Note To Preet Bharara: Discrimination And Retaliation Is The Official Policy Of The NYCDOE

From the NY Times:

The federal government accused the New York City Department of Education in a lawsuit on Thursday of engaging in a pattern and practice of discrimination against the three black teachers who worked at the Pan American International High School in Queens.

The lawsuit, filed by the office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, made it clear that the government believed that the school’s principal, Minerva Zanca, had targeted the three teachers with the goal of having them removed from their jobs.

Ms. Zanca once told the school’s assistant principal, Anthony Riccardo, that one of the black teachers “looked like a gorilla in a sweater,” and that she could never have “nappy hair” like another of the teachers, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit also claims that Ms. Zanca retaliated against Mr. Riccardo for his complaints about her treatment of the black teachers. Once, when he refused to give an unsatisfactory rating to a lesson by one of the teachers, Ms. Zanca yelled at Mr. Riccardo, accusing him of “sabotaging her plan,” and calling school security to have him removed from the building, the lawsuit says.

The Pan American school, on 94th Street in Elmhurst, says on its website that it serves “374 recently immigrated English language learners from Latin America.” The lawsuit says that during the 2012-13 school year, when it says the discrimination occurred, the school had a total of 27 teachers. Three of the teachers were black, the suit notes.

Mr. Bharara, in a statement, said, “It is nearly unthinkable that, in this day and age, one of the largest and most diverse school districts in the United States would allow racial discrimination and retaliation to flourish.”

At schools all over the city, principals and assistant principals are going into observations with pre-conceived notions of who will be given negative ratings and who will be given positive ratings.

This is the official policy of the Bill de Blasio/Carmen Farina DOE (though the discrimination detailed above took place under the Bloomberg/Walcott DOE.)

The NYCDOE is telling school administrators that there are a certain number of "ineffective" and "developing" ratings that each school must have and that it will be held against a principal if a school does not comply with that directive.

Any principal or assistant principal not on board with the increased "ineffective/developing ratings" plan is retaliated against - either by the DOE (if the person not on board with the policy is a principal) or by a higher school administrator (if the person not on board with the policy is an assistant principal but the principal at the school is on board.)

What happened at the Pan American International High School is particularly egregious because of the vile racism attached to the pre-decided negative ratings.

But the truth is, this same kind of thing is happening across the city to other teachers, based perhaps not on blatant racism, but on other criteria that have nothing to do with teaching effectiveness.

Sometimes it's based on more subtle racism, sometimes it's based on ageism, sometimes it's based on cronyism, sometimes it's based on "Well, we have to throw somebody under the bus because that's what the DOE wants - who should that be this time?"

The UFT has done nothing to protect its members against the egregious assaults being waged by the de Blasio/Farina DOE because they've been brought in by the mayor to co-manage the system.

Despite the silence of the UFT in these matters, a terrible war against teachers goes on in schools, with the Danielson drive-bys as the weapon of choice for knocking people off.

I once hoped that things would get better in NYC schools once Bloomberg was gone, tried to take Carmen Farina at her word when she said she wanted to bring joy back to school.

But quite frankly, things are worse now than under Bloomberg because the UFT leadership is completely complicit in the insanity being waged out of Tweed, turning their eyes from the increased "developing" and "ineffective" ratings and ignoring the stories from rank and file about how bad it has gotten in individual schools.

The New York City school system is rife with FEAR these days, and while the Pan American International High School case occurred during the Bloomberg Years, much the same is happening now in the de Blasio Years, perhaps not as blatantly racist, but no less as discriminatory or retaliatory.

Any system that runs with a quota for how many negative ratings must be given is discriminatory and retaliatory - and that's exactly what we have under de Blasio and Farina.

Preet Bharara should dig deeper into the way the NYCDOE operates and he'll find patterns of discrimination and retaliation throughout the school system.

Flanagan Suggests De Blasio Should Lose Mayoral Control Of The School System

From the NY Times:

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s prospects of getting the Legislature to renew his control of New York City’s schools were thrown into doubt on Thursday, when the leader of the State Senate issued a statement harshly criticizing Mr. de Blasio’s performance at a hearing on the issue.

“Too often, the mayor showed a disturbing lack of personal knowledge about the city schools,” the Senate majority leader, John J. Flanagan, a Long Island Republican, said in a statement. “In addition, he has left too many unanswered questions and failed to provide specifics on many of the issues raised by my colleagues on both sides of the aisle.”

“Until that occurs,” Mr. Flanagan added, “I will not entrust this mayor with the awesome responsibility of operating the New York City school system.”

According to the Times, de Blasio was asked a question about our back pay which he did not have a ready answer for.

That, along with the political animus state Senate Republicans have for de Blasio, may be the underlying rationale for the letter from Flanagan yesterday, which the Times described as a "sneak attack" since there were few fireworks at the hearing in Albany between de Blasio and state Senate Republicans.

In any case, before you get excited thinking de Blasio will lose mayoral control of schools and Farina's going to be shown the door the way she has her administrators showing the door to veteran teachers, understand that John Flanagan takes a lot of money from the ed deform lobby, including StudentsFirstNY.

Whatever scheme Flanagan and Cuomo cook up to replace mayoral control (or even tweak it), it will not be to our benefit but rather be some kind of change that benefits the charter school sector and Eva Moskowitz in particular.

Here's An Emblem For What's Wrong With Education In The Reform Era

It's also an emblem for how so little has changed from Bloomberg to de Blasio at the NYCDOE:

Tom Porton is used to drama: Since arriving at James Monroe High School as an English teacher 45 years ago, he has taught and staged plays. Outside, in the Bronx River neighborhood where the school is, there was plenty of drama in the 1980s, when AIDS and crack ravaged the area. His response then was to establish a group of peer educators who worked with Montefiore Medical Center to teach teenagers about H.I.V. prevention. His efforts earned him awards, including recognition from the City Council and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and led to his induction into the National Teachers Hall of Fame.

Now he is at the center of drama: Last month he clashed with Brendan Lyons, the school’s principal, who disapproved of his distributing H.I.V./AIDS education fliers that listed nonsexual ways of “Making Love Without Doin’ It” (including advice to “read a book together”). This month, he said the principal eliminated his early-morning civic leadership class, which engaged students in activities such as feeding the homeless, saying it was not part of the Common Core curriculum. Mr. Porton was already skeptical of that curriculum, saying it shortchanged students by focusing on chapters of novels and nonfiction essays rather than entire works of literature.

So, next month Mr. Porton — a 67-year-old educator whom students praised as a lifesaver and life-changer — is walking away from teaching. He handed in his retirement papers on Friday.

Education in the Reform Era, in the Danielson Era, in the Endless Testing Era has no place for a teacher like this.

What, a curriculum that engages students in activities like helping to feed homeless people?

No, by God, that's not education!

Writing argumentative essays about this, that's education!

The principal who has successively pushed Tom Porton out sounds like a doozy:

Mr. Lyons — who repeatedly replied “no comment” to questions during a telephone conversation — arrived at the school at the start of the academic year. A previous tenure at a Manhattan high school was marked by his replacing paper hall passes with toilet plungers, which students used to wreak havoc on property and one another.

In December, on World AIDS Day, Mr. Porton handed out his flier, as he had for almost 25 years. Mr. Lyons sent him an email saying the flier was “inappropriate,” and asked that he collect those already distributed. Though Mr. Lyons said he would discuss the matter later with him, Mr. Porton said that conversation never took place.

H.I.V. and AIDS may have faded from the public mind, but they remain a danger in places like the South Bronx, especially among young blacks and Latinos. Mr. Porton said the school has failed to meet Department of Education mandates to educate students about the diseases, making his work all the more necessary.

Mr. Lyons, who would not say if the school met the mandates, never explained his objections to Mr. Porton. At the start of this semester, Mr. Porton said, the principal eliminated the 40-student leadership class because he said it was not part of the standard curriculum, even though the class met before the formal start of the school day. Because of that, combined with Mr. Porton’s disappointment over the standardized test frenzy that rules in many schools, he chose to leave.

And what kind of teacher was Tom Porton?

This kind:

Reaction among students and former students, many of whom learned of Mr. Porton’s retirement on Facebook, was immediate and full of outrage.

“How can anyone think what he does is inappropriate?” said Janelle Roundtree, a former peer educator who graduated from Monroe in 1995 and went on to Howard University. “He changed Monroe. He was in the forefront of so many things. The school is losing out on this one.”

David Gonzalez (no relation to this writer), a musician, poet and performer who graduated in 1973, was so grateful to Mr. Porton that he nominated him for the Kennedy Center’s Stephen Sondheim Inspirational Teacher Award, which he received in 2011.

“Tom has been the consistent heart of that building since I was at Monroe in the ’70s,” said Mr. Gonzalez, who still wonders how the teacher managed to get tickets to Broadway shows. “He was always looking for the heart and soul of the individual. I would never have had the confidence to do what I do without him. He changed my life forever.”

The truth is, there is no place in public education these days for a teacher like Tom Porton.

Teachers who teach to the test, who teach by the Danielson rubric, who teach the crap they want her/him to teach and nothing but that - those are the kinds of teachers wanted these days.

As Porton says in the Times article, the powers that be pay lip service to the social and emotional needs of children, but all that really matters these days is the test scores.

This is just another outrage in a long line of NYCDOE outrages.

The principal, Lyons, ought to be the one leaving (see here for the mess he made at Graphics.)

Alas, life in the de Blasio NYCDOE is pretty much the same as life in the Bloomberg NYCDOE - incompetent administrators get moved around to destroy more and more schools while excellent teachers, inspirational teachers, are pushed out.

Chancellor Farina Claims Almost A "Celebratory Attitude" Around Renewal Schools

Eliza Shapiro at Politico NY, writing about a joint appearance between NYSED Commissioner MaryEllen Elia and NYCDOE Chancellor Carmen Farina on school "turnaround" efforts

Fariña has also made Renewal schools a priority, and has said she is seeing improvement in many of them.

"There has almost been a celebratory attitude around Renewal schools," she said.

Huh?

Almost a "celebratory attitude"?

This is just anecdotal, but what I have heard from teachers at Renewal schools both here on the blog and in communication elsewhere is that the pressure and stress at these schools has reached toxic levels.

From what I am hearing the only people with the "celebratory attitude" are the charter operators who stand to benefit from the receivership law when Renewal schools get turned over to them.

Are you hearing anything different?

If so, I'd like to correct the record and help "celebrate" receivership too.

Carmen Arroyo Throws Stones In Her Own Glass House

Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo, perhaps having a bad week at the casino, had a meltdown in an Assembly hearing featuring NYCDOE Chancellor Carmen Farina yesterday:

The Assembly Education Committee’s hearing on struggling schools grew heated earlier on Wednesday when Bronx Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo railed against New York City Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina’s efforts to aid bilingual students.

“I’m sorry, but I wasn’t elected to come here and kiss ass,” Arroyo shouted as Committee Chairwoman Cathy Nolan sought to move forward in the hearing.

Raising her voice and even slapping her hand on the table for emphasis, Arroyo was angered by what she saw as a lack of assistance for bilingual students and their families in city schools.

“You don’t have in your office a person or a division where the parents can go and make a request to have their children placed in bilingual program,” she said at the hearing.

Farina responded that her department has already sought to increase funding for bilingual programs as well as new training for school professionals.

“We have increased the amount of professional development of bilingual education in New York City,” Farina said. “We’re looking for extra support for these students, particularly technology assistance, but in terms of access to parents, I don’t think there’s ever been a chancellor who has done more.”

Farina also pointed to the town halls she has conducted with bilingual and non-English speaking families and her visits to neighborhoods in the Bronx.

But Arroyo was not convinced.

“You put salaries and you put people to work, but the community, that is the parents of the children who you people are obligated to serve, obligated to serve the taxpayers’ money to serve the children,” she said. “That’s why I’m angry on that.”

State of Politics reports that other members of the Assembly Education Committee grew restless at Arroyo's antics, at which point Committee Chairwoman Cathy Nolan stepped in to try and calm things.

This isn't the first time Carmen Arroyo has gotten shrill over education.

Last spring as the Heavy Hearts Club in the Assembly was passing the odious Cuomo "Blame Teachers" budget, most Assembly Members were apologetic about voting aye for the budget.

But not Carmen Arroyo:

“Those teachers that are responsible and are doing their job, those teachers that sacrifice their families and themselves for the children they serve are going to be protected.  Those that are not good, better get a job at McDonalds.” — Carmen E. Arroyo, 84^th District

Arroyo is a shill for charter schools and education reform in her own insane way, so her taking on Farina yesterday was less about the issue itself and more about just taking on Farina (and by extension, Farina's boss, Bill de Blasio.)

As for her criticism that the adults in the DOE are just looking to collect their salaries and don't care much about the kids, well, that's pretty ironic considering her grandson (and former chief of staff) pleaded guilty to the charge of embezzling money that partly went to benefit Arroyo herself:

The nephew of City Councilwoman Maria del Carmen Arroyo resigned Thursday as head of a Bronx charter school she helped fund - a day after he was charged with embezzlement.

Richard Izquierdo Arroyo - who's also Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo's grandson and chief of staff - Thursday notified the city he was resigning as chairman of the board of the South Bronx Charter School for International Culture and the Arts.

His city councilwoman aunt sponsored $1.5 million in taxpayer funds this fiscal year to help build a permanent facility for the school, which is temporarily housed in a public school.

On Wednesday, Izquierdo Arroyo was charged with stealing from a nonprofit group, SBCC Management Corp., that manages low-income apartment buildings in the Bronx. SBCC Management's director, Margarita Villegas, also was charged.

The duo stole more than $200,000 from the nonprofit to pay for designer clothes, trips to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and dozens of restaurant meals, a criminal complaint charged.

They also used the nonprofit's money to buy airline tickets to Puerto Rico for City Councilwoman Arroyo and her mother the assemblywoman.

Izquierdo eventually pleaded guilty to those embezzlement charges and served ten months in prison.

But guess what?

He landed on his feet afterwards:

The politically-connected former head of a Bronx charter school — who served time for embezzlement — has quietly taken up a position at a another nonprofit, the Daily News has learned.

Now paying restitution after serving nearly a year in federal lockup, Ricardo (Richard) Izquierdo Arroyo works on “case management” for Neighborhood Association for Inter-Cultural Affairs.

Izquierdo resigned as the head of The South Bronx Charter School for International Cultures and the Arts in 2009, after he was charged with looting more than $200,000 from SBCC Management Corp., an unrelated taxpayer-funded nonprofit that managed low-income apartment buildings in the South Bronx.

He pleaded guilty to embezzling more than $115,000 to pay for lavish meals and trips, and spending some of the pilfered funds on his grandmother, state Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo.

Izquierdo Arroyo then served 10 months in federal prison.

But now, his LinkedIn page lists his job as “case management” for NAICA, which “has been providing housing intervention and assistance services to residents of the Bronx since it was established in 1974,” according to its Facebook page.

It was unclear Monday if Izquierdo Arroyo has any background in case management. He lists his case management experience as his current position, according to his LinkedIn page.

Izquierdo Arroyo did not return requests for comment Monday. His boss, Eduardo LaGuerre, told the Daily News in an emailed statement that NAICA currently employs “several individuals that have criminal records but who are now contributing members of our society.”

“Mr. Izquierdo was hired as a case manager for his experienced (sic), skills and ability to relate to homeless man (sic) that are seeking an opportunity to better themselves,” LaGuerre said in the statement.

LaGuerre said Izquierdo Arroyo has been an exemplary employee at NAICA and previously worked at another nonprofit, “Promesa/Basics, Inc., where he also provide (sic) excellent services to the homeless residents in their shelter.” LaGuerre did not respond to an emailed follow up from the News asking what Izquierdo’s background in case management was.

...

LaGuerre did not respond to a follow-up email requesting the amount of Izquierdo Arroyo’s salary.

Besides being Assemblywoman Arroyo’s grandson and her former chief of staff, Izquierdo Arroyo is the nephew of Bronx Councilwoman Maria Del Carmen Arroyo.

Predictably, his appointment has raised a red flag among observers of New York’s not-for-profit sector.

Doug Sauer, CEO of the New York Council of Nonprofits, questioned whether his appointment was politically motivated.

“How did he get this job over any other candidate?” Sauer said. “Was it openly solicited? What is the compelling argument that overrides his history, which affects the organization that hired him?”

“It doesn’t pass the smell test.”

It's amazing to me that, given the corruption endemic to her family and political operation which seems to pale even by Albany standards, other Assembly Members just don't tell Arroyo to shut up and go away.

In any case, there are plenty of good reasons to aim criticism Carmen Farina's way over her leadership at the NYCDOE, but when that criticism comes from Corrupt Carmen Arroyo, you'd best take it with a heavy helping of table salt.

Carmen Farina, Echoing MaryEllen Elia, Says Opt Out Is Unreasonable

Even as Cuomo walks back his support of Common Core by calling for a commission review and MaryEllen Elia spent a week or so trying to clean up the mess she made by calling parents who opt their children out of state tests "not reasonable," Farina echoed those Elia remarks on WNYC yesterday:

Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña doubled down on Common Core standards that are under assault elsewhere in the state, on the eve of the first day of classes.

Fariña said New York City had the lowest opt-out rate on this year’s state Common Core math and English tests in grades 3-8 — just 1.4 percent, compared with 20 percent of students statewide who boycotted the exams.

“I don’t believe in opting out,” Fariña said Tuesday on WNYC radio, adding that boycotting standardized exams sends the wrong message to students.

“The message is, ‘You’re not ready.’ The message is, ‘You’re not accountable.’ . . . We don’t think this is reasonable,” she said.

Her comments come just days after Gov. Cuomo called for another review of the program.

The message sent by opting children out of state tests is not that students or teachers are unaccountable for performance.

The message is that NYSED, the Board of Regents, the Legislature and Governor Cuomo are accountable to the people of this state and if they're going to pursue a harmful education reform agenda, the parents of this state are not going to stand for it.

Tests rigged for 70% failure rates, a teacher evaluation system so irrational that a district just given an award for excellence for six of its schools also had some of the "worst" teachers in the state - this is a harmful agenda and since Cuomo, Tisch, Elia and the Legislature don't seem like they want to fix it, the parents of this state will have to do it for them.

It's a straw man argument to say opt out sends the message to kids that they're unaccountable.

Rather it sends the message to politicians and educrats that they are accountable.

Teachers Should Think Long And Hard Before Working At "Struggling" Or "Persistently Struggling" Schools

NYSED has labeled 144 schools around the state "struggling" or "persistently struggling," with 62 of those schools located in NYC.

According to the NY Times article I linked to above, "struggling schools" have two years to make "demonstrable" improvement in graduation rates, test scores and attendance or be given over to "an outside receiver, like a nonprofit group, that will be chosen by the district superintendent or chancellor to oversee the schools."

The Times reports that "persistently struggling schools" have just one year to make the "demonstrable" improvement or be given over to an "an outside receiver, like a nonprofit group, that will be chosen by the district superintendent or chancellor to oversee the schools."

Teachers who currently work at any of the "struggling" or "persistently struggling" schools will have to reapply for their jobs.

Some will not be rehired and will either have to find other jobs in the system or become ATR's.

"Struggling" and "persistently struggling" schools will almost certainly be looking for new blood to replace some of the teachers who aren't rehired at those schools.

The UFT put out this statement regarding that part of the receivership plan:

The UFT is working to support the Renewal program, including by building teacher leadership in the schools and ensuring that all hiring is conducted by joint city-union committees.

Here's what may await any teacher who goes to work in one of these "struggling" or "persistently struggling" schools, per a comment left on another post here at Perdido Street School blog:

Graded regents this week with a teacher who taught at a specialized school. He told me about 5 years ago a friend left to take a job at one of the struggling schools where Math/Science teachers would get a 10k bonus for transferring there. After just 1 year they began phasing the school out and he became an ATR. While he eventually found a job in a decent school it is nothing compared to his original situation.

That's actually the best case scenario, where the teacher becomes an ATR but eventually gets another placement.

The worst case scenario?

Toiling forever after as an ATR (or at least until the UFT completes throwing the ATR's to the wolves and the program no longer exists per a future contract deal) or two-three years of consecutive "ineffective" ratings and a swift trip to the unemployment office.

Teachers should think long and hard about going to work at any of the "struggling" or "persistently struggling" schools on the receivership program list.

Despite Carmen Farina's desire to put asterisks next to the names of "highly effective" teachers who transfer to "struggling" or "persistently struggling" schools, the first people that will get thrown under the bus when these schools do not make the "demonstrable progress" timetable that the state wants will be the teachers.

And it won't matter what a teacher's evaluation rating was before she/he got to the "struggling" or "persistently struggling" school either, because the system is set up with a "What Have You Done For More Lately" gloss and teachers who get dinged as "developing" and "ineffective" at those schools will wear those ratings on their heads like scarlet letters no matter what their ratings were in the years before they got to the receivership schools.

Reformers pay lip service to wanting to reward so-called "excellent teachers" who go to work with the most vulnerable populations, but all it takes for an "excellent teacher" to become a "developing" or "ineffective teacher" is to work a year or two in a school with low test scores.

Reformers, including the governor of the state and the commissioner of NYSED, do not care what a teacher's rating was a few years before, they care only what the most recent rating was - and remember that two consecutive "ineffective" ratings will get you fired under Cuomo's latest APPR evaluation system iteration.

Reformers also constantly demonize "ineffective" teachers in the press, never once noting that maybe some of those "ineffective" teachers were actually "effective" or "highly effective" teachers who transferred into a school with low test scores and had their ratings implode as a result.

So if you're a teacher out there with an "effective" or a "highly effective" rating and you're thinking about going to bring your talents and skills to one of the receivership schools, think long and hard before you make the jump.

In a year or two, you could very well be a "developing" or "ineffective" teacher headed for the ATR pool.

Or, if we're looking at another mayor in two years who gets elected with the backing of the reform community, an ally of Eva Moskowitz and her ilk, you could be looking at a dried up ATR pool and instant unemployment.

The way the system is these days, the only way for a teacher to protect herself/himself is to think and act very carefully around employment decisions.

It doesn't take much to get demonized as "ineffective" and smeared with the "I" scarlet letter on your head - and if that"i" is on your head for two consecutive years, you could be out of a job.

Educators Must Stand Up To The McCarthyites And Smear Merchants At The NY Post

The NY Post has another attack article on NYC teachers/NYC schools/Chancellor Farina/Mayor de Blasio that makes the claim schools are teaching ridiculously easy texts to students like "The Three Little Pigs," therefore making a high school diploma in NYC essentially "worthless."

Arwen E at NYC Educator's blog dispatches with this piece of Post yellow journalism here, explaining that the "Three Little Pigs" was used as a five minute DO NOW exercise to discuss point of view and bias in the college-level texts taught in the class, not as the main text.

Educators know that when you have students who struggle with texts, it's useful to use easier texts as a lead-in to the harder texts, but the Post writers either don't understand that teaching technique or care about it.

The idea behind this kind of lesson would be to use "The Three Little Pigs" to show how point of view in a story changes the inherent bias in the text - for example, if the text had been written from the wolf's perspective instead of the pigs' perspective - then use that frame to take on more difficult texts (say Beowulf and Grendel.)

But that kind of explanation didn't serve the agenda of the Post owner, editors or writers, so instead that piece of information is buried in the article and the main gist is "Hey, kids are reading kindergarten texts in de Blasio's high schools, a de Blasio diploma is worthless."

This piece of "journalism" is so yellow it looks like fall foliage and should be called out as such.

But so should the two writers whose by-lines appear on the article.

This is agenda-ridden propaganda, not journalism, that uses any old story they can (no matter how slim on the facts) to try and smear a NYC diploma under Mayor de Blasio as "worthless."

They ought to be embarrassed and ashamed as so-called journalists to contribute their efforts to it but as they work for Rupert Murdoch, I doubt they're capable of either embarrassment or shame.

The Post's agenda is, in the short run, to take away mayoral control of schools from de Blasio, and in the long run, to send him packing in 2017 (as symbolized by the ridiculous countdown clock they have at a website called DeBlasio.fail.)

This piece of yellow journalism is just one volley in a constant barrage of attacks the Post has been launching against NYC schools and teachers, part of a larger war they have launched against Mayor Bill de Blasio (see here and here.)

These are McCarthy-level smears and attacks based on half-truths and lies, they're funded by Murdoch (who is said to be losing $20-$30 million a year on the NY Post) but they're written by the "journalists" at the NY Post and published by the editors and so it's a group effort in McCarthyism.

It's time for teachers and administrators in New York City to stand up to the NY Post and call them what they are - smear merchants and McCarthyites.

They have no sense of decency, no care for the damage that their recklessness and carelessness do - they have only a political agenda and a lack of shame and embarrassment in pursuing it no matter how much they have to twist, manipulate and deceive.

Their agenda is to destroy de Blasio, but they have no compunction about destroying NYC schools and NYC schoolteachers in the process with their lies and smears.

The NY Post Gins Up The Great Teacher Scandal Of 2015

The following is a guest post by Harris Lirtzman, former Director of Risk Management for the New York City Retirement Systems in the NYC Comptroller's Office from 1996-2002 and former Deputy State Comptroller for Administration from 2003-2007.

The NY Post is having a case of the vapors bad by even Postian standards (here, here and here). Chalkbeat is in a tizzy. The only reason that the Daily News isn’t apoplectic is that the Post “owns” the story about the young woman who claims to have earned a high school degree without having done anything to “deserve” it. Carmen Farina must be summarily thrown to the wolves or, better yet, into the nearest volcano, for presiding over the scandalous practices in her very own schools that led teachers and administrators to begin “cheating” and “failing” their students. Thanks to the Post we even know the very minute when all this nefarious stuff began: 12:00:01 a.m., January 1, 2014—the millisecond after a Mr. William de Blasio became mayor of New York City and took control of the City’s school system.

We all have been told that education reformistas don’t do anything unless it is “data driven” and informed by “evidence-based practice.” Sadly, the media outlets that reformistas use to make their case to the public about the failures of public education, the “monopoly power” of teachers unions and the awfulness of bad, vampire teachers (“bad” because they belong to unions and “vampires” because they get health care and pensions) prefer to panic the public by telling stories using the old propaganda technique of the “Big Lie.” The “Big Lie” is something so astoundingly audacious that people believe it when they would dismiss a smaller lie as foolishness. We teachers, trained to value “facts” and “critical thinking,” try to refute reformista propaganda with evidence and reason and are surprised when the “Big Lie” sweeps away everything that stands before it. Our best bloggers are doing what they can but reformista propaganda is well-funded and tenacious. Public school teachers need to find an effective way to tell a counter-narrative that resonates with the public but which is true to our professional and personal values.

We all have “stories” to tell and it is only by weaving them together persuasively into a counter-narrative that we have any hope of countering the flood of “Big Lie” propaganda that washes over us each day. Here is my “story,” simply one of thousands that we can frame fully and quickly if we are going to defend public education and protect our profession.

I was a special education teacher in a high school in the Bronx from 2009-2012. During my tenure "conversation" with my principal in December 2011, which was an irregular one to say he least, I expected to be denied tenure because I had been raising serious questions within my school about widespread violations of student IEPs. I’m certain that my advocacy on behalf of my students was what precipitated the “tenure conversation” five months before anyone else in my school had the “conversation” that year but here’s what I was actually told:

Principal Grismaldy Laboy: "Mr. Lirtzman, your passing rates are low and are not consistent with the memo that I sent around to teachers last year that our school would have a 70% pass rate for each class."

Untenured Teacher Harris Lirtzman: "I have only failed two students for academic reasons in the last year. I have failed students who never attended my class. If a student came to class, made any reasonable effort to do the work and turned in anything that indicated some grasp of the basic elements of algebra, the student got at least a 65. Any student I failed was for attendance reasons."

Principal Laboy: "I don't, and the DOE doesn't, distinguish between absentee and academic failures."

Untenured Teacher Harris Lirtzman: "You are aware that I have a first period integrated algebra class. Several students never attended my class after the first week or appeared erratically during the term. They were "Long Term Absent." I worked closely with the attendance teacher here to get the kids to school on time. What else should I have done? Stand in front of their homes at 6:00 every morning and kidnap them?”

Principal Laboy: "Mr. Lirtzman, if you'd been able to make your classes more engaging they would have come."

Of course, conversations like this have been going on all around the City for the last ten years. My chapter leader sent the “grade quota” memo the principal distributed to central UFT and the district
superintendent as evidence for teacher coercion by administration to pass LTA students and, well, just about any student. Nothing. Not a surprise.

Now I can think of many reasons why Carmen Farina should resign—primarily her abject failure to sweep Tweed clean of the nest of reformistas filling up every corner of the place. But because of her willingness to allow some teachers in some cases to use multiple measures to evaluate their students? Because administrators began to press teachers to pass students without regard to attendance or academic performance only eighteen months ago? I think not.

In a conversation I had this morning with Geoff Decker, the reporter at Chalkbeat writing the stories about Farina and the “cheating scandal,” he asked me whether I thought Farina was “lowering the stakes” in the schools. I tried to explain to him that Farina hasn’t lowered the stakes in City schools because she can't lower the stakes in City schools even if she wanted to: the State sets teacher and principal evaluation standards tied to student test scores and the Renewal and other schools on the State "struggling" school list all use graduation rates, credit accumulation and other accountability measures to assess performance.

The high stakes connected with reformista accountability—receivership, teacher reapplication to struggling schools and the specter of being dumped into the ATR, administrators with feudal power over professional staff—have resulted in jumped up graduation rates and student test scores for the last decade and forced credit-recovery miracles and minimum passing rates stipulated in contractually illegal quotas onto reluctant teachers since Mayor Bloomberg obtained control over the Department of Education.

When reformistas put teachers’ careers on the line but don't hold administrators accountable for the incentive structures they impose inside their own schools the result is what the Post thinks it “discovered” this week. Tweed spent ten years trying to convince the State that "everything's OK here" because Mayor Bloomberg needed to validate mayoral control. Tweed spent the last eighteen months trying to convince Governor Cuomo and the State Senate that “everything’s OK here” because Mayor de Blasio needed to keep them from taking away mayor control entirely.

At least Chancellor Farina has set up a “task force” to investigate the nonsense that passes for accountability in our schools—though Farina might have written one more “Chancellor’s Regulation” giving Richard Condon and his crew of investigators at OSI even more authority for all the good a task force will do. No one demanded a "task force" at any time during the twelve years that Michael Bloomberg controlled the schools because it served no reformista purpose to do so. My friend, James Eterno, has been calling for a "truth commission" which would expose the institutional corruption and fraud that has infested reformista accountability measures in the City since 2002. Don’t expect to have the “facts” about the Bloomberg administration’s management of the schools revealed any more honestly than the “facts” are being told now about the de Blasio administration’s management of the schools.

Reformista media will continue to tell the “Big Lie” in all its forms to the public. We teachers will try to refute the “Big Lie” with facts and counter-arguments. The audacity and power of the “Big Lie” is a ferocious thing to behold. We must tell ourselves and the public the truth and we must tell the public our stories.

But we always need to understand that our reformista adversaries do and say the things they want to do and say because they can—evidence, facts, truth, fairness and data be damned. Mayoral control of the schools was blissfully wonderful for the NY Post for twelve years. Mayoral control of the schools became a satanic plot that allowed New York City teachers to stop educating their students on January 1, 2014. It is useful for our adversaries to make it so.

The “Big Lie” is powerful and reformistas will continue to use the “Big Lie” against us until we teachers can create a story—a deep and coherent counter-narrative—that the public is willing and able to hear. I don’t yet know how we do that but I do know that if we don’t do it quickly we will become spectators spouting “facts” that no one wants to hear while our schools and our profession are swept away by the “Big Lie” before our very eyes.

NY Post Runs Damaging Stories On Carmen Farina, NYCDOE, As Part Of "Massive Agenda" To Destroy De Blasio

This is Bob Hardt, the NY 1 Political Director, writing about the NY Post's jive coverage of crime stories in New York City, but it could just as well be about their jive coverage of the cheating scandals at the NYCDOE:

There was an alarming spate of shootings over the weekend and one New York City tabloid quickly does what it does best:  pointing its finger – and I'm not saying which one – straight in Mayor de Blasio's direction.

The New York Post rang its alarm bell yesterday with this crime story that quickly veered into the paper's political playbook: "Brooklyn residents said Sunday that they fear the return of the bad old days of 'Crooklyn' — and placed the blame squarely on Mayor Bill de Blasio — after a bloody weekend in which at least 19 people were shot in the borough."

As a former reporter for the paper where I proudly worked for nine years, it's not hard to smell a rat somewhere high up in the Post's production line. This story could have been written before any reporter was sent out to find the quotes that would damn City Hall back to Dinkinsville.

While everyone should be concerned and worried over a weekend of violence, it's also important to actually look at some numbers provided by City Hall. As of yesterday, there were five fewer shooting incidents in the city than in 2014 and there have been seven more additional shooting victims than last year. More alarmingly, homicides are up by ten percent but the numbers are still lower than they were for almost any year in the Bloomberg administration.

But perception and reality have been divided by a blurry line for the tabloid's City Hall coverage for some time now – dating back to the paper's slanted coverage of the mayoral race in 2013.

And witness the newspaper's recent obsession with a homeless man who has been wandering the streets and urinating in public for more than a decade – dating far back into Michael Bloomberg's administration.

None of this would matter if the paper was on its angry little island – but a screaming front-page headline in the Post still has influence on some radio and TV stations. And it still pressures City Hall to jump – from releasing crime statistics yesterday to having the mayor quietly visit Tompkins Square Park after the Post made it sound like it's reverted back to the bad old anarchic days of the 1980's.

Clearly, the de Blasio administration has plenty of work to do and some of the work it has already done has been far from perfect. But as journalists, it's also important to try to focus on things fairly and objectively without putting your finger on the scale. In the Post's case, it's more than a finger. It's a massive agenda.

The massive agenda the Post has against de Blasio is not only playing out in crime and quality-of-life stories, it's playing out in education stories too.

The Posties would have New Yorkers believe there is a systemic cheating scandal going on in the New York City school system that was ushered in by Chancellor Carmen Farina, that it is a "growing trend" and is only being exposed because the intrepid reporters at the Post are on the case.

As I posted yesterday, the truth is cheating has being going on for years in the NYCDOE, long before Carmen Farina became chancellor, and if anything was more prevalent during the Bloomberg Years when there was untold pressure for schools to improve their statistics and be shut down.

There were cheating scandals in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 - many reported by the NY Post, btw - and the scandal of Chancellor Klein's credit recovery scam that allowed schools to give students semester credits for watching movies or reading comic books.

Limits were placed on credit recovery programs in 2012, after Klein was gone, but the Bryant scandal is a vestige of the old Bloomberg/Klein credit recovery program -  they were the first to hand out semester credits for minimal work in order to juke the overall stats.

How cheating has suddenly becoming a "growing trend" (as somebody who didn't know better and was buying the Post coverage put it on Twitter yesterday) when it's been around since the Bloomberg Years is beyond me - but that's how it's being framed in the Post.

And just as the crime stories are full of hyperbolic language meant to scare the city into electing a new mayor (crime stats are done across the board and as, Hardt noted in his NY1 piece, the homicide rate, while up, is still lower than almost any year during the Bloomberg administration) and the quality-of-life stories are meant to make people think the social fabric of the city is unraveling (as Hardt notes, the Post is using a guy who's been urinating in the streets since the Bloomberg Years as the emblem for what's wrong with "De Blasio's New York"), they're using the cheating stories at Bryant and Dewey High Schools to smear Farina and de Blasio as cheaters.

If the Post wants to do some intrepid reporting, they ought to go back to the Bloomberg/Klein Years and dig into some of the statistics to see how they got so good - how the test scores rose so high (they were inflated), how the grad rates rose so high (credit recovery, cheating.)

But of course Rupert Murdoch does not have a massive agenda to destroy his fellow oligarch and media mogul Michael Bloomberg, so the Posties never tied the cheating incidents under Bloomberg to a larger narrative of "NYC Unraveling" as they do now with the cheating incidents under de Blasio, and they'll never go back and look at the old scandals to show how bad things were in the Bloomberg Years.

The whole thing is jive and it needs to be called out as such, as Bob Hardt did in his NY1 piece about the Post coverage of the crime stats.

At Gotham Schools, one teacher puts the whole cheating scandal into perspective by noting that there's less incentive to cheat in the de Blasio Years than during the Bloomberg Years:

Michael Dowd, a social studies teacher at Midwood High School, said schools under Fariña feel less frenzied to show gains, reducing the worries that can fuel grade inflation and inappropriate credit-recovery schemes. The city has removed two of the big sources of pressure, he said: “The closure threat — coming from the city, anyway — and the progress reports, which reward you for credit accumulation.”

That's exactly right.

Alas, New Yorkers will never know that if they're only reading the Post or getting radio/TV news as influenced by the Post coverage.

Instead they'll think the cheating just started and was fanned by Farina and de Blasio.

NYSED Acknowledges School Administrators Can Use APPR As Weapons Against Teachers

Coming on the heels of the acknowledgement by Chancellor Farina that teachers who teach at Renewal Schools may have their APPR ratings adversely affected comes this news:

The Department of Education is moving to upgrade the ratings of teachers at Brooklyn’s Dewey HS who were rated as “ineffective” after they challenged grade-fixing by then-principal Kathleen Elvin, The Post has learned.

Elvin was fired on July 8 after DOE investigators substantiated that widespread grade-fixing went on at Dewey to boost graduation rates — a practice students mockingly referred to as “Easy Pass.”

...

Teachers complained that Elvin and other administrators punished them with poor ratings for refusing to participate in the fraud.

The “ineffective” ratings of at least four of 16 tenured teachers who received them were overturned following appeals to a state arbitrator, sources said. 

Those teachers had to sign a confidentiality agreement not to discuss the changing of their ratings.

...

Records revealed that half of Dewey’s 101 instructors got ratings of either “ineffective (16 teachers) or “developing” (35 teachers) in the 2013-14 school year.

That 50 percent failure rate compared to a citywide average of only 8 percent.

Given an "ineffective" rating for refusing to participate in fraudulent behavior involving grade-fixing.

Gee, that doesn't sound like an "objective" evaluation system to me.

And NYSED admits as much by overturning at least four of the "ineffective" ratings of tenured teachers who appealed them.

There may be more overturned ratings - we don't know the exact number because of the confidentiality agreements

But what we do know is this - if Elvin and her assistant principals used APPR as a weapon against teachers to perpetrate their fraud, other principals and assistant principals can use APPR as a weapon against teachers for other reasons as well.

Had Elvin not been exposed in the grade-fixing scandal, these teachers at Dewey would still be working with "ineffective" ratings on their records.

You can bet there are other administrators elsewhere who have handed out "ineffective" ratings for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with the effectiveness of the teacher.

We learned from Chancellor Farina this week that APPR is a sham when she acknowledged that "effective" teachers can have their ratings adversely affected by switching schools and going to teach  in a school with high poverty/high homelessness demographics.

And now we've learned from the NYSED that teachers can have their APPR ratings manipulated by administrators with agendas - such as the one by Kathleen Elvin, which was, join her in her grade-fixing fraud or receive and "ineffective" rating for the year.

Chancellor Farina Knows Teachers' Evaluation Ratings Are In Jeopardy At "Struggling" Schools

Eliza Shapiro at Capital NY sat in on a meeting between NYCDOE Chancellor Farina and the superintendent of District 8, Karen Ames.

Here's an interesting bit of that report::

30 percent of students in one of the Renewal Schools are in temporary housing. Fariña closed her eyes and inhaled sharply when Ames described the school’s challenges, and said she wanted to put an “asterisk” next to city schools with extremely high levels of student poverty and homelessness.

Fariña also said she wants to establish a so-called asterisk for highly effective teachers who move to Renewal Schools. While Fariña said “it’s been easier to recruit teachers to Renewals than ever” because of strong professional development and a sense of mission, she’s concerned that effective teachers’ ratings will drop when they move from high-achieving schools to struggling ones.

Fariña said she was planning to follow one teacher who was leaving a high-performing school to teach at a Renewal School in Ames’ Bronx district.

“She’s going to do the same assessments, she’s going to do everything she did before,” Fariña said. “But the scores are only going to go to a certain point. How is that going to affect her rating? It’s not going to make her any less of a good teacher.”

Here's a question I have:

If "effective" teachers should get asterisks next to their names because they've chosen to work in a school with high poverty, high homelessness demographics next year, is it just possible that those "ineffective" or "developing" teachers that are already there working in that school might face the same challenges the new "effective" teachers are going to face next year and deserve asterisks too?

The dirty secret of education reform is that the problems in schools and districts with high poverty/high homelessness demographics are NOT caused by "bad teachers" - they're caused by all the effects that poverty has on the psychological, emotional, physical and social development of the children in those schools and districts.

Does that mean there's not some mismanagement in schools and/or districts that are "struggling"?

Of course not.

To that end, Shapiro reports that "Fariña asked Ames to outline consistency goals for all the schools in her district by October" to address the hodgepodge of programs that may not be the most effective way to educate children in the district.

But the truth is that most of the problem are not due to mismanagement, a lack of "consistency goals," or a plethora of "ineffective" teachers at those schools/districts, they're due to the effects of what Farina winced at - high rates of poverty and high rates of homelessness.

If Farina thinks the new "effective" teachers coming in to "struggling" schools deserve asterisks next to their names, then she also knows that a hell of a lot of the teachers already there deserve the same benefit of the doubt.

NYC Schools WILL Be Opened On Monday 1/26, Regents Exams WILL Be Given

The latest on the impending inclement weather and it's impact on NYC schools:

Mayor @BilldeBlasio: Schools are open tomorrow, but after school activities canceled. Schools most likely closed Tuesday.
— NYC Public Schools (@NYCSchools) January 25, 2015

This sounds like the right call to me.

Light snow is expected tomorrow during daylight hours, the heavy snow isn't expected to start until the nighttime.

We'll see if the storm plays out as the models are predicting.

But for now, school is on for Monday 1/26 and the Regents exams WILL be given.

Carmen Farina Should Be Honored To Be Criticized By A Criminal Like Jack Welch

The NY Post reports that former General Electric CEO Jack Welch criticized Chancellor Farina for hiring superintendents from "failing schools":

Former GE chief Jack Welch lit into Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña’s management skills on Monday, questioning why she hired superintendents who had run struggling schools.

“She just appointed 15 superintendents — seven from failing schools, five from disasters, 10 percent passing tests, et cetera — as superintendents,” Welch said on CNBC.

“When you have a philosophy of putting people in place without a meritocracy, without differentiation, you get bad performance.”

Welch argued that major corporations would never promote “flunkies” and “hacks” the way the Department of Education did.

“You couldn’t run CNBC, you couldn’t run GE, you couldn’t run Apple, you couldn’t run Google, you couldn’t run any company if you took of your 15 appointments of division managers and made them flunkies, hacks, and stuck them in the schools,” Welch said.

“[In] that system of no meritocracy, of no differentiation, we’re all equal, you don’t get performance. You can’t do it. You just can’t do it.”

We're going to get to a personal critique of Welch in a minute, so hang on tight.

Before we do, let's deal with Welch's assertion that there's a meritocracy in business.

Because there isn't.

What there often is in business is an old boy's network that rewards people - mostly arrogant white men like Welch - over everybody else.

Take a look at the guys at the top of nearly every major company, look at their boards - see many women there?

See many people of color?

Can't be a true meritocracy when all you see are white men everywhere, with a very few brown and black men thrown in to keep the whole thing from looking like a Klan meeting.

The gender disparity in business is quite striking, since women are more than half of the population and have been training for top positions for decades now, as this factsheet by the Center For American Progress shows:

Women make up a majority of the U.S. population

Women are 50.8 percent of the U.S. population.

• They earn almost 60 percent of undergraduate degrees, and 60 percent of all master’s degrees.
• They earn 47 percent of all law degrees, and 48 percent of all medical degrees.
• They earn more than 44 percent of master’s degrees in business and management, including 37 percent of MBAs.
• They are 47 percent of the U.S. labor force, and 59 percent of the college-educated, entry-level workforce.

And yet…

Although they hold almost 52 percent of all professional-level jobs, American women lag substantially behind men when it comes to their representation in leadership positions:

• They are only 14.6 percent of executive officers, 8.1 percent of top earners, and 4.6 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs.
• They hold just 16.9 percent of Fortune 500 board seats.
• In the financial services industry, they make up 54.2 percent of the labor force, but are only 12.4 percent of executive officers, and 18.3 percent of board directors. None are CEOs.
• They account for 78.4 percent of the labor force in health care and social assistance but only 14.6 percent of executive officers and 12.4 percent of board directors. None, again, are CEOs.
• In the legal field, they are 45.4 percent of associates—but only 25 percent of nonequity partners and 15 percent of equity partners.
• In medicine, they comprise 34.3 percent of all physicians and surgeons but only 15.9 percent of medical school deans.
• In information technology, they hold only 9 percent of management positions and account for only 14 percent of senior management positions at Silicon Valley startups.

Furthermore…

• Although women control 80 percent of consumer spending in the United States, they are only 3 percent of creative directors in advertising.
• Their image onscreen is still created, overwhelmingly, by men.
• Women accounted for just 16 percent of all the directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors who worked on the top-grossing 250 domestic films of 2013, and were just 28 percent of all offscreen talent on broadcast television programs during the 2012-13 primetime season.

Further putting a dent in Welch's "businesses are meritocratic unlike schools under Farina" assertion is the history of how the collapse of '08 came about.

A lot of it was brought about by arrogant white men, with a token man of color or two - and a lot of these guys were known to be not too bright before the whole mess came down.

Like Stan O'Neal at Merrill Lynch, who brought about the financial collapse of the firm and his replacement, John Thain, who spent $1 million remodeling his office with federal bailout money.

Or Jimmy Cayne at Bear Stearns, who famously played bridge and smoked dope as his firm collapsed. 

Or Chuck Prince at Citibank, who claimed his firm was "still dancing" even as its risky loans and bad bets were taking it to the brink of collapse.

The Peter Principle certainly seemed at work with these guys. 

Lots of inept guys are running or have run companies not associated with the '08 financial collapse of the country.

Let's look at just one - Eddie Lampert, the Ayn Rand fan, who has nearly destroyed Sears by trying to run the company the way Ayn Rand would.

Here's his record:

• Sears has amassed a mountain of debt; its debt to equity ratio was 8.406% in July 2014.
• Sears’ TTM revenue fell by $3.68 billion between July 2013 and July 2014.
• Sears CEO Eddie Lampert is trying to protect the chain’s real estate assets by transferring them to a REIT.
• Sears is closing stores so fast that observers are having a hard time keeping count.
• Sears is actually planning to close dozens of stores during the critical holiday shopping season. 

How's that for meritocratic?

Lampert's still making calls on Sears even though he has brought the once-proud company to near collapse by bad call after bad call.

OK so the "Business Is Meritocratic" argument Welch uses is obviously untrue.

Now let's deal with Jack Welch the man.

Because that matter's too.

This is a guy whose company knowingly polluted the Hudson River for decades.

Welch did the best he could to a) hide his company's actions b) shield his company from having to clean up the mess it made and c) claim PCB's aren't a health hazard or cancer-causing, citing jive studies from 30 years that were rigged to give GE the results it wanted.

The Times-Union published a piece on General Electric, PCB's and Welch back in March - it is unflinching in its depiction of Welch as a apologist for GE:

For years, as it fought against being forced to clean up the Hudson River, General Electric Co. argued that an oil-like insulating fluid that had seeped into the river from its Washington County capacitor plants wasn't harmful to humans.

Besides, GE officials said, the river was cleaning itself.

Yet newly uncovered documents reveal that as early as the 1960s — decades before the government ordered GE to undertake the river dredging that is scheduled to resume this spring — company officials were warned of the potential serious health threats of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which their engineers described in confidential memos as "hazardous waste."

The documents also indicate that GE flushed far more PCBs into the river than government regulators have estimated, and that nearly a million pounds a year of additional PCBs were carted away by scavenger crews, dumped with an attitude characterized by a GE engineer in 1970 as "out of sight, out of mind."

...

Jack Welch also doesn't believe PCBs have harmful health effects, despite scientific evidence that they may. Much of his position on that, he said, comes from studies that GE commissioned as early as 1976, in which the health trends of its factory workers were studied by scientists.

Last spring, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which first warned of PCBs' adverse health effects in 1978, declared that certain PCBs, including the type flushed into the river by GE, "have reproductive, toxic, and carcinogenic consequences." The EPA, based on past practice, is expected to adopt that finding once the World Health Organization adopts it.

"EPA," Welch scoffed, waving his hand dismissively during his deposition last year. "I was completely satisfied as to the safety of PCBs. In my time I studied it. I looked at it. I made my judgment and I was completely satisfied. ... I haven't seen any PCB studies that convince me there was another side to it."

But the studies that Welch cites have drawn scientists' questions. In one study commissioned by GE, scientists examined the health patterns of workers at the Washington County capacitor plants and determined that they had a lower rate of cancer than the general population.

"It followed people for only five years ... (and) included all the secretaries, all the people that weren't anywhere near where the PCBs were," said Dr. David O. Carpenter, who has studied PCBs for decades.

"The point about those studies is they were included in the review by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, along with all of the other studies, many of them occupational, and they were found to be unconvincing," said Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University at Albany. "The issue is that in addition to cancer, we now have such strong evidence that PCBs alter a large number of other organ systems. PCBs affect the brain and reduce learning ability. This has been demonstrated repeatedly in children exposed to PCBs, often exposed even before birth where they get PCBs from their mother's body and from breast milk."

Learning and memory functions also diminish for adults exposed to PCBs, Carpenter said. He added that some scientists suspect PCBs cause adverse effects to the thyroid glands and health risks that include diabetes, high blood pressure and effects on human reproductive systems.

"PCBs are very dangerous chemicals and anybody that says they are not dangerous simply is not telling the truth, or just does not know what studies have been done," Carpenter said.

Ah, but not to Jack Welch they're not.

And he's studied this issue, so he assures us we should take him at his word, even though the study he cites to back up his claim was rigged by limiting the length of it and by putting people who were nowhere near the PCB's into it.

Jack Welch is quite literally one of the most evil men on the planet.

His company polluted the Hudson for decades with PCB's, but in order to save his company money, he argues PCB's aren't harmful despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, then cites a rigged study to back up his claims.

Who the hell cares about anything a criminal like this says about anything?

How many cancers, how many deaths is the guy responsible for because he refused to take responsibility for the damage his company did to the river?

I'm not here to defend Farina and her choice of superintendents.

I am here to call Welch out for his horseshit.

His "Business Is Meritocratic" argument is horseshit and any rudimentary look at the quality and track records of some of the people running businesses show that.

On top of that, Welch's own track record places him squarely as one of the worst human beings on the planet.

Quite frankly, Farina should consider it an honor to be criticized by someone like Welch.

De Blasio, Farina Overhaul School Grading System

From the NY Times:

New York City is overhauling its system for evaluating schools, de-emphasizing test scores in favor of measures like the strength of the curriculum and the school environment, and doing away with an overall A-through-F grade for each school, the schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, said on Tuesday.

...

Under the old system, instituted under Mr. Bloomberg in 2006, schools received annual progress reports. Those reports included an overall letter grade, as well as separate grades in four categories: student progress, overall student performance, the school environment (based on attendance rates and the results of an annual survey of students, parents, and teachers) and improvement made by the lowest performing students, by English language learners and by students with disabilities. For elementary and middle schools, 85 percent of the overall letter grade was based on test scores.

...

The new assessments, which will be released for the first time later this fall, will take two forms: a School Quality Snapshot, directed at parents; and a more comprehensive School Quality Guide, designed for school leaders.

The snapshot ranks the school from poor to excellent on questions like “How interesting and challenging is the curriculum?” and “How clearly are high expectations communicated to students and staff?”

It lists the results, compared with city and district averages, from five questions on the school survey, including the percentage of parents who are satisfied with their children’s education and the percentage of students who feel safe at school.

It also rates the school from poor to excellent on students’ improvement on state English and math tests, both for all students and for specific categories of students, and it has a category showing how students perform at the next level of their education.

Is this an improvement or is it merely shifting the metrics from mostly test scores to test scores, school surveys and the "category showing how students perform at the next level of their education"?

I don't buy how a student does after they graduate high school is directly affected by the quality of their high school.

There's probably a slight correlation between quality of school and what happens to a student afterwards.

But causation?

Nahh.

Nonetheless this is the trajectory of the new school report card metric.

There is going to be enormous pressure to get every student to attend a college directly after high school whether that is the right decision for them or not.

And you can bet the for-profit colleges are going to lick their lips at this.

I get the need to measure outcomes, especially in the day and age of the All-Mighty Data, but whatever you measure in education tends to get fetishized and has consequences that were often not seen beforehand or intended.

And some of those consequences aren't so good.

That's going to happen with these changes to the school report card/progress reports.

Let's Be Careful Out There

When Mayor Bloomberg was running the NYC school system, his attitude toward teachers was easy to read - he despised them, thought little of teachers as people and even less of teaching as a profession and wanted as many fired as possible.

Every year around March we'd start the budget layoff season in which Bloomberg would threaten thousands of teacher layoffs.

Every year those layoffs would be averted, but the message to teachers was quite clear from the Bloomberg-run DOE:

We don't like you, we don't respect you, we don't care about you, we don't trust you and we are doing everything in our power to screw with you.

Bloomberg hired chancellors who carried out this anti-teacher campaign - Klein despised teachers, Black was brought in to lay some off (one of her specialties as a magazine exec was downsizing), Walcott replaced the woeful Black and picked up where Klein left off.

Now we have Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Farina, two individuals who claim to respect teachers, two individuals who say they want to bring dignity back to the teaching profession, and while those words sound good on the surface, so far many teachers in the system have seen little actual change from the Bloomberg/Walcott Years when it comes to the anti-teacher campaign.

I know I continue to see administrators target teachers, humiliate them in front of students, and do everything in their power to wreck careers and ruin reputations.

Something the chancellor said that showed up in the NY Daily News last weekend makes me think the message coming from the NYCDOE to administrators is to continue with the teacher targeting:

Fariña pledged to announce in the next two weeks a big reduction in the number of teachers getting paid despite not having steady classroom jobs. Earlier this month 114 of the roughly 1,100 teachers — known as the Absent Teacher Reserve — accepted $16,000 buyouts.

Fariña said the numbers would dwindle further as principals are taught best practices for writing up teachers and beginning the arduous termination process.

As I noted in a Sunday post, these paragraphs came right below this one:

She also expressed confidence she could improve teacher retention by restoring the dignity of the job. But it won’t be easy. A recent teachers union survey found that 32,000 teachers walked away from city classrooms in the last 11 years, with about 4,600 going to jobs elsewhere in the state — mainly to city suburbs that offer higher pay and less challenging teaching conditions.

Farina is playing fast and loose with the language here, sending out dual messages at once about the importance of teacher retention and restoring dignity to the teaching profession even as she says she plans to make sure every principal knows exactly how to target teachers and get rid of them.

Now I don't know about you, but I found the statement about making sure "principals are taught best practices for writing up teachers and beginning the arduous termination process" ominous.

It seems to me not much has changed from the Bloomberg/Klein/Walcott Years except for this:

The de Blasio/Farina DOE is less honest and forthcoming in their anti-teacher campaign than the Bloomberg/Klein/Walcott DOE.

With Bloomberg/Klein/Walcott, you knew they were looking to screw with you.

De Blasio and Farina like to talk about "dignity" and "teacher retention," but as Norm Scott always says about people, watch what they do, not what they say.

When I drown out what they say and instead watch what they do, I'm not seeing much of a difference from the previous administration when it comes to the treatment of teachers - all teachers.

So let's be careful out there this year, folks.

And yes, I'm echoing Michael Conrad.

Carmen Farina Vows To Drain ATR Pool By Having Principals Target ATR's

Buried at the bottom of this Daily News story on Chancellor Farina's goals for the new school year is this:

Fariña pledged to announce in the next two weeks a big reduction in the number of teachers getting paid despite not having steady classroom jobs. Earlier this month 114 of the roughly 1,100 teachers — known as the Absent Teacher Reserve — accepted $16,000 buyouts.

Fariña said the numbers would dwindle further as principals are taught best practices for writing up teachers and beginning the arduous termination process.

This threat comes just one paragraph after Farina talks about the importance of teacher retention:

She also expressed confidence she could improve teacher retention by restoring the dignity of the job. But it won’t be easy. A recent teachers union survey found that 32,000 teachers walked away from city classrooms in the last 11 years, with about 4,600 going to jobs elsewhere in the state — mainly to city suburbs that offer higher pay and less challenging teaching conditions.

Okay, so let me get this straight.

Farina says she wants to restore "the dignity of the job" in order to improve teacher retention but she intends to have her NYCDOE minions go around the city making sure principals "are taught best practices for writing up teachers and beginning the arduous termination process."

Anybody else see the contradictions here?

How do you restore "the dignity of the job" while having principals schooled in the ways to write up teachers in order to terminate them?

Seems to me that's the same kind of teacher-targeting that we got during the Klein and Walcott Years.

De Blasio, Farina Full of Shit On Test Scores

The lede of this Eliza Shapiro piece at Capital NY:

Mayor Bill de Blasio and schools chancellor Carmen Fariña on Thursday praised the slight improvement in citywide test scores while reiterating their shared ambivalence toward testing in general.

At a press conference at the Brooklyn Brownstone School to announce the scores, de Blasio said, "This is a good day for the whole New York City school system," before adding, "a school is not the sum of its test scores."

Then this:

De Blasio said his administration's ultimate goal is to have "100 percent proficiency for our children."

Added Fariña, "I won't be happy until at the end of this year I can stand before you and say we've doubled or tripled the amount of proficiency. It could be a lot better and will be and I promise you that."

Asked for specific goals for test score performance next year, de Blasio declined to give a precise figure, saying only that he expects performance to increase steadily.

Okay, let me get this straight - de Blasio doesn't think a school is the sum of its test scores but has the ultimate goal of 100% proficiency on the state tests and Farina is ambivalent about testing but won't be happy unless she sees double or triple the proficiency on state tests next year.

Which is is, folks - are you ambivalent about testing and convinced that a school (and thus a school district) is not the sum of its test scores or are you going to push for 100% proficiency on a measure you say you don't care about?

Dunno about you, but my bullshit meter went up here.

De Blasio and Farina don't get to have it both ways - either they have ambivalence about testing and emphasize multiple measures to evaluate schools, students and teachers or they get consumed by the scores and look to double and triple proficiency with the ultimate (and ridiculous) goal of 100% proficiency.

And of course the truth is, de Blasio and Farina care about the test scores a lot, even though they won't tell you they do, because all the really important people in this city, state and country do and if they don't get these test scores up those really important people are going to say mean and nasty things about them and declare them failures and so forth.

I wish they were more honest about this and tell us straight up rather than jive us with their "ambivalence" over the testing and the scores, but as George Carlin said, language gives you away always and you can see that in the language that de Blasio and Farina use that they care very much about the scores.

But Isn't The College/Career Readiness Metric All About Test Prep, Chancellor?

Eliza Shapiro at Capital NY got an interview with Carmen Farina in which the NYCDOE chancellor gives more details on her plans to improve the school system.

Farina says she plans to focus on the 2nd, 7th and 10th grades as benchmarks for how children are progressing academically, socially and emotionally - how she plans to evaluate social and emotional development is beyond me, though I suspect it will have something to do with that all-purpose word these days that reformers throw around when they talk social and emotional learning - "grit".

In any case, Farina says for 10th graders she plans to use college and career readiness benchmarks to ensure that students are progressing:

Once students get to tenth grade, Fariña said, “they are most likely going to graduate.”

“Are they going to graduate in two years, three years, or four years, and are they going to be on the right path to going on to college? The college readiness rate in high school is crucial, it’s not about graduating per say, it’s about if you go to college, will you stay here,” Fariña said.

Fariña attributed part of the bleak college and career readiness figure to the emphasis on rote memorization and standardized testing, saying, “if all you’re going to do is test prep, and you’re learning for a robotic system, when you get to college that’s not really going to help you.”

So the college and career readiness figure is bleak because the rote memorization and standardized mechanization that goes into test prep harms children and makes them into robots - okay, I get that and I agree with that.

But is the chancellor familiar with how the system currently measures so-called college and career readiness?

Because unless I missed something over the last few months, I'm pretty sure it's by test scores - as in 75 on the ELA Regents and 80 on the Math Regents or 520 on the ELA and math sections of the SAT respectively.

Now the way many students hit those benchmarks - 75 on the ELA Regents/80 on the Math Regents or 520 on the math and ELA sections of the SAT - is through a shitload of rote memorization and test prep.

I know, because I've taught both (SAT prep was my first teaching job back in 2000; I teach ELA Regents classes every year.)

It's great to talk about helping students socially, emotionally and academically to be prepared for college and career, but to make believe like the metrics that measure these things are based upon anything but testing data is absurd.

Carmen Farina is a smart woman, I'm sure she knows this.

And yet, she continues to pay homage to the all-mighty test data while claiming testing data is no longer all-mighty in the NYCDOE.

If Teachers Were Like Goldman Sachs Traders...

Thanks Uncle Mikey and Auntie Carmen - a $1,000 bucks (which is actually more like $863 after taxes and union dues)*:

Dear Colleagues,

As you come to the end of this school year we both wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for all your hard work and dedication. We both know from experience how difficult the work you do is, and we take great pride in the thousands of people in New York City Public Schools who work hard each and every day to try to fulfill the dreams and hopes of over one million students. We want you to know you have our respect and our thanks.

We wanted to do more than tell you we appreciate your hard work - we wanted to take action to show you. So we have taken the first step in implementing the financial component of the recent collective bargaining agreement between the United Federation of Teachers and the New York City Department of Education which provides for a one time ratification bonus of $1,000 (pro-rated for part-time employees) to be issued to any member who was on payroll as of the date of ratification, June 3, 2014. We are pleased to inform you that pending the ratification by the Panel for Educational Priorities on June 24th, for most school-based UFT staff this payment is going to appear in either your direct deposit account on June 25th, or in a check delivery scheduled for June 26th. Other UFT staff such as nurses and therapists should receive this payment on July 3, and part time F status staff should be receiving their pro-rated portion on July 10.

We hope you enjoy the summer and return refreshed and ready for the next school year. We have much to work on together, including efforts around enhanced professional development and dedicated time for parent engagement, and we look forward to working together on these and many other initiatives next year. Thank you for your work this year to provide a quality education for all of our students to keep them on the road to success.

Sincerely,



Meanwhile back at Goldman Sachs: 

Here’s an instant classic for the Out-of-Touch Banker genre: a former Goldman Sachs mortgage bond trader clears $30 million in the decade following his college graduation, racks up an $8.25 million bonus in a single year, and sues because he thinks he deserves another $5 million.

Meet Deeb Salem, the G.S. alum who now works at the hedge fund GoldenTree Asset Management but once helped Goldman shed its toxic assets by betting against its clients and, as his lawyer boasted to the New York Post, shorting the mortgage market in 2006. Salem is suing his former employer, alleging that he had every right to expect a $13 million bonus in 2010.

Much of the drama focuses on Salem’s 2007 self-evaluation, which eventually made its way into the public record thanks to a 2011 Senate investigation into the bank’s habit of betting against its own clients. Salem alleges that he was punished for his honesty (the bank, perhaps upset that his review provided Congress with ammunition, warned him in 2010 for “extremely poor judgment”). But it also rewarded him with an $8.25 million bonus. The previous year, he had received a $15 million bonus—more than Goldman Sachs C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein.

Don’t get the wrong idea about Salem, though. It’s not just the money that bothers him—it’s the filial shame he faced after telling his mother that he would be taking home a full $13 million in 2010.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority tossed out Salem’s case (one panelist called his claims “bullshit”), and he has since asked the New York State Supreme Court to intervene. The judge in the case has sealed the documents pending a hearing in the fall, according to Bloomberg News.

Salem believes he could have made much more had he left the firm earlier, and the scary thing is, he’s probably right—his group at Goldman brought in more than $1 billion a year during the period between 2007 and 2010. He was something of a star in a world where moving crappy products faster and more ruthlessly than your competitors yields billions of dollars of profits. But, as Goldman’s lawyer, Andrew Frackman of O’Melveny & Myers, said at a February arbitration hearing, Salem “made a ton of money.”

“He’s not entitled to more money simple because he would like to have been paid more,” Frackman said. “If that were the case, you’d have traders and bankers in here every day of the week.”

“Let’s be very clear: I was one of the most sought-after investment professionals in the mortgage industry,” Salem told the panel at the same hearing. He also compared himself to Michael Jordan in self-evaluations, writing, “I am as competitive as Michael Jordan. . . I want to win every time and I want to steamroll the opposition.”

Even Jordan would have to stand in awe of this guy’s ego.

Enjoy your $863 bucks after taxes and union dues, teachers...

* See comment here.