation on spending in education and thirty-eighth in graduation rates hurts our students across the State, including the over 1.1 million public school students in New York City.

As I said in my State of the State Address, and Mayor Bloomberg reiterated in his State of the City today, we need an education system that puts students first. Both the Mayor and I agree that this starts with implementing a teacher evaluation system that holds teachers accountable for their performance. I look forward to working together to create an accountability system that puts the interests of students ahead of the interests of the education bureaucracy."

Now here's the NYSUT on two recent surveys - one by the Gates Foundation-funded ED WEEK and one by the business cable network CNBC - that both found New York State was NOT experiencing an education crisis:

“Ed Week’s ‘Quality Counts’ report once again recognizes the successes achieved by New York’s hard-working and dedicated educators,” said New York State United Teachers President Richard C. Iannuzzi. “While there is much work that still needs to be done, this ranking, right up there with the best, validates what has already been achieved.”

“Quality Counts” was released the day after the announcement of two other indicators that public education in New York is on the right track:

CNBC issued a report showing that education in New York was tops in the nation in 2011. The television network, which specializes in business reporting, looked at the state’s educated pool of workers; colleges and universities; research and development partnerships; and K-12 schools as a quality of life issue for employees.
More than 100 students from across the state were named semi-finalists in the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search, the nation’s most prestigious pre-college science competition. New York students represent approximately one-third of all the semi-finalists.

“Educators in New York are committed to ensuring that our children succeed,” said NYSUT Vice President Maria Neira. “These rankings — presented without the taint of politics or ideology — demonstrate that, despite what some naysayers claim, we’re doing a good job and the students in our state are the benefactors. It’s time we start celebrating our schools.”

Two of those naysayers - Bloomberg and Cuomo - are gunning for teachers in general and unionized teachers in particular.

They have ginned up this "education crisis" in order to promote their corporate agenda - bust the teachers unions, fire unionized teachers, close traditional public schools, reopen them as non-unionized charters with with a workforce that can be fired at will and hand hundreds of millions of profits to their cronies like Rupert Murdoch.

It's that simple.

It's a shame that the corporate media will ignore the ED WEEK and CNBC findings and instead run with the mayor's attack on teachers and Cuomo's concurrence that there is a crisis of accountability in the school system.

There IS a crisis of accountability in New York all right - but that's at the leadership level where failed policies like merit pay, charter schools and teacher evaluations tied to test scores are promoted as the answer to an alleged education crisis that exists only in the public statements of the oligarchs looking to finish off privatizing the school system.

Bloomberg Attacks Teachers In State Of The City Speech While NYPD Arrests Protesters Outside

2012-01-12T16:57:00.006-05:00

The Mayor of the 1% continued his attacks on teachers in his State of the City speech today and his NYPD army continued their attacks on the First Amendment and the Constitution outside the venue where he gave that speech:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg put a strong focus on education Thursday in his 11th State of the City address.

Speaking at Gouverneur Morris High School in the Bronx, the mayor touted his administration's accomplishments in improving graduation rates and reducing crime in city schools.

But he says much more needs to be done, especially when it comes to attracting, rewarding and retaining top-notch educators.

"The education reforms we’ve pioneered over the past decade – no matter what the naysayers say – have been widely adopted by school systems across the nation, but this year we’ll be putting our foot on the gas and picking up the pace," said the mayor.

Bloomberg said he wants to retain the best educators by giving a $20,000 raise to those who are rated highly effective for two consecutive years.

As for teachers who don't make the grade at 33 struggling schools, the mayor wants to create "school-based committees'' to evaluate teachers.

It's a measure that would sidestep a dispute with the teachers union that is preventing the city from receiving $60 million in federal grants.

The mayor said he also wants to give parents more top-quality choices by opening 100 new schools over the next two years, including 50 charters.

...

While Bloomberg was largely met with applause Thursday, a group of protesters outside the auditorium were less thrilled.

The New York City Police Department says a total of 32 people were arrested.

All were charged with disorderly conduct.

There you have it.

Oppose Mayor 1% and his oligarchy and you'll end up in jail for disorderly conduct.

And there's a lot to oppose in this speech.

Bloomberg and his education reform backers know that there are only two more years left to finish the job of destroying the public education system in New York completely, so they've got to work overtime.

Close 25 schools.

Open 100 new ones.

Make 50 of those charter schools.

Give Eva Moskowitz and KIPP a bunch of new charters.

Place those charters in existing schools where they can act like a cancer and kill off the traditional public schools in those buildings.

Close more schools.

Open more charters.

Repeat.

Keep repeating.

And of course the one thing that stands in the way of this Education Reform Endgame is the teachers union contract.

So he's going to no longer abide by either that or state law.

He's just going to "turnaround" the SIG schools, fire half the staff and and bring in newbies to replace them.

Everybody gets evaluated by test scores and if you're found to be highly effective on that measure, you get $20,000 (no word on where that money comes from exactly - from the school itself where the teacher works? From the city? From Bloomberg himself?)

But if you're found ineffective, you're fired.

How like a Mamet play.

Only this is real life, these are real people and this evaluation system Bloomberg vows to use has real flaws.

Like a large margin of error.

Like huge swings in findings from year to year.

Nonetheless, Bloomberg is going to go through with this stuff and it is up to the UFT leadership and teachers and parents groups and community groups to push back on this charterizing and privatizing of the school system.

That's where the NYPD comes into the equation.

It's not a mistake that Bloomberg and Walcott are using riot police to quell protest of the mayor's school policies.

You can bet that as Bloomberg and Walcott put these policies in place and protest grows, they will use more and more police to quell dissent.

They want us to get the message - OBEY.

They've got lots of orange netting, pepper spray, police batons, horses and riot gear ready for the Shock and Awe Endgame coming in the next two years.

And they're going to use it.

All of it.

Get ready.

Bloomberg's State of the City Speech

2012-01-12T07:18:00.004-05:00

He's expected to give much of today's speech to education issues.

I'm going to preview it for you.

Teacher suck.
Teachers suck.

We need to fire teachers.

Teachers suck.

More money for consultants.

Teachers suck.

Class size doesn't matter.

Only teacher quality does.

Because teachers suck.

I'm awesome.

The school system was a mess before I took total control - now it's a success.

But if I can fire as many teachers as I want when I want, I can make the school system even more successful.

Because teachers suck.

Fire teachers.

Gates says so too.

So does Obama.

Because teachers suck.

21st century schools require 18th century labor practices for teachers.

There you have it - Bloomberg's State of the City speech.

Microsoft Employees Threaten Suicide At Xbox Plant Over Poor Treatment, Low Wages

2012-01-11T06:55:00.003-05:00

Bill Gates like to play philanthropist in public.

He likes to go around making believe he actually cares about people and wants to help them.

But if he cares so much about people, why does he run slave labor factories to make his Microsoft products?

SEATTLE, Wash. (CBS Seattle) – Some 300 Chinese Foxconn employees who manufacture X-box 360 machines said they would throw themselves from their Wuhan, China, plant if demands for lost wages were not met.

China Jasmine Revolution, an activist revolutionary organization with a name borrowed from the Tunisian revolt that set off the Middle East unrest, reported that employees made their demands for a wage increase for 100 employees on Jan. 2.

Management at Foxconn — the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer and a crucial link in the supply chains of Apple, Dell, Nintendo and Song — responded with an ultimatum. Employees could quit with one month’s compensation awarded for each year with the plant or go back to working.

Many employees quit, but Foxconn allegedly dishonored the agreement and awarded former employees nothing.

Around 300 workers returned to the plant in an uproar, and staged their protest on the plant’s roof on Jan. 3.

Wuhan’s mayor intervened through hours of negotiations, walking them back from the roof’s edge until 9 p.m. when workers agreed to return to work, according to China.com

So how did Microsoft respond to this?

With jive:

A Microsoft spokesperson wrote CBS Seattle a statement saying, “Microsoft takes working conditions in the factories that manufacture its products very seriously, and we are currently investigating this issue. We have a stringent Vendor Code of Conduct that spells out our expectations, and we monitor working conditions closely on an ongoing basis and address issues as they emerge. Microsoft is committed to the fair treatment and safety of workers employed by our vendors, and to ensuring conformance with Microsoft policy.”

Somebody needs to ask Bill Gates the next time he's pontificating about "bad teachers" and the need to fire them in order to help kids from low-income families rise out of poverty why it is he makes his Microsoft products in slave labor camps and factories in China which keeps people in poverty?

To be fair to Microsoft, Apple and other companies use FOXXCONN to make their crap too.

And to be fair to Gates, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs liked to play Buddha on TV, so Gates isn't the only hypocrite from the tech world using slave labor to make his products while acting "Holier Than Thou."

In Jobs' case, I do hope when he is reincarnated back to this world, he comes as an Apple employee at FOXXCONN making Apple products in slave labor conditions so he can get an inkling of the harm he caused during his life.

As for Gates, I'd like to see the media stenographers who spend all their time sucking up to him (or his wife, the equally villainous and hypocritical Melinda) ask him how he reconciles his "philanthropy" and "charity" notions with the plain fact that he runs slave labor factories that harm hundreds of thousands of people.

Seriously, read the drivel Melinda Gates "chats" about in the above Times blog I linked to and try and reconcile that with the FOXXCONN story.

The words that come to mind are "Bleeding Hypocrites!"

Education Reformers Don't REALLY Want "Great Teachers"

2012-01-10T06:54:00.007-05:00

This really hits the mark for me:

This was written by Mark Naison, professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham University in New York and chair of the department of African and African-American Studies. He is also co-director of the Urban Studies Program, African-American History 20th Century. This first appeared on the blog With A Brooklyn Accent.

By Mark Naison

I have been teaching for 45 years. My first students, in the Columbia Upward Bound Program, included a 15 year old who was destined for greatness and a 15 year old who wouldn’t say a word to me or his peers. Being able to connect to both of them, using very different methods, hooked me for life on the challenge of building the confidence and trust required to make learning possible among a diverse group of people.

It is precisely the importance of building trust which is absent from the dominant discourse about education today. Achieving mastery of a fixed body of material is prioritized; opening minds, healing hearts, and building confidence are widely neglected as “soft” attributes not amenable to measurement and evaluation.

Che Guevara once said, “The true revolutionary is guided by feelings of great love.” I would say the same about teaching. “The true teacher is guided by feelings of great love.”

How do you measure love? How do you assess it?

Governments are now spending billions of dollars on complex mathematical formulas to rate teacher effectiveness. Every single measure they have created circumvents the attributes that make teachers love their jobs and which influence students the most.

A great teacher gets inside a student’s head, becomes part of the student’s conscience, becomes a moral compass that may offer guidance ten, twenty years after the student was in their class. Things the teacher said during a lecture, wrote in the margin of a research paper, whispered to the student in a private meeting, may come up in the most unexpected times and places. Books, films and songs the teacher recommended may be ones passed on to friends, co-workers and children.
I am saying this from experience as well as inference. I had teachers who inspired me to do things I never dreamed were possible. They did this not only by modeling a passion for learning in their lectures and the way they comported themselves, but by letting me know that, despite my rough edges and uneven writing stills, there was nothing I couldn’t achieve as a scholar if I dared to give myself wholly to the subject I was investigating and kept trying to hone my prose style.

Those teachers — and I will name them because they are all worth honoring — Edward Said, Paul Noyes, Walter Metzger, James Shenton-- provided me with a model of the teacher and scholar I wanted to be. They are with me every time I walk into a classroom.

How do you measure that?

I know so many great teachers and they are all filled with love for their students and love for their jobs. Every single reform measure introduced in the last 10 years is crushing and demoralizing them.

Someday, we will realize that if we really want to instill a passion for learning in young people, we have to honor and support our best teachers and encourage our most talented and idealistic young people to be teachers for life.

And that means we have to leave room for intangibles like love and trust in how we judge what goes on in schools and understand that the results of great teaching are experienced over a life time, not by tests you administer three or four times a year.

This is EXACTLY the kind of teaching and learning that corporate education reform is crushing.

The cynic in me says this is EXACTLY the kind of learning the oligarchs and hedge fund managers pushing corporate education reform WANT to crush.

They want the public education system to churn out obedient workers and shoppers willing to live with the status quo, not critical thinkers with a lifelong love of learning and the ability to see through lies and deceit.

They don't want teachers opening minds, healing hearts, and building confidence in students.

They want teachers who teach obedience and rules and regulations and compliance.

That's why education reformers almost NEVER send their own kids to the kinds of schools they are "reforming."

Other than Eva Moskowitz, who imprisons her own children in her charter school system as a p.r. stunt, the people promoting education reform - Obama, Bloomberg, Gates, Rahm Emanuel, Cuomo, Christie and on and on and on - do NOT send their kids to schools with teachers who teach obedience and rules and regulations and compliance.

They do not send them to schools where the children take endless tests and spend the rest of the time test-prepping.

They do not send them to schools where the teachers are graded using an error-riddled value-added measurement system of the test scores and a 57 page observation rubric for classroom evaluations.

There is a reason these people do not send their kids to these kinds of schools.

Because there is no education to be had there - only learning obedience and rules and regulations and compliance.

This is why education reformers are not interested in "great teaching."

They are interested in "compliant teaching" - teaching to the test, teaching to the corporate-bough curriculum, teaching to the rules.

Editor Implicated In Murdoch Hacking Scandal Takes Reins At Daily News

2012-01-09T06:42:00.005-05:00

Just goes to prove that there is little you can do if you're a connected part of the political/financial/media aristocracy to lose your position of power:

Veteran newsman Colin Myler takes the helm this week as editor-in-chief of the Daily News.

Myler has led six other newspapers during his journalism career, most recently as editor of the News of the World.

He takes charge of New York's largest-circulation daily newspaper and NYDailyNews.com.

"I'm immensely proud and honored to be given the opportunity to lead the Daily News," Myler said. “I love New York. There's a great buzz and vitality about the city which is unmistakable — and I'm delighted to be back."

Daily News Chairman and Publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman said The News "is a great institution of American journalism which will only get better under the leadership of Colin."

In addition to editing the News of the World, Myler, 59, has helmed four other national British newspapers: The Sun, the Sunday Mirror, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail.

Myler is up to his neck in the phone hacking scandal at News Corporation where he engaged in various unethical and criminal activities including lying to authorities, conspiracy to cover up a crime, and bribery.

He doesn't belong running another newspaper - he belongs in jail.

But Mort Zuckerman decided to put him in charge of the Daily News instead.

I'm sure Myler's first editorial will be about firing unethical educators who fake the death of a family member so that they can take an extra week of vacation.

Because how could somebody lie like that to authorities in order to cover up some awful behavior they have engaged in?

Clearly this person should no longer work in public schools!

But misleading authorities or bribing people in order to cover up criminal activity at the newspaper you edit - nothing wrong with that.

As Myler said, "I don't believe it's wrong or unreasonable of any business to try to protect the reputation of itself."

He'll fit right in at Zuckerman's Daily News, where the agenda ALWAYS drives the facts and lying to the public from the editorial page in the most stentorian, self-righteous tones is a cherished tradition.

NY Times: Latest Hacking Arrest Suggests Police Are Investigating Cover-Up By News Corporation Execs

2012-01-07T22:01:00.006-05:00

Things are heating up again in the Rupert Murdoch/News Corporation hacking scandal:

LONDON — Scotland Yard’s arrest of a former personal assistant to Rebekah Brooks, a former chief executive of the British newspaper arm of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, appears to reflect the investigators’ intensifying focus on the possibility of a cover-up by executives, editors and others of the extent of illegal phone hacking and other criminal wrongdoing at the The News of the World, which is now defunct.

After 10 hours of questioning on Friday, detectives assigned to a special unit investigating the affair released the assistant, Cheryl Carter, 47, on police bail pending further questioning. She was arrested at dawn at her home in Billericay, 25 miles east of London. Efforts to reach her for comment on Saturday were not successful.

Scotland Yard said she was the 17th person, most of them former employees of the The News of the World, to be arrested by officers assigned to Operation Weeting, established last year under special provisions intended to ensure the independence of the investigators.

...

Ms. Carter’s arrest drew attention for several reasons, including a Scotland Yard statement that said that she had been questioned on suspicion of trying to pervert the course of justice, a line of inquiry that has not been specified in police statements on most of the other arrests in Operation Weeting.

In addition, Ms. Carter appeared to have had a close personal and professional relationship with Ms. Brooks, the most senior executive in the Murdoch hierarchy to have been arrested in the affair. Former News of the World employees who spoke on condition of anonymity said Ms. Carter had worked as a personal assistant to Ms. Brooks for 19 years, starting when Ms. Brooks was deputy editor of The Sun, another Murdoch-owned tabloid in London, and continuing as Ms. Brooks became editor of the The News of the World, editor of The Sun, and later chief executive of News International, overseeing all of the Murdoch titles in Britain.

The police look like to be working their way up the chain.

First Brooks' personal assistant and gatekeeper.

The next target in the investigation would undoubtedly be Brooks herself.

And above her would be James Murdoch, Rupert's son.

We'll see if they get that far.

One more thing on the hacking scandal - the NY Daily News hired a former News of the World editor who has accused James Murdoch of covering up the truth in the scandal, Colin Myler, to edit the Daily News

Calling Sheldon Silver

2012-01-05T07:05:00.004-05:00

The members of Governor 1%'s education commission to take on teacher accountability will be appointed in concert with the legislature.

We already know that Cuomo is in the pocket of the hedge fund managers and corporate education reformers.

As the NY Times reported, they gave him a suitcase full of cash in a hotel room, along with their education agenda, and he was happy to promote EXACTLY what they want.

So we know Cuomo is going to push for commission members who will demonize traditional public schools, promote charter schools (despite the evidence and research that shows they are NOT solving the nation's education problems), promote high stakes tests in every grade in every subject so that teachers can be held "accountable," and generally look for ways to privatize the public school system.

This is the DFER agenda and it is Cuomo's agenda.

But you can call or email Assembly Speaker Silver and ask him to make sure that REAL independent voices are put onto this education commission, people who are NOT beholden to the corporate education reform movement, not owned by the hedge fundies.

Here is the Assembly Speaker's contact information:

http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/?ad=064&sh=contact

District Office

250 Broadway
Suite 2307
New York, NY 10007
212-312-1420

Albany Office

LOB 932
Albany, NY 12248
518-455-3791

Governor 1% Says He's Looking Out For Students

2012-01-04T18:03:00.002-05:00

Unlike those greedy, lazy, nasty unaccountable teachers, of course:

Students have a new representative in Albany: Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

Right now, Cuomo is delivering his second State of the State address today, titled “Building a New New York … with you.”

Education issues account for one and a half of the speech’s 33 pages of prepared remarks. As expected, the governor is calling for an education commission to propose reforms to the state’s education system. That commission will look for ways to boost “teacher accountability and student achievement” and “management efficiency” — both topics Cuomo targeted during his first address a year ago — and will work with the legislature.

He’s also appointing himself chief lobbyist for students, calling them the only group in schools that don’t employ lobbyists of their own.

“This year, I will take a second job — consider me the lobbyist for the students,” he says in the prepared remarks, which he has been known to depart from. “I will wage a campaign to put students first, and to remind us that the purpose of public education is to help children grow, not to grow the public education bureaucracy.”

If Cuomo REALLY wants a commission that will look out for students interests, he'd put students on the panel, parents on the panel, education experts who have not been bought off by Pearson and News Corp. and McGraw-Hill and Microsoft/Gates.

If Cuomo REALLY wanted to look out for the interests of children, he'd ask them if they want to take both city and state tests in every subject four times a year (a total of 20 standardized tests) so that their teachers and schools can be evaluated using these scores and Cuomo's corporate buddies can rake in the dough.

If Cuomo REALLY cared about kids, he'd make sure there was enough funding for all children in NY State to eat healthy food, live in a neighborhood safe from crime, go to schools with adequate funding that could be used IN the classroom as opposed to hiring consultants and developing data systems.

But Cuomo is NOT interested in that.

He is interested in helping out his corporate buddies finish off the Shock and Awe they've been doing on the public education system for the last ten years since NCLB.

He is interested in making money for his best buddy, Rupert Murdoch.

He is interested in adding tests to every subject at every grade level a couple of times a year so he can make money for his buddies at Pearson and he is looking to track that data so he can make money for his buddies at News Corp. using systems owned by Rupert Murdoch and he is interested in closing schools that are supposedly "failing" so that his charter school pals can reopen them as privatized charters and he is interested in firing teachers using test scores and value-added assessments to ease the Brave New Education System - one where students are educated in privatized schools by a teacher in a remote place over computer - into being.

That is what he is interested in.

Cuomo Uses State Agency Websites To Promote His Facebook Page

2012-01-03T06:15:00.003-05:00

Governor 1% just wants to be "liked" by everyone (except teachers, of course):

ALBANY — Gov. Cuomo really wanted the public to “like” him — and state websites were helping to satisfy his wish.

The websites of more than half a dozen state agencies asked visitors to “like Governor Cuomo on Facebook” — until the Daily News inquired about the matter.

And the agencies were not obscure: They included the departments of taxation and finance, health, budget, labor and economic development, among others.

While a Cuomo spokesman said the social-media pitches were not tied to any political campaign, some questioned the use of state agency websites to boost the governor’s online popularity.

Union College professor and public policy economist Mary O’Keefe wrote on her Taxprof blog recently that the practice left her “shocked” when she saw it.

“One can only imagine the outraged reaction if the IRS website front page encouraged taxpayers to ‘like’ President Obama and used up 20% of the space on the irs.gov page to promote him!” O’Keefe wrote, creating a hypothetical example.

“The equivalent at the state level seems equally inappropriate to me.”

A noted government watchdog agreed.

“The agencies should not be tied to a particular individual but rather to the service of the people of New York,” argued Richard Dadey, executive director of the Citizens Union. “It’s not appropriate to tie a government webpage to an individual elected official’s Facebook page.”

After the Daily News raised questions about this, the Cuomo administration had state agencies change the wording on their pages from "like" Governor Cuomo to "connect" with Governor Cuomo's Facebook page.

This is STILL an outrage.

There should be NO link AT ALL to Cuomo's Facebook page on state agency websites.

This is a misuse of agency websites for personal campaigning and frankly, it's just wrong.

Earthquakes In Ohio Linked To Fracking

2012-01-02T20:34:00.002-05:00

Via Firedoglake, here is the story from CNN:

State leaders have ordered that four fluid-injection wells in eastern Ohio will be "indefinitely" prohibited from opening in the aftermath of heightened seismic activity in the area, an official said.

Ohio Department of Natural Resources Director James Zehringer had announced on Friday that one such well -- which injects "fluid deep underground into porous rock formations, such as sandstone or limestone, or into or below the shallow soil layer," the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency explains -- was closed after a series of small earthquakes in and around Youngstown.

Then on Saturday, a magnitude 4.0 earthquake struck that released at least 40 times more energy than any of the previous 10 or more tremors that had rattled the region in 2011.

Andy Ware, deputy director of Ohio's natural resources department, told CNN on Sunday that Zehringer and Gov. John Kasich subsequently ordered that four nearby injection well projects will not open in the coming weeks, as had previously been planned. They 'll be inoperational until a determination is made in an investigation of a possible link between the earthquakes and the fluid-injection wells, he added.

...

Last Friday's order affecting the first well in Youngstown came six days after a magnitude 2.5 earthquake that struck that area around 1:24 a.m. on December 24. After Saturday's larger earthquake, scientists recommended that operations stop at all wells within a 5-mile radius of that original site.

"We need to get more information," Ware said.

...

Ohio is far from the edges of Earth's major tectonic plates, with the nearest ones in the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, the U.S. Geological Survey explains on its website. Still, there are many known faults in this region, with the federal agency noting that it is likely there are additional "smaller or deeply buried" ones that haven't been detected.

While earthquakes are not unprecedented in the area, the rate of them in the past year has been unusual. That fact led Zehringer, the Ohio department head, to act late last week.

"While conclusive evidence cannot link the seismic activity to the well, Zehringer has adopted an approach requiring prudence and caution regarding the site," the natural resources department said Friday in a press release, explaining its decision to shut the first well.

...

Dr. Won-Young Kim, one of the Columbia University experts asked by the state to examine possible connections between fracking and seismic activity, said that a problem could arise if fluid moves through the ground and affects "a weak fault, waiting to be triggered." He explained the underground waste "slowly migrates" and could cause issues miles away, adding that the danger could persist for some time as the fluid travels and seeps down toward the fault.

"In my opinion, yes," the recent spate of earthquakes around Youngstown is related to a fluid-injection well, Kim stated -- though there has been no definitive determination, by the state or other authorities, indicating as much.

Firedoglake notes that a recent earthquake in Oklahoma may be linked to fracking as well.

So how's that secretive commission you put together to study fracking in New York State going, Governor Cuomo?

We know YOU'RE in favor of fracking, Governor.

Like everything you do - from prison closures to tax policy to this education commission you're putting together to blame teachers for the problems in public education - you like to make it look like one thing in public while it's a whole other thing in private.

We KNOW this is a done deal, that the fix is in, the oil and gas companies have bought and paid for you.

You just want this supposed commission of experts to give you political cover to open up most of the state to fracking.

But before you give your gas company buddies their fracking wet dreams, take a look at the mounting evidence that FRACKING ISN'T SAFE.

Or turn off the Sandra Lee Show and watch this video instead:

Cuomo Announces End Run Around Teacher Evaluation Impasse

2012-01-02T10:10:00.004-05:00

Clearly Governor Cuomo is going to look to implement a state test score-based teacher evaluation system WITHOUT the input of teachers or administrators:

Gov. Cuomo, in his second state-of-state address Wednesday, will accuse New York’s schools of being unaccountable and announce a commission to come up with reforms, the Daily News has learned.

Cuomo’s announcement will come just days after he was critical of the city and other districts that failed to reach agreement with their unions on a new teacher evaluation system by an end-of-year deadline.

“The failure to pass the teacher evaluation system is an example that not only is the system broken, but the ability to monitor the system and come up with a method to ensure kids are educated properly is broken,” said a source close to Cuomo.

The education commission he will announce will be designed to look at education from a “student perspective,” the source said.

“What are the performance indicators? How do you judge performance in the education system? How are the services being provided?” the source said. “No one has really looked at it without a particular perspective on what’s going on in education.”

The makeup of the commission, which as of Sunday was still undetermined, will likely include outside experts.

You can bet the "outside experts" will mostly include testing friendly corporate education reformers who will promote test-heavy accountability.

And this will not commission will not come from a "student's perspective."

It will come from the "testing company's perspective."

This "taking on school accountability" jive by Cuomo is very clearly a way to put an accountability system in place that Tisch and King and Gates and Bloomberg want without having to negotiate with teachers unions.

Call Cuomo and leave a comment:

(518) 474-8390

There's no one there today, but you can leave a message.

More Pearson Corruption Allegations - Is It Time To Cancel NY's Testing Contract With Pearson?

2012-01-02T08:40:00.006-05:00

Michael Winerip reports that Pearson Foundation, a nonprofit wing of Pearson, the nation's largest textbook and curriculum publisher, paid for "education conferences" to Singapore, London, Helsinki, Finland, China and Rio de Janeiro for education officials from two dozen states.

Most of these states have multimillion dollar contracts with Pearson.

Pearson Foundation did not disclose any of the money they paid for these trips for public officials on its tax forms as it is supposed to do by law.

Here is how one of those trips went and what the outcome was for Pearson:

In the summer of 2010, Lu Young, the superintendent of schools in Jessamine County, a Lexington, Ky., suburb, took a trip to Australia paid for by the Pearson Foundation, a nonprofit arm of Pearson, the nation’s largest educational publisher.

Ten school superintendents went on the trip, which cost Pearson $60,000. While the foundation described the visit as a way “to exchange ideas on creating schools for the 21st century,” there was ample time for play. “Everybody’s highlight of Canberra was to get to see the kangaroos,” Ms. Young said on a video produced by the foundation.

Six months later, in Frankfort, Ky., Ms. Young sat on a committee interviewing executives from three companies bidding to run the state’s testing program. While CTB/McGraw-Hill submitted the lowest bid, by $2.5 million, Ms. Young and the other committee members recommended Pearson.

In April, Kentucky’s Education Department approved a $57 million contract with Pearson. And then, over the next six months, the commissioner who oversees that department, Terry Holliday, traveled to both China and Brazil on trips underwritten by — that’s right — the Pearson Foundation.

Were the trips an effort by the foundation to influence government officials so the company would obtain a lucrative state contract?

A spokeswoman for Dr. Holliday said that the selection “was based on best value and not simply a low bid,” and Ms. Young said that the trips and the contract selection were “completely unrelated.”

“I never had any conversation or discussion with anyone from Pearson about the awarding of the testing contract during this trip or later,” Ms. Young wrote in an e-mail.

Of course she never had any overt discussions with anyone from Pearson about the awarding of the testing contract during the trip or even after - she didn't have to.

The message had already gotten across - you take care of Pearson, Pearson will take care of you.

Here's an example of Pearson taking care of one education official in Maryland AFTER a contract had been awarded to Pearson:

In Montgomery County, Md., the now-retired superintendent, Jerry Weast, approved an unusual contract in June 2010, in which Pearson paid the district $2.5 million to produce curriculum materials that the company would then sell worldwide.

Two months later he was on the plane to Australia.

And here's the tale of an education official from Illinois who really got his money's worth out of Pearson:

Christopher Koch, state superintendent of education in Illinois — which has $138 million in contracts with Pearson — went to China, Brazil and Finland with the foundation. The only Pearson compensation he listed on state ethics forms was the cost of the flight to China, $4,271 for business class. Asked why hotels, meals and the other flights were not documented, a spokesman for Dr. Koch, Matt Vanover, said, “What we’re looking at is a litmus test; they just want to make sure he’s not traveling first class.”

To be fair to Pearson, they got their money's worth out of Illinois too.

Here in New York, former NYSED Commissioner David Steiner took a trip on Pearson's dime to London and disclosed the value of the entire trip as $2000.

A trip to London, airfare, hotel, and food - all for $2,000 dollars.

Wow - that sure was a good deal!

Or Steiner is full of it.

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is looking into all of this to see if Pearson Foundation has engaged in undisclosed lobbying to benefit its corporate parent, Pearson.

Winerip writes that there are parallels between the Pearson story and a case involving an official from the non-profit organization that runs the Fiesta Bowl in Arizona who was indicted for undisclosed lobbying of public officials and undisclosed donations to political campaigns.

The case also has similarities to the “the influence-buying junkets that convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff arranged for members of Congress.”

Both Abramoff and some of the public officials he bribed , including members of Congress, members of the Bush administration, went to jail in the case.

So I would hope that the public officials who were on the other end of Pearson's largesse are also being investigated.

David Steiner and other officials in New York need particular scrutiny since the state JUST signed a 5 year, $32 million dollar contract with Pearson to revamp its standardized tests.

If Steiner lied on his disclosure form about the value of the London trip, he needs to be indicted for fraud.

In addition, we are at the point where the Pearson contract in New York needs to be scrutinized very closely.

If Pearson garnered this contract through bribery of state officials, including former NYSED Commissioner David Steiner, the Pearson contract with New York State needs to be negated.

Pearson should NOT benefit from the bribing of state officials anymore than state officials should benefit from Pearson's undisclosed lobbying.

Remember - Bloomberg Said He Wants To Fire Half Of All New York City School Teachers

2012-01-01T08:23:00.005-05:00

The various newspapers in the city are covering the DOE/UFT impasse over a new test score-based teacher evaluation system as if an intransigent union is protecting "bad" teachers from being held accountable by a fair, objective process.

As I posted yesterday, this new test score-based evaluation process is anything but fair or objective.

It is riddled with error, arcane and complex beyond belief, and has already been shown to tar excellent, highly effective teachers as "ineffective."

Of particular concern is the test score-based value-added system the city uses to see which teachers have "added value" to their students that has "wide margins of error and gives judgments that fluctuate — sometimes wildly — from one year to the next."

In one state that has already put this kind of "accountability" into place - Tennessee - both the intended and unintended consequences of this test score-based evaluation system show just what havoc it will wreak in New York State public schools if it comes to fruition here.

Tammy H. Lovell, a third grade teacher in Franklin, Tennessee, explained some of the problems in The Tennessean:

I have no problem with a plan that requires all teachers to be evaluated annually. However, the state’s current plan has too many flaws; in their haste the state’s legislators implemented it before it was properly thought through, causing teachers, administrators and even students undue amounts of stress and anxiety.

Let me give two examples of what I mean. First, the plan greatly increases the time required to create and plan out a lesson without adding value to the children’s educational experience.

I recently completed my announced instructional observation. I chose a lesson that I would normally do, using materials that I already have and regularly use. Even under those circumstances, I spent at least 20 additional hours writing up the lesson, making sure that I covered all the indicators in the rubric. I know other teachers who spent more than 30 hours.

The lesson was no better for my students than what I would have done otherwise. In fact, it was probably worse. Remember, I teach 8- and 9-year-old children. Because I had to include all the elements on the checklist — rather than choosing the ones appropriate to that particular lesson — I’m afraid they might have been overwhelmed. Choosing two or three things, and doing them well, would have been better.

Second, the plan evaluates many teachers based on the performance of students other than their own.

For example, in third grade the students take TCAP, a standardized test. For the test to effectively measure a child’s learning, you have to compare it to that child’s performance on a similar test from the previous year. But third grade is a “baseline” year; there are no tests for kindergarten through second grade. So K-3 teachers and a whole lot of others (high school teachers, those who teach related arts like music, band, art, physical education and the like) have to be evaluated based on test scores for kids and often subjects we don’t teach.

I chose the fourth-grade social studies scores, even though I don’t teach it. Oh, and the fourth-grade teachers are using eighth-grade test scores. Makes sense, right? Seems that things like this should have been a little better considered before the plan was required for everyone.

The new evaluation system in Tennessee is so badly designed that politicians in both parties are calling for it to be reviewed and changed.

So far, the governor has refused calls to do this, though he has appointed an education reform group led by former Tennessee senator Bill Frist to review the system and see if changes need to be made.

The ostensible reason for all these new evaluation systems is that there are hundreds of thousands of "bad teachers" out there in the country who need to be fired so that every child can get an excellent education.

Mayor Bloomberg said just that last November:

“Education is very much, I’ve always thought, just like the real estate business. Real estate business, there are three things that matter: location, location, location is the old joke,” Bloomberg said. “Well in education, it is: quality of teacher, quality of teacher, quality of teacher. And I would, if I had the ability – which nobody does really – to just design a system and say, ‘ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do,’ you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them and you would weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers. And double the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students.”

As the mayor acknowledges, he currently does not have the ability to fire as many teachers as he wants.

But as these new evaluation systems that are rigged against teachers go into place all across the country, more and more districts are going to have that option.

Indeed, that is what this fight is all about.

As Michael Fiorillo noted in a comment at Gotham Schools, this evaluation fight has NEVER been about improving public schools or education outcomes for children:

The RttT funds relating to teacher evaluations are not and have never been about benefitting students, but reconfiguring labor relations in the schools. Along with school closings and reorganizations, they are part of the assault against laws and contract provisions that govern tenure and seniority, are intended to give supervisors more levers for purging seasoned teachers and denying tenure to new teachers, and ultimately lead to the ed deformer's wet dream of a constantly churned, at-will and compliant labor force that will meekly implement the power and profit-driven mandates of the 1%.

If the so-called education reformers REALLY wanted to improve education for children, they would follow the suggestions of Tammy H. Lovell, the teacher from Franklin, Tennessee:

If you really want to improve education, then go volunteer in a local school. If your business wants to make a difference, then donate money for new technology or more books in the classroom. If you want every single child to show a year’s gain, then help to make sure every single child has enough food, a warm place to sleep, access to health care, parents with a job and a safe place to play.

I am busy trying to make a difference, and I could use some help.

But many (if not most) of the so-called education reformers who promote teacher accountability through test score-based value-added evaluation systems aren't looking to improve education.

They're looking to bust the unions for good, completely open the public education sector up to for-profit companies, replace a unionized workforce with a meek, compliant non-unionized one that can be fired at any time for any reason, and cash in on kids just the way they have cashed in on so many other things.

In fact, two of the most famous of the reformers - former chancellor of New York City, Joel Klein, and former chancellor of Washington D.C., Michelle Rhee - are both in the process of cashing in on reform (Klein here, Rhee here - notice how both are awash in Rupert Murdoch's money - Murdoch himself stands to make billions off education reform initiatives. )

The tabloids and the Times are doing the bidding of the 1% in this battle by framing the teacher evaluation fight as fight between education reformers who want accountability for teachers to improve education for kids and an intransigent teachers union looking to protect teachers who are afraid of accountability.

What this fight is really about is a corporate education reform movement putting the "awe" part of the Shock Doctrine into place to finish off privatizing one of the last truly "public" institutions in this nation.

Before they can complete that goal, they have to gut the work protections teachers currently have and put into place a system that allows them to fire teachers at will.

Bloomberg already told us he wants to fire half the teachers in New York City.

This test score-based value-added evaluation system will be the mechanism that allows him to do just that.

Corporate education reformers like Murdoch, Klein and Rhee will then move in to pick the carcass of the public education system clean.

The unregulated education management organizations, the for profit charter companies, the test providers, the test prep companies and the online education and tutoring providers will take their chunks too.

Somewhere, Milton Friedman is smiling.

Bloomberg and Black Ring In The New Year

2012-01-01T07:49:00.004-05:00

Times Square, New Year's Eve, 2011 - Bloomberg kisses Cathie Black at the stroke of midnight.

It's nice to see that Bloomberg harbors no ill feelings toward the woman who not only wasn't able to fire half of all New York City teachers - as the mayor wanted - but couldn't even save her own chancellorship.

The nice thing is, she landed on her face, er, feet in the Hamptons, re-emerged in New York City society with a splendid party she gave late last year that the mayor himself attended, showed up in Zuccotti Park to support Occupy Wall Street (or to just take a break from, uh, driving), got help from the Bloomberg administration in keeping her emails secret, and helped ring in the New Year dressed as Lady Gaga in Times Square last night.

She's really turned things around, hasn't she?

Why just last year she was the laughing stock of the city (except for all those kids, parents and teachers who had to deal with her crazy policy initiatives like dealing with school overcrowding by forcing stringent birth control onto people in various neighborhoods...)

Now she's back on stage looking so splendid that even the NY Post is raving about her.

Heck, let's give that woman a value-added "highly effective" bonus.

She's really adding value to this city.

Or if not that, at least this blog.

NYPD Refuses To Take Crime Reports To Keep Crime Stats Low (UPDATED)

2011-12-31T16:20:00.003-05:00

UPDATE: Proving my point, the NYPD arrested over 50 Occupy Wall Street protesters out of the 500 or so who had gathered in Zuccotti Park to ring in the New Year.

According to the NY Times, the police also tussled with a credentialed news reporter who was trying to document an arrest.

Just more proof that the NYPD is out of control on Occupy protesters even as more and more evidence is coming out that their not doing the job of investigating real crimes.

The City Council needs to drag Ray Kelly's fascist ass before them and have him explain how it is the NYPD is always arresting a slew of Occupy Wall Street protesters but just can't get around to documenting and investigating pickpocket crimes, gropings and intruders...

My wife had her wallet stolen in Herald Square two years ago.

She walked into a crowd at 34th and 6th Avenue with the wallet in her pocket, when she came out of the crowd, it was gone.

The NYPD refused to file a crime report on the pickpocketing.

They claimed since she didn't "feel" anybody steal her wallet, see anybody steal it or notice anybody jostle her, they couldn't classify it as a crime.

Instead it was "lost property."

That night somebody used a credit card from that "lost property" to buy a Happy Meal in an uptown McDonald's.

Now the NYPD had to file the "lost property" as a felony because a credit card was used.

Had my wife only had cash in the wallet and that same Happy Meal been paid for with the stolen cash, the crime never would have been documented in an official report.

At the time I posted that it was clear to me the NYPD was deliberately not filing the stolen wallet as a crime in order to keep crime stats low.

In the end they did document it as a crime only because they had to - using somebody else's credit card is grand larceny.

But you an bet that what happened to my wife two years ago is EXACTLY what happens to thousands of New Yorkers every year when they go to report a crime - the NYPD try and find any way to keep from filing an official crime report for crimes.

Now the NY Times confirms that's EXACTLY what Raymond Kelly's NYPD does:

Crime victims in New York sometimes struggle to persuade the police to write down what happened on an official report. The reasons are varied. Police officers are often busy, and few relish paperwork. But in interviews, more than half a dozen police officers, detectives and commanders also cited departmental pressure to keep crime statistics low.

...

The reasons for not taking a report, police officials said, can vary. Some officers seek to avoid the dull task of preparing reports; others may fear discipline for errors in paperwork. Sometimes officers run out of time because they are directed to another job.

There are certainly calls that do not merit a crime report: a victim’s account of an alleged crime can be deemed dubious, for example.

However, some commanders said, officers sometimes bend to pressure by supervisors to eschew report-taking. “Cops don’t want a bad reputation, and stigma,” one commander said. “They know they have to please the sergeants.” Like several other officers and supervisors, he spoke only on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The sergeants, in turn, are acting on the wishes of higher-ups to keep crime statistics down, a desire that is usually communicated stealthily, the commander said. As an era of low crime continues, and as 2011 draws to a close with felony numbers running virtually even with last year’s figures, any new felony is a significant event in a precinct and a source of consternation to commanders.

...

On the Upper West Side in July, a man in red shorts climbed through a window into the living room where Katherine Davis, 65, was reading the paper. She ran, a few steps ahead of him, and locked herself in an adjacent apartment, where she watched through the peephole as the man searched for her before he left.

Officers drove her around to look for the intruder, unsuccessfully. Ms. Davis asked if they could take fingerprints. But the officers said, “Oh, no, that’s only if you have a detective, or investigation,” she recalled. She asked for a case number.

“They said, ‘There is no case number,’ ” she said.

No one came to interview her or to seek videotape from the numerous surveillance cameras nearby, she said. That is where things ended.

“I just assumed it was laziness,” Ms. Davis said. “Why bother to take a report?”

Even when New Yorkers follow up, they are sometimes surprised to learn that their complaints were never classified as a crime. In one case, Sandra Ung, 37, went to the Fifth Precinct in Chinatown after her wallet disappeared at a Starbucks.

“I had it and then it was gone,” she said of the Feb. 23 episode. She said she believed her wallet had been stolen, but could not prove it. She assumed the police had recorded it as pickpocketing, but when she retrieved a copy of the report days later, she saw it was recorded not as a crime, but as lost property that had gone “missing in an unknown manner.”

That report also reflects the line of questioning Ms. Ung faced; it noted that “she wasn’t bumped nor jostled.”

In June, the Police Department issued a guidebook that instructed officers how to categorize all imaginable variations of crimes — including 24 situations involving identity theft and 3 types of strangulation. Its section on pickpockets could be viewed as a rebuke to how officers handled Ms. Ung’s case and possibly others like it.

The guidelines focused on the very words that the police used to discount her suspicions: “The victim does not need to have witnessed, felt or otherwise been aware of being bumped or jostled in order to properly record the occurrence as grand larceny.”

New York's Era of Low Crime - something Bloomberg and Kelly like to brag about over and over - is the result of deliberate data manipulation by the cops.

I have no doubt that the crime stats in Bloomberg's New York are as manipulated as the graduation rates and tests scores in the schools.

But I have a solution for getting the cops to take a crime report even when they are reluctant to because they want to hold their monthly stats down.

Just tell them the crime was perpetrated by a member of Occupy Wall Street.

They hate Occupy Wall Street and absolutely love arresting anybody associated with the movement and giving them the business in the station house and keeping them in lock-up for 72 hours without access to a lawyer.

If you want Ray Kelly to arrest somebody, just have him hear the words "This guy from Occupy Wall Street did it!"

As I have written before, when the history of the Bloomberg Era is really written (i.e., by somebody not on the Bloomberg, the Zuckerman or the Murdoch payroll), people will find out just how much manipulation and out and out fraud was perpetrated on this city by the man and his minions.

Why The UFT Must Not Give In On The Evaluation Fight

2011-12-31T08:09:00.005-05:00

Once again, the tabloids shriek about the federal funds that will be lost if the NYCDOE and the UFT do not come to an agreement on test score-based teacher evaluations for 44 so-called "failing" schools.

Here is the Daily News on the impasse between the city and the union (and of course they lead with how both the city and NYSED Commissioner and unofficial Pearson Education employee John King both blamed the teachers for hurting the kids):

The city could lose nearly $60 million in federal aid for its failing schools after officials were unable to reach a deal with the teachers union on instructor evaluations.

State Education Commissioner John King had given schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott until Sunday to hammer out an accord with the United Federation of Teachers in order to keep the money for 44 failing schools.

On Friday, Walcott walked away from the tense negotiations and sent King a letter saying the city and union would “not be able to come to an agreement” because “the teachers’ union is not committed to real accountability.”

King responded to the collapse of the talks by announcing that he would immediately “suspend” the promised federal funding.

“Sadly, the adults in charge of the city’s schools have let the students down,” he said. “This is beyond disappointing.”

The impasse is not disappointing at all - frankly, given the way the DOE has already tried to use the new evaluation formula under the Danielson framework in these schools to tar veteran teachers as "ineffective," it is clear that if the UFT caves in this evaluation fight, the DOE will ram through a rigged evaluation system that will be used to fire most (if not all) of the veteran teachers in these schools.

This evaluation system will then be scaled up for the whole New York City public school system and the process will be repeated - the DOE will use the Danielson framework and the value-added formula based upon student test scores to declare tens of thousands of veteran teachers "ineffective" and get them off the payroll.

As I have posted many times, this value-added formula they use for the test scores has a margin of error between 12% and 35%, depending upon how many years of test scores are used.

In addition, since the tests do not yet exist that can be used to evaluate teachers in all subjects, the city and the state BOTH have to come up with new batteries of tests for all subjects in all grade levels.

Once the new evaluation system is implemented, students will take city tests twice a year and state tests twice a year in every subject.

Basically all they will do in school is either take tests or prepare to take tests.

Then, using a complex value-added formula, those numbers will be used to rank teachers as "ineffective," "developing," "effective," and "highly effective."

The city wants the right to fire "ineffective" teachers immediately without a hearing before a third party arbiter.

In addition, there is some concern that teachers who are ranked "developing" for a few consecutive years could also be on the chopping block.

The proponents of this system - from President Obama to Governor Cuomo to Mayor Bloomberg to computer mogul/education reformer Bill Gates to Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch to NYSED Commissioner and unofficial Pearson Education employee John King all say this system is "objective" and therefore fair.

But as has been shown already by the arbitrary nature of the value-added evaluations the DOE uses for 4th-8th grade math and ELA teachers, there is nothing "objective" or "fair" about the system at all.

Teachers who are respected by their administrators, peers, students and parents, teachers who work hard and know how to teach, can come up "ineffective" in this system as Michael Winerip so ably showed in this NY Times article from last year:

No one at the Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies works harder than Stacey Isaacson, a seventh-grade English and social studies teacher. She is out the door of her Queens home by 6:15 a.m., takes the E train into Manhattan and is standing out front when the school doors are unlocked, at 7. Nights, she leaves her classroom at 5:30.

“She’s very dedicated,” said Tejal Bahtt, a fellow teacher. “She works way harder than I work. Yesterday I punched in at 7:10 and her time card was already there.”

Last year, when Ms. Isaacson was on maternity leave, she came in one full day a week for the entire school year for no pay and taught a peer leadership class.

Her principal, Megan Adams, has given her terrific reviews during the two and a half years Ms. Isaacson has been a teacher. “I know that this year had its moments of challenge — you always handled it with grace and presence,” the principal wrote on May 4, 2009. “You are a wonderful teacher.”

On the first day of this school year, the principal wrote, “I look forward to being in your classroom and seeing all the great work you do with your students,” and signed it with a smiley face.

The Lab School has selective admissions, and Ms. Isaacson’s students have excelled. Her first year teaching, 65 of 66 scored proficient on the state language arts test, meaning they got 3’s or 4’s; only one scored below grade level with a 2. More than two dozen students from her first two years teaching have gone on to Stuyvesant High School or Bronx High School of Science, the city’s most competitive high schools.

“Definitely one of a kind,” said Isabelle St. Clair, now a sophomore at Bard, another selective high school. “I’ve had lots of good teachers, but she stood out — I learned so much from her.”

You would think the Department of Education would want to replicate Ms. Isaacson — who has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia — and sprinkle Ms. Isaacsons all over town. Instead, the department’s accountability experts have developed a complex formula to calculate how much academic progress a teacher’s students make in a year — the teacher’s value-added score — and that formula indicates that Ms. Isaacson is one of the city’s worst teachers.

According to the formula, Ms. Isaacson ranks in the 7th percentile among her teaching peers — meaning 93 per cent are better.

This may seem disconnected from reality, but it has real ramifications. Because of her 7th percentile, Ms. Isaacson was told in February that it was virtually certain that she would not be getting tenure this year. “My principal said that given the opportunity, she would advocate for me,” Ms. Isaacson said. “But she said don’t get your hopes up, with a 7th percentile, there wasn’t much she could do.”

That’s not the only problem Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile has caused. If the mayor and governor have their way, and layoffs are no longer based on seniority but instead are based on the city’s formulas that scientifically identify good teachers, Ms. Isaacson is pretty sure she’d be cooked.

How did this happen? How did a good teacher respected by all with numbers and data to back up her teaching skill get rated 7th percentile?

Easy - the value-added numbers are ginned up in a formula so complex that not even the DOE experts can explain it and they MAKE NO FREAKING SENSE:

Everyone who teaches math or English has received a teacher data report. On the surface the report seems straightforward. Ms. Isaacson’s students had a prior proficiency score of 3.57. Her students were predicted to get a 3.69 — based on the scores of comparable students around the city. Her students actually scored 3.63. So Ms. Isaacson’s value added is 3.63-3.69.

What you would think this means is that Ms. Isaacson’s students averaged 3.57 on the test the year before; they were predicted to average 3.69 this year; they actually averaged 3.63, giving her a value added of 0.06 below zero.

Wrong.

These are not averages. For example, the department defines Ms. Isaacson’s 3.57 prior proficiency as “the average prior year proficiency rating of the students who contribute to a teacher’s value added score.”

Right.

The calculation for Ms. Isaacson’s 3.69 predicted score is even more daunting. It is based on 32 variables — including whether a student was “retained in grade before pretest year” and whether a student is “new to city in pretest or post-test year.”

Those 32 variables are plugged into a statistical model that looks like one of those equations that in “Good Will Hunting” only Matt Damon was capable of solving.

The process appears transparent, but it is clear as mud, even for smart lay people like teachers, principals and — I hesitate to say this — journalists.

Ms. Isaacson may have two Ivy League degrees, but she is lost. “I find this impossible to understand,” she said.

In plain English, Ms. Isaacson’s best guess about what the department is trying to tell her is: Even though 65 of her 66 students scored proficient on the state test, more of her 3s should have been 4s.

But that is only a guess.

Moreover, as the city indicates on the data reports, there is a large margin of error. So Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile could actually be as low as zero or as high as the 52nd percentile — a score that could have earned her tenure.

Now when Winerip wrote that article, the value-added system was only being used to evaluate 4th-8th grade math and ELA teachers for tenure decisions.

If the DOE, the NYSED and the Regents get their way, that system will be used to "objectively" decide who gets to remain a teacher and who gets fired.

Michael Winerip has since shown how a similar system has played out in Tennessee, an early winner of the Obama administration's Race to the Top program that put all these new teacher evaluation systems in place by dangling out federal funds to cash-starved states.

In that article, Winerip shows how insane the new test score-based evaluation system is:

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Last year, when Tennessee was named one of the first two states to win a federal Race to The Top grant, worth $501 million, there was great joy all around.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who has the job of implementing President Obama’s signature education program, praised Tennessee officials for having “the courage, capacity and commitment to turn their ideas into practices that can improve outcomes for students.”

Gov. Bill Haslam, a Republican, called his state “the focal point of education reform in the nation.” Tennessee’s new motto is “First to the Top.”

So you would think that educators like Will Shelton, principal of Blackman Middle School here, would be delighted. The state requires that teachers be evaluated by their students’ test scores, and that principals get into classrooms regularly to observe teachers.

Mr. Shelton is a big believer in both.

But not this. “I’ve never seen such nonsense,” he said. “In the five years I’ve been principal here, I’ve never known so little about what’s going on in my own building.” Mr. Shelton has to spend so much time filling out paperwork that he’s stuck in his office for long stretches.

The new rules, enacted at the start of the school year, require Mr. Shelton to do as many observations for his strongest teachers — four a year — as for his weakest. “It’s an insult to my best teachers,” he said, “but it’s also a terrible waste of time.”

Because there are no student test scores with which to evaluate over half of Tennessee’s teachers — kindergarten to third-grade teachers; art, music and vocational teachers — the state has created a bewildering set of assessment rules. Math specialists can be evaluated by their school’s English scores, music teachers by the school’s writing scores.
...

The state is micromanaging principals to a degree never seen before here, and perhaps anywhere. For example, Mr. Shelton is required to have a pre-observation conference with each teacher (which takes 20 minutes), observe the teacher for a period (50 minutes), conduct a post-observation conference (20 minutes), and fill out a rubric with 19 variables and give teachers a score from 1 to 5 (40 minutes).

He must have copies of his evaluations ready for any visit by a county evaluator, who evaluates whether Mr. Shelton has properly evaluated the teachers.

He is required to do at least four observations a year for the 65 teachers at his school, although the changes suggested last week would save paperwork by allowing two of the observations to be done back to back.

Teachers have it worse. Half of their assessment is based on their students’ results on state test scores, a serious problem for those who teach subjects with no state test.

To solve that, the state is requiring teachers without test results to be evaluated based on the scores of teachers at their school with test results. So Emily Mitchell, a first-grade teacher at David Youree Elementary, will be evaluated using the school’s fifth-grade writing scores.

“How stupid is that?” said Michelle Pheneger, who teaches ACT math prep at Blackman High and is also being evaluated in part based on writing scores. “My job can be at risk, and I’m not even being evaluated by my own work.”

For 15 percent of their testing evaluation, teachers without scores are permitted to choose which subject test they want to be judged on. Few pick something related to their expertise; instead, they try to anticipate the subject that their school is likely to score well on in the state exams next spring.

Several teachers without scores at Oakland Middle School conferred. “The P. E. teacher got information that the writing score was the best to pick,” said Jeff Jennings, the art teacher. “He informed the home ec teacher, who passed it on to me, and I told the career development teacher.”

It’s a bit like Vegas, and if you pick the wrong academic subject, you lose and get a bad evaluation. While this may have nothing to do with academic performance, it does measure a teacher’s ability to play the odds. There’s also the question of how a principal can do a classroom observation of someone who doesn’t teach a classroom subject.

The answer is, the principal still has to observe them teaching something. Erin Alvarado, a librarian at Central Magnet, a combined middle and high school, picked eighth-grade descriptive writing. One of the rubric variables is how well the teacher knows her students. There are 938 students at Central, and she knew few in that class by name. “Fortunately, the teacher put all the names on index cards for me,” Ms. Alvarado said. “I’d take a quick peek down at the card, pick a name, look around and hope the student was there.”

This would all be hilarious, except these evaluations can cost people their jobs.

Indeed, people can lose their jobs in all of this insanity over "objective" teacher evaluations that are ANYTHING BUT OBJECTIVE.

And that's the point.

This system has been put into place, pure and simple, to give districts the ability to fire veteran (and therefore expensive) teachers at will.

All the districts have to do is put pressure onto administrators to declare a certain percentage of teachers "ineffective" every year and the value-added formula with the MOE between 12%-35% will back those labels up.

Actually, the bell curve that is used to evaluate teachers in the four designations - "ineffective," "developing," "effective," and "highly effective" - will ensure that some teachers are declared "ineffective" every year no matter what.

You can pretty much bet most of those teachers will be the expensive veteran ones.

Districts will save millions of dollars in wages, benefits and pension costs by firing hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of teachers every year, depending upon the size of a district.

And as Alexander Russo showed in this post here, there are plenty of newbies without jobs waiting to replace the vets who get fired, so finding newer, cheaper replacements will NOT be a problem.

If worse comes to worse, Rupert Murdoch and Joel Klein stand waiting to step in with their for-profit, online education programs that can replace teachers completely.

But what will be a problem, ultimately, is the education experiences for students and the consequences these policies will have on the nation as a whole.

You can be sure that education will be narrowed to only include items that will be tested.

You can be sure teachers in the same school will no longer collaborate or work together in any way since they are now in "competition" on the great bell curve that is the value-added evaluation system.

You can be sure that students who need extra time, help, or care will not receive any of that from teachers scared for the jobs who know that taking time away from the endless test prep they have to do could jeopardize their jobs.

You can be sure that students will learn less and less in this Brave New World education system based upon test scores, value-added systems and Darwinian competition for teacher rankings that has been brought to us by Obama, Cuomo, and Bloomberg.

Finally, you can be sure that no one in their right mind will go into teaching in the future once they come to understand how badly the system is rigged against teachers and how easy it is for districts to scapegoat them (and ultimately fire them as well.)

The writer of the Daily News article, Ben Chapman, exposes his bias by quoting a member of the Educators4Excellence education reform group that is funded by the Gates Foundation who makes a living carrying water for the corporate education reformers:

Former teacher and Educators 4 Excellence school activist Sydney Morris called the breakdown in negotiations a “shame.”

“Teachers want and need a system that gives them meaningful feedback to improve their craft,” Morris said.

We sure do, Sydney.

But this system isn't it.

And you aren't a teacher looking for feedback to improve your craft.

You're a paid lobbyist looking for an even bigger corporate payday for carrying corporate education reform water.

Which is exactly the problem with the teacher evaluation system pushed by the state - it's been created and promoted by corporate education reform philanthropists, lobbyists and bureaucrats who either are "former teachers" who worked just year or two in a school system and then quit (like Sydney Morris, Joel Klein, Dennis Walcott or Michelle Rhee) or have never worked in a school system at all (like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, etc.)

The real world consequences this system is going to have on students, teachers and schools is stark.

But what do these people care?

They're not teachers, they're not working in schools day-to-day and they don't have to worry about having a value-added formula with a 12%-35% MOE and a bell curve evaluation system that declares a certain percentage of teachers failing every year come between them and their jobs.

This is why the UFT MUST stand fast in this fight against the new evaluation system.

It is a rigged system put together by people looking to scapegoat teachers, close traditional public schools with a unionized workforce, reopen them as privatized charters with nonunionized (and instantly fireable) rookie teachers, and make a profit either form themselves or their corporate cronies.

As James Eterno wrote in a post over at ICEBLOG, the best tact in this fight is to push for legislation to overturn this system rather than try to find common ground in one that is so rigged against teachers.

Over 1,100 principals statewide have already begun that fight.

The UFT and the NYSUT must join it.

DOE And UFT Declare Impasse Over Teacher Evaluations

2011-12-30T14:54:00.006-05:00

Mulgrew wrote the following about the impasse:

The UFT is seeking an agreement that meets the spirit of the teacher evaluation legislation in two important ways:
1) The agreement must focus on creating a process to help teachers improve their performance by providing them with feedback on the specific classroom issues that need to be addressed, recommended strategies to address these issues and specific assistance from supervisors and other school personnel in implementing the recommended strategies.

2) for teachers rated ineffective — an impartial outside review by a qualified and mutually-agreed-upon third party.

The DOE wants teachers who are rated "ineffective" or "developing" to suffer immediate and severe consequences - including the "ineffective" ones losing their jobs - all on the say-so of a value-added evaluation system with a margin of error between 12%-36% and the word of a school principal.

In addition, the evaluation system uses a bell curve for all teachers, so every year some teachers will HAVE to be declared "ineffective" whether they really are or they really aren't (even according to the criteria the state is using - so-called student performance on tests.)

So the system is set up to declare a portion of the teachers in every district "ineffective" every year, fire those teachers, and replace them with newer (and cheaper) ones.

Is this system REALLY meant to improve public education or simply provide a way for cities and districts to fire as many teachers as they can every year, regardless of quality?

The UFT offered to go to binding arbitration on this but the DOE refused.

Norm at Ed Notes thinks this was the UFT's way of giving the DOE what it wants on this issue while keeping their hands clean.

I agree with that.

The UFT should NEVER have agreed to the evaluations based upon test scores from the beginning.

Once they did, it was inevitable that the corporate education reformers running the NYSED and the NYCDOE would attempt to ram through a system that would arbitrarily punish veteran teachers as "ineffective" using a value-added system based on student test scores that is so complex NASA scientists couldn't explain it.

They're not looking to get rid of "bad teachers."

They're looking to get rid of the expensive (i.e., veteran) ones.

The new evaluation system based upon so-called student performance is the means to do this.

You can bet if Bloomberg, Walcott and King get their way on this, thousands of veteran teachers will be declared "ineffective" with the new system and immediately fired.

That has ALWAYS been the plan.

The corporate education reformers ginned up a phony education crisis in order to bust the unions and fire veteran, tenured teachers.

Let's see if the UFT REALLY means to stop this or if they're playing games.

I am not convinced there still will not be a sell-out on this in the end.

Teacher Evaluation Deal Brings Massive Change For Federal Funds That Amount To 0.2% Of The Budget

2011-12-30T09:24:00.005-05:00

The Daily News and the Times and Gotham Schools make it sound like the world will end if the UFT doesn't cave to pressure from NYSED Commissioner and unofficial Pearson Education booster John King's threat to agree to a teacher evaluation system that requires 40% of teacher evaluations to come from state and city tests (20% for each) for teachers in 33 schools deemed "failing."

NYC Educator covered a bit of that media hysteria in this post here.

But the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal puts that hysteria into some perspective:

New York state warned city officials Tuesday that they are just days away from losing nearly $60 million in federal funds that hinge on an agreement with the teachers union to use test scores in evaluations.

State officials said they would enforce a Dec. 31 deadline for school districts to strike deals with teachers unions over new evaluation plans that count student improvement on state tests for at least 20% of a teacher's score. Ten districts are eligible for about $105 million in federal education funds, but only two—Rochester and Syracuse—have submitted evidence that they've made the required changes.

...

New York City stands to lose about $58.6 million in federal funds slated for 44 low-performing schools if the deadline passes with no deal. The city and the United Federation of Teachers union agreed in theory last summer to implement a new evaluation system at those schools, but the details are still being negotiated.

...

The federal funds amount to only about 0.2% of the roughly $20 billion annual schools operating budget.

That's right - all of this fuss over 0.2% of the annual operating budget.

Hell, that's just a little bit more money than former NYCDOE official Judith Hederman helped some consulting firm steal from the DOE ($34 million.)

It's only a couple of months operating budget for the CityTime project that Bloomberg allowed to balloon from $63 million to over $700 million - much of which was stolen by crooks in what the US Attorney called one of the biggest frauds ever perpetrated against NYC taxpayers, a project that was "corrupt to the core."

And it's a little over 10% of what Bloomberg is spending this year alone to upgrade the computer systems in the schools so that computerized tests can be used to grade teachers starting in 2014.

That allocation stands at $550 million. How much is being stolen from that fund by the outside consultants? We don't know because Bloomberg has labeled this as part of capital improvements and doesn't have to give any details on how the money is being spent.

But you can be sure that if former DOE computer consultant Willard Lanham stole $3.4 million from the city, former DOE official Judith Hederman helped steal $34 million from the city, and the CityTime crooks stole $700 million, much of the $550 million Bloomberg is spending on computer consultants and upgrades is being stolen.

And let's not forget the $36 million dollars Bloomberg spent on the NYCHA computer system that doesn't work, or the $15 million he spent on GPS systems for the FDNY and the Sanitation Department that also don't work, or the $55 million he spent on the SESIS computer prgoram that also doesn't work, or the millions they fail to recoup to city taxpayers in Medicaid costs for special education services, or...

Well, you get the point.

This money for the turnaround schools is peanuts to Bloomberg and the DOE.

Compared to the money they already waste, it's a drop in the bucket that will barely be noticed.

Except by the test prep companies and online education providers, of course, who stand to make millions from the testing and test prep this money will fund.

And that's the last point I want to hit on here - just what the money CAN and CANNOT be used for.

It CAN be used for tests, data tracking systems, test prep, curriculum consultants, and online education materials related to testing.

Ed Notes points out today what it CANNOT be used for:

We should remember what this money CANNOT be used to do. It CANNOT be used to increase the number of teachers in order to reduce class size. It CANNOT be used to hire more Guidance Counselors, Social Workers, Psychologists and other support workers that our students so desperately need. It CANNOT be used to buy new, badly needed textbooks. It CANNOT be used to buy classroom supplies, such as paper or ink, toner or stencil rolls for duplicating machines.

The best thing that could happen is the city LOSES this money, LOSES the harmful education policies like ENDLESS TEST PREP and new city tests added to every subject in every grade in order to evaluate teachers that this money will fund.

Education officials and politicians are using the Shock Doctrine here to gin up a phony crisis that absolutely has to be solved by December 31, 2011 or the world will end.

I hope the UFT sticks to its guns and refuses to agree to a new evaluation system in these 44 schools that will eventually be implemented in every school that will do more harm than good.

As the Wall Street Journal pointed out in its evaluation article:

Unions and statisticians have argued that evaluations have large margins of error—especially for new teachers with only a few years of test scores to analyze. Others worry that some teachers will cheat on behalf of students if pay or layoffs are tied to scores, while other critics say it will encourage teachers to spend more time on test preparations and less on creative thinking.

Indeed, that is EXACTLY some of the problems that will be ushered in with this new system.

Media Producer Who Tried To Extort Millions From David Letterman Gets Hired To Work On Paula Zahn Show

2011-12-30T05:22:00.000-05:00

What exactly do media people have to do to, you know, get blacklisted from working?

Robert Joel Halderman, the “48 Hours” producer who pleaded guilty last year to having tried to extort David Letterman, has been hired by a competing crime newsmagazine, “On the Case With Paula Zahn,” which is shown on the Investigation Discovery channel.

“We have been impressed with Joe Halderman’s professional accomplishments as an Emmy-winning producer for ’48 Hours’ and CBS News,” Scott Weinberger, the executive producer of “On the Case,” said in a statement to the blog TVNewser, using Mr. Halderman’s nickname.

Mr. Weinberger said that the program had received “prior approval” from Investigation Discovery before bringing Mr. Halderman on board. Mr. Halderman served four months in prison after trying to blackmail Mr. Letterman in 2009 with information about his sexual relationships with staff members.

After Mr. Halderman was arrested, he was fired by CBS News, according to his defense lawyer. Yet in July, Mr. Halderman, along with six of his former colleagues at CBS News, was nominated for an Emmy Award for an episode of “48 Hours Mystery” — “American Girl, Italian Nightmare” — about the Amanda Knox case.

Apparently outside of murdering your ex-wife and a waiter, media personalities just cannot get blacklisted from working their beat.

Just another example of a lack of accountability for people connected to finance, government and the media.

Do you think this guy would have his job back if he were a teacher?

Do you think the Daily News or Post wouldn't be screaming about that if it happened?

But convicted extortionist producer back producing news magazine that covers crime?

Oh, yeah - no problem...

Bloomberg Can't Figure Out How To Get Support Service Medicaid Reimbursements

2011-12-29T19:37:00.004-05:00

You can bet if this was about teacher evaluations, they'd get this right:

New York City has failed to recover tens of millions of dollars in Medicaid reimbursements for services it provided to special-needs students in recent years, as the Education Department has struggled to adapt to new rules imposed after a devastating federal audit forced the city to return money it received for claims it could not properly document.

State Health Department data from 2006 to 2010 show that education-related claims by the city were 60 percent lower last year than they were five years ago. And virtually all of the $302 million in Medicaid reimbursements the city did receive during that period were for administrative claims that, under the rules that took effect in September 2009, are no longer eligible for reimbursement.

New York, where more than two-thirds of the 168,000 special-needs students are poor enough to qualify for Medicaid, has lagged far behind the state’s other large school districts in filing claims. In fact, the city’s Education Department filed no claims related to nursing services, occupational and physical therapy, psychological counseling, audiological evaluations or transportation between 2006 and 2010; meanwhile, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Yonkers — where the combined special education populations are less than 10 percent of New York City’s — were reimbursed $77 million for such services.

The city’s Education Department did not try to file thousands of claims in the 16 months immediately after the new rules were announced, the state records show. A spokeswoman said it was because the department lacked the staff and the training to handle the more demanding requirements. (Data for 2011 was not available.) Claims can be filed for up to 24 months after the service is provided, but much of the required material cannot be retroactively documented.

“The Medicaid reimbursement process has become increasingly cumbersome,” the spokeswoman, Barbara Morgan, said.

Ms. Morgan said a city analysis found that the Education Department did not have proper documentation for all but 9,000 students during the 2007-8 and 2008-9 school years, a period covered retroactively by the new rules. The analysis shows, however, that even for those students, almost 20 percent of the $10 million in claims filed were rejected for not meeting the new criteria.

The city says the new claims process is really, really hard and gee, they just can't figure it out so well just yet, but they're getting there...they're getting there.

Except that lots of other cities are dealing with the same process and handling it pretty well:

At a time of tight budgets and grim economic forecasts, many districts and states — each with its own set of filing rules — have invested heavily in compliance. Bruce Hunter, associate executive director for policy at the American Association of School Administrators, said the reimbursements, generally from 50 percent to 70 percent of the cost of a service, had become “an enormous help to school districts” across the country.

In New Jersey, where the state treasury retains 65 percent of the reimbursements, filing the claims has been mandatory since 2008, and the state has set precise goals for its districts, including a 90 percent return rate on forms giving parental permission for schools to file on a child’s behalf. In Washington, Mayor Vincent C. Gray asked the accounting firm Deloitte in February to suggest, among other things, ways to improve the system used by local schools to apply for reimbursements.

Each of the 57 county-level school districts in Michigan, where 40 percent of the reimbursements are kept by the state, has had its own Medicaid coordinator for years. Their duties include hiring therapists and nurses whose certification meets federal requirements and, much like an attendant at a doctor’s office, keeping students’ prescriptions up to date to ensure the claims are not disallowed, said Jane E. Reagan, a Medicaid specialist at the Michigan Education Department.

“It’s a hassle, but once you’ve got the infrastructure and staff in place, the costs are almost always worth the benefit,” said Ms. Reagan, who is the president of the National Alliance for Medicaid in Education, a professional group.

In New York State, Buffalo hired a company to handle the claims; Syracuse sent social workers knocking on students’ doors to make sure their parents signed the required consent forms; and New Rochelle hired a consultant to train school bus monitors to note pickup and drop-off times for special-needs children, as mandated by the new rules, which district officials estimate will lead to $100,000 in additional claims each year.

“We’ll be able to put more teachers in the classroom and more staff in our schools without costing the local taxpayer any additional money,” said Yvette Goorevitch, New Rochelle’s director of special and alternative education.

So why can't New York City handle the process right?

Because the people at Tweed are morons, that's why:

But in New York City, according to a September letter from the State Health Department, officials were still submitting some claims using forms that are no longer accepted. A second state audit, released in April, showed that many of the city’s claims in 2009 were missing documentation or showed incorrect dates for services, forcing the Education Department to return $87,000 as a result.

The Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, wrote to Dennis M. Walcott, the schools chancellor, in October, criticizing the city for failing “for years to apply in an organized fashion” for the reimbursements. “Funding for public schools have been cut to the bone, and it’s unconscionable that the D.O.E. will leave millions of dollars on the table,” Mr. Stringer, a mayoral hopeful, said in an interview.

Don't worry, though - the Children First folks at the DOE are going to get this thing right.

They've got a plan:

Ms. Morgan, the spokeswoman, said the city was working on the problems. In addition to putting a manager in charge of the claims, the department hired a Medicaid compliance officer last year. This fall, it added 15 doctors, who are paid about $60 an hour, plus some benefits, to work approximately four hours each week writing the service orders that must be attached to each claim. It also hired three medical consultants who are paid $110 an hour, without benefits, to do the same work.

The department has also screened therapists to determine whether they have the appropriate certification, and whether the services they provide are eligible for reimbursement. It has offered compliance training to more than 16,000 therapists, supervisors, outside providers and finance staff.

And it has spent $80 million to build a database — the Special Education Student Information System — that it hopes will make filing claims easier by making prescriptions, treatment plans and schedules of services readily available. Many teachers and principals, however, have complained about the time it takes to load the database and how often it crashes.

Ah, yes - the famed SESIS computer system that is so shitty it makes the famously buggy ARIS computer system look like it was created by divine intelligence.

That's their plan for fixing the problem.

As I said earlier, if this were about teacher evaluations tied to test scores so they can fire teachers or a new testing contract for an online servicer, you can bet your sweet ass they'd get it right the first time.

But this isn't about firing teachers or handing out computer contracts to corporate cronies (that part they already screwed up with SESIS) - so they screw this up and screw it up and cost the city millions and millions of dollars.

When the deadline for the new teacher eval system comes up and Chancellor Putzo holds a press conference to say the teachers are costing the school kids millions because they won't agree to having 40% of their evaluations based on two different sets of tests (one state, one city), somebody in the press needs to call him on this support services/Medicaid fiasco.

Frankly, it's not even true that teachers are costing city kids millions of school dollars if the eval agreement isn't hammered out - that money can only be used for useless crap like data tracking systems and new standardized tests.

But the Medicaid money IS useful and necessary and the city ought to figure out how to get the reimbursements.

After all, didn't Bloomberg say only his fiscal genius could save the city during a time of economic turmoil?

Wasn't that the rationale for his third (illegal) term?

I'll answer that for you - it was.

Yet we see time and time again how this man wastes hundreds of millions of dollars on computer projects that go way over budget because he allows crooks to steal tens of millions of dollars (and in the case of CityTime, hundreds of millions.)

Or he puts millions into garbage projects like the infamous GPS systems for the FDNY and the Sanitation Department that are so bad, they show trucks in the East River when they're actually in Astoria.

Or millions into garbage computer programs like SESIS or ARIS.

But he can't figure out how to get Medicaid reimbursements.

Bloomberg has a reputation for being a shrewd businessman.

The only thing shrewd about this guy is how he keeps the majority of the populace from seeing how incompetent he is as a manager.

Obama Governs As Centrist Republican

2011-12-28T09:59:00.003-05:00

Glenn hits this right on the head:

In fairness to the much-maligned GOP field, they face a formidable hurdle: how to credibly attack Obama when he has adopted so many of their party's defining beliefs. Depicting the other party's president as a radical menace is one of the chief requirements for a candidate seeking to convince his party to crown him as the chosen challenger. Because Obama has governed as a centrist Republican, these GOP candidates are able to attack him as a leftist radical only by moving so far to the right in their rhetoric and policy prescriptions that they fall over the cliff of mainstream acceptability, or even basic sanity.

In July, the nation's most influential progressive domestic policy pundit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, declared that Obama is a "moderate conservative in practical terms". Last October, he wrote that "progressives who had their hearts set on Obama were engaged in a huge act of self-delusion", because the president – "once you get past the soaring rhetoric" – has "largely accepted the conservative storyline".

Krugman also pointed out that even the policy Democratic loyalists point to as proof of the president's progressive bona fides – his healthcare plan, which mandates the purchase of policies from the private health insurance industry – was designed by the Heritage Foundation, one of the nation's most rightwing thinktanks, and was advocated by conservative ideologues for many years (it also happens to be the same plan Romney implemented when he was governor of Massachusetts and which Newt Gingrich once promoted, underscoring the difficulty for the GOP in drawing real contrasts with Obama).

How do you scorn a president as a far-left socialist when he has stuffed his administration with Wall Street executives, had his last campaign funded by them, governed as a "centrist Republican", and presided over booming corporate profits even while the rest of the nation suffered economically?

But as slim as the pickings are for GOP candidates on the domestic policy front, at least there are some actual differences in that realm. The president's 2009 stimulus spending and Wall Street "reform" package – tepid and inadequate though they were – are genuinely at odds with rightwing dogma, as are Obama's progressive (albeit inconsistent) positions on social issues, such as equality for gay people and protecting a woman's right to choose. And the supreme court, perpetually plagued by a 5-4 partisan split, would be significantly affected by the outcome of the 2012 election.

It is in the realm of foreign policy, terrorism and civil liberties where Republicans encounter an insurmountable roadblock. A staple of GOP politics has long been to accuse Democratic presidents of coddling America's enemies (both real and imagined), being afraid to use violence, and subordinating US security to international bodies and leftwing conceptions of civil liberties.

But how can a GOP candidate invoke this time-tested caricature when Obama has embraced the vast bulk of George Bush's terrorism policies; waged a war against government whistleblowers as part of a campaign of obsessive secrecy; led efforts to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs; extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge numbers of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim countries; engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the Iraq war; ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an unauthorised war in Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of indefinite detention without trial for accused terrorists; and even claimed and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield and without due process?

Reflecting this difficulty for the GOP field is the fact that former Bush officials, including Dick Cheney, have taken to lavishing Obama with public praise for continuing his predecessor's once-controversial terrorism polices. In the last GOP foreign policy debate, the leading candidates found themselves issuing recommendations on the most contentious foreign policy question (Iran) that perfectly tracked what Obama is already doing, while issuing ringing endorsements of the president when asked about one of his most controversial civil liberties assaults (the due-process-free assassination of the American-Yemeni cleric Anwar Awlaki). Indeed, when it comes to the foreign policy and civil liberties values Democrats spent the Bush years claiming to defend, the only candidate in either party now touting them is the libertarian Ron Paul, who vehemently condemns Obama's policies of drone killings without oversight, covert wars, whistleblower persecutions, and civil liberties assaults in the name of terrorism.

In sum, how do you demonise Obama as a terrorist-loving secret Muslim intent on empowering US enemies when he has adopted, and in some cases extended, what was rightwing orthodoxy for the last decade? The core problem for GOP challengers is that they cannot be respectable Republicans because, as Krugman pointed out, Obama has that position occupied. They are forced to move so far to the right that they render themselves inherently absurd.

I'm visiting the in-laws for the holidays and got to watch a little cable TV last night. I haven't watched MSNBC in over a year-and-a-half. I watched a little of The Ed Show last night. The Obama shillery was just over the top - no mention of Obama's drone bombing campaigns, the hundreds of thousands of people killed as a result of Obama's foreign policy, the Bradley Manning case, Obama's assertion that he can murder anybody anytime for any reason in order to keep the country safe from terrorism. No mention of the bank bailouts, the bullshit health care plan that was purposely devised as a corporate giveaway to the insurance companies, the union-busting corporate education polciies or Obama's rubberstamping of the Bush policies toward Wall Street and the Federal Reserve.

Nope - just how awful Gingrich and Romey are.

No wonder I stopped watching the channel.

I don't give my allegiance to a party.

I give my allegiance to principles.

I am opposed to the increasingly corporatized economy we have in this country - an economy that has given us the largest disparity between rich and poor in over a century. I am opposed to Forever War, to torture, to the Surveillance State, to a government that promotes corporate policiy over the general welfare of the people. I am opposed to drone killings and presidential assassination orders.

I cannot be opposed TO these things and STILL support Barack Obama.

It doesn't matter if Gingrich is WORSE than Obama.

I don't vote the lesser of two evils anymore.

Evil is evil, even when it's the lesser variety.

The American Dream

2011-12-27T05:53:00.002-05:00

As George Carlin said, they call it a dream because you've got to be asleep to believe it:

Esquire: "There are some truths so hard to face, so ugly and so at odds with how we imagine the world should be, that nobody can accept them. Here's one: It is obvious that a class system has arrived in America -- a recent study of the thirty-four countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that only Italy and Great Britain have less social mobility. But nobody wants to admit: If your daddy was rich, you're gonna stay rich, and if your daddy was poor, you're gonna stay poor. Every instinct in the American gut, every institution, every national symbol, runs on the idea that anybody can make it; the only limits are your own limits. Which is an amazing idea, a gift to the world -- just no longer true. Culturally, and in their daily lives, Americans continue to glide through a ghostly land of opportunity they can't bear to tell themselves isn't real. It's the most dangerous lie the country tells itself."

George Carlin also said that bullshit is the glue that keeps this country together.

That statement becomes more and more true these days.

Hypocrites Go After Teachers Pensions While Padding Their Own

2011-12-26T22:00:00.004-05:00

No wonder these assholes are promoting deficit reduction and tax breaks for millionaires and corporations:

Largely insulated from the country’s economic downturn since 2008, members of Congress — many of them among the “1 percenters” denounced by Occupy Wall Street protesters — have gotten much richer even as most of the country has become much poorer in the last six years, according to an analysis by The New York Times based on data from the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group.
Congress has never been a place for paupers. From plantation owners in the pre-Civil War era to industrialists in the early 1900s to ex-Wall Street financiers and Internet executives today, it has long been populated with the rich, including scions of families like the Guggenheims, Hearsts, Kennedys and Rockefellers.
But rarely has the divide appeared so wide, or the public contrast so stark, between lawmakers and those they represent.
...
One likely cause of the rising wealth, political analysts say, is the growing cost of a political campaign. A successful Senate run cost on average nearly $10 million last year, and a successful House race was $1.4 million, significantly above past elections.
The prohibitive cost has inevitably drawn richer candidates who can help bankroll their own campaigns and attract donations from rich friends — while deterring less well-off candidates, political analysts say.
The data analyzed by The Times corroborated the idea that incoming members are in fact richer than those in the past. The freshman class of 106 members elected last year, including many Tea Party-backed Republicans, had a median net worth of $864,000 — an inflation-adjusted increase of 26 percent from the 2004 freshmen.
Once in Congress, members benefit from many financial perks unavailable to most Americans. Beyond a base salary of $174,000 — an increase of about 10 percent since 2004, somewhat less than inflation — members get extra pay for senior posts and generous medical and pension benefits, as well as accouterments of power often financed by taxpayers or their campaigns.

Congressional assholes railing against government employee pensions while padding (and eventually collecting) their own.

Hmm, where have I heard a similar story about a DOE asshole who railed against teachers' pensions, then cashed in as soon as he retired to greener passages at News Corp.?

Oh, yeah - now I remember:

Just weeks before former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein slammed teacher pensions as "hollowing out public education," Klein walked into the teacher pension office to collect his own annual windfall, sources told the Daily News.
Klein, who could rake in as much as $4.5 million this year at his new gig with News Corp., also will collect $34,000 annually for his eight years as chancellor.
Accepting the money seems to fly in the face of a harsh editorial he wrote last week, ripping into the guaranteed pensions earned by veteran teachers.
"Defined-benefit pensions helped bring the once-vibrant U.S. auto industry to its knees," Klein wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 10. "The promised benefits just proved too costly. In that industry, such pensions are mostly a thing of the past."
"Alas," he added, "the same kind of pensions are now hollowing out public education."
But Klein's eight-plus years as chancellor entitled him to a slice of the public pension pie and last month he helped himself. His $250,000-a-year salary allowed him to cash out at a much higher rate for fewer years logged.
A teacher with a master's degree can make up to about $34,000 in annual pension payments only after 20 years of service.
Klein said through a spokesman that he had no comment.

You better you bet he had no comment - even Joel "Running The Phone Hacking Cover-Up" Klein couldn't lie his way out of this hypocrisy.

It's a shame the corporate news media doesn't throw it into his face every time he rails about teachers and pensions.

Same goes for these assholes in Congress padding their own pensions even as they hawk deficit reduction on the backs of working and middle class people.

But that's the country we're in now - the system is broken, our leaders are hypocrites and crooks and the corporate news media seems to carry their water more often than not.

The times when they don't -as in when they expose a Joel Klein collecting his pension just a few days after railing about teachers collecting theirs - the stories disappear like so much mist into the ether.

Better Things

2011-12-25T23:48:00.002-05:00

Ending the Christmas Day music spectacular with this Ray Davies beauty:

Occupy the New Year!!!!

Merry Christmas From The Kinks

2011-12-25T20:47:00.004-05:00

Dedicating this song to all the crooks on Wall Street and in the hedge funds:

Merry Christmas From Ian Hunter

2011-12-25T17:45:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas From The Pretenders

2011-12-25T14:54:00.000-05:00

Bought this 12 inch single on Christmas Eve at a record shop on Fifth Avenue in 1983 on the way back to the hospital to visit my Mom.

Funny how you remember those kinds of things...

Merry Christmas From Bing And Bowie

2011-12-25T12:42:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas From Marc Bolan

2011-12-25T09:37:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas From Slade

2011-12-25T05:36:00.001-05:00

Merry Christmas From The Kramdens

2011-12-25T03:04:00.001-05:00

Merry Christmas From Roy Wood

2011-12-24T23:33:00.001-05:00

Merry Christmas, I Don't Want To Fight Tonight

2011-12-24T20:29:00.001-05:00

Visit your parents in fucking Mineola???

Fuck that...

My Favorite Christmas Carol

2011-12-24T17:25:00.001-05:00

What A Surprise - Cuomo And Bloomberg Hate Each Other

2011-12-24T08:31:00.002-05:00

The Times has an article today that chronicles the deteriorating relationship between Mayor Bloomberg And Governor Cuomo:

They fume about each other’s egos, moods and stunts. They have not appeared together at a single news conference all year. Each of their successes, real or perceived, can provoke envy or resentment in the other.

Who are these bickering nabobs? The new Odd Couple of New York politics: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

One year into Mr. Cuomo’s first term, it is something of an open secret that the relationship between the billionaire mayor and the gubernatorial scion has taken a deeply sour turn.

The men haggle for credit on all sorts of issues, like passing the same-sex marriage law and providing translation assistance to immigrants. When Tropical Storm Irene blew in, the governor tried to bar a state official from appearing at the mayor’s events. Some of their aides snipe and spar.

This week, when Mr. Cuomo convened a news conference in Albany to announce a deal on Mr. Bloomberg’s plan to improve city taxi service, the mayor was not given enough notice to trek upstate. Instead, he spoke briefly via speakerphone, his voice hanging over the podium where Mr. Cuomo was flashing a grin.

In public, the two remain circumspect, insisting that talk of any conflict is fiction.

“We’ve never had an argument,” the mayor said this week, before adding, “We’re not always going to agree on everything.”

But in private conversations with lawmakers and friends, they confide frustrations.

The governor portrays the mayor as inflexible, sanctimonious and someone who treats the democratic process as an inconvenience, according to people familiar with his thinking.

And Mr. Bloomberg is said to see Mr. Cuomo as the epitome of the self-interested, horse-trading political culture he has long stood against.

Each is ambitious, tough and accomplished, but the tension, as much about style as substance, has become a key factor in city-state relations, making it more difficult to settle complex issues. And as the ascendant Mr. Cuomo builds his national profile and the term-limited mayor seeks to solidify his legacy, the conflict is unlikely to disappear soon.

Gee, two arrogant, vindictive, my-way-or-the-highway assholes don't like each other and cannot get along - what a surprise!

Actually, not really.

What is a surprise is that Cuomo - who has sought to convert his reputation from being an arrogant, vindictive, my-way-or-the-highway asshole in order to appear presidential material for 2016 - is back to being portrayed as an arrogant, vindictive, my-way-or-the-highway asshole in the news media.

He's riding high with his 68% approval rating, so he seems to have much of New York fooled and he has the upper hand on the more unpopular Bloomberg.

But I say a couple more years of Little Andy's backscene bullying and that approval rating will be down to Bloomberg's level.

Cuomo can make believe he has grown up and matured into a wise, seasoned politician who puts the best interests of the people above politics all he wants.

He's still the same win-at-all-costs asshole who ran a racist campaign against Carl McCall and he will eventually have those colors exposed again for all of New York to see.

Perhaps the Bloomberg/Cuomo rivalry article is the beginning of that process.

Pearson Was Hired To Restore Trust To New York's Tests

2011-12-22T20:24:00.003-05:00

The news that Pearson officials have been subpoenaed in a corruption probe by the attorney general's office for allegedly bribing NYSED officials with lavish trips and gifts in order to garner a state testing contract has a bit of an ironic side to it.

Back in the summer, Merryl Tisch bragged that the new state contract with Pearson would allow the Regents and the NYSED to conduct quick, accurate analysis of test results across the state to see if there was any cheating by teachers, administrators, or districts.

So Pearson - the company that's going to make sure the state test results are on the up-and-up and tamper-proofed - engaged in criminal activity in order to get a state testing contract that asks them to make sure nobody engages in criminal activity and cheats.

Well, who better to make sure there's no criminal activity around the state tests than a bunch of corporate criminals who grease the skids with kickbacks and bribes?

The contract with Pearson is much more expensive then the previous state testing contract with McGraw-Hill, btw.

Pearson is slated to receive $32 million over five years (and perhaps even more if the state finds money to add additional standardized ELA and math tests to 9th, 10th and 11th grades, as NYSED Commissioner John King hopes.)

McGraw-Hill received $26 million over eight years for its contract with NY State.

Why the discrepancy in contract amounts?

Perhaps the McGraw-Hill people didn't treat NYSED officials as well Pearson has.

Pearson In Corruption Probe - Why Are The Regents And The NYSED Not Being Scrutinized Too?

2011-12-22T07:07:00.006-05:00

The attorney general wants to know if the testing company gave free stuff to NYSED officials in return for contracts:

New York State’s attorney general is investigating whether the Pearson Foundation, the nonprofit arm of one of the nation’s largest educational publishers, acted improperly to influence state education officials by paying for overseas trips and other perks.

The office of the attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, issued subpoenas this week to the foundation and to Pearson Education seeking documents and information related to their activities with state education officials, including at least four education conferences — in London, Helsinki, Singapore and Rio de Janeiro — since 2008, according to people familiar with the investigation.

At issue is whether the activities of the tax-exempt Pearson Foundation, which is prohibited by state law from engaging in undisclosed lobbying, were used to benefit Pearson Education, a for-profit company, according to these people. Pearson sells standardized tests, packaged curriculums and Prentice Hall textbooks.

Specifically, the attorney general’s investigation is looking at whether foundation employees improperly sought to influence state officials or procurement processes to obtain lucrative state contracts, and whether the employees failed to disclose lobbying activities in annual filings with the attorney general’s office. The inquiry follows two columns about the conferences by Michael Winerip in The New York Times this fall.

If there is evidence that the foundation engaged in substantial lobbying and failed to disclose it, it could face fines and lose its tax-exempt status under state and federal laws. No subpoenas were issued to state education officials, the people with knowledge of the matter said.

My question here is, why isn't the attorney general looking into the NYSED too?

Or how about the Regents?

Isn't bribery a two-way street?

If Pearson handed out largesse in return for lucrative state contracts, didn't somebody on the state end take that largesse and in return hand out lucrative contracts?

The Times article suggests that's so:

In New York, Pearson Education most recently won a five-year, $32 million contract to administer state tests, and it maintains a $1 million contract for testing services with the State Education Department, according to state records. The last contract was awarded after David M. Steiner, then the state education commissioner, attended a conference in London in June 2010 that was organized by the Council of Chief State School Officers and underwritten by the Pearson Foundation.

This looks again like another instance of the Merry Pranksters at the Regents and the NYSED skating off without any accountability whatsoever.

We need a list of ALL state officials, including those at the Regents, who might have been on the receiving end of Pearson's largesse.

And then those officials need to explain how it is they signed off on Pearson's state contracts.

Because something smells here.

As Bob Schaeffer, a spokesman for FairTest, said:

“Despite a history of scoring errors, contract manipulation and corporate misbehavior, there’s been almost no public oversight of companies such as Pearson. It’s great that New York’s attorney general has now decided to examine the examiners and begin holding them accountable.”

Yes, it's great somebody's looking into Pearson.

They ought to look into the contracts of Wireless Generation and other politically-connected companies as well.

But the Regents and the NYSED need some scrutiny too.

Steiner needs to answer for his Pearson paid vacations

And how about Merry Merryl Tisch?

Did she go to Helsinki or some other exotic locale for an "education conference" at any point in time on somebody else's dime?

Expand the probe, Scheniderman.

Expand it to the NYSED and the Regents too.

Silly Michael Winerip - Accountability Is Only For Teachers

2011-12-19T19:11:00.002-05:00

Winerip takes apart the New York City and State education establishment in today's Times.

It's so good, I wanted to post it in full - to save for posterity.

Here it is:

On Education

10 Years of Assessing Students With Scientific Exactitude

By MICHAEL WINERIP

DECEMBER 2002 The state’s education commissioner, Richard P. Mills, reports to the state Regents: “Students are learning more than ever. Student achievement has improved in relation to the standards over recent years and continues to do so.”

JANUARY 2003 New York becomes one of the first five states to have its testing system approved by federal officials under the new No Child Left Behind law. The Princeton Review rates New York’s assessment program No. 1 in the country.

SPRING 2003 Teachers from around New York complain that the state’s scoring of newly developed high school tests is out of whack, with biology and earth science tests being too easy and the physics test too hard. The state Council of School Superintendents finds the physics scores so unreliable, it sends a letter to colleges for the first time in its history urging them to disregard the test result. Dr. Mills does not flinch, calling the tests “statistically sound” and “in accordance with nationally accepted standards.”

JUNE 2003 Scores on the state algebra test are so poorly calibrated that 70 percent of seniors fail. After a statewide outcry, officials agree to throw out the results. The Princeton Review says that ranking New York first was a mistake. “We’re going to have to come up with a fiasco index for a state like New York that messes up a lot of people’s lives,” a spokesman says.

OCTOBER 2003 A special panel appointed to investigate the state math fiasco concludes that the test “can’t accurately predict performance,” was created “on the cheap” and was full of exam questions that were “poorly worded” and “confusing.”

DECEMBER 2003 The director of state testing resigns. It was his idea to leave, a spokesman says.

MAY 2004 For the fourth year in a row, scores have risen on elementary and middle school state reading and math tests. Dr. Mills urges the Regents: “Look at the data that shows steadily rising achievement of the standards in school districts of all wealth and categories. More children are learning more now than ever before.”

FEBRUARY 2005 Dr. Mills rebukes those who question whether state scores are inflated. “The exams are not the problem,” he said in a report to the Regents. “It’s past time to turn from obsessive criticism of the exam and solve the real problems — the students who are not educated to the standards.”

SPRING 2005 New York City fourth graders make record gains on the state English test, with 59 percent scoring as proficient, compared with 49 percent the year before. “Amazing results” that “should put a smile on the face of everybody in the city,” says Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who happily recites the numbers on his way to re-election.

FALL 2005 The federal tests (the National Assessment of Educational Progress), which are considered more rigorous than the state tests, show a drop in New York City reading scores. On the eighth-grade test, 19 percent are proficient in 2005, compared with 22 percent in 2003. Asked if city and state officials had hyped the state test results, Merryl H. Tisch, a Regent, says, “They have never, ever, ever exaggerated.”

SEPTEMBER 2007 New York’s national assessment test results are again dismal; eighth-grade reading scores are lower than they were in 1998.

DECEMBER 2007 In his report to the Regents, Dr. Mills notes, “A rich, scholarly literature has challenged NAEP validity since the early 1990s.” He announces a plan to develop the first new state learning standards since 1996, to further spur academic excellence.

JUNE 2008 Newly released state test scores show another record year for New York children. Math scores for grades three through eight indicate that 80.7 percent are proficient, up from 72.7 in 2007. “Can we trust these results?” Dr. Mills asks. “Yes, we can. New York’s testing system, including grades three through eight tests, passed a rigorous peer review last year by the U.S. Department of Education. State Education Department assessment experts commission independent parallel analyses to double- and sometimes triple-check the work of our test vendor.”

JUNE 2009 In the previous decade, New York students’ average SAT verbal score has dropped to 484 from 494; the math SAT score has dropped to 499 from 506. The national assessment’s fourth-grade reading scores have been stagnant for four years, and the eighth-grade scores are their lowest in a decade.

But somehow, state test scores again soar to record levels. In New York City, 81 percent of students are deemed proficient in math, and 68.8 percent are proficient in English. “This is a big victory for the city,” the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, says, “and we should bask in it.” In November the mayor is elected to a third term, again riding the coattails of sweet city scores.

JULY 2010 Finally someone — Dr. Tisch, the chancellor of the Board of Regents — has the sense to stand up at a news conference and say that the state test scores are so ridiculously inflated that only a fool would take them seriously, thereby unmasking the mayor, the chancellor and the former state commissioner. State scores are to be scaled down immediately, so that the 68.8 percent English proficiency rate at the start of the news conference becomes a 42.4 proficiency rate by the end of the news conference. Shael Polakow-Suransky, chief accountability officer for the city, offers the new party line: “We know there has been significant progress, and we know we have a long way to go.” Whether there has been any progress at all during the Bloomberg years is questionable. The city’s fourth-grade English proficiency rate for 2010 is no better than it was in February 2001, nine months before the mayor was first elected.

Mr. Polakow-Suransky says that even if city test scores were inflated, he is not aware of any credible research calling the city’s 64 percent graduation rate into question.

FEBRUARY 2011 The city’s 64 percent graduation rate is called into question. The state announces a new accountability measure: the percentage of high school seniors graduating who are ready for college or a career. By this standard, the graduation rate for New York City in 2009 was 23 percent.

MAY 2011 Embracing the latest new tool in the accountability universe, the governor, state chancellor and education commissioner ramrod a measure through the Board of Regents, mandating that up to 40 percent of teachers’ and principals’ evaluations be based on student test scores.

AUGUST 2011 With new, more rigorous state tests, city scores rise slightly. “We are certainly going in the right direction,” the mayor says.

NOVEMBER 2011 New York is one of two states in the nation to post statistically significant declines on the National Assessment tests. John B. King, the education commissioner, says the state is certainly going in the wrong direction, but has a plan to spur students’ achievement. “The new Common Core Learning Standards will help get them there,” he says.

DEC. 19, 2011 Nearly a quarter of the state’s principals — 1,046 — have signed an online letter protesting the plan to evaluate teachers and principals by test scores. Among the reasons cited is New York’s long tradition of creating tests that have little to do with reality.

Murdoch Post Paints Potential 2013 Mayoral Candidates As UFT Shills

2011-12-18T12:40:00.002-05:00

The NY Post editorial writers responded to a NY Times report that Christine Quinn was handed $15,000 in campaign cash by charter school advocates by saying that it doesn't matter which of the leading 2013 mayoral candidates (De Blasio, Thompson, Quinn according to the Post) gets elected, they're all on the UFT payroll and they'll all carry the UFT's water in education battles.

Geez, if only that were so.

The reality is, the one potential 2013 mayoral candidate who might have been the most UFT-friendly has already been irrevocably damaged by a fund-raising scandal.

Comptroller John Liu - the man who told Bloomberg to go fuck himself the day after the 2009 election when Bloomberg invited him to brunch - has shown himself to be an opponent to some of the mayor's education agenda and to the mayor's unfettered love of unaccountable private consultants and has used his comptroller position to push back on those Bloomberg policies.

It's not a surprise that the powers-that-be in the city decided he was the most dangerous potential 2013 candidate and took him out early.

For his entire comptroller tenure, the Daily News and the Post have gone after Liu week after week on their editorial pages.

When the fund raising scandal broke, the News and the Post gloried in Liu's alleged criminal activity and called for his resignation.

Never mind that Mayor Moneybags himself was found to have laundered money through the Independence Party in 2009 (as revealed in the John Haggerty trial.)

Never mind that Bloomberg used his philanthropic unit at Bloomberg LP to encourage city non-profits who receive Bloomberg largesse in the form of charity to back Bloomberg's call to overturn term limits (but only for Mayor Bloomberg!)

In some circles, that kind of thing would be called "bribery."

But in the world of Mayor Bloomberg, the News and the Post, that's just business as usual.

Unless it's John Liu engaging in it, of course.

Then it's criminal.

Ah, well -despite the double standard of the Liu scandal, he's done for and it's his own fault.

He ought to know that you can only get away with criminal activity in this country if you're a criminal for the 1%.

So the way the Post frames the race now, having already seen the candidate they most feared - Liu - torpedoed, they try and smear three other potential candidates as UFT shills.

But these three are not even close to being UFT shills.

As Mona Davids at the NYC Parents Union pointed pointed out last July in a letter, De Blasio is not opposed to working with charter school proponents despite the Post's characterization of him as chief UFT water carrier.

He's not opposed to flip-flopping on one of the biggest issues surrounding charter schools - co-locations - and giving the charter people EXACTLY what they want.

You can bet if he flipped on that issue, he'll flip on any other issue the charter people want - so long as the money's right, of course.

As for Quinn, she has become very close to the Kathryn Wylde's in the business community, who say things like this about Quinn:

“In her role as speaker, Christine has established credibility and a strong relationship with many members of the business community,” said Kathryn Wylde, a former housing activist herself, now C.E.O. of the Partnership for New York City, a business lobby whose board, according to Businessweek, includes Henry Kravis, Richard Parsons and Lloyd Blankfein. “I was, as a young person, a radical too.”

And let us not forget just who engineered Bloomberg's third term by overturning term limits for him - and just him.

That would be one Christine Quinn.

If Kathryn Wylde, Lloyd Blankfein and Ed Koch all like Quinn for mayor, it's difficult to see exactly how she would operate as a UFT "shill".

After all, those three didn't fall off a turnip truck - they know who will promote 1%-friendly policies and who won't.

And Quinn knows EXACTLY where her campaign cash comes from - more and more, that's from the business community.

Quinn may carry water as mayor, but you can be sure the water she'll be carrying will be for Bloomberg and the business community, not labor or the working class.

As for Thompson, he's not worth mentioning in any serious way.

After the disorganized mayoral campaign he ran in 2009, after he failed to poll the race and failed to discover that he was (gulp!) just 4%-5% down from Bloomberg in the weeks leading up to Election Day, I don't see anybody seriously backing him again for mayor.

You get one shot at running a competent race and Thompson failed that shot.

That said, even if he did run and somehow win, I doubt he would carry the UFT's water either.

Just as Vincent Gray was bought off by charter proponents and education reform advocates in D.C. to continue Adrian Fenty's reform policies, you can bet that Thompson would find suitcases full of cash to sway him the right way on those issues.

So the Post editorial today is really an amazing piece of propaganda.

Having destroyed the (arguably) most labor-friendly mayoral candidate, they now look to paint three others as UFT shills in order to ensure that if they are elected, they'll work hard to NOT shill for the UFT (or any other labor group.)

Not to worry Post editorial writers - you don't need to hack into any phone messages or computers to know whoever gets elected in 2013 will do EXACTLY what you and the business community want on education issues.

After all, this is America and cash is king.

The Kathryn Wylde's of the world literally help print it.

Mulgrew and the UFT, even if they wanted to try and compete with that (and I know my friend Norm at Ed Notes argues that they really don't want to - he may be right), couldn't.

No matter who replaces Bloomberg at City Hall, the Bloomberg policies that are so 1%-friendly will continue unabated.

Obama Administration Thinks Its Doing a Heckuva Job On Education Policy

2011-12-17T09:30:00.002-05:00

That's the only takeaway I get from this Jon Stewart interview with Melody Barnes.

Barnes actually claimed that the Obama Race to the Top program is a change from the "cookie cutter" approach to education that No Child Left Behind took.

Stewart didn't agree:

Stewart asked Barnes, who is leaving her post as director of Obama’s Domestic Policy Council at the end of the year, what she was most proud of. She singled out the administration’s education policies, both K-12 and higher education, though Stewart steered the converation to the former.

When Barnes said that “we are turning schools around” and that the multi-billion-dollar Race to the Top competition is a paradigm shift away from the “cookie cutter approach” to education than the prescriptive No Child Left Behind, Stewart was clearly not buying it.

“The biggest complaint I hear from teachers, and by teachers I mean my mom... A) Why did you wear that shirt? and B) the teaching to the test. This idea that this Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, these benchmarks that have been given from Washington have caused schools to focus entirely on whatever benchmark or requirement they need to get funding, and it has removed from education the, I guess what you’d call it, the educating.”

How did Barnes respond?

With Orwellian jive:

“That’s what we’re trying to turn around. No Child Left Behind had that cookie cutter one-size-fits-all approach to education. And instead what we’ve done through Race to the Top, and most recently because Congress wouldn’t move on reauthorizing the No Child Left Behind Act and turning it around, we’ve used our flexibility in the executive branch to say, ‘You’ve got some relief if you are going to put in place some smart reforms from those mandates from No Child Left Behind so there’s more flexiblity, there’s more innovation, there’s more creativity so teachers can in fact teach.”

Oh, sure, there's flexibility to teach - so long as you add standardized tests to every subject in every grade and use the scores to evaluate teachers and schools, fire the "bad" teachers and close the "bad" schools.

But otherwise, the system is totally flexible and leaves lots of room for innovation.

Valerie Strauss notes Stewart could have lowered the hammer here on Barnes and called her on her lies, as he once did with Cramer from CNBC, but he chose to go easy on her:

“So your feedback... The feedback I’m getting is that Race to the Top has intensified the issue, not alleviated it, but I guess the people I talk to don’t work in the White House.”

It's a shame that Stewart let her off easy.

This was a great opportunity for somebody in the mainstream media, somebody who makes his living exposing political hypocrisy and chicanery, to show that he understands that the Obama administration's claim that Race to the Top and its other education policies are completely different from No Child Left Behind and are alleviating all the federal mandates is horseshit.

Maybe the next time Duncan goes on Stewart's show, Stewart can note how full of shit Duncan was with his pronouncement that 82% of the country's schools are failing and ask him how students, parents, and teachers can trust the administration's metrics on schools and teachers when they can't get the NCLB AYP numbers even close?

Charter School Operators Think Christine Quinn's Their Best Bet - For Now

2011-12-16T11:03:00.005-05:00

Charter school operators and some of their hedge fund and technology backers met with Christine Quinn this week and offered her a bag full of $15,000 in cash as a little taste of what's to come if she gives them what they want on the charter school issue.

The NY Times reports that charter operators and their backers are worried about what's going to happen to their movement after Mayor Moneybags leaves office.

They are most concerned that Bloomberg's policy of co-locating charter schools in public school buildings will end after Bloomberg goes.

If charter schools were forced to pay for space as opposed to receiving it for free, charter operators fear they would have less money to operate their schools, spend money on public relations and purchase legislators in Albany.

As they look at the current crop of potential mayoral candidates with name recognition - Quinn, De Blasio, Stringer - they worry that they will not have the kind of education reform advocate they have had in Bloomberg (and Cuomo up in Albany for that matter, though that's not mentioned in the article.)

Luckily for them, they're heavily funded by a bunch of hedge fund criminals and Wall Street crooks, so they've got endless amounts of cash to buy off pols at will.

Witness how they bought off Andrew Cuomo with DFER money and Cuomo issued a very charter-friendly, pro-reform education agenda that read like DFER pamphlet within the week.

And all it took was one suitcase full of cash and the promise of more where that came from.

So getting Quinn on board with their agenda should be no problem.

Sure she has some loose (very loose, IMO) ties to the UFT, but the DFER's and the charter operators have the cash and in the political world, that's all that matters.

If they can't get some charter-friendly candidate to jump into the race, they'll buy off whoever does become the mayor and get what they want anyway.

And Christine Quinn has already shown herself willing to shed any and all ideological positions for power and campaign cash.

Frankly, she should come much cheaper than Cuomo came.

They're both political whores, but Quinn is a cut-rate one.

One last point on this: With all the stolen Wall Street and hedge fund-cash the charter operators and their backers have, I don't see why they don't just pay for their own damned school buildings themselves.

But then again, that would leave less money to pay charter CEO's and spend on political bribes, powerful lobbyists, and public relations, so it makes complete sense they continue to want the free real estate ride from the city.

Dennis Walcott Has Highest Disapproval Rating Of His Tenure

2011-12-14T07:15:00.003-05:00

Latest Quinnipiac poll finds Chancellor Walcott enjoying a 34% disapproval rating compared to a 33% approval rating.

The disapproval numbers are the highest he's had since he became chancellor.

They're not quite into Joel Klein territory yet, and they're certainly nowhere near the disdainful numbers people had for Cathie Black, but nonetheless Walcott is NOT a popular chancellor.

In October, the same polling firm found 39% of New Yorkers approving of Walcott's performance as chancellor and 33% disapproving.

Back in July, there was a +13 point gap between his approval and disapproval numbers, with 37% approving of Walcott but only 21% disapproving.

So in just five months, Walcott has gone from +13 in approval/disapproval to -1 in approval/disapproval.

And this is BEFORE the annual school closure season gets REALLY going.

This is BEFORE the annual "Fire Teachers/Hire Outside Common Core Consultants" gets REALLY going.

This is BEFORE parents learn that Bloomberg and Walcott plan to add city tests to every grade in every subject in order to evaluate teachers - tests they are spending millions on to develop even as they lay off parent coordinators and school aides.

These high stakes tests will be in ADDITION to ones Merry Merryl Tisch and John King have planned in every subject in every grade from the state.

Can't wait to see what Walcott's numbers look like after that.

Who Needs Charter School Oversight?

2011-12-13T07:03:00.002-05:00

Not Florida:

Florida’s charter school law, which makes it easy to open charter schools and difficult to monitor them, has spurred a multimillion dollar industry and a school boom — all while leading to chronic governance problems and a higher-than-average rate of school failure.

Nationally, about 12 percent of all charter schools that have opened in the past two decades have shut down, according to the National Resource Center on Charter School Finance & Governance. In Florida, the failure rate is double, state records show.

The bulk of charter school problems have surfaced in states like Florida that have “a large number of charter schools and rapid growth,” said Gary Miron, an education professor at Western Michigan University who studies the charter school industry. In many cases, Miron said, the agencies charged with oversight were underfunded.

Experts say some of the problems, both financial and academic, could be avoided if charter school authorizers were stricter in issuing school charters. (In Florida, local school districts and colleges can authorize charter schools.)

“Florida has one of the most liberal laws as far as establishing a charter school goes,” said Jeffrey Grove, a research associate for the nonpartisan Southern Regional Educational Board.

Florida law also is hands-off when it comes to existing charter schools, giving operators the power to run schools with little oversight from the state or local school districts. Districts can close a charter school, but only if the school is in extreme financial distress or chronically low performing. Other than that, there is little a district can do when academic, financial or governance problems arise.

Nor online charter school companies:

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing.

Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll.

By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

Agora is one of the largest in a portfolio of similar public schools across the country run by K12. Eight other for-profit companies also run online public elementary and high schools, enrolling a large chunk of the more than 200,000 full-time cyberpupils in the United States.

The pupils work from their homes, in some cases hundreds of miles from their teachers. There is no cafeteria, no gym and no playground. Teachers communicate with students by phone or in simulated classrooms on the Web. But while the notion of an online school evokes cutting-edge methods, much of the work is completed the old-fashioned way, with a pencil and paper while seated at a desk.

Kids mean money. Agora is expecting income of $72 million this school year, accounting for more than 10 percent of the total anticipated revenues of K12, the biggest player in the online-school business. The second-largest, Connections Education, with revenues estimated at $190 million, was bought this year by the education and publishing giant Pearson for $400 million.

The business taps into a formidable coalition of private groups and officials promoting nontraditional forms of public education. The growth of for-profit online schools, one of the more overtly commercial segments of the school choice movement, is rooted in the theory that corporate efficiencies combined with the Internet can revolutionize public education, offering high quality at reduced cost.

How bad is K12 Inc? This bad:

The New York Times has spent several months examining this idea, focusing on K12 Inc. A look at the company’s operations, based on interviews and a review of school finances and performance records, raises serious questions about whether K12 schools — and full-time online schools in general — benefit children or taxpayers, particularly as state education budgets are being slashed.

Instead, a portrait emerges of a company that tries to squeeze profits from public school dollars by raising enrollment, increasing teacher workload and lowering standards.

Current and former staff members of K12 Inc. schools say problems begin with intense recruitment efforts that fail to filter out students who are not suited for the program, which requires strong parental commitment and self-motivated students. Online schools typically are characterized by high rates of withdrawal.

Teachers have had to take on more and more students, relaxing rigor and achievement along the way, according to interviews. While teachers do not have the burden of a full day of classes, they field questions from families, monitor students’ progress and review and grade schoolwork. Complaints about low pay and high class loads — with some high school teachers managing more than 250 students — have prompted a unionization battle at Agora, which has offices in Wayne, Pa.

A look at a forthcoming study by researchers at Western Michigan University and the National Education Policy Center shows that only a third of K12’s schools achieved adequate yearly progress, the measurement mandated by federal No Child Left Behind legislation.

Some teachers at K12 schools said they felt pressured to pass students who did little work. Teachers have also questioned why some students who did no class work were allowed to remain on school rosters, potentially allowing the company to continue receiving public money for them. State auditors found that the K12-run Colorado Virtual Academy counted about 120 students for state reimbursement whose enrollment could not be verified or who did not meet Colorado residency requirements. Some had never logged in.

“What we’re talking about here is the financialization of public education,” said Alex Molnar, a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education who is affiliated with the education policy center. “These folks are fundamentally trying to do to public education what the banks did with home mortgages.”

That last paragraph gets to heart of so much of education reform - declare traditional public schools failing, blame the "failure" on teachers and unions, de-unionize the system, bring in all kinds of non-traditional (and privately run) alternatives, cash in on public education dollars.

Of course to do this, the pols have to be paid off in graft and the Times article points out that many local and national politicians are paid off, former Education Secretary and degenerate gambler William Bennett being the most prominent.

The media, too, is often on the payroll or in bed with the for-profit ed companies (NBC doing work with the University of Phoenix, the Washington Post owns Kaplan University.)

So no wonder this stuff gets pushed - the pols are on board, the media are on board, everybody's cashing in and all they have to do is make traditional public schools and unionized teachers the villains of the piece.

With the media and the politicians working for them, that hasn't been hard, has it?

Data-Driven Equality Model Of Reform

2011-12-12T06:39:00.003-05:00

Now this is change I can believe in - via Valerie Strauss at Answer Sheet:

This was written by John Kuhn, the superintendent of a small public school district in Texas.

By John Kuhn

As a public school administrator, I have been a steadfast critic of the legacy of No Child Left Behind. But I’ve recently figured out a way that school reformers can get me on their side. It’s very simple.

My concern has long been that the test-based focus of NCLB and the insistence on assigning labels to struggling schools has really been about convincing Americans that public schools are failing in order to justify privatizing the system — to the benefit, of course, of investors, not children. Why think anything else, when “higher standards” are accompanied by slashed education budgets, continuing inequities in school funding, and continued efforts to roll back public sector employee rights?

But reformers such as former Washington D.C. Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and Sandy Kress — a lawyer who was a principal architect of the school accountability system in Texas (during the administration of then gov. George W. Bush) which served as the basis for NCLB — assure us that all their reforms are really about the children.

They repeatedly call on get teachers and administrators to quit making excuses and hold themselves accountable for the educational outcomes of poor and minority students. Who could be against that?

Well, I’m calling their bluff. Let’s see if it really is all about the children.

NCLB has done one important thing: By disaggregating data, it has forced teachers and administrators like me to agonize over the outcomes of our neediest students.

But after 10 years, it is clear that NCLB’s reforms haven’t spurred miracles, and it is time that the profound problem of inequality is addressed. The deck is stacked against kids who live in poverty not just because their schools are on average worse than others, but also because of the circumstances of their lives when they leave campus.

It’s time that we admit that it isn’t just teachers holding back poor and minority students back. The problems are societal.

So I’m calling on reformers — Kress and Rhee included — to lend support for a new kind of reform, one that steps outside the schoolhouse and shares the onus for achievement with more than just teachers.

I’m calling for data-driven equality, modeled on Kress’s work, expanding it to force greater societal changes that will help teachers bridge the achievement gap.

Let the 50 states disaggregate equality-related data by ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status, and let us rank the states and reward them for closing all the societal inequalities that are truly at the heart of our achievement gap. There should be an incentive for voters to elect lawmakers who will craft policies that minimize inequalities.

Let’s have national benchmarks for equality in incarceration, equality in college enrollment, equality in health coverage, equality in income levels, employment rates, rates of drug addiction and child abuse.

Let the states figure out how to close their gaps, but reward results. Citizens in states whose data shows progress toward equality benchmarks should be rewarded with a lower federal income tax rate.

Note that the states can figure out how to get there, so no one can accuse me of urging socialist fixes to inequality. I don’t care how you fix it, just fix it. As a teacher I am calling on society to do its part to save these kids! The kind of plan I am describing leaves mechanisms to the states — it merely incentivizes equality.

We should all insist that our leaders build a system that guarantees the demise of inequity on these shores. Let’s move together toward a broader social accountability, driven by data and gauged by progress toward statistical, measurable, social equality.

Here’s an incentive: As a state moves closer to demonstrable equality according to data, then Washington could reduce the federal income tax rates charged to citizens in that state. Let citizens who opt for equality in so doing opt for lower taxes and more individual liberties. Incentivize equality, and see if kids don’t do better in school.

Let’s publish the data in newspapers. Let’s label all 50 states once a year. Let the states stand on their records and compare their progress. Let’s ensure that no more American Dreams get deferred because of unequal opportunity.

Today some 22 percent of American children live in poverty. Are we going to pretend forever that it is acceptable to ignore the needs of children outside the schoolhouse and blame teachers and principals for everything that happens inside?

As soon as the data shows that the average black student has the same opportunity to live and learn and hope and dream in America as the average white student, and as soon as the data shows that the average poor kid drinks water just as clean and breathes air just as pure as the average rich kid, then educators like me will no longer cry foul when this society sends us children and says: Get them all over the same hurdle.

And so I as an educator now say to a nation exactly what it has said to me for years: No excuses! Just get results.

Disaggregating data forced me to pay attention to minority students. Let’s force society to agonize over equality like teachers now agonize over test scores!

Give me equal children, and I guarantee you that my fellow public school teachers and I will produce graduates who will create a brighter future for this nation than you or I ever dreamed possible.

The corporate education reform movement likes to blame everything on teachers and schools and unions.

Like Kuhn, I believe that they are in the school reform game not improve education for all but to privatize the system and profit from it.

Calling their bluff on this, using their own data-driven mechanisms of accountability against them, is really an interesting way to expose the hollowness of blaming teachers and schools and unions for all the problems in the system today.

Bloomberg: Maybe There Wouldn't Be Any OWS Protests If Schools Weren't So Bad

2011-12-09T07:00:00.003-05:00

Seriously - that's what he said:

Earlier today, Mayor Bloomberg was asked what he thought of Rep. Jerry Nadler's desire for an investigation into whether the NYPD used excessive force in getting Occupy Wall Street protesters out of Zuccotti Park.

Hizzoner's short, paraphrased answer: That's a pretty dumb idea, and you have better things to worry about.

"Representative Nadler I know very well. Most things I agree with him. I think [in] this case, that’s ridiculous. If he would spend more time getting us homeland security money, maybe he’d make the streets safer. If he could get more federal monies, maybe we could make our schools better and we wouldn’t have some of the things people are protesting against," Bloomberg said, according to a transcript by our Reuven Blau.

Right - people are protesting all across this country against income inequality, corporate greed, bank bailouts, the Federal Reserve system that allows our government to literally print free money and hand it to Too Big To Fail Banks, mortgage and foreclosure fraud, and a host of many other issues because our public education system has failed.

Uh, no.

People are protesting against income inequality, corporate greed, bank bailouts, the Federal Reserve system that allows our government to literally print free money and hand it to Too Big To Fail Banks, mortgage and foreclosure fraud, and a host of many other issues because greedy assholes like you, Mayor Bloomberg, have enabled a system that works for only a very few other rich assholes like yourself.

And for too long Americans sat by and let this happen - let big money take over politics, let corporations and banks skew laws and taxes and regulations the way they want them in order to screw the rest of us, let the government use 9/11 and terrorism to clamp down on our freedoms and rights.

But now the country is beginning to awaken from its slumber and see the corporate-sponsored mess rich assholes like you, Mayor Bloomberg, have created.

Occupy Wall Street protests exist not because of a bad public school system - they exist because rich assholes like you have decided to turn the country into an oligarchy for your own pleasure and power, have decided to rig the game completely in your own favor.

Occupy Wall Street exists, in part, because of you, Mayor Bloomberg.

Daily News Calls NAEP Scores A "Stunning Blow" To Bloomberg's Education Legacy

2011-12-08T07:29:00.003-05:00

Two sets of reality on the latest NAEP scores.

First, here's how the DOE trumpeted the results:

Schools Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott announced today that scores for New York City students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) have improved significantly on three of the four math and reading tests between 2003 and 2011. This year’s results – released as part of the Nation’s Report Card: Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) Reading and Mathematics 2011 – show that since 2003, New York City public school students improved an average of eight points in 4th grade math, six points in 8th grade math, and seven points in 4th grade reading—all statistically significant increases that mirror or exceed trends seen across the nation. Also since 2003, the gap between black and white students in New York City has narrowed on all four exams, and on all four since 2009.

...

“By the ‘gold standard’ for measuring academic progress, our students have made impressive gains since 2003—especially compared to their peers across New York State and the nation,” said Chancellor Walcott.

Now here's the Daily News article on the same NAEP results:

In a stunning blow to Mayor Bloomberg's legacy on education, new national exam results show the city's math and reading scores have flatlined since 2009.

Eighth-grade reading scores have stagnated since 2003, when the Bloomberg administration reforms first took effect.

There's also been no significant improvement in the percentage of eighth-graders who tested "proficient" or above in math, the scores released Wednesday show.

Well, if there have been significant gains, these are due to the magnificence of Mayor Bloomberg, former Chancellor Klein and Chancellor Walcott and all the other folks at Tweed.

And if there have been problems, these are due to all the bad teachers in the NYC schools and the evil union that protects them and the evil NAACP that sues to keep the mayor and the DOE from closing "bad" schools.

There you have it - Bloomberg, Klein, Walcott, Tweed are good.

Teachers, teachers unions and community groups that push back on Bloomberg policies are bad.

Public education in NYC in a nutshell.

TSA Defends Strip Searches Of Elderly People

2011-12-07T07:05:00.002-05:00

The only way we can save our freedoms is by giving up our freedoms:

WASHINGTON — A third elderly flier who relies on a medical device says she was “traumatized” by a search at a Kennedy Airport security checkpoint after the Thanksgiving holiday.

Linda Kallish, 66, of Boynton Beach, Fla., counts on an insulin pump and a stash of fruit juice to control “erratic” diabetes, she told the Daily News.

Screeners from the federal Transportation Security Administration kept the fruit juice from her for 10 minutes while she waited for a pat-down and a second search in which she had to partially remove clothing to show an official her pump implant.

Kallish said she is willing to accept heavy security — including intrusive searches — but said the TSA must come up with a better way to check over fliers with acute medical needs.

“There has to be a way to address this,” she said.

Kallish’s ordeal happened on Nov. 29, the same day Lenore Zimmerman, 85, of Long Beach, L.I., ran into trouble with TSA at the same airport.

Zimmerman claims the TSA took her to a private area after she decided not to pass through a scanning machine for fear it would cause problems with her heart defibrillator. Once in the private room, she was ordered to remove some clothing and back brace, exposing her private areas.

Zimmerman cut her leg in the process, and missed her flight, she said.

The previous day at the same checkpoint, cancer survivor Ruth Sherman, 88, of Sunrise, Fla., was forced to show TSA screeners her colostomy bag, which can cause pain if it is touched.

TSA officials maintain that in each case, its screeners followed procedures aimed at detecting threats from terrorists.

“TSA does not strip-search people,” TSA Administrator Joe Pistole said, according to Bloomberg News.

He said pat-downs of elderly passengers who do not consent to passing through whole-body scanners, or those whose medical devices lead them to trigger the devices' alarms, must be done because it is possible terrorists could deploy an older person to carry a bomb.

“Terrorists are willing to exploit societal norms,” Pistole told Bloomberg News.

This is heresy to say, nut I believe the people in charge of this country - the real owners, as George Carlin would say, were not saddened by the 9/11 attacks at all.

Rather, post-Cold War, these attacks gave them excuse to ramp up another "Forever War" to replace the Cold War, gave them an excuse to spend trillions on the military-industrial complex (and enrich themselves in the process) and gave them the excuse they needed to clamp down on constitutional rights and freedom in the name of safety.

And of course we keep creating more terrorists with the blowback from our policies and bloody actions in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Yemen and Somalia and Pakistan.

It's a never-ending cycle in which fear of terrorism allows the powers-that-be to clamp down on our freedoms and engage in "anti-terrorist" actions abroad that ultimately create more terrorists and give them the excuse to clamp down on more and of our rights.

And so, now we hit that point in the country where the colostomy bag might be a bomb and the elderly ladies have to be taken off the line at the airport and strip searched for bombing materials.

The TSA can say they're not strip-searching elderly people all they want - when it gets down to underwear and the colostomy bag, as it did with two of these ladies, they're doing exactly that.

Alas, it's what we have to do to remain free...

Students And Principal Pepper Sprayed At Bronx School

2011-12-05T17:10:00.006-05:00

The Times reports that 14 people at Banana Kelly High School were pepper sprayed this afternoon, including the principal of the school.

A fifteen-year-old female student is the alleged sprayer.

Nine people were taken to the hospital for treatment.

This is the third pepper spraying incident in the last few weeks in the city school system.

In November, 17 students were sprayed by a fellow student in the Bronx and 8 students were sprayed at a school in Harlem.

Gee, I can't imagine where these kids are learning such behavior from.

Oh, wait - I think I remember:

Yeah, now I remember where they're learning it from.

Sign those kids up for careers in blue.

Bloomberg Cracks Down On Street Performers

2011-12-05T14:49:00.000-05:00

Gee, I wonder if this has anything to do with OWS:

Musicians, artists, and other performers were joined by lawyers Sunday to speak out against the city's recent crackdown on performing in Washington Square Park.
The New York City Park Advocates group is asking Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the Parks Department to stop prohibiting performances.
They say the park is a cultural space and their freedom of speech rights are being violated.
"From Zuccotti Park to Central Park, to Lincoln Square Plaza and now to Washington Square Park it appears that expressive activity is a target," said attorney Norman Siegel.
"If I didn't have this platform, I don't know where I actually would be today, in my life," said performer Kareem "Tac" Barnes.
Advocates said the crackdown has resulted in clashes with parks officials and an increase in summonses being issued.
Washington Square Park has been home to thousands of street performers, attracting both tourists and locals.

Work, shop obey - those are the activities you are allowed to do in this city.

You have a fucking problem with that, we'll orange net your ass, pepper spray you in the face and throw you in lock-up for 16 hours until you finally get to see a lawyer.