This is a great sentence: "I hope over the next year to convince parents to help us help them understand why we test," Merryl Tisch.
— Lindsey Christ (@LindseyChrist) May 21, 2015
A court has ordered New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to release records from his SAFE Act’s assault weapons registry immediately as a result of a lawsuit filed against him by a radio talk show host.
The New York Supreme Court in Albany County ordered Cuomo to release statistical records related to the registry from the New York State Police. Judge Thomas J. McNamara directed the release of records after Freedom of Information Act requests were denied for over a year.
The court’s judgement indicated that the State Police received 2,019 FOIA requests for records similar to the petitioner’s request from January to September 2014.
“The reason we pursued it for our station was to get figures from the government, and they weren’t providing it,” said Bill Robinson, host of the Second Amendment Radio Show and the Homeland Security Radio Show at WYSL, a talk radio station in Avon, New York.
“They are supposed to be public servants, and we pay them,” said Robinson. “We’ve had enough of this nonsense. They work for us and we want to remind them of that.”
Robinson said he was asking for general statistical information from the registry, not confidential material such as names of those on the registry or their addresses. “And we had to sue for it,” he said.
Robinson’s attorney, Paloma Capanna, said in a prepared statement that the ruling takes effect immediately.
“We won. The ruling is clear and unequivocal. The effect of the ruling is immediate,” said Capanna. “Any failure to comply with the ruling can—and will—be met with an application for civil contempt against the New York State Police.”
“The Cuomo Administration has the worst record for transparency in modern New York political history. Everything is a secret to the governor, and he fights tooth and nail to keep the public from knowing what is going on,” said Assemblyman David DiPietro (R.).
“Maybe with this great victory in court, we will finally have an open window to see whether this registry is yet another maneuver by the Cuomo Administration for personal gain with no public benefit,” said DiPietro.
“The SAFE Act never had anything to do with preventing crime or tragedy, which is why Andrew Cuomo is now refusing to provide any meaningful information about its enforcement. It was a staged theatric, which will do nothing more than snag otherwise law-abiding New York citizens in a nightmare of compliance problems,” said Assemblyman Bill Nojay (R.).
A spokesman for Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office said the administration is reviewing the decision. It's possible Cuomo could appeal the decision, delaying the release of information.
The NY Safe Act passed in January 2013, one month after the school shootings in Newtown, Conn. At the time, Cuomo championed the legislation as the strictest gun control laws in the nation.
Since then, a federal judge has rejected a seven-bullet maximum as arbitrary. A background check for all ammunition sales still has not been implemented.
Baby Mario's refusal to release the data merely highlights the impotence of these gun laws which he is now trying to hide from the public. Remember the "spent case database" that NYS rammed through years ago. Millions of dollars spent and how many crimes did it help solve - ZERO! So it is with the so-called Safe Act which was yet another shameless bill rammed thru in the dead of night by a person who - like his father before him - aspires to run for president some day. Only if you agree first to tell the American people of your complicity while running HUD in the 2008 mortgage lending meltdown. The "goal" of the Safe Act was never to actually "impact crime" for which it's impact in truth has been negligible - the goal was nothing more than Baby Mario's attempt to pander to the anti-gun Left in NYC.
In a letter, the state Education Department informed the school board it could lose state and federal funding, and the state said board members could be fired if they violated the law.
Superintendent Dawn Mirand, who publicly opposed the board’s proposal, said in a meeting last month that teachers and administrators could lose certification if they did not administer state tests. Mirand originally estimated the district could lose as much as $50 million in aid, WGRZ reported.
“With all of that in mind,” School Board President Bob Dana said, “I can’t honestly sit in front of you today and push for a continuation of these proposals.”
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Peter Stuhlmiller, the president of the Kenmore Teachers Association, said the board made the right decision by moving in a different direction.
“We realized that our board members faced incredible intimidation from the state Education Department and threats from the governor’s office,” Stuhlmiller said.
“Hopefully, in the long run, State Ed will wake up and realize they can’t continually use kids as a pawn in this political battle.”
The Obama administration is inviting states to apply to renew their waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act. And according to guidance issued Thursday, these renewed waivers could last all the way through the 2018-2019 school year -- locking down some of President Barack Obama's education policy changes well into the next presidency.
The new guidelines don't radically change the criteria for escaping the law's strictures. According to an Education Department document, states will have to ensure that schools cannot receive top ratings for accountability if they are not closing "significant achievement or graduation rate gaps" between different groups of students. Some states have struggled to keep promises they made under the 2011 waiver guidelines to improve low-performing schools. Under the new guidance, states must update their lists of such schools "to ensure that interventions are being implemented in the lowest-performing schools."
Beyond that, a state must continue to show "how it will continue to ensure all students graduate from high school ready for college and a career, through implementation of college- and career-ready standards and high-quality aligned assessments," the new guidelines say. Many states have satisfied this waiver requirement by adopting the Common Core State Standards, a controversial set of learning standards that formally define what students need to know in English language arts and math by the end of each academic year. Oklahoma dropped Common Core earlier this year, and lost its waiver in August as a result.
States must also continue to show that they are implementing teacher evaluations that take student performance into account, as they promised when they initially joined the program. Washington state lost its waiver for failing to comply with this directive.
The new guidelines are essentially like the old guidelines, with a hard line emphasis on basing evaluation of teachers, schools, students, principals, bus drivers, landscaping artists and the guy who delivers paper supplies to the school on standardized tests. It was just a month ago that Duncan was shrugging his shoulders and saying, "Dang. I don't know why the heck everyone got so obsessed with testy stuff. I guess it was all of us, huh?" Now he's back to "You will all eat, breathe, live and die by the tests. Or else."
If the outcry over unilateral executive moves we’ve seen over the last few years remains consistent, Obamacare and immigration are likely to keep sucking up most of Republicans’ attention and the media’s coverage. But just as sweeping have been executive waivers issued from the hated No Child Left Behind Act – really the most recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act – that have been instrumental in connecting numerous states to, among other things, the Common Core national curriculum standards. And yesterday, the Education Department issued guidance offering states the chance to obtain waivers – if they do the administration’s bidding, of course – lasting well into the term of the next president: the 2018-19 school year.
These waivers are almost certainly illegal – even a Congressional Research Service report often cited to suggest the opposite says they are unprecedented in scope and, hence, an untested case – and even if they are not deemed technically illegal, the reality is they still amount to the executive department unilaterally making law. NCLB does grant the Secretary of Education the authority to issue waivers from many parts of the Act, but it grants no authority to condition those waivers on states adopting administration-preferred policies. Indeed, as University of South Carolina law professor Derek W. Black writes in a recent analysis of waivers, not only does NCLB not authorize conditional waivers, even if a court were to read any waiver authorization as implicitly authorizing conditions, the actual conditions attached – “college- and career-ready standards,” new teacher evaluations, etc. – fundamentally change the law. In fact the changes, Black notes, are essentially what the administration proposed in its 2010 “blueprint” to reauthorize NCLB. And quite simply, the executive fundamentally changing a law is not constitutional.
The latest waiver guidance goes beyond even the toxic status quo. Not only is the President using his vaunted pen and phone to unilaterally make education law, but law that would continue well into his successor’s term. It is a very dangerous move that, quite frankly, deserves at least as much alarmed coverage as Obamacare waivers and immigration actions. If for no other reason, because the action is moving us swiftly toward a de facto federal curriculum. In other words, direct control over what the vast majority of the nation’s children learn.
Federal power can’t get much more invasive than that.
A nurse who was being quarantined at a New Jersey hospital after working with Ebola patients in Sierra Leone criticized her treatment on Saturday as an overreaction after an initial test found that she did not have the virus.
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She described being held in isolation for about seven hours at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday, left alone for long stretches and given only a granola bar when she said she was hungry.
Ms. Hickox, 33, was placed in quarantine under a new policy announced on Friday by the governors of New York and New Jersey. All people entering the United States through Newark Liberty and Kennedy Airports will now be quarantined for 21 days if they had direct contact with Ebola patients in Guinea, Liberia or Sierra Leone, even if they show no symptoms of infection.
On Friday night, New Jersey health officials said the nurse had developed a fever after arriving, but on Saturday, they said her blood had tested negative for Ebola. Additional tests will be conducted.
Ms. Hickox disputed that she had had a fever. She wrote that at the airport, a forehead scanner showed her temperature to be 101, but that came after four hours during which she had not been allowed to leave.“My cheeks were flushed, I was upset at being held with no explanation,” she wrote. “The female officer looked smug. ‘You have a fever now,’ she said.”She was eventually escorted by eight police cars to University Hospital in Newark and taken to a tent outside the building. An oral thermometer showed her temperature to be 98, she wrote.
She added that the doctor felt her neck and rechecked the temperature. “ ‘There’s no way you have a fever,’ he said. ‘Your face is just flushed.’ ”Her complaints served as a broadside against the new quarantine policy, which goes further than recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Asked about the nurse’s essay while visiting Iowa, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said, “My heart goes out to her because she’s someone who has been trying to help others and is obviously ill.”“I’m sorry if in any way she was inconvenienced but inconvenience that could occur from having folks that are symptomatic and ill out amongst the public is a much, much greater concern of mine,” he continued. “I hope she recovers quickly, and we’re going to do everything we can in New Jersey and in our public health system to make sure that she does.”In a telephone interview on Saturday night, Ms. Hickox’s father, Leon Hickox, said that his daughter “is not ill in any way.”
If Ms. Hickox was asymptomatic, said Udi Ofer, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, he would have serious questions about the legality of her quarantine.“Mandatory quarantine of people exhibiting no symptoms and when not medically necessary raises serious constitutional concerns about the state abusing its police powers,” Mr. Ofer said.
Gov. Bobby Jindal went on the offensive against state Education Superintendent John White Wednesday, accusing him of marginalizing teachers and implying Louisiana's top education officials may be silencing opposition from educators on the Common Core academic standards.
Jindal issued an executive order requiring local and state education officials to respect teachers' right to free speech and specifically their right to criticize Common Core. There was universal praise for the governor's action, but also some disagreement over whether there is a widespread problem with teachers being muzzled over the academic standards.
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Jindal issued the executive order as a reaction to an article in Alexandria's Town Talk, in which one anonymous teacher says she had been reprimanded for posting a negative comment about Common Core on Facebook. The governor's office said it had heard from other teachers who were also told to keep their Common Core complaints to themselves.
"We have received a lot of calls and letters from teachers who are opposed to Common Core, and we want to be sure that these teachers' rights are protected," said Shannon Bates, Jindal's deputy communications director. "If teachers are being quieted in one parish -- it can happen in others, and we want to make sure these teachers are able to be heard."
Louisiana teachers associations were grateful that Jindal reaffirmed free speech protections for educators. They said teachers are afraid to speak out against school policies, though that fear isn't exclusively related to Common Core.
Educators have felt mounting pressure for at least two years not to say anything about major teaching changes, since it has become easier for supervisors to fire them through a new state law Jindal supported.
"They do feel as though their jobs might be in jeopardy. It's not just in Louisiana. It's something that is common all over the country for teachers," said Debbie Meaux, president of the Louisiana Association of Educators.
The state Education Department wants Buffalo School District leaders to prove that they offered meaningful opportunities for parents to weigh in on the district’s comprehensive improvement plan and the consolidated application that enables the district to qualify for more than $20 million in federal grant funding.
Samuel L. Radford III, president of the District Parent Coordinating Council, said Sunday that he’s confident there’s no way the district will be able to provide such evidence, which will result in the district being sent back to the drawing board to redraft both documents.
“In this particular case, I believe they’re going to do what they should have done in the first place,” Radford said. “They should have just included us in the first place, and we wouldn’t have had to go through any of this.”
The latest letter from the state is part of a continuing pattern in which the parent council, or DPCC, warns the district and the Board of Education that they are about to take action that violates state rules, but administrators and board members move ahead without the parent council’s agreement.
So far, these actions have resulted in the state investigating the parent council’s complaints, siding with the parents and requiring the district to start over. That was most recently the case with the district’s student transfer plan, which was ordered to undergo further revision because of the lack of parent involvement.
In a letter Friday, Roberto Reyes, a director in the state Education Department’s Office of Accountability, said the state says it can “find no evidence that the DPCC was consulted” in the creation of the district’s comprehensive improvement plan or individual school improvement plans.
He added that he is also concerned about allegations by Radford that the district did not collaborate meaningfully with the parent council in the submission of the federal grant application that is subject to approval by the state.
Robert Small said he wanted to express his dismay over the introduction of a new school curriculum at a public forum Thursday night in Towson, but instead the Ellicott City parent was pulled out of the meeting, arrested and charged with second-degree assault of a police officer.
Small stood and interrupted Baltimore County School Superintendent Dallas Dance during a question-and-answer session and began to tell the audience that he believed the new curriculum was lowering the standards of education and was intended to prepare students for community colleges. "You are not preparing them for Harvard," he said.
The format of the forum did not allow the public to stand and ask a question. Instead, those who wanted questions answered had to write them on a piece of paper. Dance read the questions and had members of a panel, which included state schools Superintendent Lillian Lowery, answer them.
When Small started speaking, Dance told him that he believed his question would be answered, but Small continued to talk. After a couple of minutes, a security guard confronted Small, saying, "Let's go. Let's go."
Small, 46, asked him if he was an officer and the security guard, an off-duty Baltimore County police officer, showed him a badge. The officer grabbed Small's arm and pulled him toward the aisle. The audience gasped and some people sitting nearby got out of their seats.
As he was being taken out, Small said, "Don't stand for this. You are sitting here like cattle." Then he said, "Is this America?"
The officer pushed Small and then escorted him into the hall, handcuffed him and had him sit on the curb in front of the school. He was taken to the Towson precinct and detained. Small was charged with second-degree assault of a police officer, which carries a fine of $2,500 and up to 10 years in prison, and disturbing a school operation, which carries a fine of $2,500 and up to six months.
The police report said that Dance's chief of staff, Michele Prumo, who was standing on the side of the auditorium, had asked the officer to walk over and calm Small down. The report also said Small had attempted to push the officer away when he first confronted him.
The forum was held by the Maryland State Department of Education to explain the new curriculum, known as the common core, to the public. Objections to the new standards, which are being implemented this year for the first time in 45 states and the District of Columbia, have been growing in the past several months.
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In an interview Friday, Small was not critical of the police officer but said he believed the state education officials were not allowing the public to express their concerns about the new curriculum.
"Look, I am being manhandled and shut down because I asked inconvenient questions," Small said.
"Why won't they allow an open forum where there can be a debate? We are told to sit there and be lectured to about how great common core is."
The format was designed so that as many questions could be asked as possible in a short time, according to Bill Reinhard, a spokesman for the Maryland State Department of Education. He said the same format was followed at a previous forum.
The department handed out rubber bracelets with a toll-free number so the public could have their questions answered. In addition, he said, Lowery stayed after the forum was over and answered individuals' questions.
Small said in the interview that he is a research manager for the Department of Veteran Affairs and has a second-grader and a sixth-grader who attend Howard County schools. He was released about 3 a.m., he said.
He said he has nothing against community colleges, because he went to one for two years and then transferred to the University of Maryland, College Park, where he got his bachelor's degree. However, he said, he wants his children to receive an education that will allow them to attend four-year colleges.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg railed against the court system Friday, blaming lawsuits for railroading his agenda in his final term.
“We’ve got to do something about our court system. Because they just stop everything,” Mr. Bloomberg lamented during his weekly radio interview Friday morning with WOR’s John Gambling.
Mr. Gambling chimed in in agreement: “Everything gets stopped–everything the city does.”
“Every single thing,” Bloomberg echoed. “You just can’t run a railroad this way.”
In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday the country’s interpretation of the Constitution will “have to change” to allow for greater security to stave off future attacks.
“The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a press conference in Midtown. “But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”
Mr. Bloomberg, who has come under fire for the N.Y.P.D.’s monitoring of Muslim communities and other aggressive tactics, said the rest of the country needs to learn from the attacks.
“Look, we live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms. New Yorkers probably know that as much if not more than anybody else after the terrible tragedy of 9/11,” he said.
“We have to understand that in the world going forward, we’re going to have more cameras and that kind of stuff. That’s good in some sense, but it’s different from what we are used to,” he said.
After a week of almost non-stop corruption revelations, including charges that Bronx Assemblyman Eric Stevenson took bribes to write a bill to help his friends, Bloomberg included Gov. Andrew Cuomo in his revulsion of all things Albany, implying that one of the things that aids corruption is the practice of the governor sending lawmakers something called a “message of necessity” so a bill can pass quickly, without anyone having a the chance to study it.
“Why can’t you give it time? Well, the answer is they don’t want anybody to see it. That’s the only explanation,” Bloomberg said.
Stop-and-frisk has removed thousands of guns from the city’s streets — but the NYPD detained millions of innocent New Yorkers to find them
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A Columbia law professor testified Wednesday that just one gun was recovered for every thousand people stopped from 2004 through June 30, 2012.
“The NYPD hit rate is far less than what you would achieve by chance,” Jeffrey Fagan said in Manhattan Federal Court.
