NY Times: Cuomo Reportedly Set To Reduce Role Of Testing In His Vaunted APPR Teacher Evaluation System

It's amazing what 220,000+ opt outs and poll numbers mired in the very low 40's will do to a politician's take on a particular issue:

Less than a year ago, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York proclaimed that the key to transforming the state’s education system was tougher evaluations for teachers, and he pushed through changes that increased the weight of student test scores in teachers’ ratings.

Now, facing a parents’ revolt against testing, the state is poised to change course and reduce the role of test scores in evaluations. And according to two people involved in making state education policy, Mr. Cuomo has been quietly pushing for a reduction, even to zero. That would represent an about-face from January, when the governor called for test scores to determine 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation.

There's some conjecture on just what this "reduction" will be:

The idea that Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, is pushing for the changes comes from several different avenues. According to one of the education policy makers, Mr. Malatras said in a conversation that the administration wanted to decouple test scores and evaluations. The other person reported having spoken with people who had similar conversations with the administration.

Two members of the Board of Regents, the body that sets state education policy, said they had heard that Mr. Cuomo was pushing for a moratorium on the use of test scores in evaluations. The two board members, Kathleen M. Cashin and Betty A. Rosa, both said they would heartily support such a change.

There's a big difference between "decoupling" tests scores from evaluations and having a "moratorium" on test scores being used in evaluations, so as always with this stuff, the devil is in the details.

Cuomo, through shill Malatras, is claiming nothing has been determined yet, that they're waiting for findings from the vaunted Common Core Review task force that Cuomo announced in September - but that's jive of course.

Cuomo has controlled every commission, panel and task force he's put together, from the two Moreland Commissions (one after Sandy on utilities, one on corruption that has him under federal investigation for witness tampering and possible obstruction) to the other two education commissions he put together (just ask Todd Hathaway who disagreed with the findings of the task force he sat on but had his name signed to the pre-determined report nonetheless!)

So what Cuomo wants, Cuomo's Common Core Review task force will find.

And it looks as if the governor, reeling from the bad press and bad polling on education, has perhaps decided the suitcases full of cash he gets from ed deformers aren't enough to keep him pushing ed deform policies in toto:

In New York, Mr. Cuomo’s push to give test scores more weight in evaluations helped propel a widespread test refusal movement this year, centered on Long Island. More than 200,000 of the nearly 1.2 million students expected to take the annual reading and math tests did not sit for them in 2015. At some schools, as many as 75 percent of students opted out.

Long Islanders tend to be swing voters, and education is a top concern of theirs, given the high percentage of school-age children and the role that local schools’ reputations have on real estate values, said Lawrence Levy, the executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University.

“Considering how his numbers fell off in suburban communities in the last election, I thought that the governor had to pay close attention to the desires and the demands of these suburban swing constituencies,” Mr. Levy said.

One final point to make on this - there's a likelihood that all they're going to do is call for a "moratorium" on test score use in APPR or a "moratorium" on the "penalties" teachers would suffer for low scores:

“A moratorium is under consideration,” said State Senator Carl L. Marcellino, a Long Island Republican, chairman of the Education Committee and a member of the task force.

The Board of Regents would quite likely approve a moratorium or any other step to reduce the role of test scores in evaluations. Until recently, a majority of the board supported tying test scores to evaluations, but the Legislature elected several new members this year who are critical of that policy.

This "moratorium" could come based upon the 50% test score criteria Cuomo imposed in the budget or it could be lowered to something like 20% (which is apparently what NYSED MaryEllen Elia thinks it ought to be.)

In any case, the "big changes" to education policy Cuomo promised look to be coming.

Whether they're substantive changes or more jive made to look like substantive changes remains to be seen.

Having watched Cuomo closely now for a few years, I remain skeptical.

But the low approval numbers in the polling, the especially low education numbers in those polls, the high opt out rates (with the numbers set to go even higher this year if the status quo continues) and the even higher "hardship waivers" districts got on Cuomo's vaunted new APPR teacher evaluation system with the 50% test score component seem to have weakened some of Cuomo's resolve to continue to scapegoat teachers for all the ills in the education system.

Cuomo Says "A Lot Of Changes" Are Coming To Education System

Make what you will of this:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo praised the tenure of outgoing Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch on Monday, but at the same time indicated he will push for broad reforms to the state’s education curriculum and Common Core standards.

...

Cuomo has come under fire for his education policies from the state’s teachers unions and state lawmakers reluctantly approved the changes in part because they were tied to a boost in state education aid.

The governor’s Common Core panel expects to have recommendations for Cuomo in changing the standards by January.

“This is also a time where you are going to see a lot of changes in the education system,” Cuomo said. “The Common Core system I think almost everyone uniformly agrees needs dramatic reform.”

Asked if he believed Tisch did a good job as chancellor, Cuomo called her “an extraordinary person.”

But he added: “We have a lot of changes to make in education.”

Cuomo's got trouble on the polling front.

No matter what he does these days, his poll numbers remain underwater.

The latest Siena poll has him at 40% approval and 58% disapproval despite his push for a higher minimum wage, a move that was supposed to help bolster his support from the left.

On education, he has 68% of voters in the Siena poll disapproving of his handling of education.

He's got low marks on the economy, infrastructure and corruption as well.

His poll numbers have been underwater for quite a while now too (he was at 42%-57% in last December's Siena poll, for example.)

So Cuomo's floundering, he's starting to get desperate and he doesn't know how to turn this around.

He's decided he's going to pay lip service to making changes to the Common Core with a review panel, but given that the people he appointed to his review panel are mostly pro-CCSS (and pretty much the same one's who rubberstamped what we've got now), it's hard to see how we get any substantive change from them.

In addition, he refuses to make any changes to his APPR teacher evaluation system that makes test scores 50% of a teacher's rating.

So, I dunno what changes he's talking about that are coming.

From what I can see, all we're getting is a change in rhetoric on testing and the Common Core, but not actual change to the top-down imposed policies and reform agenda.

And given that this is a guy who said he would "break" public schools, I hear "a lot of changes" from him more as a threat than anything else.

Siena Poll: 68% Of New Yorker's Are Negative On Cuomo's Handling Of Public Education

A new Siena poll out this morning and the numbers are not good for Governor Cuomo.

58% of those polled disapprove of the job he is doing as governor, 40% approve.

On individual issues, the numbers are even worse.

On public education, 68% disapprove of the job he is doing, 27% approve.

On corruption, 69% disapprove of the job he is doing, 23% approve.

On the economy, 63% disapprove of the job he is doing, 35% approve.

On improving the state's infrastructure, 65% disapprove of the job he is doing, 29% approve.

This is not a popular governor.

These numbers come despite Cuomo's trying to bolster his popularity with the left through a minimum wage hike and extending protections to transgendered people.

And they come despite Cuomo's attempts to pander to parents with his sham Common Core review.

I'll have a bit more on the education numbers in another post.

Suffice to say for now, Governor Cuomo is not in a great position politically.

NY Times Shills For Common Core

At the end of a Motoko Rich NY Times piece on how states are manipulating Common Core test scores comes this bit of shillery:

Despite the pushback, teachers here continue to infuse their lessons with Common Core principles.

In a seventh-grade English class at Berwick recently, Rashaun James had posted this thought, paraphrased from the Common Core: “Gather relevant information from multiple sources and draw conclusions.”

Her teaching methods were more creative than the dry standard suggested. Cordoning off a large space in the middle of the classroom with yellow caution tape, she had faked a crime scene, strewing dirt and gravel from the school garden across a large piece of butcher paper on which she had drawn outlines of two bodies and stamped footprints of shoes dipped in red paint.

Ms. James urged the students to analyze the clues and come up with possible victims, suspects and motives for an ultimate assignment of writing a narrative about the crime.

She was not too concerned how the assignment would affect test performance. In 10 years of teaching, she said, tests changed and policies came and went. The Common Core could “go away tomorrow,” she said.

“But does it make a difference in terms of whether I have a crime scene in my classroom?” she added. “There will always be a crime scene in my classroom.”

How is this lesson "infused" with Common Core principles?

Students were never asked to analyze clues before the advent of Common Core?

Students were never asked to "gather relevant evidence from multiple sources and draw conclusions" before the advent of Common Core?

Also would note, what is "Common Core" about asking students to "write a narrative"?

Students were never asked to write narratives before the Common Core Era?

Actually, given how much emphasis is put on argumentative writing these days, having students write a narrative seems like a pre-Common Core lesson to me.

I've tried to get out of the educator reporter-bashing business the past few years, having realized it's mostly counterproductive, but I have to say that the NY Times education coverage is awful.

Rich pieces in particular tend toward offering conventional education reform wisdom framed as reporting.

Cuomo's Approval/Disapproval On Education: 33%-54%

Jon Campbell at Gannett:

The state Board of Regents passed a revamped set of rules Wednesday for New York's new system of evaluating teachers, but promised to pen a letter to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers outlining their many concerns.

The Regents, the state's education policymakers, voted 10-6 in favor of the new regulations, which included a new system for some teachers to appeal their ratings and the loosening of an observation requirement for small school districts.

The vote came after significant debate and some nose-holding among the Regents.

Several voted no in protest of the new system, which was required by a state law approved by Cuomo and the Legislature in March and has been derided by teachers unions. Other Regents warned of a possible loss of state money for local schools if the rules were voted down, noting the board was required by the law to approve a set of rules governing the process.

"Quite frankly, I have met with hundreds of people, and all I hear is the joy of teaching is being squeezed out of them as a result of this process," said Regent Judith Johnson, whose district stretches from Poughkeepsie to Westchester County. She voted against the proposal.

New Yorkers know who to blame - Andrew Cuomo.

Cuomo's approval/disapproval on education stands at 33% - 54% in the latest Quinnipiac poll.

Cuomo's fallen to his lowest approval level in a Q poll.

You can bet his handling of education issues one of the primary reasons for his continued drop in approval.

He's well under water with Republicans and Independents on that issue and even Dems only approve of his handling of education by 44%-42%.

Nonetheless Cuomo continues to shove through his unpopular education reform agenda with what seems to be political impunity.

Clearly Cuomo must pay a higher political price than falling poll numbers to abandon his harmful education reform agenda.

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.

Education Advocacy Group Brings In Bill Cosby To Speak About Improving Education

What year is this?

Bill Cosby was scheduled to visit Alabama on Thursday and Friday, for events aimed at highlighting schools in one of the poorest areas of the state. 

Cosby, whose record of educational philanthropy has been overshadowed in recent months by sexual assault allegations from more than 25 women and two pending lawsuits, will speak in several cities across Alabama’s rural Black Belt, a region named for its fertile black soil but stifled by low income and high unemployment. 

Cosby will speak with high-school students as part of a new campaign by the nonprofit Black Belt Community Foundation to improve education in the south-central part of the state. 

Foundation president Felecia Lucky said Cosby was volunteering his time to bring exposure to schools in the area.

It's like the 25 sexual assault allegations and two pending lawsuits never happened.

I don't understand why any education group would have Cosby speak at one of its events.

NYU Rudin Center For Transporation Policy: Access To Mass Transit Is The "Great Equalizer" In NYC, Not Education

Fascinating piece by Christopher Robbins at Gothamist that says the Rudin Center for Transporation Policy and Management has produced a report that purports to demonstrate that access to mass transit in NYC is more important than education in terms of economic opportunity:

Public transit is New York City's crucial equalizer in matters of housing and employment. This fact would be uncontroversial, except Governor Cuomo has balked at providing the MTA with the $32 billion in capital funds it needs to function and improve. A new report [PDF] shows how transportation plays a huge role in the earning power of New Yorkers.

NYU's Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management looked at 177 different zip codes, and found that neighborhoods with the best access to transit, usually in Manhattan, (Chelsea is number one [PDF]) also have the highest median household income, and the lowest unemployment rate. In those neighborhoods, 79% commute by walking or public transit, and only 10.9% by car.

Neighborhoods with the worst access to transit (South Staten Island) had lower median incomes ($61,381) and slightly lower unemployment rates (9.7%), but more than 50% commuted by car.

The neighborhoods with limited access to public transit, like the Flatlands in Brooklyn, fare the worst: their unemployment rate is nearly 12%, and their median household income is around $46,000.

The more jobs you can reasonably commute to within an hour, the more job opportunities you'll have, and the higher your wage will be.

Cuomo is set to "break" the public school system in NYC because he says the current system hurts children and harms their future economic potential.

But Rudin Center Director Mitchell Moss says Cuomo could do more for economic opportunity if he would just, you know, fully fund the MTA:

“In New York, mass transit is the path to economic mobility, not education,” Mitchell Moss, Rudin's director, told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s far more important to have a MetroCard than a college degree.”

...

"What’s really important for the future to metropolitan transit is winning a fully-funded, $32 billion five-year rebuilding program, which is being considered in Albany right now," Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign said in November. "That means our politicians have to find the money to buy us new subway cars and buses, rehabilitated station, safe track and computerized signals. Otherwise, its back to the big ugly. New Yorkers cannot afford that."

I think access to a quality education, along with access to public transportation, are both important.

Cuomo, who claims he cares for the future of children while teachers and the education bureaucracy don't, doesn't intend to properly fund either.

As part of his Port Authority reform, Cuomo is calling for mass transit cuts (albeit, on the NY/NJ lines, not the MTA lines.)

But just as his education policies the first four years show how little he cares for public education, his refusal to provide the MTA with the money needed to make upgrades shows how little he cares for public transportation.

Andrew Cuomo, staunch believer that the free market fairy solves all, likes the word "privatized" in front of words like "education" and "transportation" as much as possible.

Siena Poll: Overwhelming Majority Of New Yorkers Say Education Hasn't Improved Under Cuomo

We're going to have a whole host of bad news for Sheriff Andy Cuomo from the Siena poll that was released today.

The biggest piece of bad news from the poll is that a third party candidate would do some serious damage to Sheriff Andy's totals against GOP challenger Rob Astorino, as I posted about earlier.

But there's more bad news for Sheriff Andy in the poll too - bad news like this:

The survey by Siena College finds only 15 percent think the quality of education has improved under Cuomo, 41 percent think it's gotten worse, and 38 percent say it's unchanged.

79% of New Yorkers say the quality of education in New York State has either stay the same or gotten worse - with the biggest group saying it's gotten worse.

Only 15% of New Yorkers think the quality of education has gotten better under Sheriff Andy's leadership.

Cuomo may want to shove the responsibility for education policy off onto the Regents or SED (although his budget does more to steer education policy than either the Regents or SED), but voters aren't buying it.

Putting Common Core In Perspective

A commenter at the Newsday story reporting Cuomo is going to run his own pro-CCCSS ads:

CC is part of a world-wide corporate globalization initiative to dumb down teachers, currricula and students and turn them into scared, uncreative, unimaginative, test- taking drones. The de-skilling of teachers and students will turn them into lower-paid, passive people with the ultimate goal of increased corporate profits by cutting wages, benefits, teacher pay and destroying teacher unions. Junk it and go back to the old system which has produced outstanding students, teachers, districts and exceptional American innovation. Asians have a test-centered CC system producing uncreative drones. They rely on stealing US innovation or buying patents and US companies.

The corporate reformers, especially the politicians like Obama, keep talking up South Korea and China for their education systems.

But as we have seen here at Perdido Street School, we shouldn't be emulating either the South Koreans or the Chinese education systems.

Inherit The Wind

From Political Wire:

"We know we didn't come from monkeys! Ladies and gentlemen, they're using your tax dollars to brainwash our children into socialist issues and ideas and it is time for it to stop."

-- Texas Board of Education candidate Lady Theresa Thombs (R), quoted by the Dallas Observer, on science education.

From Inherit The Wind:

Bloomberg Claims His Education Reforms Are "Poster Child" For National Reform

The Daily News is doing Bloomberg "legacy" pieces today and the story on education by Ben Chapman is pretty good.

Here's the opening:

He ran for office as the Education Mayor, but his report card is mixed — at best.
Mayor Bloomberg’s overhaul of the public schools was one of the most ambitious projects in the history of city government — backed by a doubling of the education budget during his tenure.

From the very question of who would control the country’s largest school system to the tiny details of what kids ate for lunch, Bloomberg evaluated and acted on every aspect of public schools.

But 12 years after the mayor began his quest to reinvent the mammoth agency, graduation rates are up, but other indicators of student achievement remain flat — and some have even worsened.

“They threw everything they had at the problem, but the levels of learning are about the same as they were before,” said Brooklyn College education Prof. David Bloomfield. “It’s amazing how small the improvements are.”

Test scores down, NAEP scores flattened, class sizes up, conflict between communities increased dramatically because of his school closure policies, but Bloomberg says his reform agenda remains the "poster child" for the rest of the nation:

Despite his critics, Bloomberg remained certain of his own prowess as an education reformer. “What is clear is that for the 12 years we’ve been doing this, the results are – by any national standards – outstanding,” Bloomberg said at a recent press conference to announce a slight increase in graduation rates. “We really have become the poster child.”

I've said this before, I'll say it again.

Ever notice when Bloomberg touts his "legacy" here in NYC, it's always in the "We're The Bestest Thing Ever!" vein?

This week when confronted with the very large increase in income inequality under his reign and questions about the increase in homelessness in the city, Bloomberg defended his "legacy" by saying that there's no better place in the world to be homeless than NYC.

Bloomberg then had his hired henchmen, like Howard Wolfson, take to the Twitter and the pages of the WSJ to tout his greatness in helping alleviate poverty and homelessness - even though the stats show a big increase in both during the Bloomberg Years.


His need to be the "Bestest Thing Ever!" is really an interesting insight into his troubled psyche.

Even when his legacy is so clearly not the "Bestest Thing Ever!" - even when the Bloomberg-friendly Daily News acknowledges this - Bloomberg still touts it as the "Bestest Thing Ever!"

In the years ahead, Bloomberg will continue to have his minions write up the propaganda and "history" of his years in office to try and rewrite the story so that it becomes "Bloomberg Years: Bestest Thing Ever!"

Bloomberg is the poster child for a fevered ego who has never quite made it out of the pre-adolescent stage.

Jerry Brown Really Gets What Education Is All About

These are truly amazing statements from a 21st century politician:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Gov. Jerry Brown blasted the notion of government-imposed standards for public schools, saying he opposed efforts from Washington and Sacramento to dictate education policy.

Using "data on a national or state level I think misses the point — that learning is very individual, very personal," Brown said during an on-stage interview Monday with the Atlantic magazine's James Bennet at the Computer History Museum. "It comes back to the teacher and the principal. The leader of the school is by far the most important factor

When asked if he supported national education standards, Brown said, "No. That's just a form of national control."

Speaking to a half-empty auditorium of about 150 technology business leaders, Brown reprised a story he tells frequently about an exam he had in high school when a teacher asked students to write their impressions of a green leaf.

"Still, as I walk by trees, I keep saying, 'How's my impression coming? Can I feel anything? Am I dead inside?' So, this was a very powerful question that has haunted me for 50 years."

The point, Brown said, is that "you can't put that on a standardized test. There are important educational encounters that can't be captured by tests."

I'm sure these statements from Brown went over the heads of these technology business leaders who only want to push the one-size-fits-all education model that enriches them and their businesses by sticking kids in front of computers all day long and testing them on those same computers all throughout the year.

And certainly the kind of question Brown's teacher asked Brown and his classmates 50 years ago would go over the heads of our current educational consultant class, from Charlotte Danielson to Michelle Rhee, who don't believe anything that cannot be quantified has any value in education.

You'd never hear Sheriff Andy Cuomo, Chris Christie, Mayor Bloomberg or President Obama say anything like Brown just said either.

But it's good to know at least one politician in this country still has a soul.

De Blasio And His Team Push Pre-K Program

From Politicker:

Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio rolled out an “all-star” brain trust today that will work to implement his ambitious universal pre-kindergarten agenda.

...

This was not the first time Mr. de Blasio held a press event at a childcare center to promote the centerpiece of his policy platform: a tax hike on the city’s wealthiest residents to pay for universal pre-K. While his last Manhattan stop came during the course of the heated campaign, Mr. de Blasio was in Harlem today to unveil his six-person “working group,” a collection of childcare professionals and old allies that would be tasked with making his plan a reality by September 2014.

“This is an all-star team. You could not ask for a stronger group to help us prepare and get the word out,” Mr. de Blasio told the reporters. “We can and will make sure the largest number of kids are served.”

The working group is composed of: Jennifer Jones Austin, Mr. de Blasio’s transition team co-chair; Elba Montalvo, founder and president of the Committee for Hispanic Children and Families; Josh Wallack, a leader at the Children’s Aid Society and Mr. de Blasio’s former legislative director; Sherry Cleary, executive director of the New York City Early Childhood Professional Development Institute; Gail Nayowith, the executive director of SCO Family of Services; and Nancy Kolben, executive director of the Center for Children’s Initiatives.

Their initial efforts are expected to center on developing plans to recruit, train and retain educators, secure space for thousands of additional children and research the best pre-K practices from programs across the country, Mr. de Blasio said. He hopes to grow the city’s pre-K program from 20,000 to 80,000 students.

“This really is about giving every child a right to a good education,” the mayor-elect said. “We have the opportunity right now to achieve this … We are here to stay. We are going to make this work.”

When asked about the potential hurdles in Albany getting taxes raised to pay for his pre-K program, de Blasio noted he won with 73% of the vote - a mandate if ever there was one and polls show the public supports raising taxes on rich people to pay for the pre-K program.

Still no word on what he plans for the rest of the education system or who he plans to lead it.

Obama Is A Disaster

This is the first and probably only time you will see me agree with Peggy Noonan:

Peggy Noonan: "The ObamaCare rollout is a disaster for the White House, not a problem or a challenge or an embarrassment, not a gaffe or a bad few weeks. It is a political disaster, and the only question is whether it is partially recoverable, meaning the system can be made to work in a generally satisfactory way in the next few weeks. But--it has to be repeated--they had 3½ years after passage of the Affordable Care Act to make the program into something the American people could register for and feel they were benefiting from. Three and a half years! They had a long-declared start date: It would all go live Oct. 1, 2013, and everyone in the government, every contractor and consultant, knew it."

Incompetent beyond belief.

This is the same president who came to P-Tech this week to brag about his education reform agenda and how it was making education better for students all across the nation.

But of course his education reform agenda is a disaster of monumental proportions, just like Obamacare.

The consequences are being seen in the numbers of parents across the nation joining the anti-Common Core and anti-testing movements, the numbers of children saying they hate school and never want to go back, and the numbers of teachers quitting the profession or looking to quit it because of the scripted lessons, the teacher evaluations tied to test scores and the harmful Common Core standards, the idiotic curriculum that has been developed around it, and the damaging tests created to "assess" whether it has been learned by children.

This man has been a disaster as a president, as bad as George W. Bush.

And don't even get me started on the spying, the drone bomb killings, the war on whistleblowers, etc.

Michael Winerip Really Gets It

Great column in the Times by Michael Winerip on mayoral control and what is really important in education.

Here is my favorite part:

For five of the last 10 years, I’ve covered education. I’ve been in hundreds of schools, interviewed more children, teachers and principals than I can count. In that time, I spoke one sentence to Joel I. Klein; not one to Ms. Black; and one to Dennis M. Walcott, the man picked to be the next chancellor.

...

There are a few things you actually need to know to cover education in New York City: The mayor is considered to be a national leader in what’s called the reform movement; he believes in the educational market place, standardized tests and charter schools; and it’s almost always the union’s fault.

The one thing the last two chancellors and the presumptive chancellor have in common: They believe the very same things the mayor believes.

I don’t feel I’ve missed much by not talking to chancellors. At the moment Ms. Black resigned, I was in Harlem, touring Public School 241, whose students have been moved into the basement to make room for a charter school.

The thing I love about education — after the politicians have finished micromanaging; after the think-tank scholars have massaged the latest studies; after the scientists in the Education Department have produced data to justify almost anything — good teachers can still go into their rooms, close their doors and teach.

When the children of New York City grow up, they will not remember who the chancellor was when they were in school. They will not remember the name of the secretary of education. But until the day they die, they will remember their kindergarten teachers.

That's really well said.

Law School Scams - Enslaving An Entire Generation

Oh, no! What will all those Teach for America missionaries do after their three year stint in a South Bronx middle school ends!

IF there is ever a class in how to remain calm while trapped beneath $250,000 in loans, Michael Wallerstein ought to teach it.

Here he is, sitting one afternoon at a restaurant on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a tall, sandy-haired, 27-year-old radiating a kind of surfer-dude serenity. His secret, if that’s the right word, is to pretty much ignore all the calls and letters that he receives every day from the dozen or so creditors now hounding him for cash.

“And I don’t open the e-mail alerts with my credit score,” he adds. “I can’t look at my credit score any more.”

Mr. Wallerstein, who can’t afford to pay down interest and thus watches the outstanding loan balance grow, is in roughly the same financial hell as people who bought more home than they could afford during the real estate boom. But creditors can’t foreclose on him because he didn’t spend the money on a house.

He spent it on a law degree. And from every angle, this now looks like a catastrophic investment.

Well, every angle except one: the view from law schools. To judge from data that law schools collect, and which is published in the closely parsed U.S. News and World Report annual rankings, the prospects of young doctors of jurisprudence are downright rosy.

In reality, and based on every other source of information, Mr. Wallerstein and a generation of J.D.’s face the grimmest job market in decades. Since 2008, some 15,000 attorney and legal-staff jobs at large firms have vanished, according to a Northwestern Law study. Associates have been laid off, partners nudged out the door and recruitment programs have been scaled back or eliminated.

And with corporations scrutinizing their legal expenses as never before, more entry-level legal work is now outsourced to contract temporary employees, both in the United States and in countries like India. It’s common to hear lawyers fret about the sort of tectonic shift that crushed the domestic steel industry decades ago.

Yeah, I dunno if Mr. Wallerstein is remaining calm among all that expanding debt or just living in some kind of denial. Nonetheless, this is a scary story. But it is one you wouldn't know about if you were just listening to the law schools around the country talk about their statistics:

Improbably enough, law schools have concluded that life for newly minted grads is getting sweeter, at least by one crucial measure. In 1997, when U.S. News first published a statistic called “graduates known to be employed nine months after graduation,” law schools reported an average employment rate of 84 percent. In the most recent U.S. News rankings, 93 percent of grads were working — nearly a 10-point jump.

In the Wonderland of these statistics, a remarkable number of law school grads are not just busy — they are raking it in. Many schools, even those that have failed to break into the U.S. News top 40, state that the median starting salary of graduates in the private sector is $160,000. That seems highly unlikely, given that Harvard and Yale, at the top of the pile, list the exact same figure.

How do law schools depict a feast amid so much famine?

“Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,” says William Henderson of Indiana University, one of many exasperated law professors who are asking the American Bar Association to overhaul the way law schools assess themselves. “Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.”

IT is an open secret, Professor Henderson and others say, that schools finesse survey information in dozens of ways. And the survey’s guidelines, which are established not by U.S. News but by the American Bar Association, in conjunction with an organization called the National Association for Law Placement, all but invite trimming.

A law grad, for instance, counts as “employed after nine months” even if he or she has a job that doesn’t require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee’s? You’re employed. Stocking aisles at Home Depot? You’re working, too.

Number-fudging games are endemic, professors and deans say, because the fortunes of law schools rise and fall on rankings, with reputations and huge sums of money hanging in the balance. You may think of law schools as training grounds for new lawyers, but that is just part of it.

They are also cash cows.

Tuition at even mediocre law schools can cost up to $43,000 a year. Those huge lecture-hall classes — remember “The Paper Chase”? — keep teaching costs down. There are no labs or expensive equipment to maintain. So much money flows into law schools that law professors are among the highest paid in academia, and law schools that are part of universities often subsidize the money-losing fields of higher education.

“If you’re a law school and you add 25 kids to your class, that’s a million dollars, and you don’t even have to hire another teacher,” says Allen Tanenbaum, a lawyer in Atlanta who led the American Bar Association’s commission on the impact of the economic crisis on the profession and legal needs. “That additional income goes straight to the bottom line.”

There were fewer complaints about fudging and subsidizing when legal jobs were plentiful. But student loans have always been the financial equivalent of chronic illnesses because there is no legal way to shake them. So the glut of diplomas, the dearth of jobs and those candy-coated employment statistics have now yielded a crop of furious young lawyers who say they mortgaged their future under false pretenses. You can sample their rage, and their admonitions, on what are known as law school scam blogs, with names like Shilling Me Softly, Subprime JD and Rose Colored Glasses.

“Avoid this overpriced sewer pit as if your life depended on it,” writes the anonymous author of the blog Third Tier Reality — a reference to the second-to-bottom tier of the U.S. News rankings — in a typically scatological review. “Unless, of course, you think that you will be better off with $110k-$190k in NON-DISCHARGEABLE debt for a degree that qualifies you to wait tables at the Battery Park Bar and Lounge.”

Ah, yes, our finest universities and halls of academia lying about statistics and data in order to keep raking in the big bucks - why that tradition is as hallowed and American as Apple Pie, Baseball and Wall Street.

Unfortunately many students do not seem to know that the law schools are lying about the job prospects:

But so far, the warnings have been unheeded. Job openings for lawyers have plunged, but law schools are not dialing back enrollment. About 43,000 J.D.’s were handed out in 2009, 11 percent more than a decade earlier, and the number of law schools keeps rising — nine new ones in the last 10 years, and five more seeking approval to open in the future.

Apparently, there is no shortage of 22-year-olds who think that law school is the perfect place to wait out a lousy economy and the gasoline that fuels this system — federally backed student loans — is still widely available. But the legal market has always been obsessed with academic credentials, and today, few students except those with strong grade-point averages at top national and regional schools can expect a come-hither from a deep-pocketed firm. Nearly everyone else is in for a struggle. Which is why many law school professors privately are appalled by what they describe as a huge and continuing transfer of wealth, from students short on cash to richly salaried academics. Or perhaps this is more like a game of three-card monte, with law schools flipping the aces and a long line of eager players, most wagering borrowed cash, in a contest that few of them can win.

And all those losers can remain cash-poor for a long time. “I think the student loans that kids leave law school with are more scandalous than payday loans,” says Andrew Morriss, a law professor at the University of Alabama. “And because it’s so easy to get a student loan, law school tuition has grossly outpaced the rate of inflation for the last 20 years. It’s now astonishingly high.”

Like everything else about the law, however, the full picture here is complicated. Independent surveys find that most law students would enroll even if they knew that only a tiny number of them would wind up with six-figure salaries. Nearly all of them, it seems, are convinced that they’re going to win the ring toss at this carnival and bring home the stuffed bear.

Law schools teach ethics, but do not practice them themselves. If they did, they would be open and honest about job prospects. Right now, they are engaging in the same kinds of practices the GAO was nailing for-profit colleges for over the summer in a Congressional investigation.

Here is how duplicitous these universities can be:

Even students with open eyes, though, will have a hard time sleuthing through the U.S. News rankings. They are based entirely on unaudited surveys conducted by each law school, using questions devised by the American Bar Association and the National Association for Law Placement. Given the stakes and given that the figures are not double-checked by an impartial body, each school faces exactly the sort of potential conflict of interest lawyers are trained to howl about.

The surveys themselves have a built-in bias. As many deans acknowledge, the results are skewed because graduates with high-paying jobs are more likely to respond than people earning $9 an hour at Radio Shack. (Those who don’t respond are basically invisible, aside from reducing the overall response rate of the survey.)

Certain definitions in the surveys seem open to abuse. A person is employed after nine months, for instance, if he or she is working on Feb. 15. This is the most competitive category — it counts for about one-seventh of the U.S. News ranking — and in the upper echelons, it’s not unusual to see claims of 99 percent and, in a handful of cases, 100 percent employment rates at nine months.

A number of law schools hire their own graduates, some in hourly temp jobs that, as it turns out, coincide with the magical date. Last year, for instance, Georgetown Law sent an e-mail to alums who were “still seeking employment.” It announced three newly created jobs in admissions, paying $20 an hour. The jobs just happened to start on Feb. 1 and lasted six weeks.

A spokeswoman for the school said that none of these grads were counted as “employed” as a result of these hourly jobs. In a lengthy exchange of e-mails and calls, several different explanations were offered, the oddest of which came from Gihan Fernando, the assistant dean of career services. He said in an interview that Georgetown Law had “lost track” of two of the three alums, even though they were working at the very institution that was looking for them.

Georgetown Law School - not just a law school, but a Catholic law school. So not just supposed to teach ethics, also supposed to teach morals.

And here they are, caught in dishonest, duplicitous, immoral, and unethical behavior right in the pages of the New York Times.

Isn't that usually the kind of stuff you expect to read about for-profit schools like Kaplan University?

Indeed it is.

But the higher education system, like the K-12 system, is fast becoming nothing more than one big corporate scam.

In the case of higher education, they're fleecing gullible young people out of their money and enslaving them with unmanageable debt for life.

In the case of the K-12 corporatization of education, they're educating a generation of students unable to critical think and see through the corporate scams.

The sense of denial many students have - Sure, they're aren't many high paying jobs out there, but I'll get one - aids the higher education crooks in scamming people out of their money.

But the schools themselves - and the crooks running them - are most at fault for this mess.

Until people rise up in mass and say "Enough bullshit!", none of this will change.

In fact, it will get worse.

The Sole Purpose of Education

Given the move toward making the bubbling of standardized test circles the sole purpose of education these days, I think this post from Barry Ritholtz at the The Big Picture is quite apt:

In 1914, John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford, addressed the first session of his two-year lecture course as follows:

“Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies that (will) form a noble adventure…Let me make this clear to you. ..nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life – save only this – that if you work hard and intelligently, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole purpose of education.”

Can you think of any better lesson for children to learn these days than to be able to detect when a man is talking rot?

Between the corporate politicians and the corporate media, pretty much all we hear is rot these days.