Bloomberg Philanthropies: The Post-Mayoral Agenda

The mayor has spent the past two days talking smack about teachers, scolding his potential successors running for mayor that teachers should in no way be given retroactive raises for the years they have gone without a contract.

This two day campaign the mayor has embarked upon, continued on his radio program today on WOR, got me thinking that he's going to use Bloomberg Philanthropies as a propaganda tool against teachers in NYC long after he's gone from office (and perhaps even long after he's gone from this mortal coil...foundations have a longer life than their founders...)

Take a look around the glossy new Bloomberg Philanthropies site and see what you think.

Will Bloomberg continue to hammer NYC teachers long after he leaves City Hall and use Bloomberg Philanthropies to do it?

Will he punish a successor who doesn't follow his wishes on teacher contracts, evaluations, school closures, etc. by using his PAC against her/him the way he has for pols who do not support gun control?

Will Bloomberg, one tiny man with an ego so large and fragile that he needs to put his name on everything he owns, continue to have such an undue and enormous influence on education policy, schools, students and teachers simply because he's got more money than almost everybody else?

The High Stakes Testing Disease

John Merrow:

When I was a kid and when my now-grown children were kids, tests were designed and used to assess student performance and make judgements about school quality.  Now, however, tests are all about holding teachers and principals ‘accountable.’  We have lost our way, and the cheating epidemic is the clearest sign of that.  Principals and teachers know that their livelihood depends on rising test scores, and so the curriculum has been narrowed; adult energy is focused on the so-called ‘cusp kids’ who are just a few points shy of making it over the bar; music, theatre, and field trips have disappeared; children are objects to be manipulated, not living, breathing human beings with individual needs, strengths and weaknesses; and morally weak adults are cheating.

Here’s the rub: Cheating is not the problem that must be addressed. It is the most visible and disturbing symptom of the disease, but the disease itself is our excessive reliance on high stakes testing.

This disease will eventually pass, but in the meantime there are going to be quite a few careers and reputations destroyed by it before it's all said and done.


As Michael Fiorillo noted in a comment:

the Common Corporate Standards and the tests they are a vehicle for will quite likely collapse of their own unworkability and rising parent opposition. In that sense, think Carol Burris is probably right. However, in the meantime, thousands of teachers will be chewed to pieces, and millions of students will be abused and turned off to school by this malign nonsense. And then it will take years, perhaps decades to undo the damage caused by these social vandals.

We won't mention how some education reform cheerleaders, by uncritically waving their pom-poms at so many of the reforms over the last few years, helped bring about the disease of high stakes testing that is ravaging schools all across the nation.

Still, it's nice to have them awakening to the mess, even if they're still having some difficulty with the "Come To Jesus" moment and admitting to their own complicity in this mess. 

Of Course Online High Stakes Tests Are Going To Be A Mess

I don't know why anyone in power in the education world would think moving to all-online high stakes standardized tests by 2014-2015 would go smoothly.

This Education Week article says education and political officials have had their confidence shaken by a recent spate of online testing failures.

That means these people were once confident all-online testing could be carried off relatively problem-free.

Clearly these boys and girls have never used NYCDOE bandwidth to check their email at High Noon when it takes ten minutes for each screen to load.

I never develop a lesson for class that relies solely on the Internet.

I learned that lesson when I couldn't get a film I needed for one class to stream for more than 15 seconds at a time before it stopped running.

It's difficult to run a lesson about the differences between a play text and a film adaptation when you have to re-enact the film version with hand puppets.

If I, a lowly classroom teacher lacking an Ivy League degree and too stupid to have already fled the classroom and gone into policy with the TFAers, have learned that an over-reliance on technology in the classroom without a non-tech back-up is a problem, how come the geniuses running the schools systems around the country haven't learned that lesson yet?

Is it because these people believe their own pro-tech propaganda rather than the reality of their own experiences with technology?

Are they blinded by their own optimism?

Or do they figure once the online testing juggernaut starts rolling, nothing - not even a rash of online failures - can stop it?

I dunno, it's hard to get into the fevered minds of the education reform/online testing pom-pom crowd and figure out what's going on in there.

But if the reformers don't figure out a way to get these tests rolled out without major difficulties, they are going to find their vaunted new reforms - the ones they worked so hard to shove down the throats of people in 45 different states - are going to go the way of the abacus.

In fact, given how bad the online testing has been, the abacus and other implements of an age long gone just may come back:

John Althardt, a spokesman for the 30,000-student Indianapolis public schools, said students in 50 buildings experienced testing disruptions, and the district was just focusing on getting through the testing cycle before thinking about how to proceed in the future.

“Some of our folks would say they’re ready to go back and use stone tablets at this point,” Mr. Althardt said. 

I wonder who has that stone tablet contract for schools these days?

Cuomo Issues Threat On Imposed Evaluation System On NYC Teachers

From the Daily News:

In a letter to Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, Cuomo wrote that the city and union have until May 8 to reach a deal or submit paperwork to state Education Commissioner John King telling why they blew the deadline. 

King would then serve as a binding arbitrator in the matter in an “expedited” process starting May 29 if no deal is reached by then, with a final plan decided by June 1.

The deadlines were set in the new state budget.

“While the commissioner is ready to act as an impartial arbiter,  you have had ample time to reach an agreement,” Cuomo wrote. “I therefore urge you to finalize your (evaluation) plan prior to these statutory deadlines, as virtually every school district in the state has done,” Cuomo wrote.

“Our students deserve nothing less than the very best teachers, and it is critical that we provide our teachers with the opportunity to be the very best,” he added.

If "our" students, as the governor terms them, deserve the best, why did he cut $250 million from the NYC school budget and refuse to put it back in when the UFT and the NYCDOE failed to come to an agreement on evaluations?

Also, how is this APPR system that ties teacher evaluations to test scores giving students "the very best teachers"?

This system, with its inherent flaws, biases, wide swings in stability and large margins of error, will give students teachers who have to teach to the test and hope that's enough to save their jobs from the GREAT APPR BELL CURVE that insists 7% of teachers be ranked "ineffective" every year and fired.

And of course this new teacher evaluation system is based on the new Common Core tests with the ratcheted up difficulty levels, so the fix really is in on how many teachers get fired with this system.

Carol Burris told NYC Educator that we shouldn't worry, no one will be fired because the system is so badly designed that it will never stand up to court challenges.

I hope she is right.

But until those challenges are heard in the law courts, there is going to be a lot of churn and burn in schools all over the state.

Which is what Cuomo and King and Tisch and the all the education reform cheerleaders want.

There is a political agenda at work here to break up the school systems, fire as many teachers as possible and bring about the Friedmanesque fantasyland of choice that so many reformers talk abotu with glee.

Daily News Reveals Fifth Grade NY State Test

They really set students, teachers and schools up with these tests:

A concerned educator leaked the Daily News a copy of a new, more challenging state reading exam for fifth-graders, and it’s as much of a doozy as it is controversial.

It’s full of long, dense, off-the-wall nonfiction passages on making wind tunnels, soil formation and studying whales. There are two short stories, both set overseas. And there’s a vague selection from a poem about loneliness that students must interpret before choosing among four answers that contain two arguably correct selections.

Students got 90 minutes to complete the 32-page test, which contained 42 questions based on six written passages.

The News asked testing experts, teachers and parents to analyze the test, which state and city education officials have kept under lock and key. Everyone who saw it was left dumbfounded by the killer questions.

“You might as well just put ‘failure to students’ at the top of the exam,” said Tracy Woodall, a stay-at-home mom whose son is a fifth-grader at Public School 1 in the Bronx. “There’s no way they’re going to pass this.”

...

The questions on the fifth-grade reading test, designed to test comprehension, were enough to stump a city high-school teacher who reviewed it.

“Have these students had an opportunity to build up to that complexity? The answer is no,” said the teacher, who asked for anonymity for fear of getting sacked. “This test is coming at them like an anvil to their face.”

The problem here is not that the tests have gotten more difficult and complex.

 

The problem is that they have gotten more difficult and complex overnight, without the support for teachers and schools to help students master this material or level of difficulty and complexity.

 

The tests got difficult overnight without the added supports because there is a political agenda behind the tests.

 

The corporate education reformers are trying to use this tests to show how "failing" all the schools in the state are - not just schools in inner cities, which have been their favorite targets so far, but also schools in far wealthier suburbs like Scarsdale and Garden City.

 

When the dramatically lower scores from these tests come in, they're going to go on an extended p.r. campaign to convince parents and voters around the state that we need drastic changes to the public schools all over the state.

 

Rick Hess laid out the blueprint for this agenda in his  Common Core Kool Aid blog post at Education Week:

When I ask how exactly the Common Core is going to change teaching and learning, I'm mostly told that it's going to finally shine a harsh light on the quality of suburban schools, shocking those families and voters into action. This will apparently entail three steps:

 First, politicians will actually embrace the Common Core assessments and then will use them to set cut scores that suggest huge numbers of suburban schools are failing. Then, parents and community members who previously liked their schools are going to believe the assessment results rather than their own lying eyes. (In the case of NCLB, these same folks believed their eyes rather than the state tests, and questioned the validity of the latter--but the presumption is that things will be different this time.) Finally, newly convinced that their schools stink, parents and voters will embrace "reform." However, most of today's proffered remedies--including test-based teacher evaluation, efforts to move "effective" teachers to low-income schools, charter schooling, and school turnarounds--don't have a lot of fans in the suburbs or speak to the things that suburban parents are most concerned about.

And this brings us to the crux of the matter. After failing miserably to convince suburban and middle-class voters that reforms designed for dysfunctional urban systems and at-risk kids are good for their children and their schools, Common Core advocates now evince an eerie confidence that they can scare these voters into embracing the "reform" agenda.

All of these New York State Common Core tests need to be made public so that when these scores come down and they're as bad as Merryl Tisch and John King and the rest of education reform true believers want them to be, we can analyze just how accurate a gauge of student, teacher and school performance they are.

Because it is both unfair and unethical to raise test levels by two or three grade levels overnight without the needed supports and use those scores as a bludgeon against students, teachers and schools.

 

Parents know this as well as teachers, even if the education reformers in the political, education and media worlds refuse to acknowledge this.

And that's the last point I want to hit on here.

The media has hammered people who point out the problems with these tests as "whiners" who are afraid of accountability, teachers worried about having their performances exposed as lacking, parents worried that their "little darlings" (as one Daily News editorial termed children) will be exposed as not as "smart" as the parents think they are.

But this is a straw man argument.

What critics of these tests are most pointedly saying in their criticism is that these tests have been set-ups to fail students, teachers and schools.  

The tests were given to students before the curriculum was fully developed and given to teachers, so students are being tested on material they have not seen before or a level of difficulty and complexity they are not used to.

There was no way they could do well on these tests.

As one parent told the Daily News, “You might as well just put ‘failure to students’ at the top of the exam...There’s no way they’re going to pass this.”

 

Indeed.

 

And that is the whole point of these vaunted new Common Core tests - to fail the children, the teachers, the administrators and the schools and, as Rick Hess put it, "shine a harsh light on the quality of suburban schools, shocking those families and voters into action" and "scare these voters into embracing the 'reform' agenda."

 

The fix is in, the tests were rigged, and the propaganda campaign is in full swing.

 

That's why these tests need to be released by the state, if not voluntarily, then by court order.

 

There are enough high stakes attached to them that I do not see how the NYSED, the Regents, or Pearson can keep them secret.

 

Not when they start using these test scores to fire teachers and close schools.

Bloomberg Plans To Destroy Mid-Manhattan, Central Libraries

This evil little man isn't done destroying the city, selling off the commons and privatizing every thing in sight:

DON’T GUT THE 42nd STREET LIBRARY!

Join us for leafleting at the 42nd Street Library
and a rally May 8th! Click here for more info.

STOP THE CENTRAL LIBRARY PLAN

The Central Library Plan (CLP), at enormous cost to New York City and its taxpayers, would irreparably damage the 42nd Street Research Library – one of the world’s great reference libraries and a historic landmark. The CLP would demolish the library’s historic seven-story book stacks, install a circulating library in their stead, and displace 1.5 million books to central New Jersey. The new circulating library would replace the Mid-Manhattan Library (at 40th and 5th Avenue) and SIBL (Science, Industry and Business Library, at 34th and Madison), which would both be sold off.

• It will be hugely expensive, costing a minimum of $300 million (probably much more), of which $150 million will come from New York City taxpayers. There is great concern that the Library’s focus on a highly-complex construction project will absorb desperately-needed funds which might otherwise pay for renovations of branch libraries, and replenish slashed curatorial and acquisitions budgets.

• It will radically reduce the space available for the Mid-Manhattan and SIBL.

• It will threaten the 42nd Street Library’s status as one of the world’s great research libraries.

• It will threaten the architectural integrity of the landmarked 42nd Street building.

• It does not take into consideration more efficient and less destructive alternatives, such as combining SIBL and the Mid-Manhattan into a rehabilitated and expanded building on the Mid-Manhattan site.

Underlying the widespread concern is the closed process through which the Library administration has made its decisions. Despite the fact that the 42nd Street building is owned by the city and is one of our most iconic structures, the plan was formulated with minimal public notification and no public input. The $150 million that the city has earmarked for the project was awarded without oversight by the City Council and with no public hearings. If alternatives have been considered they have never been disclosed, and no cost-benefit analysis or detailed budget has ever been presented.
Famed architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, writing in the Wall Street Journal, attacked the Central LIbrary Plan as

a plan devised out of a profound ignorance of or willful disregard for not only the library’s original concept and design, but also the folly of altering its meaning and mission and compromising its historical and architectural integrity. You don’t ‘update’ a masterpiece.

New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman derided the design for the new circulating library which would replace the book stacks in the 42nd Street building as having “all the elegance and distinction of a suburban mall,” and called it an

awkward, cramped, banal pastiche of tiers facing claustrophobia-inducing windows, built around a space-wasting atrium with a curved staircase more suited to a Las Vegas hotel.

The Committee to Save the NYPL calls for a halt to the CLP until an independent agency can conduct a detailed cost analysis. This analysis should also evaluate the costs of an alternative proposal suggested by both Huxtable and Kimmelman that the 42nd Street building be left intact and attention directed instead to a renovation of the Mid-Manhattan building. As Kimmelman writes, “A new Mid-Manhattan branch should cost a fraction of gutting the stacks and could produce much better architecture.”
For an in-depth analysis of the Central Library Plan, please see The Truth About the Central Library Plan.
We are investigating all avenues of opposition to the Central Library Plan and we need your help! All donations are fully tax-deductable.

Cathie Black Emails

Bloomberg was forced to release the Cathie Black emails tonight.

Gave the emails (you can see them here) a preliminary skim. 

What I see here so far is a Bloomberg administration trying to save a floundering nomination and throwing around ideas like trying to bring "famous" women on board to sell Cathie Black to the public, to the media and to Albany.

The names of some of the women they wanted to endorse Black for chancellor included:

Marlo Thomas
Bette Midler
Gloria Steinem
Suzi Orman
Phyllis George
Anna Quindlen
Donna Hanover
Deborah Norville
Donna Karan
Whoopi Goldberg

An assorted variety of female politicians, ex-politicians and other public figures are also on the endorsement possibility list.

There's also a go around between Gayle King and Cathie Black on bringing Black's old boss, Oprah, in on the endorsement fun.

One of the points the Bloomies want talked up is that any pushback on Black is a matter of sexism, because Black is just as qualified to be chancellor as Joel Klein was, but he never received the same relentless press Black was getting.

They also spend some time trying to figure out whether they should make clear Black's complete work for and connections to Harlem Village Academies or try and hide some of them

What you get from the emails is that they are looking for ways to sell Black's nomination by hook or crook.

In the end, they did sell that nomination successfully, but Black only lasted for 95 days.

These emails really are a great example of how much effort this administration puts into public relations.

That's not a surprise, given that Bloomberg owns a media company.

If they only ran the school system as well as they created propaganda around the running of the school system (or around the nomination of a woman who had no business being chancellor of the school system), we would all be better off.

Bloomberg Cuts 2,500 Teachers And Guidance Counselors In 2014 FY Budget

Because it wouldn't be a proper Bloomberg budget season without a fight over cutting teachers and guidance counselors and closing fire houses, we have this news from the budget proposal presser today:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Thursday unveiled a revised budget for the 2014 fiscal year where he said despite a increase in revenue from the capital gains tax planned cuts will move forward.

The mayor says the $69.8 billion budget remains balanced without raising taxes.

It includes $1 billion in new revenues fueled by an increase in capital gains taxes.

However, it projects a $2.2 billion short fall for fiscal year 2015.

...

The budget proposes the city shutter 20 firehouses, reduce thousands of childcare slots and cut 2,500 teaching and guidance counselor positions through attrition over the next year.

Negotiations over the plan will now begin in the City Council.

I suspect this will be the one year where Quinn simply puts the kibbosh on this stuff early because she has to worry about the fall-out from the attrition threats and fire house closings hurting her in the Democratic primary.

The good news, this is the last budget proposal from Herr Bloomberg sans a Bloombergian political coup.

Christine Quinn Skips Mayoral Debate On Education For UES Fundraiser

Just in case you think Christine Quinn won't treat public school parents and staff with the same contempt Bloomberg and his Tweedies treat them with, take a look at this story.

Quinn's skipping a mayoral debate on education tonight that is to be moderated by Diane Ravitch so she can raise campaign funds on the Upper East Side.

This is the kind of scornful treatment the Bloomberg administration and the Bloomberg NYCDOE have given to parents and public school teachers for 12 years now.

We don't care what you think, we don't have time to listen to what you want to say, we have to meet with some hedge fundies who are our real constituency.

Again and again, we can see the kind of mayor Christine Quinn would make by the way she is running this campaign.

Don't Weep For Him, Bloomberg

Two different gun deaths - one bad in Bloomberg's estimation, one that can and should be ignored.

First the one that makes Bloomberg sad:

Alphonza Bryant III could not, in the end, escape his father’s fate. At the age of 17, his life was extinguished by a hail of bullets on April 22 as he hung out with friends on a street corner in the South Bronx, just four blocks from where his father was murdered. Police officials believe that Mr. Bryant was a victim of mistaken identity in an act of retaliation by gang members.

“It wasn’t even curfew time,” his mother, Jenaii van Doten, said in an interview Wednesday at a laundry near their home. “You would think that all the violence happens after midnight, but they fooled me this time.” 

Mr. Bryant’s life and death came into the public spotlight on Tuesday when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg singled him out as a casualty of gun violence, using the teenager to illustrate the toll that illegal guns can have on New York, and the value of the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactics. Mr. Bloomberg criticized civil rights groups, saying they expressed no outrage about Mr. Bryant’s shooting, and suggested that The New York Times had failed to cover the killing because the teenager was black.

Now the one Bloomberg ignored:

NEW YORK -- A week after police shot to death an unarmed 18-year-old in his grandmother's Bronx apartment, questions continue to swirl around the aggressive police tactics that led to the fatal confrontation.

Ramarley Graham died last Thursday after Richard Haste, 30, a New York police officer, entered his grandmother's apartment and shot Graham in the chest while he attempted to flush a bag of marijuana down the toilet. Graham was unarmed and police did not have a warrant to enter the home.

Graham's death has sparked street protests in Wakefield, a low-income neighborhood with a large African-American and Caribbean immigrant population. "They had no business kicking down the door. They went too far," said Tyrone Harris, 27. "They need to go to jail just like any other citizen."

Jeffrey Emdin, an attorney representing Graham's mother, called the police tactics unlawful. "They illegally entered the home," Emdin said. "They had no right to be inside. They had no right to use force."

Protesters linked the shooting to the NYPD's aggressive street policing program, called "stop-and-frisk," which predominantly targets low-income minority neighborhoods. In 2011, the program stopped and searched more than 500,000 New Yorkers, 85 percent of them black or Latino. The searches contributed to a record number of misdemeanor marijuana arrests last year.

"The public has every reason to question whether this shooting was the product of the NYPD marijuana arrest crusade, or whether it's the product of their hyper-aggressive stop-and-frisk program," said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. 

Gee, where is Bloomberg's press conference to state publicly how stop-and-frisk saved Ramarley Graham's life?

Oh, right - the program actually caused his death.

And where is the mayor's hand-wringing over the senseless gun violence that killed Graham?

Oh right - his "own army" killed Garaham, so everything's cool.

What happened to Alphonza Bryant III is awful, but so is what happened to Ramarley Graham.

How come nobody in the news media points this out?

How come nobody in the news media points out the disconnect between the mayor's reaction in the tragic Bryant case to the mayor's reaction in the tragic Graham case? 

So Much For State Of The Art, Cutting Edge Computerized Testing

The education reformers love to talk about the next generation of tests that are going to be state of the art and cutting edge and so much improved from the last generation of standardized tests.

But so far, all these state of the art, cutting edge next gen tests have been just a bust:

INDIANAPOLIS — School districts across several states are rescheduling high-stakes tests that judge student proficiency and even determine teachers' pay because of technical problems involving the test administrators' computer systems.

Thousands of students in Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota and Oklahoma have been kicked offline while taking tests in recent weeks, postponing the testing schools planned for months and raising concerns about whether the glitches will affect scores.

"There's been pep rallies and spirit weeks all getting ready for this. It's like showing up for the big game and then the basketball is deflated," said Jason Zook, a fifth-grade teacher at Brown Intermediate Center in South Bend, Ind.

Many frustrated students have been reduced to tears and administrators are boiling over, calling the problems "disastrous" and "unacceptable" at a time when test results count so heavily toward schools' ratings under the federal No Child Left Behind law. In places such as Indiana, where former Gov. Mitch Daniels approved changes tying teachers' merit pay to student test scores, the pressure is even greater.

"Teachers are extremely frustrated because of the high-stakes nature of this test," said Jeff Sherrill, principal at Emmons Elementary School in Mishawaka, Ind. "They know they're going to be judged on this and their schools are going to be judged on this. Certainly it's changed the outcome of the testing, because there's no way it's not going to."

Read more here: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2013/05/01/2378474/computer-glitches-derail-school.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2013/05/01/2378474/computer-glitches-derail-school.html#storylink=cpy

And just in case you think it's a case of one company's incompetence that can be remedied by bringing in another company, the problems are not related to one testing vendor:

CTB/McGraw-Hill is the contractor in Indiana and Oklahoma and administers statewide standardized tests in eight other states. Kentucky Department of Education spokeswoman Nancy Rodriguez said its vendor, ACT Inc., reported online issues in Kentucky and Alabama. American Institutes for Research, or AIR, is the contractor in Minnesota.

Kentucky Department of Education Associate Commissioner Ken Draut said the agency suspended online testing through at least Thursday after about 25 districts reported slow and dropped connections from the ACT Vantage testing system used to administer end-of-course assessments for students taking English II, Algebra II, biology and U.S. history. About 60 percent of Kentucky districts administer the tests online.

In Indiana, McGraw-Hill is in the third year of a four-year, $95 million contract, while in Oklahoma, it has a one-year, $16 million contract with an option to renew an additional four years. Minnesota's $61 million, three-year contract with AIR expires this year. Rodriguez, reached at home, said she did not know the terms of Kentucky's ACT contract.

 Here's how states are responding to the problems:

Indiana suspended testing Monday and Tuesday, the same days Oklahoma reported problems.

One Oklahoma lawmaker called for a moratorium on testing this year.

"We'll just start over next year when the testing provider has its act together," said Rep. Curtis McDaniel, D-Smithville, a longtime school administrator. "It's just not fair to these students to make them re-take tests two or three times or accept a score based on a partial test that may or may not be accurate because of technology problems."

Oklahoma State Superintendent Janet Barresi said the department is working to remedy the problem and then will determine "how to proceed with accommodations for the districts."

 ...

Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz said there's "no question" the state will have to review any data gathered in the past few days, when at least 27,000 third- through eighth-grade students were kicked offline during tests.

"After we get everybody assessed, we're going to have to look at the validity of the assessments themselves," Ritz said.

This is not the first time CTB.McGraw-Hill has had issues with its testing apparatus:

The Connecticut Department of Education fined CTB/McGraw-Hill $300,000 in 2004 for errors and delays in scoring its Mastery Test, the largest fine allowed under the state's contract.

In 2011, up to 10,000 Indiana students statewide were logged off and some were unable to log back in for up to an hour while taking the test. The state invalidated 215 scores that year because they were lower than expected.

About 9,000 Indiana students were kicked offline during the test last year.

Read more here: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2013/05/01/2378474/computer-glitches-derail-school.html#storylink=cpy

It's a mess.

The next time you hear NYSED Commissioner John King or Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch brag about the quality of NY State testing, remember two things:

First, New York has yet to move to computerized testing but will in the next few years.  You can be sure districts all over the state will experience these kinds of issues and worse - especially districts like NYC where bandwidth problems are already a challenge.

Second, New York officials are scared to reveal the contents of the tests these days, for fear that the new Common Core Pearson tests will be exposed as garbage the way the old Pearson tests were exposed last year.

The lawsuits will begin next year when teachers get VAMMED on the pencil and paper Common Core tests but are given little to no information for why they got VAMMED.

And then when NY State moves to computerized testing, you can expect even more lawsuits related to technology issues.

As Carol Burris noted over at NYC Educator's blog:

Do not worry. It is the full employment act for school attorneys. The system is so indefensible and silly, no one will get fired.

So far, that;s exactly the trajectory I see from all the vaunted Common Core reforms and changes to teacher evaluation systems.

Read more here: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2013/05/01/2378474/computer-glitches-derail-school.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2013/05/01/2378474/computer-glitches-derail-school.html#storylink=c

 

Read more here: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2013/05/01/2378474/computer-glitches-derail-school.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.tri-cityherald.com/2013/05/01/2378474/computer-glitches-derail-school.html#storylink=cpy

Christine Quinn Claims Credit For Work She Didn't Do

Christine Quinn has a pattern of taking credit for herself and minimizing the work of others:

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is taking credit for reducing the number of NYPD stop and frisks last year — a bit of campaign chest-thumping that raised eyebrows among critics of the tactic.

“Let’s be clear,” Quinn said Wednesday in response to charges from a campaign opponent who accused of her being too cozy with the Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD. “My office, myself and the City Council — we are the only ones who have actually gotten reform of stop, question and frisk.”

The mayoral candidate was taking heat from Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who trashed her as “Bloomberg light” for her relationship with the mayor and his support of the controversial stop-and-frisk police tactic.

Quinn responded that she held Council hearings on the tactic, which critics say unfairly targets minorities. She also pointed to a letter she wrote to Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly in February 2012 that urged the department to create a system to identify officers who were overusing the tactic.

The department adopted those changes a few months later, which led to a 22% drop in the number of people stopped and frisked last year.

But advocates who have been fighting the practice for more than a decade said Quinn was claiming credit for other people’s work.

“That’s a bit unrealistic,” said Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center Constitutional Rights, which has been suing to end the practice. “Whatever changes that will happen to stop and frisk are a function of 13 years of litigation and 13 years of community mobilization and not a magic wand from the City Council.”

Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito (D-Manhattan), a longtime stop-and-frisk critic, said community protests were the driving force behind changes. “I think a comment like [Quinn’s] reduces the level of engagement from the grass roots,” she said.

 Just another example of why Christine Quinn should not be mayor.

Here's An Education Reform That Really Would Improve Test Scores

An excellent piece on why social and emotional learning is important not just for school, but also for life:

Developing our children's intellect has been the primary focus of schools, yet according to Tom McSheehy, family therapist, writer, educator and former teacher at Holmes School in Oak Park, key skills that are vital for learning and thriving in life aren't being taught to the extent they need to be. Kids may be learning core academic subjects, but this limited focus is what's keeping schools out of sync with what is needed in the world.

So what's missing?

McSheehy, author of the new book, In Focus: Improving Social and Emotional Intelligence One Day at a Time, says the skills connected to social and emotional intelligence and the skills that help kids learn effectively and efficiently as well as developing resilience, reducing sickness, enhancing relationships and empowering children.

In other words, skills that help kids build mental health.

Children need to know how to manage and express their emotions, calm themselves, focus their attention, express empathy and work collaboratively. Kids also need to learn to persevere when things get difficult or challenging as well as negotiate and resolve differences. McSheehy says these skills can be taught, just like reading and math, and, if incorporated in our schools, will bring about a dramatic change in the success of our children at every level.

McSheehy's own work has helped administrators, teachers, legislators and parents understand the need to incorporate social and emotional learning into school curricula. He highlights current research findings that support this new edge of growth, findings that fully support the necessity of teaching to the entire child by bringing emotion back into the classroom.

Consider these compelling facts:

• Emotion plays a major role in every intellectual process and is a driving force in how children's brains organize themselves.
• Fear and anxiety interfere with learning, whereas safety and security support and facilitate learning.
• Students in schools with social and emotional learning programs score higher on their standardized achievement tests than students in schools without such programs by an average of 11 percentile points.
• Students who are taught social and emotional learning are better behaved, more positive and less anxious than students who aren't taught these skills.
• Social and emotional intelligence is critical to success in schools, jobs, relationships and navigating life challenges. Students who learn to identify, manage and express feelings constructively are more likely to avoid anxiety issues, depression and other mental-health disorders.
• 67% of the skills that corporations look for in new employees are related to social and emotional intelligence. It is no longer enough to just teach the traditional core subjects.
• Children who by the age of 10 can delay gratification, control impulses and modulate emotional expression become healthier, wealthier and more responsible adults. (Based on the research of Terrie Moffit of Duke University and a team of researchers who followed a group of 1,000 children for 32 years.)

Why don't the so-called education reformers promote social and emotional learning as part of their reform program?

Yeah, I've seen the gates Foundation pay SEL some lip service, but their primary focus is on test scores, cameras in the classroom and other sticks and stones that can be used against teachers.

But they never seem to push the reforms that actually are proven to work - like reduction in class sizes or social and emotional learning curricula.

The cynic in me says it's because they're less concerned with helping children learn and more concerned with control of children, teachers and schools.

Kevin Huffman: Common Core "Not A Curriculum"

Maybe this is just semantics, but...

Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman told reporters earlier Tuesday that one misconception is that common core is a curriculum, “and it’s not.”“The common core is a set of standards that says your child should know ‘X’ at the end of the year,” he said. “The curriculum is still up to local schools and local districts, the way it always has been.”

While it's nice to say that "the curriculum is still up to local schools and local districts, the way it always has been," the reality is that the same Common Core "assessments" will be given in many different states, thus making what local schools and local districts can emphasize much less, uh, local.

The point is, Mr Ex-Michelle Rhee is playing a bait and switch game here, like many reformers, to fool people into thinking the Common Core is not something developed, funded and promoted by a very small reform cadre far from the local school districts and shoved down the throats of the states while most people weren't paying attention.

Now that people are waking up to the reality of the Common Core - and the national tests that will go along with them - they're not liking what they're seeing and they want some questions answered.

But as is often the case with the reform movement, Huffman just shucks and jives concerns of others and lies about the Common Core not taking away curriculum decisions from local schools and local districts.

Not a surprise from a guy who wants to take away the power to accept or reject charter school proposals from the local districts and give it to himself and his fellow central bureaucrats.

NYCDOE Official Andrew Kirtzman: Teachers Are "Special Interests"

Former NY 1 reporter Andrew Kirtzman, now a "senior advisor to the chancellor" at the NYCDOE, had this response to Randi Weingarten's call for a moratorium on the high stakes tied to the new Common Core tests:

While King and Tisch took pains not to criticize Weingarten, Andrew Kirtzman, senior advisor to the chancellor, came out swinging.

“This is about a special interest that doesn’t want this to happen because of fear for their jobs,” he said, noting that this is a mayoral election year. “This is about the union protecting itself. The UFT cannot wait to get control of the city schools again in the next administration and New Yorkers should be very, very worried about it.”

Although the Department of Education only chose a new curriculum for teachers two months ago, Kirtzman said city teachers have been using Common Core materials all year and that the D.O.E. is not “oblivious” to the stress that they and their pupils experience. But, he said, “we are holding kids to a higher standard so that they can do better in college and their careers. This isn’t a game. This isn’t about politics. This is about improving the future of the children of the public schools.”

Andrew, teachers know "this isn't a game."

We're the people who spend seven hours a day with these children, every day, for 186 days a year, watching the effects the battery of high stakes testing, formative and summative assessments and the rest of the education reforms are having on them.

We're the ones who see the consequences of an education system that forces 20% budget cuts on individual schools even as it ratchets up the testing mandates so that principals have been forced to cut all kinds of programs and services that these children need - especially in the areas of social and emotional learning and support.

We're the ones who see how guidance counselors no longer have time to counsel because they're so busy trying to keep track of the latest testing data for the hundreds of students in their case loads and we're the ones who try and pick up the slack despite the increase in our own mandated duties.

We're the ones who see the increase in self-harm, eating disorders, depression, suicidal feelings and other problems students are experiencing as they try and deal with all the stresses in their lives - from their home lives to the streets to their schools.

Clearly the DOE is oblivious to the "stresses" students are experiencing these days or they wouldn't be cutting the budgets for the programs and services that would help children with these problems.

We're with these children every day and we know what they need - and it surely isn't a battery of high stakes tests on a curriculum they haven't yet been taught that will be used to make decisions on their grade promotion, their teachers' evaluations and their schools' very existence.

As for your "special interests jibe", if you want to see what a "special interest" looks like, take a look at all the washed up reporters and journalists brought onto the Bloomberg payroll these days to churn out the pro-Bloomberg propaganda at Bloomberg Views, Bloomberg Businessweek, Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg's philanthropic endeavors.

There are some special interests for you.

Katrina Vanden Heuvel: Standardized Tests Are High Stakes Weapons

A very good piece in the Kaplan Test Prep/Washington Post:

Let’s face it – nobody likes taking tests. Exams, by nature, elicit a certain amount of anxiety. Tension. Maybe even fear.

But New York’s high-stakes standardized tests, given to all public school students, have rattled way more than a few nerves. Enough students have actually thrown up on their tests that schools are reportedly circulating procedures on how to handle vomit-covered tests.

One Long Island superintendent told the Wall Street Journal that some kids did, indeed, get sick on their tests. One student went to the bathroom and wouldn’t come out. Many dissolved into tears. Others simply refused to take the test.

It’s no wonder that parents, educators and even students are spearheading a small but growing revolution to opt out of standardized tests. From Seattle to Pennsylvania, more and more students across the country are boycotting tests that many say are increasing stress, narrowing curriculum and, at worst, leading to the kind of cheating exposed in the recent Atlanta Public Schools scandal.
 
The opt-out movement is a symptom of a broader problem. At their best, assessments should track whether students have learned the material they’ve been taught — and give students the chance to show off what they know. Test results should provide a clear view of where students are struggling so that teachers can help them improve.

But in today’s high-stakes climate, families have come to dread the endless parade of bubble sheets that now dominate their kids’ lives. Many feel that the emphasis on standardized tests has focused instruction on how to answer multiple-choice questions instead of how to reason and think critically in an open-ended world.

Moreover, it seems that the school accountability movement has put the cart before the horse. In the past couple of years, 45 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts. The standards focus on the knowledge, critical thinking and deeper reasoning skills that students need to thrive in today’s economy and to become lifelong learners.

But in New York, for example, officials have already rolled out tougher tests tied to these new standards. They did this even though teachers haven’t yet been trained in how to teach the standards, nor have they all been given the curriculum and supports to do so.

What’s happening in New York is playing out across the country. The Los Angeles Times recently quoted a teacher who tweeted that within a few years, “we start testing on standards we’re not teaching with curriculum we don’t have on computers that don’t exist.”

Accountability is, of course, important. But how can students be tested on material they haven’t learned?

Even Bill Gates, whose foundation has given millions of dollars to school districts to implement evaluation systems that use student test scores to reward and punish teachers, has evolved in his thinking. As he recently wrote, putting such a disproportionate emphasis on test scores doesn’t make sense for teachers or students. “If we aren’t careful to build a system that provides feedback and that teachers trust,” Gates wrote, “this opportunity to dramatically improve the U.S. education system will be wasted.” Gates is engaging with a former adversary, the American Federation of Teachers, to promote a less test-driven approach to teacher evaluation.

The opportunity is one we cannot afford to waste. Too many students — most of them poor and minority — are being denied an education that will prepare them to succeed in life. This is an unconscionable moral failure. But the well-intentioned efforts to address the problem consistently miss the mark when it comes to implementation.

In no other field is this acceptable. We would never tell a physician to simply try out a new medical technique or technology without any training. Telling teachers to “just do it” is not a strategy. We should instead invest in helping them succeed. That means working with them to develop the curriculum they need to teach the standards and providing them with ongoing support, professional development and feedback so that they can continually improve.

It also means acknowledging that the common core standards are one way to level the playing field for low-income students — but they’re not a silver bullet. We must address the socioeconomic barriers and systemic poverty that leave so many young people behind.

In short, to lead with testing is an abomination. That’s why American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is calling today for a moratorium on the high-stakes part of high-stakes testing. In other words, she argues, we should first focus on properly implementing the common core standards before holding students and teachers hostage to them.

The high-stakes regime has come at a high price. It’s time to pay attention to the parents who are standing up for their kids by walking out of testing centers. And it’s time to invest our efforts and resources into what really matters – teachers teaching and students learning. 

There was much pushback from the high stakes standardized test crowd this morning.

But Vanden Heuvel gets this right:

In no other profession would they put the accountability measures in place before the skills and tools necessary to succeed were widely available.

Except in teaching, of course.

What do you mean they haven't developed the curriculum for the new standards and you had to try and cobble it together on your own on the Internets so that your students would be ready for it when it showed up on the new Common Core tests?

So what?

Clearly you just don't want to be held accountable for performance!

That's the message from the Common Core proponents in power in Albany and Tweed and in the media as well.

Parents Fight The InBloom Inc. Plan

These were fighting words:

"I know that you're just a messenger, so I want to make sure you deliver this message properly to your supervisors," parent and City Council candidate Jelani Mashariki told the Department of Education's deputy chief academic officer, Adina Lopatin, at a Borough Hall town hall packed with families Monday night.

"You're not going to give out my child's information to a third-party corporation to do whatever it is they want to do," Makarishi continued over whistles and applause from the audience. "The people are not going to have it and we are going to fight back."

Several other audience members had similar things to say regarding inBloom Inc., the controversial data-sharing initiative that parents at Monday night's volatile forum believe violates the privacy and security of their children. The $100 million initiative, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and federal grants, and built by News Corp's Wireless Generation, is responsible for designing something called an Education Data Portal in order to provide data tools to teachers and families.


As Lopatin later clarified, inBloom's EDP uses student data--including student demographics, parent contact information, dates of absence, suspensions, and state test scores--through an Amazon cloud-based service. That information is then shared with school-contracted vendors. The DOE maintains that this practice does not violate the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, and that vendors will not be able to even access the data without the school's permission, but there's also no provision for students and families to opt out.

"We live in 2013. Was anyone around last week when the AP was Twitter-hacked?" asked Natasha Capers, a parent and representative from the Alliance for a Quality Education. "It shut down New York City's Wall Street. We can only imagine what would happen when someone wants this information and knows how to utilize it properly."

InBloom Inc. representatives were invited to the forum, but declined the invitation.

Already you can see how dismissive of parents's concerns they are.

The powers that be in Albany - Silver, Tisch, King, Cuomo - do not seem overly concerned about parents concerns either.

There are two bills - one in the Assembly and one in the Senate - that prohibit "the release of personally identifiable student information where parental consent is not provided."

We'll see how far those bills go.

I cannot think of time in my nearly half century of life when politicians and their bureaucratic functionaries are less responsive to parents and their constituencies over these kinds of issues in education than they are now.

A parent at the forum put the whole mess in crystal form:

"We want to protect the privacy of our children," Lydia Bellahcene, a mother of five children in the public school system, told last night's town hall in one of the event's most impassioned speeches. "It is our God-given right. And I'm not signing that away because I put my daughter in public education."

Indeed.

If Only Bankers Were Treated Like Teachers...

From NBC News, an administrator is arrested for cheating on Regents exams:

A department head at a New York high school has been accused of changing two students' answers on state tests to give them a passing grade.

The Westchester County district attorney says 54-year-old Allison Risoli of Peekskill was arraigned Monday on false-document charges.

A call to Risoli's attorney was not immediately returned.

The district attorney said Risoli altered answer sheets for January exams in history and geography several days after the tests were taken at Peekskill High.

Meanwhile in the HSBC money laundering case:

BILL MOYERS: You’re working on a story right now that’ll come out in a couple of weeks on the HSBC settlement. That’s the, tell me about that, why it interests you.

MATT TAIBBI: Well, the HSBC settlement was a really shocking kind of new low in the history of the too big to fail issue. HSBC was a serial offender on the money laundering score. They had been twice given formal cease and desist orders by the government. One dating back as far as 2003, another one in 2010 for inadequately policing the accounts in their system. They laundered over $800 million for cartels in Colombia.

BILL MOYERS: Drug cartels?

MATT TAIBBI: Drug cartels in Colombia and Mexico. They laundered money for terrorist connected banks in the Middle East. Russian gangsters. Literally, you know, I talked to one prosecutor who’s, like, “They broke basically every law in the book and they did business with every kind of criminal you can possibly imagine. And they got a complete and total walk.” I mean, they had to pay a fine.

BILL MOYERS: $1.9 billion, a lot of money.

MATT TAIBBI: It’s a lot of money. But it’s five weeks of revenue for the bank, to put that in perspective. And no individual had to suffer any consequences at all. There were no criminal charges no individual fines, which was incredible. Incredible.

Incredible indeed.

If only these bankers who laundered the drug money had changed some answers on a Regents exam - then they'd face some accountability.

Cyprus Parliament Narrowly Votes To Accept Bailout

Amid all the stuff going on closer to home, this mess in Cyprus still bears watching:

Cyprus moved a step closer on Tuesday to receiving much-needed aid when its parliament narrowly endorsed a bailout deal drafted amid unprecedented acrimony and calls for the island to exit the eurozone.

In a nail-biting ballot, following hours of heated debate, Nicosia's 56-member House approved the €10bn rescue package with a majority of two votes. Among officials who had warned of a "chaotic default" the result was met with visible relief.

...

Highlighting the furore that the agreement has unleashed, however, the deal was wholeheartedly rejected by the island's anti-austerity opposition parties, Akel and Edek. Several lawmakers predicted that its impact on a country that until recently was better known for its robust offshore financial services, would be "far worse" than the devastating invasion it suffered at the hands of an invading Turkish army in 1974.

With the EU-IMF sponsored rescue programme forcing the government to dismantle the banking sector – and forcing depositors, for the first time, to foot the cost of recapitalising banks exposed to debt-stricken Greece – many MPs have virulently denounced the package as containing the seeds of the country's economic destruction.

Indicative of the concerns that the measure might not be passed, the beleaguered president of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, issued a last-minute appeal calling on politicians to think of the island's "greater good".

With bankruptcy looming, the governing coalition warned of "chaotic scenes", with public sector salaries and pensions going unpaid if the programme was voted down.

"Our country is passing through a critical time that calls for a sense of national responsibility and conduct in a manner which is consistent with the greater good," said Anastasiades, a British-trained barrister who assumed power barely two months ago.

In a replay of the scenes that have haunted Greece, protesters demonstrated outside parliament as the vote took place. Many hurled abuse at politicians now widely blamed for the island's economic decline. The Cypriot economy, once one of the most vibrant in the EU, is set to contract by 13% over the next year.

The prospect of the island being pushed into prolonged recession has given way to mounting speculation that perhaps it would be better if it left the eurozone altogether. In the runup to the vote, Akel ratcheted up the pressure by calling for a referendum on the issue.

"We know leaving the euro is an equally painful option, but reinstating a national currency could offer prospects for growth in the future," the party's general secretary, Andros Kyprianou, said.
Increasingly, the island's business elite has embraced the idea that the country would fare better if it dumped the single currency and returned to the Cyprus pound.

Calls for the island to leave the bloc have mounted as the knowledge has also sunk in that the price of international rescue funds will now be €13bn in budget cuts.

Maybe Randi Weingarten can issue a meaningless and useless call for the end to austerity measures?

Note To Randi Weingarten On Her Moratorium Call

You can call for a moratorium on teacher evaluations and school closures tied to Common Core tests all you want.

David Coleman and Merryl Tisch can sit in the audience and hear your entirely reasoned argument.

They're not going to put a moratorium on anything here in NY State.

Both the governor and the NYSED Commissioner want every school district in the state to use the APPR evaluation system to fire teachers next year.

They told us that last week when they warned Buffalo about a memorandum of understanding between the district and the union that no teachers would be fired using APPR the first year because it is untested and unpiloted.

Buffalo has since rescinded that agreement under threat of losing RttT and Title 1 money.

And Merryl Tisch and John King both said after your speech that there will be no moratorium in NY State from APPR.

They say they've taken all potential problems into account, so teachers in NY State will be fired using the new teacher evaluation system based upon Common Core tests.

Thanks for the free coffee and donuts at the speech though, Randi.

They were swell.

And I know you just loved getting all the attention you got today for this speech, you attention hound you.

But nothing will happen as a result of this speech.

The powers that be in NY State have told us so already.

The firings based on Common Core commence next year.