Many Students Return To School Without Their Common Core Test Results

You know how educrats, education reformers and civil rights activists living off the Gates/Broad Foundation dole like to say we must have standardized testing or otherwise we'll never know how the kids are doing in school?

This past spring saw the rollout of new tests based on the Common Core standards. The reading and math tests replace traditional spring standardized tests. About 12 million students in 29 states and the District of Columbia took the tests developed by two groups — the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).

According to Smarter Balanced, only a few states have released scores from the spring — Connecticut, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Missouri, West Virginia, and Vermont. Most states have not been able to put out test scores before the start of classes. The delay was expected in the exam's first year, but it's still frustrating for some teachers and parents.

Scores for the almost 5 million students who took the PARCC tests still have yet to be released. PAARC is still setting benchmarks for each performance level. The partnership says they're due for release this fall, and that the goal in future years of the tests is to release the results as close to the end of the school year as possible.

Just as with the New York Common Core tests, the benchmarks aren't set until long after the students  take their tests.

With the old New York State Regents exams, the benchmark scores were set before students took their tests and were posted right after the test ended.

That seems like a fair and honest way to do things - set the passing mark before students take the test.

But in the Era of Common Core, when educrats and reformers wanted to rig the tests for 70% failure rates, all of these Common Core tests, including the high school tests, are benchmarked long after students take their tests and the results are in.

Rigged?

You betcha!

If not, why not set the benchmarks before, the way they used to with the Regents exams?

Simple - they're playing with the numbers, manipulating them for their own political ends.

But as we've seen with the opposition to testing growing over the past few years, the more games the educrats and reformers play with the Endless Testing regime, the more the opposition to testing grows.

So keep playing games, folks.

You are fooling fewer and fewer with the manipulation and lies.

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.

NYSED Commissioner King Issues College Readiness Data With Margins Of Error As Large As 27%

How does one account for the fact that if the data's coming from NYSED Commissioner John King's Department of Education, it's inevitably error-riddled?

Here's the latest King/NYSED data fiasco:

Local school superintendents are livid over what they say is massively inaccurate data about how many of their high school graduates go on to and graduate from college.

"We have a sense of how our students are doing and if they're succeeding in college," said South Orangetown schools Superintendent Ken Mitchell, immediate past president of the Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents.

His district was reported as having 62 percent of 2012 high school graduates still in college in 2014 when he said the real number is 89 percent.

"The report is called 'Where are They Now?' We know where these kids are," he said. "This is a huge discrepancy. That's why we're so angry."

The data, presented to the state Board of Regents on Monday, was compiled from information provided by the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit organization that provides services to about 98 percent of the country's colleges and universities.

There were some inaccuracies, a state education official acknowledged.

Not all colleges and universities send data; some is incomplete; some students opt out of having their data included; and some schools did not provide information for students who don't receive financial aid, said Ken Wagner, deputy commissioner for curriculum, assessment and education technology.

He said the state felt that at most 3 percent of the numbers were inaccurate; the Clearinghouse's website says its number are 95 percent accurate. New York City, which contracted with the Clearinghouse privately, found a 3 percent error rate, Wagner said.

3% margin of error rate?

Here's a sampling of the MOE on SED's college readiness numbers in the Lower Hudson Valley:

Some discrepancies between the state's and local districts' data on students still in college

Pearl River HS: state: 82%, district-provided: 97%

Rye Neck HS: state: 80%, district-provided: 98%

Tappan Zee HS: state: 62%, district-provided: 89%

Valhalla HS: state: 79%,district-provided: 97%

 Carol Burris found a large MOE for her school as well:

In its zest to prove there is a crisis of college readiness, combined with a sweetheart infatuation with big data, NYSED produced reports (SIRS 601-604) to track New York high school graduates’ college enrollment. A few days before the public release of the reports, Deputy Commissioner Ken Wagner sent a memo to districts. He explained that the department had combined school data with that of the National Student Clearinghouse to document which former high school students were enrolled in college and whether they persisted in their studies.

The memo informed superintendents that after the Regents discussed the data, it would be publicly released because it would be of interest to communities.

Our district data coordinator, who is my assistant principal, brought me the SIRS report. It claimed that only 80 percent of our students from the cohort of 2008 (Class of 2012) were enrolled in college.   As soon as I saw the number, I knew it was not correct. Ninety-eight percent of the 2012 Class told us they were going to college and gave us the name of the college they would attend. Might some have left after one semester, or changed their minds? It’s possible. But I found it difficult to believe that 18 percent had either not enrolled or quickly dropped out.

I asked my assistant principal to drill down to the names in the SIRS report. Not only were the names given, the report included which colleges and universities the students attended, their race, special education status, whether or not they received free or reduced priced lunch, and in many cases, their college major. This massive collection of data on graduates made my jaw drop.

And then I looked at the names. The 2012 salutatorian wasn’t on the list. I began a name by name comparison of the cohort against the report. The list did not include the names of many former students who were attending private and public colleges and universities, both in and out of state.

I began calling families to verify the report. There were 53 names that did not have a college listing.

 By 5 p.m. that day, I had spoken with 27 families. In 25 of the 27 cases, the students were thriving in their third year of college. They were at Brown, Bard, Cornell, Bentley, Notre Dame and Wesleyan. One student was in the Naval Academy (which smartly and ironically is one of the few schools that does not share data), and another at Tufts. One was at the University of Florida and another at the University of Charleston. What was even more bizarre was that some were in New York State public colleges governed by NYSED—SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Binghamton, SUNY Stony Brook and Queensborough Community College. One student had already graduated from a technical school with a 3.84 GPA. Eighty percent had now become over 90 percent, and over the course of the next few days the percentage would continue to climb. This was no small error.

When calling, I asked parents whether they had “opted out” of having their son’s or daughter’s college enrollment data collected. They had not. One mom said: “Honestly, if I knew about it, I would have opted out. It is not John King’s^[1] business where my son goes to college or what his major is.”

Burris notes that the college readiness numbers are not the first data errors to come from King or NYSED - there was also the APPR numbers for teacher evaluations.

There is something outrageous about a political functionary like King - an anti-public school/pro-charter functionary who is part of the movement to destroy public schools and promote charter schools - using data with such large margins of error to promote his anti-public school agenda.

But that's what's happening.

As I see this, he's either incompetent or deliberately using distorted and error-riddled data.

Which is it, Dr. King?

Are you incompetent or fraudulent?

It's one or the other.

NYSED Releases District-By-District Principal/Teacher Evaluation Ratings Nine Months Late

Jessica Bakeman at Capital NY:

ALBANY—Teachers and principals in New York's large, urban school districts received lower ratings on the first year of state-mandated evaluations than their counterparts in other districts, according to data released Thursday by the Education Department.

...

The state education department released data in October 2013 showing statewide averages for teacher evaluations. At that time, commissioner John King said the district-by-district ratings would be released to the public, as required by law, by “late fall or early winter” 2013.

Capital informally requested the data on multiple occasions, but the department stalled, citing privacy concerns about individual teachers. The information released on Thursday follows a request by Capital in June for records under the state's Freedom of Information Law.

“Today's release of evaluation data will enable New Yorkers to see, for the first time, the results of their schools' teacher and principal evaluations,” department spokesman Dennis Tompkins said in a release. “The goal of the evaluation process has always been to improve teaching and learning by targeting professional development where it is most needed in order to improve student outcomes. When teachers and principals receive the right tools to improve their practice, their students benefit—it's really as straightforward as that.”

NYSED promises the district-by-district ratings by "late fall or early winter" 2014.

It's now August 28, 2014.

They're at least nine months late with the data.

Even longer if you hold them to the "late fall" deadline they offered last year.

How trustworthy is data that is this late?

Just why is the data this late?

And who does the SED flack think he's kidding when he says "When teachers and principals receive the right tools to improve their practice, their students benefit—it's really as straightforward as that"?

The data is so delayed, I could have had a kid faster than they got this released publicly.

More evidence of the APPR sham and the sheer incompetence of the educrats at SED.

Time For An Investigation Into New York State's Test Score Results, Data Tracking

Two stories from over the weekend show that the statistics and data issued by NYSED Commissioner John King and his merry men and women in reform at SED cannot be trusted.

First, as I posted yesterday, the NY Post covered how NYSED lowered the cut score levels on this year's state Common Core exams, an act which resulted in slightly higher test scores:

State officials touted increases in scores on tough Common Core exams this year but failed to reveal that they had lowered the number of right answers needed to pass half the exams.

The state Education Department dropped the number of raw points needed to hit proficiency levels in six of the 12 English and math exams given to students in grades 3 to 8, officials acknowledged.

“The reason that occurs is because the tests are slightly harder,” Deputy Education Commissioner Ken Wagner told The Post.

Student scores plunged on last year’s statewide 3-8 tests — the first based on the new Common Core standards. Before the 2013 exams, a panel of 95 educators decided how many points, or correct answers, students had to get to demonstrate proficiency.

But the point cutoffs were tweaked after this year’s tests. The state and its testing vendor, Pearson, found six tests were harder and four easier this year than in 2013, Wagner said.

They did so by comparing how students performed on “anchor” test questions — identical items used in both 2013 and 2014. A report on the scoring process will be released in December or January, Wagner said.

The changes raise questions about the validity of the results.

“The information given out about the test questions does not provide a complete picture, making it hard to judge how much progress students made last year,” said Fred Smith, a former testing analyst for city schools.

Score manipulation has erupted in scandal before. Between 2006 and 2009, the state reduced the number of raw points students needed to pass. Then-state Education Commissioner Richard Mills insisted the questions got harder, justifying the lower passing scores. But experts found the test items got easier, inflating scores hailed by then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, among others, as proof of great progress.

In addition to the Post report on the lowered cut scores, Stephen Rex Brown at the Daily News reported that NYSED couldn't account for a whole bunch of kids they said opted out of the state tests this year in New York City that the city said didn't:

State Education officials were scrambling to determine Friday why test data appeared to show more than 20,000 city students did not take math and English exams.

The perplexing numbers, which the city disputed, revealed 26,949 kids were no-shows for state math tests and 22,656 skipped the English Language Arts exam. The figures were more than triple the previous year’s numbers. State officials suspect there was an error in the way a large group of city students were coded in the state database of third- through eighth-graders who took the tests.

The city Education Department said only 1,925 students formally opted out of the exam — still double the estimate from critics of the April tests.

Leonie Haimson at NYC Public School Parents blog picked up that story, noting that while she would love to believe that the number of students opting out of the state exams in the city was as high as NYSED said it was, she didn't think this was so:

As much as I would have liked to believe the opt out figures were this high, I expressed skepticism to Stephen– and explained that I thought the numbers of students opting out had been far higher on Long Island and Westchester than in NYC. In the suburbs, in general, parents are more organized, enjoy well-funded public schools with high college-going and graduation rates, and have erupted in justified incredulity when the state tried to convince them their schools were failing and their kids were not “college and career ready.” 

Leonie goes on to note that SED's data should not be considered reliable:

My response to all this: with such erratic and unreliable information, how can anyone trust any of the test score data from NYSED?

...

Before the new Common Core tests, we had ten years of state test score inflation in NY that was obvious to anyone paying close attention, but year after year was ignored by the powers that be, because it was politically convenient. Each year Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein, sometimes accompanied by Randi Weingarten, would ritualistically bow down to the supposedly infallible test score gods and celebrate the results as showing that their reforms were working. And then the entire imaginary edifice came tumbling down in 2010, when the educrats finally admitted that an enormous test score inflation had occurred, somehow without their knowledge and complicity.

It is too early to assume that the small rise in test scores this year were due to similar manipulations , but a decade of experience should teach us to be open to the possibility. Merryl Tisch predicted that more kids would pass this year – and they did. In any event, we have overwhelming evidence from teachers and principals that the tests were poor quality and a lousy judge of real learning.

The state’s release of data showing thousands of opt outs in NYC is just one more piece of evidence showing how skeptical everyone should be about any data our government officials supply. 

The lowered cut scores that allowed SED to claim "progress" on their Common Core agenda and the disputed opt-out's here in the city are two examples for why there needs to be scrutiny into NYSED's testing operations from an outside entity unaligned with the Board of Regents, the State Education Department or the "non-profit" education reform groups that bolster both the Regents and SED (i.e., the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, etc.)

As Leonie notes there has been test score manipulation and inflation in the state before and it happened when our current Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch was on the Board of Regents.

In fact, Tisch defended former SED Commissioner Mills over the test score inflation, claiming there was none, when it was quite clear there was.

Michael Winerip, the former NY Times columnist, wrote up a timeline of test score inflation here in New York State that is worth revisiting at this time:

In the last decade, we have emerged from the Education Stone Age. No longer must we rely on primitive tools like teachers and principals to assess children’s academic progress. Thanks to the best education minds in Washington, Albany and Lower Manhattan, we now have finely calibrated state tests aligned with the highest academic standards. What follows is a look back at New York’s long march to a new age of accountability.

DECEMBER 2002 The state’s education commissioner, Richard P. Mills, reports to the state Regents: “Students are learning more than ever. Student achievement has improved in relation to the standards over recent years and continues to do so.”

JANUARY 2003 New York becomes one of the first five states to have its testing system approved by federal officials under the new No Child Left Behind law. The Princeton Review rates New York’s assessment program No. 1 in the country.

SPRING 2003 Teachers from around New York complain that the state’s scoring of newly developed high school tests is out of whack, with biology and earth science tests being too easy and the physics test too hard. The state Council of School Superintendents finds the physics scores so unreliable, it sends a letter to colleges for the first time in its history urging them to disregard the test result. Dr. Mills does not flinch, calling the tests “statistically sound” and “in accordance with nationally accepted standards.”

JUNE 2003 Scores on the state algebra test are so poorly calibrated that 70 percent of seniors fail. After a statewide outcry, officials agree to throw out the results. The Princeton Review says that ranking New York first was a mistake. “We’re going to have to come up with a fiasco index for a state like New York that messes up a lot of people’s lives,” a spokesman says.

OCTOBER 2003 A special panel appointed to investigate the state math fiasco concludes that the test “can’t accurately predict performance,” was created “on the cheap” and was full of exam questions that were “poorly worded” and “confusing.”

DECEMBER 2003 The director of state testing resigns. It was his idea to leave, a spokesman says.

MAY 2004 For the fourth year in a row, scores have risen on elementary and middle school state reading and math tests. Dr. Mills urges the Regents: “Look at the data that shows steadily rising achievement of the standards in school districts of all wealth and categories. More children are learning more now than ever before.”

FEBRUARY 2005 Dr. Mills rebukes those who question whether state scores are inflated. “The exams are not the problem,” he said in a report to the Regents. “It’s past time to turn from obsessive criticism of the exam and solve the real problems — the students who are not educated to the standards.”

SPRING 2005 New York City fourth graders make record gains on the state English test, with 59 percent scoring as proficient, compared with 49 percent the year before. “Amazing results” that “should put a smile on the face of everybody in the city,” says Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who happily recites the numbers on his way to re-election.

FALL 2005 The federal tests (the National Assessment of Educational Progress), which are considered more rigorous than the state tests, show a drop in New York City reading scores. On the eighth-grade test, 19 percent are proficient in 2005, compared with 22 percent in 2003. Asked if city and state officials had hyped the state test results, Merryl H. Tisch, a Regent, says, “They have never, ever, ever exaggerated.”

SEPTEMBER 2007 New York’s national assessment test results are again dismal; eighth-grade reading scores are lower than they were in 1998.

DECEMBER 2007 In his report to the Regents, Dr. Mills notes, “A rich, scholarly literature has challenged NAEP validity since the early 1990s.” He announces a plan to develop the first new state learning standards since 1996, to further spur academic excellence.

JUNE 2008 Newly released state test scores show another record year for New York children. Math scores for grades three through eight indicate that 80.7 percent are proficient, up from 72.7 in 2007. “Can we trust these results?” Dr. Mills asks. “Yes, we can. New York’s testing system, including grades three through eight tests, passed a rigorous peer review last year by the U.S. Department of Education. State Education Department assessment experts commission independent parallel analyses to double- and sometimes triple-check the work of our test vendor.”

JUNE 2009 In the previous decade, New York students’ average SAT verbal score has dropped to 484 from 494; the math SAT score has dropped to 499 from 506. The national assessment’s fourth-grade reading scores have been stagnant for four years, and the eighth-grade scores are their lowest in a decade.

But somehow, state test scores again soar to record levels. In New York City, 81 percent of students are deemed proficient in math, and 68.8 percent are proficient in English. “This is a big victory for the city,” the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, says, “and we should bask in it.” In November the mayor is elected to a third term, again riding the coattails of sweet city scores.

JULY 2010 Finally someone — Dr. Tisch, the chancellor of the Board of Regents — has the sense to stand up at a news conference and say that the state test scores are so ridiculously inflated that only a fool would take them seriously, thereby unmasking the mayor, the chancellor and the former state commissioner. State scores are to be scaled down immediately, so that the 68.8 percent English proficiency rate at the start of the news conference becomes a 42.4 proficiency rate by the end of the news conference.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, chief accountability officer for the city, offers the new party line: “We know there has been significant progress, and we know we have a long way to go.” Whether there has been any progress at all during the Bloomberg years is questionable. The city’s fourth-grade English proficiency rate for 2010 is no better than it was in February 2001, nine months before the mayor was first elected.

Mr. Polakow-Suransky says that even if city test scores were inflated, he is not aware of any credible research calling the city’s 64 percent graduation rate into question.

FEBRUARY 2011 The city’s 64 percent graduation rate is called into question. The state announces a new accountability measure: the percentage of high school seniors graduating who are ready for college or a career. By this standard, the graduation rate for New York City in 2009 was 23 percent.

MAY 2011 Embracing the latest new tool in the accountability universe, the governor, state chancellor and education commissioner ramrod a measure through the Board of Regents, mandating that up to 40 percent of teachers’ and principals’ evaluations be based on student test scores.

AUGUST 2011 With new, more rigorous state tests, city scores rise slightly. “We are certainly going in the right direction,” the mayor says.

NOVEMBER 2011 New York is one of two states in the nation to post statistically significant declines on the National Assessment tests. John B. King, the education commissioner, says the state is certainly going in the wrong direction, but has a plan to spur students’ achievement. “The new Common Core Learning Standards will help get them there,” he says.

DEC. 19, 2011 Nearly a quarter of the state’s principals — 1,046 — have signed an online letter protesting the plan to evaluate teachers and principals by test scores. Among the reasons cited is New York’s long tradition of creating tests that have little to do with reality.

Let us note that before Regents Chancellor Tisch finally admitted the scores were inflated, she defended the scores and SED Commissioner Mills as well as state and city officials on test score inflation by saying “They have never, ever, ever exaggerated.”

Uh, huh - except the scores were absurdly inflated and the claims Mills, state and city officials made hailing the scores were very much "exaggerated."

So Merryl Tisch's word is worthless here - as worthless as SED's data on the city opt-outs.

I had an exchange that went like this today with Assemblyman Steve McLaughlin:

@SteveMcNY It would be nice to see the legislature look into SED's manipulation of scores.
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) August 18, 2014

@SteveMcNY The cut scores were rigged by SED last year to plummet, this year rigged to show "modest improvement".
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) August 18, 2014

@SteveMcNY This test-score rigging is meant to show how NYSED's Common Core agenda is going swimmingly.
— realitybasededucator (@perdidostschool) August 18, 2014

As Leonie noted in her blog post, Merryl Tisch declared there would be test score improvement before the tests were given and - lo and behold! - there was improvement.

The previous year, both Tisch and NYSED Commissioner King declared scores would plummet on the new Common Core tests and - lo and behold! - they plummeted.

Now they lowered the cut scores on the tests for 2014, got a slight rise in scores overall and are declaring "modest progress" in the scores, noting that this "modest progress" demonstrates why their Common Core reform agenda must be followed through.

But as we can see in the disputed opt-outs, SED's data is suspect at best, and with the Post reporting that raw score manipulation puts the validity of the state tests in question, I say it is high time we get an independent investigation into the state's testing regime.

We know they pulled a fast one all through the 2000's with the scoring.

We know current Regents Chancellor Tisch was part of that deception back in those days.

We know that SED's data is suspect.

We know that King and Tisch call what the scores are going to be long before the tests are actually given, calling into question the validity of the tests.

And we know that they lowered the cut scores this year to show "modest progress" - again, something that calls into question the validity of the tests.

It is time for an investigation into both the State Education Department and the Board of Regents over these matters because they have a track record of deception previous to this, we see now that their data is suspect at best, and we know they have a political agenda they are pushing.

NY Post Covers NYSED/Regents Scam On Test Scores

The NY Post called NYSED Commissioner King and Regents Chancellor Tisch on their test score scam.

Because it is such an important story, here it is in full:

State officials touted increases in scores on tough Common Core exams this year but failed to reveal that they had lowered the number of right answers needed to pass half the exams.

The state Education Department dropped the number of raw points needed to hit proficiency levels in six of the 12 English and math exams given to students in grades 3 to 8, officials acknowledged.
“The reason that occurs is because the tests are slightly harder,” Deputy Education Commissioner Ken Wagner told The Post.

Student scores plunged on last year’s statewide 3-8 tests — the first based on the new Common Core standards. Before the 2013 exams, a panel of 95 educators decided how many points, or correct answers, students had to get to demonstrate proficiency.

But the point cutoffs were tweaked after this year’s tests. The state and its testing vendor, Pearson, found six tests were harder and four easier this year than in 2013, Wagner said.

They did so by comparing how students performed on “anchor” test questions — identical items used in both 2013 and 2014. A report on the scoring process will be released in December or January, Wagner said.

The changes raise questions about the validity of the results.

“The information given out about the test questions does not provide a complete picture, making it hard to judge how much progress students made last year,” said Fred Smith, a former testing analyst for city schools.

Score manipulation has erupted in scandal before. Between 2006 and 2009, the state reduced the number of raw points students needed to pass. Then-state Education Commissioner Richard Mills insisted the questions got harder, justifying the lower passing scores. But experts found the test items got easier, inflating scores hailed by then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, among others, as proof of great progress.

Raw points are converted to scaled scores, which are divided into four levels, with Level 1 the lowest and Level 3 “proficient.”

Last year, fourth-graders needed 38 raw points out of 55 on the English test to hit Level 3. This year’s fourth-graders needed only 36.

The number of points needed to pass also dropped on five other tests: third-grade English and math, fifth-grade math, sixth-grade math and seventh-grade English.

On four of this year’s tests, points needed to pass rose: fourth-grade math, seventh-grade math, fifth-grade English and sixth-grade English.

The points required remained the same on the eight-grade exams.

Overall this year, the number of city students who passed the math exam jumped from 30.1 to 34.5 percent. In English, the number of students rated proficient inched up from 27.4 to 29.4 percent.

“It’s a good day for the whole New York City school system,” Mayor de Blasio declared, adding students and schools shouldn’t be judged on tests alone.

The takeaway from the story?

This line:

The changes raise questions about the validity of the results.

Indeed they do.

If you're a reader of this blog and some of the other education blogs on the Internet, you know many of us predicted that NYSED and the Regents would rig the tests so that scores would rise slightly.

I had a thread about that here on Perdido Street School blog.

Here were some comments before the scores were released:

Rigged. Totally Rigged. The scores will be a little bit better. A rigged salve to those who want to dismantle the garbage CCSS. A sickening manipulation, totally scripted with the purpose of ramming the Core down the throats of the public.

...

It will be surprising if scores don't go up.

...

The CC scores be manipulated just like Bloomberg/Klein did with the cut scores of ELA exams about 5 years ago and created an abundance of 'A' schools which was so ridiculous.

...

Predictions?

More lies, deception, dissembling, duplicity, and more attacks on the way...

...

Increase of scores within the students will demonstrate to the public and "special interests" that common core is working and common core is the way for college and career. Deception at its best! Parents and teachers need to continue this fight to stop high stakes testing and common core.

Of course they rigged the scores so they could claim "modest progress" on their agenda and call for continued "reform."

But they're fooling fewer and fewer people.

You can see that when the Post goes with a story about how NYSED manipulated the scores and the takeaway from the story is that the validity of the tests is in question.

How Rahm Emanuel Got Chicago's Crime Rate Down

To quote from The Sting, it's simple - he cheats:

It was a balmy afternoon last July when the call came in: Dead body found inside empty warehouse on the West Side.

Chicago police officers drove through an industrial stretch of the hardscrabble Austin neighborhood and pulled up to the 4600 block of West Arthington Street. The warehouse in question was an unremarkable-looking red-brick single-story building with a tall barbed-wire fence. Vacant for six years, it had been visited that day by its owner and a real-estate agent—the person who had called 911.

The place lacked electricity, so crime scene technicians set up generators and portable lights. The power flickered on to reveal a grisly sight. In a small office, on soggy carpeting covered in broken ceiling tiles, lay a naked, lifeless woman. She had long red-streaked black hair and purple glitter nail polish on her left toenails (her right ones were gone), but beyond that it was hard to discern much. Her face and body were bloated and badly decomposed, her hands ash colored. Maggots feasted on her flesh.

At the woman’s feet, detectives found a curled strand of telephone wire. Draped over her right hand was a different kind of wire: thin and brown. The same brown wire was wrapped around each armrest of a wooden chair next to her.

The following day, July 24, a pathologist in the Cook County medical examiner’s office noticed something else that had been obscured by rotting skin: a thin gag tied around the corpse’s mouth.
Thanks to some still-visible tattoos, detectives soon identified this unfortunate woman: Tiara Groves, a 20-year-old from Austin. She was last seen walking alone in the wee hours of Sunday, July 14, near a liquor store two miles from the warehouse. At least eight witnesses who saw her that night told police a similar story: She appeared drunk and was upset—one man said that she was crying so hard she couldn’t catch her breath—but refused offers of help. A man who talked to her outside the liquor store said that Groves warned him, excitedly and incoherently, that he should stay away from her or else somebody (she didn’t say who) would kill him too.

Toxicology tests showed she had heroin and alcohol in her system, but not enough to kill her. All signs pointed to foul play. According to the young woman’s mother, who had filed a missing-person report, the police had no doubt. “When this detective came to my house, he said, ‘We found your daughter. . . . Your daughter has been murdered,’ ” Alice Groves recalls. “He told me they’re going to get the one that did it.”

On October 28, a pathologist ruled the death of Tiara Groves a homicide by “unspecified means.” This rare ruling means yes, somebody had killed Groves, but the pathologist couldn’t pinpoint the exact cause of death.

Given the finding of homicide—and the corroborating evidence at the crime scene—the Chicago Police Department should have counted Groves’s death as a murder. And it did. Until December 18. On that day, the police report indicates, a lieutenant overseeing the Groves case reclassified the homicide investigation as a noncriminal death investigation. In his writeup, he cited the medical examiner’s “inability to determine a cause of death.”

That lieutenant was Denis Walsh—the same cop who had played a crucial role in the alleged cover-up in the 2004 killing of David Koschman, the 21-year-old who died after being punched by a nephew of former mayor Richard M. Daley. Walsh allegedly took the Koschman file home. For years, police officials said that it was lost. After the Sun-Times reported it missing, the file mysteriously reappeared.

But back to Tiara Groves. With the stroke of a computer key, she was airbrushed out of Chicago’s homicide statistics.

The change stunned officers. Current and former veteran detectives who reviewed the Groves case at Chicago’s request were just as incredulous. Says a retired high-level detective, “How can you be tied to a chair and gagged, with no clothes on, and that’s a [noncriminal] death investigation?” (He, like most of the nearly 40 police sources interviewed for this story, declined to be identified by name, citing fears of disciplinary action or other retribution.)

Was it just a coincidence, some wondered, that the reclassification occurred less than two weeks before the end of the year, when the city of Chicago’s final homicide numbers for 2013 would be tallied? “They essentially wiped away one of the murders in the city, which is crazy,” says a police insider. “But that’s the kind of shit that’s going on.”

 

For the case of Tiara Groves is not an isolated one. Chicago conducted a 12-month examination of the Chicago Police Department’s crime statistics going back several years, poring through public and internal police records and interviewing crime victims, criminologists, and police sources of various ranks. We identified 10 people, including Groves, who were beaten, burned, suffocated, or shot to death in 2013 and whose cases were reclassified as death investigations, downgraded to more minor crimes, or even closed as noncriminal incidents—all for illogical or, at best, unclear reasons.

This troubling practice goes far beyond murders, documents and interviews reveal. Chicago found dozens of other crimes, including serious felonies such as robberies, burglaries, and assaults, that were misclassified, downgraded to wrist-slap offenses, or made to vanish altogether. (We’ll examine those next month in part 2 of this special report.)

Many officers of different ranks and from different parts of the city recounted instances in which they were asked or pressured by their superiors to reclassify their incident reports or in which their reports were changed by some invisible hand. One detective refers to the “magic ink”: the power to make a case disappear. Says another: “The rank and file don’t agree with what’s going on. The powers that be are making the changes.”

Read the rest of the Chicago Magazine piece to see how Rahm and his crime lieutenants got their drop in crime stats and think about this the next time you hear Rahm Emanuel or one of his corporate cronies tout his "leadership" in Chicago.

Bloomberg Strokes His Ego On The View

In touting his accomplishments as mayor - including making the school system "dramatically better" - Bloomberg said the following when asked by the hosts of The View what he might do next:

“I’ve always thought that Santa Claus is a short, Jewish, balding 72-year-old guy, so I’ll give it a go,” he quipped.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha - that line is almost as funny as the one about making the school system "dramatically better."

Or the story about how his malanthropic unit plans to bring all the data-driven successes of NYC like CityTime and the Bloomberg Boxer Day Blizzard plow job and plunging test scores and phonied up crime stats to the world at large.

Funny stuff, Mike.

If you had $30 billion less, people would tell you to your face how full of crap you are.

But $30 billion blinds a lot of people to reality - and not just the hosts of The View.

Do you think any mayor other than the billionaire Bloomberg who over saw a 911 system redo that is over a decade overdo, cost over $2 billion dollars and STILL doesn't work would be able to tout his accomplishments without that mess being mentioned in the press?

Or the CityTime scandal, the worst fraud ever perpetrated on NYC citizens?

Or the Boxer Day Blizzard catastrophe that saw deaths when Bloomberg couldn't get the streets outside of Manhattan plowed for days?

Same for the 911 system mess, which may have contributed to the death of a four year girl on the Upper West Side after she was hit by a car and the 911 system caused delays in emergency response.

This fevered little ego known as BLOOMBERG who needs to put his name on everything he owns - literally - would certainly get a lot more scrutiny than he has if not for the $30 billion in wealth, the press he already owns (or his friends own) and the press he is rumored to be in the market for (like the NY Times or the Financial Times.)

As it stands now, he gets to do his little "I'm Amazing" shtick without anybody calling him an imcompetent ego maniac to his face.

But that's America for you.

As some cynic more famous than me is alleged to have once said, nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

I see that more and more every day.

Regent Betty Rosa Says NYSED Rigs Data To Make NY State Schools Look Like Failures

A very important article from the Times Union about discord on the Regents Board as well as accusations that NYSED rigs the data to push its agenda:

Regent Betty A. Rosa wants people to know that her board of 17 members aren't all in agreement about the public education reform agenda that's currently upsetting many parents, teachers and school administrators statewide.

In fact, she thinks the Common Core program is based on incomplete, manipulated data.
"They are using false information to create a crisis, to take the state test and turn it on its head to make sure the suburbs experience what the urban centers experience: failure," said Rosa, a former teacher, principal and superintendent from the Bronx.

The state Board of Regents is scheduled to meet in Albany on Monday and vote on a budget request for next year. Members are expected to ask Gov. Andrew Cuomo for a substantial increase in aid for local schools, on top of this year's level of spending, $56 billion. The extra money is to help achieve the Regents' reform agenda — a series of higher standards, tests and other assessments to track and boost performance of pupils and their teachers. The program has caused a firestorm, with the Regents and Commissioner John King at the center.

Rosa said the program is built on data from incoming freshman at public two-year and four-year colleges in New York, which suggests only 24 percent are ready for work or higher education. But it doesn't consider data from private colleges, which are getting college-ready students — particularly from the suburbs, Rosa said.

"The conversation is (that) kids are not ready; it's really the black and brown children in urban centers," said Rosa, who spent her first 10 years growing up in Puerto Rico before attending public schools and colleges in New York. She earned a doctorate in education from Harvard University in 1995.

Rosa said SED disregards data from successful schools to bolster its message that public education isn't working.

"I'm not saying it's a fraud, but there's a lack of understanding ... of what's behind the Common Core," she said. "Do I believe that the purpose, the agenda is to create a sense of urgency around failure? Yes."

Regents Chancellor Tisch argues in the Times-Union piece that Rosa is wrong, it's a statewide problem with community colleges in the suburbs and rural areas experiencing the same alarming remediation rates that schools in the urban areas are experienxing.

But Tisch doesn't address the most important point Rosa makes - that SED ignores the statistics from the private colleges, which would lower the rates of students needing remediation greatly, in order to bolster their case that NY State schools and teachers are failures and disruptive reform is needed to fix the problems.

The article goes on to say that change is coming to the Regents/SED reform agenda, though how much change remains to be seen:

The state Legislature has become increasingly uncomfortable with the Regents' plan, and several lawmakers have proposed amending or putting the brakes on aspects of the program.

The "Reform of the Reforms" plan announced by John Flanagan, head of the Education Committee in the State Senate, is a lame attempt to make it look like the legislature is making changes to the SED/Regents reform agenda.

Critics of the plan point out that it actually gives more power to SED to impose their own agenda on districts and doesn't give any opt-out options to parents over the controversial inBloom data project.

Frankly, the longer the merry reformers at the Regents and SED continue to go full speed ahead with their reforms and the longer the state legislature or governor refuses to take meaningful action to stem the damage these reforms are doing, the more likely it is the whole reform ship will sink.

Tinkering at the edges of the reform agenda while telling people they're doing meaningful reform of the reforms is not going to fool too many people around the state, though it may throw even more fuel onto the anti-CCSS, anti-testing, anti-inBloom fire.

What Will You Miss Most About Bloomberg?

Just one month until the Mayor of Money flies off to Bermuda one last time as mayor.

I think what I'll miss most about him is the imperial tone he uses as he talks on his radio show or the annoyance that he shows when a reporter, rarely enough, challenges him on his b.s. at a press conference.

Following a close second is the insane reliance on ever-improving statistics so that every piece of data that emanates from government these days is phonied up - from the graduation rates to the emergency response times to the crime stats.

You know, on second thought, I won't miss any of that.

How about you?

What won't you miss after Bloomberg leaves?

Mayor Bloomberg And Commissioner Kelly May Go On Trial Just Yet

From the Daily News:

AN NYPD supervisor has lost his bid to countersue whistleblower cop Adrian Schoolcraft.

Deputy Inspector Steven Mauriello alleged that Schoolcraft — who has a pending $50 million lawsuit against the city — concocted bogus complaints about wrongdoing in a Brooklyn precinct in order to ruin his boss.

But Manhattan Federal Court Judge Robert Sweet has denied the deputy inspector, finding in part that the counterclaims would be unfair to Schoolcraft, who would have to “expend additional resources . . . preparing for trial.”

Schoolcraft claims the NYPD had him committed to a psych ward against his will because he said cops were using quotas and fudging crime stats.

He is suing the city, Mauriello, Jamaica Hospital and two doctors.

 

A commenter writes:

This guy Schoolcraft has them but good. Tapes that prove the quota system that was setup by Billionaireberg and Kelly. Kelly calls them productivity goals but are plain old quotas just with different wording. Also when Schoolcraft went to the IAB to report what he had on tape and what he was going to do with them the IAB told Mauriello who stormed Schoolcrafts home. In an attempt to find these tapes Schoolcraft was put in a psych ward so his home could be searched and wouldn't be released until Mauriello said it was ok. With Kelly and his boss Billionareberg gone soon I can't wait to see who Mauriello turns in to save his own skin.

Another commenter writes:

My good friend is an NYPD cop and I can tell you EVERYTHING this Schoolcraft guy said is true! He tells me that not only is the workload insane (Kelly has stood by his mantra of "Do More with less" which means that each cop is doing the work of the seven thousand less cops the NYPD now has, compared to years ago), but that the boss' torture them for their arrest and summons quotas. He said that there are severe punishments for cops who don't meet their numbers. I'm really surprised more cops don't snap under the stress. The reporter who broke this story wrote a great book about it. With the stuff that's in there you would think this cop worked in communist Russia or something! The NYPD is out to get it's own. Good cops who stand up to the system are tortured. For the good of the public, something has to change.

So far, Bloomberg and Kelly, along with a compliant corporate press, have kept the wraps on the criminality forced upon the cops from the NYPD brass and City Hall in order to meet their insane quotas.

But the Schoolcraft case may expose all of that and put the Bloomberg and Kelly crime stat miracle to the graveyard where myths go.

I have a friend who works in the system who tells me the crime stats are all phonied up - they arrest people just to make their monthly quotas, they refuse to take some criminal complaints, they downgrade felonies to misdemeanors.

Bloomberg gets feted in the press for making the city the safest it's been since the 1940's.

The truth is, none of the stats can be believed - nothing from the Bloomberg Era can be believed.

We Need Transparency On The Data And Stat Manipulation At Tweed During The Bloomberg Years

From Newsday:

A former Hempstead school employee who informed state officials about the district's practice of systematically changing some students' failing grades has filed a federal lawsuit alleging wrongful termination in retaliation for his action.

Carlos Ramirez, the Hempstead school district's former director of technology, sent a letter in June to state education officials informing them of his concerns about the district's grade-boosting practice. The district decided to stop rounding up final course grades of 63 and 64 to passing scores of 65 in July -- just days before it fired Ramirez.

Ramirez filed a lawsuit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn seeking back pay for wrongful termination and an unspecified amount of damages, said his attorney, Aymen Aboushi of Manhattan.

The lawsuit describes Ramirez as an "exemplary employee" who was "subject to unlawful retaliation" because he reported activity that was "in detriment of public school students and their families."

The case has not been assigned a court date, Aboushi said.

"We hope one of the things that comes out of this is some transparency," he said. "Money is not the driving force for this lawsuit."

I would love to see similar lawsuits here in NYC to get some transparency on all the data manipulation and shenanigans the Tweedies under Klein and Walcott have engaged in.

Diane Ravitch has been posting "insider" reports from a NYCDOE central employee that allege widespread data manipulation and statistical fraud at Tweed.

While "philanthropic" organizations and education reform "non-profits" all hail the Bloomberg Years as a wonderful time for education, those of us in the belly of the best know how much fraudulent the academic results in schools have been.

Credit recovery programs that gave out semester credits for reading comic books (thus increasing the graduation rates), earlier test score inflation under NYSED Commissioner Mills that had Bloomberg and Klein hailing themselves as geniuses, such pressure to raise test scores all throughout the Bloomberg Years that many schools cut any program or activity that didn't engage students in state test prep.

It's been an awful time, not withstanding the pro-Bloomberg propaganda you see at corporate education-reform sites like Gotham Schools.

Now that it is almost over, I hope we get some transparency on these last 12 years so that some of the Bloombergian education reform myths can be properly sent to the graveyard where they belong.

Daily News Claims Bloomberg Education Reforms A Success

A DN editorial today:

Schools: Under Bloomberg, children made gains on standardized reading and math tests, even as pass rates gyrated. A good gauge is how the kids compared with peers around the state.

In 2006, 62% of fourth graders read at or above grade level in New York State, versus only 51% in New York City. By 2013, the schools here had closed that 11-point gap to just five points. De Blasio’s goal must be to get the children in the five boroughs on par with those across the state.

Bloomberg also presided over a graduation rate that climbed from 51% in 2001 to 71% in 2011. De Blasio will have to keep that going, while boosting the 22% share of graduates who are prepared for college or careers.

The graduation rates were phonied up with credit recovery, where students got full semester credit for classes by watching movies or reading comic books and writing a couple of summaries.

 

The test scores fell in the city when the state finally admitted to grade inflation at the end of Klein's reign.

 

The so-called achievement gap between white and Asian students and black and Latino students is as large now as before Bloomberg took office.

 

But the zombie lies about Bloomberg's education reform "success" continue unabated.

 

If we ever get an independent investigation into the DOE, one done by somebody without ties to Bloomberg or his cronies, the manipulation of data Tweed has engaged in throughout the Bloomberg Years will become known.

 

Diane Ravitch posted some revelations from an insider at Tweed that points to just how much manipulation they have engaged in.

The DN editors don't really care about any of that - all they care is that the Bloomberg reforms are anti-union, pro-charter and pro-business, and so they push them regardless of the true efficacy of the agenda.

Where's Howard Wolfson When You Need Him?

On Monday, Bloomberg shill Howard Wolfson tweeted the following:

No murders in NYC last week. Murders down 26% this year off last year's record low.
— howard wolfson (@howiewolf) October 14, 2013

The NY Times today:

After a seven-day stretch in which no homicides were recorded in New York City, five occurred in 10 hours on Friday and Saturday. 

Three killings occurred in the Bronx, and two in Brooklyn. As of Saturday evening, no arrests had been made.

The Bloomberg administration claims New York City is on track to have the lowest number of murders in over fifty years.

But given how they play funny with the emergency response time stats, the crime stats, the graduation rates and the test scores, there are some skeptics out there:

"@howiewolf MT: No NYC murder last week. Murders down 26% this year.” @azi Serious Question: murder being defined/determined same way?
— Rebecca G (@WZora) October 14, 2013

Guarantee you, they're playing funny with the murder stats too. 

"Accidents" and "suicides" abound in this city...

Bloomberg Administration: We Went A Whole Week Without A Murder!

No murders in NYC last week. Murders down 26% this year off last year's record low.
— howard wolfson (@howiewolf) October 14, 2013

That tweet got some interesting reactions:

@azi @nycmayorsoffice First time I've seen a mayor's office call attention to 6 days without a reported murder.
— BinghamtonNow (@BinghamtonNow) October 14, 2013

And this:

"@howiewolf MT: No NYC murder last week. Murders down 26% this year.” @azi Serious Question: murder being defined/determined same way?
— Rebecca G (@WZora) October 14, 2013

Only in Bloomberg's New York does someone actually ask the mayor's minion, after he brags that there have been no murders in the city in a week, if they've changed the definition of "murder."

And that's because the data they hawk here in Bloombergville is often hard to be believe.

The test scores, the graduation rates, the crime stats, the emergency response times, etc. - all phonied up.

"Scissors-Wielding Lunatic" Slashes Five People, Including 2 Year Old, On UWS

Gee, doesn't Howard Wolfson live up there?

A scissors-wielding lunatic stabbed and slashed five victims in a Riverside Park rampage before he was subdued Tuesday morning by a brave passerby, police said.

An 18-month-old boy and his father were among those targeted as they strolled through the Manhattan park before the unprovoked 7:58 a.m. attack by a homeless man, police said.

Crazed assailant Julius James Graham, 43, who was living at a Harlem shelter, unleashed his rage without warning on a bright October morning. He was taken down by a passing good Samaritan and held until police arrived.

New York City - safest it's been since the 1940's!

So says Howard Wolfson.

Except for the motorcycle gangs taking over the West Side Highway, the lunatics slashing people in Riverside Park, the crazed men punching people into comas in Union Square and the gay bashing gangs stomping people in Brooklyn.

Other than that, it's safe as hell.

Why The "Historic Low" Crime Statistics Bloomberg Hawks Are Not Believeable

Howie Wolfson likes to tweet the lie that NYC is the safest it's been since the 1950's, with crime at "historic lows."

But tell that to the man who was chased 50 blocks by a motorcycle gang and then beaten on a Washington Heights street in broad daylight in front of his wife and two year old.

You can see the video of that chase and the brutal aftermath below the fold.

Bloomberg's DOE Manipulates Graduation Rates

The Mayor of Money has hailed graduation rate increases as another piece of proof that is education reforms have worked.

But just as the test scores were jive, just as the crime stats are jive, just as the emergency response times are jive - the graduation rates are jive too:

Dozens of struggling city high schools allowed students to use a mishmash of makeup assignments — sometimes requiring little or no work — to earn credits for classes they initially flunked, sources say and data show.

For the first time, the Department of Education has made credit-recovery data publicly available by school — and it shows nearly 40 schools awarded between 5 percent and 31 percent of their credits to kids through makeup work in 2011-12, while close to three dozen gave between 5 percent and 46 percent of their credits that way the previous school year.

Most credit-recovery programs occur over the summer, when students try to learn the course work that eluded them during the year.

But many shortcut programs also cropped up after the department started using credit accumulation as a factor in grading schools in 2007 — putting pressure on them to come up with quick fixes for credit shortages.

“It’s a big issue at the school . . . the reason the principal does this is to make our school look good on our progress report,” said a former teacher at the Academy for Language and Technology in The Bronx, where 13 percent of credits came from makeup work in 2011-12.

The ex-teacher said that students would use an online program called Apex to read passages and answer simple questions — but that no one would prevent them from looking up the answers.

“They just accumulate easy credits rather than learn anything,” the former teacher said.

As I've written before, if there were ever a true independent auditing of the Bloomberg Years, they would find so much manipulation of data and out-and-out fraud from these people that they would be frog-marching Bloomberg administration officials out for months in handcuffs.

The have phonied up everything, put in place policies that forces phonied up data ("Improve or you're fired!" tends to do that sort of thing), but the press has largely ignored the manipulation.

Certainly they have not blamed Bloomberg himself for any of this.

You can bet if de Blasio is elected in November, that will change.

In any case, no wonder Bloomberg is planning on having all the emails and other data from his administration erased before he goes.

That's a great way to ensure his fraudulent legacy never sees the light of day with the public.

Daily Data Tracking

Teach for America corps member Mary Mac Thielman enters her students' daily exit ticket percentages onto the data tracking wall at O.M. McNair Upper Elementary School in Belzoni, Miss.

The above photo and text appeared with a NY Post editorial touting the wonders of Teach For America teachers over traditional public school teachers.

I want you to take a very close look at the photo.

The bulletin board says "Data is not the destination, it's part of the journey."

Between those words at the top and bottom of the bulletin board, the TFA teacher is updating her students daily data on Daily Data Wall.

I want you to think about the kind of classroom this woman runs, where daily data is tracked on every student and put up on a wall outside the classroom.

She must focus an awful lot on the kinds of things that can be quantified and tracked.

But what about the lessons in life that children need to learn that cannot be simplified and quantified, cannot be tracked, cannot be updated on the Daily Data Wall?

And how about the slogan "Data is not the destination, it's part of the journey"?

Can that slogan be true when data is tracked on every student every day and put up publicly on a wall outside the classroom?

Doesn't this Daily Data Wall equate students solely with their daily data record?

Doesn't this so Daily Data Wall send the message to students that they are their data?

Isn't this Daily Data Wall tantamount to child abuse?

Someday in the future, when the current crop of meritocrats and sociopaths running the country in positions of power in politics, business, public education and non-profits are graveyard data themselves, people are going to say "Did those people in the 21st century really believe that everything that mattered in life can be quantified and tracked?  Did they really believe the data they tracked and used to make decisions - from the BLS jobs report to the inflation numbers to the value added's on teachers - was accurate and gave them enough information to make good and wise decisions?"

This fetishization of data will end when people begin to realize data-driven decisions are only as good as the data itself and more often than not in our world, data is manipulated, simplified, erroneous, or essentially useless because it doesn't give the whole picture.

Ever Notice How All The Stats Are The "Best Ever" Under Bloomberg?

Howard Wolfson responds to criticism of the police shooting two innocent bystanders in Times Square on Saturday with this:

@mattapuzzo @mikiebarb the NYPD is on pace to have appro 70 police shooting incidents this year, which is the lowest since records were kept
— howard wolfson (@howiewolf) September 15, 2013

Highest test scores under Bloomberg - until they were exposed as inflated.

Sky-rocketing graduation rates - except the numbers are inflated by credit recovery programs that give semester credits for tasks like watching movies.

Best crime stats ever - except there is ample evidence the police are manipulating the stats.

Quickest emergency response time ever - except they don't count the time callers spend on the line with 911 operators, thus making the stats look better than they are.

News stories abound of NYPD cops shooting lots of people in the last calendar year - but Wolfson says the approximately 70 police shootings will be "the lowest since records were kept."

So many of the statistics and so much of the data that Bloomberg and his minions hawk to prove Bloomberg is the bestest thing ever are phonied up.

I have a difficult time believing anything Wolfson says in general, but especially when he uses phrases like "the lowest since records were kept."

Too much manipulation and out-and-out fraud perpetrated by this administration (though often ignored by the corporate media) to believe these stats.

Sorry - not every stat in NYC can be the "lowest ever" or the "best ever," the way Bloomberg and his hired henchmen claim.