NY Times Should Look At Cuomo's Common Core Commission For Interference Too

The NY Times takes a look at Cuomo's first Moreland Commission - the post-Sandy panel that studied the failures of the electric companies during Hurricane Sandy and finds the following:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has faced intense scrutiny in recent months, including an investigation by federal prosecutors, over his management of a commission that he created to root out corruption in New York politics, but prevented from examining his administration’s conduct and then prematurely shut down.

 

An analysis of Mr. Cuomo’s handling of an earlier investigative commission, which highlighted the failures of electric companies in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, reveals some of the same hallmarks: interference, efforts to shield his administration’s role and a sense that the governor had a clear idea at the outset of what the commission should conclude.

Gee - what a surprise that Cuomo tampered with his LIPA commission, had a pre-determined outcome for what he wanted from the commission and worked to shield just what a sham the commission was.


These were also the hallmarks of Cuomo's Common Core Commission:

Todd Hathaway, a teacher at East Aurora High School and a member of the Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Common Core panel, ripped the process today after the panel released its report last night.

The recommendations include what Cuomo wanted: holding students harmless for the tougher exams, but not a three-year moratorium on using the tests to evaluate teachers.

The 11-member panel—which included two state lawmakers—said the state should keep Common Core-based tests in grades 3-8 from appearing on a student’s transcript, while capping the amount of instructional time that can be spent on standardized tests.

...

Hathaway said, “The report – and the process that produced it—is incomplete. the report was released suddenly, even as final comments were still being solicited. I had indicated the likelihood I would dissent and not allow the report to be spun as ‘consensus.’” Nevertheless, the report was issued with my name attached. I am very concerned that the report tries to make it seem like all the discussion had been completed.”

Here’s the rest of his statement:

“In fact, the Executive Office repeatedly ignored my concerns and the legitimate concerns of others about inappropriate state testing, the misuse of invalid tests for evaluations and the lack of transparency in state testing. The result is that some of the report’s conclusions and suggestions do not hold up to scrutiny. I wouldn’t accept this kind of work from my students and I don’t accept it here.”

“The failure to address testing and evaluation issues in a comprehensive way suggests the dynamics of the classroom will not change. The report seems to blame everybody else for the problems of the Common Core learning standards without adequately addressing the appropriateness of some of the standards and the testing that goes with it. This report should have addressed serious deficiencies in state testing. It should have discussed the lack of transparency in tests; the lack of diagnostic and prescriptive worth to teachers; the unacceptable delays in returning scores to school districts and the insanity of pretending there is validity to teacher ratings that are derived from student scores widely acknowledged to be invalid.”

“Finally, this panel should have recognized the need to pause in the use of assessments for high-stakes decisions for students and teachers. This would have allowed the State Education Department, as well as school districts, to refine the tests and testing materials; teachers to engage in the standards and develop a variety of lessons to meet them instead of just relying on modules; parents to understand the role and utility of data in education; and for teachers to receive the necessary professional development. Implementing massive curriculum changes do not just happen overnight. They take time. I fully support a delay in the use of tests in high-stakes decisions for students and teachers, but that issue was never fully explored. You can’t put students first if you put their teachers last.”

Cuomo knew what he wanted from the Common Core panel before it ever met.

It was a sham panel, just the way his first Moreland Commission was a sham commission, with the "findings" of the panel already pre-determined by Cuomo's needs and wants, just the way his second Moreland Commission was a sham commission.

I've covered this before, but it bears repeating:

The games Cuomo played with the Moreland Commission are the same games he played with the LIPA Commission and the Common Core panel.

Cuomo uses these commissions as political cover to get something he wants through, then rigs the panels and commissions so that it all ends up the way he wants.

The difference between the LIPA Commission and the CCSS panel and the Moreland Commission is, Cuomo was screwing around with potential criminality when he dealt away the Moreland Commission in order to get some minor league ethics reforms in the budget agreement.

With the other two panels, he was simply rigging a process and engaging in political gamesmanship, not dealing away criminal investigations in some quid pro quo budget deal.

That's why Preet Bharara wasn't going to look into the LIPA Commission or the CCSS panel process, but he is looking into just what Cuomo engineered in the Moreland mess.

Perhaps Cuomo, emboldened by four years of successfully manipulating these commissions and panels to get the outcomes he wanted, thought nobody would blink at his Moreland machinations either.

If so, Cuomo was wrong about that.

Too bad the Times Editorial Board doesn't read its own new section before it issues endorsements.

Maybe Cuomo wouldn't have gotten theirs.

Times, Post, and DN Newspaper Endorsements - NYers Didn't Care About Them

Blake Zeff:

Politicians thought voters cared what the top papers thought. That may not be the case any longer.

In New York, the city’s three largest papers – which each happen to also be among the nation’s top ten in circulation – suffered huge collective whiffs in recent weeks. For the office of mayor, the entire trifecta of the New York Times, Daily News, and Post, all endorsed Christine Quinn in the Democratic primary over Bill de Blasio. This was notable because the papers rarely agree on much (though all supported Michael Bloomberg). And the editorial consensus was viewed as a significant, possible turning point in the campaign for Quinn.

In reality, of course, the papers’ candidate was trounced, failing to make it into a runoff and trailing the winning primary candidate, Bill de Blasio, by nearly 25 points. One could argue that the margin might have been larger without their endorsements, which is hard to disprove. But polls at the time the papers weighed in showed Quinn with a fighter’s chance at squeezing into the primary. It just didn’t happen.

Fortunately for the editorial boards, there would be a second chance just weeks later. The primary for Public Advocate, the second-ranking office in the city, resulted in a runoff, leaving two candidates: Daniel Squadron and Letitia James.

As they did in the mayoral primary, all three papers of seemingly disparate ideological bents – The Times is generally seen as liberal, the Post conservative, and the News somewhere in between – went for Squadron. And last night when the runoff results came in, their chosen candidate…  was defeated by twenty points.

The next time the newspapers look to mock the UFT for their poor endorsement record - well, the newspapers aren't doing so hot lately either.

Few people want to listen to the Voice of God on the editorial page anymore.

Thank God.

When Does The NY Times Do The Hit Piece On Joe Lhota?

They did one on Quinn.

Did one on Weiner.

Did one on Thompson.

Now they've done one on de Blasio.

When do they do one on Lhota?

As I have blogged over and over and over, this guy's got anger management issues.

He challenged a 77 year old man to a fight last year at an MTA board meeting he was chairing.

No, really.

Back during the Giuliani administration, he got into a shoving match with a reporter right outside City Hall.

Those are the two stories we know about.

I bet there are more.

Wouldn't it be nice if the Times looked into it?

They've done their hit pieces on every other candidate.

Isn't it time Joe Lhota gets his 15 minutes?

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!!!!

Was The Daily News Reporter Even At Walcott's Brooklyn Tech Speech Yesterday?

The Daily News article on the Walcott speech at Brooklyn Tech yesterday has a vastly different tone than the NY Times article covering the same speech.

The Times writer reports that the principals resented having to be Walcott's captive audience for what amounted to a political speech defending Bloomberg and his policies.

The Times writer got quotes from two principals - one a supporter of the Bloomberg reforms, one a critic - who both went on record resenting having to listen to the speech and criticizing the DOE for using what was supposed to be an "academic conference" to wage a "political battle."

The Times writer reports that the principals laughed at Walcott when he said he didn't like to get involved in politics. 

This statement by Walcott is jive, of course, given he was a political aide to Bloomberg for many years before he was shifted to the DOE to staunch the Cathie Black wound and given he was using this Saturday academic conference to attack opponents of the mayor.

But you don't get any of this reporting in the Daily News article.

Rather the Daily News reporter frames the battle as Bloomberg/Walcott vs. mayoral candidates/UFT.

There are no quotes or statements from anybody at the speech - just reaction statements from the candidates or their campaigns.

Reading the DN article and comparing it to the Times article and Norm Scott's post on the speech at Ed Notes, I have to wonder if the DN reporter was actually at the speech or if she simply reported on the Walcott text sent out in the morning, then got response quotes from the mayoral candidates' campaigns after the speech was over.

If she was not at the speech, she should say in her article that she is reporting on the text of a speech given by Walcott, not the actual speech given by Walcott.

Because how the audience received the speech is as important a part of the story as what was in the speech.

But if she was at Brooklyn Tech yesterday and failed to report on how the principals - even the supporters of the Walcott/Bloomberg reforms - were resentful at being used as a backdrop for Walcott's political defense of Bloomberg education policies, then she failed to get the whole story.

Either way, there is a major problem with the way the Daily News reporter went about covering the Walcott speech and DN readers learn little else from the DN article that they couldn't have gleamed from the text of Chancellor Walcott's speech itself.

New York Times Executive May Have Helped Cover Up Pedophilia Allegations Against Former BBC Personality

In a pot calling the kettle black moment, the scandal-plagued, Murdoch-owned New York Post covers a scandal at the New York Times:

A burgeoning molestation scandal across the pond may have New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. wishing he had looked closer to home to fill the CEO spot.

Mark Thompson, the former head of the British Broadcasting Corp., is slated to take over the troubled broadsheet next month, but cover-up allegations are swirling about his role in an investigation into a popular television personality.

The scandal involves a TV host named Jimmy Savile, a 40-year employee of the BBC on radio and on TV with an English version of “Bandstand” called “Top of the Pops.”

The flamboyant Savile also hosted a weekly primetime TV show called “Jim’ll Fix It,” on which he made the wishes of many young viewers come true by using his celebrity to get donations.

Savile, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1972, passed away in October 2011 at the age of 84, and as part of its holiday schedule the BBC scheduled retrospectives on his life and the tens of millions of pounds he collected for charity over the years.

But since his death, more than 20 people, all under the age of 16 at the time of the crimes, have alerted British police that they were molested by Savile.

On Friday, Scotland Yard said it was following more than 400 leads with at least 200 potential pedophile victims. Some girls were as young as 13 when attacked by Savile.

Now the BBC is under fire for an alleged cover-up — both for possibly ignoring early warnings of Savile’s behavior, as well as cancelling a critical documentary about Savile after his death.

The documentary was scheduled to run on “Newsnight,” Britain’s top news show. It was scrapped for editorial reasons, according to Thompson.

“Thompson spoke to the British press and said it was a News Department decision to squash the story, and he was not in the loop — which a subsequent BBC press release apparently partially contradicted,” said Evercore Partners’ Douglas Arthur, who covers the Times.

“It may blow over unless Thompson is called to testify, should Parliament hold hearings. I believe the prime minister has called for a full investigation. So it’s unclear how this unfolds,” he said.

So a newspaper owned by the scandal-plagued Rupert Murdoch covers a pedophilia scandal at the BBC that now is embroiling the New York Times.

Add in the New York Daily News, currently run by the scandal-plagued, former Murdoch employee/hacking criminal Colin Myler, and you can see how the three major newspapers in New York City are going to be run by unaccountable, unethical and, in the case of Murdoch and Myler, criminal men.

Times Refuses To Call Cathie Black On Her Lie

Cathie Black stated emphatically that she has visited schools that have received an A, a B, a C, a D and an F on their report cards.

She actually has only visited schools with A, B, or C grades.

Gotham Schools called her on this yesterday:

She also tells reporters that by now she’s visited schools that run the full gamut: from A-ranking schools to F schools. As of mid-December she’d only been to schools getting A’s, B’s, or C’s.

...

Maura asked DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz which D and F graded schools Black has visited. Ravitz says Black has visited a “a mix so far in terms of progress report grades, mostly A’s, B’s, and C’s I believe.”

All the reporters along for the tour say they heard Black say that she’s visited schools at every grade level. Ravitz denies this and says she’ll check the transcript.

They didn't say Black had lied, but they pointed out quite specifically what she had stated and that she was wrong about it.

For some reason, the Times was much more subtle than Gotham Schools:

Of the schools she has visited in the past few weeks, the worst received a C in their progress reports, which are mostly based on how the students fare on standardized tests. A spokeswoman, Natalie Ravitz, said that Ms. Black had visits scheduled to schools that got D’s and F’s.

The Times editors seem to have taken out what MUST have been, given the reality of the Black visits, the next few sentences in that paragraph. Let me finish them:

Ms. Ravitz, as she usually is, was full of shit in this statement. Ms. Black has ONLY visited schools that received an A, a B, or a C on their report cards. The first time Black visits a school that has received a D or an F on its report card will be when she's closing it down and throwing students and teachers out onto the street.

There - I fixed the Times article so that it reads the way it should.

Silly Times editors - taking out the truth and making reality seem like the Twilight Zone!

And once again, Cathie Black opens her mouth and out comes something stupid.

Times Article Weighs In On Value-Added

This seems to me a fair article about the value-added jive:

A growing number of school districts have adopted a system called value-added modeling to answer that question, provoking battles from Washington to Los Angeles — with some saying it is an effective method for increasing teacher accountability, and others arguing that it can give an inaccurate picture of teachers’ work.

The system calculates the value teachers add to their students’ achievement, based on changes in test scores from year to year and how the students perform compared with others in their grade.

People who analyze the data, making a few statistical assumptions, can produce a list ranking teachers from best to worst.

Use of value-added modeling is exploding nationwide. Hundreds of school systems, including those in Chicago, New York and Washington, are already using it to measure the performance of schools or teachers. Many more are expected to join them, partly because the Obama administration has prodded states and districts to develop more effective teacher-evaluation systems than traditional classroom observation by administrators.

...

A report released this month by several education researchers warned that the value-added methodology can be unreliable.

“If these teachers were measured in a different year, or a different model were used, the rankings might bounce around quite a bit,” said Edward Haertel, a Stanford professor who was a co-author of the report. “People are going to treat these scores as if they were reflections on the effectiveness of the teachers without any appreciation of how unstable they are.”

Other experts disagree.

William L. Sanders, a senior research manager for a North Carolina company, SAS, that does value-added estimates for districts in North Carolina, Tennessee and other states, said that “if you use rigorous, robust methods and surround them with safeguards, you can reliably distinguish highly effective teachers from average teachers and from ineffective teachers.”

Dr. Sanders helped develop value-added methods to evaluate teachers in Tennessee in the 1990s. Their use spread after the 2002 No Child Left Behind law required states to test in third to eighth grades every year, giving school districts mountains of test data that are the raw material for value-added analysis.

...

Even critics acknowledge that the method can be more accurate for rating schools than the system now required by federal law, which compares test scores of succeeding classes, for instance this year’s fifth graders with last year’s fifth graders.

But when the method is used to evaluate individual teachers, many factors can lead to inaccuracies. Different people crunching the numbers can get different results, said Douglas N. Harris, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. For example, two analysts might rank teachers in a district differently if one analyst took into account certain student characteristics, like which students were eligible for free lunch, and the other did not.

Millions of students change classes or schools each year, so teachers can be evaluated on the performance of students they have taught only briefly, after students’ records were linked to them in the fall.

In many schools, students receive instruction from multiple teachers, or from after-school tutors, making it difficult to attribute learning gains to a specific instructor. Another problem is known as the ceiling effect. Advanced students can score so highly one year that standardized state tests are not sensitive enough to measure their learning gains a year later.

In Houston, a district that uses value-added methods to allocate teacher bonuses, Darilyn Krieger said she had seen the ceiling effect as a physics teacher at Carnegie Vanguard High School.

“My kids come in at a very high level of competence,” Ms. Krieger said.

After she teaches them for a year, most score highly on a state science test but show little gains, so her bonus is often small compared with those of other teachers, she said.

The Houston Chronicle reports teacher bonuses each year in a database, and readers view the size of the bonus as an indicator of teacher effectiveness, Ms. Krieger said.

“I have students in class ask me why I didn’t earn a higher bonus,” Ms. Krieger said. “I say: ‘Because the system decided I wasn’t doing a good enough job. But the system is flawed.’ ”

This year, the federal Department of Education’s own research arm warned in a study that value-added estimates “are subject to a considerable degree of random error.”

And last October, the Board on Testing and Assessments of the National Academies, a panel of 13 researchers led by Dr. Haertel, wrote to Mr. Duncan warning of “significant concerns” that the Race to the Top grant competition was placing “too much emphasis on measures of growth in student achievement that have not yet been adequately studied for the purposes of evaluating teachers and principals.”

“Value-added methodologies should be used only after careful consideration of their appropriateness for the data that are available, and if used, should be subjected to rigorous evaluation,” the panel wrote. “At present, the best use of VAM techniques is in closely studied pilot projects.”

Despite those warnings, the Department of Education made states with laws prohibiting linkages between student data and teachers ineligible to compete in Race to the Top, and it designed its scoring system to reward states that use value-added calculations in teacher evaluations.

“I’m uncomfortable with how fast a number of states are moving to develop teacher-evaluation systems that will make important decisions about teachers based on value-added results,” said Robert L. Linn, a testing expert who is an emeritus professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

“They haven’t taken caution into account as much as they need to,” Professor Linn said.

Indeed they haven't.

I wish the writers at the op-ed page of the Times would read the news section of the paper and learn how the VAM jive they are cheering for is full of problems.

And I REALLY wish the know-it-alls in the administration would do the same thing.

More on this tomorrow.

I think maybe VAM should be applied to the Obama administration data.

And the revenue and readership numbers of the Times.

Paterson Losing Support

Governor Paterson lost a respected member of his cabinet today in protest over allegations that Paterson and his personal state trooper contingent tried to (and may have succeeded) in getting a woman allegedly assaulted by Paterson's top aide to not pursue assault charges.

Here is the story from the Times:

Updated, 2:26 p.m. | The cabinet official who supervises the State Police has resigned in the wake of reports of intervention by the State Police and Gov. David A. Paterson into a domestic-assault case against a senior Paterson aide.

The official, Denise E. O’Donnell, commissioner of the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, issued a statement Thursday after inquiries from The New York Times.

“The fact that the governor and members of the State Police have acknowledged direct contact with a woman who had filed for an order of protection against a senior member of the governor’s staff is a very serious matter,” she wrote. “These actions are unacceptable regardless of their intent.”

The resignation, at 2 p.m., came on a day when New York’s political establishment reeled at the news of Mr. Paterson’s involvement, with some of the beleaguered governor’s few remaining allies publicly suggesting that he should end his campaign for election.

Ms. O’Donnell, a former federal prosecutor and social worker, wrote that she found the breach “particularly distressing” in an administration “that prides itself on its record of combating domestic violence.

“The behavior alleged here is the antithesis of what many of us have spent our entire careers working to build,” she added, “a legal system that protects victims of domestic violence and brings offenders to justice.”

O'Donnell says the State Police Superintendent lied to her about the involvement of the state police in the alleged cover-up.

So far, there have only been calls for Paterson to put an end to his re-election campaign.

But given the disgusting nature of these allegations, I would not be surprised to see more damaging facts come out and Paterson ultimately have to go.

Paterson was calling for Hiram Monserrate's expulsion from the State Senate for assaulting his girlfriend at the same time he was trying to get a woman who was assaulted by his chief aide to drop the assault charges against the aide and he was using the state police to help him in the cover-up.

Yeah, gotta say, that's worthy of a resignation.

Incredibly Lame Paterson Expose In Times

Dunno what all the fuss was about the past few weeks concerning Governor Paterson.

There were all kinds of rumors floating around such as Paterson and his wife are swingers and have sex parties in the governor's mansion or Paterson's a coke fiend who enjoys doing lines off the naked bodies of dead hookers.

Quality stuff like that.

The Times was supposedly investigating these rumors and was going to blow the doors out of Albany with an expose about Paterson.

Now that stuff I detailed above may be true for all I know, but the Times either doesn't have that info or plan on publishing it if it does.

What they do have is a story about Paterson's chief aide, David Johnson, a 6 foot 7 fellow nicknamed D.J. who was arrested for selling coke to the cops as a teenager and has been involved in at least three domestic abuse cases, the last one as recently as last October.

Paterson's other aides do not like Johnson and think he has too much power and influence over Paterson.

Johnson used to be Paterson's driver, now he's functioning as a quasi-chief of staff to the governor.

Granted Paterson is a hypocrite for calling for Hiram Monserrate's expulsion from the state senate for a misdemeanor conviction in a domestic abuse case while keeping Johnson, a man with his own domestic abuse problems, as his chief aide.

And granted, that Paterson would essentially give so much power to this "Benson" figure with a violent past and at least one felony drug conviction (his other conviction came when he was underage and has been sealed) is a bit scary and shows, uh, an interesting bit of judgment on Paterson's part.

But surely this story doesn't call for Paterson's resignation.

So either there is more to this story that the Times didn't get into or Paterson was right about somebody being out to get him.