NY Times Covers National Teacher Shortage, But Misses Point Of Why It's Happening

And so we've gone from "How do we fire teachers!" to "Gee, we can't find teachers!" in a pretty short period of time - even the education reporter at the NY Times noticed:

ROHNERT PARK, Calif. — In a stark about-face from just a few years ago, school districts have gone from handing out pink slips to scrambling to hire teachers.

Across the country, districts are struggling with shortages of teachers, particularly in math, science and special education — a result of the layoffs of the recession years combined with an improving economy in which fewer people are training to be teachers.

...

Louisville, Ky.; Nashville; Oklahoma City; and Providence, R.I., are among the large urban school districts having trouble finding teachers, according to the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents large urban districts. Just one month before the opening of classes, Charlotte, N.C., was desperately trying to fill 200 vacancies. 

But as is usual with the Times ed coverage, they screw up the story and miss why the shortage is happening:

Educators say that during the recession and its aftermath prospective teachers became wary of accumulating debt or training for jobs that might not exist. As the economy has recovered, college graduates have more employment options with better pay and a more glamorous image, like in a rebounding technology sector.

In California, the number of people entering teacher preparation programs dropped by more than 55 percent between 2008 and 2012, according to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Nationally, the drop was 30 percent between 2010 and 2014, according to federal data. Alternative programs like Teach for America, which will place about 4,000 teachers in schools across the country this fall, have also experienced recruitment problems.

Yes, it's true that a rebounding economy leads fewer people to go into teaching - there are more opportunities available for other kinds of work with "better pay and a more glamorous image."

But unexplored in the Motiko Rich Times piece is one big reason why teaching isn't a job with a glamorous image. - the consequences of 10+ years of corporate education reforms.

Every day you open the newspaper or turn on the TV, you see or hear some teacher-bashing crap, some politician like Christie saying he wants to punch teachers in the face, some rag like the Post blaming teachers for destroying the lives of children by using the Three Little Pigs as a DO NOW exercise to teach POV and bias.

Then there are the new "accountability rules" - the constant observations, the evaluation ratings tied to test scores (as high as 50%), the increased work load and stress for the same (or less) money, the decreased benefits, gutted pensions, and diminished work protections like tenure (Kansas is an emblem of this, but it's happening nationwide too.)

I'd say if kids are looking around at the job landscape and saying "Hell, I can do better than be a teacher!", they're right - and smart for saying it.

I teach seniors and I tell the ones who say they want to be teachers to think twice about the major - that teacher bashing and odious accountability measures (most of which simply add more work to a teacher's load without making them better teachers) make the job miserable these days.

I also tell them that teaching isn't really a career anymore, that the politicians and educrats and oligarchs who fund education reform see it as a McJob that can be filled by untrained temps who do it for a couple of years and move on (or get moved on by accountability measures) to something else.

To that end, the Times again:

Ms. Cavins, 31, who once worked as a paralegal and a nanny, began a credentialing program at Sonoma State University here in Rohnert Park less than a year ago. She still has a semester to finish before she graduates. But later this month she will begin teaching third grade — in both English and Spanish — at Flowery Elementary School in Sonoma. Ms. Cavins said she would lean on mentors at her new school as well as her professors. “You are not on that island all alone,” she said.

Esmeralda Sanchez Moseley, the principal at Flowery, said she could not find a fully credentialed — let alone experienced — teacher to fill the opening. “The applicant pool was next to nothing,” she said. “It’s crazy. Six years ago, this would not have happened, but now that is the landscape we are in.”

Before taking over a classroom solo in California, a candidate typically must complete a post-baccalaureate credentialing program, including stints as a supervised student teacher. But in 2013-14, the last year for which figures are available, nearly a quarter of all new teaching credentials issued in California were for internships that allow candidates to work full time as teachers while simultaneously enrolling in training courses at night or on weekends.

In addition, the number of emergency temporary permits issued to allow non-credentialed staff members to fill teaching posts jumped by more than 36 percent between 2012 and 2013.

At California State University, Fresno, 100 of the 700 candidates enrolled in the teacher credentialing program this year will teach full time while completing their degree.

“We don’t like it,” said Paul Beare, dean of the Fresno State school of education. “But we do it.”

Mission accomplished for education reformers - a cheap untrained temp workforce is soon going to be commonplace in schools, this will lead to an even bigger "teaching quality crisis" and allow reformers to promote privatization as the answer to the "education crisis."

Shame Motiko Rich missed the part of the story about how education reform has helped bring about the national teacher shortage.

But alas, this is another example of a Times ed article that only gets half the story: the "national teaching shortage" is reformer-generated and will serve the ultimate goal of may education reformers - to destroy the public school "monopoly" and privatize the public school system.

Why A School Would Want To Have Some Regents Tests Rescored

The NY Post reported that 55 schools out of 860 schools in NYC had some Regents exams "rescored."

Four of these schools were "Renewal" schools.

This is supposed to make readers think that these schools - and the de Blasio NYCDOE - is cheating in order to improve test scores.

But if you know anything about the Regents exam grading process, you'd know why some exams need to be rescored.

Regents exams are now scored outside of individual schools, either during the school day or after school when teachers are paid extra to score exams.

This is supposed to ensure objectivity in the scoring of the exams and prevent cheating in individual schools (where teachers and administrators have a lot riding on the scores.)

Alas, the "norming" process for training the teachers to do the grading is often haphazard at best, incompetent at worst.

I've graded both during the day and after school for per session and I can tell you, I've seen some people lead the "norming" process who had no idea what they were doing.

In one case, the person leading ELA "norming" a few years ago gave some erroneous information about the grading of exams that was only corrected because several veteran teachers at the session pushed back against the information that was being given out.

In other cases, I have seen "norming" sessions in which most teachers present have agreed upon the way to approach the exam only to have one or two teachers say "I don't care what the rest of you say about that - I'm going to grade this way!"

One year, during the electronic grading, I saw a teacher who decided to grade the Part 3 ELA responses with her own grading system rather than the one the state had given in the grading materials.

She gave 0's to short response paragraphs that clearly should have been 1's and 1's to short response paragraphs that should have been 2's.

Given that she was grading both parts of the Part 3 section, she easily could have been the difference between some students passing the exam or failing it.

Now "quality control" is supposed to catch this kind of thing, and after a while, a supervisor did approach her and tell her she wasn't grading according to the state standards.

But what happened to all the tests she had already graded?

Were they rescored?  Or were the grades kept and they simply took her off the scoring going forward?

Another problem with scoring the exams is that teachers are often under the gun to get the tests graded by a certain deadline.

I saw this first hand with history exams last year, as teachers were "speedgrading" tests the night before the last day of school.

How accurate were the grades during the speedgrading sessions?

Hard to say - maybe teachers are more forgiving during "speedgrading" sessions and apt to give students the benefit of the doubt, maybe they're more apt to grade severely because they're feeling stressed.

In any case, one thing I do know - teachers weren't able to give much thought to the grading process that last day.

Schools are allowed to request rescoring of some exams if they see egregious errors in the grading process or believe they have evidence that the scoring was unfair and contrary to the state standards.

These requests are not always granted - a few years ago, I know a school that asked to have about a half-dozen exams rescored out of hundreds scored because the grading of the essays in these half-dozen tests was clearly contrary to the state standards that were released in the grading materials.

The request was denied.

Would some of the six students who ended up failing the exam have passed if the exams had been carefully (and fairly) rescored?

You bet.

The NY Post wants you to think the grading process is competent, objective and professional.

They want you to believe that the scores that come from the Regents grading process are sacrosanct, like Mosiac law from the mount, and any requests to rescore exams tantamount to "scrubbing" or cheating.

The truth is much more complex than that.

Is it possible some schools are looking to raise grades by having some tests rescored?

Sure.

But it's also likely that there have been breakdowns in the grading process around the city and many of the schools that asked to have exams rescored had legitimate concerns about the grades their students received.

Of course, the NY Post doesn't cover this complexity because they're not much interested in anything other than pushing their political agenda - public schools suck, public school teachers are incompetent and dishonest, de Blasio is inept and his "Renewal" program doomed to failure.

But it's important to correct the record here and point out that the grading process for Regents exams is often chaotic, sometimes a complete a mess, and can lead to unfair grades for students (and teachers and schools.)

Daily News Continues To Shill For The Common Core

A Siena poll released today found the following:

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

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

Here's their headline:

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

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

50%-50% is a split.

51%-49% is a split.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digging into the numbers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's a 10 percentage point plurality.

Back in February, here's where voters were:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can bet there's some.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brutal ELA Regents Exam Grading Chart From NYSED

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

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

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

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

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

That was a brutal test too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I covered this back in June 2013 as well:

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

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

Gotham Schools covered the story yesterday:

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

June 2013 ELA Scoring Chart

January 2013 ELA Scoring Chart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sure, there was some.

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

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

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

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

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

They went down slightly.

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

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

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

Oh, and one more thing:

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

At charter schools, that's where.

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

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

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

A Reader Says Farina, Mulgrew Did Not Say Teachers Should "Embrace" Teacher Evaluation System

As I posted earlier today, the NY Post reported this surprising news today:

Meanwhile de Blasio, Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña and teachers union boss Michael Mulgrew spoke of “unity” at the United Federation of Teachers spring conference Saturday at the New York Hilton.

...

Mulgrew and Fariña agreed that teachers should “embrace” the new evaluation system — one critics say was badly weakened when legislators voted to delay tying student test scores to teacher assessment for two years.

I was skeptical and wrote that:

I have a difficult time believing Farina, a career educator who worked as a principal for a long, long time, would think this system mad with compliance should be "embraced".

I also have a difficult time believing that Mulgrew, who in the past has "embraced" this system himself, is still doing so after all the criticism and cries for help the UFT is getting from teachers under assault all over the city via the ADVANCE evaluation system.

Well, a reader named Music Lover was at the UFT Spring Conference and reports the following:

I was at the conference yesterday, RBE. Carmen and Mike said nothing of the sort about junk science evaluation being embraced during the moderation session. The topic of evaluations came up, but not in this degree at all. I took explicit notes while she was speaking.

Also, as to my knowledge, it seemed to be a surprise (except for UFT staff) that Mayor De Blasio was going to show up and speak at the conference. I was not expecting that at all. He said nothing about embracing the evaluation. He did say, expect big changes to come in September and he will try to help bring some dignity back to the teaching profession.

Scott Stringer also showed up and said the same thing. Tish James showed up at the end to speak.

The Post writer already got one part of the story wrong even before we caught this doozy - the writer wrote that "critics say (the evaluation system) was badly weakened when legislators voted to delay tying student test scores to teacher assessment for two years."

Actually, legislators did not vote to do that, nor was that provision in the 2014 state budget agreement that did contain some changes to CCSS testing for students.

Now we have Music Lover telling us that Farina and Mulgrew did not say what the Postie reporter says they said.

Two screw-ups in one Post article.

Classic Post journamilism.

The Daily News Is All Class

Anthony Weiner gave a commencement speech yesterday in Queens.

Here's the photo the Daily News ran:

Get it?

Isn't that oh so clever of them?

This is the kind of hard-hitting journalism former Murdoch hackster Colin Myler has brought to the Daily News ever since Mort Zuckerman hired him.

Garbage.

Rupert Murdoch Defends NY Post's Error-Riddled Reporting

Accountability is never for the NY Post or its owner, Rupert Murdoch:

Rupert Murdoch issued a belated defense of the New York Post's coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings on Saturday.

The paper has been besieged with criticism for its faulty reporting of the attacks. The Post said 12 people had died, when only three had; it said a Saudi man was a "suspect" in "custody", when he wasn't; and, perhaps most gallingly, it splashed pictures of two young men on its front page even though it admitted it did not know whether they were suspects or not. The men turned out to be completely innocent. One was 17 years old; he told the Associated Press that he was scared to go outside.

The Post is not a paper that apologizes very often, and it did not apologize for its Boston coverage either. Its owner continued that trend when he tweeted about the controversy on Saturday:

All NYPost pics were those distributed by FBI. And instantly withdrawn when FBI changed directions.

 Murdoch did not address how one can "withdraw" the front page of a printed newspaper from circulation.

This is an old story, one I have gone over before here at Perdido Street School.

Late last year during the Newtown/Sandy Hook tragedy, the NY Post ran an interview with a "fake Ryan Lanza" who issued ridiculous quotes to the Post reporter via Faceook that even a Columbia University Journalism School writer could have picked up as jive.

What was worse, they kept the faulty story up and simply added a note saying:

UPDATE: A spokesman for the Lanza family says an imposter is behind Ryan Lanza's Facebook page and that Ryan did not post the messages in this story.

Just as Murdoch deflected blame and responsibility for the Post's error-riddled reporting during the Boston bombing and manhunt onto the FBI, last time around the Post deflected blame onto the "imposter" rather than the reporter who swallowed the interview hook, line and sinker or the editors who went with the story.

They also tried to drag other news outlets into the mess by saying they had reported the interview too, when what those news outlets had reported was the NY Post report.

You see mistakes are NEVER the fault of Rupert Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch's employees or Rupert Murdoch's news outlets - they are ALWAYS somebody else's fault.

As I wrote back in December:

As usual with the people at a Rupert Murdoch organization, accountability is never for themselves - it's always for other people.

The same is true in April.

The DOE Couldn't Wait To Release The TDR's

The Columbia Journalism Review dispenses with the lie that the DOE was forced to release the TDR's or that journalists had to publish this stuff:

Eleven New York City education reporters were huddling on e-mail last October 20, musing over ways to collectively pry a schedule of school closings out of a stubborn press office, when the chatter stopped cold. Word had filtered into their message bins that the city was about to release a set of spreadsheets showing performance scores for 12,000 of the city’s 80,000 teachers—names included. Few understood better than the beat reporters that this wonky-sounding database was a game changer.

The Los Angeles Times already had jolted newsrooms across the country back in August, when it published 6,000 public school teachers’ names next to its own performance calculations. New York education reporters, though, were considerably more reluctant to leap on this bandwagon. They found themselves with twenty-four hours to explain a complex and controversial statistical analysis, first to their editors and then to the public, while attempting to fend off the inevitable political and competitive pressure to print the names next to the numbers, something nearly every one of them opposed. “I stayed up all night kind of panicked,” said Lindsey Christ, the education reporter for the local NY1 television station, “writing a memo to everyone in the newsroom explaining what was coming and what was at stake.”

...

On October 20, reporters from the Times, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, The Wall Street Journal, GothamSchools.org, NY1 television, and WNYC public radio found themselves in an awkward spot. Some were so angry at what looked like a blatant attempt by the city to use reporters in its fight with the UFT that they quietly threatened to quit if their editors insisted on publishing names. Others were torn between the power of the data to inform—who are we to second guess readers’ ability to process all this complexity, they asked—and their power to distort. On top of all the other distortions, the skeptics pointed out, the tests used to calculate these evaluations had been found to be flawed. The state had been forced to recalibrate the results because the tests had become too easy to pass. The next day, reporters took a collective breath. The union filed suit in New York State Supreme Court, claiming the rankings were riddled with errors that would unfairly harm teachers. “Just because it’s a number,” the union’s lawyer, Charles Moerdler, argued later, “doesn’t mean it’s suddenly objective.” Nothing would be released until the case was settled.

The delay allowed time for news organizations to compare notes. On Thursday evening, October 21, many of the reporters found themselves at a midtown Manhattan bar, sharing drinks with the same teachers union and Department of Education staff they had encountered in court earlier. The occasion was a farewell party for New York Times education reporter Jennifer Medina, who was moving to the paper’s Los Angeles bureau. A guest from the union parked his oversized protest poster—displaying the city’s confounding-looking mathematical formula for value-added numbers—against the bar. The debate from the courtroom spilled over into the festivities. School reps shrugged off complaints, reminding reporters it was they who had filed Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests for the data. Weren’t they in the business of printing information?

But the Department of Education had privately dropped hints to some reporters that their competitors had already submitted foils, some journalists countered. Suspicions had been raised when the department responded to the foils with uncharacteristic speed. Normally, such requests took months, with layers of negotiations, said Maura Walz, a reporter for GothamSchools.org, an independent online news service. This time, it was service with a smile. “The Department of Education wants this out,” said Ian Trontz, a New York Times metro editor. “They have a lot of faith in these reports. They believe they are trustworthy enough to educate and empower parents.”

Still, empowering parents had not seemed to be a top goal in the past for this administration. To the most skeptical reporters, it appeared as if the city was using them.

...

By December, frustration was mounting among the New York reporters as they waited for the State Supreme Court judge to decide whether the teacher data should be released or not. Reporters described “a spirited debate” that erupted during an off-the-record pizza and wine farewell party for outgoing Chancellor Klein before Christmas. Several in attendance said reporters bombarded him with pointed questions about the data, and Klein defended their release, for the sake of parents’ right to know.

Meanwhile, some reporters produced stories that attempted to add context to the controversy over the data. WNYC ran a story that examined what school districts in Denver, the District of Columbia, and Tennessee were doing with their value-added reports. Meredith Kolodner at the Daily News found a Manhattan middle school teacher who received a “zero” rating for her performance as an English teacher. The problem? Pamela Flanagan had never taught English, only math and science. Sharon Otterman of the Times wrote a thoughtful piece that dug into some of the research. She reported on a 2010 Mathematica Policy Research institute study that warned the city’s error rate was probably very large. That’s because the Department of Education was using only four years’ worth of students’ tests to analyze each teacher (Los Angeles used seven years’ worth). The study found that with only three years of data, the results were wrong 25 percent of the time. Parents and community members remained off the radar, however. In New York, 5,000 parents sent protest letters to the Department of Education in December opposing the release of the teacher-data reports. “We believe there must be meaningful teacher evaluations in our children’s schools,” said Martha Foote, a Brooklyn PS 321 parent, “but humiliating teachers with unreliable information will only hurt them.” Their letters did not make the news.

In November, reporters got another surprise. Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced he would replace Klein with Cathie Black, a Hearst magazine executive who had neither government service nor education experience. The New York Times went on a rare offensive against the mayor’s choice. Reporters continued to wait for the teachers union’s case to be resolved, but by this time, the Times, the Daily News, the New York Post, and WNYC had all decided to print the data when it does arrive—names included. (The Wall Street Journal refused to disclose its plans.)

On January 10, State Supreme Court Judge Cynthia Kern ruled in favor of the city and the news organizations, saying that “there is no requirement that data be reliable for it to be disclosed.” The union quickly filed an appeal. And at press time the data was stalled in court, again.

But as they waited, the news outlets were constructing databases to collect and report the numbers, which will be searchable by teacher’s name, by school, and by district. WNYC, for example, is building an interactive tool that will try to provide context for individual teachers and caveats for the wide swath of statistical errors.

It was probably inevitable. Journalists by instinct and trade are usually in the role of arguing for full disclosure of public information, fending off cautious government arguments for moderation and restraint, not the other way around. That instinct, and the pressure of competition, eventually won out. After all, the information is public, some reporters noted, and the city is using it for tenure decisions and evaluations. “It’s in the public interest,” said Trontz of The New York Times. “If we find the data is so completely botched, or riddled with errors that it would be unfair to release it, then we would have to think very long and hard about releasing it.”

The only holdout so far appears to be GothamSchools.org. “We plan to run a message saying why we are opposed to using the names,” said Elizabeth Green, editor of the site and author of a forthcoming book, Building a Better Teacher. “I want to treat schools with as much dignity as we treat restaurants. We don’t just splash grades A through F about restaurants in the paper without explanation. We do individual stories. To be fair.”

Perfection of the data is not the point, argues Arthur Browne, editorial page editor of the Daily News. The numbers, he said, will be “a net positive in terms of adding to the conversation about quality of teachers.” But what about the quality of that conversation?

In New York City, schools coverage has been largely tethered to the corporate reformers’ agenda—mostly to a measuring tool for firing incompetents. Inadequate classroom teachers are without question a serious problem, as are the rules and systems that protect them. But it’s unwise to think that weeding out the weak will address other pressing challenges facing teachers and schools and students across the city—the huge dropout rate among a rapidly growing Hispanic population, for one example, or the absence of good preschools for the rising number of poor children, or state budget cuts that are gutting core services to schools, and on and on.

I don’t happen to know any education reporters who were drawn to this complex beat in order to pore over spreadsheets, or score an interview with Bill Gates as an education expert. Most pine for more time to spend in classrooms, in science projects with preschoolers, in rapt discussions with teachers or principals or parents. Most are inspired by education’s expansive connections to culture, science, politics, and the world of ideas. The best education reporters are skilled at the invaluable art of connecting the dots for readers between policy from on high and reality in the classroom. Yet education reporters have increasingly found themselves herded toward a narrow agenda that reflects the corporate-style views of the new reformers, pulling them farther and farther away from the rich and messy heart and soul of education.

Unfortunately, most of the reporting these days has done the same for teaching by reinforcing the corporate education reform meme that the only things that matter in education are tests, test scores, and teacher ratings derived from those.

That reporters have named names in the paper using data that they know to be flawed and error-ridden is unconscionable and nothing they try and say in their defense can justify allowing themselves to be used in the political game the powers that be in both the private and government sector are playing to destroy teachers.

Sorry, doesn't matter how much "context" you give it.

These reporter KNEW the NYCDOE was using them.

And they allowed it anyway.

Unconscionable.

But they reached out and asked teachers to correct the record themselves.

Yeah, that should assuage their guilt.

Or cover them in a court of law.

Reminds me of a movie I saw once:

Newspapers Use The TDR's To Name "Worst" Teachers

That's the way the Daily News framed the story this morning:

REPORT NAMES NYC'S BEST & WORST TEACHERS

And they names names of the "worst" teachers (i.e., those who didn't "add value" to their students' test scores.)

But then you get this warning on the second page of the story:

The teachers union and education advocates have ripped city officials over the release, calling the data deeply flawed with the potential to demonize instructors.

"This was a complete calamity and it is the clearest example of the mismanagement that the Department of Ed has put upon the teachers of New York City," United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew said.

Even Walcott warned that the data is old and cautioned against drawing conclusions.

"I definitely believe in transparency and people having information,” he said. “On the other hand, I'm very conscious ... the data with the names attached could be used in ways that could be harmful to the process of what we're trying to achieve."

One measure of caution is the wide margins of error on the rankings

. The average margin of error on multi-year scores is 35 points for math and 53 for English.

On some individual teacher rankings, the margins of error become even more troubling, going as high as 75 for math and 87 for English.

"The fact that one teacher in a school might be at the 60th percentile and another one's at the 45th percentile doesn't mean that the first teacher is more effective than the second because they come with very large margins of error," said NYU Professor Sean Corcoran, who has studied a similar ranking system in Houston.

The UFT said the rankings are also riddled with straight-forward errors like assigning the wrong students to instructors.

Pamela Flanagan, a teacher at Tompkins Square Middle School in the East Village for the past six years, initially received a zero in a 2009 report.

There was one glaring problem: she was evaluated as an English instructor when she only taught math and science.

“It’s absurd. The margin of error is so wide that you can’t tell anything from it,” Flanagan said. “How is this going to help with my teaching at all?”

Gee, margins of error as high as 75% for math, 87% for English.

But you guys named the names of the city's "worst" and "best" teachers using this data?

That is an out and out attack on teachers.

It is vicious.

And it has purpose.

Once again, the corporate media does the job of its corporate masters by attacking teachers and repeating the meme that unionized teachers with due process protections are THE problem in public education.

With the new evaluation system coming to fruition next year with its mandated city and state tests in every grade in every subject, we can ALL expect to end up slandered in the press as "CITY'S WORST TEACHER!" eventually.

The new eval system, with its bell curve ratings and error-riddled value added measurements, is meant to do just that.

Who do they think is going to want to go into teaching after this?

Seriously, who would want to subject themselves to a flawed evaluation system, a teaching job that requires you to do constant test prep and testing with your job on the line if the numbers don't come up right every year, and a yearly gauntlet of media humiliation and potential loss of job when the error-riddled ratings come out

"The End Of My Way Of Life And Purpose Are Near"

Teacher Karen Scalf responding to the criminals at the NY Times who knowingly published false and misleading data as a "public service":

AS a public school teacher , I am holding on to real teaching and learning amid this crisis of "accountability." I feel like a Native American who knows the end of my way of life and purpose in life is near. The beginning of the end of good public school education is near. "Real teachers are a dying breed," a co-worker says softly to me as we walk into the school house together. We spend training time looking at testing data, noting the gaps in scores from October and December. Are we preparing our own guillotine as we note how many points a student's score went up or down, just waiting until that student's score in part of our worth? Another co-worker says, "Soon they won't need teachers, just facilitators for the test-takers formerly known as students." You can't measure compassion, patience, emotional endurance, humor, rapport, the lyrical quality of a teacher's words or her ability to turn on the "lightbulb," create motivation for globally aware lessons that access many learning styles while allowing students to ponder the intricacies of the world and the human condition.

Indeed.

Michael Daly: "Bloomberg Not King" - Except That He Is

Daily News columnist Michael Daly says today that Bloomberg's agreement to give new NYC schools chancellor Cathie Black a deputy for educational issues shows that "The king is dead!"

Daly, a big fan of Bloomberg, btw, was offended by the mayor's imperious handling of the Cathie Black matter. He says by agreeing to appoint a chief academic officer,

Bloomberg gave in. And even if the appointment of a No. 2 will make no material difference, Bloomberg did not get what he wanted just because he wanted it. That is good for him and for us.

He is not a king after all. He remains the best of mayors.

The king is dead!

Long live the mayor!

Gee - where do we start with this muddled-headed mush masquerading as journalism?

Okay, first: if you've been paying attention in even the slightest way, you know Mayor Bloomberg has been imperious pretty much since the start.

Even early on, when he would still listen to other people's opinions on issues, he had a stubborn streak that drew lines in the sand on the things.

Remember the whole controversy on where he goes during the weekends? Bloomberg refused to give any details, saying it was nobody's business. Can you imagine if President Obama disappeared on weekends to some undisclosed location and refused to tell anybody where he was? How would the press handle that?

Here in NYC, the press simply shrugged and let Bloomberg be.

Secondly, since that time, all we have seen from Bloomberg is royal policy-making. We have had his imperious rule of the NYC school system, his firing of two appointees of the PEP board because they didn't vote the way he wanted on a matter, his attempt to place a stadium that almost nobody wanted and the city couldn't afford over on the West Side because his real estate buddies thought it would be good for business, his attempt to ramrod congestion pricing through, and his banning of food with transfats in it even as he continues to eat food with transfats in it.

In all of these cases, Bloomberg has acted like king and savior, not some democratically-elected mayor ready, willing and able to listen to the will of the people.

Has Daly been paying attention AT ALL to the last nine years? The imperious nature of King Mikey the Moneybags did NOT start three weeks ago with the Cathie Black matter or a year and a half ago when he had his minions lay the groundwork to overturn term limits JUST FOR HIM.

It's been there the whole time.

The way he treated a reporter in a wheelchair who couldn't turn off his tape recorder when he accidentally dropped it symbolizes just what a arrogant autocrat Bloomberg has been.

With Bloomberg, it is ALWAYS about him and ONLY he matters.

Good God, sometimes I read stuff in the papers and think, "How the hell does this person have a job as a journalist? This garbage is worse than something Tom Friedman would write!"

Today's Daly column sure qualifies as Friedmanesque.