The amazing Justin Wedes!

Justin Wedes has emerged as one of the key spokespeople behind the Occupy Wall Street movement.  Justin, a 27 year old former NYC teacher, was on WNYC radio a couple of weeks ago, and  on the Colbert report last night (see video below), the first of a two part segment, the second of which will air tonight.

Though the reach and success of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been tremendous, Justin’s role doesn’t surprise me, since over the last year he has done some amazingly creative and compelling advocacy work, in addition to consulting with Class Size Matters and Parents Across America on our social media.

Among Justin’s accomplishments over the past year:

• He collected more than 11,000 signatures on a petition in a few weeks against the appointment of Cathie Black as Chancellor;

•           As part of the Yes Men, he helped put together a hoax that convinced the AP, among others, that General Electric had agreed to voluntarily pay back  to the government its 2010 tax write off of $3.2 billion, simply by issuing a convincing press release linked to a fake GE website, which Columbia Journalism Review called "the most amazing corporate press release in history."
  

     But my personal  favorite Justin moment was his hilarious appearance at a Panel for Educational Policy meeting last year, pretending to be Jason Wharton, Chicken of the Sea’s quality assurance representative, and giving out free tuna sandwiches to protest Bloomberg’s remarks that the PCBs in one tuna sandwich were more dangerous than the PCB-leaking lights in our public schools.

Two videos below:  Justin at the PEP last year and on the Colbert show last night. 

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Frank Macchiarola on Black's departure and Walcott's appointment

A panel discussion on Good Day NY about Cathie Black's firing and the appointment of Dennis Walcott, with Noah Gotbaum, parent and President of Community Education Council District 3, Erik Engquist of Crains, and Frank Macchiarola, former NYC Schools Chancellor and now Chancellor of St. Francis College.

Macchiarola calls Bloomberg's selection of Black "crazy," and says that the mayor's quick choice of Walcott, by just "looking across the room" without any national search, is a mistake.

"The position being filled is one of moral authority" and "in order to have confidence of people of New York ...there should be a process that engages the community in the process of selection."

He concludes, "the Mayor's judgment on this has fallen down ... as well as on a number of other issues."

Chancellor-Designate Walcott: NYC Education Policy Will Not Change: MyFoxNY.com

What will Black's departure mean for our schools, and my most unfavorite memory of Dennis Walcott

I have mixed reactions to Cathie Black’s resignation. Though friends and colleagues from around the country emailed and called to say that I must be celebrating, I had to respond.... not exactly.

Most parents realized immediately that she was not qualified for the job, although it took the mayor three months of sinking approval ratings for him to appreciate that fact. When he saw the latest polls, with Black approval ratings at 17% and his handling of schools not much higher at 27%, despite millions of dollars spent of ads trying to convince New Yorkers otherwise, he must have figured out it was time to cut bait.

Clearly, Dennis Walcott has far more experience in public education that she did. But watching Walcott in action for the last nine years, I have no evidence that he is ready to take our schools in a new direction. He can hit the ground running; but will it be in the right direction?

Parents are fed up with this administration’s version of education “reform”: rising class sizes, school closings, harmful charter co-locations, rampant overcrowding, frequent budget cuts, excessive test prep, and stagnant achievement levels -- all countered with PR spin rather than effective policies.

We are also furious at the mayor’s proposal to cut 6,000 additional teaching positions, instead of cutting the bureaucracy, wasteful consultants and contractors, or raising taxes on millionaires. We are tired of having our views ignored and disrespected by educrats who think they know better than we do about what’s right for our kids.

I remember when the mayor decided to ban all cell phones from schools a few years back. Most parents felt then and still feel that cell phones are a necessary safety device, especially considering how many of our children are forced to commute miles to school each day. Of course, not a single private school in the city, including the school that the mayor's own daughters attended, would dare ban students from carrying cell phones.

The City Council proposed legislation that would allow students to bring their cell phones to school, which then the school could store for them, but would have to give back at the end of the day. This seemed to be reasonable compromise, given the mayor's insistence that cell phones disrupted classroom activities.

Dennis Walcott testified during the hearings, as Deputy Mayor, and said that it didn’t matter one iota if the Council passed this legislation , since the mayor did not intend to comply with the law. Robert Jackson, chair of the Council Education committee, pointed to a high school students watching from the gallery, and said, “This is terrible example of democracy for these students, the fact that you would calmly say that the city does not intend to follow the law.”

Walcott replied that “No, this is democracy because we are having this discussion.”

In short, unless Walcott (and the Mayor) change course, show that they are willing to follow the law, listen to parents and other stakeholders, and alter the policies that are damaging our kids, I don't believe that our attitudes towards this administration or the mayor’s approval ratings will increase substantially.

Also: see my contribution to the NY Times blog on what Black’s brief tenure reveals about whether business success is enough to run a school system. Please take a look and leave a comment! I was also quoted in the Los Angeles Times, Gabe Pressman’s column and DNA info.

What's the real story behind Black's fall from grace?

The three NYC dailies have conflicting accounts, sometimes within their very same pages, about why Black was fired by Bloomberg, after three short months. Bloomberg usually sticks by his deputies, no matter what their level of incompetence. Despite all the emphasis on "accountability" at the school level, there is generally little accountability at the top at City Hall.

The Daily News claims that the mayor didn’t like her inability to cut the budget:

Two sources said the mayor became increasingly disenchanted with her inability to do the grueling and technical work of cutting the education budget.

Meanwhile, the NY Post says it was because she made decisions to expand programs too slowly:

The Department of Education under Black actually delayed plans to expand citywide an ambitious special-ed pilot program and increase the number of schools containing a high-tech education program. Even when she rolled out a program -- finding $10 million to spend on after-school tutors -- Black drew criticism for bragging about such a paltry expenditure.

These programs – the special ed pilot and expanding the Izone -- are both very controversial, of course, and the latter is going to cost millions of dollars, not less; of course, which doesn't exactly help with cutting the budget.

In a different NY Post article, it says that John White was actually running the department, and when he left, Bloomberg realized he needed someone else in there quick:

Bloomberg admitted the breaking point came earlier that day when Black's most competent deputy chancellor, John White, quit -- the fourth top DOE official to defect since Black took over the nation's largest school system. "White was running the system," a source said. "The mayor felt he needed to make a move."

Yet the NY Times features an account that claims that decisions were being made too slowly, because they were vetted through her two top deputies, as well as Walcott and Wolfson at City Hall, and doesn't even mention John White:

Under Ms. Black, proposals meandered through layers of review: Ms. Black, her two powerful deputies, and City Hall officials, including Mr. Walcott and another deputy mayor, Howard Wolfson. …Ms. Black often deferred to Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief academic officer, and Sharon Greenberger, the chief operating officer, giving them so much power that education officials jokingly referred to them as “chancellor,” the two aides said.

Meetings were rife with jockeying as senior officials tried to steer Ms. Black toward their view, the aides said. Mr. Polakow-Suransky and Ms. Greenberger served as gatekeepers, deciding which proposals to endorse and which to scuttle.

One of the few named sources in this NY Times article is Joe Williams of DFER, while failing to identify him as a charter school lobbyist:

“Anybody working on any plan for the last two and a half months had no assurance that it would ever get done rather than just having dust gather on top of it,” said Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, who works closely with schools and education officials. “Not having a leader there makes them wonder why they are showing up every day to this giant bureaucratic blob.”

Clearly, Joe felt that the DOE under Black was not giving him and his hedgehog friends the sort of access they got when Klein was there.

Here’s another quote from the Times, this one from an anonymous source:

Among some charter school operators, there is also frustration. When new charter schools open, the Education Department guarantees most of them space. But there have been challenges to the space allocations, brought on by flawed plans that needed to be amended due to lack of detail or typographical errors.

The problems have also meant that e-mails and phone calls are not getting returned. “I’m trying to hang a sign on a building, and the czar of signs is not answering his phone,” said the head of a high-performing network of charter schools, who asked not to be named for fear of angering the department.

My guess that this quote is from Eva Moskowitz, who works closely with Joe. Few other charter operators would be so open about their desire to acquire space to admit frustration in "trying to hang a sign on a building".

So charter operators were fed up with the slowness of DOE to respond to their demands, especially as compared to Joel Klein, who was at Eva's beck and call and responded to every one of her innumerable emails.

Is the real explanation, then, that Black was fired because the privatizers complained that they weren’t getting their co-locations quick enough?

Who knows? My guess is that the story is far more simple: Cathie Black was fired because the mayor’s poll numbers were falling fast, down to 27% approval for his handling of education, in spite of the millions of dollars of TV ads he is paying for out of his own pocket. Wolfson, his political guru, probably told him the ads weren't working, and that he had to throw her overboard, fast. Loyalty only goes so far, after all.

Why is Cathie Black so unpopular, and why is the DOE scrambling for evidence of parent support?

Today's NY Post features a column about Cathie Black's abysmal approval ratings of only 17%; more on the Quinnipiac poll results, including the fact that only 28% of NYC public school parents now approve of Bloomberg, while 61% disapprove of him here.

As to Ms. Black, I think it’s interesting to analyze why her approval ratings are so low.

Nothing she has said or done is objectively worse than Joel Klein, and in a few cases, she seems to have pulled back from some of the most controversial choices that he likely would have made: reversing the closing of PS 114, and deciding to put the KED charter in Tweed for just one year and then give it back to the community for their exploding number of Kindergarten students. In contrast, Klein seemed to relish putting his thumb in the eyes of parents and local electeds.

Moreover, in my view, Cathie Black's public persona is not nearly as objectionable as his was. Truly, she was unqualified for the job, but so was Joel Klein, in every way imaginable. He was a non-educator and a non-manager, and had zero people skills besides .

My speculation is that she is even more unpopular than Klein results from a few developments:

Klein’s approval ratings were always the lowest of any NYC public figure, but for many years, he and Bloomberg coasted on two things: school budgets that were generally increasing each year (though much of the increase was spent on the wrong programs) and rising state test scores (which activists knew were a fraud but managed to assuage most parents that their kids were doing well.)

Then the mayor starting cutting budgets for schools, and last summer, the test score bubble burst. Suddenly, Bloomberg and Klein had nothing to fall back on. Terrible relationships with parents and the community, rising class sizes and overcrowding, policies based on high-stakes testing, school closings and charter co-locations – all of which most public school parents despise, with good reason. And the DOE finally lost all credibility with even those people who don’t spend their time paying attention to what’s really going on.

This is why the DOE is so desperately scrambling for support in the parent community, and, as it was recently revealed, resorted to trying to get parent coordinators to persuade "Happy Harrys" to show up at PEP meetings, rather than the furious parents that normally appear at these shouting fests. They also asked PCs to get parents to sign a petition, supporting their controversial proposal to end teacher seniority protections. Even if parent coordinators tried to gather parent support, they will find it nearly impossible to do so.

Cathie Black, fairly or not, is reaping the results of nine years of wrong-headed education policies, as well as open contempt for the views and priorities of parents. Unless she makes a determined effort to change these policies , I don’t know how she -- or Bloomberg -- can possibly recoup.

What do you think about the reasons for her low approval rating -- as well as Bloomberg's? Please leave a comment below.

Teaching experience matters!

Even as Mayor Bloomberg, Chancellor Cathie Black and Michelle Rhee are arguing for experienced teachers to be laid off regardless of seniority, every single study shows teaching experience matters.

In fact, the only two observable factors that have been found consistently to lead to higher student achievement are class size and teacher experience, so that it's ironic that these same individuals are trying to undermine both.

Generally speaking the corporate reformers argue that only the first few years of experience matter,these charts from a study by Thomas J. Kane , Jonah E. Rockoff , and Douglas O. Staiger reveal that at year five, effectiveness is still increasing  for all categories of teachers --other than uncertified teachers. (see charts to the right.)

Of course, most Teach for America recruits are gone by then, which is why their dotted line vanishes at year three.

Actually, there are many studies that show that teaching experience matters, for 15-20 years – with each year in the profession leading to more student gains, especially in reading.








The importance of experience may be clearer in the teaching profession than any other, as shown in a recent re-analysis of the STAR Tennessee experiment, showing that Kindergarten students had higher achievement and earnings as adults, depending on how long their teachers had been in the profession, with gains for every year up to twenty. 

Another study of low-performing, high poverty schools, shows that years of teaching experience at the 2^nd grade level was associated with higher reading achievement, for up to 21 years.

“A teacher who had been teaching at a particular grade level for more than 5 years was positively and significantly associated with increased student achievement (effect size=.27)…grade level experience was sizable compared to race (minority status effect size = -.33) and SES (economically disadvantaged effect size= -.08)….Teachers constantly improved teaching effectiveness until the 21^st year and declined beyond that.”

See also this study , showing that for 4^th and 5^th grade teachers in Florida, "in elementary school reading there may be student achievement returns to as many as 15 years of additional teacher experience."

Here's another study that shows student gains for teacher experience-- again, for up to 20 years. (See charts to the right).

So when people who claim to care about kids advocate for laying off experienced teachers, don't believe them.

Private schools and well-funded public schools don't have to choose between having experienced teachers and smaller classes, and neither should our public schools.

What the real choices are for Cathie Black and NYC kids

With all the furor over Cathie Black's comments about “birth control” and “many Sophie’s choices” in relation to school overcrowding, I hope the larger issues are not ignored.

There is a huge school-age population explosion in downtown Manhattan, not because people are reproducing like rabbits, but because of the rampant development that Mayor Bloomberg and other city officials have encouraged.

(For information about the downtown population explosion, see this presentation, Why downtown's kids need to keep Tweed, by Eric Greenleaf, NYU professor and public school parent; it was in response to Eric's projections, which have been right on the mark that Cathie Black made her joke about birth control.)

The DOE has failed to build enough schools to accommodate these kids, as well as throughout the city, and has repeatedly underestimated the need for new seats. Yet instead of saving critical space within its headquarters for downtown Kindergarten students, the Department of Education has decided to donate space in Tweed to a charter school for middle school students, run by a for-profit company headquartered in Sweden.

This is no "Sophie's choice," but a deliberate decision to benefit a charter school over neighborhood children. The charter operation is run by Kunskapsskolan, or KED, which had revenue of more than $37 million in the third quarter of 2010, and could afford to build its own school, or lease space elsewhere. But instead, KED is not only getting free space, they are being given it right inside the DOE's headquarters, which represents tremendous advertising and promotional value to the company. (For some of the reasons this charter school should never have been authorized by SUNY in the first place, see our comments to the SUNY Charter Institute.)

So why would DOE prefer to give space to a Swedish charter school, rather than provide for the needs of the downtown community, and the wishes of their powerful Assemblymember, Speaker Shelly Silver? Because KED is an online charter school, and right now, DOE officials are hugely enamored with the potential of virtual instruction.

Here is how one of KED’s Swedish schools was described in the British paper, the Telegraph:

It’s 10 o’clock at Kunskapsskolan Nacka, a Swedish school for 12 to 16 year-olds, and no one seems to be working. One pupil plays Nirvana on a guitar. A second walks about barefoot eating an apple. Two more sit on desks, chatting. Suddenly the head enters. One might expect rebukes, or reprimands. None come. Instead, the head, Lotta Valentin, smiles and ruffles the hair of a nearby pupil. ''I really enjoy walking about the school and seeing the children at work,’’ she says.

One supposes that they also spend some time at computers.Get a Professional QualificationChoose from more than 40 courses from the UK’s leading home study college and start gaining new skills today!

As Elizabeth Rose of DOE's Portfolio planning explained at an earlier meeting, they intend to tear down walls within Tweed and install glass, so that all the educrats in the building can observe these students walking around and receiving virtual instruction online.

The population explosion is occurring not just downtown, but all over the city, as a result of Bloomberg's policies to encourage development, rezoning 76 neighborhoods, and in many cases, allowing more density and high rises to be built. Many other factors have also contributed to the citywide increase in the public school population, which the DOE’s “expert” consultants said would not occur until 2016 or 2017, but began as early as last year – and in most districts even earlier than that. These include a rise in the birth rate, the closing of many parochial schools, and the tendency of families to stay in the city longer, because of lower crime rates and the perception of an improved overall environment.

Yet city officials have carelessly failed to plan for the school population that would be generated. (For a good article on this, see the NY Magazine article from last year.) This, despite numerous warnings in reports detailing the population boom that was imminent, from Class Size Matters, the City Comptroller’s office, and the Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.

So what can be done? Again, there are several decisions that should be made –not difficult ones for any rational policymaker, but so far for DOE.

First of all, the Chancellor should call a stop to all the co-locations, which not only cause intense conflicts within buildings and communities, but make overcrowding worse, since every new school that is inserted into an existing school subtracts valuable classrooms to make room for administrative and cluster spaces – with an estimated 10% loss of capacity each time.

Secondly, she should immediately re-align spending priorities. In November, the DOE added a billion dollars to the school capital plan, to be spent on technology, in addition to the $800 million that was already in the plan for that purpose. Why? So virtual learning and the “Izone” experiment can be inserted in 200 more schools over the next two years, and 400 schools thereafter. They want to proliferate these programs rapidly, supposedly to “personalize” instruction (ironically, by means of computers) without any independent evaluation of the success of the Izones that have already been implemented. (Here is a dizzying presentation of the theory behind this.) And they want to spend all this billion dollars in one year alone, over the next school year.

With all the millions that the city has misspent and wasted on high –tech projects in the last few years, from ARIS, the $80 million super-computer super-boondoggle that never lived up to expectations, to the bloated contracts of Future Technology Associates, to the ongoing scandal that is City Time, none of these can compare to the potential for waste involved in the DOE’s new proposal to spend one billion dollars in one year, amidst all the other budget cuts – on online learning.

These funds should instead be spent on leasing or building new schools, including some of the 27 parochial schools closing this year in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, and the 19 closed last year in Brooklyn and Queens, to alleviate overcrowding, allow for smaller class size, and actual “personalized” instruction – with real teachers, in real classrooms, instead of subjecting kids to an an expanded online system, with unknown risks and benefits, and the potential of a billion or more dollars down the drain.