Sol Stern: The Centerpiece Of Bloomberg's Ed Reforms Lies In Tatters

Sol Stern writes that the school report cards handed out by the NYCDOE - what Stern calls one of the centerpieces of Bloomberg's education reforms - are a failure:

There is little stability in the year-by-year individual school evaluations. Many schools found to be inadequate by the state are ranked high by the city and vice versa. Thus parents are increasingly baffled by the grades assigned to their children’s schools. Teachers are demoralized because they are under pressure to narrow the curriculum and teach to the state tests. Principals qualify for cash bonuses if their school’s ranking goes up; on the other hand they face the threat of closing if the school’s grades go down. Not surprisingly they are tempted to game the system by, for example, allowing students who have not completed their course work to graduate. Even The New York Post, among the mayor’s most enthusiastic supporters on education issues, now recognizes that the progress report “erodes confidence in the mayor’s management — endangering his legacy and undermining respect for vital reforms, like mayoral control of the schools.”

Stern then takes aim at not just the mayor's education reform centerpiece, but test-based education reform as a whole:

 This debacle was entirely predictable. Testing experts have recognized that accountability schemes based so heavily on standardized tests can lead to fraud. The principle even has a name: Campbell’s Law, after Donald Campbell, one of the greatest American social scientists of the 20th century, who concluded that “when test scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.”

Of course things are going to get much worse before they get better because the state has put a new teacher evaluation system into place, APPR, that requires all teachers be evaluated using their students' test scores. 

Additional standardized tests in every grade in every subject are going to be added all throughout the year not so that children can be assessed but so that their teachers can be evaluated.

The geniuses who put this system into place - Obama, Duncan and Gates who have promoted and funded it at the national level, Cuomo, Tisch and King who pushed this through at the state level, and the union leaders like Mulgrew and Iannuzzi who haven't challenged the premise of test-based accountability in any practical way - are going to have a lot to answer for when this generation of students damaged by test-based accountability become adults.

As for Bloomberg, the citizens of this city know that the mayor has no clothes when it comes to education and the school system - the latest Marist/NY1 poll shows that 49% believe the school system is worse now than a generation ago, another 16% say the quality is about the same despite all the dramatic changes wrought by Bloomberg.

The mayor has gotten a Mayor Data Report and the score is an "F".

Sol Stern was once a supporter of the mayor's reforms.

But Stern sees the damage that has been done by this regime, just as many New Yorkers see it, and says the following:

 The perverse incentives of the progress reports cause harm — to the kids, to the teachers and principals and to the parents. It’s time for the Bloomberg administration to face this inconvenient truth and restore integrity to the accountability system. 

I would add one thing - it's time for the Accountability Mayor to face some accountability for his failures himself.

The Drugging Of A Generation

The more I think about today's Times story that reported on low-scoring students from low income backgrounds being prescribed ADHD drugs to pacify their behaviors and raise their test scores, the more I think about the damage being done to an entire generation of children as a consequence of education reform.

According to the story, the drug of choice doctors prescribe to low-scoring children from working class backgrounds is Adderall.  Risperdal is also prescribed to one child in the story after he has a psychotic episode from the Adderall and grows suicidal.  The article also mentions Clonidin, a sleep aid, to help all of those drugged children get to sleep.

What kind of society do we live in that this conscious drugging of children to get their test scores up and their behaviors pacified is happening?  What damage has education reform done to children that anybody - seriously , anybody - thinks drugging these kids to get their scores up is a good idea?

If these kids are lucky, they will end up in 12 step or other treatment programs for the inevitable drug and alcohol addiction behaviors they are learning from this.  That's if they're lucky.
 
More than likely we are teaching a generation of kids to become addicts when life gets hard and things don't work the way you want them to (or the way your parents or school want them to.)

Heckuva job.  Just what the education reformers want.  Pacifies the lower classes and keeps them under wraps.  Makes money for Big Pharma.  And get the test scores up.  It's a win-win-win - for everybody except the children.

Giving Low-Scoring Students ADHD Pills To Raise Their Scores

We must raise test scores by any means necessary - even by drugging the kids and diminishing their authentic development as humans.

That's the take away from this horrifying story in this morning's New York Times:

CANTON, Ga. — When Dr. Michael Anderson hears about his low-income patients struggling in elementary school, he usually gives them a taste of some powerful medicine: Adderall. 

The pills boost focus and impulse control in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Although A.D.H.D is the diagnosis Dr. Anderson makes, he calls the disorder “made up” and “an excuse” to prescribe the pills to treat what he considers the children’s true ill — poor academic performance in inadequate schools. 

“I don’t have a whole lot of choice,” said Dr. Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta. “We’ve decided as a society that it’s too expensive to modify the kid’s environment. So we have to modify the kid.” 

Dr. Anderson is one of the more outspoken proponents of an idea that is gaining interest among some physicians. They are prescribing stimulants to struggling students in schools starved of extra money — not to treat A.D.H.D., necessarily, but to boost their academic performance. 

It is not yet clear whether Dr. Anderson is representative of a widening trend. But some experts note that as wealthy students abuse stimulants to raise already-good grades in colleges and high schools, the medications are being used on low-income elementary school children with faltering grades and parents eager to see them succeed. 

...

Dr. Anderson’s instinct, he said, is that of a “social justice thinker” who is “evening the scales a little bit.” He said that the children he sees with academic problems are essentially “mismatched with their environment” — square pegs chafing the round holes of public education. Because their families can rarely afford behavior-based therapies like tutoring and family counseling, he said, medication becomes the most reliable and pragmatic way to redirect the student toward success. 

The Drug Enforcement Agency classifies these drugs as "Schedule II Controlled Substances because they are particularly addictive." 

We do not know what the long term side effects are. 

It is quite possible children will become dependent upon these drugs long into adulthood - perhaps for the rest of their lives. 

And what are the effects of taking these drugs on a child's emotional and psychological development?

Doctors really don't know, but you can be sure it isn't good.

Take the case of this family who have all of their kids prescribed with these drugs:

On the Rocafort family’s kitchen shelf in Ball Ground, Ga., next to the peanut butter and chicken broth, sits a wire basket brimming with bottles of the children’s medications, prescribed by Dr. Anderson: Adderall for Alexis, 12; and Ethan, 9; Risperdal (an antipsychotic for mood stabilization) for Quintn and Perry, both 11; and Clonidine (a sleep aid to counteract the other medications) for all four, taken nightly. 

Quintn began taking Adderall for A.D.H.D. about five years ago, when his disruptive school behavior led to calls home and in-school suspensions. He immediately settled down and became a more earnest, attentive student — a little bit more like Perry, who also took Adderall for his A.D.H.D.

When puberty’s chemical maelstrom began at about 10, though, Quintn got into fights at school because, he said, other children were insulting his mother. The problem was, they were not; Quintn was seeing people and hearing voices that were not there, a rare but recognized side effect of Adderall. After Quintn admitted to being suicidal, Dr. Anderson prescribed a week in a local psychiatric hospital, and a switch to Risperdal. 

While telling this story, the Rocaforts called Quintn into the kitchen and asked him to describe why he was had been given Adderall. 

“To help me focus on my school work, my homework, listening to Mom and Dad, and not doing what I used to do to my teachers, to make them mad,” he said. He described the week in the hospital and the effects of Risperdal: “If I don’t take my medicine I’d be having attitudes. I’d be disrespecting my parents. I wouldn’t be like this.” 

Despite Quintn’s experience with Adderall, the Rocaforts decided to use it with their 12-year-old daughter, Alexis, and 9-year-old son, Ethan. These children don’t have A.D.H.D., their parents said. The Adderall is merely to help their grades, and because Alexis was, in her father’s words, “a little blah.” 

”We’ve seen both sides of the spectrum: we’ve seen positive, we’ve seen negative,” the father, Rocky Rocafort, said. Acknowledging that Alexis’s use of Adderall is “cosmetic,” he added, “If they’re feeling positive, happy, socializing more, and it’s helping them, why wouldn’t you? Why not?”

Dr. William Graf, a pediatrician and child neurologist who serves many poor families in New Haven, said that a family should be able to choose for itself whether Adderall can benefit its non-A.D.H.D. child, and that a physician can ethically prescribe a trial as long as side effects are closely monitored. He expressed concern, however, that the rising use of stimulants in this manner can threaten what he called “the authenticity of development.” 

“These children are still in the developmental phase, and we still don’t know how these drugs biologically affect the developing brain,” he said. “There’s an obligation for parents, doctors and teachers to respect the authenticity issue, and I’m not sure that’s always happening.” 

Dr. Anderson said that every child he treats with A.D.H.D. medication has met qualifications. But he also railed against those criteria, saying they were codified only to “make something completely subjective look objective.” He added that teacher reports almost invariably come back as citing the behaviors that would warrant a diagnosis, a decision he called more economic than medical. 

“The school said if they had other ideas they would,” Dr. Anderson said. “But the other ideas cost money and resources compared to meds.”

 This is one of the consequences of the education reform movement - succeed at school at any cost.  Never mind the emotional development of the children, just get the test scores up and the behaviors pacified.

I wonder what the drug addiction and alcoholism rates for this generation are going to be after they've been taught since childhood to just take a pill when things aren't going well for you.

This is wrong, pure and simple, and it will lead to very bad consequences in the long term.

You can see some of the consequences already in the short term in the experience of the Rocafort family and their son Quintn's psychotic episode.

Oh, well - nothing to be done but get those test scores up.

As Geoffrey Canada once said on Education Nation, there's no time to do anything else but focus on what works to get the scores up.

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?

NY1/Marist Poll Finds NYers Think NYC Schools Have Grown Worse Over The Past 20 Years

A Ny1/Marist poll finds that 49% of New Yorkers think the quality of New York City public schools has declined over the past 20 years.

Another 16% say the quality has remained the same despite all the changes to the system - from the demise of the old Board of Education to the advent of mayoral control to the closure of many large high schools and the opening of many new small schools.

Just 23% say the schools have improved.

NY1 reports that responses to the poll do not change much across borough, income level, race or age - 2/3rds of the city's inhabitants believe the school system has either not improved or gotten worse over the last 20 years.

And what are some of the complaints people cited for why they believe the system is worse now than it was a generation ago?

“Overcrowding. Budget cuts. A lot of things that once were implemented in schools, like a lot of programs, have been cut out,” said one New Yorker.

“He's cramming these charter schools into the public schools, pitting charter school parents against public school parents," said another.

“There are so many problems inherent in the standardized tests and the focus on testing,” said a third.

Mayor Bloomberg thinks the school system has gotten much better since he took over total control of it a decade ago.  When asked by NY1 why so many New Yorkers and parents of NYC public school students disagree with his assessment of the state of NYC schools, the mayor pointed to school surveys that showed parents were happy with their own schools and rising enrollment which shows people are voting with their feet.

And yet, the mayor could not explain the dismal NY1/Marist poll numbers.

49% say the system is worse than a generation ago.

Another 16% say it is about the same - even though the mayor has had autocratic control of the system and pushed through a radical agenda of school closures, standardized testing accountability, and charter school expansion.

Those numbers - independent of the DOE's school surveys, which are of course slanted since parents and teachers know if they make any complaints in the surveys, those complaints will be held against the individual schools, not the DOE as a whole - are hard to argue with.

But leave it to the data-loving mayor to argue with data that doesn't agree with his worldview that he has done a magnificent job of reforming the NYC school system and given another year, will do an even better job by closing another 60 schools and opening another 30 charters.

The mayor has gotten a Mayor Data Report in the form of the NY1/Marist poll - and he has failed to add value to the school system or to the education of students.

The Problems With The DOE School Report Cards Are Replicated In The Teacher Evaluation VAM's

The NY Post attacked the Mayor of Money's school report card program for being "too confusing," "misleading," and "eroding confidence in his leadership" of the school system.

Here is some of what they said:

This year’s marks, or “progress reports” — released last week for some 1,200 elementary and middle schools — prove the point yet again.

For example, schools in District 2, which includes well-off sections of TriBeCa and the Village, are widely considered among the best in the city.

But the district’s year-on-year ranking, based on the progress reports, nose-dived from 4th among the city’s 32 districts — to an embarrassing 12th. That includes PS 234, a particularly well-respected school, whose overall grade dropped from an A to a C.

It didn’t help that rankings released by the state less than two months ago, which reflected slightly older data, appeared to be at odds with the city’s grades for many schools.

Likewise, of seven elementary and middle schools that Bloomberg says are so bad they should be shut down and reopened with new staff, two wound up with Bs.

The Post editorial asks how is it possible that such "great" schools like the one's in TriBeCa and the Village could be ranked so low by the DOE report card system, then notes that the system is not based on overall quality but rather on the supposed "progress" and gains students have made on state standardized tests as measured by a complex value-added algorithm put together by the geniuses at the DOE.

So as the Post editorial states, a low grade on the city report card does not necessarily mean a school is bad - it means the school made little "progress" as measured by the DOE's complex value-added algorithm.

The Post says the system is too confusing for parents to understand without some explanation and context for it - explanation and context the DOE and the Mayor of Money fail to adequately provide:

Many parents have little understanding of what the grades actually mean.
 
So when they see their kids’ beloved schools graded poorly, even as the students there earn reasonably high scores on tests, they just figure that the Bloomberg folks are ninnies.

That erodes confidence in the mayor’s management — endangering his legacy and undermining respect for vital reforms, like mayoral control of the schools.

Yes, many grades, especially at the high and low ends, do correspond roughly to what folks think the schools deserve.

It’s also worth noting that the grading system stems from a vital effort to make schools accountable. If parents get mad at a low grade, they may pressure the school. That’s a good thing.

But then, if folks don’t trust the grades in the first place, accountability measures have no chance.
Nor, for that matter, do Bloomberg’s reforms — or the schools themselves.

What the Post editorial fails to mention is that the vaunted new APPR teacher evaluation system promoted by Governor Andrew Cuomo, and signed off upon by both the NYSUT and the UFT leaderships, does the same thing for individual teachers that the DOE report cards do for individual schools.  The problems that are inherent in the way the DOE is inaccurately measuring schools are going to be replicated when the NYSED begins to measure so-called teacher performance using a complex value-added methodology (more on this below.)

Of course when the Post published the Teacher Data Report scores of 4th-8th grade math and ELA teachers earlier this year - the scores with the 52% median margins of error and the 87% maximum margins of error - they too failed to properly explain what the scores mean and how error-riddled and unstable they could be, just as the mayor and his Tweedies have failed to provide proper explanation and context for the DOE school report cards.

Instead the Post trumpeted the TDR scores as "accountability" for teachers, even though many truly excellent teachers, highly respected by students, parents, colleagues and administrators, were tarred as "ineffective" by the highly unreliable TDR scores (Gary Rubenstein demonstrates just how unreliable the scores are here.)

The Post even used the TDR scores to bludgeon individual teachers, smearing one as the "CITY'S WORST TEACHER!" even though this woman was a special education teacher whose score was based upon the tests of eleven ESL students who arrived into the country at various points in the school year and yet were still required to take state tests.

So while I can appreciate the Post's public concern that the DOE school report cards are erroneous, misleading, confusing and undercutting support for Bloomberg's leadership of the school system, I ask where is the same concern for the APPR teacher evaluation system?

The very problems the Post is citing for the school report cards were present in the DOE's Teacher Data Reports and are also present in the state's APPR teacher evaluation system (as Sean Feeney, principal of The Wheatley School in New York State and president of the Nassau County High School Principals’ Association, points out here.)

And yet, not only did the Post trumpet the erroneous, error-riddled, unstable TDR scores as objective, scientific data that proved the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of individual teachers, they've been promoting the state's APPR system as the same.

Make no mistake, many excellent teachers who are respected by students, parents, colleagues and administrators are going to be smeared by APPR as "failures."

I await the Post's concern troll editorial over that travesty with not-so-baited breath.

Clearly the Posties, along with many other education reformers, are worried that the parents in TriBeCa and the Village are going to start to wonder about the validity of a DOE school report card system that measures their children's schools as mediocre and/or failing when those same schools send lots of kids off to high performing schools like Stuyvesant or Hunter College High School.

And once those parents become aware that the DOE school report cards are unreliable, they're going to start to question many of the other tenets the education reformers trumpet as gospel - from the utility of the standardized tests as a measurement of school, teacher and student performance to the validity of the value-added measurement as a tool for high stakes decisions like teacher evaluations, school closings, and employee firings.

The education reform House of Data Cards is beginning to crumble and the Posties know it.

The End Game For The Reform Data Fetishists

The NY Times reports that one Texas district is piloting tracking students through electronic ID's:

SAN ANTONIO —  For Tira Starr, an eighth grader at Anson Jones Middle School, the plastic nametag hanging around her neck that she has decorated with a smiley face and a purple bat sticker offers a way to reflect her personal flair. For administrators, it is something else entirely: a device that lets them use radio frequency technology —  with scanners tucked behind walls and ceilings —  to track her whereabouts. 

Anson Jones is the first school in San Antonio’s Northside Independent School District to roll out the new nametags, which are part of a pilot program intended to ensure that the district receives all of the state dollars to which it is entitled. 

...

 

But the radio frequency identification nametags have prompted concerns from civil liberties groups and electronic privacy watchdogs, which fear a Big Brother atmosphere in Texas public schools.

Matthew Simpson, a policy strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, said the technology was easy to acquire, meaning people outside a school might be able to monitor a student if they obtained the student’s unique tracking number. 

Mr. Simpson said the technology was originally designed for shipping goods and for cattle. “It was never intended for people,” he said.

Oh, boy - think of the data mining possibilities with this "innovation".

It's enough to give Joel Klein, Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch Texas-sized hard-ons without the Viagra pills.

And be sure, this abomination will spread, billed as some "safety" innovation or cost-savings.

But of course we know exactly why the powers that be want ID tags on students (and teachers too.)

It's easier to track everything they do, everything they buy, everything they eat, everywhere they go and, eventually, everything they think and feel.

That's why Gates was experimenting with the Galvanic skin response bracelets that measure so-called student engagement in the classroom.

The boys running the country want to control everything, as much for commercial purposes as for political purposes - and more and more, technology is allowing them to do just that.

It's not a mistake that the ID tags that used to be used for products and cattle are now on people.

We're the product.

Sue, Baby, Sue

The NY Post covers the story of Tiffany Webb, a former guidance counselor at Murry Begtraum who was fired for a past job she had as a bikini and lingerie model.

Webb, now 37, had posed for the photos when she was 18-20 and disclosed the job when she was first hired by the DOE.  The photos have shown up on the Internet over the past few years, leading to her being "rubber roomed" twice for a year each while the DOE investigated the case.  There was also a third investigation conducted without a rubber room imprisonment.

Webb received satisfactory ratings every year and was respected by colleagues and students, juggling a case load of 540 students according to the Post.  Nonetheless, she was fired for "conduct unbecoming a DOE employee" on December 23 of last year after a student allegedly showed photos of the lingerie-clad to the principal of the school at the time.

Here is how the DOE decided the case:

 “The inappropriate photos were accessible to impressionable adolescents,” a three-member chancellor’s committee ruled by 2-1. “That behavior has a potentially adverse influence on her ability to counsel students and be regarded as a role model.”

The dissenting member argued, “Her professional work as a guidance counselor has been outstanding, and she should not be punished for something that happened years ago.”

Webb has changed her name and is working in New Jersey as a teacher.  She is suing the DOE for

 wrongful termination, sex discrimination and violation of First Amendment rights. She seeks reinstatement, back pay and punitive damages.

Of course we know that the chancellor and the mayor have both said there is a "No Tolerance" policy for any employee misconduct and even if an arbitrator finds in the favor of a teacher, the chancellor and the mayor want the right to overturn the arbitrator's decision.

In this case, they wouldn't have to overturn any decision - the teacher was fired for lingerie photos she had taken almost twenty years ago.

And of course the kids are the winners here, because they have now learned an important lesson - whatever you do these days on the Internets WILL come back to haunt you and cost you a job in the future - even if it is something as innocuous as taking lingerie photos that could be in a Victoria's Secret catalog.

The other lesson is, it's okay for the Daily News and Post to put up half-naked photos of celebrities like Rihanna and call this "news" but if someone working as a teacher used to work as a lingerie model when she was in college, she's a dirty filthy sex creep and MUST be fired to save the delicate psyches of teenagers who must not be exposed to this sexual stuff - unless the Daily News or Post is showing it.

All I can say is, paraphrasing another former bikini model who once ran for vice president, sue, baby, sue.

Will De Blasio Get "Liu'ed" For Saying He Wants To Work With Labor?

The corporate shills at the Daily News took Public Advocate Bill de Blasio to task in an editorial today for saying he believes in defined pension benefits for public workers over 401(k) plans:

Later, in an interview, de Blasio ruled out trying to switching future city employees from traditional pensions to a 401(k)-style retirement savings plan.

“I believe in defined benefit pensions, and I don’t want to move away from it,” he said, adding, when pressed for details, “I want to work with labor, by gathering everyone around the table.”

This statement about pensions, along with his willingness to work with as opposed to do to labor groups, infuriates the corporate shills at the Daily News.

They promptly declare de Blasio is "off to a bad start" in his quest to be mayor at the end of the editorial.

Now this is the kind of thing that can be a problem for a candidate and politician.

The corporate media went after Comptroller John Liu early and often for standing with labor and the working families of this city and have helped smear him as a "crook" over campaign finance fraud even though no charges have ever been filed against Liu and the associate of his who has been arrested has claimed the Feds tried to get him to manufacture charges against the comptroller.

The ironic thing about all of this is, Mayor Bloomberg admitted in a court of law that he laundered $1.1 million dollars through illegal channels to the Independence Party, and yet somehow he is not smeared by the Daily News and the Post as a campaign finance fraudster the way the unindicted Liu is.

Still, while he is no Liu and does a much better job of assuaging the hedge fundies of this city by doing nothing to upset them, De Blasio had better watch out when he talks to the DN corporate shillsters about labor.

Make enough statements about how you want to work with labor and you support pensions over 401(k) voodoo and you'll end up like John Liu - a target for the corporate shillsters in the press to smear

NYPD Bills Family Of Man Killed During Chase For Dent To Cop Car

Brillaint - don't only just kill people, but charge the family fees for the privilege:

The mother of a man who was struck by a New York City police department car during a chase says cops want her to pay $710 to have the car repaired, New York Daily News reports.

Tamon Robinson, 27, was killed in April around dawn after he tried to outrun officers who were chasing him through his Brooklyn housing project. He was fleeing after being caught stealing decorative stones from the grounds, police said.

Now his mom, Laverne Dobbinson, 45, says she's been ordered to pay the cost of repairing the police car that killed her son, the paper reports.

"We're still grieving, and this is like a slap in the face," Dobbinson said."They want my son to pay for damage to the vehicle that killed him. It's crazy."

A letter dated Sept. 27 and mailed to her son seeks $710 for "property damage to a vehicle owned by the New York Police Department," according to New York Daily News. It also threatens to slap the family with a lawsuit if the claim isn't paid.

After being hit by the squad car, Robinson slipped into a coma and never regained consciousness, dying six days later of blunt impact head injuries.The city medical examiner ruled his death an accident.

At the time, Robinson worked at a muffin shop but also tried to make extra money hawking items, including paving stones to scrap dealers, his mother told the paper.
The police department's Internal Affairs Bureau is probing allegations from witnesses that Robinson was deliberately mowed down.

An NYPD spokesman did not return a call or e-mail from the paper seeking comment.

The NYPD is out of control - much more so now than during even the worst days of the Giuliani administration.

Here they deliberately run over a guy stealing freaking paving stones, then bill his family for the damage to the squad car.

Now that the story has made the news, you can be sure the city will drop the collection against the family.

Nonetheless, the story is emblematic of Mayor Bloomberg's New York.

Cops murder victim, get away with the murder with impunity, then bill the surviving family members for damages.

You can't make this up.

Former El Paso School Chief Sentenced To 3 and 1/2 Years In Prison For Cheating Scandal

Yikes:

EL PASO, Texas — A federal judge sentenced the former superintendent of El Paso Independent School District to more than three years in prison Friday for his participation in a conspiracy to improve the district’s high-stakes tests scores by removing low-performing students from classrooms.
Lorenzo Garcia’s scheme to prevent hundreds of sophomores from taking the accountability tests fooled authorities into believing that academic standards had improved in his West Texas district — resulting in a boost in federal funds and personal bonuses totaling at least $56,000.

Garcia pleaded guilty to two fraud counts in June; one in the testing scandal and another in which he misled the school board so that his lover would receive a $450,000 no-bid contract to produce school materials.

On Friday, federal judge David Briones sentenced him to 3½ years in prison on each fraud count, to be served at the same time. Garcia also was ordered to pay $180,000 in restitution and fined $56,500 — the amount he received as a bonus from the district for its success on test scores.

...

 Garcia, who was hired in 2006, implemented a plan with several other administrators that allowed for the pre-testing of 10th-graders to identify those who were likely to fail the standardized tests. The method, known as the “Bowie Model” because it was employed with the most force at Bowie High School, was intended to keep low performing students from taking high-stakes state tests used to measure its performance under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Other large districts also have been ensnared in scandals to raise test scores, most recently in Atlanta, where educators gave answers to students or changed answers after tests were completed. But none has been so brazen as to cast off low-scoring students.

After the scandal came to light last year, Texas officials placed the district on probation, named a monitor to oversee it and said the schools showed “utter disregard” for the students’ needs.

In El Paso, 10th graders who performed poorly on the pre-tests were held back in the ninth grade or promoted to the 11th grade before the state tests were administered. To keep other students from taking the 10th grade tests, the district held those who recently transferred from Mexico in the ninth grade, told older students to leave and obtain a GED elsewhere and threatened some students with fines for allegedly living in Mexico, outside the El Paso School District’s area.

Garcia had one employee photograph students crossing the border so they could be forced out on the grounds that they lived in Mexico, rather than within the school district.

In some cases, when the district needed to improve its graduation rate, it gave students credit for computer-based classes or “turbo-mesters,” which were 90-minute sessions in which students earned a full semester worth of credits.

“One girl got two semesters in three hours, in the last day of school, while her teacher was collecting books,” said former principal Stephen Lane, one of five people allowed to testify before Briones sentenced Garcia.

The whole idea, said former state Sen. Eliot Shapleigh, was to make students “disappear” before they were tested.

If this guy were working on Wall Street with derivatives instead of in El Paso with students, he'd be the "Innovator of the Year."

NYPD Kill Another Unarmed Person

This is horrific:

An Army reservist with a clean record was fatally shot in his car by an NYPD detective early Thursday — before he even had “a chance to put his hands up” in surrender, a witness told the Daily News.

Noel Polanco, 22, was killed on the Grand Central Parkway in what witness Diane DeFerrari called an act of “pure road rage” following a terrifying chase by cops in an unmarked vehicle.

“Noel didn't have a chance to put his hands up. They screamed, ‘Put up your hands!’ and shot at the same time,” said DeFerrari, a 36-year-old bartender who was riding in the front passenger seat. “It was simultaneous. There was a pop and Noel gasped.”

“They acted in pure road rage,” she added.

Following the shooting, DeFerrari said she and a backseat passenger, an off-duty NYPD cop, were ordered out and made to put their hands on the car.

“The cop said, ‘Your friend just shot himself,’” DeFerrari recalled. “I didn’t dispute what I saw because I was afraid. They wouldn’t let me look at him.”

The cop who gunned down Polanco offered a different account, according to a source familiar with what he told colleagues. Detective Hassam Hamdy said he pulled the trigger after the Queens man reached down for something that turned out to be a yellow-and-black power drill, the source said.

But DeFerrari insisted Polanco never took his hands off the wheel.

“His hands were on the steering wheel” the whole time, said DeFarrari — a bartender at the Ice Lounge in Astoria, where Polanco worked in the club’s hookah section.

Polanco may have been driving under the influence - he had been served alcohol before he got in the car to drive his friends home.

Nonetheless, nothing in the accounts that have surfaced so far suggest he should have been killed by the NYPD.

And yet he was.

Another unarmed person shot and killed by the NYPD.

When will Mayor Bloomberg's personal army be reined in?

When will Bloomberg and Ray Kelly be held to account for these murders?

A False Sense Of Precision

Education reformers like to say their reforms for schools are hard, scientific and data-driven.  These are precise metrics used for what is going on with students, teachers and schools, so when decisions are made to hold students back, to fire teachers or to close schools, the data can always be relied upon for accuracy and precision.

Aaron Pallas says as far as the school report cards go, this is nonsense:

Aaron Pallas, professor of sociology and education at Teachers College at Columbia University, said the methodology behind the city’s progress reports offer “a kind of false sense of precision.”

He singled out the peer index, which is used to compare schools that have similar demographics. The index takes into account economic need, students with disabilities, students who are black and Hispanic and English language learners.

Principals often complain about these groupings, claiming their schools are frequently compared to schools that are actually very different. Or to schools that are so similar that a slight fluctuation in one school’s test scores can lead to a big change in another school’s progress report.

How schools are grouped together for the methodology is a subjective decision made by somebody at Tweed. 

The same goes for how teachers are grouped together for comparisions along the Great Teacher Evaluation Bell Curve.

That's a decision made by somebody at the state level or at Tweed.

And yet, these guys sell this stuff as hard, data-driven science, as if there's no subjectivity to the exercise at all.

Same goes for deciding to use one year of test scores for the school report cards instead of three.

Or deciding that 85% of the report card will be made up solely of test scores.

Or basing 85% of the report card on tests like the Pineapple and the Hare - ones so badly written that schools ought to band together and sue the NYSED, Pearson and Tweed if they're on the closure list.

How can the hacks at Tweed or the NYSED claim with a straight face that these school report cards are precise and fair when the scores they're based on came from the infamously error-riddled Pearson tests.

No, there is nothing "objective," "scientific" or "precise" about these school report cards, just as there was nothing "objective," "scientific" or "precise" about last year's Teacher Data Reports that were published in the papers.

If the UFT were an actual union instead of a company union, it would be publicizing all the problems with this data and explaining why neither schools nor teachers should be held to account using flawed data from error-riddled tests.

But the UFT is too busy bragging about how it helped Cuomo get APPR in place, subjecting individual teachers to this test score nonsense that schools as institutions have been dealing with for years.

These data-driven education reforms give the public a false sense of precision over the policies and decisions made for schools and teachers.

Someday maybe the public will learn that.

Mulgrew Brags About UFT Role In Using Test Scores In APPR System

Michael Mulgrew penned an opinion piece for the Daily News today in which he blamed the NYCDOE for not negotiating in good faith over the new teacher evaluation system.

But the part of the piece that I found most interesting was this:

The irony is that while the mayor and his allies blame the United Federation of Teachers for the lack of a deal on this issue, it was the union that led the effort to create a new evaluation protocol.
In 2010, we went to Albany and then to Washington as part of the federal Race to the Top competition to make sure that our conception of such a system was part of New York State’s winning entry. Under the final plan, 20% to 25% of a teacher’s evaluation will depend on the growth in his or her students’ standardized test scores, while the remainder will be based largely on other measures of student achievement and on supervisors’ observations.

That’s not symbolic. It represents a revolution in the way teachers are to be mentored, developed and rated

No, it certainly isn't symbolic that the UFT "led the effort to create a new evaluation protocol" that requires teachers be evaluated using their students' test scores.

This new system is called APPR and requires state test scores to account for 20%-25% of a teachers evaluation, local tests to account for another 15%-20%.

That's real "solution-oriented unionism" in action, as Mulgrew's former boss, Randi Weingarten, might say.

The only problem is, as Sean Feeney has pointed out in the Washington Post, the solution is much worse than the problem.  Here is how the state's vaunted new APPR system works:

With the new school year comes a new responsibility for principals across the state: the need to inform teachers of their “growth score” based on the New York State assessments their students took in the spring. This teacher growth score is one of the parts of the New York State APPR system that was implemented last year in a rushed manner against the very public objection of over one-third of the New York State principals along with thousands of other teachers, administrators, parents and concerned citizens.

 These state-supplied scores were the missing piece in a teacher’s final end-of-year score — potentially determining whether or not a teacher is deemed Ineffective and therefore subject to requiring a Teacher Improvement Plan (TIP) within 10 days of the start of the school year. These scores were not available to schools until the third week of August. So there you have it: high-stakes information that can potentially have a serious impact on a teacher’s career being supplied well past any sort of reasonable timeframe. Welcome to New York’s APPR system!

...

 Officials at our State Education Department have certainly spent countless hours putting together guides explaining the scores. These documents describe what they call an objective teacher evaluation process that is based on student test scores, takes into account students’ prior performance, and arrives at a score that is able to measure teacher effectiveness. Along the way, the guides are careful to walk the reader through their explanations of Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs) and a teacher’s Mean Growth Percentile (MGP), impressing the reader with discussions and charts of confidence ranges and the need to be transparent about the data. It all seems so thoughtful and convincing! After all, how could such numbers fail to paint an accurate picture of a teacher’s effectiveness?

...


One of the items missing from this presentation, however, is an explanation of how State officials translated SGPs and MGPs into a number from 1 to 20. In order to find out how the State went from MGPs to a teacher effectiveness score out of 20 points, one needs to refer to the 2010-11 Beta Growth Model for Educator Evaluation Technical Report. Why a separate document for explaining these scores? Most likely because there are few State officials who are fluent in the psychometrics necessary to explain how this part of our APPR system works.

It is incredulous that the state feels that it is perfectly fine to use a statistical model still in a beta phase to arrive at these amorphous teacher effectiveness scores. I make it a point not to use beta software on my computer, for I do not want something untested and filled with bugs to contaminate the programs that are working fine on my machine. It is a shame that the State does not have the same opinion regarding its reform initiatives.

As explained in the technical paper, the SGP model championed by New York State claims to account for students who are English Language Learners (ELL), students with disabilities (SWD) and even economically disadvantaged students as it determines a teachers adjusted mean growth percentage. While the statistical explanation underlying the SGP model is carefully developed, nowhere do the statisticians justify the underlying cause for any change in student score measured. In other words, what is the research basis for attributing any change in score from year to year to the singular variable of a teacher? The reason why this is never explained is because there is virtually no research that justifies attributing the teacher as the sole cause of a change in student score from year to year.

So if it is not solely the teacher who caused the change in score, to what should one attribute a change in student score? Well, that is a question that continues to challenge statisticians and educational researchers. Despite the hopes and declarations of so many of our present-day “reformers,” we simply do not have to tools necessary to quantify the impact a single teacher has on an individual student’s test score over the course of time. Derek Briggs presented a critique of the use of SGPs in this paper.

They're using a beta statistical model on teachers for high stakes decisions on evaluations and employment.  Does Mulgrew feel the need to explain this part of the evaluation system, the one he happily agreed to, in his Daily News piece?

Of course not - he's too busy patting himself on the back for selling teachers down the river and complaining that Bloomberg wants him to sell teachers even further down the river and that he just cannot do.

As the next UFT election approaches, it will serve you well if you remember that not only did Michael Mulgrew and the UFT leadership agree to the APPR system that is still in beta form, but he's bragging that he and the UFT leadership agreed to it.

If we had real union leadership in NYC, Mulgrew would be pointing out to New York Daily News readers what Sean Feeney pointed out to Washington Post readers of Valerie Strauss' blog.

But we do not have real union leadership in NYC.

We have a corrupt, entrenched union leadership looking to remain in power forever and willing to make any accommodations they need to ensure that happens.

And so, we have the APPR system - still in beta form - being used on us.

Nothing like being a guinea pig for reform.

Thanks, Mike - Mulgrew AND Bloomberg.

Bloomberg To Go Nuclear This Year With School Closures

Buried at the end of this Murdoch Street Journal article about the sharp increase in "failing" school report card grades for NYCDOE middle and elementary schools this year is this:

In about a week, the city will narrow down the current field to a smaller group of schools that will be given greater scrutiny. Last year, the number of middle, elementary and high schools that made the second cut in the closure review was about 40 of the city’s district and charter schools, which numbered about 1,750 at the time. Eventually that was whittled down again by about half.


Will there be more schools targeted for closure this year?

City and Department of Education officials say it’s probable – but it’s not because on Monday there was a big increase in the number of schools that received three straight years of poor grades on progress reports. Instead, people close to City Hall say it’s likely because the Bloomberg administration wants to make as much of an impact as possible in its last full year in charge of the school system, and also because there were schools it wanted to close last year but couldn’t after a judge blocked the closures.

I think the nuclear war analogy is apt here.

This is Bloomberg's last full year in office, this is the last time he can really blow stuff up.

He is not going to miss that opportunity.

When Bloomberg and Klein first came into power, their goal was to blow as much of the old system up as possible so that it couldn't be reconstituted again.

They weren't wrong to say that the old system wasn't working, but they were wrong on their plans to fix it - constant reorganizations, constant chaos, FEAR-based policies, and the like.

They've already changed things so many times, most people have no idea how the system is organized anymore.

Districts? Regions? Networks? 

Who knows?

And the content of the curriculum, we've gone from the central office pushing RAMP UP to every school (and reading rugs and standardized bulletin boards measured by people from Central Office) to "We don't care what you teach, just get the test scores up!" to Common Core.

So many changes, many breathtaking in scope - and yet, at the end of the day, we have 217 schools labeled "failures" and on the docket for closing this year, and that's BEFORE the high school reports come out.

Bloomberg won't take the blame for any of this, of course, it's never his fault, so it must be the fault of the schools, teachers and administrators.

This is disaster capitalism in action - cause many calamities yourself, then blame others and privatize the whole thing as the remedy.

Don't be surprised if Bloomberg doesn't have every school that was listed for closure last year on the list again this year (as the DN says is the plan) and adds another hundred to the list.

Bloomberg is going to go out with a huge mushroom cloud over the NYC school system - and this is his last year to finish the destruction of the system that he started in 2002.

Bloomberg News: Top 1% Got 93% Of The Income Gains In 2010

Somebody from Bloomberg News should tell Bloomberg himself - the U.S. has less social mobility than Uganda:

The 1.2 million households whose incomes put them in the top 1 percent of the U.S. saw their earnings increase 5.5 percent last year, according to estimates released last month by the U.S. Census Bureau. Earnings fell 1.7 percent for the 96 million households in the bottom 80 percent -- those that made less than $101,583.

The recovery that officially began in mid-2009 hasn’t arrived in most Americans’ paychecks. In 2010, the top 1 percent of U.S. families captured as much as 93 percent of the nation’s income growth, according to a March paper by Emmanuel Saez, a University of California at Berkeley economist who studied Internal Revenue Service data.

The earnings gap between rich and poor Americans was the widest in more than four decades in 2011, Census data show, surpassing income inequality previously reported in Uganda and Kazakhstan. The notion that each generation does better than the last -- one aspect of the American Dream -- has been challenged by evidence that average family incomes fell last decade for the first time since World War II.

Of course the Mayor of Money blames income inequality on teachers and schools, so it's doubtful this story on his own news website would upset him too much.

A retired CEO from American Airlines sees the problem, however:

“Income inequality of the scale we have today is destroying our democracy,” retired American Airlines CEO Bob Crandall said in an interview. Crandall, 76, says he became so frustrated at what he sees as selfishness among his peers that he started writing a blog on his Lenovo laptop. “Anyone else willing?” he titled his first entry in August 2011, which argued that people should pay higher taxes.

...


Crandall, the former American Airlines CEO, said that while his blog isn’t a “burning success” -- he’s heard from 50 readers -- he feels compelled to write about income inequality, taxes and CEO pay. “I wake up every morning and read the newspapers and fly into a rage,” he said. Growing up in Rhode Island during the Great Depression and World War II, he felt a sense of collective effort that’s missing now, he said.
 
“The whole notion of responsibility kind of went away,” Crandall said. “If the boss is going to get a bonus, then everybody in the company ought to get a profit-sharing check.” 

 The corporate criminal running Caterpillar does not see the problem, however:

Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) made headlines this year for resisting wage demands at a plant in Joliet, Illinois, after reporting a record $1.7 billion in second-quarter profit. Machinist Kathy Keifer, 56, started there in 1994 after a friend in a geometry class at Joliet Junior College raved about the opportunities. She said she was trained in welding, machining and assembly, and by 2007, was making $25 an hour, enough to support a daughter as a single parent. After a career detour as a real estate agent, she said she returned in 2010 to a changed employer.

Joliet machinists, who make $14.74 to $25.88 an hour, in August accepted a six-year contract that provided no pay increase for those hired before May 2005. Workers hired later receive a one-time 3 percent pay raise or “market-based” increases, whichever is higher. Employees also got a $3,100 signing bonus.

Compensation for Caterpillar’s CEO, the 37-year company veteran Douglas Oberhelman, rose 60 percent to $16.9 million last year. Keifer said that over the next six years, the most she can expect is a 55-cent increase from $17.39 an hour.

“At $25, I was feeling pretty good, definitely middle class,” she said. “Now it’s like the bottom’s giving out.” As the strike depleted her savings, Keifer put off plans to buy a two-story frame house for $99,000 in Joliet.

“I don’t see what good it does our country if companies are hiring at minimum wage,” she said.
Caterpillar takes a “market-based approach” for all employees, and comparing a production worker’s pay to the CEO’s isn’t valid, said Rusty Dunn, a spokesman for the Peoria, Illinois-based company. The contract is fair and necessary to keep the company competitive globally, he said.
“It is not in anyone’s best interests to have the type of labor agreement suited to something you would see years ago,” he said.

Keifer’s postponed home purchase helps explain one factor limiting job growth: Americans don’t have the income to spend as much as they used to. Although U.S. consumer spending climbed to its highest level in four years in August, according to Gallup surveys, it still lags 2008 levels by more than 20 percent. Most of the spending came from higher-income households. 

The CEO gets a 60% raise, the worker gets a 55-cent raise over six years.

That's America today.

Less social mobility than Uganda.

That says it all, doesn't it?

When Are The Problems In NYC Schools Bloomberg's Fault?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't Michael Bloomberg been in charge of the NYC school system for ten years now?

At what point does he own the problems in the system?

When are the plummeting school report card grades his problem?

When are the stagnant test scores his fault?

When is the phonied up grad rate his?

These flunkies at the NYCDOE like to skirt accountability even as they push it on teachers, administrators and schools.

But the person who likes to skirt accountability the most while pointing fingers at others is the Mayor of Money himself.

The corporate media and the corporate shills who work as "journalists" in it help this along by refusing to call him on this.

Perhaps they worry they may have to work for him some day when he buys up the rest of New York's print media.

Perhaps they just don't want to challenge him.

Whatever the case, few in the media ask the question: Why Aren't The Problems In NYC Schools Bloomberg's Fault?

After all, he has had autocratic control now for a decade.

If anybody should be held "accountable" for the problems in the system, it ought to be the guy with total control of it.

Polakow-Suransky Says School Closure Process Is An Art

NYCDOE Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky tells the New York Times that school closures based upon school report cards are "an art, not a science."

Huh?

These guys at the both the NYSED and the NYCDOE are always telling us these methodologies they're using on both individual school report cards and individual teacher evaluations are "scientific," "objective," and "rigorous."

The old way of evaluating schools and teachers was "soft" and "subjective."

The new way - the Shael way, the Gates way, the Obama way, the Cuomo way, the Bloomberg way - is "hard," "data-driven," "objective," and "scientific."

So what if the tests that these school report cards are based on were error-riddled?

So what if the value-added measurements used in the NYCDOE Teacher Data Reports have a median margin of error of 52% and maximum margin of error of 87%?

This is data-driven science and you CANNOT argue with the numbers.

Except when you can, of course.

Which is apparently always.

These numbers they pick and choose, the way they decide to weigh them, the tests they decide to use for them, the rubrics they decide to use for the tests - this stuff is ALL subjective.

It leaves out a whole host of other ways to evaluate schools and teachers and privileges just a few.

Parents at P.S. 3 in Greenwich Village say that is exactly the case with their children's school:

 “They are educating critical thinking and creative minds and that is not at all reflected on these tests,” said Nick Gottlieb, co-president of the school’s PTA and a father of two students. Lisa Siegman, P.S. 3’s principal for the past 12 years, said the progress report favored schools that improved their test scores over those that maintained high scores.

“It’s such a complicated statistic that you can have families feel that their kids are doing really well and still get a C,” Ms. Siegman said.

Yes, but how do you "rigorously," "scientifically," and "objectively" measure the teaching of critical thinking skills to children, Mr. Gottlieb? 

Don't you understand that if something cannot be immediately measured by a Pearson no-bid contract test, it does not exist in any objective way?

Don't you understand that what the NYCDOE is doing here is SCIENCE and cannot be argued with your critical thinking skills?

Except when of course even Shael Polakow-Suransky admits it's not a science.

Might be good to tuck away this Shael quote and bring it back up at the PEP school closure meetings later this year.

Even the American Enterprise Institute Gets The Problems With Many New Teacher Evaluation Systems

Huffington Post has a piece about an American Enterprise Institute report on teacher evaluation systems post-RttT entitled "The Hangover: Thinking About The Unintended Consequences Of The Nation's Teacher Evaluation Binge."

The report says we need to beware the unintended consequences of these new systems:

  there is a prevailing sentiment that holding teachers accountable for their performance will more closely align teaching with norms in other professions. However, most professional fields rely on a combination of data and managerial judgment when conducting evaluations and making subsequent personnel decisions. This is in stark contrast to the teaching profession, in which new evaluation systems have aimed to eliminate subjective judgments entirely, instead focusing solely on student performance.

 According to the paper, the best protection against biased managerial judgment is to ensure that the managers themselves are also held accountable for performance. Furthermore, in designing value-added systems, policymakers should consider whether the elements they are adding move education away from or closer to professional norms in other fields.

...

The paper’s authors point out that poorly designed evaluation requirements could also hinder other innovative models. Some schools have begun to incorporate learning-based software in their classrooms and other blended learning models; these technologies vary in design, approach, costs and teacher role. Student groups in these models are more flexible and fluid, and students receive instruction and tutoring from a variety of teachers and programs. This makes it difficult or impossible to attribute student learning gains in a particular subject to a particular teacher, and complicates teacher evaluation systems that rely on linking teachers to their students’ academic results.

Yesterday, Carol Burris wrote about all the problems APPR, the vaunted new teacher evaluation system hailed by Andrew Cuomo as "scientific" and "objective," is going to cause in New York State:

The shortcomings of evaluating teachers by test scores were apparent in the recent report of the American Institute for Research (AIR), which developed the New York growth score model. AIR, in its BETA report, shows how as the percentage of students with disabilities and students of poverty in a class or school increases, the average teacher or principal growth score decreases. In short, the larger the share of such students, the more the teacher and principal are disadvantaged by the model. I predict that when the state results are made public, you will see a disproportionate amount of teachers of students with serious learning disabilities and teachers in schools with high levels of poverty labeled ineffective on scores. And that label will be unfair.

Likewise, in the model used this year, teachers who have students whose prior test scores were higher were advantaged, while teachers whose students have lower prior achievement were disadvantaged. This phenomenon, known as peer effects, has been observed in the literature since the 1980s. There is no control for peer effects in the model. We will see patterns of low scores for teachers of disadvantaged students. Over time, the students who need the best teachers and principals will see them leave their schools in order to escape the ‘ineffective’ label.

Perhaps the best critique of the model comes from AIR itself. The BETA report concludes that “the model selected to estimate growth scores for New York State represents a first effort to produce fair and accurate estimates of individual teacher and principal effectiveness based on a limited set of data” (p. 35). Not “our best attempt,” not even a “good first attempt,” but rather a “first effort” at fairness.

And yet, across the state, teachers and principals have received scores telling them that they are ineffective in producing student learning growth.

There is nothing "scientific" or "objective" in the new system.  The VAM is an error-riddled mess.  The tests the VAM is based on are an error-riddled mess.  And the "ineffective" ratings that are handed out as a result of this system are a travesty.

Nonetheless, Cuomo and his deputies in education privatization, NYSED Commissioner John King and Regents Merryl Tisch, have declared this system to not only be sound but to be the best in the land.

When the American Enterprise Institute gets the problems with VAM and overly prescriptive evaluation systems that supposed "Democrats" like Andrew Cuomo do NOT get, you know the world is turned upside down.

Or perhaps not. 

Maybe Andrew Cuomo, like so many others Dems these days, is beholden to the interests of the  privatizers and doesn't particularly care about the harm he does to children, teachers or schools.

Remember, Cuomo sends his kids to private school, just like his education commissioner John King does.

Why should they care about the harm they cause to kids, teachers and schools - they won't have to deal with the consequences.

Unless we make them deal with the consequences - at the ballot box.

The New UFT Ad

The UFT spent $1 million to run some fluff ad called "Ready" that does nothing to set the record straight on education issues.

Assailed Teacher promos the ad the UFT SHOULD run:



AT's ad has a lot more to do with reality than the UFT's ad.