Daily News Declares War On Teachers And Parents Who Are Critics Of Corporate Education Reform

The Daily News editorial page is certain that Governor Cuomo MUST not decouple student performance from teacher evaluations:

Gov. Cuomo’s sudden call for a “comprehensive review” of New York’s use of the Common Core educational standards stands as a loud warning that the drive for teacher accountability is in dire jeopardy.

...

What Cuomo should now clearly state is not what is on the table but what’s off it. Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia should join him in laying down non-negotiables:

They will not bend on ensuring higher standards that closely track Common Core guidelines developed over many years by the nation’s top education experts.

And that they will not accept any attempt to decouple student achievement gains, as measured primarily through rigorous state tests, from teacher ratings.

The teachers union, petrified about finally being subjected to serious evaluations, has played a skillful and cynical game in amplifying anti-Common Core anxieties among parents and legislators.

Stunningly, Speaker Carl Heastie, who represents the Bronx, has gone along with a suburban-based movement that works to the disadvantage of the city’s largely minority student body.

Kids in struggling schools have for years been plagued by low expectations and too many lower-performing teachers.

For their sake, supporters of higher standards for kids and more accountability for teachers must gird for war.

Did the Daily News just declare war against parents and teachers in this state who are opposed to the corporate education reform agenda Cuomo, NYSED and the Regents have imposed?

They did indeed - and of course, they do so with a straw man argument that attempts to paint teachers as children who wish to skirt accountability and parents who go along with critiques of the APPR teacher evaluation system as dupes of the teachers union.

Another straw man argument from a pro-reform newspaper editorial board about teacher evaluations - gee, what a surprise.

Let's dispense with the straw man argument that teachers don't want to be evaluated.

Teachers are not afraid of evaluations - we're afraid of an irrational evaluation system that has an adverse affect on our jobs, professional reputations, and ability to take care of our families.

Cuomo's vaunted APPR teacher evaluation system - the one the reformers at the Daily News love so much - is currently in the courts with a judge deciding whether to toss part or all of it onto the junk heap because it is an irrational system set up not to fairly evaluate teachers but rather one that uses a value-added method that NYSED refuses to explain, that often seems inexplicable (more on this in a moment) and is rigged to find at least 7% of teachers "ineffective."

Sheri Lederman, 19 year veteran teacher, sued the state over her APPR VAM because she went from 14 out of 20 on her state test component to 1 out of 20 in a year - even though her students performed similarly on their tests in both years.

Lederman, who was rated "effective" overall on her evaluation, nonetheless was given an "ineffective" rating on her state test component, something that now matters a lot since Governor Cuomo has insisted the state test component should count for 50% of a teacher's evaluation.

Here's Carol Burris in the Washington Post explaining the irrationality of the system and how it played out in the Lederman court case:

The exasperated New York Supreme Court judge, Roger McDonough, tried to get Assistant Attorney General Galligan to answer his questions. He was looking for clarity and instead got circuitous responses about bell curves, “outliers” and adjustments. Fourth-grade teacher Sheri Lederman’s VAM score of “ineffective” was on trial.

The more Ms. Galligan tried to defend the bell curve of growth scores as science, the more the judge pushed back with common sense. It was clear that he did his homework. He understood that the New York State Education Department’s VAM system artificially set the percentage of “ineffective” teachers at 7 percent. That arbitrary decision clearly troubled him. “Doesn’t the bell curve make it subjective? There has to be failures,” he asked.

The defender of the curve said that she did not like the “failure” word.

The judge quipped, “Ineffectives, how about that?” Those in attendance laughed.

Ms. Galligan preferred the term “outlier.” Those who got ineffective growth scores were “the outliers who are not doing a good job,” the attorney said. She seemed oblivious to the fourth-grade teacher who was sitting not 10 feet away from where she stood.

“Did her students learn nothing?” Justice McDonough asked. “How could it be that she went from 14 out of 20 points to 1 out of 20 points in one year?” He noted that the students’ scores were quite good and not that different from the year before.

Back behind the bell curve Ms. Galligan ran. As she tried to explain once again, the judge said, “Therein lies the imprecise nature of this measure.”

...

Lederman was not the only teacher in the school to get a poor score. In 2014, 21 percent of the staff at E.M. Baker School received a score of “ineffective,” 21 percent “developing” and 57 percent were “effective.”  Just the year before, not one teacher received an “ineffective” score.

The irrationality was not limited to the teachers of Sheri Lederman’s school, one of the highest performing elementary schools in the state. In 2014, 44 percent of the teachers of the Fox Meadow School in Scarsdale received growth scores that said they were not “effective” teachers with 22 percent rated “ineffective.”  Yet 61 percent of the school’s students were proficient in English Language Arts, and 75 percent were proficient in math—more that double the state’s proficiency rate.   Similar results were found at the high-achieving Harbour Hill School in Roslyn, where 36 percent of its teachers received growth scores that labeled them “ineffective.”

The Lincoln School in Rochester, is a school designated as a priority/failing school by the state. Its proficiency rate was less than 3 percent. In 2014, 100 percent of its teachers received “effective” state scores, with 7 percent being rated “highly effective.”  At another school facing receivership, The Martin Luther King Jr School in Utica, New York, 60 percent of the teachers received “effective” VAM scores and 40 percent were given VAM scores of “highly effective .”

I point out these dramatic differences not to disparage or embarrass the teachers of any school, but rather to shine a light on the irrational state-produced teacher scores based on the New York Common Core tests. For more information on the unreliable manner in which these scores functioned in 2013 and 2014, read here.

Bruce Lederman argued the irrationality of that rating system before the court. He laid out a careful, systematic argument. He was not opposed to evaluation. He was not even opposed to evaluation based on a measurement of student learning growth. He objected to a rating created in a black box that spit out predictions that compared his wife’s students to “avatar students.” He was disturbed that when questioned, that system responds with “because we say so.” He noted that “the magic of numbers brings a suspension of common sense.”

“There is nothing in the law that requires a bell curve,” he argued. He explained that a bell curve with its forced failures violates that law that requires that every teacher must be able to get all scores. Not only did he want the court to set aside his wife’s score, he wanted the court to “declare the measure an abuse of discretion” because “the State Education Department does not get a pass on unreasonable and irrational actions.”

NYSED never showed cause for why Lederman received the 1 out of 20 on her VAM score the year after she received 14 out of 20.  They instead tried to have the Lederman case dismissed twice (here and here), arguing there was no harm to Lederman because she was rated "effective" overall despite the "ineffective" VAM score.

But the evaluation system that the Ledermans have put on trial has been made that much worse by Governor Cuomo and the Legislature this year, with test scores now increased to about 50% of a teacher's evaluation rating, so the "irrationality" of the state's APPR VAM matters greatly and a decision by the judge to declare the measure "an abuse of discretion" will have serious consequences for the governor, the Legislature, the Board of Regents, NYSED and teachers and schools all across the state.

But not for the reformers at the DN editorial board.

They want teachers held "accountable" for student performance, the rationality, sanity and justice of the evaluation system be damned, and so, they publish a straw man argument in today's paper to warn Cuomo they will not be happy if his teacher evaluation system is changed and warning that "war" coming between reformers and the rest of the system.

BTW, Sheri Lederman got her latest APPR teacher evaluation rating from the state and her state test component VAM has again changed drastically - she received an 11 out of 20 on it.

So from 14 out of 20 to 1 out of 20 to 11 out of 20 in three year's time.

That's some trend.

How exactly do the reform-friendly writers at the Daily News defend a system that jumps around like that?

Reality is, they don't - they simply ignore the problems with the system, smash their proverbial fists down onto their desks, insist upon "teacher accountability!" and "gird for war!"

A shameful editorial, but just the kind of thing we can expect from education reformers as they desperately try to save their precios education reforms.

Daily News Carries Water For Cuomo, Continues To Ignore Systemic Prison Abuse In State System

Enough is enough.

The New York Daily News continues to hammer the Rikers prison scandal, putting stories on the front page day after day, calling for resignations and investigations and kinds of change at the prison.

Good for them.

But they inexplicably continue to ignore the systemic abuse, torture and murder of prisoners in the state prison system by corrections officers even as they hammer the Rikers story.

There have been 60+ allegations of prisoners being beaten, choked, abused, and threatened with waterboarding at Clinton Correction Facility in Dannemora and an allegation of a prisoner being beaten to death by corrections officers known as the "Beat Up Squad" at Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon.

The NY Times reported on both of these stories the past few weeks, but other New York papers, including the crusading Daily News that never met a Rikers story it didn't want to put on the front page and editorialize about, has ignored them.

Today the Albany Times Union published an editorial, asking when the Department of Justice will investigate these allegations of torture, abuse and murder in the state prison system under Cuomo:

Cruel and All Too Usual

“There is no protection from the freezing temperature … the prisoners are still standing in the courtyard, shivering with cold, tortured by hunger and fainting from exhaustion. In such conditions, the prisoner has only one hope left, to die.”

So goes a description of a roll call by photographer-author Brian Gaylor in “Ghosts of Auschwitz,” about the most infamous Nazi death camp.

“Once the frisking was done, they continued to make us stand with our hands on the fence. Those of us that didn’t have gloves were suffering, and the staff didn’t care.”

That second account is not from World War II. It’s from an modern-day inmate of a Feb. 7, 2013, incident at Bare Hill Correctional Facility in northern New York. The incident, related by reporter Alysia Santo of The Marshall Project, a journalism nonprofit that focuses on criminal justice, involved a prison yard search for weapons after an inmate’s face was slashed. The search that went on, inmates claim, for 30 minutes or more in the 5- to 10-degree cold. Inmates say they were ordered to remove their hats and gloves and hold a chain-link fence, even after the search was over, as guards waited for someone to come clean about the assault. Ten prisoners suffered frostbite.

Which brings us, once again, to the question: What is going on in New York’s prisons, and when will the U.S. Department of Justice take notice?

The question springs from Clinton Correctional Facility where, after the escape by two prisoners this summer, inmates told The New York Times that guards beat handcuffed prisoners, slammed them against walls and cell bars, and choked them or suffocated them with plastic bags over their heads.

The question lingers at Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, a prison with a history of complaints of official brutality, where the Times recently reported on allegations that an inmate was beaten to death in April by what’s known at the prison as the “Beat Up Squad,” and witnesses put in solitary confinement and threatened.

The response from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration on the allegations at Clinton Correctional? They’re being looked into. At Fishkill? Looking into it; State Police will turn over their findings to the Dutchess County District Attorney in the “near future.” At Bare Hill? No comment, since it’s a matter of litigation.

When is enough enough? When does one report of abuse after another add up to a possible pattern of systematic, dehumanizing brutality?

When will the Cuomo administration concede that this demands an outside investigation, not one by the same state government that operates these prisons and stands to be on the hook for possible civil rights violations and potential damages?

And when will the Justice Department take notice? When these prisoners’ terms are done, and they return to society, to put into practice all the lessons they have learned about how civilized people behave?

When will the DOJ take notice of these allegations?

Hell, when will the New York Daily News?

It seems that if prison abuse doesn't occur at Rikers Island, they're not interested in the allegations in the least.

The cynic in me wonders if they continue to do Rikers stories day after day because they get to hammer de Blasio but they ignore the state prison abuse allegations because that would reflect badly on Governor Cuomo and they wouldn't want to hurt his feelings (or his political standing.)

The same goes for the politicians in this state, all of whom continue to ignore the state abuse stories even as some talk about criminal justice issues.

Some of these politicians have been hailing Cuomo as a criminal justice reformer - take Hakeem Jeffries, for example, who gave Cuomo an award from the Urban League for being swellest politician on criminal justice reform issues even as allegations of systemic abuse, torture and murder of prisoners by New York correctional officers surface in the NY Times.

The newspapers and many in the political establishment have it out for de Blasio these days, the Rikers story being just the latest example of where they take the rhetorical bludgeon out and bash him over the head with it.

I think the Daily News is justified to do so with the Rikers mess.

Yet I cannot fathom why the Daily News and other newspapers (outside of the Times and Times Union) or politicians like Hakeem Jeffries stay silent on the state prison abuse allegations even as they speak out on the Rikers mess other than they have a political agenda to protect Andrew Cuomo and destroy Bill de Blasio.

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.

Cablevision Drops $1 Bid For Daily News, Says Zuckerman Paper Isn't Worth Even A Buck

Wow:

It was one dollar too much for Cablevision Systems Corp (CVC.N). The cable company is planning to pull out of the auction process for the New York Daily News after spending hundreds of hours analyzing a potential deal, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Cablevision had bid just $1 for the tabloid newspaper in March, Reuters reported at the time. It is now planning to bow out ahead of a second-round bid deadline next week, the source said on Tuesday, asking not to be named because the process is confidential.

Cablevision, which owns the Long Island, N.Y.-based newspaper Newsday, could not justify paying even $1 for New York Daily News because of its poor financial condition and prospects, the person said. Even if Cablevision bought the newspaper's state-of-the-art printing press, it would have still lost money on the deal, the source said.

The DN is reported to be losing $30 million a year.

When Cablevision won't take the DN for even a buck, that's when you know it's in trouble.

Think about this story next time you see the DN editorial page get shrill over so-called "failing schools."

It's a newspaper that loses $30 million a year that isn't worth a dollar to Cablevision.

If anybody should know about failure, it's the Daily News.

Daily News Hawks Merryl Tisch As Part "15 For 2015" List, But Carol Burris' Assessment Much More Accurate

It's so interesting to see the selective writing of the functionaries for the oligarchy at the Daily News when it comes to Merryl Tisch.

They have a "15 For 2015" fluff piece out today that promotes the usual neo-liberal claptrap you get from the Zuckerman Daily News -and Regents Chancellor Tisch is on that list:

MERRYL TISCH
Mayor de Blasio has often accused his predecessor, Mike Bloomberg, of hastily abandoning failing schools in favor and closing and reopening them as clusters of new, small schools.

Although the evidence shows that the smaller schools have well served their students, de Blasio has done his own quick abandonment — of the reform strategy.

He and schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña say they will turn around 96 struggling campuses with new money and services, firing staff only as a last resort.

But state Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch is unlikely to let the experiment play out — and with good reason: The schools "have failed for generations now," she says.

She has the power to effectively order them closed if de Blasio and Fariña fail to sufficiently overhaul teaching staffs.

Meantime, Tisch will be at the center of negotiations to toughen teacher evaluations, with Gov. Cuomo breathing down her neck.

She'll continue to champion the worthy Common Core standards, which remain under siege across the state. In 2015, they will get weakened for good — or be cemented in classrooms from Brooklyn to Buffalo.

All that is after she finds a likeminded state education commissioner to replace the outgoing John King. Josh Greenman

What's missing from Josh Greenman's paean to Tisch?

Lots of stuff, including the awful Common Core implementation (which Governor Cuomo himself criticized, calling it "chaos") and Tisch's refusal to take responsibility for handing over a charter school to a con man named "Dr" Ted Morris Jr.

Carol Burris had a much more accurate assessment of Merryl Tisch at The Answer Sheet.

Here it is, in full:

The hallmark of a corporate reformer is an undying belief that numerical measures of accountability are the primary lever of school change. New York State Schools Chancellor, Merryl Tisch, is just such a reformer — a true believer in “what gets measured gets done.” From school, teacher and principal evaluation systems, measurement by the numbers distinguishes the focus of Tisch’s school reforms.

In describing her rollout of Common Core testing, Tisch said, “we jump into the deep end,” using the royal “we” to obscure the fact that kids were taking the jump. She also rejected the notion that school and educator ratings be put on hold during the rollout, stating that “we cannot have the implementation of Common Core that is isolated from an accountability system.”

Despite the repeated use of “we,” Tisch has excluded herself, her state commissioner of education and her Board of Regents from the ratings. Accountability is for students, educators and schools, who have little to no input into the commanded change.

Although I do not suggest we subject Tisch to the silly number ratings given to teachers and principals, I do think it is fair to review New York student growth under her leadership. Tisch was selected as chancellor in the spring of 2009. Since 2010, New York’s graduation rate increased only 1.5 percent, which includes two years of no growth at all. In looking at graduation data, one will note that prior to 2010, state graduation rates were climbing, even as graduation standards (meaning the required passing of Regents exams), were increasing. In addition, the earning of the Regents Diploma with Advanced Designation, a consistent bar with no change in standards, has been flat since she became chancellor.

In 2009, the average New York SAT scores were 485 (reading), 502 (math), and 478 (writing). In 2014, they were nearly identical—488, 502, 478 —no improvement there to show.

Tisch “raised the bar” for Grade 3-8 proficiency in 2010, and in 2011 and 2012, there was little or no growth in student achievement. In 2013, the Common Core tests were given and proficiency rates dramatically dropped. Though the chancellor promised that scores would improve the second year of the Common Core tests, there were no improvements in English Language Arts scores and minimal improvement in math.

If teachers and principals are to be judged by score growth, what growth has the chancellor created after nearly six years at the helm? The whirling dervish of change in standards, tests, diploma requirements and accountability measures, has produced no discernible increase in student performance. Perhaps the hope is that if you change everything else, no one will notice that no progress has been made.

The fascination with holding teachers and schools accountable by the numbers has generated an endless (and expensive) stream of data from the New York State Education Department, which she oversees. One of the most recent measures was a report entitled “Where Are They Now?” described in an New York State Education Department slide show that makes claims about the percentages of New York public high school students who enroll in college.

In conjunction with this report, the state Education Department posted school by school figures, purporting to show how many graduates were attending college, with data that they claimed came directly from the National Student Clearinghouse.  The data are fraught with error and under-reporting of college enrollment, which I wrote about here. What I did not know when I wrote the blog was where the error originated. Since that time, I have received access to the database of my school’s graduates at the Clearinghouse level, and have determined that the vast majority of the under-reporting errors, (22 of 31 in a class of 261), were made in the generation of the State Education Department report. Meanwhile, Westchester and Rockland county districts are finding even greater rates of error than my school’s 12 percent, with some schools’ rates at over 20 percent.

What is remarkable is that the chancellor has yet to admit these errors, or even ask the department to take down the public reports, which can still be found here.

In the past month, other examples of serious error on the part of the New York State Education Department have come to light regarding charter school approval and regulation. Tisch has been part of a public campaign to increase charter schools, with the chancellor asserting, “I believe in opening them aggressively.”

Part of the aggressive campaign was the approval of the Greater Works Charter School by her Board of Regents. The leader of Greater Works was 22-year-old  Dr. Ted Morris, Jr. When it came to light that that his resume was a collection of lies and misrepresentations, Tisch not only deflected the blame but said that the charter school, whose board was recruited through Craig’s list, should still open. Following continued accounts in the press, New York State Education Department finally asked the charter to withdraw its application.

Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters provides an excellent account of that and other New York charter scandals here. She concludes her blog by asking in reference to the State Education Department and Tisch, “where is the accountability for them?”

Given the current system of appointment, Merryl Tisch, who has wealth and deep political connections, will likely remain in power. She is married to billionaire James S. Tisch, the CEO of the Loews Corporation, and has been a friend since childhood of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who controls the appointments through the votes of the Assembly. The people of New York have no direct mechanism to have her removed.

In her oversized influence on the fate of public school children, Tisch is hardly alone. Bill Gates, Eli Broad, the Walton family, Rupert Murdoch and Michael Bloomberg are but a few of the other billionaire reformers who have managed to bend public education to their will, while absolving themselves from any accountability for the damage their policies have wrought. They are socially buffered by surrounding themselves with like-minded individuals who are insulated from bad educational policies because their children and grandchildren attend private schools or sycophants who tell them only what they want to hear. Public school educators and parents are caricatured and dismissed as either self-interested or ignorant and misinformed.

Healthy democracies infuse accountability throughout the system–from the bottom to the top. We cannot afford a governance system where those who assume positions of power–whether elected or appointed–escape responsibility.

This year, six Regents are up for reappointment. Given the past year of discontent — during which the majority of New York voters have rejected the Common Core, high-stakes standardized testing and the evaluation of teachers by test scores, polls shows — it is time for the Democratic Assembly to be accountable to the public by appointing Regents who more closely reflect the views and experience of their constituents. If they are not willing to assume that responsibility, then the public should demand a direct voice either through Regent or State Commissioner election.

Amazing how Daily News editor Josh Greenman managed to ignore all of the points Burris raised + the "Dr" Ted fiasco.

Par for the course, though, at both the Daily News editorial board and in the corridors of power.

Accountability is for the little people, skirting accountability is for the powerful and the Daily News editorial pages are there to spread the neo-liberal claptrap and propaganda.

Daily News Continues To Shill For The Common Core

A Siena poll released today found the following:

BY a 49-39 percent margin, voters want to see implementation of the Common Core stopped rather than continued.

Despite these numbers, Common Core-supporting newspaper the Daily News reports voters are "split" on the Core here in New York.

Here's their headline:

Voters back Cuomo; split on Common Core and hydrofracking: Siena Poll

Since when is 49%-39% - a 10 percent plurality in opposition to the Core - a "split"?

50%-50% is a split.

51%-49% is a split.

Hell, I might even go with 52%-48% is close to a split if the argument you make to back that up is good enough.

But 49%-39% is a "split"?

Nahh - that's a 10 percentage point plurality of NYers who are opposed to the Core.

Leave it to the pro-CCSS hacks at the Daily News, ever the evangelicals for the Common Core, to continue to carry the Gospel of the Common Core to the masses in their Siena poll story headline even as the masses turn against it.

No wonder the print edition of the Daily News isn't long for this world.

When you're buying a newspaper, you kinda want it to, I dunno, cover the news accurately and truthfully.

Siena Poll Finds 49% Of New Yorkers Say Common Core Needs To Go

These poll numbers are going to make NYSED Commissioner King and Regents Chancellor Tisch very, very sad:

BY a 49-39 percent margin, voters want to see implementation of the Common Core stopped rather than continued.

Digging into the numbers:

"While a majority of New York City voters and a plurality of Democrats think Common Core standards continue to be implemented, a majority of Republicans, independents and upstaters, and a plurality of downstate suburbanites think implementation should be stopped. A majority of white voters want implementation stopped, a majority of black voters want implementation continued, and Hispanic voters are evenly divided," Greenberg said.

Support for the Common Core has plummeted across the state, with New York City the only stronghold of support remaining.

But if I were John King, Merryl Tisch, Andrew Cuomo or any other Common Core proponent, I wouldn't take much solace from that because the trajectory of CCSS support is clearly tanking.

By a 47%-40% margin, Dems in the state support CCSS.

By 60%-25% margin, Republicans oppose CCSS.

And by a 53%-39% margin, independents oppose CCSS.

Common Core proponents have completely lost Republicans, they have lost a majority of independents and they've lost 40% of Dems, maintaining a slim 7 point plurality in Dem support for the Core.

So far, Core proponents have been able to keep the Core alive and well in NY State and until politicians are made to pay for their political support of the Core and the ancillary reforms like testing and teacher evaluations tied to tests that go with it, I don't see that changing in the short term.

But as support for the Common Core continues to erode, political support in Albany is going to soften and eventually erode too.

We're at 49%-39% in opposition to the Core.

It's a 10 percentage point plurality.

Back in February, here's where voters were:

Most New York voters back a two-year delay in the implementation of the controversial Common Core education standards, but they remain divided on the quality of the curriculum itself, a new Siena College poll found.

The poll found a bare majority – 50 percent to 38 percent – of New Yorkers backs a two-year delay of the roll out of the standards, which has come under criticism from parents and teachers alike for a reliance on standardized tests and lack of preparation.

But voters are divided on the learning standards themselves, the poll found.

Thirty-six percent say the standards are too demanding, while 24 percent believe they aren’t demanding enough. Just 23 percent believe the standards strike the right balance.

Different questions asked about the Core back in February, but you get the idea here how opposition to the Core in New York State is beginning to solidify.

It is incumbent upon Core critics and opponents to continue to grow the opposition to the Core and make some politicians who support the CCSS pay a political price for that support.

How Does Eva Moskowitz Not Make The Daily News' "50 Most Powerful Women In NYC" List?

The list is here.

Why isn't Eva Moskowitz on it?

Hillary Clinton, Kristen Gillibrand, and Chirlane McCray are on it.

Carmen Farina is on it.

Emma Wolfe, de Blasio's chief aide, is on it.

Kathyrn Wilde is on it.

I get those names.

A bunch of women who run Fortune 500 companies are on the list.

I get those.

And then there are women listed that make you scratch your head.

Reshma Saujani, perennial loser for political office, is on it.

The head of Divamoms.com is on it.

All right, maybe these women are "powerful" in their own right.

For instance, no one is more full of shit than Saujani, yet somehow she manages to cobble together a public persona that kinda hides that.

Still, I don't understand why Moskowitz didn't make the list.

Can there be a more powerful person in education in NY State today than Eva Moskowitz?

She forced a mayor to his knees in a fight over charter school co-locations, got the governor to put into the budget a law that makes the city either find space for all future charter schools or pay the rent for them, and is on the cusp of opening 14 more charter schools over the next year (all of which will have space provided or rent paid for by the NYCDOE.)

While Eva no longer has a bat phone to the NYCDOE chancellor's office anymore, as she did during the Bloomberg Years, she has other ways of getting exactly what she wants.

That Moskowitz isn't on the list but the head of divamoms.com, a bunch of actresses, a comedian,  and Linda Stasi are is as absurd as the need to promote the "50 Most Powerful Women In NYC" list so prominently on the Daily News website.

I guess we're in the dog days of summer already.

We must be - not only is the DN promoting this kind of "news," but I'm blogging about it!

Looking Forward To Daily News Investigation Of In-House Grading Of Regents Exams At Charter Schools

There was a Daily News story this morning that alleged grade inflation on ELA Regents exams, reporting that scores "plummeted" in 2013 when the exams were no longer graded by teachers in-house but were instead sent to centralized locations where they were graded by other teachers.

I posted about that story this morning in a piece entitled Daily News Misses A Big Part Of ELA Regents Score Plummet Story, raising two points that were ignored in the News story:

1. The Regents/SED changed the grading charts from 2012 to 2013, raising the number of correct responses required on the multiple choice component as well as the scores needed on the writing components in order for students to pass the exam. The difficulty of the reading passages and vocabulary used in the multiple choice questions were also increased. These changes to the test contributed in part to the drop in scores.

2. Regents exams are still graded in-house at charter schools. If there was grade inflation at traditional public schools as the DN reported, it behooves them to now take a look at charters where they are still grading their own exams.

There was undoubtedly grade inflation at some schools, including the ones named in the DN article like the School For Excellence where scores fell 50 percentage points when exams went from being graded in-house to a centralized location. 

That's an outrageous drop and is pretty clearly a sign of a massaging of stats - something that is not isolated to schools, btw, as crime stats, emergency response times, fire stats and jobs programs numbers were also manipulated during the Bloomberg Era as City Hall put a lot of pressure on those below to consistently get "better" stats.

Nonetheless it's wrong, it shouldn't have been done and kudos to the Daily News for pointing it out and naming some names of schools with big drops in scores.

I now look forward to the Daily News doing a big expose on charter schools where the Regents exams are still graded in-house.

Considering the emphasis the charter industry puts on test scores and making comparisons via those scores to traditional public schools, they might want to take a look to see how many charter schools are massaging their statistics during in-house grading sessions.

You can bet there's some.

I won't hold my breath waiting for that charter school/Regents exam grade inflation story however.

Because the Daily News has an agenda when it comes to education issues and that agenda is almost always pro-charter/anti-traditional public school.

And you can see that in just how this grade inflation story was framed, both by what they put into it and what they left out.

A fair story would have noted that charters still grade Regents exam in-house and reported on the changes to the grading chart by SED.

The DN story didn't do either and that's why it feels like another hammer job in a long line of DN hammer jobs on traditional public schools and traditional public school teachers.

Daily News Misses A Big Part Of ELA Regents Score Plummet Story

The Daily News claims cheating teachers were the main reason scores on the 2013 ELA Regents exam fell:

Scores on English Regents exams for high schoolers plummeted when the city cracked down on grade-fudging teachers, a Daily News analysis shows.

Thousands of public school students failed the high-stakes state tests in 2013 after the city instituted new grading rules to prevent score inflation.

A stunning 373 schools out of 490 saw their passing rates drop after new guidelines barred teachers from grading tests administered at their own school.

Students must pass the test with a 65 or higher to graduate.

Overall, the number of students who failed English exams jumped from 27% in 2012 to 35% in 2013, a statistical leap not reflected in the other nine Regents subjects. At 73 schools the passing rate plummeted by more than 20 percentage points.

...

City Education Department spokeswoman Devora Kaye said that she didn’t believe the grading crackdown was responsible for the drop in scores. Algebra and History tests also used open-ended questions, she said, yet scores didn’t decline in those subjects .

David Bloomfield, an education professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Grad Center, was willing to take a stab at identifying the cause of the drop.

“It appears that more objective scoring resulted in a higher failure rate,” he said.

A reason why the grades fell that never gets mentioned in the Daily News article?

The Regents changed the grading chart so that students needed to get more multiple choice questions right and score higher on the three written components in order to pass.

I covered this back in January for the 2014 Regents exam:

Brutal ELA Regents Exam Grading Chart From NYSED

Okay, they're looking for a high failure rate at SED on the ELA Regents exam, that's for sure.

Students need to get 20 out of 25 multiple choice questions right in order to get only a 6 on their writing component.

Given how hard the passages were, I suspect we are going to see lots of 6's on the writing components.

That means we're going to get lots of failures.

The chart is even harder than last August's when students had to get 19 out of 25 multiple choice right in order to pass with a 6 out of 10 on their writing components.

That was a brutal test too.

But IMO the Regents and the SED saved the best for the latest - a truly brutal test with a brutal scoring chart.

It's not an accident that as teacher evals have been tied to Regents scores, the charts and tests have gotten harder each time.

Commissioner King, Regents Chancellor Tisch and Governor Cuomo have a political agenda here - to prove that public schools are failing and public school teachers are failures.

The children of the state just happen to be collateral damage in all of this.

I have some students from a remedial class who have failed the exam three or four times, depending on whether they took it over the summer or not.

It is really difficult to see any of them passing today's exam with the scoring chart handed down from King and Tisch.

I don't know what to say to them when they say "You mean I have to spend another five months preparing for this exam I can't pass?" 

And I covered this back in June 2013 as well:

The ELA Regents Exam: Set Up By The Regents And The NYSED To Fail Both Students And Teachers

There are two good pieces on the brutal scoring chart that the NYSED and Regents are using for the 2013 June ELA Regents exam.

Gotham Schools covered the story yesterday:

Bronx Center for Science and Math Assistant Principal Stephen Seltzer sent a letter to State Education Commissioner John King expressing frustration about the new conversion chart that has made it more difficult for students to pass the English Regents exam.

Seltzer writes that “the rubrics and conversion charts must be aligned and consistent, and both should be made available when teachers are preparing students, not at the time of the exam.”

In the letter, sent Thursday, Seltzer writes that there is a four-point difference in the June 2011 and June 2013 conversion charts. He gives the following example to illustrate his point:

A student who scored a 23 in the multiple-choice and a 7 in the writing received a 79 in 2011 but a 75 in 2013; a student who scored a 21 on the multiple-choice and a 5 on the writing passed with a 65 in 2011 but failed with a 60 in 2013.

The change to the conversion tables was made without corresponding changes in rubrics, which makes it more difficult for teachers to identify where students’ must improve if they have to take the test again, Seltzer writes in the letter.

“A child can receive a higher raw score, meaning they’ve answered more questions correct, but receive a lower actual grade,” said Bronx Center Principal Ed Tom. “You’ve technically done better on the exam, but the score will reflect a lower grade.”

...

Tom said his school usually has about a 90 percent passing rate on the ELA Regents exams. But this year the school is at a 75 percent passing rate. Tom said he looked at individual student grades and the numbers don’t seem to make sense.

He said a number of students scored well on the multiple choice section, but they struggled to received credit on the short answer and essay sections, which require human grading.

“As we’re looking child by child, we’re noticing that it simply doesn’t make sense that a kid would know so much information to score almost perfectly on the multiple choice and not be able to write a short response or essay to get any points,” Tom said.

My Life As A NYC Teacher posted about the same issue:

As an ELA teacher, I have a stake in the results of these tests - stake through the heart that is.  Since teachers are now going to be evaluated based on student performance on these tests, we can be fired as a result of these results.  For this reason, we English teachers here at Jonathan Levin H.S. in the Bronx just took a look at the scoring charts for the June 2013 English exam and the January 2013 exam.  What we found is interesting indeed.  Here they are.

June 2013 ELA Scoring Chart

January 2013 ELA Scoring Chart

In June 2013 if a student scored 16 on the multiple choice section and 7 on the writing sections, the student failed with a 61.  However if that same student had been lucky enough to take the test last January 2013, scoring 16 on the multiple choice and 7 on the writing would have yielded a passing score of 65.

DOE formula #1: Fewer students passing = more teachers fired.

Going back to Aug. 2012, June 2012 and Jan. 2012, we find the following:

                        Multiple Choice          Writing           Score
Aug. 2012:               16                          7                     65
June 2012                 16                          7                     65
Jan. 2012                  16                          7                     68

In other words, the June 2013 ELA Regents exam is set up to fail more students than in the past.  Coincidentally, New York State has just "adopted" - read: had shoved down our throats - a new evaluation system that the UFT, rather than condemning, seems to be endorsing.  See Chapter 52: Open Season on Teachers.  Under this system, the "value" of a teacher is tied directly to student performance.

DOE formula #2: more failing students =  more fired teachers.

And that really is what all this is about - firing more teachers and being able to use the scores in the news media to "prove" that there are many "failing" schools and "bad" teachers as a reason for why we need more corporate education reformers like charter schools and online schools.

It is not a mistake that the chart has gotten so harsh in the year that accountability has been moved from the school district and the school to the individual teacher via the Cuomo/Tisch/King APPR teacher evaluation system.

Unless the NYSED and the Regents get hammered in the press by parents for the rig job they've pulled with this scoring chart, you can expect the August ELA Regents scoring chart to be as bad.

The fix is in with this scoring chart and the scores are going to plummet accordingly.

Expect King and Tisch to wring their hands in the media about all the bad teachers and failing schools and the need for more reforminess as a result of the Regents scores - even though they're the ones who ensured the scores would plummet by rigging the scoring chart.

It's a shame the journalists at the Daily News focus on grade inflation as the sole reason for falling scores.

But if you're a teacher in the NYC school system and you pay even a little attention to the press coverage, you know the DN always has a "Blame Teachers" first mentality.

Was there some grade inflation when teachers graded tests in-house?

Sure, there was some.

Were there some schools where grade inflation was the name of the game during Regents time?

During the high stakes Bloomberg Era where schools got closed based almost solely on test scores, you bet.

The Daily News manages to find many of those schools and name them.

The same thing happened with the fire stats, the emergency response times and the crime stats under Bloomberg, btw - fudging on the numbers because of the pressure from above for constant improvement.

With all of that said, scores on the ELA Regents exam at many NYC schools didn't "plummet" when the in-house grading was ended.

They went down slightly.

And keep in mind that at the same time they were changing the in-house grading, the state was making the exam more difficult., including raising the reading difficulty and complexity on the passages, the vocabulary needed to get the multiple choice questions right, and, as I posted above, the number of correct multiple choice answers as well as scores on the writing components.

Those changes had something to do with the scores falling as well.

Too bad the Daily News journalists either didn't know about that part of the story or didn't care about it because it didn't fit their story frame.

Oh, and one more thing:

You know where they still do in-house grading of Regents exams?

At charter schools, that's where.

Somehow the traditional public school-hating Daily News couldn't bring itself to take on that part of the grade inflation story.

The DN is certain grade inflation took place in traditional public schools, but as usual with the DN, the charters get a free pass.

Classic "Blame Teachers" journalism from the Daily News - but only teachers at traditional public schools.

Compare And Contrast the DN Treatment of John King To Newsday's Treatment

The Daily News ran with a pro-King editorial entitled "Lomg Live The King!" yesterday.

The title tells you everything you need to know about what tack they took in the King/Common Core meeting controversy.

Leaving aside that it took them 11 days to come out and defend him (though we will note that they waited for the announcement of new parent forums before they finally took a public stance on the controversy), the neo-cons at the DN made excuses for why King canceled the state PTA-sponsored town hall meetings and then said they're glad that Commissioner King has said there will be no substantive changes to the state's reform agenda:

And so, opponents are standing athwart education reform history, yelling “stop.”

The national, state and city teachers unions want a three-year “moratorium” on connecting the new Common Core tests to any stakes for parents and students.

That’s code for stalling a necessary reform in order to kill it entirely once it has been weakened.

They are demanding that King halt full rollout of a teacher evaluation system that offers, for the first time, the chance to make objective distinctions between fantastic teachers and awful ones.

A parent group called New York State Allies for Public Education (allied in New York City with the radical anti-testing group Class Size Matters), seconded by state Sen. Jack Martins (R-Mineola), has gone so far as to call for King to resign.

They watched King get crudely lambasted at a town hall meeting on the Common Core — with one parent shouting that her child was being taught curriculum “like a little Nazi.”

After intially (and understandably) nixing four planned town halls as a result, King said Friday he would tour the state, making 16 stops to hear concerns, including four to be broadcast on TV.

We say: Good for King for answering critics head-on. We also say: Good for state Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, who set the Common Core policy that King is carrying out and is standing foursquare with him.

“John has a unique voice for educational reform that includes every child in every school district in every school building in New York State,” Tisch said on Friday, adding for emphasis:

“I’m not backing down here.”

Excellent. Not one inch.

Now here's Newsday's more measured approach to the King controversy.

 

Newsday continues to support the Common Core and APPR teacher evaluation system but notes that parents and teachers have the right to have their concerns heard:

 

Earlier this month, state Education Commissioner John B. King Jr. thought he could back out of public forums on the state's new education standards and testing after the first meeting became a shouting match. According to media accounts, the event in Poughkeepsie was so acrimonious that a person who pleaded with the crowd to settle down was himself shouted down. Two days after that meeting, King canceled four upcoming events, including one in Garden City.

If King thought he stumbled into a brawl when he exchanged ideas with parents and educators about the new Common Core curriculum, it was nothing compared to the brouhaha that erupted when he canceled further exchanges. The response was so explosive that King had to replace the four canceled appearances with 12 new ones, including four on Long Island. They will be moderated by legislators. He also is adding another four that will be televised.

King's decision to cancel meetings without a plan for alternative forums came off as a whiny, embarrassing error. Parents and teachers are upset and fearful: That's why these meetings have to happen. It's not an excuse to cancel them. But calls for King's resignation from legislators and educators are overblown. Test scores of third- through eighth-graders across the state plummeted about 30 percent compared with the previous year because the standards got tougher and the curriculum is new. The curriculum and its toughness are steps in the right direction. But parents are rightfully anxious about the changes

.Listening to and understanding what King is trying to do, and in response, offering suggestions and alternatives that could make the adoption of the new curriculum smoother, should be the point of these forums. But if people want to scream and shout, then King, who works for these taxpayers and has admitted the Common Core rollout was clumsy and poorly explained, needs to sit there and take it.

In short: 

 

Daily News - parents and teachers need to shut and listen to the King.

Newsday - parents and teachers have the right to express their concerns to King, Tisch and the rest of the SED/Regents reformers.

Daily News - ooh, King is so strong and manly.

Newsday - King is a whiny little embarrassment.  He needs to sit down, shut up and listen to the public even if they're only there to scream and shout.

The neo-cons at the DN do love their authoritarianism, don't they?

Alas for them, John King, like most strong men, was exposed as a coward when parents really took it to him.

Daily News Only Likes Teachers Were They're Trying To Stop People With Guns

Did you ever notice how the coverage of teachers and the teaching profession in the New York Daily News is overwhelmingly negative - unless the story is about a teacher trying to stop somebody with a gun?

Take this story of a tragedy in Nevada from yesterday:

A teacher died heroically in Nevada on Monday, using his body as a human shield to protect students after a middle-schooler opened fire with a semiautomatic handgun, police said.

The name of the shooter, believed to be a seventh-grader who died at the scene, was not released. It was not clear if he committed suicide.

The slain educator was identified by his family as Michael Landsberry, a beloved math teacher and former Marine.Witnesses said Landsberry, 45, was shot after he placed himself between the kid with the gun and other students.

“In my estimation, he is a hero. We do know he was trying to intervene,” Reno Deputy Police Chief Tom Robinson said.

Usually in the DN, we get stories about perv teachers, rubber room teachers, lazy teachers who don't want to be held accountable for student performance, etc.

But on days when tragedy strikes a school and a teacher selflessly puts herself/himself in harm's way to save others, the DN neo-cons swerve from the regularly scheduled teacher bashing to acknowledge that sometimes teacher do "heroic" things.

More hypocrisy from the news media aimed at teachers and the teaching profession.

Maybe They Can Use The NY Post And NY Daily News For The Third Grade MOSL Tests?

"If you can read the @nydailynews or the @nypost, you can do college level work," says @joelhota, lamenting many kids graduate hs unready to
— Erin Durkin (@erinmdurkin) October 3, 2013

You can be successful at college if you can read the Post or Daily News?

Try you can be successful at the fourth or fifth grades if you can read the Post and the Daily News.

Not too much in the way of complex text in these rags.

Either Lhota is a moron and reads at a fifth grade level himself or he's trying to suck up to Zuckerman and Murdoch by aggrandizing their papers.

Either way, a stupid comment made by Lhota.

Times, Post, and DN Newspaper Endorsements - NYers Didn't Care About Them

Blake Zeff:

Politicians thought voters cared what the top papers thought. That may not be the case any longer.

In New York, the city’s three largest papers – which each happen to also be among the nation’s top ten in circulation – suffered huge collective whiffs in recent weeks. For the office of mayor, the entire trifecta of the New York Times, Daily News, and Post, all endorsed Christine Quinn in the Democratic primary over Bill de Blasio. This was notable because the papers rarely agree on much (though all supported Michael Bloomberg). And the editorial consensus was viewed as a significant, possible turning point in the campaign for Quinn.

In reality, of course, the papers’ candidate was trounced, failing to make it into a runoff and trailing the winning primary candidate, Bill de Blasio, by nearly 25 points. One could argue that the margin might have been larger without their endorsements, which is hard to disprove. But polls at the time the papers weighed in showed Quinn with a fighter’s chance at squeezing into the primary. It just didn’t happen.

Fortunately for the editorial boards, there would be a second chance just weeks later. The primary for Public Advocate, the second-ranking office in the city, resulted in a runoff, leaving two candidates: Daniel Squadron and Letitia James.

As they did in the mayoral primary, all three papers of seemingly disparate ideological bents – The Times is generally seen as liberal, the Post conservative, and the News somewhere in between – went for Squadron. And last night when the runoff results came in, their chosen candidate…  was defeated by twenty points.

The next time the newspapers look to mock the UFT for their poor endorsement record - well, the newspapers aren't doing so hot lately either.

Few people want to listen to the Voice of God on the editorial page anymore.

Thank God.

Mad Max In Bloomberg's New York City

Thirty bikers surrounded a man in Upper Manhattan yesterday after a fender bender on the Upper West Side, caused when one of the bikers stopped short in front of the man's SUV, and pummeled him in broad daylight in front of his wife and 2-year-old.

The Daily News reported:

Geo Karo On The NY Times Sandanista Hack Piece On De Blasio

If you haven't seen Geo Karo's post on the hack job the NY Times did on Bill de Blasio the other day over the Sandanista bit, you should read it.

Geo says the Times took the FOX News route on this and I think that's exactly right.

That all three daily newspapers - the Post, the News and the Times - are attacking de Blasio daily should tell you something about the fears these people have over what a post-Bloomberg New York City will be like.

It seems unreasonable to me, as I wrote earlier today.

And yet, when you see how shrill they're getting, you can see how fearful they are.

New York Daily News Gets Nearly EVERYTHING Wrong On Navy Yard Shooter Story

More classic DN journalism - just about everything wrong:

The cover of Tuesday's New York Daily News about Monday's Navy Yard shooting is now almost entirely wrong.

The cover features a large AR-15 gun with the headline "Same Gun, Different Slay," and a photo widely circulated on Monday of people tending to a man laid out on a Washington, D.C. corner.

In a press conference Tuesday afternoon, the FBI confirmed that an AR-15 was not used in the shooting. Meanwhile, the photo, since retracted by the AP, has now been determined to be of a medical emergency unrelated to the Navy Yard.

Many outlets, including CNN, NBC News and BuzzFeed initially reported that an AR-15 may have been used by the shooter and published the photo, which had been posted to Twitter by Tim Hogan, communications director for Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.).

Requests for comment to the New York Daily News were not returned as of posting time.

Of course they didn't respond to getting nearly everything in their cover story wrong.

Like their hero, Mayor Bloomberg, they never accept accountability for anything.

Not ever.

Daily News Hits Spitzer On Money Spent On Campaign - But What About Bloomberg?

From the Daily News:

With the polls showing a surge in voter support for Scott Stringer in the Democratic race for city controller, Eliot Spitzer is pouring money — big money — into his redemption drive. Desperation to win has trumped principle.

No surprise there.

On Aug. 30, this column challenged Spitzer to keep faith with his long-stated support for campaign finance reform. He has repeatedly backed public funding of political races to eliminate corruption and to level the playing field for all candidates by setting spending limits.

Manhattan Borough President Stringer is paying for his race with small donations plus matching funds awarded by the city’s campaign finance system. The rules limit Stringer to spending $6 million, and that’s quite enough.

Spitzer entered the race after the deadline to join the voluntary system and is free to spend what he likes. He is aided in that regard by the fact that he comes from a family of high wealth thanks to the real estate business built by his father.

When last we wrote, official filings showed that Spitzer had dipped into his considerable wallet for $3.7 million. Updated documents showed that as of 4 p.m. Thursday, Spitzer had boosted his contributions to $10.3 million and had spent $8.9 million.

Those numbers are likely to rise as Spitzer attempts to buy his way into an office that he took for granted. He and Stringer are on the air with attack ads: Stringer focusing on Spitzer’s betrayal of his oath of office as governor, Spitzer knocking Stringer on a term limits issue. Both are fair game.

What’s not fair game is Spitzer’s push to leverage his wealth to overwhelm Stringer with commercials. He used to swear by campaign reform, but not now.

Worse, Spitzer went so far as to attack Stringer for accepting public-campaign financing. Then he offered an utterly bogus explanation for refusing to limit his own personal spending: He claimed that the business community was planning to run anti-Spitzer ads as payback for Spitzer’s Wall Street crackdown.

Such a blitz never materialized, partly because corporate leaders feared running afoul of Securities and Exchange Commission rules, which prohibit financial houses that deal in municipal securities from funding the political races of officials responsible for selling those securities. That covers the controller.

Don’t get us wrong. Rich candidates are free to finance political races to whatever extent they like. Mayor Bloomberg is a case in point. What’s galling is that Spitzer was once a vocal advocate for giving candidates an equal financial shot.

It turned out that he meant all candidates but one: him.

I get it - so Spitzer is not allowed to spend all the personal wealth he wants to spend on his race but Michael Bloomberg is.

And that's because Bloomberg has never been for campaign finance reform but Spitzer once was.

Yeah, that makes sense.

No, wait - actually it doesn't.

Hit out at Spitzer all you want for trying to buy his race, DNers.

But don't give Bloomberg a pass for doing the same thing.

Doesn't matter if the candidate once expressed support for campaign finance reform or not.

Throwing gobs of their own wealth into races is obscene.

End of story.

You ever notice how the men writing the editorials (and they almost always men) twist themselves into pretzels when they write these things?

Daily News Editors - A Bloodthirsty Bunch Of War Criminals

There doesn't seem to be any bombing campaign, preemptive strike or out-and-out war the very serious men at Mort Zuckerman's Daily News don't like.

Yesterday in an editorial on Syria, they wrote the following:

The commander-in-chief of the United States of America is asking Congress for approval to punish the Syrian regime with the military might of the globe’s sole superpower. The Congress must authorize an attack.

President Obama’s grounds for striking the regime of Bashar Assad are sound beyond a reasonable doubt. In violation of long-standing international norms, the Syrian military targeted civilians with rocket-launched gas, killing more than 1,400 people, including hundreds of children.

There must be retribution so as to dramatically degrade Assad’s power, chemical and otherwise, and to set a cautionary precedent for the world’s like-minded others. Here were the President’s words, spoken Saturday in the Rose Garden:

“This attack is an assault on human dignity. It also presents a serious danger to our national security. It risks making a mockery of the global prohibition on the use of chemical weapons. It endangers our friends and our partners along Syria’s borders, including Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq. It could lead to escalating use of chemical weapons, or their proliferation to terrorist groups who would do our people harm. . . . Now, after careful deliberation, I have decided that the United States should take military action against Syrian regime targets.”

Those full truths stood in sharp contrast to the half measure Obama uttered in closing: “I’m ready to act in the face of this outrage.” Yes, military brass are set to let fly the missiles with but a presidential nod, but, no, having gone on bended knee to Congress, Obama will not be “ready” until the members vote yes to some plan of action.

Obama sought no such blessing when American forces helped oust Moammar Khadafy from Libya. He properly asserted presidential power to put U.S. forces into a fight without Capitol Hill’s formal backing. That was called a war. This, Obama has described as a limited “shot across the bow” and still he cedes some of the power that is central to his office.

His move was an unfortunate and politically necessary byproduct of a muddled Syrian policy that brought the American people suddenly to the brink of entering a war that had seemed of minimal critical interest, despite 100,000 deaths, despite Obama’s wish to see Assad deposed, despite Obama’s all too casual warning that Assad would cross a red line with use of chemical weapons.

Then came the mass carnage, along with Obama’s August surprise for a public who had so often heard him say that the tides of war and terrorism were receding. Virtually no one knew what the administration’s conflicting voices were talking about. In their wisdom, Americans overwhelmingly told pollsters they wanted congressional consultation. So this humbled President asked permission.

Obama must not be humbled further. Congress must support a cause that’s just, maintaining presidential prestige and America’s moral authority.

Let's unpack all the bloodthirsty language the very serious men at the DN engage in with this editorial and think about the implications of the language they use.

We must "punish" the Syrian regime with the "military might" of the "globe's sole superpower."

Obama's grounds for striking Syria "are sound beyond a reasonable doubt."

There must be "retribution."

Obama should do this attack just the way he did his attack on Libya - without Congressional authorization.

He can "assert presidential power to put U.S. forces into a fight without Capital Hill's backing."

This is "called war."

"Obama must not be humbled further" by asking for "permission" to attack Syria.

Wow - what a bloodthirsty editorial full of jingoistic nonsense that points to some seriously sick psyches that the very serious men at the DN have.

These guys truly think they have the right to call for an attack on anybody at any time for any reason, regardless of the Constitution or legal rationale.

This is all about showing how tough they are and how tough the U.S. is.

This is about "retribution" - about "punishing" an enemy and showing the world how tough we are, and by extension, how tough they are

We must not "embolden" our enemies by wavering.

Just attack now!

As I read this editorial, I couldn't help but think about this George Carlin piece about the Gulf War and how much it pertains to neo-con psychos like the very serious men at the New York Daily News:
 

What happened to these very serious men as children that they've grown up to be such bloodthirsty jingos who never met an act of military violence they didn't like?

Daily News Bases Anti-De Blasio Story On One Anonymous Facebook Commenter

Those fine journalists at the Daily News are at it again.

Dante de Blasio’s Afro — which has been the subject of fascination and admiration — became an issue after his dad’s campaign made it the focus of a new social media blitz, urging supporters to tweet the hashtag #GoWithTheFro, to build momentum for the Democrat.

Scoffers accused the lanky liberal of exploiting Dante’s ’do.

Critics chided the elder de Blasio on Facebook. One wrote that the whole social media push “makes me uncomfortable. Please stop running on your son’s hair.”

De Blasio, who is white, and his wife, Chirlane McCray, who is black, have two children.

The elder de Blasio already has featured Dante in two television ads, a spotlight that appears to have helped the candidate politically.

 Indeed, the new Quinnipiac poll found de Blasio drawing more support from black Democrats than any other candidate, even Thompson, the only African-American in the race.

Several black leaders brushed aside the criticism of de Blasio.

“I thought it was extremely touching,” the Rev. Calvin Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, said of one of the de Blasio ads featuring Dante.

“Is he using them as props?” asked Queens Councilman Leroy Comrie, who supports Quinn. “Hell, yeah. But they’re effective props. And they’re willing props.”

Classic Daily News journalism - they base the "critics are angry that de Blasio is exploiting his son's fro" story on one anonymous Facebook commenter.

How do they know that anonymous Facebook commenter doesn't work for Quinn or Thompson?

Quinn has been known to hire sock puppets for her Internet work.

But the DN runs with the story anyway because if it's anti-de Blasio, it's fit to run.

We're getting a good indication of what the tabloid coverage will like be if de Blasio is elected mayor.