Is the tug of war on education policy between liberal "reform proponents" and the unions, as the NY Times argues, or the 1% and nearly everyone else?

NY Times ran a front page article on Wednesday, focused on the tug of war for Hilary Clinton’s soul, supposedly between the teacher unions and the big donors, mostly hedge fund operators, who want to privatize public schools and ramp up high-stakes testing, weaken teacher tenure and base their evaluations on student test scores. Value-added test based teacher evaluation has proved to be highly unreliable, and many expert groups, including the American Statistical Association and the National Academy of Sciences, have concluded that it could have damaging impact on morale and the quality of education.   

In the article, the hedgefunders make it clear that they will threaten to withhold their contributions if Hillary does not adopt their positions:

“This is an issue that’s important to a lot of Democratic donors,” said John Petry, a hedge fund manager who was a founder of the Harlem Success Academy, a New York charter school. “Donors want to hear where she stands.”

Yet in the process of writing about this ideological battle, the reporter, Maggie Haberman, characterizes Democrats for Education Reform, one of the principle hedge fund-backed lobby groups as a “left of center group,” which is absurd.  For some reason, DFER has managed to persuade reporters that it has any liberal credentials, despite the fact that as Diane Ravitch pointed out, the California Democratic Party has repudiated it.  

Parents Across America wrote an open letter to the NPR ombudsman in 2011, objecting to the fact that Claudio Sanchez, the NPR reporter, had called DFER a “liberal” organization, while quoting their criticism of the progressive participants in the anti-corporate reform Save Our Schools march in DC.   

We also pointed out that DFER’s founder, hedge fund operator Whitney Tilson, admitted that the only reason he put “Democrats” in the organization’s title and focused on convincing Democrats to adopt their pro-privatization agenda was that GOP leaders were already in agreement with most of their positions.  The following is an excerpt from a film made by Tilson called “A Right Denied”:

“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”

In addition, by characterizing the struggle on education policy as being a conflict primarily between the teacher unions and big donors, the reporter misses the boat.  Indeed, the only mention of parents in the piece implies that they are allied with the DFER privateers: “Reform proponents include donors, but also a cross section of parents and business advocates.”   

Hopefully NY Times readers and especially Hillary will smart enough to reject this claim, if they merely looked at Governor Cuomo’s plunging popularity.  Cuomo’s poll numbers are dropping like a stone, largely because his positions on education are in thrall to his big donors in the DFER/hedgefund crowd.  He has pushed hard on test-based teacher evaluation and other favorite talking points of the corporate reform contingent.   

According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, Cuomo’s approval ratings on education are at a tepid 28% - while 63% of voters reject his views on school reform.  65% of voters reject the notion that teacher tenure should be based on student test scores; 71% reject the idea that teacher pay should be based on scores, and 55% trust the teacher unions on education, compared to 28% who trust Cuomo. 

And the overwhelming rejection of Cuomo's views is shared among rural, suburban, urban voters, Republicans and Democrats alike.

Interestingly, instead of citing any of the many polls that show voters overwhelmingly reject the corporate reform/hedgefund education agenda,  the NY Times article uncritically links to a leaked “memo” from Joe Williams of DFER, to “Board members and Major Donors,” citing polling results that supposedly show that “voters agree with our policies.”  

But in the memo, Williams fails to reveal the actual questions – or what it might actually mean that 69% of voters feel that education is on the “wrong track”.  After a decade or more of increasingly severe test-based accountability, many voters are indeed weary of the focus on testing and test prep, and the disruption and damaging cycle of closing neighborhood schools, and so reject the DFER agenda that is based on more of the same.

Another recent poll from GBA Strategies, conducted for In the Public Interest and the Center for Popular Democracy went unmentioned by the NY Times. Unlike the DFER survey the full questions and answers were released, revealing that most voters do indeed reject the corporate reform agenda. Voters see lack of parental involvement as their biggest education concern, followed by too much testing, funding cuts and overly large class sizes. School choice came in last on a list of their priorities.

Let’s hope for more accurate and less biased education reporting from the mainstream media in the future.  The tug of war on education is not primarily between liberal reformers and the teachers union – but between the 1% and nearly everyone else.

Merryl Tisch, the State Education Dept and their epic fail when it comes to charter expansion

Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the Regents, has proclaimed in recent days that she believes in expansion of charter schools. On a Nov. 16 radio show, she said: “I personally am a great believer in charter schools ... I believe in opening them aggressively…I’d like to push more charter schools.”  She added that rather than support the Mayor’s preference for improving struggling schools rather than shutting them down, ”If we do not see movement on these schools, these lowest-performing schools, in terms of their ability to retool their workforce, by the spring, we will move to close them.”

The most recent Quinnipiac poll from November 19 revealed that 48 percent of NYC voters believe that the Mayor should freeze or reduce the number of charter schools in NYC, while only 43 percent think that the number should be increased  – despite millions spent by the deep-pocketed charter lobby on marketing and television ad campaigns. Fifty percent of voters believe charters should pay rent if housed in a public school vs. 41 percent who oppose this.  Sadly, both the authority to decide whether charter schools should expand and whether they should pay rent have been taken out of the Mayor’s hands, as the power to determine the number of charters rests with the Governor and the state Legislature. 

Moreover, the Governor already pushed through a new law last spring which obligated NYC to provide free space or pay their rent in private space for any new or expanding charter going forward – the only district in the state saddled with this burden, where we already suffer from the most overcrowded public schools and the highest real estate costs.  And now Cuomo, Tisch and their Wall St. buddies are working hard to raise the cap – especially in NYC, where we already have 197 charters, with 31 approved to open over the next two years, and 28 remaining under the cap. We are already paying $1.3 billion per year for these privately managed schools – and will likely be spending hundreds of millions of dollars more for their rent.  

On a subsequent radio show, Tisch said that the remaining open slots in the rest of the state should be shifted to NYC “where we are eager to have them.”  (See this radio interview, at about 32 minutes in. )  One wonders who is the “we” referred to here.  Is it the royal we, or does we mean the Wall St. pro-charter crowd with whom she socializes?  Clearly, it does not mean NYC voters or public school parents. 

 

Last spring, the hedge fund/charter lobby spent $5.95 million on ads to pressure the Mayor and the legislature to give free space to charters.  This fall, they spent another $4 million on TV ads to elect a Republican majority in the State Senate that would support raising the cap, without ever mentioning the word “charter schools” in their ads – because those words don’t go down so well in the swing districts of the candidates whose campaigns they were supporting. 

Today, there are only 51 charter schools in the rest of the state, and more than 100 slots remain under the cap outside NYC.  Suburban districts have mostly managed to resist the charter onslaught, but not here in NYC where the wealthy oligarchs have more influence with the Regents and the SUNY board than the hundreds of public school parents who appear at hearings in opposition. 

Last week, apparently as part of Tisch’s “aggressive” stance towards expanding charters, the Regents approved a Rochester charter school founded by 22 year old “Dr.” Ted Morris Jr., who lied about his resume, claiming he had degrees from a high school, college and even graduate schools that he had not attended and/or graduated from.  The State Education Department and the Regents did not do even the most minimal fact checking, as Morris’ resume in his charter application did not match his Linked-in profile, nor did it align with earlier charter applications he had submitted to NYSED, starting at the age of 18.  After his lies were discovered, “Dr.” Ted Morris resigned from the charter, but Tisch said that the school would be opened anyway, with a board recruited from Craig’s List. Subsequently, the approval was withdrawn, but only after bloggers and the media did the minimal research that NYSED had failed to fulfill in the first place.

At the same meeting, the Regents approved the Harlem charter application of Dr. Steve Perry, who runs a magnet school in Connecticut, even though his school enrolls far fewer poor students , those with disabilities, and English Language Learners than the other high schools in Hartford.  Perry is a controversial figure who has compared teachers to cockroaches and his bullying of parents led the Hartford Board of Education  president to call for an investigation against him. Now Jonathan Pelto has called for a new investigation – this time, into the fact that Perry admitted using Hartford district employees to prepare his charter application and to develop the educational programs to be implemented at his Harlem charter school.

Also at the same Regents meeting, NYSED released college-going statistics for districts and schools that were shown to be wildly inaccurate by Superintendents and principals throughout the state. 

A recent report, summarizing the audits of NY charter schools, concluded that millions of dollars have been wasted and/or improperly spent  by them, and there was “probable financial mismanagement in 95% of schools examined. “ Another just-released report from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers found that NY is the 18th lowest out of 21 states for strong charter accountability laws.

Four years after the previous NY charter law was amended, that barred any charter school from being re-authorized or allowed to expand or replicate that has not enrolled equal numbers of at-risk students as the public schools in their communities, the state has failed to release any data that would allow one to assess their student attrition rates.   We know from the data that does exist that the student cohorts at many NYC charter schools, including Success Academy, lose many students along the way.  According to  Peter Goodman,

In the spring of 2013 a number of regent members asked the commissioner for a report on attrition: were the charter schools dumping low achieving and discipline problems especially before the state tests – a year and half later – no report.

Clearly, NYSED and the Regents have failed to be responsible for the charters that they have already authorized, have proven themselves incapable of performing minimal due diligence in authorizing new charters, and are certainly unable to provide proper oversight for the additional numbers of charter schools that Tisch wants to so “aggressively” expand.   It is time that the State Education Department and Chancellor Tisch stop recklessly throwing away taxpayer money in their campaign to privatize our public schools.  One has to wonder where the accountability is for them.

Who is to blame for the failed negotiations over teacher evaluation?

If the Governor goes ahead with punishing NYC children for the failure to reach a deal over teacher evaluation by subtracting $250 million from state aid, it will be terribly unfair.  Yet there is little doubt that most parents will blame Bloomberg for this latest fiasco, as the just-released Quinnipiac poll shows that NYC voters trust the UFT by 53 to 35 percent over the mayor. And 63 percent of those polled believe that the mayor should share power, compared to only 13 percent who say he should continue to have complete control, without any checks and balances. 

In response to  bills introduced in the Legislature to undo mayoral control last year, the mayor’s spokesperson said that no one should want to return to “those bad old days of dysfunction and corruption.”  These bills have just been re-introduced.

Actually the "bad old days" look pretty good compare with the collapse of negotiations over a new teacher evaluation system,  the bus strike, the largest class sizes in 14 years, and million dollar contracts awarded vendors who have been shown to  have stolen millions in the past.  (The latest beneficiary of the DOE’s largesse is Champion Learning, which was awarded $4.5 million by the Panel for Educational Policy in November, despite having found to have overbilled DOE by many millions and being under federal investigation.)

The legislature should take note, and refrain from punishing NYC students, by insisting that their schools are fully funded and that no future mayor has the unilateral ability to damage our schools and hurt our kids again.

Noah Gotbaum vs. Mitt Romney on who parents trust more, the union or Michael Bloomberg?

See the video below, in which NYC parent leader Noah Gotbaum confronts Mitt Romney at the propaganda fest known as Education Nation about how parents support the teachers union more than the Mayor, a proposition that Mitt says he doesn't believe. Noah is right , of course.

Parents do support the teachers union far more than they support Bloomberg and  the Chancellor as seen in this Quinnipiac poll from last February. The poll found that overall, NYC voters trust the teachers' union more than the mayor to protect the interest of public school children 56 - 31 percent; and public school parents trust the union by an even larger margin: 69 - 22 percent.

The same was true in Chicago, with most registered voters supporting the teachers, even during the strike, according to this Sun-Times poll. According to another independent poll, 66 percent of Chicago parents supported the striking teachers. Why?

Because parents understand that teachers are fighting for smaller classes and other reforms that would actually improve our neighborhood public schools, rather than impose even more high-stakes testing, increase class size, or close them down and turn them over to private corporations, and as the mayors of NYC and Chicago would like to do.

Despite all the corporate, venture philanthropy and hedge fund millions going to into campaigns to convince us to support mayoral control, the spread of charter schools and online learning, the weakening of union protections, and now the "Parent trigger", most public school parents are too smart to be tricked by their lies.

Mayor's poor showing in Quinnipiac poll, and vote in our poll now!

1.      A new Quinnipiac poll came out yesterday, showing that only 26% of New Yorkers approve of the way Bloomberg is handling our schools; 61% disapprove. 

57  57% think he has failed to improve our schools, and only 13% think the next mayor should retain mayoral control.  The mayor blamed his poor showing on the ads the UFT has been running and said that if he bought up enough ad time, he could reverse the results.

I have added a poll to the right hand side of our parent blog; do you think the mayor’s handling of our schools has been successful?  Do you support the school closings?  Do you think that the mayor should retain control over our schools? Please answer the questions now on the right hand side of the blog.  Also, if you have a comment leave it below.  Thanks!

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.