Talk out of School: Our most listened to podcasts in 2021

One of the best things that happened to me in 2021 was finding a collaborator who share hosting responsibilities on Talk out of School, my WBAI radio show and podcast.  Daniel Alicea is a special education teacher and the founder of the organization Educators of NYC.  

Below are the episodes most listened this year, half of them hosted by Daniel.  But there are many more that are worth hearing on the podcast website.  Please subscribe!  And if you enjoy our show, please also contribute to WBAI, the only purely listener-supported radio station in NYC that doesn't accept any advertising.

September 4, 2021   Council Member Mark Levine on his concerns with the health and safety protocols in the NYC school reopening plan 

August 28, 2021: Keeping our Children and Schools Safe: Discussing School Reopening with Tajh Sutton and Dr. Kaliris Salas-Ramirez

July 17, 2021: Inside UFT Politics and History (Part 1) : How the Nation’s Most Powerful Teachers Union Impacted NYC Public Schools

July 10, 2021: The Creation, Implementation, and Failure of Common Core Standards with Tom Loveless

Autopsy of the failed teacher evaluation deal

In all the conflicting accounts between the city and the UFT about the collapse of the teacher evaluation negotiations, there is one clear point of agreement:  the Mayor refused to accept a two year sunset for the plan. In this, he was deeply wrong for disallowing the city to pilot what is essentially an experiment that could go badly, for both teachers and children.  Meanwhile, 90 percent of the districts in the rest of the state, appropriately, have a one year sunset on their teacher evaluation systems.  As I commented on the Schoolbook site, this insistence that the plan should be set in stone, with no sunset, shows Bloomberg as an arrogant wannabe Mayor-for-life. 

• On the UFT site, Edwize, Leo Casey posts what appears to be a DOE document, showing that the two year sunset had been accepted by the DOE before the Mayor blew the deal out of the water.  This evidence further contradicts Bloomberg's claim that it was the UFT who tried to slip the sunset provision in at the last minute. His claim is also inconsistent with what Ernie Logan has revealed, that the DOE had already agreed to an even shorter sunset of one year with the principals union, before Bloomberg blew up their evaluation deal as well.

•  Casey also reveals that towards the end, DOE tried to change “numerous scoring tables and conversion charts” that would incorporate the different components of the evaluation plan, including the growth scores based on student test scores, and that the DOE and the UFT then agreed to form a committee that would work on the scoring tables after the agreement was signed.  This suggests that even before the mayor rejected it, the deal was not really complete but could have faced serious conflicts in the future.

• There’s a good piece in the Village Voice with lots of quotes from Bruce Baker of Rutgers, about the fact that the state still owes NYC billions of dollars in funds through the CFE decision, and  that the Governor should not be allowed to cut $250 million, as he has threatened, because of the city's failure to come to an agreement.  If so, he will merely be hurting the children of NYC who deserve these funds no matter whether there is a new teacher evaluation system or not.  The article also contains links to Baker’s analysis, showing that the growth scores that would be included in the plan, required as part of Race to the Top,  are particularly unreliable, and the problem with “[these] policy prescriptions is they're trying to do it in a particularly dumbass way."

• Yoav Gonen reveals in the NY Post that the man who was primarily responsible for these dumbass prescriptions, Arne Duncan, called the Bloomberg and the UFT to urge them to make a deal.

• Meanwhile there is NY State Education Commissioner  King’s statement that the city and the UFT still have a “legal obligation to continue to negotiate,”  I suppose because the State promised this in return for getting RTTT funds, but whether anyone will take this seriously is doubtful.