Education activists around the country explain what their districts have done during Covid pandemic

On the latest Talk out of School podcast, after some local education news,  I spoke to three education activists: Damaris Allen, Hillsborough County parent and President of the Florida Collaboration Project; Glenn Sacks, a LA teacher and chapter leader, and Cassie Creswell, Chicago parent and Exec. Director of Illinois Families for Public Schools , about what their schools have been doing during the Covid pandemic to keep students safe and healthy, and what sort of education is being provided to make up for the disruptions in their schooling.  You can check out previous podcast episodes here.

Episode Notes

Chalkbeat, NYC officials keep a lid on data from tests to address ‘learning gaps’

Gothamist, Some NYC Teachers Worry "Learning Loss" Tests Will Exacerbate the Problem

Class Size Matters and Education Law Center, State budget hearings testimony on the DOE’s failure to use state funds appropriately and with required public input

NY Daily News, NYC Education Dept. shortens quarantine for students who test positive for COVID-19 from 10 to 5 days

American Medical Association press release, AMA: CDC quarantine and isolation guidance is confusing, counterproductive

El Diario, Preocupación y confusión entre padres por nuevos cambios en reglas de cuarentena de niños en escuelas de NYC

JD Supra, Mask Mandate; Nassau County Court Decision; Where Are We?

Brooklyn Eagle, Brooklyn Judge Reinstates NY Mask Mandate

Chicago Sun-Times, CPS says change in COVID case reporting wasn’t intended to mislead public

Chicago Sun-Times, Fight over COVID testing of students — and whether CPS disregarded governor’s offer of help — at heart of dispute with union

 

Update on class size caps, violations & strikes in NYC, LA, Oakland and Florida

Update 3/2/19:  After a seven-day strike, the Oakland district and the union have tentatively agreed to a new contract that includes an 11% salary increase over four years, more counselors, psychologists, related service providers and speech pathologists, and to phasing in lower class size caps starting next school year in Kindergarten to 23 students per class;  1st-3rd grade classes to 26 students per class ; 4th-5th grade classes to 29  students per class and HS classes in core subjects to 31.  By 2021, these class size caps will be further reduced by one. (All these caps lower than current UFT contract  that hasn't changed in 50 years.)  The OEA union summary of the agreement is here; the entire agreement is here; separate chapters are here.

Wednesday, the UFT announced the beginning of an expedited process to resolve class size violations in five high schools where violations had been chronic: Benjamin N. Cardozo High School, Francis Lewis High School, and Academy of American Studies, in Queens, and Leon M. Goldstein High School and Secondary School for Journalism, in Brooklyn.  Chalkbeat wrote about this here. 

This process was negotiated as part of the new UFT contract and is supposed to accelerate the lengthy and often ineffective way that excessive class sizes in schools have been addressed in the past, especially where violations have repeatedly occurred over the years.  The UFT press release  says the grievances will be referred "immediately to arbitration and the arbitrator’s decision must be implemented by the DOE within five days.”

Yet neither Chalkbeat the article nor the UFT press release provides any information about how many other NYC public schools in addition to these five schools still suffer from class sizes over the cap. What the UFT did say about all these other schools was this:

In addition to the expedited process for chronically overcrowded classes, the UFT will be working with district superintendents and the citywide Class Size Labor Management Committee to resolve oversize class complaints in other schools. Any schools where class size issues are not resolved by this process will be eligible for arbitrators' hearings, with the additional requirement that arbitrators' remedies must be implemented within five school days.

The class size caps according to the UFT contract are listed here:

Kindergarten: 25 students contained
Grades 1-6 in elementary schools: 32 students
JHS/MS: 33 students in non-Title I schools; 30 in Title I schools.
HS: 34 students.

Coincidentally, on Friday, the DOE released the audited Oct. 31 data for class sizes this fall, citywide, by district and by school.   When the law requiring DOE reporting was first passed over a decade ago, in part because of our advocacy, we pushed for two reporting periods, once in the fall and once in the spring, because we knew that high school classes were reconstituted in the second semester and we wanted to have a handle on those class sizes as well and try to provide pressure for them to be lowered as promptly as possible. 

Unfortunately, the DOE interpreted the law another way and after releasing the Oct. 31 data on Nov. 15, uses the Feb. 15 date to release the same basic data from Oct. 31, now just audited, rather than class size data from the  second semester.  The City Council has never challenged them on that interpretation.

Anyway, over the weekend we looked at the just-released audited fall data two ways, one assuming the Title I middle school cap of 30 pertains, and the other way assuming the non-Title One middle school cap of 33.  (About 83% of NYC public schools receive Title one funds, according to this DOE budget allocation memo – yet I don’t know of any middle schools where teachers grieve class sizes between 31-33; parents/teachers, please correct me if I’m wrong.)

The audited data shows that as of Oct. 31, there were 49,442 students in 1,311 classes that violated the class size limits,  assuming non-Title one caps of 33 in middle school:

# of classes and students over UFT limits, no Title I MS	Number of Students in Classes over UFT limits	Number of Classes over UFT limits
K-8 (assuming MS cap of 33)	12,676	399
HS	36,766	912
Total	49,442	1311

Assuming the smaller cap of 30 in Title one middle schools, there were more than twice as many violations in grades K-8, for a total of 67,656 students in 1908 classes:

# of students and classes over UFT Limits	Number of Students in Classes over UFT limits	Number of Classes over UFT limits
K-8 (assuming MS cap of 30)	30,890	996
HS	36,766	912
Total	67,656	1,908

The Oct. 31 audited data also shows that the largest percentage of violations occur in Kindergarten (affecting 7% of students) and middle school (5%-7% of students, assuming a cap of 30).

An article from the UFT newspaper dated Nov. 1, 2018 cites figures showing 401 schools citywide and 2,056 classes were out of compliance as of the 10th day of school this year, which was September 18. The same article also reports a class size cap of 30 for middle schools.  Assuming this limit to be true, only about 150 classes out of more than 2000 were brought into compliance between Sept. 18 and Oct. 31. I would guess that most of these schools did not lower class sizes after Oct. 31, but do not know for sure since neither the UFT nor the DOE report on this data.

In any case, these class size caps are far too large, and haven’t been lowered in over fifty years since the days of Albert Shanker, who was able to negotiated both salary increases and smaller classes, although  now of course we know far more about the tremendous benefits of class size reduction for student and teacher success. 

Though the UFT did not negotiate smaller caps in the new contract (according to teacher Arthur Goldstein because the “DOE told us point blank they had no interest in that”),  as a result of the recent Los Angeles strike, LA teachers won both higher salaries and smaller class size caps, as well as a resolution from the school board calling for a moratorium on charter schools.   

Yet the LA class size caps were originally far larger than those in NYC.  Moreover, there was a clause in the contract allowing the district to ignore the caps completely by claiming “financial necessity”, they had claimed nearly every year.  Thankfully, the union also managed to eliminate that clause in the new contract. 

After a strike at four Chicago International Charter Schools was settled last week, those teachers won higher salaries and smaller classes, including class size caps of 30 at all three of the chain’s high schools, significantly smaller than the UFT high school caps of 34.

Oakland teachers have announced they too plan to strike on Thursday, and among their demands are both higher salaries and smaller class size caps.  The fact-finder report proposed that Oakland teachers should get both, and “that lower class sizes will improve teacher retention and educational outcomes.”

While Oakland teachers are demanding caps be lowered by two students per grade, the fact-finder instead recommended a decrease in one student per class “to be fully implemented by July 2020, with 20% of schools having an implementation date of July 2019. The intent is for implementation to happen first at the highest-needs schools. I also recommend that the parties form a joint class size reduction taskforce. This task force will be charged with looking at ways to fund further class size reductions to be implemented by July 2021.”

The fact-finder report also disclosed the current class size caps at Oakland schools: Kindergarten classes at 27; 1^st-3^rd at 30; 4th-6^th at 31; 7-12 at 32 in most core subjects – smaller in every grade except Kindergarten and middle school than NYC, assuming Title one middle school caps of 30. The Oakland fact-finder also agreed with the union that there should be financial penalties imposed on the district for violating these caps.

Class size caps in Florida schools are smaller yet – as a result of a referendum in 2002 that amended their state constitution.  No more than 18 students per class are allowed in prekindergarten through grade 3; 22 students in grades 4 through 8; and 25 in high school classes.  Though schools are provided with flexibility to some degree, especially in elective and AP courses, the vast majority abide by the caps according to the official state reports.  Charters and public “schools of choice” are  allowed to meet these figures through school-wide average figures rather than classroom caps.

As the Tampa Bay Times reported last month,

According to the Department of Education, only 474 of 18,755 traditional classrooms missed the mark in the fall count — most of them in Polk and Hendry counties. …Even districts using a more liberal rule that lets them apply averages to their “schools of choice,” a program implemented by lawmakers in 2013, had slightly increased problems. This fall, 18 of 2,873 “choice” schools — 0.6 percent — violated the rules of 18 students in K-3 classes, 22 in grades 4-8 and 25 in high school.

The Florida class size caps have  led to nearly ideal statewide class size averages , as shown in the data for the 2017-2018 year of 15.5 students per class in preK-3^rd grade, 17.8 students per class in 4^th-8^th grade, and 18.6 students per class in high school. In 2002,  then-Governor Jeb Bush confided to state legislators he had “devious plans’ to eliminate the class size caps, and various members of the Legislature have tried to scrap them over the years, but they have been unable to do so because of their huge popularity among parents and teachers.

In any case, we shall see if Oakland teachers, like Los Angeles and Chicago charter school teachers before them, achieve both salary increases and reductions in class size.  I will be rooting them on and crossing my fingers that they do.

Los Angeles: ground zero in the fight over class size and corporate reform

The Los Angeles school board has a new president, Dr. Richard Vladovic, and a new member, Monica Ratliff, a working fifth grade teacher, who won her seat despite being hugely outspent more than 10-1 by the corporate reform crowd, including $1 million from NYC Mayor Bloomberg.  (UPDATE: counting independent expenditures, it was more like 42-1; see comment below.)

Vladovic was elected president by 5-2. The two votes against him came from outgoing president Monica Garcia and her ally Tamar Galatzan.

LA Superintendent John Deasy

The Los Angeles school district also has, for the first time in years, an increase in funding from the state, and has decided to spend a large portion to reverse the increase in class sizes that has driven class sizes in many classrooms to 30 to 40 students or more.

Here is a video of the June 18 school board meeting, showing Los Angeles parents, many of them Mexican-American, pleading with the school board to pass the resolution that had been introduced in support of reducing class size.  It is well worth watching in its entirety.  

At the behest of some LA parents and activist Robert Skeels, I wrote a short research brief supporting the resolution that is posted here.

The class size reduction resolution was approved by the board 5-2.  The two votes against it came, again, from Monica Garcia and Tamar Galatzan. The board  postponed a vote on a competing resolution, introduced by Galatzan and supported by Superintendent John Deasy, that would have given schools more “flexibility” in spending these funds.

Deasy had already pushed through a program to give iPads to all LA students, and expand digital learning to teach the common core, all favorite experiments of the corporate reform crowd and especially the Gates Foundation.

Deasy was appointed straight from the Gates Foundation, which  remains the nation’s most powerful opponent of reducing class size, despite the voluminous evidence for its efficacy in boosting learning and narrowing the achievement gap. 

After the vote of the school board in favor of reducing class size, Deasy said he would ignore their wishes and would implement Galatzan’s resolution:

 “The Board voted down the directive to have me come and do it,” said Deasy, referring to Galatzan’s local spending resolution: “…we’re doing it anyway. If they had voted to prevent me from doing it… well they didn’t think of that.”

He said his spending plan will somehow combine both resolutions, including the one supporting class size reduction, which he derisively described as a “directive to hire every human being on the West Coast.”   

The LA principals and teachers unions subsequently sent a letter of protest to the board about Deasy’s intention to defy their decision.

Below is a video clip of the most dramatic part of the board’s debate over class size, as Steve Zimmer, the new vice-president, also a former school teacher, explains the hypocrisy of those who opposed this resolution by showing how many LA charters boast about their smaller classes.  (Deasy is proud of the fact that LA is now the largest charter authorizer in the United States.)

Here is a description/explanation from a LA insider, originally posted on Diane Ravitch’s blog:

With mounting irritation, Zimmer starts shouting—quoting and throwing the paper printouts from the charters websites wildly over his shoulder (where the charters’ websites’ main page touts and specifically cites their exact student-to-teacher ratios.)

This was breathtaking. You can’t see this because of the camera angle, but Board Member Galatzan was visibly angry at this point. A little subtext here.

Both Galatzan and Monica Garcia have strongly backed the private charters in general—and the ones mentioned by Zimmer in particular, while at the same time, lambasting teachers in the traditional public schools and those teachers’ union, UTLA for doing a lousy job, and “obstructing reform” and being “defenders of a failed status quo,” and on and on… (In the process, Galatzan and Garcia are parroting the talking points of the “reform” organizations who pumped millions into their campaigns… but that’s another story).

In 2009, Galatzan and Garcia also voted to raise class size in the traditional public schools—and saying nothing about the ratios at their beloved charter schools. While the state budget was a contributing factor to the vote, Galatzan and Garcia also cited in part the following reasons for raising the class size in the traditional public schools:

1) “Lowering class size is just about teachers unions wanting more members and more dues, and more power… with no proof that it helps kids.”

2) “Lowering class size is about advancing adult interests at the expense of children’s interests.”

3) “Lowering class size is just so teachers, who have it easy enough already, will have it even easier, with less work required from less students.”

Zimmer makes brief reference to these objection ”to those who think that (lowering) class size is solely about jobs.. ”

For Galatzan and Garcia, they take a seemingly contradictory (hypocritical?) stance on this, as again, they bend over backwards supporting and praising the charter schools whose success is in part due to their low class size—the low class size the charters tout on their websites.

Anyway, back to the video.

Galatzan starts picking up the papers that Zimmer flings indiscriminately over his head and slapping them down angrily on the counter, and says to him, “Are you gonna clean this up?”

Not flinching a bit, Zimmer continues his laser-like focus, not even looking sideways at Galatzan as he snaps, “I’ll clean it up!” as if to say, “Don’t butt in… I’m on a roll here.”

Again… a breathtaking performance.

It is especially breathtaking for those of us here in NYC, whose children continue to suffer from rising class sizes because of mayoral control and a lack of democracy, with a school board whose decisions are in lock step with their master, Michael Bloomberg.

The Broad inside game

Check out this posting on “The Broad Effect” , about how the Broad Foundation influences educational policy by inserting graduates of his Broad Superintendents Academy into top positions at urban districts from throughout the country, to pursue its privatization agenda, sometimes provoking controversy in the process.

Just as the Gates Foundation plays the "outside game" by putting its people inside the US Dept. of Education, where they can use the Race to the Top funds to bribe states to adopt their policies, Broad plays the inside game.

The Rhode Island State Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist, who recently ordered the firing of the entire teaching force of Central Falls HS, is a Broad graduate.

Here in NYC we have much experience with the grads of this fabled institution. The first was Chris Cerf, Class of 2004, formerly head of Edison charter schools, who became Deputy Chancellor for “Strategy and Innovation” at DOE, then moved over to the Bloomberg campaign, and is now is selling science curricula in Brazil. (See the inspired illustration above, thanks to David Bellel; sadly Cerf now seems to be excised from the “featured” alumni on the Broad website.) Also:

• Marcia Lyles, class of 2006, former Deputy Chancellor of Instruction, now Superintendent of the Christina School District in Wilmington Del.
  
• Jean-Claude Brizard, class of 2007, former DOE “senior executive for policy and sustainability” and now superintendent in Rochester, NY.
  
• Shael Polakow-Suransky, class of 2008, (currently Chief Accountability Officer at DOE).
  
• Garth Harries, class of 2009, former head of Office of Portfolio Development and now asst. Superintendent in New Haven.


• Currently, John White is in the Broad class of 2010, now Cerf’s successor as “Deputy Chancellor for Strategy” (he now apparently leaves off “Innovation” from his title)

Broad doesn’t stop there. He also gives out his award each year to the top urban school district; conveniently awarded NYC in 2007, despite stagnant gains on the NAEPs, shortly before Bloomberg embarked on his campaign to renew mayoral control. And Broad is a generous donor to charter schools in NYC and elsewhere.

Chancellor Klein persuaded Dan Katzir, the head of the Broad Foundation, to give a million dollars to Eva Moskowitz's chain of charter schools, so she could create an army of parents who would support their initiatives, writing: “she’s done more to organize parents and get them aligned with what our reforms than anyone else on the outside.”

The Times ran a recent rather unflattering profile of Broad . In it, Roland Fryer, whose “institute” at Harvard and large scale experiments in student bribery are funded by Broad: “For me there has been no downside....But I think if you’re not on your game, Eli will crush you." (For more on Fryer's Broad-funded experiments, see here, here, here, and here.)

Bribery seems to come naturally to these guys. More recently, Katzir has admitted that they use an unusual method to "place" their superintendents -- promising cash-strapped districts that in exchange, they will cover part of their salaries.

The Detroit Public School Board has just unanimously voted to file a lawsuit against Robert Bobb, the "emergency" manager of their schools and a Broad graduate, saying the extra $145,000 he receives from the Broad foundation and other "unidentified philanthropic organizations" represents a conflict of interest.

"Because Bobb has sole and virtually unreviewable control over the $1.4 billion DPS budget, it is especially dangerous to allow the Broad Foundation and similar 'venture philanthropists' to fund one-third of his salary," according to the complaint.

In Los Angeles, Broad is paying the salaries of top school officials including Matt Hill, who is “overseeing the district's high-profile effort through which groups inside or outside L.A. Unified could take over new and low-performing schools."

Responds Dan Katzir: "It's common for the foundation to match people it has trained with districts, and initially to help pay for it."

Can you imagine if the people running our public hospitals were trained by the drug companies and had their salaries supplemented by them? There would be justified outrage. But when it comes to our public education system, anything goes, and conflict of interest is the name of the game.

Why are inside-the-beltway so clueless at diagnosing the real problems of our public schools?

See the typical screed in Slate, by Ray Fisman, a professor at the Columbia Business School, subtitled “Why are public schools so bad at hiring good instructors?” It decries the inability of principals to get rid of incompetent teachers, and attributes poverty, the achievement gap and God knows what else to teacher tenure.

Strangely enough, it reports that the principal featured in the story, Anthony Lombardi at PS 49 in Queens, managed to get rid of one third of entire his teaching staff since he arrived, despite the existence of tenure, and, you got it, test scores rose.

The article doesn’t question that looking at test scores alone may not be the best or the only way to evaluate teachers or the quality of education. This is peculiar, especially since Lombardi seems to have rated his teachers not by looking at their test scores, but by examining their lesson plans and observing them in action, which is exactly how tenure decisions are made now.

(By the way, the school got a “B” in its recent DOE school progress report, for whatever that’s worth. And the teachers who remain at the school, though they may have been spared Lombardi’s wrath, don’t seem to respect him much – in the teacher survey, 50% disagreed with the statement that “School leaders invite teachers to play a meaningful role in setting goals and making important decisions for this school for this school,” And 57% disagree that “School leaders encourage open communication on important school issues.”

Most notably, the article omits the fact that teachers no longer have the right of automatic transfer – and in fact implies otherwise: “Since his arrival, a third of PS 49's teachers have been squeezed out through Lombardi's efforts. Of course, this just meant they were moved to another classroom in another school, lowering the test scores of someone else's children.”

Perhaps this inaccuracy results from the fact that much of the description of Lombardi and his schools seem to be lifted directly from a now-outdated NY Magazine article from 2003 (click here).

But the most interesting aspect of the piece, to me anyway, is that it cites the findings in a study by Kane, Staiger and Gordon (yes, the infamous Robert Gordon) that the quality of teaching in LA did not diminish one iota after they had to triple their hiring of teachers to reduce class size, despite the repeated claims of the Bloomberg/Klein administration that lowering class size in NYC would inevitably do just this. In fact, there is no evidence in the research literature that this has ever occurred.

To the contrary, providing them with smaller classes is the most certain way to improve the effectiveness of the teachers we already have in NYC, as well as reducing our sky-high attrition levels, in the process making it more likely that students have experienced teachers – the most reliable predictor of effectiveness, as parents know and which is also backed up by research. It is widely known that no private school in NYC will hire a first year teacher, but makes them spend a couple of years of “seasoning” in the public schools first.