Daily News Tries To Humanize Shael Polakow-Suransky

The NY Daily News has a heart-tugging article about Cathie Black's new #2 man on the NYCDOE totem pole, Shael Polakow-Suransky.

His wife died of cancer last year.

The article details how devastated Polakow-Suransky was by her death and how he felt like a hole had been ripped in the world with her gone.

Very touching and sad.

It's manipulative too, of course.

Because it is an attempt to humanize a guy whose life's work has been to dehumanize the school system.

Polakow-Suransky is a numbers guy -he's all about the data, the test scores, the math.

You can bet Polakow-Suranksy wouldn't give a second thought to firing a teacher with a low value-added score two years running even if that teacher had been dealing with a loved one's devastating illness at home.

Don't get me wrong here - I am truly sorry to hear when a man of 37 loses his wife to cancer or any disease or tragic circumstance.

It is truly awful and my empathy goes out to him.

That said, let us not lose sight of who Polakow-Suranksy is - a Broad Foundation-trained data fetishist who makes it his job to take all of the humanity out of public education, to put in place systems that dehumanize teachers and children, to promote a public education philosophy that privileges data and only data as the sole reason for being.

He is an eduwanker through and through and no amount of horrible tragedy in his own life should make us lose sight of who he is and what he has been put into place to do - along with his boss, Cathie Black.

How Did The Charter School/Hedge Funders Get Here?

If you're a male of a certain age, you know Ronnie James Dio - singer with Elf, Rainbow, post-Ozzy Black Sabbath and his own band, Dio.

He died yesterday at the age of 67.

The news wasn't a complete surprise, unfortunately. He had been very sick with stomach cancer (he looked very frail in recent photos) and the summer tour of Heaven and Hell - the post-Ozzy Sabbath renamed to keep Sharon Osbourne from suing them - was canceled back on May 4th because Dio was too sick to perform.

Still, the news made me feel a little sad when I heard. I pulled out the old Sabbath cds - Heaven and Hell and The Mob Rules - and the Rainbow cd Rainbow Rising last night and played them really loud to bring back the feeling I had first listening to them as a 13 year old. I started looking at the websites, seeing other people reminisce about the 70's and 80's music scene, about Ronnie's passing, about the man's career (he actually started in a doo wop band in the late 50's!!!)

As I was taking an hour or so to roll down memory lane, what do I come across on one of the music websites about Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne but an ad for "keepteachersgreat.org."

Not kidding - on a site about Ozzy rereleasing his first two solo albums with the original rhythm section restored (another Sharon Osbourse/lawyer special), there is this ad that says "Petition the UFT - get rid of bad teachers."

On a site about music - specifically 80's heavy metal music.

Tell me, why are the hedge funders/charter school scumbags putting an anti-teacher ad there?

Seriously.

Every newspaper, major blog on right and left and the MSN homepage wasn't enough?

I love how the hedge funders/charter school scumbags like to play like they're the underdogs against the big bad all-powerful teachers unions.

Meanwhile they have quite literally blanketed the web with these ads - from the Times to Huffingtonpost to a music site about heavy metal.

They're like Bloomberg back in the last election -so much money to burn, they can literally send out a mailing a day to everybody in the world.

The question I have is, what kind of democracy do we have when a small contingent of the richest people on earth can run a very expensive ad campaign to demonize unionized teachers everywhere on the web for as long and as frequent as they want?

I guess it's the same kind of democracy that calls capping oil company profits socialism but caps the liability they have for the worst oil spill in the history of mankind of $75 million.

It's the best democracy money can buy - for the rich and the powerful and the connected.

For everybody else, it's the shaft.

As Ronnie James Dio wrote all those years ago "If you listen to fools, the mob rules..."

Surely that is true these days.

Rest In Peace, Ronnie.

A Real Emergency

The NY Times ran an article this morning about how the 2010-2011 school year is shaping up to be the most "austere" in decades, as many districts are being forced to cut teachers, programs, and even school days in order to meet their budgets.

Secretary Arne himself weighed in on the crisis:

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan estimated that state budget cuts imperiled 100,000 to 300,000 public school jobs. In an interview on Monday, he said the nation was flirting with “education catastrophe,” and urged Congress to approve additional stimulus funds to save school jobs.

“We absolutely see this as an emergency,” Mr. Duncan said.

Now the Obama administration have over $3 billion sitting around from the first stimulus bill that Duncan and Obama have put into the Race to the Top competition, but they refuse to give it to states unless they "innovate" schools with programs like replacing teachers' salaries with merit pay programs, tying teachers' evaluations to test scores, adding longer school days and school years and building expensive "data-tracking" systems in order to collect, collate and analyze student and teacher performance data.

In fact, the two states that won the first round of the RttT competition are using most of the extra federal money for computer systems to track data, not to keep teachers on the payroll or lower class sizes.

So when Duncan says states are facing economic catastrophe and he thinks Congress should appropriate more funds to help them, you can be certain that those funds, even if appropriated by Congress, will only be available to the most "innovative" of states.

They will come with lots of strings attached.

And the strings will require states to use the extra money not to keep teachers in classrooms or after school programs going but to purchase data tracking systems and put merit pay programs into place.

It is a real emergency these days in public education, but not only because times are hard and budgets and jobs are being slashed in districts all across the country.

It's a real emergency because the corporate whores running the country do not give a shit about any of that and only see this as an opportunity to force permanent "education reforms" they want onto schools all across the country.

NYCDOE Merit Pay For Students Program Dubbed A "Failure"

Surprise, surprise - merit pay for students doesn't work:

A program that paid city students if they got higher test scores earned an F, a new study shows.

The Harvard-based study led by former city Education Department consultant Roland Fryer examined the program he spearheaded, which poured $6.3 million in private funds into 261 schools in four cities.

Fourth- and seventh-graders at 58 high-needs city schools were paid to show up for tests and also earn high marks. A fourth-grader could earn up to $250, and a seventh-grader could pocket up to $500.

But students who were paid showed no significant improvement on math or English tests compared to their unpaid peers.

"The study found that incentives provided for actions, for example, reading books, school attendance and behavior were effective at increasing test scores," said Fryer, "but that incentives tied to results, such as test scores and grades, were not as effective at increasing test scores."

The city Education Department, which heralded the plan at the time, expressed no regrets.

"While incentives didn't substantially improve student achievement in New York, we consider our participation in the national study to be a great success and a testament to our approach of pairing innovation with rigorous evaluation to find new programs that make a difference," said Education Department spokesman David Cantor.

Translation - "innovation" matters more than success when it comes to education policy.

You can see that in the approach Obama and Duncan are taking at the federal level as well.

RIF is a program that works? Ahh, screw it - let's defund it and force the program to "innovate" if it wants to survive.

Merit pay for kids doesn't work? Ahh, screw it - let's force states to tie teacher pay to test scores because that's more innovative than the old ways of compensation.

CHANGE FOR CHANGE'S SAKE - that's what the motto of the education deform movement.

And that's Obama's motto too.

As long as the "change" and the "innovation" mean more money for the privatized education companies, that is.

Poor Newsweek...

...the test prep guys took their swanky new offices:

Newsweek staffers, having suffered through layoffs and the struggle for the title’s future, have to endure yet another loss: their new offices.

Scarcely a year after they moved from their unglamorous Midtown offices to cushier Tribeca digs, staffers were told they would have to pack up again, to relocate uptown.

Newsweek will trade places with Washington Post Co. sibling Kaplan, the test-prep unit, which is outgrowing its Midtown space, according to a March 31 staff memo from Newsweek chief executive Tom Ascheim.

Staffers will make the move in August from 395 Hudson St. to Kaplan’s current space at 888 7th Ave., down the street from Newsweek’s old digs.

In the interim, Newsweek employees will have to endure construction and some internal relocation to make room for incoming Kaplan employees.

Ascheim tried to put a positive spin on the news, pointing out that after the move, staffers will be closer to Central Park.

The news comes at a particularly tough time for the newsweekly. Ad pages fell 26 percent to 1,117 in 2009. With ad revenue declining, the title cut its rate-base guarantee twice in the past year, to 1.5 million in January from 2.6 million a year earlier.

How ironic that both the Washington Post and Newsweek - which are publications at the nexus of the education deform movement with eduwankers like Jay Matthews and "reporters" like Evan Thomas pushing for the privatization of public schools, the wide expansion of charter schools and the busting of teachers unions - are owned by test preparation company/for-profit school operator Kaplan.

Coincidence?

I think not.

Even more ironic that Thomas, who says "bad" teachers who do not raise the test scores of their students need to be fired immediately can't seem to keep the circulation or the revenue of his weekly "news" magazine from plummeting.

Under his own guidelines for teachers, Thomas ought to be fired for failure.

I believe it was Thomas (or his headline writers) who said about teaching: "In no other profession are workers so insulated from accountability."

I dunno, given the performance of Newsweek over the past few years, that anybody from the editorial board has still got a job looks like a failure of accountability to me.

But I have a feeling that oversight will be rectified soon enough.

Moving the test prep unit to Newsweek's office and moving Newsweek to where Kaplan used to be - that's a sign, I'll tell you what.

Maybe after they finally shut Newsweek down, Thomas and the others at the magazine can go into test prep.