Update on our Skinny award dinner, class size, court hearings, privacy violations and more!

1. Save the date! On Wednesday June 19 we will hold our annual Skinny award dinner at Casa La Femme on 140 Charles St. The honorees will be Attorney General Tish James for her steadfast and courageous leadership in supporting public school students and parents over many years; and NYC Kids PAC, the only political action committee that rates candidates on their positions on public education. Please reserve your ticket now -- for a delicious three course dinner with wine and great company besides!

2. Last week, the Education Council Consortium and CEC 2 both passed resolutions in support of our campaign to urge the City Council to allocate funding for class size reduction in this year's budget. Please ask your CEC to do the same! We can provide you with district-specific data if you like.

3. This week two important court hearings will be held. Tomorrow, Wed. May 15 at 2:30 PM at the NY Supreme Court, 60 Centre St., Rm. 418, Judge Arthur Engeron will hear a lawsuit vs the city for redacting nearly the entire final City Hall decision memo that we FOILed about how the DOE's formula for assessing school space would be revised, and why the Mayor rejected the Blue Book Working Group's proposal to align school capacity with smaller classes.  

4. This Thursday May 16 at 11 AM, Judge Katherine Levine will hear arguments on the DOE's proposal to close PS 25, a small zoned school in Bed Stuy. The hearing will take place at the Kings Country Supreme Court in Brooklyn, at 360 Adams St. Last year PS 25 parents sued and got a temporary restraining order against closing the school. I wrote an open letter to Chancellor Carranza that was published in the Washington Post Answer Sheet, asking him to withdraw this proposal; obviously he did not.

5. Because of unconscionable delays on the part of the US Department of Education in responding to parents' FERPA complaints, Eva Moskowitz and Success Academy have once again violated student privacy and federal law. An update on this long-running saga is here.

Talk to you soon, and please sign up for our Skinny dinner today!

Last night on the steps of Tweed, we occupied DOE again!

Join us on Thursday to protest the waiver!

Yesterday, Commissioner Steiner approved a waiver for Cathie Black, a magazine executive, to become our next Chancellor, despite a total lack of educational qualifications.

For more on the approval, including the fact that the mayor has consistently overstepped the law when it comes to our schools, see today’s Times. What can we do?

• Join the new Deny Waiver Facebook page, and keep up with the latest news and developments.
  

• Join with parents across the city in the Deny Waiver Coalition on the steps of Tweed this Thursday, December 2, at 4 PM, and wear red to show your outrage. Here's a flyer. Post this event on your Facebook page and invite your friends and colleagues.

We’ve had eight long years with our schools run by a non-educator. Class sizes have risen sharply, our children have lost art, music and science, test prep has replaced learning, and the results? Black and Hispanic students have fallen even further behind their peers in other large cities, and we are the only city in the country where non-poor students actually score worse on the national tests than in 2003.

It’s time to start fighting back. Join on Thursday, and spread the word! Above is a flyer you can post and hand out at your schools.

Michael Duffy and Tweed: we don't listen and we don't care

Michael Duffy, head of the charter school office at DOE, in an interview said that he learned nothing from speakers at the hearings about the controversial expansion of Girls Prep Charter school:

"… I think, for my part, in a couple of hours of comments, I didn’t hear anything new from the public that wasn’t already known prior to the start of the hearing. I know it’s important that people have a chance to speak their mind, but I don’t think there’s anything that wasn’t known to the Department prior to the proposal for the expansion of Girls Prep."

Obviously he wasn't listening and doesn't care what parents or members of the community think. He is not alone.

Here is an excerpt from DOE's "amended" Educational Impact Statement for the proposed closing of Alfred E. Smith HS, summarizing the public comment so far:

Thirty-eight oral comments and 315 written comments regarding this proposal were received between December 3, 2009, and January 25, 2010. The comments came from current students at Alfred E. Smith, alumni from the school, teachers, community members, and companies that employ Alfred E. Smith alumni. All comments opposed the closure of Alfred E. Smith. At the January 11, 2010, joint public hearing on the original proposal, 100 members of the public noted their opposition.....One oral comment and sixty-one written comments were received between January 26 and February 23; all of these comments also opposed the DOE’s revised proposal.

More than four hundred people sent in comments opposed to the closing and not one in favor.

So did the DOE change its proposal in any way to close Alfred E. Smith?

No. So much for public process.

The Onion Just Flat-Out Nails It!

The latest print issue of The Onion, New York's (and America's) best print/online satire magazine, includes a "Sports Section" article that absolutely nails the state of NYC and NYS education as well as that of the entire U.S. under NCLB.

Titled "Pittsburgh School District Leads Nation in Ability to Spell 'Roethlisberger,'" the article is fall-on-the-floor, laugh-out-loud hilarious, at least until you realize just had sadly true is the underlying reality that it satirizes. Replace the word "Roethlisberger" with NYS Math and ELA exams, Grades 3-8, and you've got the exact voice of the Tweed/DOE P.R. machine. If I hadn't seen it in The Onion newspaper myself, I'd have thought it came from Gary Babad. Enjoy.

Tweed's favorite principal

In the last few weeks, the NY Post has become a total PR outlet for the Mayor, complete with several daily filings from former education reporter Carl Campanile that could have been dictated from Tweed.

Today’s Post features a story lauding the accomplishments of Queens Principal Anthony Lombardi under Mayoral control. Lombardi was earlier profiled lauding the DOE’s reforms back in 2003 in NY Magazine.

In 2006, Joe Williams (who is also coincidentally mentioned by Juan Gonzalez in his column today for providing the pass through for Sharpton’s big payoff) interviewed Lombardi for a favorable piece about the Klein agenda in Education Next. Lombard was also profiled in Slate magazine in 2008.

Even more recently in three separate articles in the NY Post, Lombardi offered up his support for DOE’s controversial proposal to test K-2 students with standardized exams, be stricter in granting tenure, and bar teachers from wearing political buttons.

With over 1400 NYC principals, you would think the DOE (and the NY Post) could find a fresher face to shill for their policies.

Paul Hovitz on the incompetence of Tweed

Part III of the downtown forum "Demystifying Mayoral control" featuring Paul Hovitz, member of Community Board 1 , former teacher and official in the Auditor's General. Paul describes the incompetence and mismanagement at Tweed, including the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars of Medicaid funds, because of DOE's failure to properly document the special services they said were being provided to special education students.

Diane Ravitch, Leonie Haimson, and Paul also answer questions from the audience, about who will make the final decision on Mayoral control, charter schools, and other issues.

Growing the bureaucracy: but guess which office at Tweed has actually shrunk?

The Daily News carried an article this morning, showing that despite the budget cuts, and the increasing class sizes in our schools, and the fact that there is supposed to be a “hiring freeze” at Central, Tweed continues to hire more educrats – with nearly a hundred new ones since last February: Bureaucrats and class sizes are up sharply

Here is where you can see the headcount as of November 2008 (the latest available data)-with Central at 2422 full time employees; as of February 2008, there were only 2342. In October 2004, the earliest data I could find, there were only 1984 – which means the bureaucracy has increased by 22% since then.

In October 2004, the Department of Assessment and Accountability had 19 employees. As of Nov. 2008, this number has grown to 89 – an increase of 421%. Enough to create more useless and misleading test score data.

The Chancellor’s office had seven positions, while now he has16 underlings, a growth of 129%. Enough to help him run around the country and brag about his non-achievements here in NYC.

Office of School Enrollment Planning and Operations (OSEPO) had 19 employees, and now has 35 – an increase of 84% --enough to screw up preK admissions royally!

The Office of Public Affairs had 13 employees as of 2004; now Communications, Communications, Media Relations & Community Affairs is up to 23 – an increase of 77% -- enough to spread disinformation far and wide.

But not all offices of Tweed have grown.

For example, the Office of the Deputy Chancellor for Teaching & Learning had 133 positions in October 2004. Now it is down pitifully to 23 – a reduction of 83%. This is symbolic of the actual interest in teaching and learning at DOE.

The teaching staff has also shrunk since last year. According to a DOE spokesperson, there are “440 fewer teachers working directly with students than … the year before.”

More cuts to the classroom , despite Tweed's claims

In today's Daily News, it is revealed that schools will be forced to pull teachers out of their classrooms for up to three days next month to score the state exams.

This will even affect students in grades, like Kindergarten, who do not have to take these tests. Why?

"[Some principals] said they were reluctant to pull teachers in older grades out of the classrooms so close to the state math exams, which are given in March."

In the past, DOE hired teachers to score these standardized tests during the February break. Now, schools will have to pay substitutes to take their place.

Yet in a budget presentation to the PEP, DOE officials falsely described the revision in the “scoring of state assessments in Math and ELA” as a major part of its “$40 million cut to Central and Field.”

In another budget document circulated by Tweed, this change was listed as having “No Impact to Schools.”

Instead, this represents yet another major budget cut to our schools. Not to mention its damaging effects on the classroom.

More testing, less learning. And more evidence of how the DOE’s claims to be making major cuts to administration cannot be trusted.

Another day, another reorganization; meanwhile more ARIS delays.

All the previous reorganizations (how many have their been? four? Five? Who can count them?) have caused nothing but chaos, confusion, and a massive waste of money. Each of them was supposed to cut the bureaucracy.

Yet somehow, the headcount (and salaries) at Tweed continue to grow, year after year.

Now, there’s yet another reorganization on the way .... but when Elizabeth Green reported this story about the latest reorganization (oh, I meant “reshuffling”) in the morning, she filed again in the afternoon, after Eric Nadelstern, the new "Chief School Officer" called back, to try to reorganize the spin on the reorganization.

If Nadelstern and all the other bumblers at Tweed really believe their own PR about giving principals the choice so they can be the CEO’s of their own buildings, they should privatize Tweed, set it up as a consulting company, and see if any of these CEOs would bother to hire them. I doubt they would – even those zombies trained at the Leadership Academy.

I was at a CPAC meeting this morning, and guess when Santi Taveras said that the vaunted $80 million supercomputer ARIS and its data would be accessible to parents? Not until May. How many months has this been delayed?

Here is an excerpt from the Oct. 24 NY Times:

James S. Liebman, the Education Department’s chief accountability officer, said on Thursday that the project was “proceeding in an appropriate manner” and “in the way we anticipated.” He said that parents would begin gaining access to the system in December, and noted that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in his State of the City speech in January, said that ARIS would be online by the fall, not September specifically.

Well, no way you can redefine May as in the fall. Except perhaps in Australia, which perhaps is the last place in the world that Joel Klein is still popular.

About the only reorganization led by Tweed that would really improve the situation is if they reorganized themselves out of existence.

DOE administrators: high salaries and how many there are!

Philissa at Gotham Schools, bless her heart, has posted an excel file with all the salaries of DOE administrators, derived from a searchable database of employees on SeeThroughNY.net,.

I counted 22 DOE administrators who earned at least $180,000 as of last June – most of whom I have never heard of; and 74 who made $150,000 or over.

What’s most interesting is how many administrators there are – including hourly workers: 11,796! More than 10,800 are listed with annual salaries.

Talk about a huge bureaucracy. This makes all the exposes of the growing head counts at Tweed (like this one at Eduwonkette from last May, or Juan Gonzalez more recent column here ) look like bupkis.

Update: readers have pointed out that not all these administrators are at Tweed; some may be necessary support staff in schools. But principals are not included here either, and there has been a big increase in the number of principals resulting from all the new small schools created by the Bloomberg/Klein regime.