NYSED Commissioner Elia's Appointment Of Dennis Walcott As East Ramapo State Monitor Is An Empty Gesture

The rhetoric out of former NYCDOE Chancellor Dennis Walcott yesterday after he was named state monitor of the troubled East Ramapo school district:

“I will be present on a regular basis and meet with community members,” Walcott told the crowd, which alternately cheered and booed the plan.

...


Walcott and his team will provide a report of their actions and findings to Elia and the Board of Regents in December.

He said he'll make unannounced visits to schools and offices in East Ramapo to get a better idea of what's going on. He also plans to reach out to parents of children who attend private schools.

"We know when something stinks, when something's not right," Walcott pledged, to cheers.

Walcott has no power, so even if he actually sees something that "stinks," there isn't going to be much he can do about it:

Skeptics argued his team had no real power, since it can’t reverse board decisions, attend closed executive sessions or fire board members.

A state fiscal monitor’s report last year recommended an independent monitor with veto power, and said the board often violated open public-meetings laws by spending most of its time behind closed doors.

Essentially what you have with the Walcott appointment is a high profile dog and pony show that will solve little in the district.

It's an empty gesture, one that got some applause yesterday - and some boos - but in the end will probably get mostly boos as people realize Walcott and his monitoring team can't actually influence much in the district, even if they wanted to because they have no veto power.

And I must admit, I''m a skeptic that they want to in the first place.

NYSED Commissioner Elia Appoints Dennis Walcott As State Monitor For East Ramapo

Rising phoenix-like from wherever the hell he was:

Dennis Walcott, the former chancellor for New York City schools, vowed to work cooperatively with the East Ramapo schools as the new state monitor for the district — but also pledged to hold them accountable for their actions.

Walcott was officially announced today as the monitor for the troubled Rockland County district by state Education Commisioner MaryEllen Elia and Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch.

“This effort will be both cooperative and collaborative; we will work directly with the East Ramapo school board but we will not shy away from keeping the district accountable to the community when we identify areas of improvement,” Walcott said in a statement.

“Our goal is to help the district develop sustainable practices to ensure that East Ramapo is able to provide, and actually does provide, appropriate educational programs for all its students. My team will get started right away, and one of our first orders of business will be to engage the district, its students, staff, parents and stakeholders.”

What, was Joel Klein busy?

Oh, yes, that's right - he has been busy losing $371 million dollars.

So out steps Walcott.

Amazing how they keep shuffling members of the Titanic musicians guild around the deck to play the same old song while the ship goes down, eh?

Another winning move by MaryEllen Elia.

Still crowing about that appointment, NYSUT?

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.

Great News - New Walcott Health Data Coming!

Earlier this week, former NYCDOE chancellor Dennis Walcott released the results of his latest physical in the Daily News - an event that I covered in a post called Dennis Walcott Needs To Just Go The ---- Away!

Here's a bit of Walcott's piece:

My annual physical checkup — I just got the results — yielded the following comparisons to last year’s findings: Weight down from 152 to 148 lbs.; HDL (“good cholesterol”) up from 80 to 103; LDL (“bad cholesterol”) down from 82 to 73; blood pressure from 122/70 to 120/68; resting heart rate from 59 to 46 beats per minute.

Wow, isn't that awesome!  I'm so glad to know Walcott, who has the look of one of those dudes who runs 10 miles twice a day and hasn't had ice cream since the 1970's, is as physically fit in his data as he is in his appearance.

Yet not everybody was happy with Walcott's disclosures - one of the commenters on the post lamented that Walcott didn't disclose his Fully Monty:

Surprised he didn't give us details of his colonoscopy? Emaciated scumbag...

And I felt the same disappointment that while I know Walcott's weight, HDL and LDL cholesterol, blood pressure and heart rate, I still don't REALLY know Dennis Walcott the way I could have if he would have just released the results of his colonoscopy, prostrate exam, stool sample testing, et al.

But good news, America, more data is indeed coming - former Chancellor Walcott was so excited by the response to the release of his physical exam results in the Daily News over the weekend that he has agreed to make the results of his colonoscopy, prostrate exam, and stool sample tests available for all to see and study!

Now I dunno about you, but I was always part of the group that assumed this guy was full of shit as both deputy mayor and schools chancellor, so it will be great to see if we were right about that.

Walcott's results will be available, with video and PDF files, at the Daily News on Sunday.

How exciting - more data and information than we could ever want about Dennis Walcott!

And here's hoping this doesn't just stop with Walcott.

Maybe all this disclosure from Walcott and the tremendous response he's received over it will persuade Walcott's former boss, Michael Bloomberg, to release his medical results.

Mayor Trans Fat likes to tell the rest of us what we can and cannot eat, drink, smoke, etc.

It would be great to see if he puts his money where his mouth is, so to speak.

Come on, Mayor Mikey - why not follow in Dennis Walcott's footsteps and release the data?

Time For Dennis Walcott To Just Go The ---- Away

Dennis Walcott shares the results of his latest physical for all New Yorkers to rejoice in:

Smart government policies to improve longevity and health outcomes for the public are critical. But it is ultimately our own individual responsibility to chart a healthier course for ourselves. You don’t need to run marathons. A modest change in diet and exercise habits can go a long way.

My annual physical checkup — I just got the results — yielded the following comparisons to last year’s findings: Weight down from 152 to 148 lbs.; HDL (“good cholesterol”) up from 80 to 103; LDL (“bad cholesterol”) down from 82 to 73; blood pressure from 122/70 to 120/68; resting heart rate from 59 to 46 beats per minute.

I am here today as a result of the change in diet and exercise and a determination to confront the diseases that devastated families like mine. It’s a small price to pay to experience the joy of holding your grandchildren someday.

That's great, Dennis - you're an awesome physical specimen.

But you're also a de-humanized functionary of the oligarchy who has spent years doing the work of privatizing the public school system.

Few people have done more to damage children in the past ten years in this city than you.

Better to be a little less of an awesome physical specimen and a little more of a whole human being.

Go away, Dennis.

No one gives a shit about your latest physical results, your cholesterol levels or your body fat measures.

Again I Ask, Why No Blame For Bloomberg And Walcott?

The Post does another story on horror school PS 106 this morning:

Kids at Queens’ notorious “School of No” have been forced to pay for a bizarre fifth-grade party at which their principal makes them dress up as little brides and grooms, The Post has learned — as the DOE announce that it would probe conditions at the school.

PS 106’s fur-clad principal, Marcella Sills — who is known for frequently being absent — has for at least the past three years orchestrated an annual prom at a posh rental hall.

She has required parents to pay more than $110 per child for the shindig.

The girls must rent little white dresses that look like bridal gowns, and the boys must attend in tuxedos, sources told The Post.

The kids, many of whom live below the poverty line, must foot the bill for the strange get-ups, which Sills personally picks out at stores such as Men’s Wearhouse and David’s Bridal, parents and ex-teachers said.

Sills, meanwhile, sets herself up as the belle of the ball — donning her own long, white bridal-type gown for the event, which was held last June at Russo’s on the Bay in Howard Beach. The outfit comes complete with elbow-length white gloves, witnesses said.

“It’s absurd,” said one former teacher at the crumbling Far Rockaway school.

“This is a school where children are given a free breakfast and free lunch, and you’re asking them to pay money for a lavish, unnecessary event.”

According to the Post article, while the principal forces families to spend money on this Belle of the Ball stuff, the school struggles to provide basic supplies and instruction for students.

No gym, no art classes, no textbooks, no nurses's office.

Former staff and students do not mince words about Marcella Sills:

Staff described PS 106 as a dysfunctional campus with rat-infested instruction trailers.

Sills often doesn’t show up. Last week, she missed every school day but one. Nevertheless, she managed to rule in absentia through fear and retaliation, sources said.

She cuts quite a figure, when she does appear. She arrives in a BMW wearing expensive fur coats. She makes a base $128,000 salary. “She’s evil,” former PS 106 teacher Patricia Walsh said. “She finds pleasure in ruining people’s lives.”

“She’s been getting away with it for years,” said Silaka Cox, an NYU freshman who graduated from PS 106 on Sills’ watch.

Two questions to pose here:

First, if Sills has been ruling her medieval fiefdom like this for years, why no blame from the Post for the former chancellor, Dennis Walcott, or his boss, Mayor Bloomberg?

Didn't most of this malfeasance happen under the watch of Walcott and Bloomberg?

Second question - how many other PS 106's are out there?

Bloomberg made every principal the CEO of their school and destroyed much of the oversight apparatus that used to ensure compliance with such niceties as providing a nurse's office instead of holding a Belle of the Ball party.

You can bet PS 106 isn't the only place where a principal has run amok with no oversight or accountability.

What's worse, with the new evaluation system in place, they basically have total power to do what they want to whomever they want with little that can be done to stop them.

Farina says she's sending a deputy chancellor to PS 106 to see what's going on.

That's a start - but how about putting a clamp on principal power at the policy level so that they cannot rule a school with fear and intimidation like Sills has done at PS 106?

Why Aren't Bloomberg And Walcott Blamed For This?

We always hear how great Mayor Bloomberg was for the school system, how much better things were after his 12 years of reign than before he took over.

Then you get this kind of story from the Post that sounds very much like a school from the "bad-old days":

Students at PS 106 in Far Rockaway, Queens, have gotten no math or reading and writing books for the rigorous Common Core curriculum, whistleblowers say.

The 234 kids get no gym or art classes. Instead, they watch movies every day.

“The kids have seen more movies than Siskel and Ebert,” a source said.

The school nurse has no office equipped with a sink, refrigerator or cot.

The library is a mess: “Nothing’s in order,” said a source. “It’s a junk room.”

No substitutes are hired when a teacher is absent — students are divvied up among other classes.

A classroom that includes learning-disabled kids doesn’t have the required special-ed co-teacher.

About 40 kindergartners have no room in the three-story brick building. They sit all day in dilapidated trailers that reek of “animal urine,” a parent said; rats and squirrels noisily scamper in the walls and ceiling.

...

“This school is a complete s- -thole, but nobody in a position of power comes to investigate. No one cares,” a community member said.

PS 106 families hope their cries for attention bring newly installed Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña to the rescue, saying they can’t recall any prior DOE leader visiting the remote school.

She would find it sinking, they say.

The isolated building sits a block and a half from the beach, surrounded by vacant, weed-choked lots, the road behind it strewn with trash bags and broken TVs.

The floods of Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 wrecked a hangar-like annex, called the Early Childhood Academy, which housed pre-K, kindergarten and first and second grades. It has not been repaired.

Two kindergarten classes moved into “temporary classroom units” in the yard. The other children moved into the main building, forcing some classes to squeeze into small offices and storage rooms. The pre-K class sits in the auditorium, but has to move to the cafeteria during the movies.

Kids in several grades said that last week they watched “Fat Albert,” “Alvin and the Chipmunks” and “Monsters, Inc.,” but did not relish the downtime.

“I like gym. I like to draw,” said Charm Russell, 10, who added her peers are too restless and bored to watch the screen. “They’re always making noise, and there’s nothing entertaining going on. No art, no gym, no music class.”

More alarming, the teachers have gotten no curricula since Sandy. Last February, the DOE announced several new options, including “Go Math” for grades K-5, and “ReadyGen” or the state Education Department’s “Core Knowledge” for English language arts. The books cover the Common Core standards, skills that kids should master at each level.

But five months into the school year, PS 106 classes still don’t have the books or teacher’s guides.

“They have no reading program, no math program,” a source said, adding Sills blames outside administrators for not sending materials.

Teachers muddle through by printing out worksheets they find online, buying their own copy paper.
The DOE gave no explanation for the missing curricula but said it’s “working with the school to provide students with physical education.”

A spokesman denied the trailers are rat-infested.

Staffers won’t speak up or even file a grievance with their union because Sills will retaliate, a source said.

The Post says the principal is often a no-show, runs the school through fear and retaliation in any case, so even when she's there, things aren't running so well.

Somehow this whole article never mentions either Mayor Bloomberg or Chancellor Walcott, the two people in charge of the school system during the time this school was damaged by Sandy and seemingly never recovered.

It's as if the principal of the school is the only person responsible for the mess, or maybe some nameless bureaucrats at the DOE, but certainly not Bloomberg and Walcott.

Oh, no - the school system is so much better because of those two gentlemen (as well as Chancellor Klein) and you never hear stories about horror schools where incompetent or corrupt principals run them like medieval fiefdoms, ruling through fear and intimidation, all the while stealing time or money or both from the system.

Except when you get stories like the one in today's Post, of course - one's that somehow manage to avoid mentioning the people in charge of the system during the time of the malfeasance.

Imagine if you will, five years hence, the Post publishes an article like this about a horror school somewhere in the system.

What are the chances de Blasio and Farina are not named and blamed in that article as the perpetrators of the horrors?

How Was Your First Bloomberg-Less Day?

The impending snow storm and the short school week had attendance down, so it really didn't quite feel like a regular schoolday.

Also, I was scrambling to get some grading done and get some ELA Regents work put together for next week, so I was a little preoccupied today.

Nonetheless, it was kind of fun to come to work in a NYC school and think "Hey, Bloomberg doesn't run this thing anymore!"

How was your first day back sans Bloomberg?

De Blasio To Appoint Carmen Farina As NYC Schools Chancellor

Given all the rumors around this selection, I'll believe this when I see it:

Carmen Farina, a Department of Education veteran and a longtime informal adviser to Bill de Blasio, will be named chancellor Monday after months of speculation about who would manage the city’s school system.

De Blasio will name Farina head of the nation's largest public school system at M.S. 51, the Park Slope middle school his children attended.

If true, this is the best choice that we are going to get following 12 years of Bloomberg:

Friends and colleagues of Farina and de Blasio say they share a single educational philosophy, with a focus on progressive education, a skepticism of standardized testing and charter schools, and a focus on racially and economically integrated public schools.

Alas, with the job starting on Thursday and the announcement not even made official yet, hard to see any changes to the system coming in the short term.

Why No Chancellor Announcement Yet?

So now it's December 20th, the last school day of Dennis Walcott's tenure as chancellor.

In just 12 calendar days, Walcott's replacement is supposed to come into power.

There have been lots of stories in the press and on the Internet about the names that are supposed to be on de Blasio's short list for chancellor, but no actual announcement about the pick itself from de Blasio.

Here is de Blasio's schedule for today:

NYC Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio is in the city with no public schedule.

Doesn't look like there's going to be any announcement today either.

What exactly could be holding up the announcement?

The news stories in the past few weeks seem to say that former DOE official Carmen Farina is de Blasio's choice for the job and Farina, after saying for a long, long time that she didn't want it, is now ready to take it.

If de Blasio wants Farina and Farina now wants the job, at least for a little while, what exactly is holding up Bill de Blasio from having a press conference to announce this pick?

Are there machinations going on behind the scenes, some pressure being exerted by the Obama administration for de Blasio to pick someone pro-testing (as has been reported) or from the education reform/hedge fund manager contingent for de Blasio to pick someone pro-charter?

Is Farina actually unsure whether she wants the job or is de Blasio unsure he wants her?

Is de Blasio looking to pick someone more corporate education reform-friendly for the gig, someone like Barbara Byrd Bennett, Rahm Emanuel's CPS CEO, and looking to bury that announcement during Christmas week?

De Blasio has a well-deserved reputation for being late as hell to events, but the delay in this chancellor announcement, given that many tea leaf readers think de Blasio wants Farina and Farina now wants the job, is very, very strange.

Any idea why the hold-up on the announcement?

Should we be concerned by the delay or is this just business as usual with BdB?

Things They Should Name To Honor Dennis Walcott

An empty storefront.

A garbage dumpster.

A burnt, abandoned car.

A mold-infested FEMA trailer.

Flight deck at Bellevue.

That smell on the subway in August.

Any others?

Daily News: DOE Gig Looks To Be Down To Farina, Starr, And Cashin

Kaya Henderson is a no for the chancellor job. http://t.co/Ru9L14S4vJ Linda Darling-Hammond also no. Maybe: Farina, Cashin, Starr
— Rachel Monahan (@NYDNrachel) December 13, 2013

Lindsey Crist says this about Henderson's chances for the DOE job::

@NYDNBenChapman but true, right? Such smart politics! From everything I've been hearing, she had a VERY small chance (and that's generous)
— Lindsey Christ (@LindseyChrist) December 13, 2013

And so it goes - five school days left with Walcott at the helm, but we don't know his successor just yet.

Other than, it won't be Kaya Henderson.

No Reformer Comes To Commissioner John King's Defense

Lat spring, College Board President David Coleman said this about NYSED Commissioner John King:

“These are hard times for New York City and New York State,” Coleman said. “The vultures are out. There is a culture in our city and state right now of trying to take people down, including the commissioner to my left.”

Coleman then implored the mostly friendly audience, which included former superintendents Harold Levy and Jean-Claude Brizard, “to stand up for this man for his courage in not backing down.”

After the event, Coleman said his comments were meant as a defense of King, not a response to any specific criticism.

Commissioner King has been having a very difficult time of it lately, having taken criticism at two separate parent town halls in the last week, then taken even more criticism when he canceled future town hall meetings with parents and blamed the cancellations on "special interests" for co-opting the meetings and making it impossible for him to have a dialogue with parents.

The Twitterverse and blogosphere has been awash with negative comments, statements, blog pieces and Facebook posts about King's arrogant dismissal of parents, their concerns over the Common Core and the radical SED education reform agenda.

People have been pointing the chutzpah King has demonstrated by declaring parents "special interests" and the hypocrisy King has shown by claiming special interests had hijacked the "dialogue" at the Poughkeepsie town hall meeting when news accounts report that the evening was actually a two hour John King monologue interspersed with a few minutes of parent questions that King kept interrupting.

After King issued his press release explaining why he had canceled the future town hall meetings, he went into hiding in Albany and hasn't been seen or heard from since.

Interestingly enough, neither has David Coleman or any of the other education reformers so enamored of John King just a few months back.

I have looked for comments from Coleman, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Dennis Walcott or any other prominent ed deformer defending King this weekend in the face of the heavy criticism he is taking and have so far, found nothing.

That no prominent reform voice is coming out to loudly defend King should be a warning sign to our erstwhile SED reformer in Albany.

As I posted yesterday, the politicians and reformers will stick with somebody so long as they are useful to them, but once that usefulness is exhausted, they will turn on them.

The silence from the ed deform side on John King is as deafening as the criticism of King coming from parents and teachers.

It is especially deafening given the passionate defense of King that David Coleman offered just a few months ago.

A Coordinated NYCDOE "Perv Teacher" Propaganda Campaign In Motion

Perv teacher beat reporter Ben "Where are the perverts?" Chapman had a rubber room/perv teacher article in today's Daily News.

I dispensed with that article here.

This afternoon, the NY Post has an even more sensationalised article entitled "Abusive, Violent Teachers Let Off The Hook" that, like the DN piece, hammers away at the disciplinary process for teachers and claims guilty, violent perverts are allowed to not only go free from justice but continue teaching children.

Now if you're like me, you have one of those "Hmm..." moments when you see two separate but similar teacher-bashing articles show up in the New York tabloids on the same day.

It seems unlikely that it's a coincidence that four different New York reporters, two for the DN, two for the Post, got the idea to write up "perv teacher" articles on the same day.

Rather, it seems like a coordinated campaign coming out of Tweed to do one last "perv teacher" propaganda push to try and get some changes to the disciplinary process before Bloomberg flies off to Bermuda for good on December 31.

If I had to make a bet about where they go from here, I bet we'll get a Campbell Brown emergence from Galt Gulch or wherever the hell she lives these days to do some public appearances declaring the UFT pedophile defenders and a Chancellor Walcott appearance before some cameras to say how horrified he was to learn of all these instances of abusive and violent teachers still working in the system and how he needs to be given the tools to rid the system of these violent criminals and perverts right away!

Never mind that if these teachers were guilty of any crimes, they would be arrested and put in prison, which makes it hard for the UFT to defend them since, you know, they'd be in prison.

Never mind that it's clear the coordinated propaganda campaign emanated from Walcott's office in the first place, so why should he be surprised about any of these stories when it's his people planting them in the press?

This is the usual smear campaign stuff they do in Bloombergville, but it also has echoes of the Bush strategy over the Iraq war.

Remember when the Bushes, via Scooter Libby, planted the story in the NY Times via Judy Miller that Saddam had WMD's, then used that story as proof positive for why there must be an attack on Iraq - Dick Cheney himself announced this on Meet The Press?

Well, Walcott and the Tweedies are doing the very same thing here.

They're ginning up another perv teacher campaign, with compliant corporate press people happy to give them the space to hawk their agenda, then they'll point to those newspaper stories as proof positive for why the disciplinary process needs to be changed and any teacher accused of a crime should be fired right away regardless of guilt or innocence.

Perhaps with the sun setting on Bloomberg's corporate empire, they think they have one last chance to get something done before the end of the year.

Or perhaps they're just laying down makers for the future, getting ready for another heavy perv teacher blitz when de Blasio takes over.

Either way, these stories are part of a coordinated campaign meant to mislead the public into supporting a revision to the teacher disciplinary process that will give the DOE the power to fire a teacher accused of misconduct without a fair, impartial hearing.

Tish James Wants To Save The DOE Emails

It has been reported that the NYCDOE will be shredding evidence of their education reform crimes and burning down much of Tweed in late December before the next mayor takes power.

Tish James, candidate for Public Advocate, doesn't want that to happen:

CITY HALL — Councilwoman Letitia James wants copies of a colossal amount of Department of Education emails — to ensure they’re not deleted when Mayor Bloomberg exits office in January.

James has requested under the state’s Freedom of Information Law that the DOE provide her with all its employees’ emails that discuss key education policies.

The demand came just days after DNAinfo New York’s Sept. 17 story about the Bloomberg administration remaining undecided on an email-retention plan for various city agencies.

With a few months left in its final term, the administration is still mulling whether to preserve emails from the DOE, the NYPD, the mayor’s office and other major agencies or allow them to end up in a digital dumpster.

Barbara Sherman, an education policy analyst for James, said the councilwoman wants copies to help the next mayor understand the previous administration’s thinking.

“In order to move forward and have a smooth transition and understand how these transitions are made, they need this information,” Sherman told DNAinfo.

“I think for just the sake of continuity, there is something very strange for the [Bloomberg] administration to get rid of 12 years of correspondences,” she added.

James, a Democrat currently in a runoff election for Public Advocate, has asked for copies of all DOE emails discussing enrollment, testing, Common Core standards, audits and support services for students with disabilities.

She also wants emails in which Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott and deputy chancellors discuss the truncation or closing of city schools. Her FOIL letter also requests emails in which they discuss school bus transportation, bus contracts and employer protection provisions for drivers and matrons.

  

“Education is quite important to the councilwoman," Sherman said. "She has been a champion of families whose voices have not been heard. This is just another area where the Department of Education is eliminating — not just stifling, but eliminating — this voice."

Clearly Bloomberg and Walcott intend to erase any evidence of their crimes and incompetence before they go.

They must be stopped.

Notice that Tish James is trying to stop them.

Not Dan Squadron (who, as Patrick Sullivan pointed out on Twitter last night, has never made it to a PEP to protest a school closure while James has been a regular fixture at those meetings.)

Nope - Tish James.

Something to think about before you vote on October 1.

Bloomberg Tells Walcott: Drinks Are On Me!

Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Walcott took what the New York Daily News termed a "victory lap" yesterday over the Common Core test scores:

Cheers to us!

Under relentless criticism from his would-be successors, Mayor Bloomberg took a victory lap Monday over the fact that 22 of the 25 top-ranked schools on new state tests are in the city.

The mayor even suggested that his teetotaling Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott toast the results.

“You can have an extra drink tonight, it can be cranberry juice or vodka tonic, anything you want, but you deserve it,” Bloomberg said.

Sixteen of the 22 highly ranked schools have selective admissions, so only top students can get in.

Bloomberg said it was cause for celebration that city schools can compete with “wealthy suburbs."

“In ’01, zero out of the 25 best schools in the state were in New York City. Today, 22 out of the 25 schools,” he said. “I don’t know how you could write anything other than, ‘It is just amazing.’”

Actually the test scores have plummeted during Bloomberg's Reign of Error over the city school system - first in 2010 when the state admitted to test score inflation and city scores fell 26 points in reading and 24 points in math (to 42.4% proficiency in reading, 53% in math), then again in 2013 when the state changed the 3rd-8th grade tests to the so-called Common Core and test scores fell to 26% proficiency in reading, 30% in math.

Bloomberg has hawked tests scores throughout his Reign of Error as proof positive his Children First education reforms are working, so he has had to live and die by the test score numbers.

With scores now lower than they have ever been and with this his final year in office, he has been looking for any way he can to fool people into thinking his Reign of Error over the NYCDOE hasn't been a disaster.

Thus the "Hey, we've got 22 out of the top 25 schools!" bit (even though they've manipulated that by using selective admissions to certain schools.)

It's pathetic, really, and I bet even Walcott, who sort of lives in reality, knows that (I've always suspected Walcott's just in this for the money he will make off Bloomberg when his governmental service is done - Bloomberg is notoriously generous to those who stick by him.)

Bloomberg, however, believes his own b.s., so I have no doubt he really thinks he's done a swell job with the schools, despite having to spin the new Common Core test scores as another Bloombergian victory when they are anything but.

The Mayor of Money surrounds himself with yes men and women like Howard Wolfson and Dennis Walcott who never tell him anything he doesn't want to hear, so he's rarely given the opportunity to have to confront reality as it is rather than reality as he wants to see it.

As NYC Educator noted in a comment on another post I wrote about Bloomberg and his beloved statistics:

What I notice is when scores go up, it's great. When they're proven inflated and static, that's also great. And when they introduce new tests and scores plummet, that's great too.

So I guess when you're Wolfson, you just can't lose.

 And indeed, that seems to be the case.

No matter what the stats are, what the test scores are, Bloomberg always wins!

No wonder the drinks are on him.

Who Are These Teachers Who Like Walcott?

The NYCDOE survey results:

In his second year as New York City schools chancellor, Dennis Walcott’s popularity fell to levels that rival the tumultuous 95-day tenure of his predecessor, Cathie Black. Fifty-seven percent of teachers said they were “unsatisfied or very unsatisfied” with Walcott, the highest disapproval rate for a chancellor since at least 2010.

A little more than one in four teachers expressed strong approval for Walcott.

Do you believe that a little more than 25% of teachers feel strong approval for Chancellor Walcott?

I don't believe that number.

I don't think the DOE played funky with the results, not at Tweed, but I would bet some teachers continued to be told by their supervisors to respond to all questions on the survey positively no matter what.

In my school, I bet the "strongly approve" response for Walcott was in the low single digits.

There was one E4E guy who wasn't the swiftest card in the Delaney book, so it's possible he would have "strongly approved" of Walcott.

Like most E4Eers, he's moved on from the classroom to bigger and better things.

There might be one or two other teachers that I could see at my school responding "strongly approve" for the Walcott question.

That's out of 100+ teachers.

So a little under 3% or so is my gauge for "strong approval" responses for Walcott.

I find it hard to believe 25% of teachers around the rest of the system, if administered truth serum, would say they "strongly approve" of Walcott.

What say the rest of you out there?

How do you gauge the response in your school?

How about system-wide?

Is there something funky about the numbers reported on the surveys?

McGraw Hill Loses Regents Exams, NYCDOE Makes Students Retake The Tests

Just outrageous:

Students from a Chelsea high school have to retake their English Regents exams today after their original tests fell off the back of a truck on their way to be graded, the teachers union said last night.

The United Federation of Teachers said about 75 11th-grade students from Chelsea Career and Technical Education HS have to retake the test after education company McGraw Hill lost the booklets.

“We were told that the test booklets were on a truck, somehow the boxes of tests fell out,” said English teacher Jan Scott. “Some they recovered, but not ours.”

The city Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.

“All my students know is that no one ever found their test,” Scott said.

McGraw-Hill and the NYCDOE make the mistakes, the students at Chelsea Career and Technical High School are forced to pay for those mistakes.

How come the people in charge of this system, the ones who talk so often and so passionately about holding others accountable, are never held accountable themselves?

And there's a class and race angle to this story.

The student body at Chelsea Career and Technical High School is 91% black and Latino.

70% of the students receive free lunch.

That's why the NYCDOE is making these kids take the ELA Regents exam again.

You can bet had this happened to white and Asian kids at Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech, the NYCDOE would have sent emissaries out into the community to assuage outraged parents over the mess.

But a majority black and Latino school with 70% of the student body receiving free school lunch?

Screw 'em, Walcott and Bloomberg say.

The next time you hear Walcott or Bloomberg or Polakow-Suransky or any of the functionaries at Tweed say how much they care about the kids while teachers are only in it for themselves, remember the kids from Chelsea Career and Technical High School.

NYCDOE STILL Doesn't Have Common Core Curriculum Materials Ready

Tomorrow the new Common Core test results for ELA and math classes, 3rd-8th grade, will be released to the public.

They are going to show some very, very low scores.

The scores will be so drastically different from previous years because these tests were a) based on the new Common Core standards and b) had difficulty levels ramped up several grade levels for each grade (i.e., what used to be tested on the fifth grade math test now was on the 3rd grade test and the time allotments for the tests were cut from previous years.)

You can bet that Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Walcott will do their best tomorrow to spin these low results as the fault of "bad teachers" and "failing schools" tomorrow when they give their press conference.

The Times reported that the city and the union have already been trying to spin the results before they're released and that the low scores threaten Bloomberg's education legacy.

The city is going to argue that these are new "baseline" scores and that improvement will follow each year as Mayor Bloomberg's vaunted education legacy goodness filters down through the schools and helps all the "bad teachers" Bloomberg hasn't been able to fire get up to speed on these new 21st century Common Core standards.

But NY1 reports that the NYCDOE still doesn't have Common Core curriculum materials ready for elementary and middle school teachers:

New York is implementing new national learning standards, called the Common Core, much quicker than most other states. But educators say that means they have not had the textbooks, teaching guides, worksheets and timelines they need to teach the day-to-day lessons.

"It's almost as if you're asking, you know, a truck driver to deliver goods without a truck," said Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers.

It was only in May that principals got the chance to choose a curriculum recommended by the city.
Schools do not have to use one of the city's recommended curricula, but 87 percent decided to this year. In the past, it has been about 70 percent.

Now with September fast approaching, most of what schools ordered has still not arrived.

"The problem is the teachers need the curriculum in July and August because that's when they plan for the year," said Mulgrew.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt says its math curriculum is on track to be delivered to 600 elementary schools this month, as is Scholastic's English curriculum, which 230 middle schools have ordered.

But the nearly 900 schools that chose curricula from Pearson, the same publishing company that produces the state tests, face a more complicated timeline.

Materials are being posted online throughout the summer and fall and shipped to schools in bits and pieces. The student textbooks should arrive in time for each lesson, but just barely in many cases.

Several teaching guides are scheduled to arrive after schools should have used them, although Pearson says it will post them online in advance. 

As Diane Ravitch noted in this post, tomorrow many in the education reform establishment and the corporate media are going to use these 3rd-8th grade ELA and math scores as proof positive that NY State schools are "failing" and there are tens of thousands of "bad teachers" across the state who need to be weeded out by the new APPR teacher evaluation system.

And yet, here in the city teachers did not have the materials to teach students what would be on the Common Core tests last year, which automatically calls these scores into question.

But even this year, teachers will be scrambling to get students ready for the tests because the vendors who are supposed to deliver the curriculum materials - including the incompetents at Pearson - can't meet the deadlines and get the stuff to schools on time.

Please remember all of this tomorrow as the usual corporate education reform concern trolls wring their hands in the media about the low scores and what it means for the schools and for students.

It really means nothing because they gave these Common Core tests before teachers had the material to prepare students for them, though you can bet the reformy people will not message it that way to the public.