NY Post Runs Damaging Stories On Carmen Farina, NYCDOE, As Part Of "Massive Agenda" To Destroy De Blasio

This is Bob Hardt, the NY 1 Political Director, writing about the NY Post's jive coverage of crime stories in New York City, but it could just as well be about their jive coverage of the cheating scandals at the NYCDOE:

There was an alarming spate of shootings over the weekend and one New York City tabloid quickly does what it does best:  pointing its finger – and I'm not saying which one – straight in Mayor de Blasio's direction.

The New York Post rang its alarm bell yesterday with this crime story that quickly veered into the paper's political playbook: "Brooklyn residents said Sunday that they fear the return of the bad old days of 'Crooklyn' — and placed the blame squarely on Mayor Bill de Blasio — after a bloody weekend in which at least 19 people were shot in the borough."

As a former reporter for the paper where I proudly worked for nine years, it's not hard to smell a rat somewhere high up in the Post's production line. This story could have been written before any reporter was sent out to find the quotes that would damn City Hall back to Dinkinsville.

While everyone should be concerned and worried over a weekend of violence, it's also important to actually look at some numbers provided by City Hall. As of yesterday, there were five fewer shooting incidents in the city than in 2014 and there have been seven more additional shooting victims than last year. More alarmingly, homicides are up by ten percent but the numbers are still lower than they were for almost any year in the Bloomberg administration.

But perception and reality have been divided by a blurry line for the tabloid's City Hall coverage for some time now – dating back to the paper's slanted coverage of the mayoral race in 2013.

And witness the newspaper's recent obsession with a homeless man who has been wandering the streets and urinating in public for more than a decade – dating far back into Michael Bloomberg's administration.

None of this would matter if the paper was on its angry little island – but a screaming front-page headline in the Post still has influence on some radio and TV stations. And it still pressures City Hall to jump – from releasing crime statistics yesterday to having the mayor quietly visit Tompkins Square Park after the Post made it sound like it's reverted back to the bad old anarchic days of the 1980's.

Clearly, the de Blasio administration has plenty of work to do and some of the work it has already done has been far from perfect. But as journalists, it's also important to try to focus on things fairly and objectively without putting your finger on the scale. In the Post's case, it's more than a finger. It's a massive agenda.

The massive agenda the Post has against de Blasio is not only playing out in crime and quality-of-life stories, it's playing out in education stories too.

The Posties would have New Yorkers believe there is a systemic cheating scandal going on in the New York City school system that was ushered in by Chancellor Carmen Farina, that it is a "growing trend" and is only being exposed because the intrepid reporters at the Post are on the case.

As I posted yesterday, the truth is cheating has being going on for years in the NYCDOE, long before Carmen Farina became chancellor, and if anything was more prevalent during the Bloomberg Years when there was untold pressure for schools to improve their statistics and be shut down.

There were cheating scandals in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 - many reported by the NY Post, btw - and the scandal of Chancellor Klein's credit recovery scam that allowed schools to give students semester credits for watching movies or reading comic books.

Limits were placed on credit recovery programs in 2012, after Klein was gone, but the Bryant scandal is a vestige of the old Bloomberg/Klein credit recovery program -  they were the first to hand out semester credits for minimal work in order to juke the overall stats.

How cheating has suddenly becoming a "growing trend" (as somebody who didn't know better and was buying the Post coverage put it on Twitter yesterday) when it's been around since the Bloomberg Years is beyond me - but that's how it's being framed in the Post.

And just as the crime stories are full of hyperbolic language meant to scare the city into electing a new mayor (crime stats are done across the board and as, Hardt noted in his NY1 piece, the homicide rate, while up, is still lower than almost any year during the Bloomberg administration) and the quality-of-life stories are meant to make people think the social fabric of the city is unraveling (as Hardt notes, the Post is using a guy who's been urinating in the streets since the Bloomberg Years as the emblem for what's wrong with "De Blasio's New York"), they're using the cheating stories at Bryant and Dewey High Schools to smear Farina and de Blasio as cheaters.

If the Post wants to do some intrepid reporting, they ought to go back to the Bloomberg/Klein Years and dig into some of the statistics to see how they got so good - how the test scores rose so high (they were inflated), how the grad rates rose so high (credit recovery, cheating.)

But of course Rupert Murdoch does not have a massive agenda to destroy his fellow oligarch and media mogul Michael Bloomberg, so the Posties never tied the cheating incidents under Bloomberg to a larger narrative of "NYC Unraveling" as they do now with the cheating incidents under de Blasio, and they'll never go back and look at the old scandals to show how bad things were in the Bloomberg Years.

The whole thing is jive and it needs to be called out as such, as Bob Hardt did in his NY1 piece about the Post coverage of the crime stats.

At Gotham Schools, one teacher puts the whole cheating scandal into perspective by noting that there's less incentive to cheat in the de Blasio Years than during the Bloomberg Years:

Michael Dowd, a social studies teacher at Midwood High School, said schools under Fariña feel less frenzied to show gains, reducing the worries that can fuel grade inflation and inappropriate credit-recovery schemes. The city has removed two of the big sources of pressure, he said: “The closure threat — coming from the city, anyway — and the progress reports, which reward you for credit accumulation.”

That's exactly right.

Alas, New Yorkers will never know that if they're only reading the Post or getting radio/TV news as influenced by the Post coverage.

Instead they'll think the cheating just started and was fanned by Farina and de Blasio.

Time For An Investigation Into New York State's Test Score Results, Data Tracking

Two stories from over the weekend show that the statistics and data issued by NYSED Commissioner John King and his merry men and women in reform at SED cannot be trusted.

First, as I posted yesterday, the NY Post covered how NYSED lowered the cut score levels on this year's state Common Core exams, an act which resulted in slightly higher test scores:

State officials touted increases in scores on tough Common Core exams this year but failed to reveal that they had lowered the number of right answers needed to pass half the exams.

The state Education Department dropped the number of raw points needed to hit proficiency levels in six of the 12 English and math exams given to students in grades 3 to 8, officials acknowledged.

“The reason that occurs is because the tests are slightly harder,” Deputy Education Commissioner Ken Wagner told The Post.

Student scores plunged on last year’s statewide 3-8 tests — the first based on the new Common Core standards. Before the 2013 exams, a panel of 95 educators decided how many points, or correct answers, students had to get to demonstrate proficiency.

But the point cutoffs were tweaked after this year’s tests. The state and its testing vendor, Pearson, found six tests were harder and four easier this year than in 2013, Wagner said.

They did so by comparing how students performed on “anchor” test questions — identical items used in both 2013 and 2014. A report on the scoring process will be released in December or January, Wagner said.

The changes raise questions about the validity of the results.

“The information given out about the test questions does not provide a complete picture, making it hard to judge how much progress students made last year,” said Fred Smith, a former testing analyst for city schools.

Score manipulation has erupted in scandal before. Between 2006 and 2009, the state reduced the number of raw points students needed to pass. Then-state Education Commissioner Richard Mills insisted the questions got harder, justifying the lower passing scores. But experts found the test items got easier, inflating scores hailed by then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, among others, as proof of great progress.

In addition to the Post report on the lowered cut scores, Stephen Rex Brown at the Daily News reported that NYSED couldn't account for a whole bunch of kids they said opted out of the state tests this year in New York City that the city said didn't:

State Education officials were scrambling to determine Friday why test data appeared to show more than 20,000 city students did not take math and English exams.

The perplexing numbers, which the city disputed, revealed 26,949 kids were no-shows for state math tests and 22,656 skipped the English Language Arts exam. The figures were more than triple the previous year’s numbers. State officials suspect there was an error in the way a large group of city students were coded in the state database of third- through eighth-graders who took the tests.

The city Education Department said only 1,925 students formally opted out of the exam — still double the estimate from critics of the April tests.

Leonie Haimson at NYC Public School Parents blog picked up that story, noting that while she would love to believe that the number of students opting out of the state exams in the city was as high as NYSED said it was, she didn't think this was so:

As much as I would have liked to believe the opt out figures were this high, I expressed skepticism to Stephen– and explained that I thought the numbers of students opting out had been far higher on Long Island and Westchester than in NYC. In the suburbs, in general, parents are more organized, enjoy well-funded public schools with high college-going and graduation rates, and have erupted in justified incredulity when the state tried to convince them their schools were failing and their kids were not “college and career ready.” 

Leonie goes on to note that SED's data should not be considered reliable:

My response to all this: with such erratic and unreliable information, how can anyone trust any of the test score data from NYSED?

...

Before the new Common Core tests, we had ten years of state test score inflation in NY that was obvious to anyone paying close attention, but year after year was ignored by the powers that be, because it was politically convenient. Each year Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein, sometimes accompanied by Randi Weingarten, would ritualistically bow down to the supposedly infallible test score gods and celebrate the results as showing that their reforms were working. And then the entire imaginary edifice came tumbling down in 2010, when the educrats finally admitted that an enormous test score inflation had occurred, somehow without their knowledge and complicity.

It is too early to assume that the small rise in test scores this year were due to similar manipulations , but a decade of experience should teach us to be open to the possibility. Merryl Tisch predicted that more kids would pass this year – and they did. In any event, we have overwhelming evidence from teachers and principals that the tests were poor quality and a lousy judge of real learning.

The state’s release of data showing thousands of opt outs in NYC is just one more piece of evidence showing how skeptical everyone should be about any data our government officials supply. 

The lowered cut scores that allowed SED to claim "progress" on their Common Core agenda and the disputed opt-out's here in the city are two examples for why there needs to be scrutiny into NYSED's testing operations from an outside entity unaligned with the Board of Regents, the State Education Department or the "non-profit" education reform groups that bolster both the Regents and SED (i.e., the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, etc.)

As Leonie notes there has been test score manipulation and inflation in the state before and it happened when our current Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch was on the Board of Regents.

In fact, Tisch defended former SED Commissioner Mills over the test score inflation, claiming there was none, when it was quite clear there was.

Michael Winerip, the former NY Times columnist, wrote up a timeline of test score inflation here in New York State that is worth revisiting at this time:

In the last decade, we have emerged from the Education Stone Age. No longer must we rely on primitive tools like teachers and principals to assess children’s academic progress. Thanks to the best education minds in Washington, Albany and Lower Manhattan, we now have finely calibrated state tests aligned with the highest academic standards. What follows is a look back at New York’s long march to a new age of accountability.

DECEMBER 2002 The state’s education commissioner, Richard P. Mills, reports to the state Regents: “Students are learning more than ever. Student achievement has improved in relation to the standards over recent years and continues to do so.”

JANUARY 2003 New York becomes one of the first five states to have its testing system approved by federal officials under the new No Child Left Behind law. The Princeton Review rates New York’s assessment program No. 1 in the country.

SPRING 2003 Teachers from around New York complain that the state’s scoring of newly developed high school tests is out of whack, with biology and earth science tests being too easy and the physics test too hard. The state Council of School Superintendents finds the physics scores so unreliable, it sends a letter to colleges for the first time in its history urging them to disregard the test result. Dr. Mills does not flinch, calling the tests “statistically sound” and “in accordance with nationally accepted standards.”

JUNE 2003 Scores on the state algebra test are so poorly calibrated that 70 percent of seniors fail. After a statewide outcry, officials agree to throw out the results. The Princeton Review says that ranking New York first was a mistake. “We’re going to have to come up with a fiasco index for a state like New York that messes up a lot of people’s lives,” a spokesman says.

OCTOBER 2003 A special panel appointed to investigate the state math fiasco concludes that the test “can’t accurately predict performance,” was created “on the cheap” and was full of exam questions that were “poorly worded” and “confusing.”

DECEMBER 2003 The director of state testing resigns. It was his idea to leave, a spokesman says.

MAY 2004 For the fourth year in a row, scores have risen on elementary and middle school state reading and math tests. Dr. Mills urges the Regents: “Look at the data that shows steadily rising achievement of the standards in school districts of all wealth and categories. More children are learning more now than ever before.”

FEBRUARY 2005 Dr. Mills rebukes those who question whether state scores are inflated. “The exams are not the problem,” he said in a report to the Regents. “It’s past time to turn from obsessive criticism of the exam and solve the real problems — the students who are not educated to the standards.”

SPRING 2005 New York City fourth graders make record gains on the state English test, with 59 percent scoring as proficient, compared with 49 percent the year before. “Amazing results” that “should put a smile on the face of everybody in the city,” says Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who happily recites the numbers on his way to re-election.

FALL 2005 The federal tests (the National Assessment of Educational Progress), which are considered more rigorous than the state tests, show a drop in New York City reading scores. On the eighth-grade test, 19 percent are proficient in 2005, compared with 22 percent in 2003. Asked if city and state officials had hyped the state test results, Merryl H. Tisch, a Regent, says, “They have never, ever, ever exaggerated.”

SEPTEMBER 2007 New York’s national assessment test results are again dismal; eighth-grade reading scores are lower than they were in 1998.

DECEMBER 2007 In his report to the Regents, Dr. Mills notes, “A rich, scholarly literature has challenged NAEP validity since the early 1990s.” He announces a plan to develop the first new state learning standards since 1996, to further spur academic excellence.

JUNE 2008 Newly released state test scores show another record year for New York children. Math scores for grades three through eight indicate that 80.7 percent are proficient, up from 72.7 in 2007. “Can we trust these results?” Dr. Mills asks. “Yes, we can. New York’s testing system, including grades three through eight tests, passed a rigorous peer review last year by the U.S. Department of Education. State Education Department assessment experts commission independent parallel analyses to double- and sometimes triple-check the work of our test vendor.”

JUNE 2009 In the previous decade, New York students’ average SAT verbal score has dropped to 484 from 494; the math SAT score has dropped to 499 from 506. The national assessment’s fourth-grade reading scores have been stagnant for four years, and the eighth-grade scores are their lowest in a decade.

But somehow, state test scores again soar to record levels. In New York City, 81 percent of students are deemed proficient in math, and 68.8 percent are proficient in English. “This is a big victory for the city,” the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, says, “and we should bask in it.” In November the mayor is elected to a third term, again riding the coattails of sweet city scores.

JULY 2010 Finally someone — Dr. Tisch, the chancellor of the Board of Regents — has the sense to stand up at a news conference and say that the state test scores are so ridiculously inflated that only a fool would take them seriously, thereby unmasking the mayor, the chancellor and the former state commissioner. State scores are to be scaled down immediately, so that the 68.8 percent English proficiency rate at the start of the news conference becomes a 42.4 proficiency rate by the end of the news conference.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, chief accountability officer for the city, offers the new party line: “We know there has been significant progress, and we know we have a long way to go.” Whether there has been any progress at all during the Bloomberg years is questionable. The city’s fourth-grade English proficiency rate for 2010 is no better than it was in February 2001, nine months before the mayor was first elected.

Mr. Polakow-Suransky says that even if city test scores were inflated, he is not aware of any credible research calling the city’s 64 percent graduation rate into question.

FEBRUARY 2011 The city’s 64 percent graduation rate is called into question. The state announces a new accountability measure: the percentage of high school seniors graduating who are ready for college or a career. By this standard, the graduation rate for New York City in 2009 was 23 percent.

MAY 2011 Embracing the latest new tool in the accountability universe, the governor, state chancellor and education commissioner ramrod a measure through the Board of Regents, mandating that up to 40 percent of teachers’ and principals’ evaluations be based on student test scores.

AUGUST 2011 With new, more rigorous state tests, city scores rise slightly. “We are certainly going in the right direction,” the mayor says.

NOVEMBER 2011 New York is one of two states in the nation to post statistically significant declines on the National Assessment tests. John B. King, the education commissioner, says the state is certainly going in the wrong direction, but has a plan to spur students’ achievement. “The new Common Core Learning Standards will help get them there,” he says.

DEC. 19, 2011 Nearly a quarter of the state’s principals — 1,046 — have signed an online letter protesting the plan to evaluate teachers and principals by test scores. Among the reasons cited is New York’s long tradition of creating tests that have little to do with reality.

Let us note that before Regents Chancellor Tisch finally admitted the scores were inflated, she defended the scores and SED Commissioner Mills as well as state and city officials on test score inflation by saying “They have never, ever, ever exaggerated.”

Uh, huh - except the scores were absurdly inflated and the claims Mills, state and city officials made hailing the scores were very much "exaggerated."

So Merryl Tisch's word is worthless here - as worthless as SED's data on the city opt-outs.

I had an exchange that went like this today with Assemblyman Steve McLaughlin:

@SteveMcNY It would be nice to see the legislature look into SED's manipulation of scores.
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) August 18, 2014

@SteveMcNY The cut scores were rigged by SED last year to plummet, this year rigged to show "modest improvement".
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) August 18, 2014

@SteveMcNY This test-score rigging is meant to show how NYSED's Common Core agenda is going swimmingly.
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) August 18, 2014

As Leonie noted in her blog post, Merryl Tisch declared there would be test score improvement before the tests were given and - lo and behold! - there was improvement.

The previous year, both Tisch and NYSED Commissioner King declared scores would plummet on the new Common Core tests and - lo and behold! - they plummeted.

Now they lowered the cut scores on the tests for 2014, got a slight rise in scores overall and are declaring "modest progress" in the scores, noting that this "modest progress" demonstrates why their Common Core reform agenda must be followed through.

But as we can see in the disputed opt-outs, SED's data is suspect at best, and with the Post reporting that raw score manipulation puts the validity of the state tests in question, I say it is high time we get an independent investigation into the state's testing regime.

We know they pulled a fast one all through the 2000's with the scoring.

We know current Regents Chancellor Tisch was part of that deception back in those days.

We know that SED's data is suspect.

We know that King and Tisch call what the scores are going to be long before the tests are actually given, calling into question the validity of the tests.

And we know that they lowered the cut scores this year to show "modest progress" - again, something that calls into question the validity of the tests.

It is time for an investigation into both the State Education Department and the Board of Regents over these matters because they have a track record of deception previous to this, we see now that their data is suspect at best, and we know they have a political agenda they are pushing.

NY Post Covers NYSED/Regents Scam On Test Scores

The NY Post called NYSED Commissioner King and Regents Chancellor Tisch on their test score scam.

Because it is such an important story, here it is in full:

State officials touted increases in scores on tough Common Core exams this year but failed to reveal that they had lowered the number of right answers needed to pass half the exams.

The state Education Department dropped the number of raw points needed to hit proficiency levels in six of the 12 English and math exams given to students in grades 3 to 8, officials acknowledged.
“The reason that occurs is because the tests are slightly harder,” Deputy Education Commissioner Ken Wagner told The Post.

Student scores plunged on last year’s statewide 3-8 tests — the first based on the new Common Core standards. Before the 2013 exams, a panel of 95 educators decided how many points, or correct answers, students had to get to demonstrate proficiency.

But the point cutoffs were tweaked after this year’s tests. The state and its testing vendor, Pearson, found six tests were harder and four easier this year than in 2013, Wagner said.

They did so by comparing how students performed on “anchor” test questions — identical items used in both 2013 and 2014. A report on the scoring process will be released in December or January, Wagner said.

The changes raise questions about the validity of the results.

“The information given out about the test questions does not provide a complete picture, making it hard to judge how much progress students made last year,” said Fred Smith, a former testing analyst for city schools.

Score manipulation has erupted in scandal before. Between 2006 and 2009, the state reduced the number of raw points students needed to pass. Then-state Education Commissioner Richard Mills insisted the questions got harder, justifying the lower passing scores. But experts found the test items got easier, inflating scores hailed by then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, among others, as proof of great progress.

Raw points are converted to scaled scores, which are divided into four levels, with Level 1 the lowest and Level 3 “proficient.”

Last year, fourth-graders needed 38 raw points out of 55 on the English test to hit Level 3. This year’s fourth-graders needed only 36.

The number of points needed to pass also dropped on five other tests: third-grade English and math, fifth-grade math, sixth-grade math and seventh-grade English.

On four of this year’s tests, points needed to pass rose: fourth-grade math, seventh-grade math, fifth-grade English and sixth-grade English.

The points required remained the same on the eight-grade exams.

Overall this year, the number of city students who passed the math exam jumped from 30.1 to 34.5 percent. In English, the number of students rated proficient inched up from 27.4 to 29.4 percent.

“It’s a good day for the whole New York City school system,” Mayor de Blasio declared, adding students and schools shouldn’t be judged on tests alone.

The takeaway from the story?

This line:

The changes raise questions about the validity of the results.

Indeed they do.

If you're a reader of this blog and some of the other education blogs on the Internet, you know many of us predicted that NYSED and the Regents would rig the tests so that scores would rise slightly.

I had a thread about that here on Perdido Street School blog.

Here were some comments before the scores were released:

Rigged. Totally Rigged. The scores will be a little bit better. A rigged salve to those who want to dismantle the garbage CCSS. A sickening manipulation, totally scripted with the purpose of ramming the Core down the throats of the public.

...

It will be surprising if scores don't go up.

...

The CC scores be manipulated just like Bloomberg/Klein did with the cut scores of ELA exams about 5 years ago and created an abundance of 'A' schools which was so ridiculous.

...

Predictions?

More lies, deception, dissembling, duplicity, and more attacks on the way...

...

Increase of scores within the students will demonstrate to the public and "special interests" that common core is working and common core is the way for college and career. Deception at its best! Parents and teachers need to continue this fight to stop high stakes testing and common core.

Of course they rigged the scores so they could claim "modest progress" on their agenda and call for continued "reform."

But they're fooling fewer and fewer people.

You can see that when the Post goes with a story about how NYSED manipulated the scores and the takeaway from the story is that the validity of the tests is in question.

Bloomberg's DOE Manipulates Graduation Rates

The Mayor of Money has hailed graduation rate increases as another piece of proof that is education reforms have worked.

But just as the test scores were jive, just as the crime stats are jive, just as the emergency response times are jive - the graduation rates are jive too:

Dozens of struggling city high schools allowed students to use a mishmash of makeup assignments — sometimes requiring little or no work — to earn credits for classes they initially flunked, sources say and data show.

For the first time, the Department of Education has made credit-recovery data publicly available by school — and it shows nearly 40 schools awarded between 5 percent and 31 percent of their credits to kids through makeup work in 2011-12, while close to three dozen gave between 5 percent and 46 percent of their credits that way the previous school year.

Most credit-recovery programs occur over the summer, when students try to learn the course work that eluded them during the year.

But many shortcut programs also cropped up after the department started using credit accumulation as a factor in grading schools in 2007 — putting pressure on them to come up with quick fixes for credit shortages.

“It’s a big issue at the school . . . the reason the principal does this is to make our school look good on our progress report,” said a former teacher at the Academy for Language and Technology in The Bronx, where 13 percent of credits came from makeup work in 2011-12.

The ex-teacher said that students would use an online program called Apex to read passages and answer simple questions — but that no one would prevent them from looking up the answers.

“They just accumulate easy credits rather than learn anything,” the former teacher said.

As I've written before, if there were ever a true independent auditing of the Bloomberg Years, they would find so much manipulation of data and out-and-out fraud from these people that they would be frog-marching Bloomberg administration officials out for months in handcuffs.

The have phonied up everything, put in place policies that forces phonied up data ("Improve or you're fired!" tends to do that sort of thing), but the press has largely ignored the manipulation.

Certainly they have not blamed Bloomberg himself for any of this.

You can bet if de Blasio is elected in November, that will change.

In any case, no wonder Bloomberg is planning on having all the emails and other data from his administration erased before he goes.

That's a great way to ensure his fraudulent legacy never sees the light of day with the public.

Bloomberg Tells Walcott: Drinks Are On Me!

Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Walcott took what the New York Daily News termed a "victory lap" yesterday over the Common Core test scores:

Cheers to us!

Under relentless criticism from his would-be successors, Mayor Bloomberg took a victory lap Monday over the fact that 22 of the 25 top-ranked schools on new state tests are in the city.

The mayor even suggested that his teetotaling Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott toast the results.

“You can have an extra drink tonight, it can be cranberry juice or vodka tonic, anything you want, but you deserve it,” Bloomberg said.

Sixteen of the 22 highly ranked schools have selective admissions, so only top students can get in.

Bloomberg said it was cause for celebration that city schools can compete with “wealthy suburbs."

“In ’01, zero out of the 25 best schools in the state were in New York City. Today, 22 out of the 25 schools,” he said. “I don’t know how you could write anything other than, ‘It is just amazing.’”

Actually the test scores have plummeted during Bloomberg's Reign of Error over the city school system - first in 2010 when the state admitted to test score inflation and city scores fell 26 points in reading and 24 points in math (to 42.4% proficiency in reading, 53% in math), then again in 2013 when the state changed the 3rd-8th grade tests to the so-called Common Core and test scores fell to 26% proficiency in reading, 30% in math.

Bloomberg has hawked tests scores throughout his Reign of Error as proof positive his Children First education reforms are working, so he has had to live and die by the test score numbers.

With scores now lower than they have ever been and with this his final year in office, he has been looking for any way he can to fool people into thinking his Reign of Error over the NYCDOE hasn't been a disaster.

Thus the "Hey, we've got 22 out of the top 25 schools!" bit (even though they've manipulated that by using selective admissions to certain schools.)

It's pathetic, really, and I bet even Walcott, who sort of lives in reality, knows that (I've always suspected Walcott's just in this for the money he will make off Bloomberg when his governmental service is done - Bloomberg is notoriously generous to those who stick by him.)

Bloomberg, however, believes his own b.s., so I have no doubt he really thinks he's done a swell job with the schools, despite having to spin the new Common Core test scores as another Bloombergian victory when they are anything but.

The Mayor of Money surrounds himself with yes men and women like Howard Wolfson and Dennis Walcott who never tell him anything he doesn't want to hear, so he's rarely given the opportunity to have to confront reality as it is rather than reality as he wants to see it.

As NYC Educator noted in a comment on another post I wrote about Bloomberg and his beloved statistics:

What I notice is when scores go up, it's great. When they're proven inflated and static, that's also great. And when they introduce new tests and scores plummet, that's great too.

So I guess when you're Wolfson, you just can't lose.

 And indeed, that seems to be the case.

No matter what the stats are, what the test scores are, Bloomberg always wins!

No wonder the drinks are on him.

Ever Notice How All The Stats Are The "Best Ever" Under Bloomberg?

Howard Wolfson responds to criticism of the police shooting two innocent bystanders in Times Square on Saturday with this:

@mattapuzzo @mikiebarb the NYPD is on pace to have appro 70 police shooting incidents this year, which is the lowest since records were kept
— howard wolfson (@howiewolf) September 15, 2013

Highest test scores under Bloomberg - until they were exposed as inflated.

Sky-rocketing graduation rates - except the numbers are inflated by credit recovery programs that give semester credits for tasks like watching movies.

Best crime stats ever - except there is ample evidence the police are manipulating the stats.

Quickest emergency response time ever - except they don't count the time callers spend on the line with 911 operators, thus making the stats look better than they are.

News stories abound of NYPD cops shooting lots of people in the last calendar year - but Wolfson says the approximately 70 police shootings will be "the lowest since records were kept."

So many of the statistics and so much of the data that Bloomberg and his minions hawk to prove Bloomberg is the bestest thing ever are phonied up.

I have a difficult time believing anything Wolfson says in general, but especially when he uses phrases like "the lowest since records were kept."

Too much manipulation and out-and-out fraud perpetrated by this administration (though often ignored by the corporate media) to believe these stats.

Sorry - not every stat in NYC can be the "lowest ever" or the "best ever," the way Bloomberg and his hired henchmen claim.

Joel Klein, The Man Who Hawked Inflated Test Scores As Chancellor, Lectures People About Inflated Test Scores

You can't make this stuff up.

Here's the former NYCDOE chancellor and current head of Rupert Murdoch's for profit education technology division, Joel Klein, lecturing people about how inflated New York's test scores were in the past:

For years, states around the country dummied-down standards to make it look as if students were more prepared for success after graduation than they actually were. This may have made some politicians look good, but it has been a terrible disservice to our kids.

Raising standards will mean we now have a more true measure of how well our students are learning. In the near term, it will also mean that previously inflated test scores will drop.

While some may confuse lower scores as a negative development, the fact that we’re finally being honest about academic achievement is a very positive sign.

For decades, states and local school districts have been responsible for their own education standards; the quality varied widely. A student deemed highly successful in one state could fail in another. The lack of uniform expectations didn’t do our students any favors. In fact, it doomed many to mediocrity.

If anybody rode the wave of inflated test scores in the past, it's former NYCDOE Chancellor and current head of Rupert Murdoch's for profit education technology division, Joel Klein, and his former boss, Michael Bloomberg.
To wit, Joel Klein stood next to his boss, Mayor Bloomberg, back in 2005 as Bloomberg gave a press conference outside P.S. 33 to tout "historic" and "record-breaking" gains in the city's test scores statistics, with P.S. 33 leading the way.

Sol Stern picks up the narrative from there:

One morning in May 2005, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office bused the city hall press corps to P.S. 33, an elementary school in one of the Bronx’s poorest areas. In the school’s auditorium, overflowing with happy children and teachers, the mayor proclaimed a miracle. With an enrollment 95 percent Hispanic and black, and with 100 percent of the students poor enough to qualify for free lunch, P.S. 33 had hit the jackpot on the state’s fourth-grade reading test. Over 83 percent of the school’s 140 fourth-graders scored at or above proficiency (or grade level), the mayor explained, compared with only 35.8 percent in 2004—an unheard-of one-year gain of close to 50 percentage points. The school’s terrific score was just four percentage points below the average for the richest suburban districts in the state.

The P.S. 33 success was the cherry topping off a very sweet election-year gift for Mayor Bloomberg. At the press conference, he could report “historic” and “record-breaking” gains in reading—59.5 percent of all Gotham fourth-graders had achieved proficiency on the state test, a gain of nearly ten percentage points from the year before. The results proved, the mayor contended, that his education reforms “really are paying off for those who were previously left behind.” Media coverage the next day echoed the mayor’s claims. It was clear that mayoral candidate Bloomberg had hit a home run right on the home field of his likeliest Democratic challenger, Fernando Ferrer.

When the 2006 reading scores came out in September, however, Bloomberg was in California, burnishing his national political image and spreading the gospel about the benefits of mayoral control of urban school districts. It was up to schools chancellor Joel Klein to discuss this year’s results at a reporters’ “roundtable” at his Tweed Courthouse headquarters (no gala press conference this year, no miracle schools to visit). Klein acknowledged that fourth-grade reading was down slightly but noted that Gotham remained ahead of most of the state’s urban districts. And though eighth-grade reading was still dreadfully low—only 36.6 percent of city students had attained proficiency—it was up three points over 2005.

The education reporters seemed rather incurious about what happened to the P.S. 33 fourth-graders whom they celebrated as heroes last year. Too bad, because it would have been easy to find out. The federal No Child Left Behind law now requires state education authorities to test students in grades three through eight and make the scores public. Thus, one can for the first time track a particular student cohort’s test scores on the same battery of state tests as they move from grade to grade. One discovers that the miraculous achievement of P.S. 33’s fourth-graders in 2005 completely disintegrated in 2006, with the pass rate plummeting to 41.1 percent in the fifth grade. This year’s fourth-graders at the school achieved proficiency at only a 47.5 percent rate.

Put aside the raw numbers and consider the human consequences of this collapse. Last year, the mayor publicly honored 120 poor Hispanic and black children for beating the odds and passing the reading test. This year, half of those kids discovered that they were failures after all. Last year, they shone as stars of a mayoral campaign. This year, they were truly “left behind.”

No one from city hall or the education department came to the school to explain how so many kids could be high achievers one year and failures the next. Nor was the school’s miracle principal, Elba Lopez, around to explain the shocking setback. After last year’s triumphant press conference, she retired, collecting a $15,000 bonus for her school’s spectacular 2005 performance, boosting her pension $12,000 for life. Meanwhile, the school’s wildly fluctuating test numbers are so unbelievable that they should attract the attention of state education authorities and the city school system’s special office of investigations. 

Joel Klein has a lot of chutzpah to lecture anybody about "lying" to children with inflated test score results when he spent his entire 8 years as NYC chancellor hawking inflated test score results as proof positive that his reform agenda was working.

In fact, Klein's bogus test score stats fell further in 2010 when NY State finally admitted the state tests had been inflated to make the results look better.

Diane Ravitch picks up the story:

Since 2006, scores have gone through the roof. Teachers and principals quietly told reporters that the tests were getting easier to pass, but no one listened. A few critics and testing experts warned that outsized annual gains were not credible, but no one listened.

At the same time that the state was announcing phenomenal annual gains, national tests administered by the federal government - exams considered the gold standard - told a different story. On those tests, the state's scores in reading were flat from 2000 to 2009. Math scores were up in fourth grade, but not in eighth grade, where they were flat from 2005 to 2009.

New York Commissioner of Education David Steiner made a bold move. He decided to end the inflation - and administer some shock therapy. The sharp contrast between mostly flat scores on national tests and dramatic annual claims by the state made it necessary for him to act, and he did.
Now we know the painful truth. Last year, 86.4% of the state's students in grades three to eight were deemed proficient in mathematics; today it is 61%. Last year, 77.4% of students in the same grades were deemed proficient in reading; today it is 53.2%.

When the scores were released, there was a sound of bursting bubbles across the state. What once were miracles turned into mirages.

Since 2005, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein have trumpeted historic gains. But after the state's adjustment, the pass rate on the state reading test among city students fell from an impressive 68.8% to an unimpressive 42.4%, and from an astonishing 81.8% to a disappointing 54% in mathematics. Overnight, the city's historic gains disappeared.

Now, look at the achievement gap between the performance of white students and that of minorities. Last year, black students were 22 points behind white students in passing the state English exam. This year - after the state corrected its scoring - the gap increased to 30.4 points.

In math, the gap grew even more. Black students were 17 points behind whites last year. Now they've fallen 30 points behind.

Charter school advocates saw their bubble burst as well. The pass rates in the state's charter schools, overall, dropped even faster than those in regular public schools. In third grade math, it plunged from 96.1% to 61.6%, and in eighth grade, from 84.5% to 50.4%. On the 2010 reading tests, the scores of charter students in New York City were nearly identical to those of district schools: 43% compared to 42%.

In math, 63% of the city's charter students passed, compared to 54% in public schools, which was an advantage but nothing like the miraculous results previously claimed by charter promoters.
Among other bubbles that popped were the city's school report cards, which based 85% of their grades on the state's test scores, mostly on gains on the test now proven to be vastly overstated. Some schools were given an A for "progress" on dumbed-down tests, and others were closed because they didn't make the grade. But the measure was a deeply flawed instrument.

The hundreds of millions of dollars that the city has spent on test preparation turned out to be a bad investment. Students were learning test-taking skills, not truly learning reading or mathematics.
As a result of the fiasco, we now know that the bonuses of more than $30 million handed out last year to teachers in schools that made "gains" on the state tests were a waste of precious money.

Why does test score inflation matter? Aside from the fact that the state misled the public, the inflated scores caused tens of thousands of students to be denied needed remediation. The inflated scores also help to explain why 75% of the city's high school graduates require remediation when they enroll in community colleges at the City University.

It's not a surprise that Klein conveniently forgets his own role in hailing inflated test scores as "historic" gains or claiming the achievement gap between white and Asian students and black and Latino students has disappeared, nor is it a surprise that his current boss, Rupert Murdoch, gives him space in the NY Post to spin the new scores to help his old boss, Michael Bloomberg.

Both of these men have their own self-serving reasons to carry on the fiction that Klein himself and his old boss, Bloomberg, aren't charlatans.

But the truth is, Klein is full of it and so is his piece.

The test score results in 2010 - real ones, not inflated ones - prove that.

Klein has no business lecturing anybody about bogus test score results, not with his record of hawking inflated test score results to anybody who would listen as evidence of his education reform genius.

Weiner Accuses Bloomberg Of Manipulating Test Scores And Closing Schools To Get Around The UFT Contract

Fresh from being told to go ---- himself by a voter on Atlantic Avenue yesterday, Anthony Weiner decided to go on the offensive against Mayor Bloomberg on education policy today:

Former Congressman Anthony Weiner accused Mayor Michael Bloomberg of using school closures to skirt union rules and fudging test scores ahead of his 2005 re-election bid during a conversation on education policy this morning that represented a rare reprieve from relentless questions about his latest sexing scandal.

Still trying to shift the conversation away from revelations that have engulfed his fledgling mayoral campaign in recent weeks, Mr. Weiner spent nearly an hour discussing everything from test scores to classroom diversity during a CUNY Institute of Education Policy Breakfast at Hunter College.

Asked about the Bloomberg administration’s controversial school closure policy, Mr. Weiner made the case that schools are being closed, not to improve them, but because it allows the city to skirt union rules that would otherwise bar the changes.

“It is simply a way to use their tools to be able to do what they want to ultimately do, which is to move teachers. And I think that–frankly–it’s not a particularly productive way to solve what is basically a labor–a contract–negotiation,” he said, describing the process as deeply disruptive to students.

“We’re basically saying to kids, ‘Don’t worry this school is a failure,’” he charged.

The allegations continued as Mr. Weiner accused Mr. Bloomberg of messing with test scores ahead of his 2005 re-election bid in order to make it seem as though more progress was being made.

“The mayor himself, I think, fudged the scores wildly leading up to his re-election in 2005,” said Mr. Weiner, who at the time was also running in the race. “A lot of those early numbers turned out to be discredited.”

In a scrum with mostly education reporters after the forum, Mr. Weiner doubled down on the accusation, pointing to news reports from the time questioning the scores.

“There was a spate of press conferences about how amazing the schools were doing that were later on discredited when those numbers came crashing back to earth,” he said. “These numbers are getting fudged in hundreds of ways,” he said.

Why would the press challenge Weiner on Bloomberg's playing funky with the test score data?

Bloomberg used to scream to holy heaven about how great the test scores were, how his reforms had closed the achievement gap.

But after the state acknowledged that state test scores were inflated, the city scores dropped precipitously and Bloomberg could no longer brag about either high test scores or closing the achievement gap.

Seriously, political journalists can actually look that stuff up if they want and see it for themselves.

Or they can call a journalist like Juan Gonzalez and ask him.

It's a fact - and not even a "Weiner" fact, but a real, honest-to-God true fact:

For years, Mayor Bloomberg, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and top education officials in Albany touted big jumps in math and reading scores statewide - and skyrocketing results among New York City's pupils.

The scores, they said, were proof that mayoral control and Klein's data-driven version of school reform had succeeded.

Schools were winning the "civil rights battle of our time," the chancellor claimed, by closing the racial "achievement gap."

To promote his reforms nationwide, Klein even founded a nonprofit group last year with the Rev. Al Sharpton. They called it the Education Equality Project.

Now, state officials have revealed a startling nosedive in test scores. Admitting that results from previous years had been inflated, the state announced tougher standards this year - resulting in the lower scores. Thousands of parents who had been told their children were at grade level are suddenly learning they aren't.

Even worse, the new scores show the racial "achievement gap" has increased.

Back in 2003, 73.3% of white fourth-grade students met state standards, compared with only 46.3% of black pupils. The gap between the two groups was 26.9 points. This year, the gap between black and white fourth-graders increased to 31.7 points.

For Hispanic fourth-graders, there was a smaller rise, from 29.7 points in 2003 to 30.3 this year - but a rise nonetheless.

Comparisons aren't possible for all grades because the state only tested fourth- and eighth-graders until 2006.

More than 15% of the 400,000 students who took this year's reading test registered at Level 1 - the lowest possible level - while only 2.8% did last year. An astonishing 85% of those lowest achievers were African-American and Hispanic.

The new scores are so bad Sharpton has begun to distance himself from Klein. "I'm very disturbed and concerned by these scores," Sharpton said.

"We were told students were improving, but it seems our kids were victims of dumbed-down tests to make the administration look good."

See?

Too bad the political press are too busy trying to get Weiner to say whether he's seen Sydney Leather's x-rated video released yesterday to look this kind of thing up and see that he's right about Bloomberg manipulating the test score data to make himself and his reforms look better.

This might have been a teachable moment for the political press and the corporate media, but alas, anything that doesn't jibe with Mayor Bloomberg as fiscal and education reform genius doesn't seem to compute with them.

Call it The Bill Keller syndrome - the inability to see Mayor Bloomberg for what he is.

Tisch And Teachers College

Fred Smith at Schoolbook:

Unfortunately, the unilateral decision by T.C. President Susan Fuhrman to honor New York Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch next week at the school’s convocation defies this tradition. As a member of the board since 1996, Tisch has supported New York’s testing program as it became the black hole of education from the inception of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002. Children have been reduced to data points. Education is now a census filed annually on their answer sheets.

Many in the Teacher’s College community as well as off-campus bystanders are disturbed by Fuhrman’s decision to honor Tisch who represents to her critics the testing agenda which they believe has corrupted education policy.

In 2009, after becoming chancellor, Tisch admitted that the test results during her tenure had been misleading but maintained that the tests were valid. Her agenda, with the promise of more rigorous testing, became the focus for New York.

The shift was navigated in editorial boardrooms where she won support for the idea that more testing was the way to go, and test scores could be defended in reaching high-stakes decisions about students, teachers and schools — uses for which they were never intended.

Not once did she ask for an independent investigation of the relationship between the test publisher and the State Education Department and how the results had become so spuriously high. The regent board member who watched the misuse of testing unfold was now in charge of its reform.

I've often wondered how it is that Merryl Tisch, who not only oversaw the test score inflation during Richard Mills' tenure as Regents chancellor but also defended those scores, now gets to dub herself the doyenne of testing standards.

Why wasn't there an independent investigation into the test score inflation?

Why did Ms. Tisch defend those scores back in 2005?

Did she not know they were inflated?

Did she know and simply spout the Mills party line anyway?

There was talk in the editorial pages of the Murdoch papers of Tisch running for mayor.

I was always hoping she would, because I thought that would give the public a great opportunity to find out just what Ms. Tisch knew about score inflation during Mills' tenure and why she only saw the light after the NYSED and the Regents were forced to admit the tests and grading were easier than they should have been.

I also wanted her to run for mayor because I wanted to find out more about her family's connections to K-12 Inc. and the for-profit education industry as well as the family history in the cigarette business.

As a former Newport cigarette smoker who started smoking at the age of 13 when Newport ran an ad campaign giving away free packs of cigarettes in my neighborhood during the summers to anybody who wanted them (including to me and my fellow 13 year olds), I always bristle when I hear her talk about how much she cares about children and teenagers.

When I was 13, about the only way the Tisch family cared about me was to try and hook me for life on their tobacco product.

They were almost successful at that.

Unfortunately for me, I was hooked until I was 32.

There are a whole host of reasons why Merryl Tisch ought not to be feted at Teachers College, from the test mess back during the Mills days to the K-12 Inc. link.

I think the history of the Tisch family's tobacco business and their concerted efforts to hook as many children on their tobacco products ought to be another reason why she not be feted at Teachers College (and no, it doesn't matter that the Tischs sold the company a few years back - they owned it for a long, long time.)

But of course she will be feted at Teachers College as if nothing is controversial about her, as if she isn't full of crap about what she did during the Mills era over the test score inflation, as if her family has no connection to the for-profit education industry and doesn't benefit from high stakes testing.

There is no accountability for the wealthy in this country.

That Merryl Tisch is being feted at Teachers College is just one more example of that sad but true fact.