Another Education Reformer Goal - Criminalize Teachers

The latest example of where the "Teachers Are Criminals" mindset education reformers have imposed on the education system gets us:

Legendary blind gym teacher Steven Sloan may have lost his job over Listerine.

Sloan, 60, a popular coach hailed as a role model for overcoming his handicap, was yanked from PS 102 in Harlem after a parent setting up for a party last year complained she smelled booze on his breath. He claims it was the alcohol-based mouthwash.

His colleagues are outraged. Several recalled his obsession with cleanliness and hygiene, saying he rinsed religiously with Listerine.

“The DOE took an outstanding career and trashed it,” said teacher Lisa Ortiz.

Sloan, who was born with macular degeneration, brought glory to PS 102 when actor Tony Danza nominated him to carry a torch at the 2006 Olympics in Italy. Former principal Sandra Gittens, who worked with Sloan for 14 years, said he arrived early, ran after-school programs, volunteered for lunch duty and chaperoned class trips.

“The students respected him,” she recalled. “He cleared his throat — ahem — and everyone got into line. It was really amazing.”

 Sloan knew the halls of PS 102 so well he didn’t use his cane. He taught exercise and sports with an assistant who served as his “eyes” to make sure the kids did as instructed.

A parent claimed she smelled booze off Sloan, found a cup in a garbage can that had remnants of a "brown liquid" in it that smelled like alcohol and accused Sloan of drinking on the job.

Sloan and his defenders claim it was Listerine.

Sloan was never seen drinking from the cup or holding it.

Nevertheless the DOE brought him up on charges for drinking on the job.

The DOE also charged him with sexual harassment for asking anybody if they wanted to go out on a "blind date" with him, a "joke" which Sloan says he habitually used to make people feel comfortable with his disability.

Sloan settled with the DOE and agreed to retire in August.

He is "devastated" about how his career ended:

“They didn’t even let me go back to my school and say goodbye,” he said. “I just want to let everybody know I did my job diligently, with all my heart and soul.”

This is how teaching careers are going to end for many of us now that the tenure rules have been rewritten so that teachers can be dismissed on expedited 3020a charges.

The allegations can be as stupid as sexual harassment against a blind teacher who makes a "blind date" joke or they can be unproven - such as drinking on the job allegations "substantiated" by one accusation and circumstantial evidence.

Doesn't matter anymore - teachers are assumed to be criminals first, guilty first, and the system will do what it does and grind them down and spew them out.

Meanwhile real criminals - the corrupt politician nominally in charge of a system owned and operated by the Wall Street and real estate criminals and tech sociopaths - commit their criminals acts with seeming impunity and only get taken down when their actions go beyond the pale (a la Vito Lopez and the pols that Preet Bharara has charged, convicted and/or indicted with crimes.)

Unionization Key To Closing Racial Wage Gap

Turns out busting public schools is NOT the secret recipe to closing the racial wage gap:

A study released on Friday, noting the gains made by black union workers in New York City, said that raising the rate of unionization among black workers across the country would help narrow the racial pay gap.

The study, conducted by two professors affiliated with the Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies at the City University of New York, which issued the report, described high unionization rates for black workers who live in the city compared with national rates.

Nearly 40 percent of black workers who are city residents are union members, compared with roughly 13 percent of black workers nationally.

The difference between the rates of black and nonblack unionization is also especially pronounced in New York City. The black unionization rate is nearly double that of nonblacks in the city, a difference that is much smaller nationally.

The authors, Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce, found that black union members enjoyed higher wages than black nonunion workers, and were also likely to have better access to employer-sponsored health care benefits and pensions.

“Unionism offers black workers a substantial economic advantage in regard to earnings — to a greater degree than is the case for nonblacks, reflecting the fact that larger numbers of blacks than nonblacks are employed in low-wage jobs,” the study said.

Gee, who'd a thunk it?

Workers with union protections and wages have economic advantages that workers without union protections and wages have.

Maybe reformers should try to stop trying to bust the public school "monopoly" and push for union jobs if they actually care about closing the racial wage gap.

But they don't actually care about any such thing.

The rhetoric around closing the racial achievement gap or racial wealth gap is just the cover story for their real aim - the privatization of the school system and the busting of the teachers unions.

What "Master" Teacher Would Go Work In A "Struggling School"?

NYSED released a list of 144 schools around the state that have been placed into receivership, with 61 here in NYC:

The New York State Education Department announced on Thursday that 144 underperforming schools, nearly half of which are in New York City, will enter receivership, a new designation that puts pressure on the de Blasio administration to show improvement at the city’s most troubled schools, and to do so quickly.

The program was one of several education reforms hammered out during budget negotiations this spring. Under the deal, schools are placed into two categories, “struggling schools,” those in the bottom 5 percent of schools in the state for three years, based on measures like test scores and graduation rates, and “persistently struggling schools,” which have been in that bracket since 2006.

For the first years of receivership, the superintendent — or, in the case of New York City, Carmen Fariña, the schools chancellor — will be the receiver. As receivers, they will have the authority to make changes, like lengthening the school day or year and requiring teachers to reapply for their jobs.

Struggling schools will have two years to make “demonstrable” improvement in areas like graduation rates and attendance; persistently struggling schools will have one year to do so. If they do not, an outside receiver, like a nonprofit group, will be chosen by the district superintendent or chancellor to oversee the schools. That receiver must be approved by the state, which has set aside an additional $75 million for the schools.

The list of those schools is here.

There are an awful lot of Queens high schools on that list.

Also a lot of schools in Buffalo.

Here is initial thrust of the program while these schools remain in local receivership:

Under the receivership law, a school receiver is granted new authority to, among other things, develop a school intervention plan; convert schools to community schools providing wrap-around services; expand the school day or school year; and remove staff and/or require staff to reapply for their jobs in collaboration with a staffing committee.

But the ultimate goal is "independent receivership," i.e., an outside entity brought in by NYSED to take over these schools from the local district and convert them to charter schools.

That will happen for schools deemed "persistently struggling" after one year where they are deemed by the state of not improving.

Schools deemed "struggling" have two years before "independent receivership."

And just who are these independent receivers?

Independent receivers, who can be an individual, a not-for-profit organization, or another school district, have sole responsibility to manage and operate the school and have all of the enhanced authority of a school receiver.  Independent receivers are appointed for up to three school years and serve under contract with the Commissioner.
 
As with Persistently Struggling Schools, the independent receiver appointed by the district must be approved by the Commissioner, and the Commissioner will make the appointment if an acceptable receiver is not selected by the district.

NYSUT was busy praising new NYSED Commissioner MaryEllen Elia last week, but her first big step this week is aimed at firing teachers and privatizing schools as allowed by Cuomo's "Schools Death Penalty Budget of 2015."

Harris Lirtzman left an astute comment on the efficacy of this reform program:

Every single one of these schools is in NYC, Buffalo, Rochester, Yonkers, Syracuse, Albany or Islip/Bellevue in Long Island. Jeez, that's really a surprise.

We all know that the only example where "receivership" supposedly does anything for struggling schools is the short-term and very limited improvement in the Lawrence, MA school district. As with every other element of the reformista program--which claims to prize "data," "accountability," "evidence" and "research" above all else--none of that really matters when the reformistas just want to do something.

Beyond that, where are all the magical teachers going to come from to staff these schools when their current rosters get dumped into the ATR in New York City and straight fired everywhere else? Will the State give the "receivers" special wands and hocus-pocus powers to make magical teachers appear from thin air? What "master" teacher anywhere would transfer to any of these schools when the State accountability system will turn a "master" teacher into a "developing" teacher in one year?

Indeed, what "master" teacher would go teach in one of these schools and end up "developing" or "ineffective" the next year under the state's punitive, test-centric teacher evaluation system?

It's, to continue with one of Andrew Cuomo's favorite analaogies for what should happen to "bad schools," the "death penalty" for a teacher's career, since two years of consecutive "ineffective" ratings can get you fired and three years of them will get you fired.

Cuomo's "Death Penalty Program" for struggling and persistently struggling schools is going to bring a lot of destabilization in the next couple of years before most of these schools are ultimately turned over to independent receivers and privatized.

And of course that was always the goal of Cuomo's reform plans - to "bust" the public school "monopoly," to destabilize public education and to privatize public schools.

Siena Poll: 73% Of New Yorkers Give Cuomo Poor Marks On Education

Siena College poll out today that shows a continued downward trend in Governor Andrew Cuomo's job approval ratings (now down to 39% approval, 60% disapproval) and favorability ratings (49% favorable, 44% unfavorable), but it's the question on education that intrigued me most:

Has Governor Cuomo done an excellent, good, fair or poor job of improving the quality of education in New York State:

Excellent - 4%
Good - 20%
Fair - 32%
Poor - 41%
Don't Know - 3%

For those of you scoring at home, that's a 24% approval, 73% disapproval rating for Cuomo on education.

Think about those numbers for a moment

By nearly a 3-1 margin, New Yorkers disapprove of Cuomo's handling of education issues.

Cuomo just imposed a radical education reform agenda on the state during the last budget session that includes an unworkable teacher evaluation system sure to cause chaos in the system.

It will be interesting to see what Cuomo's rating on education issues is after a year or so of stories in the news about teachers getting rated "ineffective" based on test scores for students they don't teach in subjects they don't teach and that sort of thing.

Overall, Cuomo's approval and favorability continue to fall, and while that hasn't stopped Cuomo from being able to shove through much of his radical agenda this past year, don't think that he's not paying a political price for it.

Looking at the polling numbers in all three polls, the Marist poll, the Siena poll, and the Quinnipiac poll, the trend over the past couple of years has been clear - New Yorkers approve of Cuomo less and less as time goes on and like him less and less as time goes on.

Three more years of this trend and Cuomo will be below the Spitzer line, certainly in approval and perhaps in favorability too.

Cuomo Spokesman: The More You Protest, The Worse It Will Get For You

From Jessica Bakeman at Capital NY:

ALBANY—More than 1,000 teachers and public education advocates marched through the Empire State Plaza concourse on Monday, clogging security checkpoints into the Capitol and rallying on the Million Dollar Staircase in a boisterous protest of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s education reform proposals.

Led by New York State United Teachers, the primary opponent of Cuomo’s plans to overhaul the state’s teacher evaluation system and tenure laws and boost charter schools, protesters arrived from around the state in 15 buses as well as by car from local school districts.

Carrying signs and even a cardboard cutout of Cuomo adorned with a NYSUT scarf, they chanted, “hey, hey, ho, ho, this corporate greed has got to go,” “shame on you” and “this is what Democracy looks like.”

Members of both houses of the Legislature attended the rally as it reached the Capitol staircase that’s in between the Senate and Assembly chambers. Assembly education committee chair Cathy Nolan, a Queens Democrat, was met with cheers when she encouraged teachers to continue to fight for school funding and respect for their profession.

“You have to be here to make your voice heard, or you will not be,” Nolan said. “I know it’s not easy, but it matters.”

The response from the Cuomo administration?

Their voices were heard in the hallways outside the chambers, and apparently also by the Cuomo administration, whose offices are on the second floor. Their screams further motivate the governor to pursue his agenda, spokesman Richard Azzopardi said in a statement.

“The governor is fighting to reform a system that spends more money per student than any other state in the nation while condemning hundreds of thousands of children to failing schools over the last decade,” Azzopardi said. “The louder special interests scream to protect the status quo—and today they were screaming at the top of their lungs—the more we know we’re right.”

Classic authoritarianism from Cuomo.

He doesn't care that the polling shows the public backs teachers, he doesn't care that parents and teachers are fighting against his agenda.

All he cares about is ramming through a privatization agenda that has been bought and paid for by his Wall Street and hedge fundie constituency, one that will enlarge the charter school sector, set up more public schools for failure by putting ever more mandates onto them (but not on charter schools!) and put in place a state takeover policy of schools and school districts that will allow private entities to take them over, cancel union contracts and run them the way they want.

It's November 14...

...and I'm freaking beat.

Meetings, meetings, meetings, PD, PD, PD, observations, observations, observations...

It just doesn't stop.

Would be nice to have some time to actually teach and grade, work with students.

Would be nice to stop running from meeting to PD, writing up four page lesson plans for every class just in case it's time for a drive-by observation, drowning in compliance work.

But nope - no time for any of that.

Only time for that constant feedback ed deform destructos like the Educators4Excellent love so much (it's not a coincidence most of them have moved on from teaching to full-time advocacy work.)

Only time for compliance work.

We are nearing the end game in the ed deform destruction of public education in New York State.

Part of the goal was to burn everybody out - children, teachers, administrators.

And we're there already.

I even hear it's happening to students from prominent families in New York.

Alas, that won't stop Governor Cuomo from finishing off what he started.

The destruction of the school system.

Bloomberg: Students Should Skip College, Become Plumbers Instead

Hard to believe the mayor who destroyed many of the career and technological education programs in the city school system and geared the NYCDOE accountability system toward "College For All" now says this:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -Former New York City Mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg has some advice for high school seniors: forget college, become a plumber instead.

...

"Today if your kid wants to go to college or become a plumber, you've got to think long and hard," said Bloomberg Monday at the annual meeting of Wall Street trade group SIFMA.

"If he's not going to go to a great school and he's not super smart academically, but is smart in terms of dealing with people and that sort of thing, being a plumber is a great job because you have pricing power, you have an enormous skill set," he said.

The founder of financial data and news services company Bloomberg L.P. even went as far as to say that students considering Harvard should do the math.

You could pay $50,000 to $60,000 a year to Harvard or you could make that much as an apprentice plumber, he explained.

Too bad the Little Oligarch didn't think this bright idea before he destroyed many of the CTE programs in city schools and started bludgeoning schools over college stats.

Michael Bloomberg: Compulsory Military Service Can Solve Public Education Problems

Michael Bloomberg made this stunning pronouncement at West Point a few months before he left office:

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg backed compulsory military service at an event last year, according to a report from Capital New York.

“I've always thought the only solution to our education problems in this country is compulsory military service, where if you do nothing else but teach people what they should have learnt in the public school system, you would make an enormous difference in this country,” he said.

The mayor was speaking to a group of young cadets at the United States Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., less than two months before he left office. Capital obtained a video of the event through a Freedom of Information Act Request.

Does this mean the public school system should be teaching children:

A) How to march?

B) Do jumping jacks at 4 in the morning?

C) Fire weapons?

D) Pilot drones?

E) Invade countries?

F) Take orders and be sent to the stockade when they don't follow them?

No disrespect to people in the armed services, but just what does Bloomberg think compulsory military service can teach children that public schools should have taught them but didn't?

The military is one thing, public schools are another.

No wonder Bloomberg loves "No excuses!" charters like KIPP, Uncommon Schools and Success Academies so much.

They treat the children like they're in the army, making them march up and down the halls and stairs silently, turn on a dime when teachers snap their fingers and otherwise impose "discipline" onto the children.

Bloomberg's ultimate fantasy is a country where everybody takes orders.

That's clear from the statements he makes and the way he ran the city.

Campaign To Drive Down Confidence In Public Schools A Success

The headline in the PDK/Gallup poll released yesterday was how much support Common Core has lost with both the general public and parents of children of school age.

But we shouldn't lose sight of these poll findings either:

The wide-ranging survey also showed that trust in the nation’s public school system has evaporated, as a consistent majority of Americans approve of charter schools that operate independently of state regulations.

...


Survey participants said that the top issue facing public schools is a lack of financial support, while concern about discipline issues or crime in schools is dropping.

Respondents also said that they placed more trust in their local school boards when it comes to educational policy issues than in the federal government. The survey showed the Obama administration influence waning as many Americans believe that the federal government should play a smaller role in public education.

On average, respondents said they thought highly of their neighborhood schools. But the poll showed that close to 80 percent of Americans disapprove of the nation’s public schools at large.

So the usual contradictory mess - Americans think highly of the public schools in their own communities but more than three-quarters disapprove of public schools at large.

How does this disconnect occur?

Well, if every time you turn on the TV you see television news and television programs that denigrate the quality of public schools and public school teachers and every time you open the newspaper or go on the Internet you see stories denigrating public schools and public school teachers and this occurs for, I dunno, say thirty+ years, kicking off with a Reagan administration report that declares the "nation at risk" because of the quality of the schools and continuing from there, I'd imagine you'd be convinced that the school system and the people working in it suck too.

And Americans seem to hold this belief even though, when many of these same Americans come into contact with actual public schools and public school teachers (i.e., the ones in their communities), they like and respect both.

Almost every institution in American life (e.g., government, the office of the president, the Congress, Wall Street, Big Business, churches, the press, media companies) has seen a sharp decrease in public esteem over the last thirty years, so in one sense, this huge disapproval rating for schools at large is just a part of that same devolution in public esteem for so many other American institutions and entities.

But on the other hand, it's also a consequence of the powerful and wealthy interests who have spent the last thirty years+ attacking public schools and public school teachers in the media.

The campaign to destroy public schools has been quite successful - at least when Americans think about the system as a whole.

As for their own schools, well, a lot of Americans still like those.

Therein lies the way to pushback on some of this.

Just as people tended to like Common Core when they heard about it in the abstract but hated it when they came in contact with it, people overwhelmingly disapprove of schools in the abstract but kinda like their own.

This is because experience changes perceptions and when people see what their own schools are dealing with, how their own teachers are performing, they see that the stories they hear about on the TV and in the news aren't true about their own schools and school teachers.

Now comes the trick of it - taking that experience and getting people to say, "Well, if that's true of the schools and teachers in my community, maybe it's true of school and teachers at large too?"

Hard to do when there's a well-funded, concerted effort to drive down the esteem people have for schools and teachers funded by some very wealthy business interests.

But this is I where think we must go if we want to see public education survive.

Court Rules Charter Schools Are Not Public Schools

And so Eva Moskowitz wins again:

New York charter schools won a big victory Thursday when a judge ruled the state’s top fiscal officer can’t follow the money and look at their books.

Charter school crusader Eva Moskowitz filed suit to bar state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli from auditing her 22 schools, all of which are publicly funded but also receive private donations. On Thursday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Breslin ruled DiNapoli did not have the authority to audit any New York charter because the schools are not technically “units of the state.”

“We are disappointed that the court struck down the law authorizing the Comptroller’s office to audit charter schools,” said DiNapoli spokesman Matt Sweeney. He added an appeal is under consideration.

Other cities, such as Los Angeles and Chicago, have rules allowing charters to be audited. In New York, the schools are required to hire independent auditors.

So Eva gets to hire her own "independent auditor" to scrutinize her books and financial numbers.

Yeah, I'm sure that scrutiny will be tip-top.

That's like Wall Street banks hiring their own ratings agencies to rate their financial products.

Remember how well that went?

In the end, I wonder if this court decision helps or hurts Eva and the other charters.

If Cuomo is going to shove through rules that enshrine co-location and additional charter funding because he says charter schools are public schools with a right to those things but now a court says they're not public schools and the state has no right of scrutiny over their financial books, doesn't that kind of undercut Cuomo's (and the charter operators) meme?

Or do charters get to have it both ways - they're public schools when they want the goodies like money and co-location rules, but they're private entities when the sticks come, like the audits and the teacher evaluation rules and the like?

Should Bring Them To A Public School Too

From the DN weekend news round-up:

With his two daughters in tow, President Obama visited popular D.C. bookstore “Politics and Prose” Saturday to encourage holiday shoppers to support local businesses. (NYDN)

Great, Barry, now bring them to a public school and show them what a mess you've made of the public education system with your Racing to the Top and No Child Left Behind waivers that have brought us high stakes standardized tests in every grade in every subject, teacher evaluations tied to those tests, badly designed national standards that are boring students to tears in English class and confusing them in math class, and a data collection program that encourages states to hand over sensitive student information to Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch.

I mean, so long as you're using your daughters as political props.