Note To Preet Bharara: Discrimination And Retaliation Is The Official Policy Of The NYCDOE

From the NY Times:

The federal government accused the New York City Department of Education in a lawsuit on Thursday of engaging in a pattern and practice of discrimination against the three black teachers who worked at the Pan American International High School in Queens.

The lawsuit, filed by the office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, made it clear that the government believed that the school’s principal, Minerva Zanca, had targeted the three teachers with the goal of having them removed from their jobs.

Ms. Zanca once told the school’s assistant principal, Anthony Riccardo, that one of the black teachers “looked like a gorilla in a sweater,” and that she could never have “nappy hair” like another of the teachers, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit also claims that Ms. Zanca retaliated against Mr. Riccardo for his complaints about her treatment of the black teachers. Once, when he refused to give an unsatisfactory rating to a lesson by one of the teachers, Ms. Zanca yelled at Mr. Riccardo, accusing him of “sabotaging her plan,” and calling school security to have him removed from the building, the lawsuit says.

The Pan American school, on 94th Street in Elmhurst, says on its website that it serves “374 recently immigrated English language learners from Latin America.” The lawsuit says that during the 2012-13 school year, when it says the discrimination occurred, the school had a total of 27 teachers. Three of the teachers were black, the suit notes.

Mr. Bharara, in a statement, said, “It is nearly unthinkable that, in this day and age, one of the largest and most diverse school districts in the United States would allow racial discrimination and retaliation to flourish.”

At schools all over the city, principals and assistant principals are going into observations with pre-conceived notions of who will be given negative ratings and who will be given positive ratings.

This is the official policy of the Bill de Blasio/Carmen Farina DOE (though the discrimination detailed above took place under the Bloomberg/Walcott DOE.)

The NYCDOE is telling school administrators that there are a certain number of "ineffective" and "developing" ratings that each school must have and that it will be held against a principal if a school does not comply with that directive.

Any principal or assistant principal not on board with the increased "ineffective/developing ratings" plan is retaliated against - either by the DOE (if the person not on board with the policy is a principal) or by a higher school administrator (if the person not on board with the policy is an assistant principal but the principal at the school is on board.)

What happened at the Pan American International High School is particularly egregious because of the vile racism attached to the pre-decided negative ratings.

But the truth is, this same kind of thing is happening across the city to other teachers, based perhaps not on blatant racism, but on other criteria that have nothing to do with teaching effectiveness.

Sometimes it's based on more subtle racism, sometimes it's based on ageism, sometimes it's based on cronyism, sometimes it's based on "Well, we have to throw somebody under the bus because that's what the DOE wants - who should that be this time?"

The UFT has done nothing to protect its members against the egregious assaults being waged by the de Blasio/Farina DOE because they've been brought in by the mayor to co-manage the system.

Despite the silence of the UFT in these matters, a terrible war against teachers goes on in schools, with the Danielson drive-bys as the weapon of choice for knocking people off.

I once hoped that things would get better in NYC schools once Bloomberg was gone, tried to take Carmen Farina at her word when she said she wanted to bring joy back to school.

But quite frankly, things are worse now than under Bloomberg because the UFT leadership is completely complicit in the insanity being waged out of Tweed, turning their eyes from the increased "developing" and "ineffective" ratings and ignoring the stories from rank and file about how bad it has gotten in individual schools.

The New York City school system is rife with FEAR these days, and while the Pan American International High School case occurred during the Bloomberg Years, much the same is happening now in the de Blasio Years, perhaps not as blatantly racist, but no less as discriminatory or retaliatory.

Any system that runs with a quota for how many negative ratings must be given is discriminatory and retaliatory - and that's exactly what we have under de Blasio and Farina.

Preet Bharara should dig deeper into the way the NYCDOE operates and he'll find patterns of discrimination and retaliation throughout the school system.

Here's An Emblem For What's Wrong With Education In The Reform Era

It's also an emblem for how so little has changed from Bloomberg to de Blasio at the NYCDOE:

Tom Porton is used to drama: Since arriving at James Monroe High School as an English teacher 45 years ago, he has taught and staged plays. Outside, in the Bronx River neighborhood where the school is, there was plenty of drama in the 1980s, when AIDS and crack ravaged the area. His response then was to establish a group of peer educators who worked with Montefiore Medical Center to teach teenagers about H.I.V. prevention. His efforts earned him awards, including recognition from the City Council and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and led to his induction into the National Teachers Hall of Fame.

Now he is at the center of drama: Last month he clashed with Brendan Lyons, the school’s principal, who disapproved of his distributing H.I.V./AIDS education fliers that listed nonsexual ways of “Making Love Without Doin’ It” (including advice to “read a book together”). This month, he said the principal eliminated his early-morning civic leadership class, which engaged students in activities such as feeding the homeless, saying it was not part of the Common Core curriculum. Mr. Porton was already skeptical of that curriculum, saying it shortchanged students by focusing on chapters of novels and nonfiction essays rather than entire works of literature.

So, next month Mr. Porton — a 67-year-old educator whom students praised as a lifesaver and life-changer — is walking away from teaching. He handed in his retirement papers on Friday.

Education in the Reform Era, in the Danielson Era, in the Endless Testing Era has no place for a teacher like this.

What, a curriculum that engages students in activities like helping to feed homeless people?

No, by God, that's not education!

Writing argumentative essays about this, that's education!

The principal who has successively pushed Tom Porton out sounds like a doozy:

Mr. Lyons — who repeatedly replied “no comment” to questions during a telephone conversation — arrived at the school at the start of the academic year. A previous tenure at a Manhattan high school was marked by his replacing paper hall passes with toilet plungers, which students used to wreak havoc on property and one another.

In December, on World AIDS Day, Mr. Porton handed out his flier, as he had for almost 25 years. Mr. Lyons sent him an email saying the flier was “inappropriate,” and asked that he collect those already distributed. Though Mr. Lyons said he would discuss the matter later with him, Mr. Porton said that conversation never took place.

H.I.V. and AIDS may have faded from the public mind, but they remain a danger in places like the South Bronx, especially among young blacks and Latinos. Mr. Porton said the school has failed to meet Department of Education mandates to educate students about the diseases, making his work all the more necessary.

Mr. Lyons, who would not say if the school met the mandates, never explained his objections to Mr. Porton. At the start of this semester, Mr. Porton said, the principal eliminated the 40-student leadership class because he said it was not part of the standard curriculum, even though the class met before the formal start of the school day. Because of that, combined with Mr. Porton’s disappointment over the standardized test frenzy that rules in many schools, he chose to leave.

And what kind of teacher was Tom Porton?

This kind:

Reaction among students and former students, many of whom learned of Mr. Porton’s retirement on Facebook, was immediate and full of outrage.

“How can anyone think what he does is inappropriate?” said Janelle Roundtree, a former peer educator who graduated from Monroe in 1995 and went on to Howard University. “He changed Monroe. He was in the forefront of so many things. The school is losing out on this one.”

David Gonzalez (no relation to this writer), a musician, poet and performer who graduated in 1973, was so grateful to Mr. Porton that he nominated him for the Kennedy Center’s Stephen Sondheim Inspirational Teacher Award, which he received in 2011.

“Tom has been the consistent heart of that building since I was at Monroe in the ’70s,” said Mr. Gonzalez, who still wonders how the teacher managed to get tickets to Broadway shows. “He was always looking for the heart and soul of the individual. I would never have had the confidence to do what I do without him. He changed my life forever.”

The truth is, there is no place in public education these days for a teacher like Tom Porton.

Teachers who teach to the test, who teach by the Danielson rubric, who teach the crap they want her/him to teach and nothing but that - those are the kinds of teachers wanted these days.

As Porton says in the Times article, the powers that be pay lip service to the social and emotional needs of children, but all that really matters these days is the test scores.

This is just another outrage in a long line of NYCDOE outrages.

The principal, Lyons, ought to be the one leaving (see here for the mess he made at Graphics.)

Alas, life in the de Blasio NYCDOE is pretty much the same as life in the Bloomberg NYCDOE - incompetent administrators get moved around to destroy more and more schools while excellent teachers, inspirational teachers, are pushed out.

Public Education Is All About Compliance: Obey Or Else!

From the Daily News:

A teacher at an Upper West Side high school was fired for creating a curriculum with lessons about the Central Park Five that administrators feared would “rile up” black students, according to a new federal lawsuit.

English teacher Jeena Lee-Walker said her bosses at the High School for Arts, Imagination and Inquiry urged her in November 2013 to be more “balanced” in her approach to the racially charged Central Park jogger case that ended with five black and Latino teens being exonerated after spending several years in prison for the attack.

They told her the lessons could create little “riots,” according to court papers.

Although Lee-Walker, 37, agreed to soften her approach, she argued “that students in general, and black students in particular, should be riled up.”

“I kind of wanted to hook them in, engage them, win them over,” she said. “I thought that this material was not only engaging but important.”

...

After several tense exchanges with supervisors, Lee-Walker received a series of bad performance reviews over the next 18 months that ultimately led to her dismissal, the suit said.

Lee-Walker said she was accused of insubordination and given poor evaluations not just because of the material, but because she pushed back.

She was fired in May, roughly two years after joining the High School for the Arts and six years after she began teaching in city public schools.

“I felt abandoned and mistreated,” Lee-Walker said of the ordeal. “I think a lot of teachers in the system feel the same way.”

There's still all this talk in the media and from politicians about the need to fire "bad" teachers and close "failing" schools.

The environment for education is toxic and poisoned these days by all the compliance mandates we have that are supposed to handle the firing of "bad" teachers and the closing of "failing" schools.

Danielson drive-bys, where administrators come into your room with the Danielson rubric and ensure that you're jumping through every hoop on the rubric, are meant to control and contain teachers.

They're also meant to give dismissal tools to administrators who want to get rid of teachers they don't want - regardless of whether they're "bad" or not.

There's nothing "objective" about the Danielson rubric - administrators can ignore all the great stuff a teacher does, focus on one or two supposed "flaws" in a lesson and give enough developings and ineffectives in an evaluation to get the teacher either put on a PIP or sent packing.

You can see how this worked with Lee-Walker - they wanted her to tone down her lessons, she agreed, but the "softening" wasn't enough for administrators at the school and she was targeted for dismissal and successfully canned after a period of so-called "objective documentation."

The message for teachers in the DOE - obey or else! - is also the message for students when they see what happens to their teachers who try and step out of the uniform and give something of themselves in the classroom.

That message is underscored by the EngageNY curriculum and Regents exams, which punish any thoughts that do not come "from the text" and so teach students that they are not to think for themselves, only learn what their betters think and figure out how to parrot that back in the endless "text-based argumentative essays" they have to write across classes.

Lee-Walker's lawyer puts this all into perspective for us:

“Ms. Lee-Walker is the type of teacher we want in a classroom,” her lawyer, Ambrose Wotorson, told The News.

“We’re not looking to turn our students into automatons. We’re looking to turn out independent thinkers — and she got fired for that, and that's just wrong,” Wotorson said.

Actually it's quite the opposite.

What education reformers want are compliant teachers who obey the rules, teach only what is supposed to be taught in the way the system wants it taught and students who learn to be automatons who are just smart enough to be able to figure out what their betters want but not smart enough to know how badly they're getting screwed by the system.

21st Century public education is all about compliance - from the system as a whole right down to the individual classrooms and the teachers and students in each one.

Another Education Reformer Goal - Criminalize Teachers

The latest example of where the "Teachers Are Criminals" mindset education reformers have imposed on the education system gets us:

Legendary blind gym teacher Steven Sloan may have lost his job over Listerine.

Sloan, 60, a popular coach hailed as a role model for overcoming his handicap, was yanked from PS 102 in Harlem after a parent setting up for a party last year complained she smelled booze on his breath. He claims it was the alcohol-based mouthwash.

His colleagues are outraged. Several recalled his obsession with cleanliness and hygiene, saying he rinsed religiously with Listerine.

“The DOE took an outstanding career and trashed it,” said teacher Lisa Ortiz.

Sloan, who was born with macular degeneration, brought glory to PS 102 when actor Tony Danza nominated him to carry a torch at the 2006 Olympics in Italy. Former principal Sandra Gittens, who worked with Sloan for 14 years, said he arrived early, ran after-school programs, volunteered for lunch duty and chaperoned class trips.

“The students respected him,” she recalled. “He cleared his throat — ahem — and everyone got into line. It was really amazing.”

 Sloan knew the halls of PS 102 so well he didn’t use his cane. He taught exercise and sports with an assistant who served as his “eyes” to make sure the kids did as instructed.

A parent claimed she smelled booze off Sloan, found a cup in a garbage can that had remnants of a "brown liquid" in it that smelled like alcohol and accused Sloan of drinking on the job.

Sloan and his defenders claim it was Listerine.

Sloan was never seen drinking from the cup or holding it.

Nevertheless the DOE brought him up on charges for drinking on the job.

The DOE also charged him with sexual harassment for asking anybody if they wanted to go out on a "blind date" with him, a "joke" which Sloan says he habitually used to make people feel comfortable with his disability.

Sloan settled with the DOE and agreed to retire in August.

He is "devastated" about how his career ended:

“They didn’t even let me go back to my school and say goodbye,” he said. “I just want to let everybody know I did my job diligently, with all my heart and soul.”

This is how teaching careers are going to end for many of us now that the tenure rules have been rewritten so that teachers can be dismissed on expedited 3020a charges.

The allegations can be as stupid as sexual harassment against a blind teacher who makes a "blind date" joke or they can be unproven - such as drinking on the job allegations "substantiated" by one accusation and circumstantial evidence.

Doesn't matter anymore - teachers are assumed to be criminals first, guilty first, and the system will do what it does and grind them down and spew them out.

Meanwhile real criminals - the corrupt politician nominally in charge of a system owned and operated by the Wall Street and real estate criminals and tech sociopaths - commit their criminals acts with seeming impunity and only get taken down when their actions go beyond the pale (a la Vito Lopez and the pols that Preet Bharara has charged, convicted and/or indicted with crimes.)

NYCDOE Website Crashes As Payroll Reveals Retro Payments (UPDATED - 5:55 PM)

My friend NYCDOEnuts:

On the day NYC teachers finally learn how much $ they've waited SIX yrs for, the DOE schedules weekend maintenance. pic.twitter.com/KCZwD5eHQ0

— nycdoenuts (@nycdoenuts) October 10, 2015

Probably not an accident that the website was taken down for "maintenance" at the same time the retro money was revealed in paycheck stubs:

@nycdoenuts I think their servers were unpreprared for the traffic & crashed, & now they're scrambling to fix them.

— Sean McGowan (@jersey2bronx) October 10, 2015

Rage Against The Levene puts it all in persepctive for us:

I don't know if you heard teachers made the schools.nyc.gov website crash because the retro check amounts were posted.

Imagine if they voted.

Indeed.

Imagine.

UPDATE: John Galvin tweets the following:

@perdidostschool doe sent email yesterday that system would be down all saturday

— John Galvin (@JohnGalvinBK) October 10, 2015

Fair enough, perhaps the maintenance was scheduled by the DOE beforehand.

I still couldn't get on the payroll site the few times I tried throughout the day yesterday.

De Blasio To Mandate Computer Science In Schools

Oy:

To ensure that every child can learn the skills required to work in New York City’s fast-growing technology sector, Mayor Bill de Blasio will announce on Wednesday that within 10 years all of the city’s public schools will be required to offer computer science to all students.

Meeting that goal will present major challenges, mostly in training enough teachers. There is no state teacher certification in computer science, and no pipeline of computer science teachers coming out of college. Fewer than 10 percent of city schools currently offer any form of computer science education, and only 1 percent of students receive it, according to estimates by the city’s Department of Education.

Computer science will not become a graduation requirement, and middle and high schools may choose to offer it only as an elective.

But the goal is for all students, even those in elementary school and those in the poorest neighborhoods, to have some exposure to computer science, whether building robots or learning to use basic programming languages like Scratch, which was devised by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to teach young children the rudiments of coding.

You know what some seniors asked me for last week while I was introducing them to financial aid?

A home economics class.

You know, where you learn how to cook, clean, sew, fix stuff, balance your checkbook, do your taxes, figure out your credit card statement - you know, the kind of stuff many people can't do anymore.

Mandating computer science is swell and I know "coding" is all the rage, but as we keep adding more and more mandates to the school day, it seems like students can do less and less to take care of themselves.

By all means, offer computer science to every student because it's such a fast-growing career and it's spaceage and whatever, but let's not forget the basic stuff of life too.

Seriously, the kids are asking for it.

While we're adding robots and computer programming. while we're focusing on Common Core and argumentative writing, how about bringing back home economics too?

Doesn't have to be a big thing - maybe just a half credit stuck in somewhere.

I know it would really help many students.

Teachers Should Think Long And Hard Before Working At "Struggling" Or "Persistently Struggling" Schools

NYSED has labeled 144 schools around the state "struggling" or "persistently struggling," with 62 of those schools located in NYC.

According to the NY Times article I linked to above, "struggling schools" have two years to make "demonstrable" improvement in graduation rates, test scores and attendance or be given over to "an outside receiver, like a nonprofit group, that will be chosen by the district superintendent or chancellor to oversee the schools."

The Times reports that "persistently struggling schools" have just one year to make the "demonstrable" improvement or be given over to an "an outside receiver, like a nonprofit group, that will be chosen by the district superintendent or chancellor to oversee the schools."

Teachers who currently work at any of the "struggling" or "persistently struggling" schools will have to reapply for their jobs.

Some will not be rehired and will either have to find other jobs in the system or become ATR's.

"Struggling" and "persistently struggling" schools will almost certainly be looking for new blood to replace some of the teachers who aren't rehired at those schools.

The UFT put out this statement regarding that part of the receivership plan:

The UFT is working to support the Renewal program, including by building teacher leadership in the schools and ensuring that all hiring is conducted by joint city-union committees.

Here's what may await any teacher who goes to work in one of these "struggling" or "persistently struggling" schools, per a comment left on another post here at Perdido Street School blog:

Graded regents this week with a teacher who taught at a specialized school. He told me about 5 years ago a friend left to take a job at one of the struggling schools where Math/Science teachers would get a 10k bonus for transferring there. After just 1 year they began phasing the school out and he became an ATR. While he eventually found a job in a decent school it is nothing compared to his original situation.

That's actually the best case scenario, where the teacher becomes an ATR but eventually gets another placement.

The worst case scenario?

Toiling forever after as an ATR (or at least until the UFT completes throwing the ATR's to the wolves and the program no longer exists per a future contract deal) or two-three years of consecutive "ineffective" ratings and a swift trip to the unemployment office.

Teachers should think long and hard about going to work at any of the "struggling" or "persistently struggling" schools on the receivership program list.

Despite Carmen Farina's desire to put asterisks next to the names of "highly effective" teachers who transfer to "struggling" or "persistently struggling" schools, the first people that will get thrown under the bus when these schools do not make the "demonstrable progress" timetable that the state wants will be the teachers.

And it won't matter what a teacher's evaluation rating was before she/he got to the "struggling" or "persistently struggling" school either, because the system is set up with a "What Have You Done For More Lately" gloss and teachers who get dinged as "developing" and "ineffective" at those schools will wear those ratings on their heads like scarlet letters no matter what their ratings were in the years before they got to the receivership schools.

Reformers pay lip service to wanting to reward so-called "excellent teachers" who go to work with the most vulnerable populations, but all it takes for an "excellent teacher" to become a "developing" or "ineffective teacher" is to work a year or two in a school with low test scores.

Reformers, including the governor of the state and the commissioner of NYSED, do not care what a teacher's rating was a few years before, they care only what the most recent rating was - and remember that two consecutive "ineffective" ratings will get you fired under Cuomo's latest APPR evaluation system iteration.

Reformers also constantly demonize "ineffective" teachers in the press, never once noting that maybe some of those "ineffective" teachers were actually "effective" or "highly effective" teachers who transferred into a school with low test scores and had their ratings implode as a result.

So if you're a teacher out there with an "effective" or a "highly effective" rating and you're thinking about going to bring your talents and skills to one of the receivership schools, think long and hard before you make the jump.

In a year or two, you could very well be a "developing" or "ineffective" teacher headed for the ATR pool.

Or, if we're looking at another mayor in two years who gets elected with the backing of the reform community, an ally of Eva Moskowitz and her ilk, you could be looking at a dried up ATR pool and instant unemployment.

The way the system is these days, the only way for a teacher to protect herself/himself is to think and act very carefully around employment decisions.

It doesn't take much to get demonized as "ineffective" and smeared with the "I" scarlet letter on your head - and if that"i" is on your head for two consecutive years, you could be out of a job.

The NY Post Gins Up The Great Teacher Scandal Of 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grade Fixing, Cheating Took Place Under Bloomberg Too

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take this one at Lehman in 2009:

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

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

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

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

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

Or this one from 2010:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or this one from 2011:

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did I miss that performance or did it not happen?

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

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

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

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

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

Eva Moskowitz Cries Poverty Even As She Rakes In Tens Of Millions Of Dollars In Hedge Fund Donations

Remember when Eva Moskowitz declared it an existential crisis if charter schools were forced to pay for co-locations or God forbid, had to find their own space?

I do.

Today Eliza Shapiro at Capital NY reports the following:

The Success Academy charter school network has received an $8.5 million donation from the philanthropic foundation of John Paulson, a billionaire hedge fund manager.

The donation, which was announced on Thursday, will be used to build new Success elementary, middle and high schools.

The network is expanding significantly, with 14 new schools opening in the next few years. By 2020, the network will have about 50 schools educating about 36,000 students.

...

The network's critics, some of whom are allied with teachers' unions, have assailed its close ties to hedge fund managers. The new donation is sure to give those groups more ammunition, although Moskowitz has said that charity goes to an array of worthy goals, including education. Success raised $9.3 million at its most recent benefit, almost exclusively from financiers.

That's $9.3 million at the spring benefit and $8.5 million from Paulson for a cool $17.8 million dollars from just two events - the benefit and Paulson's largesse.

Add in the $9.7 million pro-charter Families for Excellent Schools spent lobbying and carrying Moskowitz's water in Albany and in the media and you have Moskowitz doing pretty good for herself despite that existential crisis she declared if mean ol' Bill de Blasio forced her to pay rent for co-locations or pay for private space on her own dime.

If Moskowitz can raise this kind of money in so brief a period, isn't it time she pull her own weight and stop taking money away from New York City's public school children?

NYSED Acknowledges School Administrators Can Use APPR As Weapons Against Teachers

Coming on the heels of the acknowledgement by Chancellor Farina that teachers who teach at Renewal Schools may have their APPR ratings adversely affected comes this news:

The Department of Education is moving to upgrade the ratings of teachers at Brooklyn’s Dewey HS who were rated as “ineffective” after they challenged grade-fixing by then-principal Kathleen Elvin, The Post has learned.

Elvin was fired on July 8 after DOE investigators substantiated that widespread grade-fixing went on at Dewey to boost graduation rates — a practice students mockingly referred to as “Easy Pass.”

...

Teachers complained that Elvin and other administrators punished them with poor ratings for refusing to participate in the fraud.

The “ineffective” ratings of at least four of 16 tenured teachers who received them were overturned following appeals to a state arbitrator, sources said. 

Those teachers had to sign a confidentiality agreement not to discuss the changing of their ratings.

...

Records revealed that half of Dewey’s 101 instructors got ratings of either “ineffective (16 teachers) or “developing” (35 teachers) in the 2013-14 school year.

That 50 percent failure rate compared to a citywide average of only 8 percent.

Given an "ineffective" rating for refusing to participate in fraudulent behavior involving grade-fixing.

Gee, that doesn't sound like an "objective" evaluation system to me.

And NYSED admits as much by overturning at least four of the "ineffective" ratings of tenured teachers who appealed them.

There may be more overturned ratings - we don't know the exact number because of the confidentiality agreements

But what we do know is this - if Elvin and her assistant principals used APPR as a weapon against teachers to perpetrate their fraud, other principals and assistant principals can use APPR as a weapon against teachers for other reasons as well.

Had Elvin not been exposed in the grade-fixing scandal, these teachers at Dewey would still be working with "ineffective" ratings on their records.

You can bet there are other administrators elsewhere who have handed out "ineffective" ratings for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with the effectiveness of the teacher.

We learned from Chancellor Farina this week that APPR is a sham when she acknowledged that "effective" teachers can have their ratings adversely affected by switching schools and going to teach  in a school with high poverty/high homelessness demographics.

And now we've learned from the NYSED that teachers can have their APPR ratings manipulated by administrators with agendas - such as the one by Kathleen Elvin, which was, join her in her grade-fixing fraud or receive and "ineffective" rating for the year.

Chancellor Farina Knows Teachers' Evaluation Ratings Are In Jeopardy At "Struggling" Schools

Eliza Shapiro at Capital NY sat in on a meeting between NYCDOE Chancellor Farina and the superintendent of District 8, Karen Ames.

Here's an interesting bit of that report::

30 percent of students in one of the Renewal Schools are in temporary housing. Fariña closed her eyes and inhaled sharply when Ames described the school’s challenges, and said she wanted to put an “asterisk” next to city schools with extremely high levels of student poverty and homelessness.

Fariña also said she wants to establish a so-called asterisk for highly effective teachers who move to Renewal Schools. While Fariña said “it’s been easier to recruit teachers to Renewals than ever” because of strong professional development and a sense of mission, she’s concerned that effective teachers’ ratings will drop when they move from high-achieving schools to struggling ones.

Fariña said she was planning to follow one teacher who was leaving a high-performing school to teach at a Renewal School in Ames’ Bronx district.

“She’s going to do the same assessments, she’s going to do everything she did before,” Fariña said. “But the scores are only going to go to a certain point. How is that going to affect her rating? It’s not going to make her any less of a good teacher.”

Here's a question I have:

If "effective" teachers should get asterisks next to their names because they've chosen to work in a school with high poverty, high homelessness demographics next year, is it just possible that those "ineffective" or "developing" teachers that are already there working in that school might face the same challenges the new "effective" teachers are going to face next year and deserve asterisks too?

The dirty secret of education reform is that the problems in schools and districts with high poverty/high homelessness demographics are NOT caused by "bad teachers" - they're caused by all the effects that poverty has on the psychological, emotional, physical and social development of the children in those schools and districts.

Does that mean there's not some mismanagement in schools and/or districts that are "struggling"?

Of course not.

To that end, Shapiro reports that "Fariña asked Ames to outline consistency goals for all the schools in her district by October" to address the hodgepodge of programs that may not be the most effective way to educate children in the district.

But the truth is that most of the problem are not due to mismanagement, a lack of "consistency goals," or a plethora of "ineffective" teachers at those schools/districts, they're due to the effects of what Farina winced at - high rates of poverty and high rates of homelessness.

If Farina thinks the new "effective" teachers coming in to "struggling" schools deserve asterisks next to their names, then she also knows that a hell of a lot of the teachers already there deserve the same benefit of the doubt.

The Goal Of Education Reform Is To Exert Power And Control Over All

Education reformers love adding stress and pressure to the education system, ensuring people's livelihoods and reputations are tied to the high stakes testing scores.

Given the stress and pressure people are under, this kind of thing was inevitable:

The principal of an innovative West Harlem public school killed herself the day after her students took the state Common Core exams — which were later tossed out because she cheated, The Post has learned.

Jeanene Worrell-Breeden, 49, of Teachers College Community School, jumped in front of a B train in the 135th Street station on St. Nicholas Avenue on April 17, police said.

She was pulled out from under the train and taken to Harlem Hospital, where she died eight days later. The city Medical Examiner’s Office ruled it a suicide.

The leap came at 9:20 a.m., less than 24 hours after her 47 third-graders wrapped up three days sweating over the high-stakes English exam — the first ever given at the fledgling school.

It was also the same day a whistleblower reported the cheating to DOE officials.

Parents were shocked and saddened to learn Worrell-Breeden died but were given no details at the time. It was rumored she was killed in a car crash.

Parents were in for another shock in June. Superintendent Gale Reeves told them in a meeting that all the third-grade English exams had been “red-flagged” and “invalidated.”

Worrell-Breeden had some challenges outside of her work life according to the Post, including the death of a parent and a marriage break-up.

And there is some funkiness around the way the story was released - with details of the death dribbling out over time - to make you wonder if the DOE isn't just scapegoating Worrell-Breeden now that's she dead and can't defend herself.

To that end, the Post makes sure they get in how Worrell-Breeden had been caught falsifying her time cards in a previous gig before the Teachers College Community School and docked two weeks pay for those actions.

Nonetheless, the stress and pressure educators in public education are under these days is real, which even the Post article acknowledges:

The tough Common Core exams have raised anxiety. In 2014, only 34.5 percent of city students passed the math tests, and 29.4 percent passed English tests.

“A lot of people are getting sick and leaving the system because of the pressure the high-stakes tests are putting on them,” a veteran educator said.

It's not just the high stakes testing, it's the constant concern over drive-by Danielson observations, the micromanaging that's going on in many schools, the despair many feel as they see their autonomy torn from them and replaced with EngageNY scripts.

All these stresses and pressures are real, here for good and getting worse by the year.

And that's the way the education reformers want it.

The goal of education reform is FEAR.

They want a system in which everybody, from the students to the teachers to the administrators to the district officials are in constant FEAR, worried about grades, test scores, observations, and the myriad other accountability measures used to gauge so-called student, teacher, school  and district performance and they do not care about the human cost of any of this.

When the USDOE tells NY State it must test every student, even students with severe disabilities who have no chance to pass the high stakes exams, and count every test score in the accountability measures for teachers, schools and districts, you know the message is "We do not care about children or you, we care only about our political agenda!"

When Governor Cuomo imposes an evaluation system that ties 50% of a teacher's rating to test scores of students they don't teach in classes they don't teach, you know the message is "We do not care about children or you, we care only about our political agenda!"

When NYSED rigs the Common Core tests for 70% failure rates in order to prove how "failing" schools and teachers in this state are, you know the message is "We do not care about children or you, we care only about our political agenda!"

When the Board of Regents hires a new "reformy" NYSED commissioner whose callousness and incompetence led to the deaths of three children in her former school district, you know the message is "We do not care about children or you, we care only about our political agenda!"

I don't know whether this principal from the Teachers College Community School killed herself because she was worried she had been caught trying to cheat on the ELA Common Core exams or not, but I do know that given the stresses and pressure in the system, it's quite possible that's what happened and moreover, the education reformers who have imposed their reform agenda, the Endless Testing regime onto the system, want it that way.

If there are sick children throwing up on exams, teachers smeared as "ineffective" based upon similar test scores results that declared them "effective" the previous year, educators at all levels of the system in constant FEAR and anxiety over the data - well, that's exactly the point of education reform.

And if someone takes her life because of the stress and pressure in the system, you can bet reformers see that as a small price to pay for so-called accountability as well.

This is a toxic system devised by toxic people who do not care about anything other than power and control over others - and FEAR is the primary tool they use to exert power and control over all.

What "Master" Teacher Would Go Work In A "Struggling School"?

NYSED released a list of 144 schools around the state that have been placed into receivership, with 61 here in NYC:

The New York State Education Department announced on Thursday that 144 underperforming schools, nearly half of which are in New York City, will enter receivership, a new designation that puts pressure on the de Blasio administration to show improvement at the city’s most troubled schools, and to do so quickly.

The program was one of several education reforms hammered out during budget negotiations this spring. Under the deal, schools are placed into two categories, “struggling schools,” those in the bottom 5 percent of schools in the state for three years, based on measures like test scores and graduation rates, and “persistently struggling schools,” which have been in that bracket since 2006.

For the first years of receivership, the superintendent — or, in the case of New York City, Carmen Fariña, the schools chancellor — will be the receiver. As receivers, they will have the authority to make changes, like lengthening the school day or year and requiring teachers to reapply for their jobs.

Struggling schools will have two years to make “demonstrable” improvement in areas like graduation rates and attendance; persistently struggling schools will have one year to do so. If they do not, an outside receiver, like a nonprofit group, will be chosen by the district superintendent or chancellor to oversee the schools. That receiver must be approved by the state, which has set aside an additional $75 million for the schools.

The list of those schools is here.

There are an awful lot of Queens high schools on that list.

Also a lot of schools in Buffalo.

Here is initial thrust of the program while these schools remain in local receivership:

Under the receivership law, a school receiver is granted new authority to, among other things, develop a school intervention plan; convert schools to community schools providing wrap-around services; expand the school day or school year; and remove staff and/or require staff to reapply for their jobs in collaboration with a staffing committee.

But the ultimate goal is "independent receivership," i.e., an outside entity brought in by NYSED to take over these schools from the local district and convert them to charter schools.

That will happen for schools deemed "persistently struggling" after one year where they are deemed by the state of not improving.

Schools deemed "struggling" have two years before "independent receivership."

And just who are these independent receivers?

Independent receivers, who can be an individual, a not-for-profit organization, or another school district, have sole responsibility to manage and operate the school and have all of the enhanced authority of a school receiver.  Independent receivers are appointed for up to three school years and serve under contract with the Commissioner.
 
As with Persistently Struggling Schools, the independent receiver appointed by the district must be approved by the Commissioner, and the Commissioner will make the appointment if an acceptable receiver is not selected by the district.

NYSUT was busy praising new NYSED Commissioner MaryEllen Elia last week, but her first big step this week is aimed at firing teachers and privatizing schools as allowed by Cuomo's "Schools Death Penalty Budget of 2015."

Harris Lirtzman left an astute comment on the efficacy of this reform program:

Every single one of these schools is in NYC, Buffalo, Rochester, Yonkers, Syracuse, Albany or Islip/Bellevue in Long Island. Jeez, that's really a surprise.

We all know that the only example where "receivership" supposedly does anything for struggling schools is the short-term and very limited improvement in the Lawrence, MA school district. As with every other element of the reformista program--which claims to prize "data," "accountability," "evidence" and "research" above all else--none of that really matters when the reformistas just want to do something.

Beyond that, where are all the magical teachers going to come from to staff these schools when their current rosters get dumped into the ATR in New York City and straight fired everywhere else? Will the State give the "receivers" special wands and hocus-pocus powers to make magical teachers appear from thin air? What "master" teacher anywhere would transfer to any of these schools when the State accountability system will turn a "master" teacher into a "developing" teacher in one year?

Indeed, what "master" teacher would go teach in one of these schools and end up "developing" or "ineffective" the next year under the state's punitive, test-centric teacher evaluation system?

It's, to continue with one of Andrew Cuomo's favorite analaogies for what should happen to "bad schools," the "death penalty" for a teacher's career, since two years of consecutive "ineffective" ratings can get you fired and three years of them will get you fired.

Cuomo's "Death Penalty Program" for struggling and persistently struggling schools is going to bring a lot of destabilization in the next couple of years before most of these schools are ultimately turned over to independent receivers and privatized.

And of course that was always the goal of Cuomo's reform plans - to "bust" the public school "monopoly," to destabilize public education and to privatize public schools.

Families For Excellent Schools Want More Students Held Back Or In Summer School

From the Daily News:

Pro-charter school group Families for Excellent Schools ripped Mayor de Blasio on Thursday after city Education Department officials revealed a steep decline in the number of kids held back a grade or forced to go to summer school.

“Socially promoting tens of thousands of students, and depriving them of critical learning, promises to deepen New York City’s failing schools crisis,” said Families for Excellent Schools CEO Jeremiah Kittredge.

Education Department officials Wednesday said city principals referred 19,422 students to summer school classes in 2015, down from 32,205 in 2013.

The officials also revealed that the percentage of students held back a grade fell from 2.5% in 2013 to 1.2% in 2014.

State test scores are often used to decide which students get left back a grade or have to attend summer school.

We know the Common Core tests were rigged for failure, with NYSED setting the scores such that failure rates would sky-rocket from the pre-Common Core tests.

And lo and behold, many more students failed the Common Core tests than the pre-Common Core tests.

Nonetheless, if you look at the chart linked above, you'll see there's progress, albeit incremental, in the test scores from 2013 to 2014.

Should the rates of students being held back improve along with the scores or should they stay the same because, you know, ed reformers think kids need to learn a little grit?

As for summer school, FES may not know that Governor Cuomo pushed through and continues to tout a rule that says the Common Core tests will not be used against students for a couple of years (although they are being used on teachers.)

Indeed, the NYCDOE pointed this out in their pushback:

Schools officials said de Blasio's policies are in accordance with a change in state law that requires educators consider multiple criteria in decisions to promote students or hold them back.

In fact, Cuomo called the test scores "meaningless" for students back in April as the opt-out movement against the state's tests was gaining steam:

Governor Andrew Cuomo on Friday said parents who have chosen to have their children “opt out” of taking this month’s state exams don’t understand that the scores are “meaningless” in terms of students' grades.

“That’s their option,” Cuomo, referring to parents who have participated in the unprecedented boycott of state exams, told reporters after an Association for a Better New York breakfast in Manhattan. “What I don’t think has been adequately communicated is, we passed a law that stops the use of the grades on the test for the student. So the grades are meaningless to the student.”

Cuomo was referring to provisions in the 2014-15 state budget that prohibited Common Core-aligned tests from being included on students’ permanent records or used in grade promotion decisions. He said that action was necessary because of the flawed rollout of the Common Core standards in New York, which he has blamed on the State Board of Regents and Education Department.

“My position was, the department of education had not done a good job in introducing the Common Core, and they had rushed it, so we said, for a period of five years, the test scores won’t count,” Cuomo continued. “So they can opt out if they want to, but on the other hand, if the child takes the test as practice, then the score doesn't count anyway.”

Would have been nice if the DN could have gotten into the story the part about Cuomo insisting that Common Core test scores were "meaningless" and would not be used in any punitive way against them.

Instead the DN story just makes it into a they said/they said thing, with FES vs. the DOE.

Nonetheless, that's another reason for fewer students going to summer school than in the past.

The media's got a bias here, to make de Blasio's NYCDOE look less "rigorous" than the Bloomberg NYVDOE, so they're happy to give Families For Excellent Schools the press to bash the NYCDOE and de Blasio, then half-ass the pushback.

Why A School Would Want To Have Some Regents Tests Rescored

The NY Post reported that 55 schools out of 860 schools in NYC had some Regents exams "rescored."

Four of these schools were "Renewal" schools.

This is supposed to make readers think that these schools - and the de Blasio NYCDOE - is cheating in order to improve test scores.

But if you know anything about the Regents exam grading process, you'd know why some exams need to be rescored.

Regents exams are now scored outside of individual schools, either during the school day or after school when teachers are paid extra to score exams.

This is supposed to ensure objectivity in the scoring of the exams and prevent cheating in individual schools (where teachers and administrators have a lot riding on the scores.)

Alas, the "norming" process for training the teachers to do the grading is often haphazard at best, incompetent at worst.

I've graded both during the day and after school for per session and I can tell you, I've seen some people lead the "norming" process who had no idea what they were doing.

In one case, the person leading ELA "norming" a few years ago gave some erroneous information about the grading of exams that was only corrected because several veteran teachers at the session pushed back against the information that was being given out.

In other cases, I have seen "norming" sessions in which most teachers present have agreed upon the way to approach the exam only to have one or two teachers say "I don't care what the rest of you say about that - I'm going to grade this way!"

One year, during the electronic grading, I saw a teacher who decided to grade the Part 3 ELA responses with her own grading system rather than the one the state had given in the grading materials.

She gave 0's to short response paragraphs that clearly should have been 1's and 1's to short response paragraphs that should have been 2's.

Given that she was grading both parts of the Part 3 section, she easily could have been the difference between some students passing the exam or failing it.

Now "quality control" is supposed to catch this kind of thing, and after a while, a supervisor did approach her and tell her she wasn't grading according to the state standards.

But what happened to all the tests she had already graded?

Were they rescored?  Or were the grades kept and they simply took her off the scoring going forward?

Another problem with scoring the exams is that teachers are often under the gun to get the tests graded by a certain deadline.

I saw this first hand with history exams last year, as teachers were "speedgrading" tests the night before the last day of school.

How accurate were the grades during the speedgrading sessions?

Hard to say - maybe teachers are more forgiving during "speedgrading" sessions and apt to give students the benefit of the doubt, maybe they're more apt to grade severely because they're feeling stressed.

In any case, one thing I do know - teachers weren't able to give much thought to the grading process that last day.

Schools are allowed to request rescoring of some exams if they see egregious errors in the grading process or believe they have evidence that the scoring was unfair and contrary to the state standards.

These requests are not always granted - a few years ago, I know a school that asked to have about a half-dozen exams rescored out of hundreds scored because the grading of the essays in these half-dozen tests was clearly contrary to the state standards that were released in the grading materials.

The request was denied.

Would some of the six students who ended up failing the exam have passed if the exams had been carefully (and fairly) rescored?

You bet.

The NY Post wants you to think the grading process is competent, objective and professional.

They want you to believe that the scores that come from the Regents grading process are sacrosanct, like Mosiac law from the mount, and any requests to rescore exams tantamount to "scrubbing" or cheating.

The truth is much more complex than that.

Is it possible some schools are looking to raise grades by having some tests rescored?

Sure.

But it's also likely that there have been breakdowns in the grading process around the city and many of the schools that asked to have exams rescored had legitimate concerns about the grades their students received.

Of course, the NY Post doesn't cover this complexity because they're not much interested in anything other than pushing their political agenda - public schools suck, public school teachers are incompetent and dishonest, de Blasio is inept and his "Renewal" program doomed to failure.

But it's important to correct the record here and point out that the grading process for Regents exams is often chaotic, sometimes a complete a mess, and can lead to unfair grades for students (and teachers and schools.)

De Blasio "Insources" IT Work For New York City

Juan Gonzalez in the Daily News:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bloomberg was never personally held accountable for these.

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

Bloomberg's NYCDOE Covered Up Violence In Schools

This isn't a surprise:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ...

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

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

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

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

... 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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