Fair student funding & the ATR system - two bad policies undermining NYC schools

Today Chalkbeat covers the budgetary ramifactions of the new agreement between the UFT and the NYC Department of Education in which the DOE will place ATR teachers (on Absent Teacher Reserve) in schools with vacancies, whether the principal chooses these particular teachers or not.  In addition, unlike earlier years, the principal will have to pay the full amount of their salaries – which are often much higher than the average teacher salary, even though the school only receives funding for the average salary under the Fair Student Funding system, implemented by Joel Klein in 2007, after much controversy and protest.

As an earlier Chalkbeat article explained, the cost of the ATR pool has risen to more than $150 million per year, according to an IBO estimate, and included 822 teachers at the end of the last school year -- teachers who had no permanent assignments but had been “excessed” because of school closings, enrollment decline, disciplinary offenses or low ratings from their principals.  The existence of a  wasteful system like this is the confluence of large number of factors and policies adopted by the DOE during the Bloomberg administration: mass school closings and their replacement with charter schools, NYC’s  version of a student-weighted funding system called Fair Student Funding, and the agreement made in 2005 not to place tenured teachers who had lost their positions into schools with openings, but leave the choice of who would fill these positions completely up to the principal’s discretion.

Earlier this summer, the DOE announced plans to place hundreds of these teachers into school vacancies by Oct. 15, even if principals objected. And yet one of the reasons that the ATR pool has grown so large and principals remain reluctant to hire them, no matter  their qualifications, is that one of the peculiarities of the Fair student funding system, at least in NYC, is that it requires principals to cover the whole cost of their staff, by allocating per student funding to a school based on the average teacher salary -- which has decreased in recent years due to teacher attrition.  

According to Chalkbeat, based on IBO estimates, “on average each ATR teacher received a total of $116,258 in salary and fringe benefits for the past school year. (By comparison, the base salary for a city teacher as of May 2017 was $54,000). “ Thus for every average teacher hired from the Absent Teacher Reserve, a principal could hire more than two new teachers for his or her school.

At the time, Robert Gordon who devised the Fair Student Funding system for Joel Klein in 2007 was quoted in the NY Times as saying that the system would allow principals “to retain their most experienced teachers if that is what they want to do.''   This shows that the idea was devised to provide an incentive to schools to get rid of their experienced teachers, through the ATR, the rubber room or otherwise. At the time Randi Weingarten, then head of the UFT warned in the above article that “it will destabilize good schools and give principals a disincentive to hire experienced teachers simply because they cost more.''

Advocates like Noreen Connell of the Educational Priorities Panel was quoted in the same NY Times article that “the funding proposals have the potential to do lasting damage for decades to come.'' More specifically, she warned that by not covering the costs of a particular staffing ratio, the system would lead to sharp class sizes when budgets were cut—and principals would have no choice but to increase class size, get rid of their experienced teachers, or both.

Class sizes have indeed risen sharply since 2007, and nearly ten years after the recession many schools still only receive 87% of the funds that they are owed via the FSF formula. I would argue that the system is inherently misconceived and undermines the quality of schools, since there are only two observable, quantifiable school-based factors that have been shown to lead to more learning – small class size and experienced teachers.

I don't know any other school district in the country that has adopted this version of Fair Student Funding and that demands principals cover the full cost of their staff no matter what their salaries. If you do know of another district that does this, please let me know below. 

Bill de Blasio promised when he was running for office he would re-evaluate the FSF system, but has not done so.  Certainly, no NYC Mayor would impose this sort of rigid funding system on local police precincts or firehouses, and demand that NYPD or fire company captains cover the cost of their staff -- – even if could mean shortages if they had particularly experienced officers.  If any Mayor did try to impose such a system, no doubt he would face mighty resistance from his own Commissioners as well as the police/fire fighter unions.

Just as I am not aware of any other district that has adopted NYC’s version of the FSF system, I don’t know of any district that has given principals the right to hire outside the reserve of teachers already on staff.   When Cami Anderson ran the Newark school system from NYC she adopted the system, but it was later deep-sixed by Chris Cerf when he was appointed as Newark Superintendent – because it was recognized as too expensive and too wasteful.

If teachers are incompetent or have engaged in misconduct, they should be dismissed in the usual way, via a 3020-a disciplinary hearing, rather than put into the Absent Teacher Reserve. I know of several former principals and administrators who say this is time-consuming but eminently doable.  If teachers have not been found to exhibit any of these deficiencies, they should be offered to principals to reduce class size or provide other services at no expense to the school. If there are any teachers left over in the reserve, their contracts should be bought out.   The current system is an absurd waste of money. And NYC’s Fair Student Funding system needs to be re-evaluated in light of its detrimental impact on teacher experience and class size.

NJ parents occupy the NJ Dept of Education to fight the scourge of charter schools in their community!

Parents protesting at the NJ Department of Education credit: NJ Star Ledger

A few days ago we featured the real-life "Won't Back Down" story of a Brooklyn parent and teacher who together battled to prevent a billionaire-backed charter school from invading their successful public school building.  Today we feature the story of Darcie Cimarusti, who with other NJ parents, successfully fought to prevent a charter school from siphoning off funds from their public schools. You should also follow Darcie's terrific blog, Mother Crusader and she can be reached at
darciecimarusti@gmail.com.  Please send us your own real-life "Won't Back Down" stories at info@classsizematters.org

My name is Darcie Cimarusti, and I am a parent of twin six year olds who attend the Highland Park Public schools.  When my daughters were in Pre-K I became aware of a charter school that intended to open in our district.

 Our district was able to provide quality public schools, including free half day Pre-K, despite Governor Christie’s huge budget cuts.  I soon became concerned about how our district would absorb the additional financial burden of a charter school that would draw funds away from our public schools.

In March of 2011 the founders of the Tikun Olam Hebrew Language Charter High School applied for a charter from the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE) for the third time.  While there had been community opposition to the first two applications, the issue really heated up for the third one.

Darcie Cimarusti

One of the many reasons for the increased resistance was that after the founders were denied twice the opportunity to open in the diverse, successful districts of Highland Park and Edison, they chose to add the city of New Brunswick to their third application.

This angered all three communities, as it seemed to be an opportunistic attempt to exploit the needs of the New Brunswick community, which has many poor and minority students, to gain approval from the state.  Both Governor Christie and Commissioner Cerf had made it clear that their focus was on opening charters is struggling districts.  Parents in Edison and Highland Park were certain that the founders intended to draw the majority of their students from the Jewish populations in their own  districts, but added New Brunswick to increase the odds that they would receive approval from the state.  

When I became involved in the opposition to the charter, along with numerous other community members, we scoured the application to understand who wanted to open this charter, and what they intended to do with the almost $1.3 million they would divert from the budgets of the three districts.  I also researched New Jersey’s charter law to better understand what was and what wasn’t allowed in our state.

I learned that when New Jersey’s charter school law was enacted in 1995 it was intended to empower parents and teachers to identify unmet student needs in a particular school or district, and to create a place where those needs could be met. 

The law and existing regulations defined an "eligible applicant" as teaching staff or parents of children attending the schools of the “district board of education”, in other words, the PUBLIC SCHOOLS!

When we looked into the background of Tikun Olam’s founders, we discovered none of them had children enrolled in the public schools and none were teachers.  Rather, most had chosen to send their children to private, religious schools.. 

The NJDOE’s Office of Charter Schools had completely overlooked the fact that, by law, the founders of this charter WERE NOT eligible applicants, and allowed them to apply time and time again.  During the third application we submitted copious materials to the NJDOE alerting them to this oversight.  The application was denied for the third time in September of 2011, but when we received a report that stated the reasons for the denial, nowhere was it mentioned that the applicants were ineligible to apply for a charter.

And then in October of 2011, just before the next application cycle began, it was announced that the founders had received a $600,000 federal grant from the US Department of Education, which seemed to almost guarantee their eventual approval from the state.  The founders reapplied for a fourth time, but removed Highland Park from the application, no doubt thinking our opposition would die down.

It didn’t.  Instead, we mounted an unprecedented opposition campaign.

Parent activists, together with the Highland Park Board of Education and the Highland Park Borough Council held a Town Hall meeting in Highland Park to discuss the application, but representatives from the NJDOE, including then Acting Commissioner Chris Cerf, refused to attend.  So we organized an “Occupy the DOE” event and protested outside the NJDOE building (and even briefly occupied the lobby before the police were summoned.)  (see video below).  We invited parents from districts across the state to join us, and they came from as far north as Teaneck and as far south as Cherry Hill.  We asked to speak with anyone from the Office of Charter Schools, and also requested to schedule a meeting, but no one would come out and talk to us and no meetings were scheduled.

Shortly after our occupation, New York Times education columnist Michael Winerip began working on a column that questioned why a $600,000 federal grant was awarded to Tikun Olam when the proposed charter school had been denied three times and their application was filled with misrepresentations.  Only then did the NJDOE agree to meet with us to hear what we had to say.

In his column, Mr. Winerip noted the widespread backlash against charters in New Jersey, but concluded “it is an uphill battle against an education establishment that includes Democrats (President Obama) and Republicans (Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey) with strong financial backing (the Gates, Broad and Walton foundations).”

Despite the odds, parents in Highland Park, Edison and New Brunswick won our uphill battle.  The application was denied for the fourth time, and though the lead founder said that they would reapply for a fifth time, so far they have not.  Moreover, months after the denial, with the help of Congressman Frank Pallone, the federal grant to the charter was also rescinded.

The parents, teachers, and residents of these three communities were able to come together to successfully defend our public schools, and we refused to back down.  We were successful in stopping the corporate reformers and privatizers at the New Jersey and United States Departments of Education from forcing an unwanted, unneeded charter school down our throats. 

Chris Whittle's latest private school scheme, and why Joel Klein deserves a cut of the action

There's a long article in today's NY Times about Chris Whittle’s latest scam; starting a for-profit private school called Avenues in Chelsea that whose tuition will be almost $40,000 per year: The Best School $75 Million Can Buy .

NYC parents are so desperate to get their kids into a good school that they are willing to pre-pay before the school is even open, to ensure their children have preference on an “early admission” list.

FYI, both Joel Klein and Wendy Kopp of TFA attended one of the glossy promotional events for this school.  Perhaps this is what Klein meant when he told Manhattan parents that they have “choices.”  No mention of how overcrowded downtown Manhattan public schools are, and how this is feeding into this frenzy.  

Klein’s delinquency in failing to create enough public school seats and allowing class sizes and Kindergarten waiting lists to grow out of control will likely help his friend Whittle make money; perhaps he should get a cut of the action.  (For more on this see: Why Aren’t Parents Rioting in the Streets?)

Whittle, of course, is the former head of Edison charter schools, which also promised to make money for its investors and provide a superior education, based on "efficiencies" that he would deliver, and failed to make good on either of these promises.  Chris Cerf, the former Edison COO, is now Acting NJ Commissioner of Education; perhaps he can go into business with Whittle setting up more private schools, once he's helped to destroy the NJ public school system.

Here's a NY Magazine article from 2008 about a previous Whittle private school  that never materialized.

A Parent Guide to the Broad Foundation just released!

Check out the new Parent Guide to the Broad Foundation, its Training Programs and Education Policies, just released by Parents Across America.  (Here is the guide as a handy downloadable fact sheet.)

Jean-Claude Brizard is a Broad Academy graduate, formerly of DOE,  subsequently Superintendent of the Rochester schools.  Just yesterday he was appointed to be Chicago's CEO of schools.

So is Chris Cerf, John White, Shael Suransky and several of the top corporate-style educrats who worked at Tweed and across the country, many of whom have provoked controversy with their pro-privatization policies and autocratic leadership style.

What is Eli Broad trying to achieve by installing his brand of leadership in schools throughout the country? Parents, be forewarned!

Chris Cerf: there you go again

This morning featured an extended story in the Star Ledger examining Chris Cerf, and his record as Deputy chancellor of NYC schools. Cerf has been appointed to be acting New Jersey Commissioner of Education by Gov. Christie, and is intent on implementing many of the same divisive policies that have been tried and failed in New York City, including charter school co-locations and expansion, and teacher merit pay linked to unreliable test scores.

He is also now embroiled in the same sort of conflict of interest charges and allegations of dishonesty that marred his time in NYC. As Bob Braun of the Star Ledger has written,

“Newark residents want reform but they also want a say — all parents do. When decisions about their children are made behind closed doors by billionaires who believe they know what’s best for them, they have a right to be concerned. They also have a right to rely on the law.”

As a result, a prominent NJ State Senator, Ron Rice, says he will block Cerf’s nomination:

"Acting Commissioner Cerf prevaricates. He doesn’t tell all truths…He may be here now, but he can’t stay forever, and he will not be permanent at this point. The governor will have to find someone else."

In today’s article, Cerf said, “while he has found the negative publicity bruising and "profoundly unfair," he has no plans to step down, describing his motivation to reform education as something "spiritual."

Despite this “spiritual” calling, he used the occasion of this article to viciously attack Tim Johnson, NYC public school parent and former head of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council [CPAC].

“In an e-mail, [Cerf] called him [Johnson] a "pathetic, two-bit player" and a "stooge" for the United Federation of Teachers.”

Anyone who knows Tim realizes he is fiercely independent, and that Cerf’s attack is ludicrous.

In 2007, Tim had the nerve to question Cerf about whether he still held Edison stock– something that Tim apparently was the only person in NYC with the temerity to do.

I have held off blogging about Cerf, but I am now impelled to clarify the deep flaws in his record as a DOE administrator.

A little background: Cerf was originally employed by Edison Schools, a for-profit charter management chain, between May 1997 until April 2005, rising to be the President and COO of the company. Though in many cases they used pressure tactics to charge districts more than average per pupil funding for their services, Edison utterly failed to make a profit or to create effective schools.

The company was eventually saved from bankruptcy when it was taken private in 2003, in a buyout by a private company called Liberty Partners, a deal facilitated by Jeb Bush, who as Governor of Florida, invested billions of the state teacher’s pension fund in the company at the same time.

Cerf officially resigned from Edison’s board of directors in October 2006, though he had already apparently been acting for several months as a consultant to DOE, which had substantial contracts with Edison for their supplemental tutoring services amounting to more than $9.6 million in the 2005-6 school year. (Such obvious conflicts of interest never seemed to bother Joel Klein, which is worrisome, especially given that Klein is now heading Rupert Murdoch’s online learning ventures at the same time that the DOE is intent on spending millions on expanding these programs .)

Cerf was hired by Klein as Deputy Chancellor in Dec. 2006. In February 2007, I was in the room when he was asked by Tim at a CPAC meeting whether he owned Edison stocks. Cerf vociferously denied he did, without revealing that he had just divested himself that morning, after learning that he would be asked this question. Here is the account as reported in the NY Times:

Asked by Tim Johnson, the group’s chairman, to describe his financial interest in Edison Schools, he replied, “I’d be delighted to do that,” adding: “I have no financial interest in Edison of any kind. Zero.”

When Mr. Johnson persisted, asking, “Can we ask when you divested yourself of Edison stock?” Mr. Cerf said he would be “delighted” to give Mr. Johnson a copy of financial disclosure forms he said he was required to file as a public employee. “That will answer all of your questions, and that’s what I’m prepared to say today,” he added.

These stocks were at the time more or less worthless, because of the company’s poor financial performance, though they could be potentially worth from $1.1 million to $6.7 million, according to filings Edison had made with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Over the next few days, I along with several others asked the Special Investigator for Schools, Richard Condon, to investigate the legality of Cerf having held onto these stocks. Though Condon’s report was completed in August 2007, it was not publicly released until I FOILed more than a year later, in December of 2008. When I saw what it included, I immediately gave it to Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News; someone else leaked it to the NY Times at the same time.

Though it was heavily redacted, the report revealed that Cerf had violated city conflict-of-interest laws by soliciting a $60,000 contribution for the Darrow Foundation, on whose board he sat, from Edison officials at the same time that he divested himself of their stock:

"At 7:37 am, prior to the scheduled CPAC meeting, Cerf sent an email to [redacted] of Edison, stating, "Per this email, I irrevocably release you and any interests with which you are associated from any and all obligations arising under the document executed on or about the date of my departure." As with his earlier messages to the Liberty and Edison executives, Cerf asked [redacted] to consider a contribution to the Darrow Foundation."

Cerf later took back the request for a donation when asked about it by the Special Investigator’s office. After investigators questioned him about its propriety, Cerf sent an e-mail to the Edison executives saying: "I have now concluded that it would be the better course not to proceed with the contribution."

Subsequently, the NYC Conflict of Interest Board sent him a confidential letter, admonishing him for using his city position to benefit the charity:

"It appears that you were aware that Edison schools was likely to come before the DOE and/or to be affected by your official actions on behalf of DOE," the letter stated. The board recommended no further disciplinary action but reminded Cerf that such violations "can result in civil fines of up to $10,000 ... and other penalties."

The Special Investigator also found that Cerf had relinquished an ongoing ten-year consulting contract with another Edison-connected firm only at the same time as he gave up the stocks, a contract that could have been worth $2.5 million.

Though Cerf claimed that the contract was not "operational" since he never signed it, the question remains why the word "Accepted" was written over his name on the document, and why he felt compelled to hurriedly renounce the agreement in the same email exchange in which he divested himself of Edison stock.

The Special Investigator’s report also pointed out there were mistakes and omissions in Cerf's official financial disclosure forms that appeared to relate to ongoing class action lawsuits against Edison. These forms he was subsequently allowed to amend, though such omissions can also result in termination of employment and criminal prosecution.

See Juan Gonzalez' column about these matters, as well as the NY Times story here. Here is the FOILED report,  GothamSchools here  shows a redacted page, and describes the report as “the investigation into a top school official that you will never read“ because so many pages were crossed out.

All this differs considerably from Cerf’s own account of the SCI investigation at the time:

“There is nothing here other than an investigation that exonerated me. The only real story here is that I was put through a rather tortuous experience.”

What did Cerf learn from this experience? Evidently very little, considering how he has been entangled in a similar controversy, involving misstatements concerning a secret, leaked report from his consulting company, which advised the takeover and charter conversion of many Newark public schools.

Cerf’s time in NYC featured other controversies. In October 2007, it was revealed that he had assigned an employee of the DOE press office to tape Diane Ravitch at public events, and was keeping a dossier on her. After failing to interest any reporter to write about her alleged contradictions, he got Kathryn Wilde head of the NYC Partnership to publish an NY Post oped attacking her.

Later, when asked by Patrick Sullivan of the Panel for Education Policy about this “Soviet-era approach to stifling dissent,” Cerf responded that it was totally “appropriate” to spend public funds taping Diane, and to prepare a document tracking her positions.

Nevertheless, the conservative National Review described Cerf’s smear tactics this way: “Welcome to Moscow or Berlin circa 1935.”

Kenneth Bernstein of the liberal Daily Kos wrote,

“There is something seriously wrong with people unwilling to hear criticism. Actions to suppress criticism imply to me an insecurity or worse a recognition that the positions being criticized cannot truly be defended...”

Again, Cerf was not discouraged by the widespread criticism of his Nixonian-like tactics. In July 2008, it was revealed that he had assigned several members of his still growing press office to monitor other potential critics, by subscribing to our NYC education list serv, in a effort called the “Truth Squad.”

And that is not all. As a DOE consultant, Cerf devised a cockamamie plan to reorganize the NYC system, and give private companies the responsibility to offer support services for schools, replacing the district superintendents, whose role had been specifically retained in state governance law.

At that time, Joel Klein claimed that he could not legally exclude for-profit companies like Edison from bidding for the work – a claim that after considerable protests, he renounced, though non-profits were still allowed by Klein to support schools, in so-called “Partnership support organizations,” run by private groups like New Visions etc.

Cerf also devised a new bizarre management structure, in which district superintendents were appointed “Senior Achievement facilitators” and required to spend 90% of their time on the road, coaching schools outside their districts on how to analyze and improve test scores.

This proposal even more clearly violated two consent decrees, in which DOE had promised to retain the customary support and supervisory role of district superintendents, after state legislators sued them for breaking the law. (See Patrick Sullivan’s questioning of Cerf on this issue as well at a December 2007 PEP meeting).

What else? Cerf consistently failed to investigate principals who were accused of tampering with test scores. When yet another such scandal broke, Cerf, who by that time was working for the Bloomberg campaign, said this:

"We cannot comment on any aspects of this, but we certainly do not condone the kinds of things that are alleged. But at the same time, we believe that accountability for student outcomes is a central driver of positive reform and we believe it is critical to hold everybody in the system accountable for student results.”

The implicit message to principals: lie, cheat or steal, it hardly matters as long as test scores go up.

Cerf also claimed that the reason that class size had increased sharply in NYC schools under his watch, despite a state law mandating their reduction, was that principals did not regard this reform as important. Yet in a citywide survey of over 500 principals, co-sponsored by the NY City Council, 87% of principals responded that they were unable to provide a quality education because of excessive class sizes.

Cerf was in charge of commissioning the teacher data reports, and promised that these reports would not be used for teacher evaluations and that the DOE would fight against any effort to disclose them publicly.

In an October 1, 2008 letter to Randi Weingarten, Cerf wrote, “It is the DOE’s firm position and expectation that Teacher Data reports will not and should not be disclosed or shared outside of the school community.”

Both promises have been broken, with the DOE basing tenure on these highly flawed reports, as recounted in a recent Michael Winerip column in the New York Times, and pushing for the release of these reports in the press.

Clearly, the man cannot be trusted; and Cerf’s persistent proclivity towards prevarication, political smear campaigns, and the privatization of public schools shows that he is not fit run New Jersey’s education system.

(photo above, thanks to Newark Star-Ledger.)