Albany Catholic Schools Reject Common Core, Return To Student-Centered learning

The rejection of Common Core continues:

Catholic elementary and middle schools in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany are stepping back from the Common Core-New York State Assessments and shifting instead to a more student-focused approach to standardized testing, the diocesan Catholic Schools Office announced Oct. 2 at a news conference at St. Madeleine Sophie School in Schenectady.

"Long before the advent of Common Core, Catholic schools in this diocese were known for their high academic standards, and today’s announcement signals a recommitment to and recognition of what we have always done best: educating the whole child – body, mind, and spirit,” said Bishop Edward B. Scharfenberger.

At the news conference, Catholic Schools Superintendent Michael Pizzingrillo explained that over the past two years, the Catholic Schools Office along with a variety of stakeholders have evaluated participation in the New York State Assessments and found that although its schools have used test results appropriately, the negative perception of its potential use did not allow parents and teachers the ability to benefit from its participation in all grades.

“The end result is a stepping back from the New York State Assessments coupled with a stepping forward with an achievement-based assessment we have chosen for ourselves,” Pizzingrillo said. “Although the standards of the Common Core itself are good, the collateral pieces have caused great strife for families and teachers alike. It’s time to put a renewed focus back on our students where it belongs.”

They're still going to administer state tests, but only three times from K-8:

Beginning this year, diocesan Catholic elementary and middle schools will administer the New York State Assessments only in grades 3, 5, and 7, meaning the tests will not serve as annual evaluations of student performance, but rather as benchmarks of longitudinal student progress over a set number of years. Catholic schools will administer the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (recently renamed the Iowa Assessments), a nationally normed multiple-choice assessment, to all students in grades 3 through 8 in November.

Putting a renewed focus back on the students instead of rote teaching/learning and standardized testing...

Imagine that.

That'll Get Their Attention

NY Post report claims Assembly Dems are retaliating against the Catholic Church over the education tax credit the diocese has been pushing for:

Assembly Democrats, under pressure from the Catholic Church to pass a tax break to help parochial schools, on Monday revived a bill that would allow lawsuits involving decades-old claims of sexual abuse by priests.

“This is a retaliatory strike against the church,” Dennis Poust, spokesman for the New York State Catholic Conference, told The Post.

“We haven’t heard a whisper about this bill in six years .

“If this bill becomes law, it will have catastrophic consequences for the church — and they know it,” Poust added.

The legislation, sponsored by Assemblywoman Margaret Markey (D-Queens), would wipe out a law giving accusers up to five years to file suit once they reach 18. But after that period, lawsuits are barred.

The new law would allow anyone to sue going back decades for one year after the measure is enacted.

There's no way the state Senate or Cuomo will go for the bill, so it's really just a measure to try and embarrass the Church for hiding behind the statute of limitations on some sexual abuse charges.

The Church and other pro-tax credit groups have been playing hardball with the education tax credit PR, claiming Assembly Dems who oppose it are hurting children, so you can see why some Assembly Dems might want to hit back with "Hurting children? How about all those sexual abuse charges you hid for years?" attack.

It's brutal, but so are some of those pro-education tax credit ads getting run against Assembly Dems.

The Clergy Campaign for Social and Economic Justice Calls Cuomo's Education Tax Credit Bill A Giveaway To The Wealthy

From the Daily News:

ALBANY — Timothy Cardinal Dolan and Gov. Cuomo pressed state lawmakers to pass a controversial education tax credit Monday while more than 100 clergy members signed a letter urging the governor to abandon it.

The Clergy Campaign for Social and Economic Justice said Cuomo’s proposal would provide “unaccountable tax relief in the funding of private education for the wealthiest among us.”

Clergy members also opposed Cuomo’s effort to raise the state’s cap on charter schools.

"The governor's agenda appears to be an assault on public schools, on behalf of wealthy donors and corporate interests,” said the Rev. Michael Walrond Jr. of the First Corinthian Baptist Church in Harlem.

Charter schools have harmed Catholic schools greatly, so really, the Catholic diocese at large should be opposed to an increase in the charter cap.

Many students in past years who might have attended Catholic schools now attend charters.

But in the usual quid pro quo that is politics, Dolan and Company remain mum on the charter cap so that they have a chance to see tax credits passed for private and Catholic schools.

So far, the heavy hearts in the Assembly have said they will hold the line and not pass the Cuomo private/Catholic school tax credit bill.

We'll see if that continues.

Liberals And Conservatives Join Together To Fight Common Core

Much of the most recent backlash against Common Core is coming from conservatives, particularly parents who send their kids to Catholic schools or who home school their children.

Many of these parents have begun to learn that their children will be subjected to the Great Common Core experiment too - just like public school children.

Catholic schools that take money from the federal government must have their students take the Common Core-aligned state tests.

Homeschooled children may receive Common Core-aligned instruction because some of the companies that create and sell home school curricula are, you guessed it, aligning to the Common Core.

The reach of the Obamacore is far and wide indeed.

But that may be the seed for its own destruction.

So long as reformers aimed at urban districts, they pretty much could do whatever the hell they wanted in ed policy.

But now that they've taken their reforms to the suburbs, to rural America, to Catholic schools and to home schooled children, they are getting pushback from all angles.

I've been reading some of the conservative blogs and articles lately about Common Core.

I posted yesterday about a Maggie Gallagher piece in National Review on Indiana's halting of Common Core implementation in the state.

There's a lot more bubbling up around the country in states that were expected to meekly go along with the ALEC and Chamber of Commerce-endorsed Common Core.

Liberals and conservatives alike are joining together to fight the Core.

Common Core proponents tend to be an arrogant, delusional bunch (see here), so they may not realize just what a favor they have done for us all by promoting these standards for children everywhere and for aligning the SAT to the Core as well.

If they had kept the Core implementation to public schools, they might have had an easier time with their agenda.

But now that they've awoken Catholic school and home school parents to the dangers of the Federal Core, they are having a much more difficult time sliding these standards into place.

Indiana has halted implementation.

Other states may follow suit.

The Great Common Core experiment is at a crossroads.

And the Common Core proponents have their own arrogance and hubris to thank for that problem.

We'll see if they can overcome this.

They have a lot of money to burn (Gates put $150 million alone into the fight.)

Bloomberg, Broad, Walmart and other corporate proponents are funding it as well.

But now that they've got people on both the left and the right suspicious and/or outright hostile to the Federal Core, it's going to take all that money and more to complete their agenda.

Education Deform Takes It Toll On Catholic Schools Too

DNAinfo looks at a rally to save some Bronx schools the Archdiocese of New York wants to close to save money:

BRONX — When St. Jerome School first opened its doors in Mott Haven in 1871, Abraham Lincoln had been dead only a few years, Thomas Edison had yet to perfect the electric light bulb and The Bronx was not part of New York City.

“This school has been here for 141 years,” principal Joseph Puglia said at a rally Wednesday to fight plans to close it.

“If we lined everybody up that graduated from this school, it would go from here all the way down to the Archdiocese of New York," he said, pointing toward its headquarters in Manhattan.

In the Soundview section of The Bronx, Blessed Sacrament School took root more than 75 years ago and counts Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor among its famous alumni.

Yet for all their history, both schools fell on a list of 26 Catholic elementary schools — eight of them in The Bronx — and one high school that the Archdiocese of New York is considering closing next year as part of a restructuring effort to shore up its budget.

“These are difficult, but necessary decisions,” Archdiocese Superintendent Timothy McNiff said in a statement last month when the list was announced.

...

 

But at separate rallies Wednesday, supporters of St. Jerome and Blessed Sacrament assailed this offer as unrealistic and said the schools’ financial woes stem from the low-income communities they serve.

“How do you explain to elementary school children that because we are a poor community, Blessed Sacrament will no longer serve as their safe haven?” principal Herminia Roman, who did not participate in the rally, wrote in a letter to families.

“140 years it took to build,” St. Jerome parent Kelvin Ramirez said at that school’s rally. “Misguided and ill-informed people will destroy it in 30 days.”

Schools closures in Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York City - almost all in poor neighborhoods, almost all serving poor communities, minority communities.

Public, Catholic, it makes no difference - the neo-liberalism train is coming and running over anybody who gets in the way.

These kids need to go to for-profit charter schools owned by some EMO or a "non-profit" charter like one run by Geoffrey Canada or Eva Moskowitz, where the rule is, the larger the enrollment, the larger the free real estate allotment from the city is.

 

Make no mistake, these kinds of schools are being targeted by Evil Eva and For Profit Geoffrey as much as the public schools are.

I wonder, would Jesus close these schools and send the kids to "No Excuses!" charters where they can go from being taught as humans to being taught like prisoners?

 

Just asking...

Charter Schools Destroy Catholic Schools Too

The Daily News takes a look at what the charter school movement has done to Catholic schools:

Emotional students and teachers packed up years’ worth of belongings as their beloved school, St. Augustine, closed its doors forever last June. A charter school moved into the building.

The conversion reflects a sea change happening throughout the state, said Abe Lackman, who is presenting new research in April to the National Conference of Catholic Educators.

Lackman, a scholar-in-residence at Albany Law School, told the audience that Catholic school enrollment in the state has been on the verge of collapse in the last decade, and that transfers to charter schools account for 37% of the decline. About 180 charter schools in the state have drawn roughly 32,000 students away from the Catholic school system.

“Without some type of relief, those charter schools will draw another 50,000 students over the next decade,” said Lackman, who started researching K-8 schools last August. “I think it’s the tip of the iceberg.”

Lackman said about 200 new charter schools are opening in the state in the next several years. Nine are opening in the Bronx next school year.

His initial findings have generated buzz in the city, propelling a panel discussion titled “The Tension Between Catholic Schools and Charter Schools” at St. Francis College in Brooklyn last week.

Of the five borough Catholic grammar schools that closed last year because of financial woes, two are now charters: Harriet Tubman Charter School at St. Augustine, and the Bronx Charter School for Excellence at Our Lady of Solace. St. Martin of Tours now houses Public School 51.

Rev. Thomas Fenlon, pastor at St. Augustine - which recently merged with Our Lady of Victory in Claremont - said losing students to public and charter schools also means losing a moral curriculum.

“(The school) was an important part of our church, our parish, our mission, to try to help the children and talk about the values that are important to us,” Fenlon said, “and we’re not able to do that.”

Make no mistake, charter schools sell a moral curriculum as well - it is the Gospel of Work, Shop, Obey.

And make no mistake, a few more years of unbridled charter school growth and almost every Catholic school in the city will be gone, replaced with a Moskowitz "Success" Academy or some other charter that preaches the Gospel of Work, Shop, Obey that is supported by hedge fund managers and other Wall Street criminals.

For years, Catholic schools and traditional public schools have co-existed peacefully in this city, but now the Catholic school is being killed by the very cancer that was created by the free marketeers to kill off the traditional public school.

It is time to rid this city of the charter school cancer.

I used to think that charter schools could peacefully co-exist beside traditional public schools the way Catholic schools have, but the last ten years has shown me this is not the case.

Charters really are a cancer and the industry and its entrepreneurs will not be satisfied until they have killed off every traditional public and parochial school.

Catholic Schools Hire New Teachers Even As They Close Schools And Lay Off Teachers

Looks like the Catholic school system has taken the lessons of Saint Bill of the Teacher Evaluations Based Upon Test Scores and Our Mayor of the Bleeding Money to heart:

Lucy Ozzi, a teacher at the St. Sylvester Catholic school on Staten Island for 12 years, was shocked and insulted by a letter she got last month from the schools superintendent for the New York Archdiocese.

It came just weeks after Archbishop Timothy Dolan and Schools Superintendent Timothy McNiff said they would close 27 financially troubled Catholic schools. That meant laying off more than 300 teachers, including the entire staff at St. Sylvester.

The shock was that the letter was addressed not to Ozzi, but to her daughter Michelle, 21. In it, McNiff congratulated Michelle, a product of the Catholic school system, for her upcoming graduation fromManhattan's Fashion Institute of Technology.

Then came the insult.

"If you have not decided on your plans for next year, I encourage you to consider teaching in one of our Catholic schools," he wrote, urging her to fill out a job application online or call his office directly.

Great! They want to lay off the mother and hire the daughter!

"My daughter has no teaching experience and is majoring in fashion merchandising," Ozzi said in disbelief. "I've got a master's degree and 12 years' teaching experience. And he wants to let me go to recruit her?"

...

Joseph Zwilling, Dolan's spokesman, confirmed that 1,700 letters were sent to "soon-to-be college graduates" as a way of "maintaining contact with our alumni" and "promoting Catholic education as a possible career path."

"We're trying to build a data base of teacher candidates ... for years to come."

His response doesn't satisfy Patricia Gabriel, president of the Federation of Catholic Teachers.

"They have a hiring freeze in our schools, and they are required by our union contract to offer priority for any vacancy to tenured teachers who are losing their jobs," Gabriel said. "So I can't comprehend why they would be recruiting anyone from the outside. It's hurtful."

Dolan and McNiff, Gabriel notes, have yet to thank the affected teachers for their many years of service. The archdiocese hasn't even offered them severance benefits.

McNiff has made a raft of enemies with his corporate management style in the less than three years since he took over the schools.

McNiff, who has a doctoral degree from Argosy University in Sarasota, Fla., a for-profit school that specializes in online education, is being paid $270,000 a year - more than city Schools Chancellor Cathie Black makes, system insiders say. Zwilling refused to say what his official salary is.

The schools chief has also embarked on major renovations of his administrative offices, while presiding over the firing or resignations of more than a dozen veteran central administrators.

Gabriel became so frustrated with the superintendent's stonewalling that last month she appealed directly to Dolan for a meeting.

Her members "feel cast off like collateral damage," she wrote.

"I understand the difficulty you are feeling each and every time you meet with a teacher whose school is scheduled to close," Dolan wrote in his March 7 response. But "faced with the current economic climate" and "declining enrollment ... it is necessary to make difficult decisions."

The teachers, he wrote, "always remain in our prayers," but he said nothing about a meeting.

A schools superintendent with a degree from a for-profit diploma mill?

Yikes.

And the values these religious men are displaying with the layoffs, the school closings, the firings at the central office even as they try and hire younger, cheaper teachers and remodel their own offices - it's positively Bloombergian.

So nice that they will keep the laid off teachers in their prayers, though.

Very spiritual.

Education Deform Comes To Catholic Schools

Vulture philanthropists aren't happy with deforming the public school system - they're taking aim at Roman Catholic schools too:

Private philanthropists have changed the face of public education over the last decade, underwriting the rise of charter schools and promoting remedies that rely heavily on student testing and teacher evaluation.

But with much less fanfare, wealthy donors have begun playing a parallel role in the country’s next-largest educational network: Roman Catholic schools.

In New York — as in Boston, Baltimore and Chicago — shrinking enrollment and rising school deficits in recent years have deepened the church’s dependence on its cadres of longtime benefactors. Donors have responded generously, but many who were once content to write checks and attend student pageants are now asking to see school budgets, student reading scores and principals’ job evaluations.

In the jargon of education reform, they want transparency and accountability; and though the church bureaucracy has resisted similar demands from other constituents in the past, the donors are getting pretty much what they want.

To the delight of some educators and the discomfort of others, major contributors have won a voice in decision-making at every level, from the staffing of the schools to the frank financial self-examination that has nudged the Archdiocese of New York toward the most severe school consolidation in its history. Church officials announced last month that falling enrollments and rising deficits would force them to close 27 schools, one-tenth of their total, by the end of this academic year.

“The relationship between the church and its contributors used to be basically, ‘Pray, pay and obey — give us money, we’ll take it from there,’ ” said Francis J. Butler, president of Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities, a national network of Catholic philanthropies. “But donors are much more proactive today. They are concerned about the quality of the schools, the leadership; they’re drilling down into these problems.”

At Our Lady Queen of Angels School in East Harlem, a Wall Street financier, Charles B. Durkin Jr., and a small group of fellow benefactors have donated a total of roughly $100,000 a year for about 15 years. Until about five years ago, the extent of their involvement was to visit several times each year and shake hands with grateful children, as Mr. Durkin, 72, did one recent morning.

Yet the next day, Mr. Durkin followed up with a long working meeting, poring over test scores and talking with the principal about the progress she was making with the students. When they were done, the two agreed that teachers might need some coaching in math instruction — and Mr. Durkin agreed to pay for it.

...

Historically, parochial schools have fared slightly better in standardized tests than public schools, partly because as private institutions they are not bound by law to take all comers, as public schools are.

But the effort to bring charter-school standards of accountability to a system once dominated by parish priests and their staffs has created some tensions between patrons and school administrators. At one school in the Bronx, a principal wanted to spend a donor’s money on a gym, which he considered crucial to attracting new students, while the donor wanted to stock a new library. The school got the library, but closed soon afterward because of declining enrollment.

Standardized testing, Common Core, benchmarks, data points, SMART goals and all the other jive ass corporate stuff brought to the public schools now coming to the Catholic schools.

I wonder what George Carlin would say about this?