Susan Lerner: De Blasio Just Followed In Cuomo's Campaign Fundraising Footsteps

Ever since somebody leaked a "report" written by a Cuomo hack at the Board of Elections alleging Mayor Bill de Blasio and people close to him circumvented campaign finance law in trying to win the state Senate for Democrats in 2014, de Blasio has been getting hammered in the press as the second coming of Boss Tweed.

Cuomo is thought to be behind the writing of the damning "report" that was sent to the Manhattan D.A. and the U.S. Attorney for criminal referral and the leaking of it to the press to do maximum damage to his "friend" de Blasio, whom he wants to see knocked off next year when the mayor's up for re-election.

One of the most frustrating parts of the coverage of the de Blasio campaign finance mess is that both Michael Bloomberg and Andrew Cuomo have acted in similar ways yet never took the heat de Blasio's getting over the fundraising.

I wrote a little about Michael Bloomberg and his shenanigans with the Independence Party here so you can see how Bloomberg played fast and loose with campaign finance, bribed individual members of the Independence Party for three election cycles and used the party to launder money to be used for illicit purposes during the 2009 election cycle.

Bloomberg himself was exonerated of any misdeeds by Manhattan D.A. Vance but alas, the operative who was helping Bloomberg to launder the money (and instead stole it) was charged and convicted of a crime.

Somehow in all the de Blasio news, the Bloomberg/Independence Party shenanigans never got mentioned.

Gee, imagine that.

Bloomberg was not the only New York political figure to play fast and loose with the law - Andrew Cuomo has done so as well.

Susan Lerner of Common Cause took to the NY Daily News to set the record on Cuomo's own campaign fundraising games that look an awful lot like Bill de Blasio's:

Much of the scrutiny trained on de Blasio feels selective — because the aggressive fundraising tactics of other politicians, particularly Gov. Cuomo, paralleled and in many ways paved the way for what the mayor would go on to do.

First, let's review the facts:

In 2011, the governor set up an entity called the Committee to Save New York, a tax-exempt, 501(c)4 non-profit group that could raise unlimited amounts of money without disclosing its donors. Cuomo and his allies deliberately created the committee in such a way as to sidestep disclosure requirements.

Before closing in the spring of 2013, the committee would go on to raise $17 million and spend in excess of $10 million in furtherance of the governor's agenda, mostly on advertising. At the time Common Cause New York, the group I lead, was highly critical of the private, "independent" political advocacy organization, mainly because of the potential for conflict that such secrecy breeds.

Some donors voluntarily disclosed their involvement — and just about all of them, gambling and real estate interests in particular, had business before the state, and millions upon millions of dollars at stake in the decisions Cuomo made.

Flash forward. The year after Cuomo's Committee to Save New York shut its doors, de Blasio launched a group clearly inspired by it — the Campaign for One New York.

Same idea, same problem: Private interests closely tied to an elected official funding what was essentially a shadow campaign operation, and millions of dollars from businesses, unions and others flowing in, in excess of the limits we impose on direct campaign giving. (One important way in which de Blasio's campaign was less nefarious than Cuomo's committee: the names of donors were disclosed, allowing he press and the public to dig into potential conflicts.)

After much scrutiny, and a formal complaint from Common Cause New York, the mayor finally shut the campaign down this March.

Lerner's not defending de Blasio's campaign fundraising games, just pointing out that they're very similar to Cuomo's.

The governor's office received a subpoena in the Buffalo Billion Project probe from U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara on Friday, so Cuomo's starting to get some heat over corruption, but there's still precious little mention that if de Blasio's dirty for his Campaign for One New York, then Cuomo's dirty for his Committee To Save New York.

Thankfully Lerner is setting the record straight in the Daily News today.

Read the whole piece.

Lerner shows just how corrupt the whole system is in New York and how everybody - everybody - takes advantage of it.

Michael Bloomberg Said To Be Considering Run For The White House

Run, Mike, run!

Word from those that know: Mike Bloomberg now seriously considering Independent run.

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) September 26, 2015

A Roger Simon reply to the Bremmer tweet puts this into perspective:

.@ianbremmer Possible, but In the past, "those that know" invariably turn out to be on Bloomberg's payroll.

— Roger Simon (@politicoroger) September 26, 2015

You got that right, Roger.

My new favorite political analyst, the very astute 102 year old Richard M. Nixon, gives us the last word on the Bloomberg trial balloon:

I want this to happen so he's laughed off the goddamn stage. https://t.co/IH0RRzpwRn

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) September 26, 2015

Me too, Mr. President.

Me too.

And I think he'll be quite successful if he runs.

Isn't the country desperately longing for a New York billionaire who wants to take away their guns, Big Gulps and styrofoam?

De Blasio Appeared To Be Only Politician To Stay To The End Of Today's 9/11 Ceremony

From WNBC News:

Perhaps it was in the spirit of Sept. 11 -- or maybe they were just stuck together in the politicos’ pen -- but on Friday morning, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo spoke face to face for the first time in months after a widely publicized rift.

...

Subsequent video images of the ceremony show Cuomo and de Blasio standing in separate areas of the politician area, attended by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former mayors Michael Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani.

...

Most of the politicians left the ceremony early, after the fourth set of bells and about 90 minutes before the reading of the names concluded. De Blasio appeared to be the only politician who stayed until the ceremony ended.

Apparently Cuomo, Christie, Bloomberg and Saint Rudy of 9/11 are too important to stay all the way through the reading of the names of the dead from the 9/11 attacks. 

Happy Labor Day: Bloomberg Cutting 3.3% Of Its Newsroom Employees

When Mayor Bloomberg was in charge of the NYCDOE, New York City teachers could look forward to threats of layoffs every budget season.

Mayor Mikey has taken his fondness for layoff private in his retirement:

While a big round of layoffs is expected to hit this week, the number of pink slips handed out will likely be lower than previously expected.

The financial news and data giant will cut 80 people, or about 3.3 percent of its 2,400 newsroom employees, as early as Tuesday, according to a source familiar with the plans.
The Post first reported Aug. 19 that Bloomberg was gearing up to cut as many as 100 employees by Labor Day — but that number has been whittled down, sources said.

...


Layoffs are rare — but not unprecedented — at a company that has long stressed loyalty above all else. In 2013, Bloomberg trimmed 50 journalists who wrote about arts and sports, along with much of its projects and investigations team.

There are a lot of complaints that de Blasio hasn't changed much about the Bloomberg ED policies and DOE agenda, but one thing he has changed:

We haven't had the annual "10,000 teachers are slated to be laid off" news when he announces his budget the way we did under Bloomberg.

The NY Post Gins Up The Great Teacher Scandal Of 2015

The following is a guest post by Harris Lirtzman, former Director of Risk Management for the New York City Retirement Systems in the NYC Comptroller's Office from 1996-2002 and former Deputy State Comptroller for Administration from 2003-2007.

The NY Post is having a case of the vapors bad by even Postian standards (here, here and here). Chalkbeat is in a tizzy. The only reason that the Daily News isn’t apoplectic is that the Post “owns” the story about the young woman who claims to have earned a high school degree without having done anything to “deserve” it. Carmen Farina must be summarily thrown to the wolves or, better yet, into the nearest volcano, for presiding over the scandalous practices in her very own schools that led teachers and administrators to begin “cheating” and “failing” their students. Thanks to the Post we even know the very minute when all this nefarious stuff began: 12:00:01 a.m., January 1, 2014—the millisecond after a Mr. William de Blasio became mayor of New York City and took control of the City’s school system.

We all have been told that education reformistas don’t do anything unless it is “data driven” and informed by “evidence-based practice.” Sadly, the media outlets that reformistas use to make their case to the public about the failures of public education, the “monopoly power” of teachers unions and the awfulness of bad, vampire teachers (“bad” because they belong to unions and “vampires” because they get health care and pensions) prefer to panic the public by telling stories using the old propaganda technique of the “Big Lie.” The “Big Lie” is something so astoundingly audacious that people believe it when they would dismiss a smaller lie as foolishness. We teachers, trained to value “facts” and “critical thinking,” try to refute reformista propaganda with evidence and reason and are surprised when the “Big Lie” sweeps away everything that stands before it. Our best bloggers are doing what they can but reformista propaganda is well-funded and tenacious. Public school teachers need to find an effective way to tell a counter-narrative that resonates with the public but which is true to our professional and personal values.

We all have “stories” to tell and it is only by weaving them together persuasively into a counter-narrative that we have any hope of countering the flood of “Big Lie” propaganda that washes over us each day. Here is my “story,” simply one of thousands that we can frame fully and quickly if we are going to defend public education and protect our profession.

I was a special education teacher in a high school in the Bronx from 2009-2012. During my tenure "conversation" with my principal in December 2011, which was an irregular one to say he least, I expected to be denied tenure because I had been raising serious questions within my school about widespread violations of student IEPs. I’m certain that my advocacy on behalf of my students was what precipitated the “tenure conversation” five months before anyone else in my school had the “conversation” that year but here’s what I was actually told:

Principal Grismaldy Laboy: "Mr. Lirtzman, your passing rates are low and are not consistent with the memo that I sent around to teachers last year that our school would have a 70% pass rate for each class."

Untenured Teacher Harris Lirtzman: "I have only failed two students for academic reasons in the last year. I have failed students who never attended my class. If a student came to class, made any reasonable effort to do the work and turned in anything that indicated some grasp of the basic elements of algebra, the student got at least a 65. Any student I failed was for attendance reasons."

Principal Laboy: "I don't, and the DOE doesn't, distinguish between absentee and academic failures."

Untenured Teacher Harris Lirtzman: "You are aware that I have a first period integrated algebra class. Several students never attended my class after the first week or appeared erratically during the term. They were "Long Term Absent." I worked closely with the attendance teacher here to get the kids to school on time. What else should I have done? Stand in front of their homes at 6:00 every morning and kidnap them?”

Principal Laboy: "Mr. Lirtzman, if you'd been able to make your classes more engaging they would have come."

Of course, conversations like this have been going on all around the City for the last ten years. My chapter leader sent the “grade quota” memo the principal distributed to central UFT and the district
superintendent as evidence for teacher coercion by administration to pass LTA students and, well, just about any student. Nothing. Not a surprise.

Now I can think of many reasons why Carmen Farina should resign—primarily her abject failure to sweep Tweed clean of the nest of reformistas filling up every corner of the place. But because of her willingness to allow some teachers in some cases to use multiple measures to evaluate their students? Because administrators began to press teachers to pass students without regard to attendance or academic performance only eighteen months ago? I think not.

In a conversation I had this morning with Geoff Decker, the reporter at Chalkbeat writing the stories about Farina and the “cheating scandal,” he asked me whether I thought Farina was “lowering the stakes” in the schools. I tried to explain to him that Farina hasn’t lowered the stakes in City schools because she can't lower the stakes in City schools even if she wanted to: the State sets teacher and principal evaluation standards tied to student test scores and the Renewal and other schools on the State "struggling" school list all use graduation rates, credit accumulation and other accountability measures to assess performance.

The high stakes connected with reformista accountability—receivership, teacher reapplication to struggling schools and the specter of being dumped into the ATR, administrators with feudal power over professional staff—have resulted in jumped up graduation rates and student test scores for the last decade and forced credit-recovery miracles and minimum passing rates stipulated in contractually illegal quotas onto reluctant teachers since Mayor Bloomberg obtained control over the Department of Education.

When reformistas put teachers’ careers on the line but don't hold administrators accountable for the incentive structures they impose inside their own schools the result is what the Post thinks it “discovered” this week. Tweed spent ten years trying to convince the State that "everything's OK here" because Mayor Bloomberg needed to validate mayoral control. Tweed spent the last eighteen months trying to convince Governor Cuomo and the State Senate that “everything’s OK here” because Mayor de Blasio needed to keep them from taking away mayor control entirely.

At least Chancellor Farina has set up a “task force” to investigate the nonsense that passes for accountability in our schools—though Farina might have written one more “Chancellor’s Regulation” giving Richard Condon and his crew of investigators at OSI even more authority for all the good a task force will do. No one demanded a "task force" at any time during the twelve years that Michael Bloomberg controlled the schools because it served no reformista purpose to do so. My friend, James Eterno, has been calling for a "truth commission" which would expose the institutional corruption and fraud that has infested reformista accountability measures in the City since 2002. Don’t expect to have the “facts” about the Bloomberg administration’s management of the schools revealed any more honestly than the “facts” are being told now about the de Blasio administration’s management of the schools.

Reformista media will continue to tell the “Big Lie” in all its forms to the public. We teachers will try to refute the “Big Lie” with facts and counter-arguments. The audacity and power of the “Big Lie” is a ferocious thing to behold. We must tell ourselves and the public the truth and we must tell the public our stories.

But we always need to understand that our reformista adversaries do and say the things they want to do and say because they can—evidence, facts, truth, fairness and data be damned. Mayoral control of the schools was blissfully wonderful for the NY Post for twelve years. Mayoral control of the schools became a satanic plot that allowed New York City teachers to stop educating their students on January 1, 2014. It is useful for our adversaries to make it so.

The “Big Lie” is powerful and reformistas will continue to use the “Big Lie” against us until we teachers can create a story—a deep and coherent counter-narrative—that the public is willing and able to hear. I don’t yet know how we do that but I do know that if we don’t do it quickly we will become spectators spouting “facts” that no one wants to hear while our schools and our profession are swept away by the “Big Lie” before our very eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's exactly right.

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

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

Grade Fixing, Cheating Took Place Under Bloomberg Too

I'm not out to defend the grade fixing at Bryant High School, but I am pointing out the double standards with which the NY Post (the newspaper that reported the sandal) and Albany politicians treat Mayor de Blasio compared to Mayor Bloomberg when it comes to the allegations.

Today the Post reports that two Assembly members - Simcha Felder and Ed Ra - say the grade fixing at Bryant will be the death knell for de Blasio's control of NYC schools:

State Sen. Simcha Felder (D-Brooklyn), who leads a committee with oversight of city schools, has already said de Blasio won’t get an extension without appearing before his panel for a grilling in Albany.

Felder didn’t return requests for comment Monday following Mejia’s explosive exposé and her teacher’s admission she felt pressured to pass her.

But Assemblyman Edward Ra (R-Nassau County) wasn’t shy with his condemnation of de Blasio.

“This is the type of thing the Legislature is going to get into when we get into the next session and next June when mayoral control comes up for renewal,” he said.

Ra added the scandal “is likely to come up even before mayoral control, as we go through the budget” and de Blasio and Fariña appear in Albany to lobby for state funding.

“It’s a clear question that’s going to be asked: What’s going on in the system, from the chancellor on up to the Mayor’s Office?” Ra said, calling Mejia’s diploma “a symptom of a lot of what’s going on in education the last few years.”

Since Ra is the one quoted in the article, let me ask him, where was he during the Bloomberg Years for these grade fixing scandals?

Take this one at Lehman in 2009:

Teachers are accusing a Bronx high school principal hired with a $25,000 bonus to improve the school’s academics of instead transforming the school into a “diploma mill.”

Transcripts given to GothamSchools by current and former teachers show that in the last year, dozens of students at Herbert Lehman High School have been given credit for courses they failed or never took.

In some instances, a student failed a class, passed the Regents exam by a slim margin, and then had his failing grade overturned. In others, students were given two credits for a class they passed once, or for classes that never appeared on their schedules.

Changing students’ grades is commonplace in the city’s schools and is often done by principals and teachers for legitimate reasons. In some cases, students are given credit recovery, meaning they complete a project, make up work, or re-take part of a class in order to get a passing grade. Other times, students who are on the cusp of passing a class can receive a boost from a Regents exam they passed by a substantial margin.

But teachers said that at Lehman, students are getting credit without doing any work. Dozens of students have had their failing grades overturned without their teachers’ knowledge.

Or this one from 2010:

A Queens high-school principal is under investigation for allegedly granting students more than 1,000 extra credits for phantom classes — and then deleting all records of his actions.

The city Department of Education called for the probe a day after The Post reported that Jamaica HS Principal Walter Acham gave foreign students up to 10 extra credits each for classes purportedly taken in their native countries.

His motive? To improve promotion and graduation rates, said staffers, adding that the credits were given “to every kid who had a foreign last name.”

The DOE at first denied any wrongdoing but “took a closer look at the school’s data” after The Post’s report, said a spokesman.

It found that the school had recently erased some 1,100 credits to about 150 students for 606 “foreign transfer courses.”

Jamaica HS’s progress-report score then fell from 46.4 to 45 — which equals a “D.”

Staffers said Acham’s credit scheme was conducted with assistant principal Denyse Prendergast, a DOE liaison assigned to assist the struggling school, which serves a large number of students learning English.

Some experts blame such shenanigans on DOE pressure to boost data. Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters said, “I’m sure it’s happening throughout the city, but teachers are too scared to speak out because they don’t want to see their schools closed down.”

Or this one from 2011:

Four city high schools have been under investigation since as far back as January 2010 for alleged Regents tampering or scoring inflation that could have fraudulently boosted their graduation rates, The Post has learned.

At least one of the schools being eyed, Bronx Expeditionary Learning HS, was flagged by a state Education Department review that found staffers had awarded too many points for students’ answers to open-ended questions in the August 2010 integrated-algebra test.

Probes of the other schools — the American Sign Language and English Secondary School in Manhattan, Science Skills Center HS in Brooklyn and Lehman HS in The Bronx — were alluded to in a follow-up audit of Regents scoring practices that was released this week by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

The initial audit had found that many schools “tended to award full credit even when answers were vague, incomplete, inaccurate or insufficiently detailed, and as a result, their scores tended to be higher than the scores awarded” by a team of independent reviewers.

...

The allegations of Regents misdeeds at Lehman HS — which sources said include charges that scores on the January 2009 living-environment, Earth-science, English and chemistry exams were changed after staffers had graded them — are part of a second long-running cheating probe at the embattled Bronx school. 

Or the "credit recovery" practices under Bloomberg/Klein from 2008:

Dennis Bunyan showed up for his first-semester senior English class at Wadleigh Secondary School in Harlem so rarely that, as he put it, “I basically didn’t attend.”

But despite his sustained absence, Mr. Bunyan got the credit he needed to graduate last June by completing just three essay assignments, which he said took about 10 hours.

“I’m grateful for it, but it also just seems kind of, you know, outrageous,” Mr. Bunyan said. “There’s no way three essays can possibly cover a semester of work.”

Mr. Bunyan was able to graduate through what is known as credit recovery — letting those who lack credits make them up by means other than retaking a class or attending traditional summer school.

Although his principal said the makeup assignments were as rigorous as regular course work, Mr. Bunyan’s English teacher, Charan Morris, was so troubled that she boycotted the graduation ceremony, writing in an e-mail message to students that she believed some were “being pushed through the system regardless of whether they have done the work to earn their diploma.”

Throughout the city, an ad hoc system of helping students like Mr. Bunyan over the hump is taking root in public high schools, sometimes over the protests of teachers, who call credit recovery programs a poor substitute for classroom learning and say they ultimately devalue the diploma. In interviews, teachers or principals at more than a dozen schools said the programs ranged from five-day crunch sessions over school breaks, to interactive computer programs culminating in an online test, to independent study packets — and varied in quality.

Top officials with the city’s Education Department say good principals have always found creative ways to help struggling students make up missed work, describing such efforts as a lifeline for students who might otherwise never earn their diplomas. And across the country, school systems confronting abysmal graduation rates are turning to online credit recovery courses, which roughly a third of states have either developed or endorsed in recent years, according to the National Dropout Prevention Center at Clemson University.

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, in a statement, called credit recovery “a legitimate and important strategy for working with high school students.” He said there was “no indication” that the practice “has been abused more in recent years.”

“If credit recovery is not conducted properly, just as with any other required course, we will take appropriate action,” he added. “We do students no favors by giving them credit they haven’t earned.”

But city officials acknowledged that credit recovery programs are neither centrally monitored nor tracked. 

Ah yes - no chance that "credit recovery" will be abused when the DOE wasn't monitoring or tracking the programs, is there?

I don't recall the Assembly calling Bloomberg up to Albany to explain the cheating allegations in the system under his control?

I also don't recall Bloomberg being called up to Albany to defend unmonitored, untracked "credit recovery" programs in city schools that essentially gave students semester credits for watching movies and reading comic books.

Did I miss that performance or did it not happen?

Is de Blasio getting targeted because he's, well, de Blasio, and Bloomberg got the kid glove treatment because he's, well, a billionaire who gave a lot of money to Albany politicians?

This grade fixing scandal is another example of the NY Post going hard and heavy at de Blasio, looking to damage him and take him out from re-election.

They've been doing it with high profile crime stories (claiming there is a "crime wave" in Central Park when there is nothing of the sort) and they're doing it with the grade tampering story.

Cheating took place under Bloomberg too but somehow the newspapers and Albany politicians didn't decide it was Bloomberg's fault, unlike now, with de Blasio.

That's not to excuse the cheating - just to point out the double standard with which the media and politicians treated had when the cheating took place under Bloomberg.

Imagine This Happened Under De Blasio Instead Of Bloomberg

I'm still on a rant over the Post coverage of the "skyrocketing crime" in NYC because it's politically motivated and jive.

As I pointed out earlier today, horrific crime took place during Mayor Mike's term in Bloombergville, but it never got connected to the larger narrative of "NYC Unraveling" that the Post and others connect these stories to now.

In going back and looking at the last months of the Bloomberg administration, when the Posties were already hawking a "The Bad Old Days Are Coming Back If De Blasio Is Elected" narrative, I found this post.

I reprint it now to point out how the Post easily could have run with a "NYC Unravels Under Absent Bloomberg" narrative if they had so chosen back in 2013 when these horrible crimes occurred and almost certainly would run as a "NYC Unravels Under De Blasio" narrative if they occurred today:

Why The "Historic Low" Crime Statistics Bloomberg Hawks Are Not Believeable

Howie Wolfson likes to tweet the lie that NYC is the safest it's been since the 1950's, with crime at "historic lows."

But tell that to the man who was chased 50 blocks by a motorcycle gang and then beaten on a Washington Heights street in broad daylight in front of his wife and two year old.

The man had called 911 from his cell phone as he was being chased by the motorcycle gang, but police never responded to the call until after the man was brutally beaten and the gang got away.

The chase went on for more than 50 blocks, then ended up in Washington Heights where the motorcycle gang pummeled the man.

There were no NYPD officers anywhere in that stretch that saw this chase?

There were no NYPD officers in the area who could respond to the 911 call from the man?

Where the hell were the cops?

Were they too busy down by Zuccotti Park frisking people to respond to Mad Max on the West Side Highway?

As I wrote last night, this is just an unbelievable story.

And yet, it happened in Bloomberg's New York.

Just the way a man was punched in the face and put into a brain dead coma at Union Square a couple of weeks ago:

A white man who was punched in the face in Union Square by a black man who was spewing anti-white sentiment died early Monday at Bellevue Hospital, a police source said.

Jeffrey Babbitt, 62, fell into a coma after he was randomly attacked Wednesday afternoon by a man who was yelling, “I’m going to punch the first white man I see!”

Lashawn Marten, 31, was arrested on charges of misdemeanor assault in the attack. The unprovoked punch knocked Babbitt backward, and he hit his head on the ground.

Babbitt lived in Brooklyn and was caregiver to his mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease, neighbors said.

After Marten assaulted Babbitt, he attacked two men who tried to help the stricken man, and then challenged two responding cops, officials said.

Just the way another man was pounded by a group of men in a bias crime in Sunset Park last week:

An attack in Brooklyn is being investigated as a hate crime, but the victim says he's not gay.

David Jimenez, 40, was on South Third Street and Bedford Avenue walking his dogs last Wednesday night.

He says he ignored a group of people screaming gay slurs at him, but he says the group attacked him anyway.

He suffered a broken nose and a fractured eye socket.

Police caught one suspect and charge him with assault and possession of a controlled substance, but the Brooklyn District Attorney's office says the defendant wasn't charged because of discrepancies regarding his identity.

"My head, it cannot comprehend how this is the case, where you literally catch someone with blood in their hands, because when he was taken in, his fist was full of blood, and he's out here walking while I'm in here locked in my house because I'm afraid of going outside," Jimenez said.
Jimenez is now resting at home.

He's expected to undergo surgery on Wednesday.

Wolfson and other Bloomberg shills like to point out the official crime statistics that show the lowest levels of violent crime since the 1940's and 1950's as proof positive why Mayor Bloomberg is a municipal genius.

But the statistics are phonied up - the crime data is manipulated.

We know that the NYPD downgrades crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, we know that they try and talk people out of filing crime reports, we know that they play funky with the stats.

That's proven.

We also know that so much of the data the Bloomberg administration touts as being "historic" is manipulated and phony - from the test scores and graduation rates to the emergency response times.

Given the preponderance of these violent stories in the media, it's difficult to believe the "historic lows" propaganda Wolfson and the other Bloomberg shills hawk on Twitter and elsewhere.

Especially when you have a man and his family chased for more than 50 blocks on the West Side Highway and beaten in broad daylight and not one cop is in sight to stop this or responds to the 911 call the man frantically put in.

And especially when we know the cops manipulate the stats because they've been caught doing it.

This is less about defending de Blasio than just pointing out the criminal negligence many in the media displayed in their coverage of Bloomberg as mayor and how they don't give de Blasio the same kid glove treatment.

I guess that's how it goes when one mayor is a media mogul who can hire 30 journalists in one fell swoop and the other, well, isn't.

But when it comes to the NY Post, this is just a daily, concerted effort to frame a narrative meant to destroy de Blasio and usher in a mayor more friendly to Rupert Murdoch's political views.

And you can bet once they get their mayor more friendly to Murdoch's views, they'll drop the "City Unraveling" narrative no matter how many people get punched to death in Union Square or chased and beaten by a 50+ member motorcycle gang of thugs and undercover cops.

The NY Post's Relentless Campaign To Take Out De Blasio

The criminals/hackers who work at the NY Post scour the city daily for "quality of life" stories that can be used to politically drub Bill de Blasio as a weak, liberal mayor who has brought back the "Bad Old Days."

There are real stories that should be covered, of course, and are concerning - like the one about the 13 people shot at the house party last night.

But then there are the stories that they highlight because de Blasio is mayor and they want to make him look bad in order to weaken him and make it more likely he is seriously challenged for re-election.

Take this one about a mugging in Central Park:

A violent beggar choked a West Side man into unconsciousness in Central Park’s Ramble in a hellish mugging that underscores the famed park’s skyrocketing robbery stats.

“If you scream I’ll kill you,” were the last words the 53-year-old victim heard Thursday night as the fiend’s arm tightened around his throat and he collapsed to the ground, cops said.

Upon regaining consciousness about half an hour later, the victim, of West 57th Street, found that his wallet was gone.

His backpack, which held glasses, keys, gift cards, jewelry and cash, was also gone, cops said.

News of the brutal mugging had park-goers on edge Saturday.

“He could have died — that’s awful,” said Martin Ovalle, 38, who runs in the park at night and takes his wife and two young daughters to the Ramble on weekends.

“We are seeing a lot more now than in the past,” Ovalle agreed.

Indeed we are!

The "crime wave" in Central Park has seen crime increase from 10 incidents last year through July to 20 this year - a 50% increase!

From 10 to 20.

Notice too the hyperbole in the writing, "a violent beggar" - a "fiend" - "choked a man into unconsciousness" in a "hellish mugging" that underscores the park's "skyrocketing robbery stats."

From 10 to 20.

How many millions of people visited the park in the first seven months of the year?

There were 20 incidents, a uptick from last year's 10.

AM NY reports the following about a quality of life story in de Blasio's New York that appears to be politically motivated:

"Bathtub of a Bum"

That's how CBS2 political reporter Marcia Kramer described Columbus Circle yesterday, after publishing exclusive pictures of a shirtless and possibly homeless man lathering up in the fountain. She also published video of the same man lounging at the entrance to Central Park, bare-chested, scratching his head and perhaps wondering how the squeegee business would be in the neighborhood.

"At least he's bathing," said one Twitter user, but the quality-of-life offense was no laughing matter to Kramer, who brought the issue to Mayor de Blasio's attention at a press conference.

De Blasio tersely said that the city was paying attention to quality-of-life offenses, and NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton noted the expansion of a pilot program training up to 10,000 officers to deal with the homeless and the emotionally disturbed. The Mayor's wife, Chirlane McCray, is also heading up a mental health initiative with an emphasis on the city's most needy citizens-roadmap to come during the fall (originally, it was planned to be unveiled this summer).

De Blasio's blues.

The rub-a-dub-dub scandal is no laughing matter for de Blasio.

A small uptick in violent crime in the recent months and a campaign by one of the city's newspapers to chronicle some incidents of . . . shall we say public exposure, paired with a City Council plan to rethink the enforcement of some quality-of life offenses has created the impression of a city backsliding through liberal boneheadedness into the tough-city days gone by.

De Blasio knows that botched snowstorms and lack of public safety are a good way to become a one-term mayor.

The back story (there always is one in Gotham)

The pictures of the still unidentified man cleaning himself under Columbus' watchful gaze, it's important to note, were not taken by some random concerned citizen, but a media relations professional named Ken Frydman, who served as Rudy Giuliani's spokesman and director of media relations during Giuliani's first successful campaign for mayor.

Frydman is recycling some arguments from his old boss's heyday about a dangerous city where squeegee men run wild.

Perhaps the bather, if he really is homeless, can use help or shelter.  A concerned citizen can always call 311 to get help for a homeless person. The man probably doesn't mean to be the symbol of a pandemic.

Also, it's feels like a gazillion degrees out. Maybe he just needed to cool down.

Yeah, the video made it's way to Kramer from Giuliani's PR guy, then Kramer dutifully ran with it so that it becomes the emblem of the "NYC Unraveling" narrative.

Don't kid yourself, there's a concerted effort going on to undermine de Blasio and bring back the narrative of the "Bad Old Days," as if these kinds of incidents didn't happen under Bloomberg.

Hell, anybody remember that Sunday morning a few years ago when a motorcycle gang (including an undercover cop) terrorized a couple on the West Side Highway?

Let me refresh your memories:




The full video taken by one of the motorcycle thugs is here, but it's been disabled for embedding.

Let us imagine this incident happened during de Blasio's term - how would the Post cover it?

As another "De Blasio Returns Us To Bad Old Days" story - a gang of 50+ motorcycle thugs takes over the West Side Highway, surrounds a man and his family in a threatening way, then chases him for a couple of miles before pulling him out of his SUV and savagely beating him on the street in front of his wife and child.

The family called for help "four times" to 911 but no police arrived to help - although one undercover cop with the motorcycle gang did take part in the beat down.

How awful!

Except this story happened during Bloomberg's term as mayor, so the criminals and hacks at the Post never connected it to a larger narrative of the "City Unraveling!" that they connect every crime and quality of life story to now.

Is the increase in shootings in the city a cause for concern?

Sure and de Blasio had better be concerned and dealing with the issue or he's going to be a one term mayor.

But other crime stats remain down, despite the Post's best efforts to turn the city back into the Dinkins Years when a couple of thousand people were murdered.

And it's not like high profile crime didn't occur during Bloomberg's term - the incidents just didn't get connected to a larger narrative meant to destroy him politically as they do now under de Blasio.

As for the quality of life issues like people defecating on the street, the truth is, the city was gross during the Bloomberg Years and it remains so now during the de Blasio Years.

Or did I miss something and you could eat off the pedestrian plazas Mayor Mike stuck everywhere in Manhattan?

Bloomberg Employees Despise Mike Bloomberg

I love it:

Mike Bloomberg is facing a near revolt from frustrated employees at his financial news and data giant — his biggest challenge yet since returning as the boss of the company he founded almost 34 years ago.

...

Tensions spilled into full view on Thursday when a scathing 3,222-word e-mail from a senior reporter in Bloomberg’s Washington bureau laid bare the crisis in the newsroom.

Dawn Kopecki described a “climate of fear” at the company’s news operations, where tone-deaf editors pit reporters against one another, stifle reporting on major issues and cause staffers to trip over unnecessary hurdles placed in their way by a bloated management.

“I’ve personally been at Bloomberg News for seven years now, three of which have been in DC, and I’ve never seen morale lower,” Kopecki wrote in the e-mail to the two senior editors of the news operation.

Genius at work, sowing discord, doing everything his way because he knows best.

That's the Mike Bloomberg I know and love.

So great to have him doing his destructive act to his own company.

More here.

De Blasio "Insources" IT Work For New York City

Juan Gonzalez in the Daily News:

Mayor de Blasio is about to end the era of huge technology firms feeding off taxpayers with their legions of $500,000-a-year consultants camped at scores of city agencies for years.

On May 15, de Blasio’s top aides completed months of secret talks with the city’s largest municipal union on a far-reaching new “IT Insourcing” agreement.

First Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris has committed in that pact, a copy of which the Daily News obtained, to “use city employees for IT work where it will achieve financial savings and improve service delivery, by reducing reliance on external IT consultants.”

City officials expect to save $3.6 million this year through the insourcing plan, but that figure could potentially rise to nearly $100 million over five years, according to the pact’s supporting documents.

De Blasio has thus turned into general policy an effort he began last year, when he took much of the city’s botched upgrade of the 911 system away from private contractors like Northrop Grumman and turned it over to municipal workers.

This signals a major shift by our city away from the “privatizing” or “outsourcing” model that has reigned in urban America for more than 20 years.

“There’s been a bias in too many places at using folks outside the public sector for certain city functions,” Shorris said Thursday. “We want to get away from a reliance on outsourcing things that don’t need to be outsourced.”

Mayor Bloomberg loved outsourcing everything he could - especially IT contracts.

And he defended this outsourcing even after the projects went years over budget or the outside consultants were found to be stealing millions from the city.

Here is part of a column from Adam Lisberg back in 2011 in the DN on that subject:

On his Friday radio show, he was asked about a new shift in city policy that had been in the newspaper for two days running - and didn't seem to know it had happened.

It's a shift on something that had been a sore point for Bloomberg's critics - outside contractors paid six-figure salaries for tech projects that blow deadlines and budgets, like the scandal-ridden CityTime system.

The mayor has long defended his administration's contracting policies, even though municipal unions and Controller John Liu say city workers could do the job for less.

So it was news last week when one of Bloomberg's deputy mayors, Stephen Goldsmith, agreed with critics and said New York will save tens of millions of dollars by bringing the work in-house.

On the radio, WOR-AM host John Gambling tossed Bloomberg a softball about it. But instead of explaining the new company line on insourcing, the mayor defended outsourcing.

"People say, 'Oh, you're spending too much money on outsiders.' If you didn't do that one contract outside, you'd have to have those people permanently on your staff," the mayor said.

"The consultants, they say, 'Oh, they charge a lot more.' Well, because that's the business," he continued. "They don't work all the time, so they have to get paid more. And sometimes they have expertise you don't have in-house."

CityTime, the 911 mess, the NYCDOE scandals (two here and here) the FDNY GPS mess, ARIS, the NYCHA computer mess - the Bloomberg Era incompetence on outsourcing goes on and on.

And yet, Bloomberg's pals in the news media gave him a pass then on this incompetence and they continue to give him a pass today.

Bloomberg was never personally held accountable for these.

It is good to see the current mayor change course and start to use municipal workers for these projects.

Bloomberg's NYCDOE Covered Up Violence In Schools

This isn't a surprise:

A review of violent episodes at 10 public schools in New York City found that the Education Department failed to report nearly a third of the cases to the state, as required, according to an audit the state comptroller released on Wednesday.

The audit, which examined episodes during the 2011-12 and 2012-13 school years, also found that some were inappropriately classified as less serious than they were.

“When incidents don’t get reported or are in effect downgraded, schoolchildren are put potentially in harm’s way,” the comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, said, adding, “The Department of Education can’t risk leaving parents uninformed about what’s going on in their child’s school.”

The more than 400 episodes that went unreported at the 10 schools included 50 assaults resulting in injuries, among them one case at Intermediate School 27 on Staten Island in which a student pushed another student over a desk, knocking him to the floor with the desk landing on top of him; 13 sex offenses; and two instances of confiscated weapons.

The state uses the city’s annual reports of violent episodes to designate certain schools as “persistently dangerous.” Those schools are required to take steps to reduce violence and to notify parents that they are entitled to enroll their children at a less violent place.

Again, no surprise that the Data King's Department of Education underreported violence in public schools because his police department underreported crimes.

Take this NY Times article from July 2013, for example:

A long-awaited report ordered by the police commissioner in New York has found deficiencies in the Police Department’s efforts to detect whether its crime statistics are being manipulated.

 ...

The report was released on Tuesday, more than two years after Mr. Kelly empaneled a committee of former federal prosecutors to review the department’s internal crime-reporting system.  

The committee’s report did not directly address how often such manipulation occurred, but it identified vulnerabilities in the department’s system for auditing the integrity of its crime statistics. 

Before each report of a crime is entered into the department’s computer system, relatively few controls exist to prevent officers on the street from refusing to fill out any paperwork or for supervisors to alter paperwork back in the station house, the review found.  

While praising the department on the considerable resources devoted to auditing crime statistics, the committee noted that most of those efforts were directed at identifying “human error” — that is, unintentional mistakes in a police officer’s paperwork. But for “an officer who wishes to manipulate crime reporting,” the report said there were “few other procedures in place that control the various avenues of potential manipulation.”  

... 

The 60-page report describes several instances of manipulation in which felony crimes were marked down as misdemeanors. In one instance “a desk officer scratched out the item values in order to bring the total to below the $1,000 threshold for grand larceny,” which is a felony. 

In another instance, police paperwork for lost property “described a complainant who ‘lost property’ following an assault by multiple individuals,” according to the report, which added, “On its face the narrative appears to describe a robbery.”  

In the aggregate, the report found, the effect of such errors, intentional or otherwise, on crime statistics was not negligible. “A close review of the N.Y.P.D.’s statistics and analysis demonstrate that the misclassifications of reports may have an appreciable effect on certain reported crime rates,” the report said.  

The report noted, for instance, that Police Department auditors had already detected an error rate in 2009 suggesting that grand larcenies were undercounted that year by 2,312. The adjusted figures represent a 4.6 percent increase over the figures that the department issued that year. 

Bloomberg's data fetish - the data must always be better!!! - brought about all kinds of manipulation, deception, and outright falsification to how the city government agencies and departments operated.

If there were any independent study of the Bloomberg Years done, it would expose this for all to say.

Alas, there has not and probably will not be and so instead we are left with the myth of the "uber-competent" Mayor Bloomberg.

If We Applied Education Reform Logic To Newspapers...

...Here's one that ought to be closed for "failure":

Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman's Thursday announcement that the tabloid is officially on the market, after 22 years of ownership by the billionaire real estate magnate, has media watchers wondering: Who would want to buy the thing?

The 96-year-old news organization's finances are tightly held, despite a very public circulation decline and numerous down-sizings that have characterized its most recent era.

But a source close to the News who's been briefed on its current finances told Capital it is believed to be losing around $20 million a year. A spokesman for Zuckerman said he would not comment on financials and that it was premature to talk about a timeline for a potential sale.

While online growth (nydailynews.com has been pulling anywhere between 26 million and nearly 40 million unique monthly visitors over the past year or so, per Comscore numbers) is a positive narrative—one that's put the News in the same orbit as the Daily Mail and other outlets making a big play for America's national advertising dollars—the print edition (which still brings in most of the money) tells a different story.

With readers flocking to computers and mobile devices amid an onslaught of competition from new-media players, average circulation for the six months ending Sept. 30, 2014, was 361,941 on Sundays and 281,907 on weekdays, down from 786,952 and 715,052 during the same period ten years earlier.

The numbers are stark - the DN has lost more than half its print circulation in the last decade.

And while the online DN site has seen growth, there's little money in that.

$20 million a year in losses is a "failure", no?

I mean, sure, online growth is nice, but isn't the bottom line always about actual revenue?

By that measure, the DN is a miserable failure, online growth notwithstanding.

The DN editorial board gets very pragmatic when it comes to "failing" schools, pointing out that the bottom line of test scores and graduation rates are the only things that matter when it comes to school measurement.

If we applied that same logic to the DN itself, the only thing that matters is the circulation and the numbers - therefore the DN is "failing."

It's time for a "turnaround specialist" to see if this "failing" newspaper can be turned around and if not, well, then it most be closed.

Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Wall Street Journal and the NY Post, is rumored to be in the market for the paper.

The Dolans - who are already doing such a magnificent job running Madison Square Garden - are also on the rumor list for potential buyers.

Finally I have heard Michael Bloomberg's name mentioned as well, although it seems to me the DN is a little down market for his blue blood.

If Murdoch acquires the paper, a merger with the NY Post (itself a multimillion dollar loser) is said to be in the offing.

In any case, whatever happens with the DN, the next time you see an editorial pontificating about "failing" schools with "low" tests scores and "poor" graduation rates, remember to apply the same bottom line logic to the "failing" Daily News itself.

Certainly the free market has.

Report: Fiscal Genius Mayor Bloomberg Royally Screwed Up 911 Upgrade

Explain to me how Michael Bloomberg continues to be revered as a fiscal genius after CityTime and this mess:

The city’s mammoth upgrade of its antiquated 911 emergency call-taking system was plagued by delays, cost overruns and “persistent mismanagement” under the Michael Bloomberg administration, investigators charged Thursday.

In a 109-page report, the Department of Investigation said failures over nearly a decade, including poor performance and price markups by a number of contractors, drove up the price of the overhaul by hundreds of millions of dollars.

The project, which was launched in 2004 to improve the city’s 911 call infrastructure and create essential backup protections, isn’t expected to be completed until 2017, at a total cost of more than $2 billion.

“[The project] not only is late and over its original budget, but also has tested public confidence in the city’s ability to deliver on necessary improvements to the 911 system that are critical to public safety,” the report says.

It's amazing what billions in your bank account can do for your reputation.

I guarantee you, were de Blasio to have similar scandals like CityTime or the 911 mess, the elites of this city, including the media, would not be so gentle.

A Question For Governor Cuomo About My Teacher Evaluation Rating

Let's say I've been getting my students ready for a Regents test next week, doing the usual job I do to have them knowledgeable about the material that will be tested and skilled to carry out the test tasks, and then a major snowstorm hits on the test day.

Let's say school isn't cancelled because Chancellor Farina thinks it's a beautiful day but 60% of my students stay home from the test because the snow is deep enough for them to, in former Mayor Bloomberg's immortal Boxer Day Blizzard words, "Take in a show."

Will this kind of snow event be taken into account when my VAM is being calculated by the geniuses at NYSED and they see 60% of my students didn't show up for the test or should I start making plans now for my next career in fast food or as a Walmart greeter?

Because the weather is starting to sound like it's going to be a tad unsettled next week and some unlucky students and unlucky teachers may have a major snowstorm cause major headaches on the very day there's a major Regents exam that has major consequences for both.

If we're going to make test scores the be-all and end-all of everything, you can see how something like a snowstorm cancelling school (as happened some years ago with the US History Regents) or just causing some students to stay home could create a huge mess for teachers linked to student test scores.

I mean, you can see that, can't you, Governor?

Or is a major snowstorm the fault of "bad teachers" too?

Emma Bloomberg Wants To Use Bribes, Er, Political Donations To Ensure Pols Stay Education Reform-Friendly

From a Forbes article on ways to make education better comes this:

Emma Bloomberg

SOURCE OF WEALTH: Inheritance (her father, Michael Bloomberg, is worth $36.5 billion)

HOW SHE SUPPORTS COMMON CORE/COLLEGE READINESS: Chairman, Stand for Children, Leadership for Educational Equity

“Essentially, Common Core is bringing our education system in line with the way the world works today standards intended to help address America’s lagging international tech scores, our inability to produce college and career-ready graduates and the growing inequality in educational opportunity, not just among socioeconomic classes but among states.

“Philanthropists need to rethink how we’re engaging in these problems. So far I think we’ve done too little to engage families and teachers and to ensure that they have what they need to help kids succeed. Second, we have been too focused on trying to solve education through the sainted lens of charitable giving and not focused enough on the more gritty lens of politics. I’m increasingly convinced that in addition to funding great schools and great teachers, training programs and other educational interventions, we need to step up our political giving. We ask our elected officials to stick their necks out for our kids, and then we don’t support them when our opponents try to tear them down. They need to know if they do what’s right we’ll be there to make sure they don’t lose their jobs.”

In short, Emma Bloomberg wants to carry on the fine family tradition of bribing people to do what a Bloomberg wants them to do.

That's what "step up our political giving" means - hand out more bribes.

Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch Looks To Circumvent Mayoral Control, Force School Closings

Diane Ravitch:

Recently Mayor Bill DeBlasio and Chancellor Carmen Farina announced a plan to help struggling schools by providing extra tutoring, after-school programs, and other needed resources. They made clear that they wanted to support schools with low test scores instead of closing them. The mayor said he would invest $150 million in extra resources to the lowest performing schools.

However, Merryl Tisch, the chancellor of the state Board of Regents, said on a radio show that if the schools didn’t show progress by this coming spring,  she would move to close them and replace them with charter schools. The Tisch family, in addition to being generous philanthropists, are big supporters of charter schools.

Giving the DeBlasio plan only a few months to prove its success seems awfully unfair. Schools don’t get “turned around” in a few months. Surely Tisch knows that.

Indeed she does - but this is all about the power to fire teachers and close schools, as Tisch made clear in her statements.

So she doesn't actually care whether the de Blasio plan has enough time to succeed or not.

All Merryl Tisch cares about is making sure there is a precedent to break the teachers contract by giving the principals of these "failing" schools the power to fire teachers.

This isn't a fight over education or what's best for the kids.

It's a labor battle, with Tisch looking to help the privatizers by enshrining the right to fire teachers regardless of the contract between the district and the union.

So she's giving until spring for the de Blasio plan to show "progress."

It's November 17.

In short, Tisch has rigged it so that the plan cannot show "progress" and then she will move to have the schools closed and the teachers fired regardless of "mayoral control."

It's amazing how the reformers loved mayoral control when they had a mayor looking to destroy the system in power.

Now that there's a mayor who's a little less trigger happy about closing schools, they're going to circumvent mayoral control.

Funny how that goes.

Why Are Bloomberg And Klein Still Considered Tech Geniuses?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you imagine the press coverage?

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

Bloomberg: Students Should Skip College, Become Plumbers Instead

Hard to believe the mayor who destroyed many of the career and technological education programs in the city school system and geared the NYCDOE accountability system toward "College For All" now says this:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -Former New York City Mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg has some advice for high school seniors: forget college, become a plumber instead.

...

"Today if your kid wants to go to college or become a plumber, you've got to think long and hard," said Bloomberg Monday at the annual meeting of Wall Street trade group SIFMA.

"If he's not going to go to a great school and he's not super smart academically, but is smart in terms of dealing with people and that sort of thing, being a plumber is a great job because you have pricing power, you have an enormous skill set," he said.

The founder of financial data and news services company Bloomberg L.P. even went as far as to say that students considering Harvard should do the math.

You could pay $50,000 to $60,000 a year to Harvard or you could make that much as an apprentice plumber, he explained.

Too bad the Little Oligarch didn't think this bright idea before he destroyed many of the CTE programs in city schools and started bludgeoning schools over college stats.

Bloomberg's Latest Threat

The Little Oligarch just won't go away:

“Michael Bloomberg’s $40 million spending splurge on politics for this year’s election taught him a lesson for 2016: You get a much better bang for your buck by trying to tip state and local elections than high-profile federal ones,” Politico reports.

“So as the former New York mayor turned activist for gun control, healthier food choices, education reform, and other issues makes his spending plans for the next two years, he plans to weight his contributions more toward ballot measures, governor and school-board candidates, and away from House and Senate races, which have become glutted with outside money.”

Charter school backers are already throwing a lot of money into local races to sway them their way.

 

If Bloomberg takes the money he threw into the national races and adds that to the cash he's already been throwing into local races, he quite literally can buy democracy at the municipal or state levels.

 

An analysis of the 2014 election shows that the candidates who spent the most money almost always won:

Morning Line: “We already know that the $4 billion spent on this midterm election was more than any other midterm in history. It was the most on congressional elections ever, including during a presidential year. What do the numbers really tell us? These two stats jumped out at us from a post-analysis done by the Center for Responsive Politics:

• 94 percent of biggest spenders in House races won, up slightly from 2012
• 82 percent of biggest spenders in Senate races won, up from 76 percent in 2012

What that means is, as one of us noted on NewsHour Monday night money, more specifically who spends the most, is about as good a predictor that there is of who will win a race. Those numbers, by the way, are pretty close to the incumbent reelection rates.”

 

American Democracy in the 21st Century - owned by the oligarchs and the political whores they purchase with their money.