Preet Bharara Launches Probe Into Homicide At State Prison

This news should throw chills into Cuomo:

ALBANY — U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara is investigating the death of an inmate at the state's Fishkill prison.

The Manhattan-based federal prosecutor said in a statement that a joint probe with Dutchess County District Attorney William Grady is investigating the death of Samuel Harrell, who died after several prison guards beat him, according to affidavits from more than a dozen other prisoners first reported by The New York Times.

State officials announced Tuesday that Fishkill was getting a new superintendent whose mandate would include reviewing “all safety concerns” in the building where Harrell died. The Correctional Association, an advocacy group with a legislative mandate to inspect state prisons, had called on the U.S. Department of Justice to launch a probe of conditions in the state's prison system, citing a “pervasive culture of violence and abuse.”

Spokespeople for the state's Department of Corrections and Community Supervision did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

The NY Times has reported over the past few weeks that there have been 60+ abuse allegations levied against guards at Clinton Correction Facility since June as well as allegations that a group of corrections officers known as the "Beat Up Squad" had beaten a prisoner to death at Fishkill prison, then covered the murder up by claiming he died of a complications from synthetic marijuana use.

Other than the Times and the Times Union, the abuse allegations and homicide were ignored by news media around the state.

The Daily News ignored the abuse allegations and the homicide even as they blasted Bill de Blasio and his handling of Rikers Island two days in a row on the front cover of the paper.

Same goes for New York politicos - for example, Criminal Justice Reform Warrior Hakeem Jeffries, who had just given Cuomo an award from the Urban League for his "leadership" on criminal justice reform issues, completely ignored the Clinton/Fishkill allegations.

With Bharara picking up the probe into the Fishkill homicide, the story ought to be ignored no more.

It's a big story and it needs to get the same attention that the Rikers abuse has gotten.

We'll see if it does.

Given that the story affects Cuomo and not de Blasio, I have a feeling it won't get the attention it deserves from either media or politicos.

That's how things have gone so far and I see no reason for any of that to change.

Hope I'm wrong - what's going on in the state prison system is horrendous, needs to be stopped and those responsible need to be brought to justice.

Daily News Applauds NY Tests Rigged To Show NY Schools Are Failing

The editorial page at Daily News cheers for failing test scores:

The squeaky-wheel parents and accountability-fearing teachers unions who have rebelled against Common Core exams claim to be shielding students from the distortions of high-stakes testing.

What they’re really at war with is reality.

New York’s exams have delivered urgent but inconvenient truths about our public schools’ failures. That’s the conclusion of a powerful new report by two advocacy organizations, Achieve and the Collaborative for Student Success.

The groups looked at state proficiency scores in reading and math — and lined them up against results from the federal National Assessment for Educational Progress, widely considered the gold standard for measuring achievement.

In most of the nation, states systematically deceive parents and teachers about what students know. But New York earned the honor of being the nation’s top “truth teller” — with exams that paint an honest picture of what kids are learning.

That’s something to celebrate. Unless you can’t handle the truth.

Let's talk about "handling the truth."

Here's a Diane Ravitch post from August 2013 on what the NAEP "proficiency" score really means:

NAEP has three levels: “Advanced” is the highest (only about 3-8% of students reach this level). “Proficient” is defined by the National Assessment Governing Board as “solid academic performance for each grade assessed. This is a very high level of academic achievement.”). “Basic” is “partial mastery” of the skills and knowledge needed at each grade tested.

“Proficient” on NAEP is what most people would consider to be the equivalent of an A. When I was a member of the NAEP governing board, we certainly considered proficient to be very high level achievement.

New York’s city and state officials have decided that NAEP’s “proficiency” level should be the passing mark.

They don’t understand that a student who is proficient on NAEP has attained “a very high level of academic achievement.”

Any state that expects all or most students to achieve an A on the state tests is setting most students up for failure.

If students need to reach “proficiency” just to pass, there will obviously be a very large number of students who “fail.”

B students and C students will fail.

The NAEP achievement levels have always been controversial. Many researchers and scholarly bodies have said they were unreasonably high and thus “fundamentally flawed.” That term “fundamentally flawed” occurs again and again in the literature of NAEP critics. This article by James Harvey is a good summary of these arguments.

Some on this blog have asked whether NAEP is a criterion-referenced test, and the answer is no. A criterion-referenced test is one that almost everyone can pass if they master the requisite skills. A test to get a drivers’ license is a criterion-referenced test. Anyone who studies the laws can pass the written test and qualify for a drivers’ license.

NAEP is not a criterion-referenced test. Massachusetts is the only state where as much as 50% of the students (and only in fourth grade) are rated proficient in reading. The NAEP tests are not designed to be criterion-referenced tests; they are a mix of questions that are easy, moderate, and difficult.

The achievement levels were created when Checker Finn was chair of NAGB. I think they are defensible if people understand that the achievement levels do not represent grade levels. If the public wants a measure of “grade level,” then “basic” probably comes closest to grade level. “Proficient” is not grade level; as NAGB documents state, it represents “a very high level of academic achievement.”

More important, the NAEP achievement levels were never intended to be measures of grade level, and New York officials are wrong to interpret them as such, especially when they mistakenly use “proficient” as the passing mark.

Any state that uses NAEP “proficient” as its definition of “grade level” is making a huge mistake; it will set the bar unreasonably high and will mislabel many students and misjudge the quality of many schools.

And that is exactly what happened in the New York testing fiasco.

If the state sticks to its present course of using NAEP “proficient” as its passing mark, it will encourage criticism of the Common Core standards as unrealistic and stoke parental outrage about Common Core testing.

People know their children, and they know their own school. The politicians may convince them that American education is floundering (even if it is not), but they can’t convince them that their own child and their own school are “failing” when parents know from their own experience that it is not true.

The corporate reformers now using the Shock Doctrine to bash the schools and disparage students may find that their tactic has backfired. They succeed only in adding fuel to the growing movement to stop the misuse of standardized testing.

What is happening in New York is likely to undermine public confidence in the state’s highest education officials and create new converts to the Opt-Out of Testing movement.

The Shock Doctrine may be a boomerang that helps to bring down the madness of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core, the Pearson empire, and every other part of the reformy enterprise.

New York may have inadvertently created by the most powerful recruiting tool for the Opt Out movement.

Ravitch was quite prescient that New York's rigging of the Common Core exams would create a powerful recruiting tool for the Opt Out movement.

It certainly has done that.

As for not being able to handle the truth about failure, the editors at the Daily News really ought to look into the mirror.

The paper is losing $30 million a year and Cablevision just pulled back a $1 dollar bid to buy the paper because an internal analysis showed they would still lose a ton of money after purchasing the DN for just a buck.

The Daily News should spend less time trying to sell the new Common Core tests as accurate pictures of reality and more time trying to sell copies of the Daily News.

The data (i.e., $30 million a year in losses) does not lie.

Daily News Carries Andrew Cuomo's Education Reform Water

No links to these stories (they don't need the extra traffic) but the Daily News is doing a five days "New York's Schools In Crisis" extravaganza that is intended to help Governor Cuomo push through his education reform agenda - including "toughened" teacher evaluations, a lifted charter cap, more money for charter schools and state takeover of "failing" schools and districts.

The stories use the same frame that Families For Excellent Schools uses for their "Schools In Crisis" meme, the same frame Governor Cuomo has used in speeches and his budget proposal - public schools suck and it's the fault of the teachers.

They use the new Common Core test scores - the ones the state deliberately set for 70% failing rates - to prove that NYC schools are failing and something dramatic needs to be done.

The stories have parents directly blaming the teachers at their children's schools for why the scores are so low, why the schools are struggling (one parent blames her child's public school for "destroying" his whole outlook on school and life.)

This is "New York Schools In Crisis" extravaganza isn't journalism, it's advocacy intended to push a set of policies the owner of the Daily News, Mort Zuckerman, and his editors want.

The DN claims this is "comprehensive" look at what's working in the system and what isn't, but as far as I could tell, this was a propaganda piece to highlight the worst parts of the system and ignore everything else.

The Daily News itself is a newspaper in crisis - it loses $20 million a year and is up for sale - so this ed deform extravaganza is just another way they're trying to drive some traffic, sell some papers and pick up a little advertising revenue.

It certainly is NOT a fair and honest look at the city school system, however - not when they use the same misleading stats that FES and Cuomo does (like the rigged Common Core tests) and ignore the many great schools in this system to focus on the one's they call most "dire," all in order to prove the system is failing and needs to be dramatically overhauled.

Make no mistake, this five part series coming right as budget talks in Albany are heating up and just two weeks before the deadline for an on-time budget is meant to help Governor Cuomo get his education reforms enshrined into law.

If We Applied Education Reform Logic To Newspapers...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Certainly the free market has.

A Tale Of Two Papers

DailyNews Editorial:

The grand jury’s vote to exonerate the police officer whose chokehold killed Eric Garner on Staten Island has glaring earmarks of a gross miscarriage of justice.

The ruling is painfully far harder to understand than the Missouri grand jury’s decision not to indict for the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

To a large degree, the evidence against Officer Daniel Pantaleo was widely scrutinized by the public in the form of a on-scene video posted to the Internet by the Daily News. The image of Pantaleo wrestling Garner to the ground with his arm around Garner’s neck was horrifying.

Even granting that a cop has wide latitude in using force to make an arrest, Pantaleo’s sudden aggressiveness was unnecessary. The fact that it entailed a chokehold only reinforced the excessive quality of his actions.

After the medical examiner found that a chokehold and chest compression led to Garner’s death, the connection between cause and effect seemed enough to many people not only to indict but to convict Pantaleo.

Deep, intense skepticism about the grand jury’s ruling is fully warranted — while recognizing that no one other than the panel and Staten Island prosecutors have reviewed all the evidence and matched the facts against the law.

Bob McManus column:

BLAME ONLY THE MAN WHO TRAGICALLY DECIDED TO RESIST

Eric Garner and Michael Brown had much in common, not the least of which was this: On the last day of their lives, they made bad decisions. Especially bad decisions.

Each broke the law — petty offenses, to be sure, but sufficient to attract the attention of the police.
And then — tragically, stupidly, fatally, inexplicably — each fought the law.

The law won, of course, as it almost always does.

This was underscored yet again Wednesday when a Staten Island grand jury chose not to indict any of the arresting officers in the death in police custody of Garner last July.

Just as a grand jury last week declined to indict the police officer who shot a violently resisting Michael Brown to death in Ferguson, Mo., in August.

Demagoguery rises to an art form in such cases — because, again, the police generally win. (Though not always, as a moment’s reflection before the Police Memorial in lower Manhattan will underscore.) And because those who advocate for cop-fighters are so often such accomplished beguilers.

They cast these tragedies as, if not outright murder, then invincible evidence of an enduringly racist society.

No such thing, as a matter of fact. Virtually always, these cases represent sad, low-impact collisions of cops and criminals — routine in every respect except for an outlier conclusion.

The Garner case is textbook.

How Does Eva Moskowitz Not Make The Daily News' "50 Most Powerful Women In NYC" List?

The list is here.

Why isn't Eva Moskowitz on it?

Hillary Clinton, Kristen Gillibrand, and Chirlane McCray are on it.

Carmen Farina is on it.

Emma Wolfe, de Blasio's chief aide, is on it.

Kathyrn Wilde is on it.

I get those names.

A bunch of women who run Fortune 500 companies are on the list.

I get those.

And then there are women listed that make you scratch your head.

Reshma Saujani, perennial loser for political office, is on it.

The head of Divamoms.com is on it.

All right, maybe these women are "powerful" in their own right.

For instance, no one is more full of shit than Saujani, yet somehow she manages to cobble together a public persona that kinda hides that.

Still, I don't understand why Moskowitz didn't make the list.

Can there be a more powerful person in education in NY State today than Eva Moskowitz?

She forced a mayor to his knees in a fight over charter school co-locations, got the governor to put into the budget a law that makes the city either find space for all future charter schools or pay the rent for them, and is on the cusp of opening 14 more charter schools over the next year (all of which will have space provided or rent paid for by the NYCDOE.)

While Eva no longer has a bat phone to the NYCDOE chancellor's office anymore, as she did during the Bloomberg Years, she has other ways of getting exactly what she wants.

That Moskowitz isn't on the list but the head of divamoms.com, a bunch of actresses, a comedian,  and Linda Stasi are is as absurd as the need to promote the "50 Most Powerful Women In NYC" list so prominently on the Daily News website.

I guess we're in the dog days of summer already.

We must be - not only is the DN promoting this kind of "news," but I'm blogging about it!

NY Post Starts The Attacks On Teacher Tenure In New York In Earnest

I'm not going to link to the story because it deserves as few hits as possible.

But here's the gist - the Post has a prominent story attacking teacher tenure today that complains about the following:

State law requires that an independent hearing officer decide whether a tenured teacher is guilty of charges and, if so, set the punishment.

Each termination case, including witness testimony, cross-examination and arguments, can drag on for months and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Of 133 educators taken to trial since 2013, the city Department of Education has gotten just 50, or 37.6 percent, fired, it said. In 77 cases, hearing officers found the employees guilty of poor performance or wrongdoing, but imposed lesser penalties. Six cases were dismissed.

The Post wants a system where there is no due process for teachers, but even the Postie article acknowledges that when there are bad teachers on the payroll:

Michael Mazzariello, a former chief prosecutor of DOE teachers, faults administrators.

“The principals say we need to get rid of these teachers, but it’s the principals who gave them tenure and rated them ‘satisfactory’ year after year,” he said.

Clearly the attack on teacher tenure in New York is beginning its earnest propaganda phase.

You can bet the Daily News won't be too far behind with another in their series of PERV TEACHER stories and Campbell Brown and some of the other professional teacher concern troll class will be out in full force using a handful of examples of teachers engaging in unethical and/or criminal behavior to push the idea that all teachers are unethical and criminal and therefore not worthy of any due process protections at work.

After the propaganda phase, they'll put pressure on the politicians to gut teacher protections at the state level.

Given that Sheriff Andy Cuomo is engaged in what is turning out to be a real political race for re-election, I am doubtful he'll take the tenure battle up this year, not publicly in statements and certainly not politically since the legislative season ends in a few days.

But you can bet after he's re-elected that he'll be more amenable to the reformers' desires and I can envision a movement here in New York State where some in the political class start talking about gutting teacher due process protections, using both the California teacher tenure case and the propaganda that's coming from the Post and Daily News as cover.

Looking Forward To Daily News Investigation Of In-House Grading Of Regents Exams At Charter Schools

There was a Daily News story this morning that alleged grade inflation on ELA Regents exams, reporting that scores "plummeted" in 2013 when the exams were no longer graded by teachers in-house but were instead sent to centralized locations where they were graded by other teachers.

I posted about that story this morning in a piece entitled Daily News Misses A Big Part Of ELA Regents Score Plummet Story, raising two points that were ignored in the News story:

1. The Regents/SED changed the grading charts from 2012 to 2013, raising the number of correct responses required on the multiple choice component as well as the scores needed on the writing components in order for students to pass the exam. The difficulty of the reading passages and vocabulary used in the multiple choice questions were also increased. These changes to the test contributed in part to the drop in scores.

2. Regents exams are still graded in-house at charter schools. If there was grade inflation at traditional public schools as the DN reported, it behooves them to now take a look at charters where they are still grading their own exams.

There was undoubtedly grade inflation at some schools, including the ones named in the DN article like the School For Excellence where scores fell 50 percentage points when exams went from being graded in-house to a centralized location. 

That's an outrageous drop and is pretty clearly a sign of a massaging of stats - something that is not isolated to schools, btw, as crime stats, emergency response times, fire stats and jobs programs numbers were also manipulated during the Bloomberg Era as City Hall put a lot of pressure on those below to consistently get "better" stats.

Nonetheless it's wrong, it shouldn't have been done and kudos to the Daily News for pointing it out and naming some names of schools with big drops in scores.

I now look forward to the Daily News doing a big expose on charter schools where the Regents exams are still graded in-house.

Considering the emphasis the charter industry puts on test scores and making comparisons via those scores to traditional public schools, they might want to take a look to see how many charter schools are massaging their statistics during in-house grading sessions.

You can bet there's some.

I won't hold my breath waiting for that charter school/Regents exam grade inflation story however.

Because the Daily News has an agenda when it comes to education issues and that agenda is almost always pro-charter/anti-traditional public school.

And you can see that in just how this grade inflation story was framed, both by what they put into it and what they left out.

A fair story would have noted that charters still grade Regents exam in-house and reported on the changes to the grading chart by SED.

The DN story didn't do either and that's why it feels like another hammer job in a long line of DN hammer jobs on traditional public schools and traditional public school teachers.

Daily News Misses A Big Part Of ELA Regents Score Plummet Story

The Daily News claims cheating teachers were the main reason scores on the 2013 ELA Regents exam fell:

Scores on English Regents exams for high schoolers plummeted when the city cracked down on grade-fudging teachers, a Daily News analysis shows.

Thousands of public school students failed the high-stakes state tests in 2013 after the city instituted new grading rules to prevent score inflation.

A stunning 373 schools out of 490 saw their passing rates drop after new guidelines barred teachers from grading tests administered at their own school.

Students must pass the test with a 65 or higher to graduate.

Overall, the number of students who failed English exams jumped from 27% in 2012 to 35% in 2013, a statistical leap not reflected in the other nine Regents subjects. At 73 schools the passing rate plummeted by more than 20 percentage points.

...

City Education Department spokeswoman Devora Kaye said that she didn’t believe the grading crackdown was responsible for the drop in scores. Algebra and History tests also used open-ended questions, she said, yet scores didn’t decline in those subjects .

David Bloomfield, an education professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Grad Center, was willing to take a stab at identifying the cause of the drop.

“It appears that more objective scoring resulted in a higher failure rate,” he said.

A reason why the grades fell that never gets mentioned in the Daily News article?

The Regents changed the grading chart so that students needed to get more multiple choice questions right and score higher on the three written components in order to pass.

I covered this back in January for the 2014 Regents exam:

Brutal ELA Regents Exam Grading Chart From NYSED

Okay, they're looking for a high failure rate at SED on the ELA Regents exam, that's for sure.

Students need to get 20 out of 25 multiple choice questions right in order to get only a 6 on their writing component.

Given how hard the passages were, I suspect we are going to see lots of 6's on the writing components.

That means we're going to get lots of failures.

The chart is even harder than last August's when students had to get 19 out of 25 multiple choice right in order to pass with a 6 out of 10 on their writing components.

That was a brutal test too.

But IMO the Regents and the SED saved the best for the latest - a truly brutal test with a brutal scoring chart.

It's not an accident that as teacher evals have been tied to Regents scores, the charts and tests have gotten harder each time.

Commissioner King, Regents Chancellor Tisch and Governor Cuomo have a political agenda here - to prove that public schools are failing and public school teachers are failures.

The children of the state just happen to be collateral damage in all of this.

I have some students from a remedial class who have failed the exam three or four times, depending on whether they took it over the summer or not.

It is really difficult to see any of them passing today's exam with the scoring chart handed down from King and Tisch.

I don't know what to say to them when they say "You mean I have to spend another five months preparing for this exam I can't pass?" 

And I covered this back in June 2013 as well:

The ELA Regents Exam: Set Up By The Regents And The NYSED To Fail Both Students And Teachers

There are two good pieces on the brutal scoring chart that the NYSED and Regents are using for the 2013 June ELA Regents exam.

Gotham Schools covered the story yesterday:

Bronx Center for Science and Math Assistant Principal Stephen Seltzer sent a letter to State Education Commissioner John King expressing frustration about the new conversion chart that has made it more difficult for students to pass the English Regents exam.

Seltzer writes that “the rubrics and conversion charts must be aligned and consistent, and both should be made available when teachers are preparing students, not at the time of the exam.”

In the letter, sent Thursday, Seltzer writes that there is a four-point difference in the June 2011 and June 2013 conversion charts. He gives the following example to illustrate his point:

A student who scored a 23 in the multiple-choice and a 7 in the writing received a 79 in 2011 but a 75 in 2013; a student who scored a 21 on the multiple-choice and a 5 on the writing passed with a 65 in 2011 but failed with a 60 in 2013.

The change to the conversion tables was made without corresponding changes in rubrics, which makes it more difficult for teachers to identify where students’ must improve if they have to take the test again, Seltzer writes in the letter.

“A child can receive a higher raw score, meaning they’ve answered more questions correct, but receive a lower actual grade,” said Bronx Center Principal Ed Tom. “You’ve technically done better on the exam, but the score will reflect a lower grade.”

...

Tom said his school usually has about a 90 percent passing rate on the ELA Regents exams. But this year the school is at a 75 percent passing rate. Tom said he looked at individual student grades and the numbers don’t seem to make sense.

He said a number of students scored well on the multiple choice section, but they struggled to received credit on the short answer and essay sections, which require human grading.

“As we’re looking child by child, we’re noticing that it simply doesn’t make sense that a kid would know so much information to score almost perfectly on the multiple choice and not be able to write a short response or essay to get any points,” Tom said.

My Life As A NYC Teacher posted about the same issue:

As an ELA teacher, I have a stake in the results of these tests - stake through the heart that is.  Since teachers are now going to be evaluated based on student performance on these tests, we can be fired as a result of these results.  For this reason, we English teachers here at Jonathan Levin H.S. in the Bronx just took a look at the scoring charts for the June 2013 English exam and the January 2013 exam.  What we found is interesting indeed.  Here they are.

June 2013 ELA Scoring Chart

January 2013 ELA Scoring Chart

In June 2013 if a student scored 16 on the multiple choice section and 7 on the writing sections, the student failed with a 61.  However if that same student had been lucky enough to take the test last January 2013, scoring 16 on the multiple choice and 7 on the writing would have yielded a passing score of 65.

DOE formula #1: Fewer students passing = more teachers fired.

Going back to Aug. 2012, June 2012 and Jan. 2012, we find the following:

                        Multiple Choice          Writing           Score
Aug. 2012:               16                          7                     65
June 2012                 16                          7                     65
Jan. 2012                  16                          7                     68

In other words, the June 2013 ELA Regents exam is set up to fail more students than in the past.  Coincidentally, New York State has just "adopted" - read: had shoved down our throats - a new evaluation system that the UFT, rather than condemning, seems to be endorsing.  See Chapter 52: Open Season on Teachers.  Under this system, the "value" of a teacher is tied directly to student performance.

DOE formula #2: more failing students =  more fired teachers.

And that really is what all this is about - firing more teachers and being able to use the scores in the news media to "prove" that there are many "failing" schools and "bad" teachers as a reason for why we need more corporate education reformers like charter schools and online schools.

It is not a mistake that the chart has gotten so harsh in the year that accountability has been moved from the school district and the school to the individual teacher via the Cuomo/Tisch/King APPR teacher evaluation system.

Unless the NYSED and the Regents get hammered in the press by parents for the rig job they've pulled with this scoring chart, you can expect the August ELA Regents scoring chart to be as bad.

The fix is in with this scoring chart and the scores are going to plummet accordingly.

Expect King and Tisch to wring their hands in the media about all the bad teachers and failing schools and the need for more reforminess as a result of the Regents scores - even though they're the ones who ensured the scores would plummet by rigging the scoring chart.

It's a shame the journalists at the Daily News focus on grade inflation as the sole reason for falling scores.

But if you're a teacher in the NYC school system and you pay even a little attention to the press coverage, you know the DN always has a "Blame Teachers" first mentality.

Was there some grade inflation when teachers graded tests in-house?

Sure, there was some.

Were there some schools where grade inflation was the name of the game during Regents time?

During the high stakes Bloomberg Era where schools got closed based almost solely on test scores, you bet.

The Daily News manages to find many of those schools and name them.

The same thing happened with the fire stats, the emergency response times and the crime stats under Bloomberg, btw - fudging on the numbers because of the pressure from above for constant improvement.

With all of that said, scores on the ELA Regents exam at many NYC schools didn't "plummet" when the in-house grading was ended.

They went down slightly.

And keep in mind that at the same time they were changing the in-house grading, the state was making the exam more difficult., including raising the reading difficulty and complexity on the passages, the vocabulary needed to get the multiple choice questions right, and, as I posted above, the number of correct multiple choice answers as well as scores on the writing components.

Those changes had something to do with the scores falling as well.

Too bad the Daily News journalists either didn't know about that part of the story or didn't care about it because it didn't fit their story frame.

Oh, and one more thing:

You know where they still do in-house grading of Regents exams?

At charter schools, that's where.

Somehow the traditional public school-hating Daily News couldn't bring itself to take on that part of the grade inflation story.

The DN is certain grade inflation took place in traditional public schools, but as usual with the DN, the charters get a free pass.

Classic "Blame Teachers" journalism from the Daily News - but only teachers at traditional public schools.

Defending The De Blasio Family

I'm not sure Chirlane McCray, the wife of Mayor Bill de Blasio, made the wisest choice when she opened up about the following to New York Magazine:

In a lengthy cover story in this week’s New York magazine, Mr. de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray ,opened up about some of the difficulties she faced adjusting to motherhood after her daughter Chiara was born.

“I was 40 years old. I had a life. Especially with Chiara—will we feel guilt forever more? Of course, yes. But the truth is, I could not spend every day with her,” she told the magazine. “I didn’t want to do that. I looked for all kinds of reason not to do it. … It took a long time for me to get into ‘I’m taking care of kids,’ and what that means.”

As Jill Colvin at Politicker reported, the tabloids were just brutal this morning:

The New York Post zeroed in on the passage, slapping the story on its wood under the headline “I WAS A BAD MOM!”

“New York City’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, didn’t much care for her new role as a mother after daughter Chiara was born — and looked for any excuse to keep away from her little girl,” the tabloid charged. “In a startlingly frank confession, Mayor de Blasio’s wife says she was unable to embrace motherhood and initially neglected Chiara, who last year dropped the bombshell that she was in treatment for abusing booze and pot. … The disclosure — bound to horrify most moms — shatters the carefully crafted image of de Blasio’s close-knit family, which helped vault him into office.”

The Daily News offered a similar–though less negative take–headlining its story, “Didn’t want to be a mom.”

Appearing visibly shaken by the remarks, Mr. de Blasio slammed both papers for their treatment of his wife’s comments.

“It really suggests a tremendous misunderstanding of what it is to be a parent, what it is to be a mother. I love my wife very deeply and she is an extraordinary mother. She always has been. She very much wanted to have children, which is evident in the New York magazine article, if anyone cares to read it and not caricature,” he said, heaping praise on her ability to handle intense family pressures.

“I over the years have marveled at her ability to take care of our two kids with such love, while having to do–in the middle of all that–the incredibly difficult work of helping both our mothers as they came to ends of their lives, while oftentimes having to have a full-time job,” he said.

Two things to say here:

First, I'm not surprised by the story McCray told New York Magazine about her troubles adjusting to her parenting role.

When McCray's and de Blasio's daughter, Chiara, announced last year that she had struggled with drug and alcohol problems, you knew then that something had happened in the past within the de Blasio household that was at odds with the P.R. image displayed during the campaign.

As someone who comes from a family where people have struggled with drugs and alcohol, I can tell you that few kids pick up a drink or a drug and begin using compulsively unless there's some deep, deep pain there that they're trying to anesthetize.

That said, I can't think of any family unit I have ever known where there wasn't some mistakes made by the parents that hurt the children and later needed to be worked out.

I dunno, maybe you know the perfect family where that didn't happen.

But I'm not surprised that the de Blasio family wasn't like that nor do I think less of them for it.

In fact, I think more of Chirlane McCray for being open about her flaws and her failures in the past as a parent and I think even more of Chiara de Blasio for getting sober as a teen and trying to work through the emotional and spiritual pain that brought her to addiction in the first place.

That's my human response to this story.

Second thing to say:

Putting my political observer's hat on, however, all I have to say is, Mayor de Blasio has got to get some decent P.R. people hired to keep a cap on the negative stories that spew out of this administration like water at an open fire hydrant in July.

It's great to be open and honest, but I wish Chirlane McCray had chosen a later date to get this open and honest with New York Magazine.

There have been way too many negative stories already out of the de Blasio administration since January, and now here's another one they have to deal with.

These are unforced errors, but they add up to real political damage.

Daily News Goes After The Little Charter School Crooks But Leaves Big Ones Like Moskowitz And Kenny Alone

One of the lines you sometimes here from charter school proponents and supporters - charters must be free from the same regulations as public schools so they can do their magical "innovation" thing.

Of course a lack of regulations also can lead to this:

On a quiet Ditmas Park side street, taxpayers shell out $2.3 million a year to lease space from the Catholic Church for a charter school called Brooklyn Dreams.

What’s shrouded in a cloak of secrecy is whether the arrangement is a good deal for the taxpayer.
That’s because a for-profit firm called National Heritage Academies acts as a middleman, renting space from the church at rates it calls “private.” Then NHA sublets the space to Brooklyn Dreams.
The firm charges the school $46.99 per square foot — much more than the $14.25 to $25.50 per square foot the city typically pays to lease school space from the church.

In effect, the for-profit company is charging the taxpayers at a far higher rate— in some cases more than double — than what the city would normally pay to rent space for public schools.

If Brooklyn Dreams paid the church directly at the city’s top rate, the city would still save another $1 million a year — money that could go to aid students. Neither NHA nor the church would say how much NHA was paying the diocese.

“We are not releasing terms of these private contracts,” said Matt Maguire, an NHA spokesman, also declining to discuss a nearly identical sublet deal they have with another charter school, Brooklyn Scholars. NHA charges that school $37.15 per square foot.

Maguire justified the “private” deal by saying the buildings were “empty and fallow” and NHA “invested millions of dollars to make them a suitable environment for teaching and learning.”

What troubles fiscal watchdogs is that while NHA dubs this arrangement “private,” every penny involved is taxpayer money.

According to the Daily News article, taxpayers foot the bill for 70 charter schools that are leasing space from private entities (and this is before the Cuomo-directed law that forces the city to pay rent for all charters or give them space in public school buildings.)

Acting as a middleman for charter schools is turning into a lucrative business for some:

Each year dozens of for-profit vendors are paid by charters, including accountants, financial advisors and real estate brokers. One company, the Manhattan-based Charter School Business Management Inc., has experienced 176% growth since 2009, with revenue growing from $1.4 million to $3.8 million in 2012.

With little regulation and oversight of charters, it's difficult to know how these contracts are awarded or if there's any conflicts of interest involved.

Daniel Dromm, chairman of the education committee in the City Council, wants to shine a little light on this process - and for once, the Daily News seems to want to help.

Usually the News attacks anybody who questions charter schools in any way, but this time around, they seem ready to expose the charter school "middlemen" practices and corruption by charter boards - stuff like this:

The News found a pattern of weak oversight makes it difficult to know if taxpayers are getting the best bang for their buck with the city’s 183 charter schools.

In recent years city charter schools have endured a multitude of embarrassing incidents involving conflicts of interest and financial chicanery.

Charter boards have hired relatives, put themselves on the payroll or paid principals lavishly. Charter business managers have run up personal expenses on school credit cards. Auditors have found schools that simply couldn’t account for how they’d spent hundreds of thousands of public dollars.

Some schools use their tax dollars to hire non-profit or for-profit firms to manage their affairs or rent them space. Some of these firms have been criticized for inflating rent or charging exorbitant fees for services that are difficult to quantify. Some have lent out money to the schools at excessive interest rates.

Of course, wait until some of the bigger charters start to get some scrutiny - let's see if they're still on board when Eva Moskowitz and Success Academies or Deborah Kenny and Harlem Village Academies is on the other end of the sunlight.

They seem happy to go at the little charter school crooks, but a little less eager to scrutinize Eva Moskowitz or Deborah Kenny and their business practices, salaries, etc.

I'm glad to see them go after charter school corruption here in the city, but they need to take a closer look at the big charter operators like Success, KIPP, Harlem Village, etc. too.

Surprised These Poll Numbers Aren't Worse

A new Quinnipiac poll shows Mayor de Blasio under water in job performance:

Less than half of New York City voters approve of the job Mayor de Blasio is doing in his first three months in office, a mediocre rating that is well below his NYPD Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and City Controller Scott Stringer, according to a new Quinnipiac poll.

Forty-five percent of voters said they approved of de Blasio's job performance, with 34 percent saying they disapprove, the poll found. Another 20 percent said they didn't know enough to form an opinion or didn't want to answer.

It's similar to results in a Marist poll out earlier this month, which found only 39 percent of voters thought he was doing a "good" or "excellent" job. A Quinnipiac poll from January had de Blasio with a 53-13 percent approval rating.

Hizzoner's latest numbers are much lower than ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg had at this point in his tenure. A Quinnipiac poll from March 27 2002 showed then-rookie Mayor Bloomberg with a 62 percent approval rating. Sixteen percent disapproved of Bloomberg in that poll.

A January Quinnipiac poll taken right after de Blasio was inaugurated found with a 53-13 approval rating, eight points above his current ranking.

Given that the attacks against de Blasio have been relentless and well-funded, from the Murdoch papers ginning up a snow controversy back in January, the attacks over "Forkgate" (when de Blasio ate pizza with a fork), "speedgate" (when the papers reported de Blasio's mayoral motorcade sped through the city a day after he pushed for new safety rules regarding speeding) and of course the infamous (and phony) "war against charters" that Eva Moskowitz and corporate media outlets claim he is waging, I'm quite frankly surprised he's not in the 30's in job performance approval.

And notice the Quinnipiac people putting the Bloomberg approval in there to stick it to de Blasio even more.

Two things to say here:

First, Bloomberg didn't have the media and charter school assaults de Blasio has taken since he was inaugurated, so the Bloomberg numbers don't mean all that much to me (especially since his fellow media moguls at the Times, Post, Journal and News all took it easy on him for most of his three terms - unlike what they've given de Blasio in his first few months in office.)

Second, there is still plenty of time for de Blasio to turn this around - but he must get better about handling the media, heading off controversies before they start, or, if that fails, putting them to rest after one media cycle.

He can't get beaten up too many more times before the meme that he is a failure as a mayor gets baked in.

If you missed it, Blake Zeff had a very good piece on where de Blasio should go from here at Capital NY.

Sure To Make Daily News Editors And Governor Cuomo Sad

The Daily News seems to hate the idea of a tax increase on individuals making $500,000 or more in NYC to pay for Mayor de Blasio's universal full day pre-K proposal almost as much as Governor Cuomo hates it.

Both Cuomo and the DN editors will be saddened by this news:

A number of real estate executives have come out today in support of Mayor Bill de Blasio‘s plan to tax high-earners to fund universal prekindergarten and after-school programs, representing the latest group of executives to join a grassroots campaign called UPKNYC, Commercial Observer has learned.


The new backers include David Von Spreckelsen, division president of Toll Brothers; Don Capoccia, founder of BFC Partners; Christopher Havens, co-chair of Brooklyn Real Estate Roundtable; architect Jonathan Kirschenfeld; Tom Montvel-Cohen, president of the DUMBO Business Improvement District; Jonathan Marvel, founder of Marvel Architects; David Behin, president of investment sales at MNS Real Estate; Jerome Kretchmer, founder of The Kretchmer Companies; and Century 21 Department Stores.

“The time is now to make a proven investment in New York City’s children,” Mr. Spreckelsen said in a prepared statement. “We have a smart, fair plan on the table that, by asking a little more of the city’s most successful, will secure our economic prosperity for decades to come. I’m proud to support New York City’s plan and urge our leaders in Albany to do the same.”

Mr. de Blasio is calling for a five-year increase in city income tax on those earning in excess of $500,000 to 4.41 percent from 3.876 percent, which would yield approximately $530 million in new revenue. Meanwhile, Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants the state to pay for the education initiatives using existing revenues.

...

 Other endorsements of Mr. de Blasio’s plan have come from Jed Walentas, principal of Two Trees Management; David Kramer, principal of The Hudson Companies; real estate developer Leonard Litwin (who is also Mr. Cuomo’s single largest campaign donor); and Don Peebles, CEO of the Peebles Corp., according to news reports.

How dare these wealthy real estate executives shill for raising taxes on rich people to pay for pre-K when neither Governor Cuomo nor DN editors want wealthy NYers to be the target of such a Socialist proposal!

Good thing these people are already wealthy or Cuomo and the DN editors would really take it out on them.

Daily News Endorses De Blasio - Even Though They Disagree With Him On Every Issue

The neo-cons at the Daily News published a weird endorsement of Bill de Blasio for mayor today.

They disagree with him on every issue - from stop and frisk and policing to charter schools and school closure policies - and they lay down markers for what he MUST do on these issues that is different from how he has campaigned as mayor.

In short, they say de Blasio must change his policy positions to Lhota's.

A commenter at the News puts the editorial in perspective:

This endorsement is the most bizarre I've ever read. Issue-by-issue, the News agrees with Lhota and disagrees with de Blasio - school choice, stop-and-frisk, keeping the city safe, and basic economic policy. It further notes that Lhota has the managerial skill and experience to continue the good work of his predecessors, whereas Blasio is a great big unknown on these points who it "hopes" will re-educate himself into being someone he is not. In the end, other than his "big personality", the News cannot give a single reason why it is endorsing de Blasio but gives many reasons for one to vote for Lhota. Simply bizarre. Were you simply looking to get on the bandwagon of the candidate almost certain to win, lest you find yourself without any clout in the new administration?

It's true - they should have endorsed Lhota.

That's the candidate they most agree with.

But the DN editors know Lhota cannot win, so they jump on the de Blasio bandwagon.

But already they work to push him rightward with prodding from their tabloid pulpit.

Expect a lot more of that during the next four years.

Daily News Shills Play Fast And Loose With Facts On Charter Schools

The neo-liberals at the Daily News have an editorial today supporting Eva Moskowitz's walk across the bridge protest for charter schools.

As usual with the DN, they play fast and loose with the facts:

The innovative approaches, longer school days and longer school years they offer — almost always carried out by teachers working outside the union contract — are undeniable. Just one example: On the tough new state tests, about 26% of public school students citywide were proficient in English, and 30% in math.

At the Success Academy Charter in the Bronx, 97% got over the bar in math; 77% did so in English. Across the entire Success network, 82% of kids were proficient in math, and 58% in English.

See the sleight of hand here?

The DN shills are using stat wide stats and comparing them to just one charter school chain to declare the charter school sector a rousing "success" over the traditional public schools.

But if you compare city traditional public schools to city charter schools, here is what you get:

Across the city, about 25% of charter school students rated proficient in English, compared with 26% of traditional public school students. In math, 35% of charter school students rated proficient, compared with 30% of traditional public school students.

That's a report from the Daily News on August 8, btw.

Notice how strikingly different the numbers are from the DN charter shillery today.

Why not be honest and say "Hey, charters outperformed traditional public schools on the math tests, traditional public schools outperformed charters on the ELA exams?"

Because the Daily News editors have an agenda - to promote charters and choice over the traditional public schools, to promote school privatization and to destroy the teachers union.

They never let facts or truth get in the way of their agenda - whether it's Ben "Where Are The Perverts?" Chapman doing a smear job on rubber room teachers or the Daily News editors using misleading stats to sell charter schools.

The public backs charter schools - as the DN shills point out, the latest NY Times/Siena poll shows this.

But the reality is, the public has been fed a bunch of lies and deceptions over the supposed superiority of charters and nowhere is that more evident than in today's DN editorial that plays fast and loose with the facts and stats.

If there was accurate reporting over the charter sector, over how the test scores are not better than those in traditional public schools, over how charters don't accept every student and often counsel out the "problem" children that will bring their scores down - I bet the charter school polling would look a little different.

Daily News Wants "Death Penalty" For Schools Too

They applaud Governor Cuomo for saying "failing" schools deserve the death penalty, then point to a Bloomberg Philanthropy- and Gates Foundation-funded research group study that pats the Bloomberg administration on the back for its school closure policies, replacing large schools with smaller ones.

See here for how MDRC works is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropy even as it works in concert with the Bloomberg administration on various free marketeer social programs.

The study the Daily News is pointing to was funded by the Gates Foundation - which of course pushes small schools to replace large schools

Gotta love a Bloomberg-funded research group that pats the Bloomberg administration on the back for its education policies.

Gotta love even more when the Daily News uses this Bloomberg-funded research group's Bloomberg-and Gates Foundation-funded school closure study as proof positive why the Bloomberg closure policies ought to continue without acknowledging where this research group gets its money from - namely Bloomberg Philanthropy and the Gates Foundation.

Newspapers Endorsements - Kiss Of Death For Quinn?

As Mario Diaz noted on WPIX, Christine Quinn dropped to third place after all three of the daily NYC newspapers endorsed her.

There are many unknowns about today's primary.

Will de Blasio hit 40% and avoid a runoff?

If Thompson hits his "magic mark" of 25%, does that keep de Blasio from hitting 40%?

Can Stringer's GOTV operation beat Spitzer's money?

Which two candidates in the public advocate's race will make the runoff?

One thing that is no longer unknown is what will happen to Christine Quinn.

Unless all the public polls are completely wrong in their polling, she will lose today's primary and not make a runoff.

Bloomberg famously said the UFT's endorsement of a candidate was the "kiss of death" to that candidate.

He cited the previous endorsements the UFT has made of candidates who lost the race for City Hall.

Bloomberg was expected to endorse Quinn this year but as the primary race went on and it became more and more apparent that a Bloomberg endorsement of Quinn would be the "kiss of death" to her, Bloomberg never did endorse her.

But all three newspapers did.

Those endorsements didn't seem to help her.

In fact, they seemed to have hurt her.

If Thompson doesn't make a runoff against de Blasio, the UFT is going to take a hit for their endorsement strategy.

They will be mocked in the press for again planting the "kiss of death" on a candidate's head by endorsing him/her.

But the truth is, Thompson is only in this game at this stage of the election because of the UFT.

The UFT's cash, the UFT's phone banks, the UFT's ads - you can make a pretty good argument that without those, Thompson would have much less of a shot to make a runoff against de Blasio.

While I am a big fan of mocking the UFT leadership, in the case of the Thompson campaign, I think their endorsement and political work on his behalf have helped him more than hurt him.

The three newspapers, in their endorsements of Quinn, all mentioned that they couldn't endorse Thompson because he had been endorsed by the UFT or was too close to the teachers unions.

So all three endorsed Quinn.

And she dropped to third in the race.

If and when the media come around to knock the UFT for the Thompson endorsement, parroting Bloomberg's "a UFT endorsement is the kiss of death," remember what happened after the three major dailies endorsed Quinn.

She will lose this race for many, many reasons.

But those newspaper endorsements certainly didn't seem to help her, did they?

To the many voters in the Democratic primary looking for a change from Bloomberg, they seemed to say ESTABLISHMENT CANDIDATE - BLOOMBERG MACH IV: DO NOT VOTE!!!!

Daily News Propaganda Says Public Employee Contracts Will Wreck NYC

You can read it here.

The gist:

Speaking for Bloomberg, Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway recently called on the unions to accept zero raises for outstanding contracts, relinquish back wages and help finance future raises by having workers contribute to health care coverage.

“In any scenario, granting retroactive contractual salary increases for the period covering the recession would open multibillion-dollar budget gaps and force a dramatic reduction of city services,” Holloway warned, while the unions declared that they would make their demands on the next mayor come New Year’s Day.

The powers that be are worried they're not going to get a mayor who automatically insists on 0% increases, no retro and paying for health care, so they're going on the offensive to get that out to the public now.

The public employees unions must agree to these things or NYC will die.

It's interesting how they have money for tax breaks for real estate interests and tech companies that employee 17 workers, but raises for teachers who have gone without for five years - nope.

Can't give them the 4%/4% that every other union got or NYC will die.

Weiner, of course, is already hinting at this kind of tact.

Don't be surprised if that doesn't bring the oligarchs around to supporting him.

They don't care about Twitter photos if the next mayor is willing to force "the unions to accept zero raises for outstanding contracts, relinquish back wages and help finance future raises by having workers contribute to health care coverage."

Why Doesn't The Daily News See Pearson Problems With The Common Core Tests Too?

So the Daily News gets a lot right with this editorial on Pearson and their G&T test screw-ups:

Herewith a question that could well appear on the tough new Common Core standardized exams, developed by the giant testing company Pearson and administered to the city’s school children:

You are chancellor of an education department that insists on admitting 4-year-olds to gifted-and-talented programs by testing them and offering spots in strict rank order of their scores, using a formula that takes into account their birth dates.

You are the chancellor of an education department that also hires Pearson to apply the formula, which is impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t aced a grad school-level statistics course.

Your education department also knows that Pearson has messed up administering and grading exams across the country.

Pearson reports the G & T scores, only to have parents figure out that the company got them wrong for thousands of kids. You promise stern action. Pearson scores the test again. A parent questions the results and, again, Pearson is forced to admit that its geniuses got them wrong.

Who is dumber:

A) Pearson

B) You

C) It’s a tie

Explain your answer.

Here's the problem with this DN editorial:

 

They get that Pearson is a screw-up of a company that cannot be trusted to handle the high stakes on the G&T tests, but they don't apply the same logic to the Pearson-developed Common Core tests.

 

If Pearson screwed up the G&T tests twice even after assuring that they had performed quality control after the first round of screw-ups, what makes the Daily News editors think they haven't screwed up the Common Core tests as well.

 

Sure, Pearson assures us they haven't.

 

But they assured us after the first round of G&T errors as well that they had fixed the problem.

 

But they hadn't.

 

Now the Common Core tests are secret and any teacher who reveals the contents is under threat of losing her/his job.

 

The DN did get its hands on one exam and claims that after scrutinizing it, the exam holds up.

 

But that's not a good enough quality assurance for parents and teachers all across the state.

 

We need to know what all the tests, 3rd-8th grade, in both math and ELA look like and we need to know what the scoring rubric looks like as well.

 

It's not as if we don't have ample proof that Pearson is a company of incompetents.

 

The G&T and Hare and Pineapple fiascos are the ample proof of that.

 

So while I appreciate the DN coming down hard on Pearson and the city for the G&T debacle, I don't understand why they don't come down hard on Pearson and the state for the Common Core tests as well.

So long as they are kept secret, we cannot know if Pearson's "quality control assurance" is as good as the one they issued over the G&T tests.

Layoffs At The Daily News

From Capital NY:

The Daily News is now undergoing what employees of the tabloid have been fearing for weeks: Multiple insiders tell Capital that layoffs have hit the newsroom today.

Several sources put the total number of pink slips at around 15.

Two high-profile bylines we've confirmed to be among the laid-off Newsers so far are columnists Albor Ruiz and Joanna Molloy, both longtime veterans of the paper. Ruiz will continue to freelance for the News, according to a source familiar with the situation.

The news of Molloy's termination was particularly shocking. She's arguably the most famous writer still at the paper, having helmed its gossip pages for 15 years with her husband, George Rush, who took a buyout in 2010.

...

Sources said other names on the list include reporters Christina Boyle and Robert Gearty and editorial writers Stephen McFarland and Alexander Nazaryan, who also writes the paper's books blog.

Those who are affected are being told that the headcount reduction is a result of a "restructuring" at the paper with an emphasis on digital, according to a source with knowledge of the discussions.

The News has been ramping up its digital operation this past year in a bid to capture national advertising dollars and grow its online reader base outside of New York. Two weeks ago, in a sign of its web ambitions, two major promotions were announced under digital editor Ted Young, a Mail Online alumnus imported last year by Myler, a fellow Brit.

Myler characterized the promotions in a memo as part of a "general restructuring of our digital and business development operation."

The News is the fifth most widely-read newspaper in the U.S., although its combined print and digital average weekday circulation slipped 11 percent year-over-year to 516,165 during the six-month period between October and March, according to data released last week by the Alliance for Audited Media.

The Daily News is unreadable these days.

Colin Myler has made it into absolute dreck.

It's all bikini photos of celebrities and sensationalized crime stories.

No wonder the average weekday circulation is down 11%.

Heckuva job, Colin.

Zuckerman is going to come to regret that you didn't go to jail for your hacking cover-up crimes.