Why Are Bloomberg And Klein Still Considered Tech Geniuses?

Harris Lirtzman left this comment on the ARIS post from this morning:

I thought you and your readers might be interested in an article I wrote on Schoolbook on Jan. 28 in the long, painful lead-up to the contract negotiations called "Cut Waste at Education Department Before Negotiating Teachers Contract."

One could put any number of the technology and organizational and procurement boondoggles from the Bloomberg Era in any order of waste, perversity or simple ineffectiveness: my top candidates were SESIS (the "Special Education Student Information System"), your very own beloved ARIS, failure to collect hundreds of millions in federal and state reimbursements to the City for providing "related services" to students with disabilities because the DOE has no effective way to capture the information that would support the claims, stopping non-competitive contracts and procurements to "DOE-friendly" organizations and reforming or eliminating the failed and expensive school network systems.

I have always found it remarkable that the man who was responsible for building one of the most successful financial technology companies in the world could not get a single effective technology system build during his time in the City-- ARIS, SESIS, City-Time, Enhanced 911--but yet he and Joel Klein were lionized as visionaries and effective managers by many who wanted to believe.

ARIS we hardly knew ye but we're so glad to see you go.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/opinion-cut-waste-coming-table-over-teachers-contract/

I would add the NYCHA computer system, the FDNY and Sanitation Department GPS systems, and the EMT tablets to the list of Bloomberg tech boondoggles that Harris lists (SESIS, ARIS, CityTime and the 911 system.)

Let us imagine Mayor de Blasio had even a tenth of the failure that Bloomberg had with these boondoggles.

Can you imagine the press coverage?

And yet, Bloomberg has never been personally called to account for the billions of dollars of taxpayer money he lit on fire for these projects. 

Vote NO On Cuomo's Smart Schools Bond Act

Gary Stern at LoHud does a great job of giving both sides of the Smart Schools Bond Act story.

Here's why critics are opposed to Cuomo's technology bond for schools:

Opponents of the bond act say that borrowing $2 billion to pay for computers and other items with limited life spans would be an unprecedented move that has not been supported by analysis.

Nicholas Tampio of Mamaroneck, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University who has tried to incite opposition to the bond act, said money from the bond act will ultimately tie districts to the state's agenda. The state Education Department's goal, he said, is for districts to prepare for online tests aligned to the Common Core.

"School districts face a choice: Submit investment plans that (state Education Commissioner) John King wants or relinquish any chance of having the plan approved," Tampio said. "And what John King wants is the technological infrastructure to support online Common Core testing."

If the bond act is approved, each district would be eligible to receive a set amount based on the state's aid formula. But districts would need to have spending plans approved by a high-powered review board consisting of King, SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher and state Budget Director Robert Megna.

And:

E.J. McMahon, president of the Empire Center, a conservative think tank in Albany, has been the most prominent critic of the bond act. He said Cuomo has no research that proves New York needs to borrow $2 billion for school tech.

"There was no assessment of need and no one asked for this," he said. "This is the most ill-conceived and wasteful bond act to be put in front of New York voters in 30 or 40 years."

He noted that the state Board of Regents, which sets educational policy, has not endorsed the bond act.

"The governor treats the need for this as self-evident: Tech is good," McMahon said.

Why in the world would anybody want to vote for a $2 billion dollar boondoggle bond act that gives John King and Nancy Zimpher the right to approve or reject what districts do with the money?

You can be sure King and Zimpher, staunch Common Core proponents and testing advocates, will want every district to use the money for infrastructure for the PARCC (or some other online tests) to grade students, rate teachers and evaluate schools.

We ought to call this the Infrastructure For Online Computerized Testing Bond Act, because that's exactly what it is.

Don't be fooled, thinking much (or any, for that matter) of this money will go to building schools or getting rid of trailers in the city schools.

This is tech bond, pure and simple, meant to get the state up and running for the coming online PARCC tests.

Vote NO on the Proposition 3 on Tuesday.

Edu-Entrepreneurs And Lobbyists Flood Cuomo's "Smart Schools" Forum

Not a surprise - that "Smart Schools Commission meeting" I blogged about earlier was filled with edu-entrepreneurs and corporate lobbyists looking to feed off the public trough:

Rather than being filled solely with educators, many of the roughly 100 people who came to a Smart Schools Public Symposium earlier Monday were lobbyists and representatives of telecoms, networking companies, software and hardware providers as well as other businesses that service the Internet and its digital economy.

That’s because the symposium came amid the knowledge that voters this fall will decide on a $2 billion bond referendum which Gov. Andrew Cuomo has gotten on the ballot to, if it passes, modernize the state’s school buildings.

If the bond passes, these companies will be competing to equip schools with the latest broadband wiring and all that goes along with it.

And check out all the fun jargon, buzzwords and other bullshit Cuomo highlighted in his press release:

The Smart Schools Commission is charged with advising the State on how to best enhance teaching and learning through technology. The Governor instated the Commission in spring 2014 in order to reimagine New York’s public schools for the 21st Century. Access to advanced technology fosters a more interactive and personalized classroom experience while facilitating increased communication between parents, students, and teachers. Embracing innovation in education is an important step towards helping New York’s students gain the skills they need to succeed in the 21st Century economy.

...

The five experts highlighted to the Commission and community members the need and ability to: enrich the in-classroom learning experience by incorporating the use of tablets, laptops and smartphones; extend preparation for student instruction by using web-based software accessible at home, increase communication between the instructor and student’s guardian; provide more descriptive academic progress reporting; and to support these changes, build a robust network of high-speed broadband and wi-fi connectivity throughout New York’s public schools and communities. Challenges that the panel encouraged the Commission to address include the difficulty of providing broadband access to rural regions of Upstate New York and the initial implementation of new technology in the classroom.

In short, lots of yummy yummy taxpayer-provided funds for Cuomo's corporate criminal friends to gobble up - all so that we can envision and create "The Classroom of Tomorrow" today.

Sounds like the kind of claptrap I used to see hawked in "Tomorrowland" in Disney World when my parents took me there in the 70's.

Here's an idea - how about we create the "Classroom of Yesterday" when students used to read books, engage in discussions with peers and teachers and, golly, not stare at a freaking computer screen all day?

Nahh - no money to be made off that.

Because that's what this is all about, of course - funding a whole bunch of giveaways to Cuomo's corporate buddies and edu-entrepreneur friends while making believe he's "improving schools"!

Fox 5 New York Brings Joel Klein Onto "News" Show To Peddle Amplify Tablets

From MyFoxNY.com back in March:

Former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is now the Executive Vice President for News Corporation (parent company of FOX 5). 

Klein visited the set of Good Day New York on Tuesday to discuss the new Amplify tablet.  

The device is designed for teachers and students.

"Teachers love it; students love it. The teacher can personalize (the tablet.)  A teacher can also click on and see what skills (the student) has mastered. Everything the student does is stored in a cloud," said Klein.

The Android based tablet is being piloted in school districts across the county.

For more information, visit Amplify.com/Tablet

A commenter notes:

Joel Klein really has a face for radio! All kidding aside, he was a terrible Chancellor, is a terrible human being, and now he wants to peddle hundreds of thousands of these crappy tablets to schools nationwide....and the sad thing is, he'll probably succeed. From what I've seen, American kids already know how to play video games on smartphones and tablets....what exactly is the educational value of a game in which Tom Sawyer fights the Brontes? And how can you pitch this as "news" when it's a product YOUR COMPANY (Newscorp) is selling? From what I've seen the "Amplify" is only going to amplify problems.....and really, who wants to give Rupert Murdoch a camera that sees into children's bedrooms? FAIL!

Indeed.

Who Needs All That Technology?

Not school's in Finland:

HELSINKI — At the start of morning assembly in the state-of-the-art Viikki School here, students’ smartphones disappear. In math class, the teacher shuts off the Smartboard and begins drafting perfect circles on a chalkboard. The students — some of the highest-achieving in the world — cut up graphing paper while solving equations using their clunky plastic calculators.

Finnish students and teachers didn’t need laptops and iPads to get to the top of international education rankings, said Krista Kiuru, minister of education and science at the Finnish Parliament. And officials say they aren’t interested in using them to stay there.

That’s in stark contrast to what reformers in the U.S. say. From President Barack Obama on down, they have called education technology critical to improving schools. By shifting around $2 billion in existing funds and soliciting $2 billion in contributions from private companies, the Obama administration is pressing to expand schools’ access to broadband and the devices that thrive on it. 

School districts nationwide have loaded up students with billions of dollars’ worth of tablets, laptops, iPods and more on the theory that, as Obama said last year, preparing American kids to compete with students around the globe will require interactive, individualized learning experiences driven by new technology.

But with little education technology in the classroom, Finnish students have repeatedly outperformed American students on international tests. In 2001, Finland’s students were the highest-achieving in the world, according to the Programme for International Student Assessment test administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The Nordic country uses innovative teaching strategies in the classroom, just generally without incorporating technology. Private schools and charter schools aren’t part of the mix, and all education is essentially free. Powerful teachers unions work hand in hand with the government, which went to great lengths to revamp teacher training. The profession is revered and respected, and government has no bearing on assessing a teacher’s performance in the classroom.

If technology was so necessary for an "excellent" education, many of the country's elite, including it's tech elite, wouldn't be sending their kids to low tech Waldorf schools.

The real goal behind this expanded technology spending in education is to pull money out of the public school classroom, away from individual schools and teachers' salaries, and hand it off to tech companies and the donor class.

The Daily News Can't Wait For The Security State To Replace Unionized Doormen

The Daily News has a propaganda piece cheerleading for technology that will replace doormen while still making sure the riff-raff don't get where they don't belong:

An Israeli general is at work on a “biometric security” system that he believes will have New Yorkers tossing out their keys and maybe ditching their doormen, too.

Using sophisticated scanners that can recognize a person’s face, voice, build and stride, the system can unlock your door in under two seconds. Any strangers not in the database will be denied access. 

“This is only the beginning,” says General Aharon Farkash, the founder and president of the firm FST21. “This is the way people will enter buildings in the 21st century.”

To help establish FST21 in the states, Farkash opened a North American office earlier this month at 7 World Trade Center. Should you drop by, you’ll be greeted by one of its security devices. But unless he’s beamed a code to your phone or you work there already, there’s no convincing the small 8-inch scanner to let you in.

...

“Cities are crowded, often dangerous places, with the gap between rich and poor growing,” Farkash says. “We need a way to live safely but also comfortably next door to one another.”

For those worried about privacy as well as security, Farkash stresses that the system is self-contained, so it is impossible to hack from outside. It also stores no data of users coming and going beyond two weeks.

“I was the Israeli NSA, so I can tell you I know privacy, and the best effort is being made to keep things private,” Farkash says.

Gee, sounds fabulous.

Except I don't buy that part about keeping things private and anybody who has even scanned an article in the last year about NSA spying shouldn't either - they'll be tracking everywhere you go via this "biometric security" apparatus, the cell phone you carry and the credit cards you use to purchase items.

Such is life in the 21st century.

But besides our privacy and humanity, what else do we lose in the tradeoff when every building starts using "biometric security"?

Why, unionized jobs of course!

For individual homeowners, it offers the convenience — and cool factor — of not having to fumble for the keys anymore, especially with the kids and groceries in hand. For condo and co-op boards, it could mean serious savings.

“It’s much cheaper than a doorman,” Farkash says. “To have 24-seven coverage, that’s four shifts a day, at least $250,000 a year. Our system is 70% less to install, and 90% less to maintain each year after that.”

Oh, goodie - another technological advance that will replace jobs humans do.

On the plus side, when the people who used to have jobs but can no longer find them in our increasingly globalized, technology-laden economy start to steal to eat, the "biometric security" will keep them out of your condo.

On the negative side, you (or I) may be the one the security is looking to keep out.

More plutocratic propaganda from the Daily News masking itself as "journalism".

What A Surprise That A "Blended Learning" Course Is A Disaster

Mayor Bloomberg loved all things techie - especially when it came to replacing humans with computers or computerized programs.

So of course we got all kinds of computerized nonsense in the NYDOE during his 12 years in power and one of the more infamous was the iZone, which was a highly-touted education program that was supposed to combine online learning with classroom learning into an highly effective amalgamation of "real" and "virtual" educational opportunities for students.

They called this amalgam "blended learning" and it was supposed to revolutionize education, especially for students who had fallen behind in "traditional" classroom settings, giving them a chance to catch up on credits and learn material they had failed to grasp earlier.

But many teachers who have worked these "blended learning" programs have told me that taking students who have failed classes before - many of them having behavioral issues, attention span problems, and other obstacles that have kept them from succeeding in school before - and putting them before a computer for a couple of hours a day to read and answer text-based questions is a disaster.

What these students actually need is a small class with at least one teacher (in some cases two if many are support service students) "personalizing" the learning through face-to-face interactions, not to be put into a class with rows of computers and told to sit in front of a computer and complete some work from an iZone learning program.

The program also leads to all kinds of fraud opportunities because there is a component that has students working on their own on the computer to complete work - either at computers at school during a free period or at home.

Of course anybody can sign in and do the work at that point, but that rarely gets touted in the "Wonders of Blended Learning" stories you read in the media.

There's lots and lots of money to be made by the edu-entrepreneurs in "blended learning," so you rarely hear about the problems in this kind of education, especially from education journals like Education Week, which makes money off advertising for that kind of stuff.

The same might be said for the Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corporation, which is trying to sell tablets to school districts for blended learning programs.

But the Murdoch-owned Post never misses an opportunity to publish a school-based scandal, so today they tell us about a "blended learning" course at Murry Bergtraum that isn't really much of a course.

Here is the story in full:

On paper, he’s a super-teacher. To critics, he’s the poster child for academic fraud in New York City.

Alexis Pajares “teaches” 475 students at Manhattan’s Murry Bergtraum HS for Business Careers in all grades and all disciplines — including algebra, biology, chemistry, Chinese, earth science, economics, English, government, health, history, law and Spanish.

Students failing any of those subjects get dumped on Pajares, who signs them up for an online course they can do in a computer lab or at home. Students can snag full credit without attending class.

“There’s little to no traditional instruction going on, which makes the whole thing a farce,” said history teacher and union chapter leader John Elfrank-Dana. “It’s a credit-recovery trick, in most cases, to move kids along and get them out.”

Principal Lottie Almonte started the program last year, appointing Pajares the “blended learning” teacher. But staffers charge that it violates state rules that online programs must include “substantive interaction” with a teacher certified in the subject. Pajares is certified only in social studies.

Elfrank-Dana, citing complaints from teachers and students, said he has repeatedly asked Almonte to explain the program but got no response.

Two blocks from City Hall, “F”-rated Murry Bergtraum has struggled in recent years as a “dumping ground” for overage or held-back students who lack credits. The school had only a 51.2 percent graduation rate last year.

Almonte referred questions to the Department of Education. A spokesman admitted Pajares doesn’t teach all 475 kids, but “is running the blended learning program,” that other certified teachers “support students” and students are required to be in classes with traditional instruction.

Teachers and guidance counselors dispute those claims. Schedules show students in blended learning without an equivalent class.

“You don’t learn a lot,” said a 21-year-old senior — a recent immigrant from the Dominican Republic — who takes an online chemistry course.

“We just sit down, sign on to the program and that’s it,” he said.

He watches a video of a teacher giving a lesson, then has to answer questions in a quiz. If he doesn’t know the answer, he watches the video again — or uses Google. He takes notes, but “nobody checks our notes.”

Another senior took blended learning English after failing the class in her junior year.

“There’s no attendance. You just log on when you feel like it,” she said.

The online course, which she did at home, took three weeks — while a classroom semester lasts 4¹/₂ months. She said she got no feedback on the one essay she was required to write and doesn’t know who grades it.

Other kids take the online classes purely as a convenience — instead of a regular class that starts early and requires a lot more work.

A math teacher said the program is flawed because kids take tests at home — not under school supervision — raising the possibility of cheating.

Staffers have heard that some students pay friends $80 to $100 to take the online exams for them.

Another math teacher had a student who “sat there doing nothing all semester,” the teacher said. “He told me, ‘I don’t have to do any work in your class. I can take blended learning.’ ”

After flunking out, the kid scored 82 online.

But students who pass the online courses stumble in subsequent classes. “I have not seen any kid who can handle material at the next level after blended learning,” the teacher said.

The Post does mention that Bergtraum had been made into a "dumping ground" by the DOE, so at least we get a bit of context for why Bergtraum has so many "failing students" who need to take the blended learning course to make up credit.

But what they fail to tell us is that "blended learning" programs always lend themselves to these kinds of problems by their nature.

The point of "blended learning" is to use fewer teachers to teach more students.

Yes, I know they sell it as a 21st century learning program to instill technological expertise and skills for a student populace that needs to compete in an increasingly global and ruthless marketplace
.
But all of that is not really the point of blended learning.

The point is always to decrease the number of teachers you need to teach students and to increase the dollars that go to the edu-entrepreneurs.

That's been the selling the point certainly for schools like Bergtraum that use the blended learning programs to try and catch students up in credits - fewer teachers to teach more students, in this case one teacher for 475 students.

It's not a surprise to me that the program lends itself to fraud, giving schools opportunities to pass students along for doing a little bit of work (and maybe not even that - you never really know who is doing the work on the computer off-site.)

Teachers I have spoken to who have taught this stuff tell me that even in schools where the blended learning program is small and well-organized, it's mostly a disaster when its used for credit recovery for students missing credits.

Again, you're taking students who have already struggled with the material, then sticking them in front of computers for a few hours to work on their own to pore through reading, writing and multiple choice tasks.

The very population that needs the most support, the best "personalized" learning opportunities in a face-to-face interaction with a teacher instead gets the "personalized" learning of a computer program and computer screen.

Even in the best schools, that's a recipe for disaster.

Job Search Discouraging For Many Americans

There's been all kinds of jive the last few months about how the economy has turned around, the housing market has turned around, the jobs market is turning around.

Let's be clear that the economy is still being propped up by the Federal Reserve printing press, the housing market is re-inflating in part because that Federal Reserve printing press program is helping Wall Street buy a ton of houses and the jobs market remains dismal for many:

WASHINGTON (AP) — After a full year of fruitless job hunting, Natasha Baebler just gave up.

She'd already abandoned hope of getting work in her field, counseling the disabled. But she couldn't land anything else, either — not even a job interview at a telephone call center.

Until she feels confident enough to send out resumes again, she'll get by on food stamps and disability checks from Social Security and live with her parents in St. Louis.

"I'm not proud of it," says Baebler, who is in her mid-30s and is blind. "The only way I'm able to sustain any semblance of self-preservation is to rely on government programs that I have no desire to be on."

Baebler's frustrating experience has become all too common nearly four years after the Great Recession ended: Many Americans are still so discouraged that they've given up on the job market.

Older Americans have retired early. Younger ones have enrolled in school. Others have suspended their job hunt until the employment landscape brightens. Some, like Baebler, are collecting disability checks.

It isn't supposed to be this way. After a recession, an improving economy is supposed to bring people back into the job market.

Instead, the number of Americans in the labor force — those who have a job or are looking for one — fell by nearly half a million people from February to March, the government said Friday. And the percentage of working-age adults in the labor force — what's called the participation rate — fell to 63.3 percent last month. It's the lowest such figure since May 1979.

The falling participation rate tarnished the only apparent good news in the jobs report the Labor Department released Friday: The unemployment rate dropped to a four-year low of 7.6 percent in March from 7.7 in February.

People without a job who stop looking for one are no longer counted as unemployed. That's why the U.S. unemployment rate dropped in March despite weak hiring. If the 496,000 who left the labor force last month had still been looking for jobs, the unemployment rate would have risen to 7.9 percent in March.

"Unemployment dropped for all the wrong reasons," says Craig Alexander, chief economist with TD Bank Financial Group. "It dropped because more workers stopped looking for jobs. It signaled less confidence and optimism that there are jobs out there."

 There are simply not enough jobs:

"It's the lack of job opportunities — the lack of demand for workers — that is keeping these workers from working or seeking work," says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. The Labor Department says there are still more than three unemployed people for every job opening.

Cynthia Marriott gave up her job search after an interview in October for a position as a hotel concierge.

"They never said no," she says. "They just never called me back."

Her husband hasn't worked full time since 2006. She cashed out her 401(k) after being laid off from a job at a Los Angeles entertainment publicity firm in 2009. The couple owes thousands in taxes for that withdrawal. They have no health insurance.

She got the maximum 99 weeks' of unemployment benefits then allowed in California and then moved to Atlanta.

Now she is looking to receive federal disability benefits for a lung condition that she said leaves her weak and unable to work a full day. The application is pending a medical review.

"I feel like I have no choice," says Marriott, 47. "It's just really sad and frightening"

This is life in neo-feudal 21st century America.

The Best and Brightest running the country are technologizing everything they can, putting more and more people out of work and squeezing wages on everybody else, leaving more and more (often stolen) profits for the financial sector.

There is no end to this and you can bet that Obama calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare isn't going to help that any.

The game is rigged, folks, and until the masses rise up against the bankster class and make them feel fear that they've got to loosen up the money, wealth and opportunity spigots a little, nothing is going to change.

That's why the Occupy movement was so scary to the oligarchs.

And that's why they, with the help of the Obama administration, destroyed the camps.

They want us all alone and isolated, fighting each other for what little remains of the social safety net.

Hiring More Guidance Counselors

Last week, Comptroller John Liu called for the NYCDOE to hire more guidance counselors, specifically college counselors, to help students with their post-secondary plans.

In a report called “The Power of Guidance” released Thursday, Liu calls on the city Education Department to spend $170 million to hire an additional 1,612 high school guidance counselors.
That would bring bringing the total number of high school counselors to 2,907.

“Students need enhanced advising and guidance that address both the developmental and practical components of college planning and preparation,” the report states.

Guidance counselors in public schools are ideally positioned to help kids get into college, Liu argues, because they advise kids on academic and personal matters.

With 290,653 students enrolled in city high school, the additional counselors would establish a ratio of one counselor per 100 students.

 

I know many schools are starting to ratchet up the College and Career Readiness programs because Bloomberg has added a college metric to the school report cards.

Some college counselors have 400-500 students in their charge and now, with the College and Career Readiness plans spread to 9th, 10th, and 11th grades, they've got to worry about so much more than their seniors, the application process, SAT's and financial aid.

Adding college counselors to the system so that each counselor works with no more than 100 students makes total sense.

And so Bloomberg and the DOE will reject that call because a) it came from John Liu and Bloomberg hates Liu and b) it doesn't involve any no-bid tech contracts or hiring outside consultants for six figure salaries.

Why hire new college counselors for $55,000 a year when you can light that money on fire with tech projects, costly and useless education software and expensive outside consultants instead?

Kaplan/Washington Post Continue To Try And Extract Money From The Education Sector

Alex Pareene at Salon:

Call up Sallie Mae and take out some non-dischargable loans, because Newt University is in session! Gingrich, in partnership with the Republican National Committee, is hosting a series of “policy classes” for Republican Convention delegates in Tampa this week. (Today’s classes feature guest-lecturer Larry Kudlow, in what is I am guessing involved a creative application of NBC News’ ethics policies.) Oh, and “Newt U” will also be available online, thanks to “a new learning technology platform pioneered by Kaplan Inc called KAPx.”

According to a Kaplan press release, KAPx (which seems to be just Google+ Hangouts meant to be sold to learning institutions at a high markup)

“The KAPx™ platform is designed to help schools, organizations, businesses, and individuals who want to share information and knowledge in an exciting, interactive, and highly participatory manner that is aligned with the best instructional practices,” said Edward Hanapole, Kaplan Inc.’s Chief Information Officer. “We will continue to refine the platform to reflect our leadership in learning science and how to marry technological innovation with educational achievement.”

And of course Kaplan is the money-marking test-prep and for-profit school arm of the Washington Post Company, and its many innovations in the field of extracting money from the education sector are what keep the Washington Post’s printing presses running in this unhappy time for newspapers.

And right here on the Washington Post Company’s KAPx website is a big plug for Newt U and a link to register ” for exclusive content access to Newt University courses and discussions.” Today’s theme is “We Can Do Better” and tomorrow’s is “We Built It.”

I just registered and it’s a live YouTube stream and a comment section. Thanks, Washington Post Company, for yet another exciting innovation!

You know that if Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation were hawking this crap, the NYCDOE would be happy to sign on to it today.

And in fact, Rupert Murdoch, Joel Klein and News Corporation will be hawking systems quite like this very soon.

We'll see how quickly the NYCDOE buys this crap up and how long it last before it's tossed on the junk heap.

As for the the Kaplan/Post venture, if it is as bad as Pareene says it is, I think this particular "exciting technological innovation in education to improve student achievement" will be tossed on the junk heap sooner rather than later.

Bloomberg Pulls The Plug On Vibrator Technologies (UPDATED BELOW)

Usually the Mayor of Money loves machines that replace human endeavor, but for some reason, he doesn't like vibrators:

NEW YORK (AP) -- A vibrator giveaway that attracted long lines in New York City came to an abrupt end when the city told the promoters to pack it up.

The Trojan condom company set up "Pleasure Carts" on Wednesday in two Manhattan neighborhoods, and were set to give away 10,000 vibrating sex toys. Nearly 300 people had lined up at each of the hot-dog-style carts.

According to the New York Post, the giveaway was interrupted when a city representative told the promoters to shut down because of crowds.

One of those on line, Melody Henry, grumbled that Mayor Michael Bloomberg "doesn't want anyone to have fun. You can't have a giant soda, You can't have a vibrator."

Indeed, the mayor only likes technologies that take away fun and freedom from you - like the new Microsoft/NYPD "crime-fighting system" partnership that he excitedly announced at a press conference yesterday.

Technology to track humans using thousands of cameras and computerized data systems - that Bloomberg gets off on.

Free vibrators handed out by the Trojan Man?

Not so much.

And New York City is a much sadder place for it.

UPDATE - 6:15 PM: The city has decided that the Trojan vibrator giveaway can recommence:

Good news, ladies (and certain gentlemen): Mayor Mike Bloomberg has given the Trojan condom company the green light to give away 10,000 free vibrators on the streets of New York.

As we reported earlier, Bloomberg's office put the kibosh on Trojan's sex-toy promotion, citing the fact that the company hadn't obtained the proper permits as the reason.

The vibrator giveaway is now scheduled to resume at 5 p.m. today on the south side of 14th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues, and go until 7 p.m.

It would be nice if Trojan sent some vibrators to the mayor and his staff for not being buzz kills after all.

How Technology Harms Education

Read this whole piece from Slate, but here is a snippet:

A 2007 congressionally mandated study by the National Center for Educational Evaluation and Regional Assistance found that 16 of the best reading and mathematics learning software packages—selected by experts from 160 submissions—did not have a measurable effect on test scores. But despite this finding, the onslaught of technology in education has continued. The state of Maine was the first to buy laptops for all of its students from grades seven to 12, spending tens of millions of dollars to do so, starting with middle schoolers in 2002 and expanding to high schools in 2009.

The nation is not far behind. Though no well-implemented study has ever found technology to be effective, many poorly designed studies have—and that questionable body of research is influencing decision-makers. Researchers with a financial stake in the success of computer software are free to design studies that are biased in favor of their products. (I’m sure this bias is, often as not, unintentional.) What is presented as peer-reviewed research is fundamentally marketing literature: studies done by people selling the software they are evaluating.

For instance, a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of graphing calculators from Empirical Education Inc. reports a “strong effect of the technology on algebra achievement.” But the meta-analysis includes results from a paper in which “no significant differences were found between the graphing-approach and traditional classes either on a final examination of traditional algebra skills or on an assessment of mathematics aptitude.” In that same paper, calculators were marginally helpful on a tailor-designed test. The meta-analysis included the results of the specially made test, but not the negative results from the traditional exam.

ake this gem from researchers at SRI International. They say that standardized tests don’t capture the “conceptual depth” students develop by using their software, so the “research team decided to build its own assessments”—and, of course, they did relatively well on the assessments they designed for themselves. Another example: A recent study by the Educational Development Center compared students who took an online algebra 1 class with students who took nonalgebra eighth-grade math. The online students did better than those who didn’t study algebra at all (not exactly surprising). But the online students weren’t compared with those who took a regular algebra class.

Despite the lack of empirical evidence, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics takes the beneficial effects of technology as dogma. There is a simple shell game that goes on: Although there is no evidence technology has been useful in teaching kids math in the past, anyone can come up with a new product and claim that this time it is effective.

And of course now teachers will be evaluated in part by how they integrate technology use into their lessons.

In NYC, who was most responsible for pushing the technology jive?

Joel Klein.

And what does Klein do for a living now?

Oh, right.

Bloomberg Appeals Court Decision On 911 System Report To Keep Boondoggle Under Wraps

The Accountability Mayor refuses to be held accountable himself:

The Bloomberg administration appealed on Friday a state judge’s order requiring New York City to release an consultant’s report that is believed to be critical of the 911 emergency-dispatch system.

“The city has been forthright and already provided reams of critical documents — but releasing an unfinished work product will chill the candid discussion necessary for genuine analysis,” said Gail Mulligan, the city’s assistant corporation counsel. “Today’s legal filing means that an automatic stay is in place. We’re hopeful that the appellate court will consider our arguments carefully.”

On Monday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ordered the city to turn over the documents by Monday of next week. He compared the city’s claim that the report should be kept private to former President Richard Nixon’s claims of executive privilege during the Watergate scandal.

But an appeal means the report will remain under wraps for the foreseeable future.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg commissioned the report following the city’s poor response to the post-Christmas blizzard in 2010, a storm that paralyzed the city for days and tarnished the mayor’s reputation as an expert manager. The mayor has repeatedly apologized for the city’s response to the storm, calling it inadequate.

The Teacher Data Reports they released as soon as they could.

The 911 report that shows Bloomberg's administration to be crooked and incompetent - that they're sitting on for as long as they can.

This system is $1 billion over budget and doesn't work.

The report shows that.

Bloomberg wants to make sure New Yorkers don't learn that for a long, long while.

In other Bloomberg tech news, the administration whacked its top technology official on Thursday over all the "hiccups" the administration has had with technology projects going millions over budget and becoming outdated before they're finished.

New York City’s chief technology official resigned after clashing repeatedly with a deputy mayor over the management of several costly, ambitious and troubled projects that have bedeviled the Bloomberg administration, people briefed on the confrontations said on Friday.

The departure of the technology official, Carole Post, was announced on Thursday, a day before Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the city would challenge a judge’s order to release what is said to be a sharply critical consultant’s report on an over-budget, much-delayed modernization of the city’s emergency calls and dispatching system.

The 911 system overhaul was one of a number of technology projects that were signature initiatives of the Bloomberg administration, but encountered cost overruns and performance issues.

City Hall aides said Ms. Post, who is the commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, should not be blamed for the mismanagement of the $2.3 billion 911 project, whose woes predated her arrival in the job by several years.

But the city’s deputy mayor for operations, Caswell F. Holloway, grew increasingly frustrated by and impatient with Ms. Post’s department’s work on major initiatives, individuals involved in the city’s technology operation said.

...

In meetings over several months last year and as recently as March 27, people briefed on them said, Mr. Holloway, a hard-charging infighter who formerly led the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, voiced concerns about the cost of an upgrade to CityNet, the city’s internal data network; continuing problems and shortcomings with CitiServ, a data center that was supposed to consolidate dozens of city agency servers; and a shortage of users for NYCWin, a secure municipal wireless network.

The wireless network, for example, which cost $500 million to build and costs $40 million a year to operate, is underused and arguably outdated.

CityNet has experienced interruptions in service, despite a system of redundant fiber optic rings intended to enable it to withstand a breakdown. And the $95 million CitiServ project has confounded agency officials, with DoITT struggling to migrate old systems into the new data center.

The technology department is officially referred to by its acronym, DoITT, but is sometimes derided as “Don’t Do It” by city workers who seek to avoid working with the department.

Tech projects way over budget, not delivering what was promised, or worse, outdated by the time they're completed.

That's Bloomberg' technology legacy as mayor.

Doesn't matter if Bloomberg has a great track record in the private sector as some technology genius.

As mayor, his record sucks at best.

At worst, it veers on the criminal (a la CityTime.)

Which is why he wants to sit on the 911 report.

He's got to know that this $2 billion boondoggle is going to make CityTime look like good governance.

The Machines Run Us

Where is Charlie Chaplin when you need him? Or William Blake?

Workers in the digital era can feel at times as if they are playing a video game, battling the barrage of e-mails and instant messages, juggling documents, Web sites and online calendars. To cope, people have become swift with the mouse, toggling among dozens of overlapping windows on a single monitor.

But there is a growing new tactic for countering the data assault: the addition of a second computer screen. Or a third.

This proliferation of displays is the latest workplace upgrade, and it is responsible for the new look at companies and home offices — they are starting to resemble mission control.

For multiscreen multitaskers, a single monitor can seem as outdated as dial-up Internet. “You go back to one, and you feel slow,” said Jackie Cohen, 42, who uses three 17-inch monitors in her home office in San Francisco, where she edits a blog about Facebook.

Her center screen shows what she is writing or editing, along with e-mail and instant messages; the left and right monitors display news sites, blogs and Twitter feeds, and she keeps 3 to 10 tabs open on each. One monitor recently broke, and she felt hamstrung. “I don’t want to miss seeing something,” Ms. Cohen said.

And of course there is "research" to show that the more monitors you have, the more productive you are - "research" funded by (you guessed it!) a computer monitoring company:

The main rationale for a multimonitor setup is that it increases productivity. But that notion is not simple to prove or measure, partly because it depends on the kind of work people do and whether they really need to be constantly looking at multiple data streams. Another theory holds that people have just grown so addicted to juggling that having more monitors simply creates a compulsion to check them.

One study, by the University of Utah, found that productivity among people working on editing tasks was higher with two monitors than with one. The study was financed with about $50,000 by NEC Display, which had hoped to find evidence that companies should buy more monitors to increase productivity. (Other tech companies also promote multiple displays — one Hewlett-Packard ad declares that “two is better than one.”)

The author of the study, James A. Anderson, a professor of communication, said he had not been influenced by NEC’s financing. He said he uses three monitors himself, but also said that it was hard to generalize about whether more monitors are better.

I'm going to be blunt here.

Humans are stupid fucking creatures.

We think we're so brilliant with our technology and our advances, with our math and science and engineering.

And yet, all we've done is allowed the powers that be to ties chains around us.

These chains have brand names on them like APPLE, MICROSOFT, FACEBOOK, and GOOGLE.

And we're connected to these chains 24/7, 365 days a year.

In the process, we have lost our humanity, lost our souls, lost our sanity - and we think this is progress!

Mind-forged manacles indeed.

This is why education reform insists that in order for teachers to be "effective," they must use technology in every lesson (and in the planning of lessons too!)

They want us to educate the next generation to be skilled enough to run an office using all this technology, but dumb enough to think there's nothing dehumanizing or evil about this.

But the end game for this is coming.

Even the Times article on multi-monitors notes this:

David E. Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan whose research has found that multitasking can take a serious toll on productivity, said he buys the logic about toggling. But he also warned that productivity can suffer when people keep interrupting their thoughts by scanning multiple screens rather than focusing on one task.

“There is ‘thought-killing’ going on,” Professor Meyer said. “Rome crashed and burned because it got too big. Go past that scale and you’re going to wind up like Rome.”

Indeed.

NY1: Bloomberg Spends $900 Million On Technology Next Year Despite Budget Shortfalls And Layoffs

If there is any doubt that the corporate overlords running the city privilege computers and technology over people, well, this ought to put those doubts to rest:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg still calls himself the "education mayor," but the shrinking budget can no longer support expanding reforms. Yet in one area, Bloomberg is still ramping up despite overall cutbacks.

NY1's analysis of the budget shows he wants to spend close to $900 million on education technology next fiscal year.

“The importance of technology is something that we believe in,” said Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott.

However, to find extra funds for that belief this year required some creative budgeting.

For example, principals were notified this week that textbook funding can now be used to purchase computer hardware and software. That was $264 million last year.

The Department of Education also redefined classroom computers as part of school buildings. That allows them to use $350 million of capital funds over the next three years to purchase and install computers, smart boards and printers.

Plus, in the operating budget, the DOE wants $52 million for technology contractors, up 86 percent from last year.

“My son came home and said, ‘hey mom, we're all getting laptops at school next year,’ and I said great, but what about your teachers?” said Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters.

City officials say their hands are tied. They need to get the school system prepared by 2014 for a national shift toward taking standardized tests online.

However, the reality is more complicated. The mayor wants the city on the forefront of developing the 21st century classroom.

The way technology is used in classrooms is constantly evolving. Two years after the city pronounced all schools wired and wireless, it now says every building needs an upgrade, which will cost the city another half a billion dollars next year alone.

“We have a responsibility on making sure that our students can compete in today’s society around technology,” said Walcott.

The mayor also plans to cut 6,000 teaching positions. Although most of the money directed toward technology can't be spent on teacher salaries, many question whether this is the year to increase any spending.

“You don't go out and buy a brand new car when you can't pay for your mortgage,” said Michael Mulgrew, president of the teachers union.

The DOE budget proposals still need City Council approval, and councilmembers are already questioning the amount of money earmarked for tech.

Computers over people, computerized standardized testing over a real education, technology consultants over teachers.

That's the future.

Here's Why the City Is Spending $542 Million On Technology For Schools

The Times looks at how much money Bloomberg is spending on technology for schools even as he threatens to fire six thousand teachers and slashes school construction spending to the bone.

The reason for all the tech spending?

City education officials are not shy about their goal to more fully integrate computers into everyday instruction. Instead of a lonely desktop or two at the back of a room, officials picture entire classrooms of students going online simultaneously, taking Internet-based classes or assessments to measure both their and their teachers’ performance. This school year alone, the city has issued $50 million in contracts to build an online course-management system, called iLearn NYC, as well as to provide training and to pay companies like Rosetta Stone and Pearson Education to provide content.

That's it in a nutshell.

This is the Bloomberg education miracle in action.

And of course Bloomberg gets to hand out hundreds of millions to his tech and business cronies in the bargain too.

Never mind how much money he has wasted on technology spending before from the $770 million wasted on CityTime to the $80 million wasted on ARIS - he is the Mayor of Money and he knows what is best for this city and its children

And that means computers at every desk to measure both children's performance and the performance of their teachers.

Maybe we can do this every week?

McGraw-Hill and the other no-bid contract test companies will love it.

Hope the bed bugs won't mind sharing the space!

Bloomberg needs to be stopped now.

As we have seen from testing scandal after scandal (the latest bringing light to the Michelle Rhee reform miracle in D.C.), an over-reliance on standardized testing is harmful and reductive.

Stop the testing.

Stop the over-reliance on technology.

Humans evolved in the real world.

Why is it all these business reformers want to take education to the virtual world?

Might it be they don't want children to know the difference?

The Hollowing Out Of The American Economy

The education reformers both in and out of the Obama administration like to say that there is no unemployment problem in this country, there is an education problem.

Under this dubious theory, Americans are not educating themselves enough to be able to do the high tech jobs the economy is creating.

Once the American public education system is blown up and replaced by a charter school system that actually educates the youth of America better, especially in the areas of math, science, and technology, the unemployment problem will largely disappear.

The NY Times lays waste to this theory today:

When five television studios became entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit against CBS, the cost was immense. As part of the obscure task of “discovery” — providing documents relevant to a lawsuit — the studios examined six million documents at a cost of more than $2.2 million, much of it to pay for a platoon of lawyers and paralegals who worked for months at high hourly rates.

But that was in 1978. Now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, “e-discovery” software can analyze documents in a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost. In January, for example, Blackstone Discovery of Palo Alto, Calif., helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000.

Some programs go beyond just finding documents with relevant terms at computer speeds. They can extract relevant concepts — like documents relevant to social protest in the Middle East — even in the absence of specific terms, and deduce patterns of behavior that would have eluded lawyers examining millions of documents.

“From a legal staffing viewpoint, it means that a lot of people who used to be allocated to conduct document review are no longer able to be billed out,” said Bill Herr, who as a lawyer at a major chemical company used to muster auditoriums of lawyers to read documents for weeks on end. “People get bored, people get headaches. Computers don’t.”

Computers are getting better at mimicking human reasoning — as viewers of “Jeopardy!” found out when they saw Watson beat its human opponents — and they are claiming work once done by people in high-paying professions. The number of computer chip designers, for example, has largely stagnated because powerful software programs replace the work once done by legions of logic designers and draftsmen.

Software is also making its way into tasks that were the exclusive province of human decision makers, like loan and mortgage officers and tax accountants.

These new forms of automation have renewed the debate over the economic consequences of technological progress.

David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the United States economy is being “hollowed out.” New jobs, he says, are coming at the bottom of the economic pyramid, jobs in the middle are being lost to automation and outsourcing, and now job growth at the top is slowing because of automation.

“There is no reason to think that technology creates unemployment,” Professor Autor said. “Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.”

Automation of higher-level jobs is accelerating because of progress in computer science and linguistics. Only recently have researchers been able to test and refine algorithms on vast data samples, including a huge trove of e-mail from the Enron Corporation.

“The economic impact will be huge,” said Tom Mitchell, chairman of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “We’re at the beginning of a 10-year period where we’re going to transition from computers that can’t understand language to a point where computers can understand quite a bit about language.”

Nowhere are these advances clearer than in the legal world.

...

Quantifying the employment impact of these new technologies is difficult. Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, is convinced that “legal is a sector that will likely employ fewer, not more, people in the U.S. in the future.” He estimated that the shift from manual document discovery to e-discovery would lead to a manpower reduction in which one lawyer would suffice for work that once required 500 and that the newest generation of software, which can detect duplicates and find clusters of important documents on a particular topic, could cut the head count by another 50 percent.

There is an Asimov short story, one of the Robot stories I think, that starts out with a line about how some people were supportive of the robots in society but others worried what humans would do for jobs once the robots took over much of the employment. What would the robots do to the economy?

Well, we're now there.

I have been thinking about this topic a lot, not least of which because I believe ultimately the powers that be will replace teachers like me with computers, virtual instruction software and one or two remote teachers somewhere in Sri Lanka to teach students in NYC.

I have also thinking about this topic in terms of how to help my seniors navigate the college admissions world. Majors that once seem sure bets for employment - like law, like education, like computer programming - now seem more uncertain as automation replaces much of what humans used to do.

I'm no Luddite, but I am uncomfortable with so much of the uncritical "Gee Whiz!" reaction we get to so much of this human-replacing automation we are seeing in the past few years.

And as Autor, the economics professor from MIT, pointed out in the Times article, these high-paying jobs that are disappearing are NOT going to be replaced with anything nearly as lucrative.

Indeed, Robert Reich noted this in his commentary about yesterday's jobs report.

There are jobs returning to America, yes - 190,000+ last month.

But they don't pay anywhere near what the jobs that disappeared back in 2008-2010 paid.

This ought to be the thing that Obama and his merry men are worried about for the future.

But they're not - they're too busy scapegoating teachers and schools for a systemic problem that will not be addressed by education levels, but that will instead be addressed by coming to a different understanding of the value and economics of work.

Consumer Reports: New Apple iPhone Piece Of Shit

Quick, where's the accountability for Steve Jobs, Apple's arrogant CEO/ chief bullshit artist, over this mess?

Consumer Reports said in a blog post and accompanying video on Monday that widely reported signal problems with the iPhone 4, Apple’s latest mobile phone, were a result of a flaw in the phone’s antenna design and that it could not recommend purchasing the phone. That contradicts earlier claims by Apple that the problems are a software issue.

The magazine said its engineers performed a series of tests on three separate iPhone 4s inside a controlled lab environment known as a “radio frequency isolation chamber.” They found that when the bottom left corner of the iPhone was touched, it could sometimes lose enough signal strength to drop calls.

Consumer Reports said the tests led it to conclude that it could not recommend the iPhone 4 to consumers until Apple fixes the hardware problem. It also questioned Apple’s honesty on the antenna issues:

Our findings call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4’s signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software that “mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.”

When reports first surfaced of a reception flaw in the new phone, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, said to a customer in an e-mail that he was simply holding the phone incorrectly. Technology writers lambasted the company for this comment.

Earlier this month, Apple released a statement saying that it had looked into the signal problems and was “stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong.” The company also said it would release a software update to fix the issue and would make “bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see” on the phone’s signal display. It did not acknowledge any problem with the phone’s hardware.

Consumer Reports also tested several other phones, including the earlier iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre, and reported that “none of those phones had the signal-loss problems of the iPhone 4.” The report also said AT&T’s network did not appear to play a primary role in the iPhone 4’s signal woes.

There are 14 pages of complaints about the new Apple iPhone over at Consumeraffairs.com.

Jobs - like his counterpart at Microsoft Bill Gates - is very big on getting "bad teachers" fired.

Turns out that just like Mr. Gates, Mr. Jobs is also a liar and a purveyor of shit products.

Maybe both Jobs and Gates should stay out of education reform and make products that, you know, work?

Or, if they continue to make shit products that don't work (and are made by slave labor in Chinese factories with high suicide rates), take responsibility instead of jiving about the problems.

Just saying...

Catering To The Masters Of Expensive Technology

The following critique is leveled at the financial markets and the changes wrought by all the technology that now governs how things are done, but it could just as easily be leveled at the education deformers in New York City, Washington, Chicago, and Bill Gates' mansion who push the same thing onto public schools:

“Not so long ago, if our markets experienced severe stress, and certainly a “fat finger”, human wisdom would intervene. Reasons for the stress would be ascertained, trading in affected stocks would be slowed or halted, stabilizing bids would be initiated as needed, and severe volatility would be dealt with in a calm and reasoned manner.

Today, the human specialist model has been replaced by an automated market maker model. Our market structure has evolved. It has evolved, not by design,
or a well-thought and reasoned plan, but it has evolved to cater to masters of expensive technology, deployed unfettered by participants whose only concern is to squeeze out every last picosecond and fractional cent before they move on to other countries’ markets and asset classes. The for-profit exchange model at every chance sacrifices the protection of long term investor interests for the profitability of serving hyper-leveraged intraday speculators . . .

Today’s price swings in a great number of stocks highlight the inherent and systemic risk of our automated stock market, which has few checks and balances in place. Once the market sensed stress, the bids were cancelled and market sell orders chased prices down to the lowest possible point.”

Just as in the markets the human specialist has been replaced by an automated market maker, in education the teacher specialist who makes teaching decisions based upon the curricula that has been thought out and developed by education experts has been replaced by twenty-something central bureaucrats with business degrees and/or technology backgrounds, education "advisors" trained by the Gates and Broad Foundations to push more and more technology onto schools and place more and more blame onto humans, and politicians happy to take the yummy yummy political contributions and bribes in the form of grants from the corporatocracy looking to privatize public education and run the entire public education sphere according to data and stats.

That, apparently, is the change we can believe in that President Accountability was spewing from his mouth during the 2008 campaign.

It is also the gospel of education deform that Joel Klein, evangelist for the multi-national corporatists and technocrats, is bringing to countries like Australia, England, and Israel.

And Bloomberg, if he gets his way (and given the way the economy is probably going to tank at the end of 2010 into 2011, he just may), will spend $100 billion or more to buy the White House in 2012 and complete the corporatist job of destroying democracy and establishing a corporatocracy - government by the corporation, for the corporation, of the corporation.

Destroying public education and making it into a step-child of the corporatocracy - where children can be trained to be good, compliant employees happy to take any treatment so long as they have a job - is a big part of the plan.