Final results for our poll, do we live in an age of insanity or stupidity, and was that the right question?

Not long ago, we featured a poll on this blog, the idea for which originally came from a speech by Diane Ravitch.  We asked readers, "Do we live in an age of insanity or stupidity?" when it comes to education policy. 

Here are the results: 33% for insanity; 59% for stupidity; 6% for neither. 

But was this really the right question?

We live in an age when education policy is being made by non-educators like Bill Gates, who calls  for class size increases in our public schools, while the private schools his children attend have 15 to 17 students per class.  

We live in an age when Justin Snider, a writer for the Hechinger Post  (which receives funding from Gates) echoes this view, calling efforts to reduce class sizes in the public schools "foolish", while not revealing that the classes he teaches at Columbia University are capped at fifteen.

We live in an age when the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan calls for teacher evaluation and pay to be tied to student test scores, while the Arlington VA schools that his children attend admit that they don't do this; neither does the private school that the Obama children attend, because, as a school administrator points out, "We don't believe [test scores] to be a reliable indicator of teacher effectiveness."

No,  as Diane Ravitch has concluded, and I agree: we live in an age of hypocrisy and outright meanness, when it comes to those powerful men making policies for our public schools.

More hypocrisy from Bloomberg and Klein on class size

Check out this account, from the Queens Chronicle about a recent Town Hall meeting in Forest Hills:

The mayor said the school system in the city “is getting better,” but when Jenny Fisher, an Iraq War veteran who just earned a degree in elementary education asked Klein when the Department of Education would lift a hiring freeze on teachers, Bloomberg stepped in.

“We don’t have the money to hire new teachers,” he said. “I don’t want to lay off teachers and Joel just has to work with that restriction. Don’t blame him, blame me, I guess.”

Klein, speaking directly to Fisher, added, “I wish I could hire you. Our kids need it — lower class sizes and young, enthusiastic teachers.”

What utter hypocrisy! The city received $200 million in federal funds this summer specifically meant to hire more teachers for the 2010-2011 school year; (see the federal guidance here.) And yet the administration wants to hold onto these funds until the following year, despite the fact that they are anticipating a loss of 2,000 teaching positions and an increase in at least 18,000 students this fall.

Over the last four years, the DOE has misused hundreds of millions of dollars in state funds meant for class size reduction. They are canceling the Early Grade class size reduction program that had existed since 1999, which was dedicated to reducing class size in grades K-3^rd.

There are currently 1700 teachers on Absent Teacher Reserve, getting paid full salaries, and yet the administration refuses to assign any of them to classes to lower class size; and would rather leave them in limbo, no matter what the damage to our children, to bolster their case for laying them off.

Bloomberg and Klein have done everything they can to resist providing our children with smaller classes that the New York's highest court said was their constitutional right. The result is that this fall we will likely see the sharpest increases in class size in twelve years, particularly in the early grades.

Kindergarten classes will probably be substantially larger than they were when Bloomberg first came into office, just as new research is revealing huge academic and economic benefits to keeping Kindergarten class sizes below twenty.

Already last year there were districts in the Bronx and Queens where nearly half of all Kindergarten students were in classes of 25 or more.

What a waste. We have new tests, new teacher evaluation systems based on unreliable test scores, a new organizational structure, and new experimental online learning systems, and yet our class sizes will be more overcrowded than ever.

Despite all their claims, this administration could care less about providing proven educational reforms such as smaller classes, in their zeal to waste money devising more damaging experiments on our children.

The bake sale ban and the hypocrisy of the DOE

Why does the DOE get itself into these messes, like banning PTA bake sales?

Because they never bother to consult with anyone, least of all parents, before making these harebrained decisions.

Excerpt from today's NY Times:

The education department is trying to persuade parents and students to hold food-free fund-raising events, perhaps selling T-shirts, pencils, notebooks, shoelaces or handmade beaded jewelry instead. One option it suggests is selling exercise: the buyer pays for the student to run a certain number of laps around a park or track.

That’ll be a big seller for sure.

What hypocrisy! When it comes to important educational decisions like class size, they say they don’t care and they will leave it up to the principal to decide. When it comes to banning home-made goods from our schools, all of a sudden they have to have the final word.

Check out info about the bake sale protest tomorrow, Thursday March 18 at City Hall at 4 pm; more info at www.nycgreenschools.org