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.

Data-Driven Reform That Has Lost Sight Of Realities

The Village Voice reports that small class sizes, individualized instruction via a real teacher and not a Joel Klein computer program and mastery design courses rather than endless standardized test prep actually helps students learn:

CUNY began experimenting in 2007 with a different approach to remediation. Jahleah Santiago and Ashley Baret are in the START program, an intensive 12-week immersion designed for students with remedial needs in one, two, or all three areas.

Nathan Stevens, Baret and Santiago's START teacher, has a luxury few of his CUNY colleagues enjoy: time, a total of 15 hours a week with these students. On a recent afternoon, he stands at the whiteboard, going over eight homework problems, encouraging all 14 students (average class size is 20) to verbalize their thought processes. A scruffy figure with a beard and tattoos, Stevens is relentlessly Socratic—"How do you know that you're finished with the factors now?"—and patiently draws out each student, who range in age from teens to fifties, as the class simplifies polynomials and multiplied exponents: "Put it into words, Manny. Tell me how you got that answer."

Seventeen hundred students are in the START program this spring. They are technically deferring admission to CUNY, paying the $75 fee out of pocket so they don't start the Pell Grant clock. Their curriculum was written especially for the program, and all instructors spent a full semester training with another teacher in the classroom. "In this program we seek to show what's really happening in the math," Stevens says. "Rather than teaching my students to memorize the formulas, tricks, rules, I try to reinforce the underlying ideas of what they're looking at, with the hope that they could solve any problem they see."

"In my high school, math was kind of under a veil," says Santiago. "You didn't know what was going on—you just do that and that and get the answer. Nathan will break it down and do different examples until we get it."

That process sounds an awful lot like what we used to think of as "teaching." And 60 to 70 percent of START students, most of whom set out with multiple remedial needs, gain proficiency in a given subject after just one semester, compared with 20 percent who take regular remedial courses. The program began in 2009, building on the model of ASAP, a full-year intensive program. CUNY also opened an entire school called New Community College near Bryant Park last fall; all three programs feature intensive, accelerated study, small classes, and individual attention. START and ASAP will both double in size this fall to a total of 8,000 students. "It's amazing, the progress I see in such a short time," says Stevens, putting his hand over his heart with unabashed sincerity. "The students leave me, they pass the test, I see them later in the hallways, and they tell me how well they're doing. They hold on to their notes from my class. It just gives you that wonderful teacher feeling."

Doing things this way isn't just warm and fuzzy—it also seems surprisingly cost-effective. While it's initially more expensive to have small classes with extra advisors and tutors, of the original cohort who entered ASAP in 2007, 55 percent earned their associates' degree in three years, compared with 24.7 percent of similar students in the broader CUNY campus and just 16 percent of urban community college students nationally. According to an independent study by the Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education at Columbia, the graduation rates were so much higher that ASAP cost about 10 percent less per graduate.

At its heart, this story is about a complex set of math problems. CUNY is beginning to make headway with this reinvented approach to remediation, but the underlying paradox persists: It is still spending considerable money and time, its own and its students', to teach people what they should have already learned.

The contradiction is stark. If the city's Department of Education were to adopt the practices of START and ASAP—small class sizes, mastery-based course design, one additional counselor or adviser for every 25 students—it seems likely that more students would progress on grade level, and the system as a whole would actually save money. The trend, however, is in the opposite direction: 13 percent cumulative budget cuts since 2007, and larger classes at 60 percent of middle and high schools as of last fall. It's no wonder the remediation numbers keep rising.

In the Bloomberg Era, we have also gotten data-driven accountability based upon test scores and graduation rates which means if the students do not pass the test and do not graduate on time, it is the fault of the teachers, the administrators and the schools and all will be held accountable.

Under the new APPR state evaluation system, that means teachers may be fired.

Under Bloomberg's Reign of Error over the NYCDOE, that means hundreds of schools may be closed, reopened as new schools and then closed again.

You always here this jive statement from corporate ed deformers and charter school cheerleaders when they're talking about schools: "We know what works."

Most of them mean busting the teachers union and firing "bad teachers."

But we really do know what works in education and what has worked for a long, long time:

Small class sizes, individualized instruction via a real teacher and not a Joel Klein computer program and mastery design courses rather than endless standardized test prep actually helps students learn.

Too bad in the era of data-driven accountability, in the era of the Bushes and the Obamas and the Rhees and Kleins and Spellings and Paiges and Duncans, there is no time or money to experiment with methods that actually work to improve education.

These people are too busy branding teachers "bad" and schools "failing" and looking for ways to shut the whole system down and privatize it.


Because the agenda in education reform is not improve schools or help students.

It is to privatize the last great public institution that hasn't been privatized yet and profit from it.

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

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

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

Just 23% say the schools have improved.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bloomberg Works To Complete Destruction Of Public School System

Bloomberg and Klein always had one goal in mind when it came to public schools - blow the old system up so that it could never be replicated.

That's why in the early days of their reign, Klein and Bloomberg reorganized the NYCDOE four times - exploding the old districts into regions and then cohorts and consortia and now whatever the hell they're calling things.

On one level, they were trying to figure out what they thought would work better than the old BOE structures. But on another level, they just wanted to destroy the structure of the old system so that whoever came after them could not pick up the pieces and put it back together again.

This is why they have closed so many schools as well, especially the large zoned schools.

Those schools were the center pieces of the old system, so if you want to blow up the old system completely you have to go after those schools.

Since 2002, Bloomberg and his various chancellors have closed most of those large zoned schools and replaced them with either smaller schools or charter schools.

But the pace of destruction has not been fast enough for Bloomberg as he realizes his Reign of Error is coming to an end. In addition, the Cathie Black debacle took him and the DOE off track for a few months, further requiring an acceleration of their creative destruction plans.

This is why Bloomberg is putting the pedal to the metal this year on school closures - closing a total of 49 schools - and school openings - opening a total of 80 next year.

If Bloomberg gets his way on the 23 SIG schools and closes them this summer, he will have closed 140 schools since he took office.

Bill Thompson said at an education forum yesterday that he has heard rumors from people in the DOE and from politicians in the legislature that Bloomberg plans on closing 75 schools next year.

Bloomberg has already told us in his State if the City address in January that he plans on opening many new charter schools and small schools before he leaves office, wanting to have over 1800 schools in the system by 2013.

Since he took office, he has opened 589 schools (though some of those new Bloomberg schools have later been closed for "failing".)

To what end is all of this destruction and creation?

Bloomberg says it is to give city voters school choice.

But underlying all of this is the same philosophy Bloomberg brought when he came into office and gave the keys to the system to Joel Klein - destroying what came before so that it can never be put back together again.

Profit for Bloomberg's cronies in the technology, education, and testing worlds is another motive, of course.

Reformers fear there will be rollback when the next mayor comes into office, no matter who it is, because that mayor will not have the same animosity for the old system and hostility toward teachers and the UFT that this mayor has.

This was why they were so angry over the Black chancellorship - that debacle took precious time away from Bloomberg's destruction of the school system and put him on the defensive rather than the offensive on education matters.

This was also why I had hoped Black would stick around for a while longer.

But Black is gone and Bloomberg has his puppet Walcott to do his dirty work and the next year and a half is going to be a particularly destructive time for students, teachers and schools.

When we get to 2014 and the end of Bloomberg's Reign of Error, we will just have to see what is left standing, pick up the pieces of what has been broken and try and make this system human.

Because currently it is a corporatist's wet dream - a top-down managed, fear-based, data-driven system beset by chaos and destruction.

Bloomberg and Walcott can put a happy face on it all they want.

The corporate news media can mislead the public into thinking Bloomberg's reforms have worked all they want to.

The reality is, Bloomberg's legacy has been nothing more than the chaos and destruction he brought to the system.

He used to tout test score gains.

Those disappeared when the state admitted the tests were too easy.

He used to claim he had closed the achievement gap.

That claim disappeared along with the test score gains.

He claims graduation rates have soared since he took office, but the number of NYC grads needing remediation when they get to college suggests graduation rates are phonied up as much as the testing data was.

Really, his only accomplishment under mayoral control has been blowing up the old system, replacing it with the constant churn of chaos and destruction and enriching his cronies in the testing, charter school, and media worlds with all that yummy yummy education money in the form of hundreds of millions of dollars in no bid contracts.

Judge Orders Mayor Data Report On 911 System Released

Mayor Bloomberg claims that a report on New York City's troubled 911 emergency system shouldn't be released to the public because it contains errors and is an unfinished document.

The report shows that response times for the city's emergency services have gotten longer even as the city has spent $2 billion dollars on the 911 system. The report also says that the city has misled the public on response times by cutting 33% of the total minutes from the overall response time.

Bloomberg says the report is not actually finished and the information contained within could mislead the public about the project, which has gone $1 billion dollars over budget.

But as Accountable Teacher pointed out here, this same mayor had no problem releasing the Teacher Data Reports for 18,000 NYC public school teachers even though those documents had a maximum margin of error of 87% and were used to mislead the public about the efficacy and skill of NYC schoolteachers.

But somehow what's good for teachers in this city isn't good for the mayor of this city.

Until today, that is:

Mayor Bloomberg was ordered yesterday to release a scathing analysis of the city’s trouble-plagued 911 and emergency-dispatch systems.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron, in a stinging rebuke to the mayor, told city lawyers they have one week to turn over a copy of the so-called “911 CPR” analysis and all drafts of the document.

Engoron said City Hall can’t keep the report from taxpayers who funded it.

The bombshell study, first reported last week by The Post, shows the city’s 911 and emergency-dispatch systems are getting worse at handling emergency calls despite $2 billion spent to improve them.

The judge actually compared Bloomberg to Nixon in his written statement:

The judge compared the mayor’s efforts to hide the document to former President Richard Nixon’s efforts to stonewall Watergate probers.

“Nixon kept claiming executive privilege . . . and the public and the courts didn’t buy it,” Justice Engoron declared. “We are talking about much the same thing.”

Engoron dismissed the city’s arguments, claiming the report, “belongs to everybody. I don’t think we have nuclear secrets here.”

Bloomberg certainly shows a Nixonian flair in how he runs this city - with an iron fist, bludgeoning his enemies with his money and his media empire (or the media empire of his fellow oligarchs, Zuckerman and Murdoch), using his police force as his "own army" to enforce his corporatist rule.

And just as Nixon lied about the Vietnam War, lied about Watergate, lied about pretty much everything, Bloomberg lies about the crime stats, the education stats, the recycling stats and now the response times of the FDNY and EMS services.

George Carlin once said that he believed not one thing his government told him - not one.

The same strategy should be used when viewing Bloomberg's public statements and city data.

Everything is skewed to make himself look good and make his "enemies" look bad.

And even when a judge orders him to release the report and compares his attempts to hide the data to Nixon's attempts to hide Watergate evidence, Bloomberg STILL defends his cover-up:

Later, Bloomberg again defended his stance. “I don’t know how any government would be able to function if you had to put out every single paper even at the beginning of a study and all through the study,” Bloomberg said.

The NY Post says the city's lawyers haven't decided whether to appeal.

I suspect there will be an appeal to this decision and Bloomberg will try and delay the release of the report for as long as he can so it does as little damage as possible to his legacy and reputation while he is still in office and people are paying attention to him.

But had this been Teacher Data Reports with a MOE of 87%, this report would have been released today, packaged in a bow and hand delivered to the hacks at the Times, News, Post, Observer, Wall Street Journal, et al.

Because this is a Mayor Data Report by an independent auditor, Bloomberg is trying to keep it from seeing the light of day.

What are you afraid of Mr. Mayor?

It seems you only believe in accountability for teachers and schools, not for yourself, not for your administration and not for the numerous projects you have wasted billions on - like CityTime, like the FDNY GPS systems, the NYC Housing Authority computer system, like the 911 upgrade.