NY Times Fails To Hold Klein Accountable Today

The NY Times conducted an "interview" with outgoing NYC schools chancellor Joel Klein.

They threw him softball after softball, never pressed him on the jive he said, and missed an opportunity to REALLY look at the Klein tenure.

To wit, he should have been asked:

1. How can you call your tenure as chancellor a success when you privilege ONLY test scores as a measure of success and student test scores are LOWER as you leave than before you came in and the achievement gap between white and Asian students and black and Hispanic students is LARGER than ever?

2. How can you call your Children First reforms a success when many of the small schools you opened at the beginning of your tenure are being closed at the end of your tenure (and many more will be closed after you are gone)?

3. No independent auditor has looked at the graduation rates you are hawking as proof positive of your success as chancellor. Why won't you open the books and let an independent auditor take a look at just how you increased the graduation rates (credit recovery program, independent study classes, etc.)?

4. You were one of the most divisive people to work in NYC government since the generally reviled Saint Rudy of 9/11. How is it that somebody who can't get along with people and has the socio-emotional skills of a misanthrope got to run a school system that has as its intent not only to educate children but to socialize them to be decent human beings? (It's interesting that some of the most misanthropic and/or maladjusted people in public life - Klein, Rhee, Christie, Gates, Bloomberg - are the vanguard of the "education reform movement.")

Those are the four questions I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sure you out there in the blogosphere can think of some more.

But instead of asking these questions, the Times asked Klien where to get the best pizza in NYC.

A missed opportunity at holding Klein accountable for the mess he leaves in place.

Klein lamented that he wasn't MORE disruptive as chancellor.

That tells you everything you need to know about Klein.

A destructive, evil man with only the aggrandizement of his own ego and the enrichment of himself and his ed deform cronies as his sole concern.

Buzzwords: "Assessment" Edition

I hate the word "assessment".

It's all the rage in the ed deform world these days, usually used by ed deform zealots or their acolytes in the media or politics to talk about how to gauge student and teacher performance.

I think it's used because it has those soft "s" sounds rather than the hard "t" sounds of the word "tests."

Less negative impact with those soft "s" sounds.

Say it with me now - "assessments..."

Now say "tests..."

See what I mean?

Also, the word "tests" has a negative connotation left over from NCLB, so ed deform zealots and their acolytes have changed the name to "assessments" in order to fool people into thinking the Obama administration education policy is not the Bush education policy of testing, testing, testing on steroids.

It's kinda like how they changed the name of the war condition "shell shock" (which really got the point across) to first "battle fatigue" and then "post-traumatic syndrome disorder."

PTSD takes away the images and impact that the phrase "shell shock" has and makes the condition less easy to understand.

(DISCLOSURE: I borrowed the above example from George Carlin.)

So I definitely think there was a conscious decision by ed deformers to change to the "assessment" term as a way to fool people into thinking it is something more beneficial and helpful than the standardized tests Americans said they hated as part of the Bush policy.

But here is something else interesting about the word - it turns out ed deformers only like "assessments" when they're used on others and not themselves:

So, “assessment” is a buzzword in academia, and probably in other areas of endeavor as well. At the core, there’s little that’s objectionable to periodically taking a deeper look below the surface of what you’re doing, and seeing if it actually does what you think it does. Of course, taking a deeper look is not always easy, it requires some thought and reflection, and making it into an obligatory and constant bureaucratic exercise is not a good way to generate useful and thoughtful efforts.

Going beyond the reasonable notion that you should periodically take a deeper look at what you’re doing, pedagogical reformers of many sorts get convert zeal and treat assessment as a moral imperative. But, when a religion has enough zealous adherents, it might suddenly become mainstream. And when it goes mainstream, it goes from being pure to being mass market lowest common denominator oversaturation. The word “assessment” is no longer just confined to careful examinations of how well something is working. It isn’t even just applied to a bureaucratic ritual of report-writing focused on the curriculum. It’s applied to every piece of paper, every report, every bit of data, any and every piece of bureaucracy and hoop-jumping and report-generating. The odds are good that a time sheet will soon be marked “Hours assessment” and an account statement will be marked “Fiscal assessment.”

So, at lunch the other day a colleague who has drunk deeply of the kool-aid remarked on how much he hated having to write a friggin’ report over some small piece of triviality. And I said to him “Oh, I thought you’d be a big fan of assessment?” (He and I get along well enough that I can good-naturedly chide him for drinking the kool-aid and he can chide me for not drinking it. Or maybe he’s just pretending to enjoy our banter while he works on converting me.) And then he reminded me that there’s Real Assessment (done by True Scotsmen, I imagine) and all of the bullshit that they make us do.

And so I had a new insight into buzzwords and kool-aid: While some kool-aid drinkers might exult when the bureaucracy embraces their cause and turns it into a buzzword that we must all pay homage to, those who hold it sacred view their idol as having been profaned. And so I actually gained a bit of respect for some of the kool-aid drinkers. Say what you will about the tenets of assessment, dude. At least it’s an ethos.

Atrios has a definition of "assessment" too:

My understanding is that the popularity of "assessment" in higher education is based on the notion that other people suck and I would like some way to prove that, one which, preferably, would not inconvenience me or demonstrate that I, too, suck.

Thus Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg use assessments on teachers but not themselves.

Or when people try and assess Klein and Bloomberg via the same stats they try and assess teachers by, they cry foul.

Therefore Atrios is EXACTLY right.

Assessments in the NYC school system are thus: teachers suck, Klein and Bloomberg do not.

Naming Names

Create any old value-added assessment you want.

Use tests that were never meant to be used for value-added assessment.

Run the scores through a computer and come up with a list of "good teachers" and "bad teachers."

Publish those names in the LA Times on Sunday.

Have the Obama administration publicly endorse the publication through a statement by the Secretary of Education.

Never mind that the tests were not meant to judge teachers.

Never mind that they way the analysis was conducted leaves the end product open to a margin of error the size of Obama's ego.

They're going to go with this Naming Names strategy as a way to publicly shame "bad teachers" out of their jobs.

I think they hope parents will see the names in the paper and demand that the teachers be fired.

Or perhaps they hope parents will take justice into their own hands vigilante-style.

Because that's kind of what this is.

Okay, forget the "kind of" part.

That's what this is.

They publish the names of tax cheats in the papers.

They publish the names of deadbeat dads and parents not paying alimony and child support.

They publish the names of johns arrested for soliciting prostitutes.

They publish the names of people arrested for DWI.

They publish the names of sex offenders.

And now they publish the names of "bad teachers."

Who cares if the analysis used to come to those conclusions is flawed?

The point is to get "bad teachers" out of the system.

And now that the Obama administration has publicly endorsed this action, you can be sure we will see similar articles all around the country.

I bet the Wall Street Journal - exceedingly pro-charter and pro-"reform" since Rupert Murdoch took it over - is working on such an article about NYC right now.

Perhaps Zuckerman has his minions at either the Daily News or US News working on one (US News loves to publish lists - Best Colleges, Best Medical Schools, Best Graduation Schools...Worst Secondary School Teachers fits right in with the rest of the reductionism that passes for analysis at that rag.)

Whenever I have juniors or seniors talk about wanting to go into teaching these days, I always say you might want to rethink that career choice.

Teachers are under attack from all sides - from Bloomberg and Klein here at the city level to Paterson (and soon Cuomo) at the state level to Obama and Duncan at the federal level (and Bush and Spellings before them.)

Billionaire slave labor employers like Steve Jobs want to see us fired and the unions busted.

Predator philanthropists like Bill Gates and Eli Broad put up millions to bring that dream to fruition.

Hedge fund criminals like Whitney Tilson start "education reform" non-profits that work toward the hedge fundie wet dream of a completely privatized public school system open to billions of EMO profits.

And our unions, rather than fight these attacks with all they've got, either stick their heads in the sand and make believe they're not happening or actually collaborate and invite the enemy into the city (as Weingarten did by having Bill Gates speak at the AFT convention.)

These are bad times for the country at large.

The economy has been terrible and it's getting worse even as I write this post.

The unemployment rate is 9.5% and going higher by the end of the year.

The underemployment rate is 19% and going higher by the end of the year.

GDP is expected to slip to 1.2% or lower for Q2 and hover near 0% for the second half of the year.

Foreclosures have increased every month for the last thirteen months and with over a year's worth of housing inventory on the market and prices still needing to fall to get back to a historical home price/income ratio, the housing crisis is going to get worse before it gets better too.

What is being done about any of this?

Not much - other than to blame the public school system and public school teachers for not teaching the skills needed to survive this uber-corporate 21st century economy.

It's not our fault, of course.

The predator billionaires and hedge fund criminals run things on Wall Street and in Washington.

They steal as much as they can from the economy without putting anything back in the form of either investment or hiring.

They nearly brought about economic collapse in 2008 and rather than be punished for their crimes and hubris, they are bailed out by both Bush and Obama and allowed to continue to run the economy like a rigged casino.

And now, rather than just blame teachers for this mess they did NOT create, the powers that be have decided to name names and get some vigilante justice going.

Don't be surprised if that isn't the plan.

Do you think Michelle Rhee or Joel Klein would be sorry to see outraged parents take to a classroom to themselves "fire" a teacher rated "bad" by some newspaper through some jive value-added analysis story?

How about Duncan and Obama?

I don't know about you, but I could absolutely see Rhee shrugging if some crazy parent or parents, angry that their kid has been left back or is struggling below grade level, took to a classroom and punched some teacher exposed as "bad" by the local newspaper.

I could absolutely hear Rhee say "If bad teachers refuse to step down themselves and teachers unions try and protect bad teachers from firing, then maybe parents have to take action themselves."

The point, apparently, is just to get rid of "bad teachers."

Doesn't matter how you do it. Doesn't matter how you measure it.

Just that it happens.

These are bad times indeed.

Klein Hears It From The Crowd

Ever since the NYSED revealed Mayor's Bloomberg's and Chancellor Klein's New York City "education miracle" to be phony - boosted by artificially inflated scores - Bloomberg and Klein have been on the defensive over education.

Where once they bragged about narrowing the achievement gap between minority and white and Asian students, now the test scores reveal that gap, in the words of the NY Times, "has returned to about the same level as when the mayor arrived."

So much for the Bloomberg/Klein education miracle.

Where once Bloomberg and Klein claimed the achievement gap between students at the richest and students at the poorest schools in the city was closing, now the test scores reveal that gap has, in the words of the NY Daily News

widened significantly this year after state tests were made more difficult, a new analysis shows.

Only 47% of fourth graders in poor schools passed the state math exams this year compared with 81% in the highest income schools - increasing the gap between rich and poor schools from 15 percentage points in 2009 to 35 points this year.

Other grades showed similar patterns, according to an analysis of Education Department data by the Coalition for Educational Justice, which compared schools in the top 10% to the bottom 10% by income.

So much for the Bloomberg/Klein education miracle.

Bloomberg and Klein decided to ignore the damage done to their "reform movement" by the new test scores and insisted that the New York City students have made "real gains" since they took autocratic control of the school system.

Their shills at the Daily News, Post and Times editorial boards agreed with the same jive.

But last night at the PEP meeting, Klein got a taste of what REAL ACCOUNTABILITY looks like - an outraged crowd of parents and students angry over the scores, the Klein/Bloomberg education policies and Klein's refusal to let them speak their critiques - confronted Klein with the truth:

Angry parents protested a falloff in test scores at a meeting of a citywide education panel on Monday night, prompting its members and the schools chancellor to walk out.

Forty-five minutes into the hearing, as a crowd of about 100 people jeered and chanted slogans, the chancellor, Joel I. Klein, and the members of the Panel for Educational Policy left the stage. They did not return, choosing to reschedule the meeting, as parents marched the aisles of the auditorium at Murry Bergtraum High School in Lower Manhattan and took turns expressing their outrage over a bullhorn.

“This is a call to all those in charge at the Department of Education,” shouted Esperanza Vazquez of Morrisania. “Do your work for our children.”

The upheaval began after Mr. Klein, among others on the stage, said that despite the drop in this year’s scores after the state recalibrated its standardized exams, students citywide were still making substantial progress, based on graduation rates and other data.

In response, a panelist, Patrick Sullivan, moved to open the floor to public comments about test scores. Though a second panelist, Anna Santos, seconded the motion, it was denied by the chairman, David C. Chang, who pointed out that time for comments had been allotted after scheduled business.

With that, the crowd erupted into boos and chants of “Let the parents speak.”

“Where is the accountability?” asked Evelyn Feliciano of West Tremont, in the Bronx, who said her son’s scores had dropped drastically.

Indeed, Bloomberg and Klein (like the president and the secretary of education in Washington) have avoided REAL ACCOUNTABILITY for the mess they have made, but by disrupting meetings and by trying to force Klein to listen to actual parents from actual schools and not parents hand chosen by his charter pals like Eva Moscowitz or Geoffrey Canada, Klein got an idea of the outrage people are feeling over where the school system is these days.

These kinds of protests need to continue at every appearance Klein makes to tout "the real gains" made by students since he took over the system.

Especially when he refuses to listen to parents and students, as happened at last night's meeting.

The data, usually much-beloved by Chancellor Klein, shows very clearly both he and Mayor Bloomberg have been FAILURES at leading the school system.

When Klein and the rest of the mayor's shills on the PEP board walked out last night rather than face the anger of the crowd, parents and students chanted "We'll be back! We'll be back!"

And that's EXACTLY what needs to be done to continue to expose the sham that is the Bloomberg/Klein reform movement and end their autocratic rule.

As one commenter at Gotham Schools wrote last night

yes we did derail it and we will continue to. the voices of parents have been ignored for far too long, this mayor and chancellor feel they can manipulate and PR their way through their destructive reforms… well, we have had enough! there will be changes or their will be growing civil disobediance, this is only the beginning.

I think it is high time that these men actually face the outrage of the people they have harmed with their damaging reforms, phony data and lies and deceptions.

And then it is time to take their autocratic power from them - forcibly.

POSTSCRIPT: This Gotham Schools post makes it sound like Klein and his PEP shills fled from the crowd last night (the writer uses the words "retreated backstage.")

Not surprised.

Klein, like his boss Mayor Bloomberg, is a coward, and when faced with actual anger from actual parents and students and not the loving glow of the New York City op-ed writers or education deform shills and hedge fund criminals, Klein ran away.

Teacher, Not Administrators, Held Accountable In Drowning

This is emblematic of how Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein run the system:

Responsibility for the drowning of a Manhattan girl on a school field trip will fall squarely on the teacher who chaperoned - and not any of her supervisors.

Officials confirmed yesterday that both administrators faulted by investigators for the death of sixth-grader Nicole Suriel, 12, will return to Columbia Secondary School in the fall.

Andrew Stillman - who lost his job as the school's assistant principal last month after the investigation found he backed out of chaperoning at the last minute - is being hired back as a teacher at the school, officials said.

"It was a jaw dropper," said former Columbia Secondary School teacher Chance Nalley, who took a job at another Manhattan school this summer. "I was just shocked."

Nothing to be shocked about.

Bloomberg and Klein are ALL about scapegoating, blaming and firing teachers while enabling incompetent and/or abusive administrators to thrive in the system.

Hell, they gave the principal in charge of this school tenure just days AFTER the student drowned, then said they couldn't fire him because he, you know, had tenure.

Here is what the father of the student said at his daughter's funeral:

Tears turned to rage Saturday at the funeral of a 12-year-old girl who drowned during a field trip to the beach.

After grieving the death of Nicole Suriel, dozens filed out of the Church of the Annunciation in Harlem. Most were silent and somber. But one man whose daughter attends Columbia Secondary School lashed out at the school's principal, Jose Maldonado.

"Tell the truth, Maldonado!" David Suker hollered. "Nicole needs justice."

...

"You are the only one responsible in this tragedy," Suker continued. "I want to know where the permission slips are, and I want to know why parents weren't told children would be swimming."

Maldonado left quickly after the service and declined to answer questions. "I'm not going to make any comment," the principal said. "Obviously we're dealing with the family's suffering and our own."

Nicole's father told the Daily News that her parents never signed a permission slip.

City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein also attended the service, but wouldn't talk about the ill-fated trip. "I'm just here for the funeral," Klein said.

Long Beach police have launched a criminal probe to determine whether child endangerment laws were broken. Only three chaperones accompanied the students on the trip.

Klein refuses to comment, the principal falls back on how he himself is "suffering" and doesn't want to talk about it, and the assistant principal in charge of the fired teacher lost his AP position but is back at the school teaching (and probably will be rehired as an AP a few years from now when this tragedy is "forgotten.")

Meanwhile a 12-year is dead.

Well, at least a teacher got fired in the bargain.

That ought to make President Obama, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, and Mayor Bloomberg happy.

And isn't that what we're all here for in NYC?

Helping administrators and people in charge avoid responsibility and accountability while at the same time scapegoating and firing teachers.

Time For Some Investigations and Firings

The NY Daily News reports this morning that the NYSED isn't interested in finding out how or why the NY State test scores became inflated:

The state should investigate the school test mess, and heads should roll, outraged education reform advocates say.

But the new state education boss wants to move on - saying there's no point in finger-pointing over abysmal reading and math scores released last week for third- through eighth-graders.

"We all bear responsibility for the past," said Commissioner David Steiner. "Rather than go back...and try the impossible 'blame game,' what's crucial is to say, 'We need tests that test effectively.'"

Longtime critics of the state tests were less ready to forget past mistakes.

"If all these things are so bollixed up, why is the state's testing director still on the payroll?" said the Manhattan Institute's Sol Stern, a longtime education advocate. "There ought to be a legislative investigation."

Stern suggested a national search to replace David Abrams, the head of testing, who has been in office since 2004 and brings home $147,000 a year.

But Tom Dunn, a spokesman for Steiner, said Abrams "is an important element of a strong team that has implemented improvements."

Some education reformers stopped short of calling for anyone to be fired - but still pushed for a probe.

"I think you have to look back. That's how you prevent it in the future," said New York Charter School Association Policy Director Peter Murphy, calling for the next governor or the Legislature to seek answers. "How did we go so far off the rails? How do we stay the course?"

Stay the course?

Do you mean the course of adding tests to every grade at every level that are absolutely meaningless but sure do add lots of profits to your education management organization pals' profits, Peter?

NYC minority students now score BELOW where they did BEFORE Mayor Bloomberg and Klein grabbed absolute power.

Bloomberg and Klein have reorganized the NYCDOE four times, have closed hundreds of schools, thrown a couple of thousand teachers into the ATR pool while vilifying them in the press, changed curricula in math and English a few times (remember RAMP UP?) while paying off their cronies in corporate education with lots of no-bed testing contracts, and STILL there has been NO improvement in the system.

But rather than acknowledge that the "reformers" running things have brought the public school system to disaster, the op-ed writers at the Times and the Post and the News continue to say "Oh, no there has been much improvement since Bloomberg/Klein took over."

And Merryl Tisch and David Steiner at NYSED also continue to shill for Bloomberg and Klein, Tisch actually claiming at that anybody who can't see the improvement in NYC since Bloomberg and Klein took over must not be looking too closely.

The entire system, from the people at the NYSED who clearly need to stay on Bloomberg's good side by sucking up to the big bully to the cronies at the newspapers to the politicians in Albany and Washington who continue to parrot how wonderful the reforms in NYC have been and point to it as a model for reform nation-wide to the teachers union that does little to fight the mess, is corrupt.

Steiner, Tisch, Paterson, Cuomo, Bloomberg, Klein, Gates, Broad, Weingarten, Mulgrew, Duncan and Obama should ALL be fired for the mess they have created in New York City and elsewhere.

As for the owners of the Times, Post, and News and their puppets at the op-ed pages, they need to have their papers undergo a "turnaround" the way Obama and Duncan advocate for "failing" schools.

That would be accountability.

But silly reality-based educator, accountability is only for teachers, not for the politicians who put disastrous policies in place, the bureaucrats who carry those disastrous policies out, the press who shill for them in editorials on the TV, the computer moguls who fund those changes from behind the scenes, and the president who cheers them at speeches on CSPAN.

City Gets $5 Million To Hire New Teachers...

...even as they get ready to lay off 6,400 teachers:

The DOE asked the PEP to approve an allocation of $5,000,000 to recruit new teachers while at the same time they are threatening to lay off thousands of us. The excuse given was that DOE has to have teachers for our most needy special education students ready on day one as this is a shortage area. This is a laugh as I pointed out to the Panel when I spoke as Jamaica has special education classes that in May still don't have a regular teacher.

The UFT was in the house and they made a great case on the issue of this ridiculous expenditure. The best speaker was clearly UFT Secretary Michael Mendel who spoke for two minutes of the folly of the DOE's spending 5 million dollars to recruit teachers during these tough fiscal times when they are talking about layoffs.

Of course this $5 million expenditure is going to the New Teacher Project, a "non-profit" founded by Joel Klein crony Michelle Rhee, so really this expenditure is less about hiring new teachers and more about paying off cronies.

The DOE has also hired eight new deputy chancellors, continues to spend millions on new testing programs, and hand out no-bid contracts for busing services and the like (even with gangsters who bring guns to the negotiations.)

The City Council gave 4% raises to its staff, Bloomberg gave raises to his staff, and he gave bonuses to his campaign people (albeit, this money came from his own pocket.)

With all this money going from hand to hand, there IS money to AVERT layoffs even if the state and the feds do not give more money to the city.

The just have to reallocate it from other things - like the testing programs, the no-bid contracts, the new deputy chancellor hires, and the payoffs to cronies.

Lately in some circles there has been talk of furloughs to avert layoffs. There has also been talk of taking a wage freeze and salary step freeze to avert layoffs.

I believe these ideas are huge mistakes.

Bloomberg and Klein are not playing honest with the money any more than the MTA plays honest with their budget when they are getting around to asking for fare hikes.

To agree to furloughs, wage freezes or salary step freezes would allow Bloomberg and Klein to continue to spend money on their priorities - like adding more tests and more PD that brings them closer to their goal of a totally privatized system with merit pay and work protections gutted.

Furloughs, wage/step freezes also would allow them to continue to pay themselves and their cronies more money while funding the recession on the backs of teachers, schools and most importantly, children.

Until Bloomberg and Klein get honest with WHAT they're spending money on, teachers should not sacrifice their own financial well being so that Bloomberg, Klein and all of their no-bid contract cronies can save theirs.

Catering To The Masters Of Expensive Technology

The following critique is leveled at the financial markets and the changes wrought by all the technology that now governs how things are done, but it could just as easily be leveled at the education deformers in New York City, Washington, Chicago, and Bill Gates' mansion who push the same thing onto public schools:

“Not so long ago, if our markets experienced severe stress, and certainly a “fat finger”, human wisdom would intervene. Reasons for the stress would be ascertained, trading in affected stocks would be slowed or halted, stabilizing bids would be initiated as needed, and severe volatility would be dealt with in a calm and reasoned manner.

Today, the human specialist model has been replaced by an automated market maker model. Our market structure has evolved. It has evolved, not by design,
or a well-thought and reasoned plan, but it has evolved to cater to masters of expensive technology, deployed unfettered by participants whose only concern is to squeeze out every last picosecond and fractional cent before they move on to other countries’ markets and asset classes. The for-profit exchange model at every chance sacrifices the protection of long term investor interests for the profitability of serving hyper-leveraged intraday speculators . . .

Today’s price swings in a great number of stocks highlight the inherent and systemic risk of our automated stock market, which has few checks and balances in place. Once the market sensed stress, the bids were cancelled and market sell orders chased prices down to the lowest possible point.”

Just as in the markets the human specialist has been replaced by an automated market maker, in education the teacher specialist who makes teaching decisions based upon the curricula that has been thought out and developed by education experts has been replaced by twenty-something central bureaucrats with business degrees and/or technology backgrounds, education "advisors" trained by the Gates and Broad Foundations to push more and more technology onto schools and place more and more blame onto humans, and politicians happy to take the yummy yummy political contributions and bribes in the form of grants from the corporatocracy looking to privatize public education and run the entire public education sphere according to data and stats.

That, apparently, is the change we can believe in that President Accountability was spewing from his mouth during the 2008 campaign.

It is also the gospel of education deform that Joel Klein, evangelist for the multi-national corporatists and technocrats, is bringing to countries like Australia, England, and Israel.

And Bloomberg, if he gets his way (and given the way the economy is probably going to tank at the end of 2010 into 2011, he just may), will spend $100 billion or more to buy the White House in 2012 and complete the corporatist job of destroying democracy and establishing a corporatocracy - government by the corporation, for the corporation, of the corporation.

Destroying public education and making it into a step-child of the corporatocracy - where children can be trained to be good, compliant employees happy to take any treatment so long as they have a job - is a big part of the plan.

Bloomberg/Klein Spend $5 Million To Recruit New Teachers While Laying Off 8,500 Current Ones

Explain the rationale of this:

The city may lay off 8,500 teachers, but education officials still want approval for a contract of up to $5 million a year to recruit even more teachers.

The agency's Panel for Educational Policy will vote later this month on the hefty contract, but already critics are questioning the need to spend money to recruit during a time of layoffs.

"We should put a freeze on any spending related to new hiring. We should not even be going through the expense of negotiating a contract now," said Patrick Sullivan, the panel's Manhattan representative.

Since 2000, the New Teacher Project has contracted with the city to recruit New York City Teaching Fellows. For this school year, the group received $2.8 million for recruiting 705 teachers.

You know what? I'll explain the rationale for this.

Bloomberg and Klein want to make sure their cronies at the New Teacher Project get paid off despite the severe economic conditions that Bloomberg's says will require 8,500 layoffs in schools.

Also, Bloomberg and Klein want veteran teachers who are too "expensive" off the payroll, but you can only move vets out by bringing cheaper "newbies" in.

Thus we have the city spending $5 million to recruit new teachers even as they try and lay off 8,500.

Outrageous.

But not a surprise.

For-Profit Schools Means FOR PROFIT

There is a tone of shock and surprise in this Daily News article that tells of a for-profit school management company that is charging three charter schools interest on fees, but I'm not sure why.

First, here's the story:

Three city charter schools are on the hook for thousands of dollars in interest payments to a for-profit management company.

Victory Schools Inc. charges charter schools between $2,000 and $2,700 a student for back office support and help with curriculum planning and hiring.

But if the schools can't pay up, they get socked. The company charged more than $100,000 in interest payments to three of its schools last year alone, using rates ranging from 6% to about 15% if a school pays late.

By comparison, the averagecredit card interest rate wasabout 11% last year, Bankrate.com says.

"No school should be using tax dollars to cover interest payments, especially at credit card rates," said city Public Advocate Bill de Blasio.

Merrick Academy charter school in Queens has paid $85,464 in interest for a loan from Victory over the past three years. The management group charged a 9.85% interest rate, which a spokesman called "competitive."

"This is cash loaned to the school when the school cannot find any other lender," said James Stovall of Victory Schools.

Audits show that the South Bronx Charter School for International Cultures and the Arts was charged $74,050 in interest over two years and was in hock to Victory for $1,132,206 as of last June.

Last year, the New York City Charter High School for Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industries in the Bronx was charged more than $19,000 in interest.

Victory asserts that it has not collected the money from the two Bronx schools, even though the money is listed as part of the schools' expenses.

"It's something [that's] in there because we've made a business decision that there should be an interest fee," said Stovall, "but where we have good relationships, we don't collect it."

Why would there be any shock or surprise that Victory Schools Inc. (I wonder if the crooks who run the company get the Orwellian/1984 irony to their name?) is squeezing the charters it supports for every dime.

That's what for-profit companies do.

It's like saying, I can't believe that shark attacked that swimmer in the wetsuit that made him look like a yummy dolphin.

Makes no sense.

If you want companies like Victory to stop squeezing schools, then stop privatizing the school system.

Otherwise you're going to have lots of parasites and predators looming about taking all that they can.

This is also not the first controversy involving Victory Schools Inc. this year. Juan Gonzalez detailed that back in January:

Hours after rebuffing parents and voting to shut 19 public schools, education officials announced plans to end most programs at Alfred E. Smith High in the Bronx and replace them with a charter school.

That charter school, however, has its own troubled history.

It's called the New York City Charter High School for Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industries (AECI), and it has been in operation fewer than two years.

Last June, a Manhattan federal grand jury charged its founder and chairman, Richard Izquierdo Arroyo, with stealing more than $200,000 from a nonprofit South Bronx housing organization.

Prosecutors say Izquierdo spent the money on designer clothes, fancy restaurants and trips to the Caribbean for his grandmother, state Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo, and his aunt, City Councilwoman Maria del Carmen Arroyo.

Another board member of the school, Margarita Villegas, an employee of the housing group, was indicted with Izquierdo. Both have pleaded not guilty. They immediately resigned from AECI's board and from the board of the South Bronx Charter School, where Izquierdo was chairman.

Virtually all the teachers who began at AECI when it opened its doors in September 2008 resigned within the first year.

This month, 17 of the 19 new staff members at the school filed a state labor petition to have the United Federation of Teachers represent them.

The angry teachers claim that Victory Schools Inc., the for-profit management company hired by AECI to administer their school, is charging an exorbitant management fee.

Meanwhile, DOE has posted little information on the academic performance of AECI students.

James Stovall, the executive at Victory in charge of AECI, did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Irma Zardoya, the retired DOE administrator who replaced Izquierdo as chair of AECI's board.

None of these problems seem to trouble the educrats at Tweed.

One day soon, our city will wake up to discover that Bloomberg's mad rush to create hundreds of independent charter schools has unleashed bigger financial scandals than in the bad old days of community school boards.

So Klein and the eduwankers at Tweed wanted to close down a school and replace it with one run by Victory Schools Inc. - the very company charging interest on its support fees to schools.

Klein says he has to lay off senior teachers because they make too much money at the very same time he is paying interest money out to usurious school support/management companies and doing business with gangsters who run mobbed up bus companies.

Something is rotten at Tweed and in Klein's office and it isn't just the education policy.

There is an awful lot of money being pushed into the hands of the wrong people by Klein and his cohorts.

It is time for John Liu to look into this.

"Stunning"

That's how the Daily News described Judge Lobis's ruling that Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein broke the law by closing 19 NYC public schools without following proper procedures as required by the 2009 re-write of the mayoral control law.

Here's how the Times described the judge's ruling:

Justice Lobis, who voided the panel’s decision, said the new law “created a public process with meaningful community involvement regarding the chancellor’s proposals.” The entire mayoral control law, she wrote, “must be enforced, not merely the portion extending mayoral control of the schools.”

Following the law - what a concept! Certainly not a concept Mayor Moneybags is used to, of course, as I will get to in a minute, but it surely is nice to see a court enforce it on a billionaire politician/bully and his corporate minion every once in a while.

The Times says the city argued that yes, they knew they might have not followed the letter of the law, but these schools are "failing" and therefore for the good of the kids and the city they must be closed, law be damned.

The judge did not agree, though the city says they will appeal and we'll have to see where this goes from here.

But even as Bloomberg and Klein were being beaten in the UFT and the NAACP lawsuit against school closures, Klein was going ahead to circumvent the ruling, as noted in this comment thread at Gotham Schools by Leonie Haimson:

Klein appears about to defy the court order by sending out the acceptance letters with none of the closing schools on them, as though the decision never happened; not only should this be barred, but the court ought to throw him in jail for contempt of court.

So even if the city loses an appeal of this decision (or fails to appeal) and these 19 schools remain open, they will die next year because the Klein and the DOE will have made sure no new students apply.

This is of course the m.o. of Bloomberg and Klein - to break the law - both letter and spirit - and not give a shit about the consequences. I think Leonie is right - Klein ought to be tossed in jail for contempt for violating the court order by sending out acceptance letters without the 19 schools that had been slated for enclosure being included.

As for Bloomberg, he's got lawsuit troubles all around. Even as he and Klein were losing the school closures lawsuit, three more women joined a discrimination lawsuit against Bloomberg LP, bringing the total number of women in the lawsuit to 79.

Moneybags himself has been named as a defendant in the case and will have to testify about the "culture of discrimination" he and other top management at Bloomberg LP created against women.

That culture of discrimination includes firing female employees seeking maternity leave with management making comments like "I'm not having any pregnant bitches working for me" or Bloomberg himself telling a top saleswoman who alerted him to her pregnancy that she should "Kill it!" if she wanted to continue working at Bloomberg LP.

This culture of discrimination and misogyny at Bloomberg LP is not new, of course. Nor is Bloomberg's own contempt for the law.

Bloomberg and his company had been hit with numerous discrimination complaints even before Moneybags bought his first mayoral term.

Here is how Wayne Barrett wrote that story up in October 2001:

In a 1998, 272-page deposition never before made public, Michael Bloomberg said he would believe a rape charge only if it was supported by "an unimpeachable third-party" witness, and accused an ex-employee who said she'd been raped by a Bloomberg executive of "extortion." Asked if he believed "false claims of rape are common," the GOP mayoral contender and CEO of a vast financial-information empire replied: "I don't have an opinion." [Read excerpts.]

Bloomberg's comments are drawn from one of three sexual harassment lawsuits that have dogged him since 1996, all of which contended that "a hostile environment of persistent sexual harassment and the general degradation of women" existed at the 8000-employee company of the same name that Bloomberg founded and ran. In addition to his uninformed testimony about rape, Bloomberg also displayed a chilly indifference to sexual harassment laws and guidelines during the deposition. Bloomberg declined to discuss these issues with the Voice,though a company spokeswoman insisted it has "zero tolerance" for harassment or rape. While the rape case of sales representative Mary Ann Olszewski has been mentioned in occasional news accounts, it has not attracted as much attention as a companion case filed by Sekiko Garrison, another member of the predominantly female, and usually young, attractive, and short-skirted sales force.

...

The company settled the Garrison case, without admitting wrongdoing, for what the Voicehas learned was "a very high six-figure" amount, making it appear more credible than Olszewski's, which was dismissed by a federal judge in 1999. But a closer examination of the Olszewski record reveals that the dismissal had nothing to do with the merits of the case—her lawyer had ignored repeated deadlines to submit a response to a motion to end the case. Indeed, a new lawyer revived the case in 2000, allowing it to mysteriously disappear from the court docket just as Bloomberg's mayoral candidacy emerged earlier this year.

While Olszewski, then 28, claimed she was forced out of her job shortly after making the rape charge in a May 25, 1995, meeting, the accused rapist, Bryan Lewis, who was Olszewski's immediate supervisor, remained in a top position throughout the litigation. Court records also indicate that the company conducted a wide-ranging investigation of Olszewski, attempting to get coworkers to portray her as "flirtatious" or a "sex hound." On the other hand, attorneys for Lewis and the company successfully thwarted repeated attempts by Olszewski to determine if the company was paying Lewis's personal legal bills, and the company declined the question now.

...

Though Bloomberg testified that he "became aware" of the allegation "instantly" after she told Louis Eccleston, the head of the company's 500-member sales force, he said all he did about it was "ascertain that we had commenced the appropriate investigative process and were treating all parties appropriately." The investigation eventually resulted in a 60-page report on Olszewski that company attorneys refused to turn over in the litigation. But one sales staffer questioned during the probe, Michael Medd, said in a phone conversation secretly taped by an Olszewski ally that he'd been asked three times to provide "reputation" information about her.

"I don't think she was very provocative, and I keep telling them I'm not going to change my words," said Medd, who complained at the time that the company was pressing him for the name of a client who could provide a "bad character portrayal" of Olszewski. Said Medd: "I don't think she was a sleep-around person." Bloomberg said in his deposition that he recalls "some discussion as to her relationships with clients, but I don't remember the specific situation," adding that his knowledge of this was "nothing other than to ensure that we were making the appropriate investigations."

Bloomberg took the position that Olszewski's refusal to cooperate with the internal probe—combined with the fact that she didn't raise the issue until two years after the alleged incident—made him "skeptical" of her allegation. He never spoke to either Olszewski or Lewis about the charge—though he testified he "knew" Lewis and "could vaguely picture" the tall, statuesque Olszewski—and admitted he neither read anything about rape nor consulted rape experts when the charge surfaced. The company first published a handbook with a section about sexual harassment procedures in 1996, after both the Olszewski and Garrison charges surfaced.

In his deposition, Bloomberg conceded that the most the company offered to do was to transfer Olszewski out of Lewis's unit, meaning she would still be working on the same wide-open sales floor, without any offices or partitions, as Lewis, who was regarded as a powerful figure within the department. Asked why the company didn't offer to move Lewis, Bloomberg said: "He seemed content with where he was." Lewis was not Olszewski's supervisor at the time of the alleged rape in 1993, but became her boss shortly afterwards, a sequence that assumed great importance in Bloomberg's deposition. Though Lewis was a senior executive within Olszewski's department, Bloomberg said it was only a violation of company policy if supervisors had sex with subordinates who "reported" to them.

Barrett revisited the sexual harassment/discrimination story in 2005, reported on six separate sexual/racial discrimination cases against Bloomberg and noted that he threw lots of money around to buy silence. Barrett writes that we will never know the full stories in these cases because they have all been settled out of court and the ex-employees all have signed "confidentiality agreements," but that voters should know that there is a dark side to Bloomberg:

The six sagas here are both unsettling and incomplete. The confidentiality blanket that covers them gives each episode a powerfully suggestive aura short of definitive fact, but the cumulative picture that emerges is one of a corporate Bloomberg awash in unusual personnel problems either connected to his own unhinged repartee or his company's insensitive policies.

Why do I bring up the current E.E.O.C. discrimination case against Bloomberg LP and the past cases against both Bloomberg himself and his company in a post about the school closures lawsuit?

Because they show a pattern here of a very nasty and very powerful bully with a contempt for the law, a contempt for women, and a contempt for common decency. They also show his willingness to throw his money around to circumvent the law and destroy enemies. Notice how he had management try and portray the woman bringing the rape charge against one of his top managers as a "sex hound" and "flirtatious." Notice how they told employees to lie about her and change their stories so she could be sufficiently depicted as promiscuous. Also notice how Bloomberg bankrolled the legal fees of his accused manager and how the suit "mysteriously disappeared" right before Bloomberg began his mayoral run in 2001.

This is classic Bloomberg behavior and it is behavior he has brought from the private sector to the public.

Bloomberg's treatment of women at his company, the culture of discrimination and contempt he helped create and indeed even fostered is the very same contempt and discrimination he has for those of us in public education, both male and female. Perhaps it's because he sees education as a "feminine sphere," perhaps it's because he's just used to getting his way in all things, but the connection between telling an employee to "kill" her baby and telling Klein to "kill" a bunch of schools every year, no matter the circumstance, are connected.

You see, in Bloomberg's mind, whatever he wants is always "right" and anybody who doesn't see it that way must be destroyed. He's been getting his way with this for a very long time now, but that just may be coming to an end. As I wrote above, we'll have to see how the school closures lawsuit shakes out and we'll have to see how the E.E.O.C. lawsuit plays out, but lately Bloomberg is not getting his way 100% of the time in these matters. I do hope the schools remain open, that Klein and Bloomberg are not allowed to manipulate the finding of the case, keep students from applying to those schools and closing them next year anyway. I also hope the 79 women in the E.E.O.C. lawsuit against Bloomberg and his company get their day in court and beat him for millions. Bloomberg is wily enough to not have a Captain Queeg moment on the stand, but it still would be nice to get him up there and force him to address the "kill it!" remark and the other acts of misogyny he either took part in ("I'd do her!") or condoned at Bloomberg LP.

It would be nice if people outside of the public school system got to know Michael Bloomberg the way the women at Bloomberg LP and the teachers and administrators in the DOE know him.

That would be the most stunning thing of all.

So That's Where The Money Is!

Chancellor Klein says he needs to layoff 8,500 teachers because his budget shortfall is so large.

But Juan Gonzalez in today's News informs us the city is wasting millions in fees and salaries for a failed payroll system that the mayor says has been a "disaster":

The city is paying some 230 "consultants" an average salary of $400,000 a year for a computer project that is seven years behind schedule and vastly over budget.

The payments continue despite Mayor Bloomberg's admission the computerized timekeeping and payroll system - called CityTime - is "a disaster."

Eleven CityTime consultants rake in more than $600,000 annually, with three of them making as much as $676,000, city records obtained under a Freedom of Information request show.

The 40 highest-paid people on the project bill taxpayers at least $500,000 a year. These enormous salaries are coming out of a $139 million extension to the CityTime contract that began July 1 and runs to Sept. 30.

Gonzalez says some of these "consultants" have been working for as long as ten years at these kinds of salaries.

Nice work if you can get it.

At any rate, there we have $139 million the city could take from paying these crooks at CityTime and use for schools.

See how easy this is getting more money for schools and less money for Bloomberg's no-bid contract cronies?

In addition, the City Council has raised its budget for this year by $52 million - that includes 4% raises for staff.

4% raises when every other agency is being asked to cut between 2.7% and 7% of their budget?

Seems to me we could look at whatever Quinn and Company are doing with the money they're doling out at the City Council, make some cuts, and start spending it on education.

Let's say we reduce the raises to 2% and return $26 million to education.

Now we have restored a total of $165 million to education.

See how easy this really is?

When you really don't want to lay people off and you want to find productive solutions to problems - including budget shortfalls - you can.

But Bloomberg and Klein do not want to do that.

Rather, like Obama is using the financial crisis to remake/privatize public education through rttT and NCLB Jr, Bloomberg and Klein want to use the fiscal crisis here in NYC to redo the contract, gut seniority protections and start laying off all those "bad" (i.e., expensive, veteran teachers.)

I'm sure John Podesta, Evan Thomas and the wankers at Morning Joe would approve.

Say What?

Miss Eyre points out that while Chancellor Klein is talking all doomsday about having to lay off 8,500 teachers and how the state better allow him to choose which ones go or lots of really good, new teachers are going to lose their jobs and lots of old, burnt out ones will be teaching all the kids he's actually hiring new teachers.

Uh, huh.

And while the Center for American Progress rewrites a Gates Foundation pamphlet about how teacher effectiveness must be the cornerstone of education reform and how layoffs need to be based on evaluation of effectiveness and not seniority, they fail to note that in most districts the bottom line will prevail and the oldest and highest paid teachers will be laid off first regardless of effectiveness.

After all, Klein's already doing this here in NYC by hiring new teachers even as he's getting ready to lay off thousands.

In a corporatocracy, the bottom line will ALWAYS prevail.

That's what unions are supposed to protect against.

The problem is not when a corporate whore like Klein wants to derail these protections - you kinda expect that from a parasite like him.

The problem is when supposedly "progressive" think tanks like the Center for American Progress carry water for him and Bloomberg and write stories like "Improve Education, Fire Bad Teachers."

NYC Condom Contest

Down to just five entries for what the official "Condom of New York City" will be.

Entries are here.

You can provide your own Bloomberg and/or Klein jokes in the comments section.

To The Woodshed

Mayor Moneybags overturned the will of the people in New York City when he arranged to have the City Council dismantle term limits so that he and some of his fellow cronies could run for third terms.

In order to win that third term, Moneybags had to spend $104 million dollars against his opponent, the anemic and woeful Bill Thompson.

Even after spending $104 million dollars and blanketing the city with paper and media ads touting his leadership and charm, Moneybags still only won re-election to a third term by 51,000 votes.

Of course he called that slim election victory a "mandate" and began dictating new policy initaitves as if it is a foregone conclusion that his will is the people's will.

Turns out that's not the case, however.

The City Council voted down a Bloomberg initiative to turn an armory in the Bronx into a retail mall.

The vote was, hold your breath, 45-1 - with one abstention.

That's right, the City Council, led by Bloomberg pom-pom girl Christine Quinn, handed Moneybags a 45-1 defeat on a real estate initiative.

That's never happened before, not in the Quinn era at any rate, where what Moneybags wants from the City Council on real estate, Moneybags gets.

But not today, not anymore.

Moneybags says he'll veto the City Council decision but Quinn says she has the two-thirds majority to override him.

The message from that vote is clear.

Moneybags is a wounded lame duck mayor.

He struts like he's LBJ in December, 1964.

But let us remember, he's Mayor $104 million/51,000 votes.

He can be taken to the woodshed and beaten.

Let's take him to the woodshed on the school closures.

Schools closures are a different issue than real estate, of course, and the PEP board that will hold the hearings on the closures is a rubber stamp for Moneybags.

But let's at least make a lot of noise so that the citizens of this city start to notice that Moneybags has no education plan other than to keep closing things down and hope people mistake reckless activity for meaningful action.

Just When I Thought I Was Out, They Pull Me Back In

I started blogging at reality-basededucator.blogspot.com back in March 2005.

Initially I started as an education blogger, but quickly turned into a political blogger outraged by the various high crimes and misdemeanors perpetrated upon the country and the world by George Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Tom Delay and the rest of the Republican Party establishment.

In 2007 I started to blog more and more about economics as it became apparent that the bubble economy created and maintained by both the Clinton and Bush administrations was about to collapse around the nation's ears.

I quit regular posts at reality-basededucator in December 2007. I became a full-time contributing blogger to nyceducator.com for a while, but gradually blogged less and less. When the demise of the Bush administration and the rise of the "progressive" Democrats brought no real change to so many issues that are important to me - from the various wars we are currently fighting overseas to the closure of Gitmo to the extension of Big Brother's powers via the laws created in the wake of the WoT to civil rights for GLBT citizens of this country to fair work/fair wages for the working and middle classes to the continued extension of standardized-test based mandates to the privatization of the public school system to the trillion dollar welfare hand-outs both Bush and Obama have given the financial sector and Wall Street - I was disgusted and done with trying to effect even a small amount of change via my little blogposts.

But some things have happened in the past few months that have me feeling re-energized and re-outraged and ready to blog regularly again.

First, it became clear that the Obama administration, far from being a "change agent" that would usher in even a moderate amount of liberal reform to a country that has become owned and operated solely by and for corporate interests, is squarely interested in helping maintain the status quo (reign for Wall Street, pain for Main Street.) The financial bailout policy Obama has pursued has me outraged beyond belief - Nailin' Paylin and the other tea party people can call him a socialist all they want, it is clear that Mr. Obama is a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporatocracy (see Matt Taibbi's article in Rolling Stone for just the latest example of that) who is doing all he can to extend the power of multi-national corporations while further enslaving working and middle class people to working longer and harder to make less and less.

Next, Mayor Moneybags bought himself a $104 million third term here in New York City so that he could continue to destroy the NYC public school system. His reform movement consists of closing down every large high school in the city, firing all the unionized teachers and reopening charter and small schools in the same buildings that used to house some good schools destroyed by his administration's policy of shifting "at-risk" students to large schools without the necessary resources to educate them (see here for just one example of that.) Bloomberg and Klein have announced 22 schools closings this year and they intend to close 100 or more schools in the next four years (unless Bloomberg decides to overthrow the will of the people once again and runs for a fourth term or simply dispenses with the niceties of democracy itself and forms a military junta under the auspices of martial law - in which case he'll close ALL public schools.)

Finally, the Obama administration has decided that not only is No Child Left Behind the greatest education policy ever, they want to expand the testing mechanisms in the law by tying teacher pay and teacher's jobs to test scores. On top of that, they want to take Mayor Bloomberg's "Close All Public Schools and Reopen Them as Charter Schools Run by Hedge Fund Managers" policy nationwide through both the Race to the Top funds and the NCLB reauthorization next year. They have decided that public education needs to be privatized, because the boys on Wall Street need another punch bowl after the TARP/TALF bailouts, the Internet bubble, the housing bubble and all the rest of the government policies that have enabled Wall Street and top 1% to grab trillions at the expense of the working and middle classes of this country.

And so, just when I thought I was out of this lousy Internet shit, they've dragged me back in - Obama and Bloomberg and Klein and Duncan and Larry Summers and Treasury Timmeh Geithner and David Paterson and their allies in the press like Little Morty Zuckerman and Rupert Murdoch and GE Jack Welch and the rest.

My friend Norm at Education Notes Online has been asking me to get back on the front lines and fight the good fight against the corporate whores and multi-national lords in the great class war of the 21st century.

All right, Norm, I'm back, I'm mad as hell, and I'm ready to do battle at the barricades.