Michael Bloomberg Said To Be Considering Run For The White House

Run, Mike, run!

Word from those that know: Mike Bloomberg now seriously considering Independent run.

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) September 26, 2015

A Roger Simon reply to the Bremmer tweet puts this into perspective:

.@ianbremmer Possible, but In the past, "those that know" invariably turn out to be on Bloomberg's payroll.

— Roger Simon (@politicoroger) September 26, 2015

You got that right, Roger.

My new favorite political analyst, the very astute 102 year old Richard M. Nixon, gives us the last word on the Bloomberg trial balloon:

I want this to happen so he's laughed off the goddamn stage. https://t.co/IH0RRzpwRn

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) September 26, 2015

Me too, Mr. President.

Me too.

And I think he'll be quite successful if he runs.

Isn't the country desperately longing for a New York billionaire who wants to take away their guns, Big Gulps and styrofoam?

Tax Deadbeat Andrew Cuomo Thinks Your Tax Money Is His Personal Cash Stash

Two stories that illuminate what an arrogant imperial leader Governor Andrew Cuomo is:

First, his holding school aid hostage to passage of his education reforms:

Superintendent of Schools Paul Padalino said Gov. Andrew Cuomo is playing “a childish game” in negotiating with state lawmakers to change school district ad teacher evaluation procedures.

Padalino made the comments following Wednesday’s Board of Education meeting. He said the state’s failure to release state aid figures to school districts is making budget planning difficult.

“We’re going to do what we always do in schools, no matter what they do up there in Albany,” Padalino said. “We have 7,000 kids coming to school ... and we have a budget that we have to present to our community, and my board expects to give them some idea what we’re going to do. So we’re going to come up with a way to guesstimate reasonably close to where we’re going to be and I bet where we’ll be.”

Cuomo’s budget would provide $23.14 billion in education aid statewide, an increase of $1.06 billion, if his reforms are approved by the state Legislature. The increase would be reduced to $377 million if the governor and state legislators cannot reach an agreement.

Reforms being sought by Cuomo include changes to the teacher evaluation, tenure certification and preparation process, and giving the state more authority to rescue schools evaluated as “failing.”

However, Padalino said the tactic of negotiation between lawmakers has made budget planning for school districts even more difficult than during the years when lawmakers in Albany were routinely late adopting a state budget.

“They didn’t pass (the budget) but they still had the governor’s first runs,” he said. “So you had a ballpark of where you were going. You knew the Senate was going to tweak it, you knew the Assembly was going to tweak it a little bit ... but you weren’t too far off and you knew what the governor had in mind for individual districts. Now we don’t. We have no idea.”

The tactic by Cuomo to withhold aid information also came under fire from a school district watchdog group, Kingston Action for Education.

“His proposal has made it abundantly clear that he supports an increased emphasis on high-stakes testing and that he supports a reduction in local control of our schools,” Jolyn Safron, a spokeswoman for the group, said of the governor. “He does not support a fair and appropriate education for our students, but instead is holding school aid hostage to force the Legislature to implement his education proposals.”

Safron said local lawmakers and Cuomo’s office should be contacted by parents who want to see an end to political wrangling over education. “We request that the Kingston school board partner with Kingston parents by proposing ways that we can advocate (for) Gov. Cuomo and the Legislature to abandon this set of harmful educational proposals,” she said.

 Safron added that the proposals by Cuomo will “undoubtedly intensify the teaching to the test atmosphere in the classroom.”

Then take a look at how Cuomo's treating Syracuse and other upstate cities, which he says will only get state aid if their economies improve enough to warrant state investment:

SYRACUSE, N.Y. - Gov. Andrew Cuomo today said he has no plans to send millions of dollars to Syracuse or other Upstate cities to fix leaky aging water mains. Why not?

"Because you are going bankrupt," Cuomo said of Syracuse, later adding he meant that metaphorically. "You are unsustainable. You need jobs, an economy, business."

Instead, he wants Syracuse and other urban centers to come up with their own plans to fix themselves. Those plans should include job creation, strengthening regional economies and rebuilding local tax revenues.

"The upstate cities have to be stronger economically. They have to do better," Cuomo said today during an editorial board with The Post-Standard and Syracuse.com.

If the plan is good enough, if it involves private sector investment and promises new jobs, Cuomo would invest $500 million into places like Syracuse and Central New York. In turn, those areas should be able to afford mending their own problems, he said.

"Show us how you become economically stronger and create jobs," Cuomo said. "Then you fix your own pipes."

Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner tonight called the message inconsistent, especially after the governor promoted other aspects of infrastructure improvement across the state at a budget presentation at SUNY's College of Environmental Science and Forestry.

"He is the governor of New York," Miner said this evening. "The infrastructure of the Tappan Zee Bridge is important. But so are the roads in Syracuse. To come Upstate and say: Find some developers, then fix your own water mains? I find a complete inconsistency in his message."

I'm not sure who Cuomo thinks he's winning over with all this tough guy stuff.

The ed reformers and hedge fundies may love his holding school aid hostage to passage of his ed reform agenda, but I guarantee you that tactic's going to backfire with parents all across the state, particularly because the education reforms he's pushing aren't popular with them to begin with.

And the treatment of Syracuse and other struggling cities, the imperious "I'm not going to give you money to fix your infrastructure because you're going bankrupt" statement - that kind of of thing has a way on backfiring of a politician too.

I'm not sure what delusion Cuomo is operating under, but he won re-election with just 53% of the vote.

He had the lowest vote totals of any governor seeking re-election in New York since FDR in 1930.

His job approval numbers in last month's Siena poll were 47%-51%.

It's true, his favorability number in that poll was 60%, but he's fooling himself if he thinks that's the power base he can use to shove through all his imperious demands.

And last point I want to make, it's amazing that a guy who refuses to let the tax assessor into his own home to assess the improvements made to it (and thus raise his own taxes) is acting as if the state money is his personal kitty.

"I'm not going to give you..."

Who does Cuomo think he is?

Louis XIV?

God?

It's time New Yorkers take this dude down a few pegs.

We don't have a king in New York.

We have a governor who got re-elected with 53% of the vote in a low turnout election that saw him win the fewest votes since FDR in 1930.

And we have a governor with a job approval rating at 47% and a job disapproval rating at 51%

He shouldn't be allowed to govern like he's got a mandate the size of Mike Bloomberg's ego.

NYSED Commissioner John King Vows To Bring The Chaos, Confusion & Anxiety Of New York's Common Core Roll-Out To A National Audience

From Jessica Bakeman at Capital NY:

ALBANY—Outgoing state education commissioner John King hopes to help school leaders in other states navigate the difficult transition to the Common Core standards and related standardized testing in his new position as the second-highest ranking official in the U.S. Department of Education.

Two years ago, under King’s leadership, New York became the second state to begin testing students on material aligned to the more difficult math and English language arts standards. New York launched the new assessments years ahead of most other states, which will begin administering the tougher exams this spring.

...

“In some ways, the hardest part of the transition is when you’ve given that first set of assessments that reflect higher standards and the state has to confront lower scores and the reality that there’s such a large gap between where we are and where we need to be,” King said during an exclusive interview with Capital. “I’ve encouraged my colleagues to do the best they can to prepare parents, communities, the public for those lower scores. We certainly tried to do that in New York and most importantly pointed to what it means: It isn’t to say that students learned less during that school year but rather to say that this is a realistic picture of where we are relative to college and career readiness.

 “It is a place where I hope that I can be helpful, certainly to my colleagues around the country,” he said.

Oh, yeah, John, you'll be extremely helpful to your colleagues around the country as they see what NOT to do as they rollout out Common Core and the attendant tests that come with the standards.

It was Governor Cuomo who characterized the implementation of Common Core by John King's NYSED as "massive confusion, massive anxiety and massive chaos all across the state."

Parents and teachers across the state criticized King and his NYSED, Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and her Board of Regents, over the mess that is Common Core and the Common Core tests in New York.

King refused to accept any of the criticism and responded with his own passive aggressive hostility, first canceling future town halls with parents, then sitting stone-faced through rescheduled ones after Regents Chancellor Tisch forced him to attend them.

The LoHud editorial board described King's engagement with parents and teachers at these forums:

For many in the Lower Hudson Valley, a lasting image of outgoing Education Commissioner John King will be of him sitting impassively at Port Chester Middle School in late 2013. The school auditorium was packed with hundreds of parents, teachers and others. Speaker after speaker stood up to decry the rapid rollout of the Common Core standards and new state tests. King appeared to listen, but said little and gave no ground. Most importantly, he didn't show a pinch of interest in connecting with parents, acknowledging their concerns or even making them feel as if they had been heard.

...

The Port Chester forum came shortly after King had canceled another series of statewide forums, claiming they had been co-opted by "special interests." To John King, anyone who questions or criticizes the state's top-down education "reform" agenda is an outsider who is not committed to seeing kids learn. Parents and educators who find flaws in sweeping curriculum and teacher evaluation changes are portrayed as lazy, excuse-making haters.

 This isn't the case, of course. Many parents and educators in this region have offered reasonable, passionate and often convincing arguments against the growing state focus on testing, data-crunching, and evaluating teachers with a formula that is easily picked apart. But King has not been willing to engage his critics. This position has enraged many and created a bizarre stare-down between the state Education Department and many school districts that are supposed to be part of the same team.

Given his track record of failure here in New York State as education commissioner, the only "help" King can provide other education leaders around the state is as a symbol of hubris, overreach and incompetence.

That is, unless the rest of the country wants the "massive confusion, massive anxiety and massive chaos all across the state" that King brought here to New York.

And that's pro-Common Core, pro-testing Andrew Cuomo characterizing King's CCSS implementation that way, not some member of the opt-out movement or other critic of education reform policy.

The Arrogance, Hubris And Pathology Of The Education Reform Movement

I want to play a game.

I'm going to list education reformers from different professions.

See if you can figure out what they all have in common:

Oligarchs: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, Rupert Murdoch, Mort Zuckerman, Reed Hastings, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, various members of the Walton Family, Merryl Tisch, hedge fundies backing DFER, StudentsFirst, etc.

Politicians: Barack Obama, Andrew Cuomo, Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, George W Bush, Rahm Emanuel, Harold Ford, Cory Booker, Kevin Johnson

Political functionaries: Joel Klein, John King, Michelle Rhee, Arne Duncan, Kaya Henderson, Cami Anderson, John White, David Coleman, Chris Cerf, Tony Bennett, John Deasy

Charter entrepreneurs: Eva Moskowitz, Steve Perry, David Levin, Andre Agassi, Pitbull

Celebrities who publicly identify as education reformers: Bill Cosby, John Legend, Isiah Thomas

Media members who publicly identify as education reformers: Joe Scarborough and the entire cast of the Morning Joe Clown Show, a good part of the NY Times columnist corner (Brooks, Friedman, Kristof, Bruni), Jonathan Alter, Campbell Brown

That's just a partial list above - I know there are a whole host of names of reformers from all the categories I've missed (you can add the names in the comments section of the post.)

They are all different people with different personalities and different experiences from different walks of life.

But they all share one thing besides an interest in education reform.

And that's hubris, arrogance and certitude that they are RIGHT.

What is it about education reformers that they can't ever admit to being wrong?

John King never makes mistakes at NYSED, nor Merryl Tisch at the Board of Regents, even when they hand over a charter school to a con man who has lied about everything on his resume except for his birthday.

Andrew Cuomo never makes mistakes either, not with Common Core (which he assures us is great if only the NYSED and Regents would implement it better) nor with his APPR teacher evaluation (which only needs to be "strengthened" to ensure more teachers are fired to make it better.)

Barack Obama never makes mistakes, which is why he wants his education reforms enshrined into law well past the sunset of his administration (No Child Left Behind waivers are going to try and maintain the Obama deforms into 2019.)

Eva Moskowitz is so right that she refuses to allow anybody to audit her charter network if she can help it.

David Coleman knows everything about everything.

Michael Bloomberg is so egocentric he needs to put his name on everything he owns.

Go through the list - find me a reformer who isn't arrogant or hubristic.

Then go through the list and count how many narcissists and sociopaths are on it.

When the people behind the education reform movement are such an unsavory lot of sociopaths, narcissists, and pathological know-it-all's, can there be anything good that comes from that movement?

Could There Be Anything Crazier Than Expecting Rich People Like Bill Gates To Save Us?

Bill Gates does a lot of destruction in education by throwing around a ton of money to push through changes he thinks will make a difference in schools - teacher evaluatinos tied to test scores and Common Core are two examples.

But the destruction Gates wreaks is not limited to education - he's doing it to the environment too:

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has been supporting a wide array of research on geoengineering since 2007, ScienceInsider has learned. The world’s richest man has provided at least $4.5 million of his own money over 3 years for the study of methods that could alter the stratosphere to reflect solar energy, techniques to filter carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere, and brighten ocean clouds. But Gates’s money has not funded any field experiments involving the techniques, according to Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Palo Alto, California. 

...

Gates has shown interest in geoengineering research before. He is an investor in Intellectual Ventures, a Seattle, Washington–area firm that pursues inventions and has applied for patents on techniques to geoengineer the stratosphere. Along with officials from that organization, Gates applied for a patent in 2008 to sap hurricanes of their strength by mixing surface and deep ocean water.

What's his ultimate goal? Gates "views geoengineering as a way to buy time but it's not a solution to the problem" of climate change, says spokesperson John Pinette. “Bill views this as an important avenue for research—among many others, including new forms of clean energy.” (Pinette works for BCG3, a think-tank type firm Gates started last year which has no apparent role thus far in supporting geoengineering.) “Scientific and technological advances are making it possible to solve big, complicated problems like never before,” writes Gates on the Web site of the Gates Foundation, which is also not involved in the geoengineering work.

Gee, I can't imagine how "geo-engineering the stratosphere" could go badly.

And neither can Bill Gates.

He also couldn't figure out why his small schools initiative went wrong, doesn't understand why standardizing the nation's education system is dehumanizing and still thinks Microsoft Surface tablets are swell.

Scary stuff that a guy like Gates gets to throw around this "philanthropic" money, a lot of it in secret, to do things he wants to do because he thinks they're cool.

And it's doing untold damage to the planet and the people on it.

As Robert Jensen put it in his review of Naomi Klein's new book on climate change:

Klein also places little hope in the “enlightened billionaires” who have expressed interest in environmental protection, such as Warren Buffett, Tom Steyer, Bill Gates, or—heaven help us—T. Boone Pickens. Klein goes into detail about how Virgin Airlines’ Richard Branson has consistently gone back on promises to go green, while touting decidedly non-green ideas such as Virgin Galactic’s space tourism.

Could there be anything crazier than expecting rich people to save us? How about combining an adolescent yearning for superhero stories with a fundamentalist faith in technology, which gives us geo-engineering, the project of “dimming the sun.”

While not endorsed by most climate scientists, “Solar Radiation Management” is promoted by “the Geoclique,” which Klein describes as a group “crammed with overconfident men prone to complimenting each other on their fearsome brainpower.” (267) These fantastical projects, which would pump sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space and slow warming, offer the kind of techno-fix that our culture finds so tempting, no matter what the risks. Klein points out the obvious lesson: “[I]f the danger of climate change is sufficiently grave and imminent for governments to be considering science-fiction solutions, isn’t it also grave and imminent enough for them to consider just plain science-based solutions.” (283)

Whether it's in education or the environment, billionaires like Gates are acting like little boys enacting their crazy schemes on the rest of us, sometimes publicly, sometimes behind the scenes, often to the detriment of us all.

And in an America that worships wealth and power, there's little to stop them.

Bloomberg Is Still An Arrogant Ass

Bloomberg sure does think well of himself:

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg just wrapped up a panel discussion with macro legend Ray Dalio. 

...

His fellow panelist Dalio added that culture is an important factor to consider when picking a place to work. He went on to say something about how there’s no correlation between money and happiness.

Bloomberg swooped in: “Just remember: Happiness can never buy money.” 

The audience laughed.

Yeah, that's some funny stuff out of our former comedian mayor.

Says a lot about him too.

Reminds me of what Michael Corleone said about Hyman Roth in Godfather II:

He thinks he's going to live forever.

Bill Gates Whines "Unmotivated Students" Are The Problem With The Education System

Via Diane Ravitch's blog, here's an AP story on Bill Gates stroking himself at an event at Los Alamos:

Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates says eradicating malaria, tuberculosis and polio is easier than fixing the United States' education system. But what he says he really wishes he could do is write a check to eliminate biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

Gates made the comments in a 45-minute talk Monday to a packed auditorium of employees at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Gates, his son Rory and a friend were in northern New Mexico for a private tour of the nation's premier nuclear weapons facility, which also does a wide-range of cutting-edge research across all fields, including an HIV vaccine, which the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation helps fund.

Gates, who had to fly in to Santa Fe because his personal plane was too big to land at Los Alamos, said he enjoyed the "great science, amazing history."

Obviously, he said, he loves science.

"It's the thing that makes the world interesting. ... It gives us a chance to save the world," he said.

...

Gates is still a technical adviser to Microsoft, but has turned his attention to the foundation. It's key areas of focus include lobal health and education.

Gates talked about his foundation's work improving and distributing vaccines across the world. But he says making advances in education is the foundation's hardest challenge.

"You name it, we have been passed by," Gates said of the country's math and science programs.

New technology to engage students holds some promise, but Gates says it tends to only benefit those who are motivated.

"And the one thing we have a lot of in the United States is unmotivated students," Gates said.

Couple of things to point out here:

Notice the arrogance of his "Science...is thing that makes the world interesting. ... It gives us a chance to save the world..." claptrap.

I would argue that it is "science" like the stuff pursued at a death trap like Los Alamos that causes so many of the problems in the world to begin with.


I might add there are plenty of other instances of Gates' "science" causing more problems than they solve - namely his education policy agenda and his GMO agenda.

And the ego on him to think that he can "save the world" through his genius and efforts - it's just breathtaking.

And yet, he still can't admit when he's wrong about stuff or take the blame when he screws things up.

After a few years, it became apparent that Gates' small schools initiative was a failure - he blamed teachers for the mess.

Notw that it's becoming clear that his latest solutions for solving education problems - national standards with national tests and teacher evaluations tied to those tests - aren't solving anything either, he's blaming "unmotivated students" along with teachers for the mess.

It seems the only person who is never to blame for anything is Bill Gates and his Gates Foundation functionaries.

Gates is an arrogant clueless prick of the first order - too bad not enough Americans see through his bullshit and say, "Take you billions, Bill, and go the fuck away!"

Still, more and more people are seeing this, especially in his education policy efforts - we may get to there just yet.

Bill Gates Exposed For All To See As An Arrogant, Whiny Elitist

Okay, it's official:

We're onto a new phase of the fight against the CCSS.

News media outlets are no longer buying and using pro-Common Core boilerplate rhetoric in stories on the Common Core, they're no longer framing the CCSS the way CCSS proponents want the standards framed, and they're no longer buying into the marginalization of proponents strategies that CCSS proponents and supporters have used over the last few years to dismiss criticism and opposition to the Core.

Most importantly, they're beginning to report on the man behind the curtain who pushed and promoted the CCSS and brought about a revolution in public education - Bill Gates - and some of that reporting isn't so complimentary.

Today's front page Washington Post story entitled "How Bill Gates Pulled Off The Swift Common Core Revolution" is a devastating expose of how one arrogant elitist/monopolist bribed every major stakeholder organization involved in public education to accept an untested, un-piloted idea that standardized learning standards, tests and teacher evaluations across the nation would improve public education.

Gates is on the defensive in much of the article and comes across as an arrogant, whiny jerk:

In an interview, Gates said his role is to fund the research and development of new tools, such as the Common Core, and offer them to decision-makers who are trying to improve education for millions of Americans. It’s up to the government to decide which tools to use, but someone has to invest in their creation, he said.

“The country as a whole has a huge problem that low-income kids get less good education than suburban kids get,” Gates said. “And that is a huge challenge. . . . Education can get better. Some people may not believe that. Education can change. We can do better.”

“There’s a lot of work that’s gone into making these [standards] good,” Gates continued. “I wish there was a lot of competition, in terms of [other] people who put tens of millions of dollars into how reading and writing could be improved, how math could be improved.”

Referring to opinion polls, he noted that most teachers like the Common Core standards and that those who are most familiar with them are the most positive.

Gates grew irritated in the interview when the political backlash against the standards was mentioned.

“These are not political things,” he said. “These are where people are trying to apply expertise to say, ‘Is this a way of making education better?’ ”

“At the end of the day, I don’t think wanting education to be better is a right-wing or left-wing thing,” Gates said. “We fund people to look into things. We don’t fund people to say, ‘Okay, we’ll pay you this if you say you like the Common Core.’ ”

Two things to note here - first, the writer uses Gates statements that make him sound illiterate ( “The country as a whole has a huge problem that low-income kids get less good education than suburban kids get..."), something that's already been noted and mocked on the Internet:

.@BillGates @carolburris Yup - "less good." Kinda like Windows 8.
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) June 8, 2014

.@perdidostschool @BillGates I think Clippy was even lesser good.
— Carol Burris (@carolburris) June 8, 2014

Also, Gates' irritation at being challenged comes across in this part of the story, something that we see again later in the piece:

Now six years into his quest, Gates finds himself in an uncomfortable place — countering critics on the left and right who question whether the Common Core will have any impact or negative effects, whether it represents government intrusion, and whether the new policy will benefit technology firms such as Microsoft.

Gates is disdainful of the rhetoric from opponents. He sees himself as a technocrat trying to foster solutions to a profound social problem — gaping inequalities in U.S. public education — by investing in promising new ideas.

Education lacks research and development, compared with other areas such as medicine and computer science. As a result, there is a paucity of information about methods of instruction that work.

“The guys who search for oil, they spend a lot of money researching new tools,” Gates said. “Medicine — they spend a lot of money finding new tools. Software is a very R and D-oriented industry. The funding, in general, of what works in education . . . is tiny. It’s the lowest in this field than any field of human endeavor. Yet you could argue it should be the highest.”

Many CCSS proponents show disdain and scorn for critics and opponents (think Arne Duncan saying critics are just suburban moms shocked to find out their kids aren't as smart as they thought they were), but the head guy in showing disdain and scorn for critics and opponents is Gates.

He's never been much interested in hearing from anybody else when he's been promoting his education initiatives (Gates Foundation people didn't want to hear from small schools critics who pointed out smaller schools often mean fewer class and after school choices for students either) and he's still not interested.

Interestingly, he laments that nobody is putting the kind of money into education R & D that he is, but when it came time to pushing his CCSS, his hundreds of millions of dollars in "philanthropy" ensured that no other ideas about reform would get through.

Carol Burris noted the irony:

"I wish there was a lot of competition" said the man who got in trouble for crushing Microsoft competition :)
— Carol Burris (@carolburris) June 8, 2014

Indeed, Gates is a guy who literally made his fortune by crushing all competition and running his computer empire as a monopoly - his call for "competition" in education R & D rings hollow and phony.

As does his defense for why he doesn't send his kids to schools that use CCSS:

 Bill and Melinda Gates, Obama and Arne Duncan are parents of school-age children, although none of those children attend schools that use the Common Core standards. The Gates and Obama children attend private schools, while Duncan’s children go to public school in Virginia, one of four states that never adopted the Common Core.

Still, Gates said he wants his children to know a “superset” of the Common Core standards — everything in the standards and beyond.

“This is about giving money away,” he said of his support for the standards. “This is philanthropy. This is trying to make sure students have the kind of opportunity I had . . . and it’s almost outrageous to say otherwise, in my view.”

But Bill, if the CCSS are so good, you ought to be sending your kids to schools that are using the CCSS - that's called putting your money where your mouth is.

But of course like so many CCSS proponents - from Gates to Duncan to Obama to our own NYSED Commissioner King - the CCSS is all about experimenting on "Other People's Children," not their own.

That hypocrisy comes through loud and clear in this Post piece.

As does the danger of having a country where one filthy rich "philanthropist" can fund his pipe dreams:

“This is about giving money away,” he said of his support for the standards. “This is philanthropy. This is trying to make sure students have the kind of opportunity I had . . . and it’s almost outrageous to say otherwise, in my view.

Sure it is, Bill.

It has nothing to do with your own ego and messianic complex, your need to control everything you see or the money that rolls in to Microsoft as a consequence of the "technocratic" revolution in public education.

Carol Burris also pointed out how defensive Gates looked in the video of the interview that was posted:

.@LyndseyLayton does a tough interview w/ an intimidating bill gates . Watch body language in video http://t.co/3U9N1hm3yy
— Carol Burris (@carolburris) June 8, 2014

Gates isn't used to being put on the defensive by anybody - he's using to hearing "Yes, Bill!" and "You're a genius, Bill!"

That Gates the elitist subjected himself to this interview lets you know just how much trouble the Common Core is in - Gates wouldn't put himself in this position, shilling for the Core, unless he and his minions were truly worried about what was happening to their Common Core agenda.

Three states have dumped the standards, one more is flirting with it, even more states have dumped the common "assessments" that the Gates people wanted to ensure the CCSS would be taught throughout the country and they lost their data tracking program when parent activists were able to kill InBloom Inc.
 

The counterrevolution against Common Core is in full swing and its coming from both right and left - something I bet Billion Dollar Bill and his CCSS proponents never thought they'd see.

This Washington Post article by Lyndsey Layton is an extraordinarily important one - it's where Bill Gates and his operations are subject to "rigorous" scrutiny in the mainstream media and put on the defensive.

You can bet that CCSS proponents and education reformers saw the Post cover this morning and thought, "Oh shit - we've got trouble!"

this will be quite something on the anti-cc list servs and sites pic.twitter.com/FxAoBxvct8
— Jonathan Martin (@jmartNYT) June 8, 2014

And they do have trouble - lots of it.

Students, parents and educators are rebelling all over the country over Bill Gates' CCSS revolution, the Endless Testing regime that came with it, and the data tracking programs they wanted to use to ensure it all went off as planned.

There's still much work to be done, including making sure every politician who continues to push CCSS and the Endless Testing regime pays politically for that support, getting the standards pulled from all the states, killing off the testing regime, and forging a new era for public education where all stakeholders get a say in what gets taught and tested - not just the plutocrats and their paid shills.

The plutocrats still have the money and the politicians in their pockets - but as we see with this Gates piece today, the tone of the conversation has turned and where once critics and opponents were mocked in the media as crazies, now it's Gates, his corporate education reformers and their reforms that are on the defensive.

It's a new phase in the fight against corporate education reform.

Bloomberg Still An Arrogant Ass

The NY Times publishes a piece on Bloomberg and his gun control work this morning and at the end, we get this statement from Mayor Mike:

Mr. Bloomberg was introspective as he spoke, and seemed both restless and wistful. When he sat down for the interview, it was a few days before his 50th college reunion. His mortality has started dawning on him, at 72. And he admitted he was a bit taken aback by how many of his former classmates had been appearing in the “in memoriam” pages of his school newsletter.

But if he senses that he may not have as much time left as he would like, he has little doubt about what would await him at a Judgment Day. Pointing to his work on gun safety, obesity and smoking cessation, he said with a grin: “I am telling you if there is a God, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close.”

A little man with an ego so fevered he thinks even "God" will bow to his wishes.

Nothing Changes Until Politicians Are Made To Pay A Political Price For Supporting Education Reform

Gary Stern at Lohud has a piece out about an Assembly bill to delay a new state test for prospective teachers that many education students say they have not been given sufficient time to prepare for.

In the article, we get this statement from an Assemblywoman Deborah Glick about the problems with the new NYSED policy and test:

"It hasn't been thought out," she said. "It seems the state Education Department, whether on this issue or K-12 testing, has been intransigent and disconnected from people's lives."

Just how disconnected from people's lives are the functionaries at the state Education Department?

So disconnected that NYSED Commissioner King, flanked by US Secretary of Education
Duncan, gave a defiant speech at New York University yesterday in which he declared there will be no turning back from the state's education reform agenda and no quarter given to opponents and critics of that agenda.

King further stated that no matter how botched the Common Core implementation has been, it will continue unabated:

“The road to change will always be bumpier for some than for others,” the commissioner, John B. King Jr., said in a speech to officials, educators and public policy students at New York University. “But that’s no reason to stop."

Nope, no change in course, no rethinking goals, no softening the rhetoric - just damn the torpedos, full speed ahead with reform!

So far, despite widespread criticism of King and the SED/Regents/Cuomo reform agenda, there have been few changes to the reform trajectory.

The Common Core Standards are still the "state" standards, the Common Core tests are still being given, and while the tests do not "count" for students, they are still be using to evaluate teachers and ultimately fire the "bad" ones.

In addition, the legislature and governor have given even more money to SED for "professional development" for teachers and administrators, more money to SED for public relations outreach to parents to win them over on the Common Core and other reform agenda components, and more time to continue their reform agenda pretty much undiminshed by public criticism or concern.

As I wrote earlier, until politicians are made to pay political prices for supporting King, Regents Chancellor Tisch and the state's reform agenda, SED Commissioner King and the other education reform functionaries at SED are going to continue on their reform trajectory.

You take out a couple of Assembly Members in a primary or general, directly related to Common Core and the state's ed reform agenda, and you'll see some changes.

There has been some talk of Oliver Koppell challenging IDC head/State Senator Jeff Klein of the Bronx.

Klein, despite being a former teacher, has helped Governor Cuomo dismantle public schools here in NYC by giving them unlimited expansion powers and more cash from the public school budget.

Klein has been very supportive of Common Core, APPR and other parts of the state's reform agenda.

Helping to take Klein out of power would certainly get some attention from the political hacks in Albany that critics and opponents of the state's reform agenda mean business.

Benedict Arnold/Tony Avella is another pol in need of a new job who would be ripe for a take-out over CCSS (with Avalla now part of the IDC, he helps ensure the state's reform agenda remains intact 100%.)

Dunno if either Klein or Avella will be primaryed, dunno if either could be taken out in either a primary or a general, but I'll tell you what - until that starts to happen, the arrogant autocrats at the SED and the Regents are going to continue to shove their agendas down our throats.

And they'll do it in style, as King did yesterday, with middle finger waving in our faces, letting us know just how powerless we are to effect change in this "democracy" we call New York State.

Don't Kill The Bees!

Mass murder at the Yankees game down in Florida - for bees:

TAMPA — Steinbrenner Field was buzzing Tuesday, but it had nothing to do with the Yankees and Red Sox.

The rivals were delayed for seven minutes in the bottom of the third inning when a swarm of bees wreaked havoc in left field.

Boston left fielder Mike Carp pointed the bees out to umpires, who stopped the game while stadium employees treated the area with insect spray.

“I heard them before I saw them,” Carp said. “I turned around and knew I had to get out of there.”

“I didn’t know what was going on,” said Boston pitcher Felix Doubront, “but I knew I didn’t want to be out there.”

Both teams stood at the top of their dugouts watching the scene, though Mark Teixeira decided to have some fun and fetched two bottles of honey from the clubhouse and brought them onto the field.

“I’m a big peanut butter-and-honey guy, so I always know where the honey is,” Teixeira said. “What I thought was if you could just do a line of honey out to the parking lot the bees would maybe follow it and leave us alone.”

Fans gave the stadium employees a big ovation after the situation was resolved.

“That was a first for me,” Red Sox manager John Farrell said. “Never saw a game delayed by bees.”

I'm going to be blunt here because this story PISSES me off:

The players on both teams are fucking morons.

The fans in the stands who gave the stadium employees a standing ovation for killing the bees are fucking morons.

And the Yankee employees who killed the bees are fucking morons.

Do any of these people know that we NEED bees for life and currently bees are dropping dead at rates that put the future of life as we know it on the planet in jeopardy?

Commenters at the DN story do:

Do these idiots realize that destroying our honeybees is damaging our food chain? I just can't believe they were allowed to do this. All they had to do was wait for the queen to settle and they would have swarmed around her. As a beekeeper I am appalled at them  destroying the bees. Anyone involved in this should be ashamed of themselves.

...

Don't spray insecticides haphazardly!  Geez.  What are they?  A bunch of New Yorkers in Florida?  ;)

There are many beekeepers who are willing to rescue swarming honeybees!

http://www.callabe­ekeeper.com/CallaBee­keeper.asp?State=FL&­Submit=Search

http://www.beeremo­valsource.com/bee-re­moval-list/florida/

...

Shame on them for using insecticides. I hope they inhaled enough themselves to
feel sick. Swarming bees have their bellies full of honey and are almost
incapable of stinging. You can scoop them up with unprotected hands
once they land somewhere and cluster. They are just trying to find a new
home. The Yankees should have done the right thing and called for a
beekeeper, and reap in good publicity for it. Using poison is just bad.
Shame on them for even having this stuff on hand. I hope they will lose
every game for the next decade for killing innocent insects. Yeah I'm
putting a beekeeper curse on them.

...

I agree with Elizabeth, it should be illegal to spray bees at this point. It's a major issue. Here's a way to be part of the solution instead of the problem: http://bidg­rouponeconsulting.wo­rdpress.com/2014/03/­18/using-the-power-o­f-the-internet-to-he­lp-protect-endangere­d-bees/

One more time - everybody involved at the game who contributed to the deaths of the bees are fucking morons.

There are smart ways to handle a swarm and then there's the way the Yankees handled it.

The older I get, the more I can't figure out how human beings have managed to last this long on the planet given the stupid things we do to the ecosystem. 

Given how much damage we've done to the ecosystem lately, we'll see how much longer human hegemony goes on. 

Might not be much longer. 

Here's hoping if collapse comes, it starts at Steinbrenner Field. 

Rick Hess: Ed Reformers Overreached, Reform Backlash Resulted

Rick Hess in the Daily News today:

Those who follow New York City schools have been witnessing a time-honored ritual — pro-testing school reformers have mightily overreached, inviting pushback that’s now poised to dismantle much of their useful handiwork.

Mayor de Blasio has said that he and his new chancellor, Carmen Fariña, will “do everything in our power to reduce focus on high-stakes testing.” At the press conference where he introduced Fariña, de Blasio said, “[Testing] has taken us down the wrong road and, within limits of state and federal law, we will do all we can to roll back that focus.”

This strident stance is misguided and likely to yield unfortunate results. There’s good reason to regularly test students in reading and math, and to use those results to inform judgments about how well schools and teachers are doing. When it comes to key skills, such tests can illuminate important truths and make it clear if some schools or classrooms are failing certain students.

 ...

All that said, de Blasio and Fariña have tapped into real concerns and raised valid criticisms. However well-intentioned, testing advocates have managed to take a common-sense intuition and pushed it with such reflexive enthusiasm that they’ve created a caricature.

Instead of using reading and math tests as one useful tool, many reformers have made these results the defining measure of school quality. That stance alienates parents and educators who see such an emphasis as narrowing the curriculum and providing a distorted view of school quality.

Last year, Gallup’s annual national survey on education reported that 22% of respondents thought the increased use of testing over the past decade has helped school performance and 36% thought it had hurt. In 2007, the same survey found the public split, 28%-28%.

Meanwhile, reformers have long been hampered by a tendency to overpromise. After suggesting that accountability, charter schooling or now the Common Core standards will spur rapid, profound improvement in schools, they’ve been stuck trying to put a happy face — at best — on much more modest, gradual gains.

All of this has been complicated by reformers’ habit of leaning heavily on federal pressure, first through the No Child Left Behind Act and more recently on the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, to force states and cities to move — even if that meant that policies were pushed forward while still half-baked.

These forces have all combined to transform a promising approach to heightened transparency and accountability into a self-parody that was ripe for blowback. How bad have things gotten? When she accepted the chancellorship, Fariña said, “There are things that need to happen, but they need to happen with people — not to people.”

This unexceptional sentiment was widely regarded as a break with the Bloomberg reforms. Meaning, reformers have seemingly convinced a large swath of the public that they think change happens outside the classroom, and that they believe in doing things “to” people rather than with them.

That’s a clear sign that they’ve driven what was a sensible agenda right off the rails.

Alas, reformers at the New York State level - on the Board of Regents, at the State Education Department, and in the governor's office - continue to do things "to" people rather than with them.

That sentiment was crystallized last week when SED Commissioner John King told the State Senate Education Committee that the the New York State Assembly and Senate have no power to pull the state out of the Common Core State Standards - that's completely in the "purview" of the SED and Regents.

King's arrogance - whether it's talking smack to the Senate Education Committee, calling parents who oppose his reform agenda "special interests" or refusing to do anything with the rising opposition to his reforms other than pay lip service to "flexibility" - is another emblem of the arrogance of the education reform movement and another example of why there is so much growing "blowback" to the reform movement.

Mayor Bloomberg Plans On Bringing NYC's Homeless Problem To The Rest Of The World

Mayor Bloomberg, fresh from arguing that there's no place as good as NYC to be homeless and down on your luck, brags that the consulting firm he has put together to help governments around the world make their income inequality problems as bad as NYC's is very much in demand:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, burnishing his legacy in all five boroughs this week as he prepares to leave office, shed a sliver of light today on the new consulting firm he’s planning to found once he leaves office, aimed at helping cities across the world.


Mr. Bloomberg, who was in Brooklyn to herald the opening of a new ice skating center in Prospect Park, told reporters that many other cities want to replicate the “wonderful things” New York has accomplished in his tenure.

“We’ve got enormous demand and we’ve had for years now from other cities around the world, not just around the country of, ‘How do you do these wonderful things?’” Mr. Bloomberg said. “We are, no matter we may whip ourselves, but we are the poster child for most of the good things that have happened in big cities.”

And what are some of those good things he's brought to NYC that he now wants to bring to the rest of the world?

Why despair, hopelessness and abject poverty of course!

Wonkette has the story:

So we have all read the New York Times story about homelessness in New York, yes? And we have all cried for the smart, tough little girl named Dasani, who lives in a “520-square-foot room with her parents and seven siblings” in a most wretched shelter, where life is most wretched, and we have all said, “Goddamn, this is unacceptable and something must be done.” Yes?

No. Apparently, some of us think, ‘Meh, that’s just God for ya.’ Some of us who happen to be bazillionaires and soon-to-be-ex-mayors of New York.

Asked today if he was similarly moved by the story, current Mayor Michael Bloomberg told Politicker he’d had a different reaction.

While calling her life story “really quite extraordinary,” Mr. Bloomberg insisted Dasani’s situation was not representative of the city’s broader homeless population. 

Well, actually, Mr. Mayor, the point of the story is that actually, Dasani is not “really quite extraordinary.”

Yet Dasani is among 280 children at the shelter. Beyond its walls, she belongs to a vast and invisible tribe of more than 22,000 homeless children in New York, the highest number since the Great Depression, in the most unequal metropolis in America. 

But hey, don’t blame the city or its mayor for that. Nope, blame God.

“This kid was dealt a bad hand. I don’t know quite why. That’s just the way God works. Sometimes some of us are lucky and some of us are not,” he said. 

Yes, God sure does work in mysterious ways, arbitrarily dealing bad hands like that. Sometimes he hands out lots of money, like to Mayor Bloomberg, who is just lucky that way, and sometimes he does not. Shrug, we guess. Whatcha gonna do? Hey, maybe you can fight the scourge of extra-large sodas! Sure, God invented the Big Gulp, but that’s, like, a Serious Problem, the kind of problem that a mayor should do his very best to do something about. Unlike homeless children living in filth and squalor and where guards sexually assault their moms, because that’s just bad luck. Sorry, Dasani and the thousands of children like you, but if you wanted to be not poor and homeless in one of the wealthiest cities in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, you should have asked God for better luck.

Yeah, NYC surely is the poster child for most of the good things that have happened in big cities and I'm sure many other cities can't wait to have Bloomberg and his consultant group bring them what he's brought to NYC.

How The NYPD And The NYCDOE Suffer From The Same Bloombergian Disease

It's called checklistitis - as in, the corporate managers of the NYPD and the NYCDOE, people with little to no actual experience in the jobs they're now managing other people for, demand accountability of underlings through endless checklists on which every category of data must get checked or else there is hell to pay.

In the end, the only thing that matters in such a system is the checklist and making sure that you can tell top-down management that no check box has gone unchecked.

Here's a retired sergeant from the NYPD writing about how checklistitis stripped cops of autonomy and created a CYA environment where nothing mattered more than the data:

Under Bratton, NYPD executives were subject to Compstat meetings, where they were challenged, often reprimanded regarding crime statistics in their commands and compelled to develop strategies to correct these conditions. But ultimately, the focus was on having well-trained and effective line-level enforcers.

A lot of that changed under Commissioner Raymond Kelly, when a harsher, more corporate management ethos took over.

Units previously run by lieutenants were now managed by an executive. These commanders were less concerned with allowing detectives to run their investigations than with trying to anticipate and generate answers to the questions they expected to be asked when called on the Compstat carpet or briefing the commissioner on high-profile cases.

And most of the new bosses had very little hands-on experience. Detectives who spent their careers investigating serious offenses were being told at every step to check in first with an executive who typically never worked as a detective.

The sharp decline in detectives’ case clearance rates is strong evidence that this management style has outlived its usefulness.

Under Kelly, the NYPD has become top-heavy, with more executives than ever micromanaging minutiae barely worthy of a sergeant’s attention.

Now, when a situation challenges a patrol officer, he calls a sergeant, who calls the lieutenant, who notifies the captain.

Many of my former colleagues are dubious that Bratton’s proactive, cop-friendly tactics will be met with approval by Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio. But the incoming commissioner’s adaptability should not be underestimated.

The challenge Bratton faces on his return, which may be more perplexing than the out-of-control crime he faced in 1994, is how to get detectives who have been trained to follow checklists rather than investigative leads — and supervisors with years of seniority who have never made a significant decision — onboard with his agenda, which depends on intelligence and autonomy, rather than automatons.

Sounds eerily familiar to those of us in the DOE who have seen the same micromanaging of minutiae barely worth anybody's attention but under Bloomberg, God forbid that minutiae remains unchecked on the checklist, or there is hell to pay.

This is Bloomberg's top-down management style, which stems from his arrogant conviction that everybody outside of himself and his crop of cronies is an idiot who cannot be allowed to handle any decisions on their own.

A commenter at the News story wrote:

The Mayor believes that the people of New York are incapable of making petty decisions as well. Great point and it would seem that their like-mindedness has made them (Mayor & PC) inseparable all these years.

Indeed, it really comes down to that.

 

Bloomberg believes nobody can make decisions on their own.

 

That's why he isn't going away, even though he's leaving office.

 

As the Times revealed today, he plans on bringing all the wonders of his governance of NYC to the world at large - including the overreliance on data.

 

The Times describes this coteria of Bloomberg cronies thusly:

 

The organization, to be called Bloomberg Associates, will act as an urban SWAT team, deployed at the invitation of local governments to solve knotty, long-term challenges, like turning a blighted waterfront into a gleaming public space, or building subway-friendly residential neighborhoods.

In a twist on the traditional business model of consulting, clients will not be charged.

Much about the new group is still unknown. But as with most of Mr. Bloomberg’s undertakings over the past decade, it will involve spending eye-popping sums of money with no expectation of earning a profit. (The annual budget will run in the tens of millions.)

The group resembles a government in exile. Mr. Bloomberg has recruited at least half a dozen top aides from his administration, including Janette Sadik-Khan, the transportation commissioner; Katherine Oliver, the commissioner of media and entertainment; and Kate D. Levin, the cultural affairs commissioner.

Bloomberg Associates will be run by George A. Fertitta, who as chief executive of the city’s tourism agency oversaw a record increase in annual visitors to New York, to 54 million this year. Mr. Fertitta said in an interview that the group would eventually expand to about 20 to 25 employees, most of them drawn from the mayor’s office, who will work closely with Mr. Bloomberg’s sprawling charitable foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies. (Like the foundation, the consultancy will be housed inside a giant townhouse on the Upper East Side, around the corner from the mayor’s home.)

 

God help the rest of the world.

NYSED Commissioner John King: Elementary School Teachers To Blame For Common Core Opposition

First, he said there is no turning back:

State Education Commissioner John King defended the Common Core curriculum during a tour of the Binghamton region on Monday while acknowledging some difficulty in rolling out the standards.

“Any time you try to raise standards across 45 states, it’s going to be a complicated process,” King said.



King is traveling throughout the state to explain the initiative that supporters say is designed to raise the performance level of students statewide. But the common core has come under harsh criticism in some sectors as too rigid and too test intensive.

Throughout the state, some teachers are scrambling to teach to the new standards. Many teachers didn’t receive instructional materials on how to use the new curricula until mid-summer, leaving them little time to prepare lesson plans before school started. Two months into the school year, some instructional aids remained unavailable.



King said the state would remain committed to the standard.


“It would be a mistake to retreat from higher standards and from the idea of college and career readiness for all students,” King said. “That said, there are adjustments we will make along the way. We already have in the last four years.”

He then blamed elementary school teachers for some of the furor over the new Common Core:

King said some of the resistance to common core concepts comes at the teacher preparation level.“Historically, in New York, you could pass the elementary teacher certification exam and fail the math section,” King said. “You could compensate with your scores in other areas.”

 He recalled the dean of a teacher prep program telling him that candidates said they were going into elementary education “because they don’t like math.”

“That’s a problem,” King said. “We need elementary school teachers who have a strong background in math.”

In short, it's the elementary school teachers who can't understand the vaunted Common Core math standards that are the problem here.

Never mind that the Common Core math standards are considered developmentally inappropriate for young children and even parents are finding them confusing or just plain useless.

Yeah, never mind that - all this hub-bub over Common Core is the fault of the elementary school teachers.

King displacing blame onto others once again - special interests have fooled the parents into opposing Common Core, elementary school teachers who don't understand the math standards are driving the opposition to the Core.

The more he tries to defend his indefensible positions, the deeper he digs himself into a hole.

Failed Movie Director Lectures About Education Reform

From the NY Post:

M. Night Shyamalan, who directed “The Sixth Sense,” focused on education for his recently published book, “I Got Schooled.”

At the apartment of former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, who founded the Parents’ Transparency Project, Shyamalan spoke to a group that included Grace Hightower, Katie Couric, Alexandra Pelosi, Gilt Groupe founder Kevin Ryan, Newark Schools chief Cami Anderson and Success Academy Charter Schools founder Eva Moskowitz.

“In America, we’re actually educating our kids very well… but just the white kids,” Shyamalan said. “If you pull out schools in which 85 percent of students qualify for a free meal, which are predominantly African-American and Hispanic, the data show that the rest of the kids are being taught better in America than anywhere else in the world. Countries like Finland teach their white kids well, and we teach our white kids better.”

These education reformers and failed directors/would-be reformers have been drawing the race card an awful lot lately to sell their corporate reforms (see here and here.)

Failed director Shyamalan doesn't seem to realize that race is not the issue, class is.

Lots of poor white kids face many of the same educational challenges poor kids of color do.

This dude should go back to making crappy films and leave education policy to people who know what they're talking about.

I covered this before in the summer, but it needs to be said again.

Washing Away The Reformers

Here's a comment I left on a Capital NY article about the Common Core test scores:

The processes to determine proficiency are political decisions made by humans in the NYSED and at the Board of Regents. 

NYSED Commissioner King and Regents Chancellor Tisch would have people believe these so-called proficiency rates were given down from the mount and are objective, scientific measures of what students know and what they can do. 

They are not. 

Tisch and King decided very early on, in a political decision made to support their reform agenda, that the scores would be bad so that they could sell New Yorkers on their "innovative" and "rigorous" education reform agenda that encompasses, among other things, expanded charter school creation, endless testing, teacher evaluations based upon test scores, firing teachers who do not show improvement by "adding value" to their students scores and taking over "failing" districts and giving the "death penalty" to failing schools (as Governor Andy so succinctly put it.)

They had tests developed using the Common Core standards before the state or districts developed much in the way of any Common Core curricula or materials for teachers to use to prepare students.

Then they made sure there were a lot more test items so that students would have difficulty finishing the new exams.

Finally they set the cut scores at a level that they knew would detonate like a nuclear bomb on the districts, schools, teachers and students around the state.

They pushed all this through at the same time they were pushing through a new evaluation system rating teachers on student scores based on these very tests.

It's not an accident that New York couldn't wait to get the tests right before they pushed through the eval system and it's not an accident they couldn't wait to get the evaluation systems right before attaching high stakes to them.

You see, King and Tisch do not care if the system is right or not.

Nor does Governor Andy.

They care only that they have a testing system in place that allows them to sell the message that the public education system everywhere in the state is in crisis and a teacher evaluation system in place that allows them to blame the problem on teachers and fire them.

This is shock doctrine stuff, pure and simple, and was exposed by Education Week blogger Rick Hess in his now famous "Common Core Kool Aid" piece (link below.)

But what Tisch, King, Cuomo and the rest of the merry reformers do not realize is that a groundswell anti-testing and anti-reform movement is growing across the state and will wash them away soon if they are not careful.

Former Joel Klein deputy John White realizes it - he gave a speech at AIG about it (link below.)

And so does reformer and turnaround expert extraordinaire Paul Vallas - he even told it to John King's face at a CUNY education reform forum (link below.)

More and more people are seeing what the reformers have done with these Common Core tests, how they rigged the scores, ratcheted up the difficulty levels and engineered the scores they wanted and they will not get away with this much longer.

The revolt against these corporate education reformers with their rigged tests and privatization agendas has begun - from Port Jefferson Station to Syracuse.

Perhaps even here in NYC where a mayor who ran against testing and charter schools looks like he'll win the race for City Hall and put a halt to the Bloomberg reforms (if he holds true to his campaign pledges.)

King and Tisch, Governor Andy and the rest of the reformers are an arrogant bunch and they think they've got this thing all sewn up and done.

They are going to be surprised in the coming months how much anger there is out there from students, parents, teachers and administrators over what they have done to the public school system in this state.

If they are not careful, it will wash them away.

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2012/11/the_common_core_kool-aid.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/01/john-white-louisiana-schools_n_4023164.html

http://gothamschools.org/2013/05/10/alone-among-policy-heavyweights-vallas-conveys-reform-fears/

Bad Filmmaker Thinks He Has Solutions For Public Schools

M. Night Shyamalan is one of the worst filmmakers in contemporary movie making.

He had one successful film about 15 years ago and hasn't made a decent film since.

Ha has managed to win a "Worst Director" award in 2006 for Lady in the Water, however, and a "Worst Screenplay" award in 2010 for The Last Airbender.

Shyamalan's name is so tarnished these days that Sony didn't want to publicize his involvement in the Will Smith film, After Earth, for fear that Shyamalan's name would turn film goers off.

No fear there - the film was such a disaster that film goers avoided it even though they didn't know Shyamalan directed it.

Given all the disasters Shyamalan has been involved with over the last decade, you'd think he might turn his attention to his own film making craft and, you know, maybe learn how to make a decent film again.

But you'd be wrong.

Instead this paragon of bad film direction has decided he's going to solve the problems in the public school system.

No, seriously, he's actually written a book about education reform and the Wall Street Journal has a story about it.

He says he approached his research to education reform the same way he approaches directing a film, so you know that his solutions are just going to go over like a Shyamalan review at Rotten Tomatoes.

So what are his solutions for fixing education problems?

Fire teachers, put principals in charge of school culture rather than operations, make schools smaller, extend school time and give teachers and principals regular feedback.

Gee, we've never heard this stuff before, M. Night.

Thanks so much for deigning to give us your wisdom on schools and teaching.

Too bad you don't know any more about teaching and running a school than you do about movie making.

Apparently you are unfamiliar with a position in the school system called the assistant principal in charge of operations who actually handles the operational side of schools.

Strike one.

Apparently you also are unfamiliar with the small schools movement already tried by Bill Gates that did not bring about the seismic shift in school performance you think it's going to.

Strike two.

And apparently you don't know that teachers and principals are getting regular feedback via the new teacher evaluation systems put into place that will require administrators to observe teachers six times a year.

In fact, between the monthly learning community meetings, the monthly classroom rounds, the bi-weekly curriculum meetings, the weekly subject focus groups for every preparation, and the half dozen observations a year, we get more feedback over our teaching than you seem to over your film making.

Strike three. 

Time to go back to learning how to make movies, M. Night, and leave the education policy and teaching to people who know what they're doing.

On second thought, given how bad your movies are, it's probably time to give that up too.

Maybe you can go back to film school so you can a) learn how to make a decent film and b) study how teaching and learning really works.

Mayor Bloomberg Gets Frothy Over Stop-And-Frisk Ruling

A judge said NYC shouldn't be like Pretoria in the 80's and placed limits on how the NYPD can carry out its stop-and-frisk policy.

Bloomberg had a temper tantrum at his press conference over that ruling, as well as at the City Council for passing a law providing oversight for the NYPD:

At a press conference littered with grisly imagery, Mayor Michael Bloomberg ripped apart a federal court ruling today that found current stop-and-frisk practices unconstitutional.

“This is a very dangerous decision made by a judge that does not understand how policing works and what is compliant with the Constitution as determined by the Supreme Court,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a jam-packed City Hall event with Police Commissioner Ray Kelly at his side.

“I worry for my kids and I worry for your kids and I worry for you and I worry for me. Crime can come back at any time,” he warned.

Mr. Bloomberg vowed to appeal the ruling, handed down by Judge Shira Scheindlin, which found that the NYPD adopted a policy of “indirect racial profiling” by targeting blacks and Latinos in far higher numbers than other groups. Ms. Scheindlin’s ruling, if upheld, would place the NYPD under federal oversight, a development that Mr. Bloomberg called “disturbing.”

When asked if stop-and-frisk would continue to be implemented during the appeal process and potentially into the next mayoralty, the term-limited Bloomberg bluntly implied it would.

“Boy, I hope so,” he answered. “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for a lot of people dying.”

Maybe if you had a police commissioner who didn't brag about how he wants every black man in the city to be in fear that he will be stopped by the NYPD at any time for any reason, the NYPD wouldn't now be subject to federal oversight.

In this case, NYPD overreach + Bloomberg/Kelly arrogance = federal oversight.

Bloomberg and Kelly have dismissed concerns over stop-and-frisk for years.

Bloomberg figured he had more money than God and no one would dare challenge his policy.

Now Mikey discovers that some judges actually don't care about his money.

They care about the Constitution.

Imagine that.

Bloomberg: "After January, I am Going To Destroy All You F---ing Guys!"

Oh yeah, he said it:

Mayor Bloomberg went on a spitting-mad rant against a city cab-fleet boss who won a court victory over Hizzoner’s planned “Taxi of Tomorrow” — vowing to “destroy your f--king industry” when he leaves office, The Post has learned.

A fuming Bloomberg made the threat against Taxi Club Management CEO Gene Freidman at Madison Square Garden’s private 1879 Club during last Thursday’s Knick playoff game, a witness said yesterday.

“It was like Gene had kidnapped his child. He used the f-word twice,” the witness said.

Freidman confirmed the blow-up to The Post, and said Bloomberg’s tirade included the warning that, “After January, I am going to destroy all you f--king guys.”

That’s bad news for Bloomberg’s political enemies, who could all become targets once the revenge-minded billionaire has nothing but time on his hands

I am not surprised that Bloomberg acted like this toward the taxi CEO.

When Bloomberg does not get his way, he turns into a petulant child.

The only problem is, he is a petulant child with billions of dollars to carry out his threats.

You can be sure that if the next mayor overturns some of his signature education policies, Bloomberg will use his billions to bludgeon him or her.

He will look to destroy all these "f---ing guys!"

Here's the rest of Bloomberg's threat to the taxi CEO as reported by the Post:

Freidman approached Bloomberg at the exclusive club a day after a judge ruled that the mayor’s plan to replace the city’s taxi fleet with the Taxi of Tomorrow violated a city code requiring a hybrid-cab option for garage owners.

“I saw Bloomberg and his security there in the club, so I went over and said, ‘Tell me what is going on with the Taxi of Tomorrow?’ ” Freidman, 42, said yesterday.

“He turns to me, and said, ‘Come January 1st, when I am out of office, I am going to destroy your f--king industry.’

“I said, ‘Whoa, Mr. Mayor, calm down! Why can’t I sit down with you and figure out something that works?’ He got back in my face and said, ‘After January, I am going to destroy all you f--king guys,’ ” said Freidman, whose company operates a fleet of 925 yellow cabs.

Freidman said a red-faced Bloomberg’s jaw was clenched.

“He was very angry, very scary, very violent in a non-physical way. He was grinding his teeth, he was spitting, he was red and he was in my face,” the self-styled “King of the Road” claimed.

“The mayor was extremely disrespectful, and not ‘mayorly’ at all. He cursed at me, and when we walked away, I asked a friend who was with me, ‘Did the mayor just threaten me?’

“My friend responded, ‘No, he threatened you twice.’ ”

The mayor’s office declined to comment.

The witness said Bloomberg was just being a sore loser over state Supreme Court Justice Peter H. Moulton’s ruling.

The Taxi of Tomorrow is a Bloomberg pet project that would have replaced nearly the entire of fleet of yellow cabs with a more spacious model that Nissan won the right to design in an open competition.

The taxi industry, led by Freidman, challenged the overhaul — and Bloomberg seeing his foe at MSG set him off, the witness said.

“Bloomberg thinks that everyone should just follow his decisions,” he said.

Freidman said he tried to placate the mayor by reminding him of a meeting in 2006 when Bloomberg praised him for introducing hybrid fuel and wheelchair-accessible taxis.

But nothing would calm Bloomberg — who at one point looked about for security to toss Freidman from the club.

“This was my club that Bloomberg was a guest in, that I had paid to get in, and he wasn’t getting me kicked out of my own place,” said Freidman.

His lawyers have asked MSG to preserve any surveillance video that may have captured the exchange.

Freidman wondered how the mayor planned to “destroy” his industry.

“I don’t know how he’ll destroy me, whether he’ll start a black-car service that will take people for free,” he said. “Perhaps he’ll put $10 million of his own money to lobby against the taxi industry — that is pretty powerful.”

Classic - Bloomberg tries to have security toss Friedman out of his own club until Friedman tells him the mayor is not getting him kicked out of his own place.

While there's a lot of fun reading this story and seeing what a petulant, arrogant jerk Bloomberg is, this story is also quite troubling.

Because it suggests that like Nixon before him, Bloomberg has an "Enemies List" and like Nixon before him, he is going to look to get even with people on that list.

Unlike Nixon, however, Bloomberg has the press in his back pocket since he owns so many news outlets and has the billions to get away with his vengeance.

No wonder the United States of America feels like a Third World country these days.

We're ruled by banana republic dictators like Bloomberg.

More on this later.