Klein Lied to the National Press Club in Australia

Check out the latest report from the Australian organization Save Our Schools. Here is an excerpt from Klein Lied to the National Press Club:

New York City Schools Chancellor, Joel Klein, was exposed as a dissembler at his National Press Club address in Canberra last week. Under forensic questioning from The Canberra Times’ education reporter, Emma Macdonald, Klein resorted to lies and deceptions to justify his claims of increases in student achievement in New York City schools.

Macdonald challenged Klein on his claims by citing national reading and mathematics assessments which show that there has been no improvement in student achievement in NYC since 2003, except for 4th grade mathematics. She questioned him on whether the grades given to schools in this year’s school progress reports had been manipulated by reducing the cut-off scores to achieve an A or B.

Klein denied both charges. He said that Macdonald was wrong on both facts. His response was to falsely assert that the cut-off scores for school grades had not been reduced, falsely claim that New York State tests were a better measure of student achievement than the independent national assessments, and to selectively cite evidence about the success of African-American students.

Check out the entire document, complete with bibliography.

By the way, it was our own Steve Koss who first figured out the cut-off scores had been manipulated in this way: Don’t Like the Results? Change the Scale!

See also the report by the Australian Education Union, Joel Klein and the New York School Accountability Model

Forewarned, Australia is ready for Joel Klein!

According to the Age, the Australian teachers union and parent advocates are already rising up in protest against the highly unreliable NYC school grading system, which Joel Klein intends to promote on a visit down under next month, after being invited by Julia Gillard, their Education Secretary:

The federal president of the Australian Education Union, Angelo Gavrielatos, said the Australian Government should not be importing "flawed" approaches from the US, a nation that was consistently outperformed by countries such as Finland which did not publicly rank schools.

Canberra-based public education advocacy group Save Our Schools last week called on Ms Gillard to release the details of her performance reporting plan to ensure it did not reproduce the problems of the New York system, which it said had led to league tables and dissimilar schools being compared with each other.

See also the following postings from Save our Schools – which has studied the analyses of the NYC school grades by Diane Ravitch, Eduwonkette, and heard from the parents on our NYC education listserv about the numerous problems with the priorities of the Bloomberg/Klein administration.

The comments of NYC public school parent Ann Kjellberg are featured on Testimony From New York on Klein’s School Reforms:

Pretty much anyone in New York who has a kid in the system or who works in the system outside of “central office” hates these policies. It’s a triumph of public relations. There are so many things to get enraged about it’s hard to know where to begin.

See also: Gillard Should Come Clean on School Reports

Secrecy and avoidance of public debate are characteristic of how Klein has implemented change in New York’s schools. There too, teacher and parent organisations were excluded from the process.

Gillard Should Repudiate Klein’s Skulduggery

Gillard should know that Klein is widely derided by educationalists, teachers and parents in New York. She should also know that Klein’s response to their criticisms involves much skulduggery which she should repudiate.

School Accountability Discredited in New York

Conservative educationalist, Diane Ravitch, is at it again – highlighting the failures of the New York City school accountability model which Julia Gillard wants to emulate in Australia.

More Questions Raised About the New York School Reporting Model

More questions are being raised about the validity and reliability of the New York system of reporting school performance, which Julia Gillard wants to introduce in Australian schools.