School Budget Cuts Presented at Panel for Educational Policy

Monday's Panel for Educational Policy meeting included a briefing on the budget cuts. Click here for the full Powerpoint. At Mayor Mike Bloomberg's insistence, the cuts must total $180 million for this year and $385 million for next year. Most of the cuts will come directly out of school budgets.

After the presentation, I asked for cuts to be made in the new standardized testing program, specifically for teachers to do their own interim assessments instead of the $26 million scheduled to be spent and for elimination of the pilot program extending testing in the K-2 grades. I also asked for the Chancellor's large press office to be shuttered and instead have DOE senior leaders speak directly to the press without intermediaries. As you'd expect, Chancellor Klein dismissed these suggestions. It has become increasingly clear that no matter what cuts are required, the Bloomberg administration's massive ramp up in standardized testing will go largely untouched. For more ideas on better places to cut see our list compiled here.

Here is how the cuts were presented by DOE -- in five "buckets":

Bucket 1: $40 million* for a 6% cut to Central and Field

• Includes reduction of 338 positions for 8% of Central and Field positions through a further rationalization of these operations.*
• Revise scoring of state assessments in Math and ELA, grades 3-8
• Reduce and/or combine publications in OSEPO
• Reduce meeting/conference expenses
• Cancel mid-year teaching fellows program, reduce size of next cohort of teaching fellows
• Eliminate citywide science assessments
• Defer OTPS spending for the Office of School & Youth Development
• Hold ARIS training in DOE facilities only
• Reduce training in DIIT
• Reduce consulting expenses for ECLAS2 assessment program
• Reduce HS enrollment tool costs

Bucket 2: $27 million cuts with an indirect impact on schools

• Reduce facilities work – will monitor cleanliness and make necessary repairs
• Reduction in custodial services
• Reduction in maintenance and repair contracts and related materials
• Elimination of 137 positions in the trades workforce and management
• Delay initial trial of GPS implementation (transportation)
• Eliminate school bonuses for AS and WD on the progress reports
• Reduce family worker positions (not required) for Pre Kindergarten as revise support and technical assistance for PK in public schools
• Mandate that schools with ATRs use them as substitutes rather than hiring an external substitute teacher
• For FY10, estimating cutting less than half of a percentage point from the transportation budget

Bucket 3: Reduce school funds by $104 million for a 1.3% reduction in FY09

• Schools were notified of targets on November 10th
• Schools have through Nov 21st to work with ISC/CFN/SSO to identify specific targets
• Guidelines on reductions were provided to schools
• An estimated cut for FY10 was provided to help schools consider impact on and from FY10
• No school layoffs for FY09
  

Bucket 4: District 75 -- $2 million

• District 75 schools were exempt from the last 2 round of cuts but this year will take under a $2 million cut for 0.26% reduction to their tax levy funding in FY09.

Bucket 5: Other – Fringe

• FY 09 cut: $7.5 million
• FY 10 cut: $12.3 million

Klein Stiffs Parents of Children Receiving Special Ed Services to Defend Accountability

At Monday's Panel for Educational Policy meeting, Chancellor Joel Klein made a last minute agenda change to make room for Chief Accountability Officer Jim Liebman's rambling and defensive account of how much money his office spends. To make time for Liebman, Klein postponed an update on special education, drawing howls of protest from the many parents of children receiving special education services who had come specifically to hear the briefing. Citywide Council on Special Education member Patricia Connelly waited patiently for the public comment period, then gave an impassioned speech on how Klein's indifference was emblematic of his attitude toward the 180 thousand public school children with IEPs.

The impetus for the Accountability briefing was a report by the Independent Budget Office demonstrating how DOE will spend $129.6 million this year and $105 million next year on its Accountability initiative. The report, which drew wide press coverage, must have struck a nerve because Liebman came loaded for bear with a thirty-page Powerpoint, three live testimonials from DOE administrators and a live demonstration of the much-delayed ARIS system.

You can find the Powerpoint here. From start to finish it is a preposterous document. Some highlights:

• There are the usual statistics on DOE "success" which carefully omit any mention of Federal NAEP tests showing a lack of progress.
• An absurd statement from Columbia's Jonah Rockoff insisting school progress reports released only a couple of months before children sat for state tests were responsible for improving their scores.
• Not one but two pages of endorsements from those great sages of pedagogy, the editors of the Daily News.
• A blatantly false assertion that the $80 million spent on ARIS had to be spent on technology as part of the city's capital budget (actually, new schools, gyms or science labs would have been fine -- exactly the things Bloomberg tells us we can no longer afford)
  
• An extensive assault on the IBO analysis, the only point of which appears to be that, yes DOE is spending the hundreds of millions IBO said they are but technically speaking, it's not really on "accountability".

The reality is that Liebman is spending even more than even what IBO enumerated; they agreed to exclude the massive Interim Assessments expense which will be $26 million this year alone and another $8+ million in Senior Achievement Facilitators went uncounted.

At the end of his presentation, I asked Liebman how he could justify the six positions posted on the DOE web site with titles like "Knowledge Manager" and "Achievement Facilitator" when we are likely to see layoffs of art & music teachers and cuts in custodians. His reply that he was not necessarily really hiring people drew chuckles from the audience. The net of all this is that the Bloomberg administration is set on protecting this standardized testing juggernaut even if it means passing on the cuts on to our classrooms.

The PEP meeting ended with a long barrage of public comment. The parents who had come for the special education briefing were bitter, ATR and rubber room teachers were out in force and several parents spoke on the ever-present overcrowding crisis. See EdNotes for another account of meeting.

NYC standardized tests -- formative or not?

See Test Industry Split Over 'Formative' Assessment, in Education Week, about how standardized testing companies are selling their products as “formative” assessments, even though, according to most experts, formative assessments are diagnostic tools that are supposed to be classroom-based and designed by teachers themselves.

The Princeton Review described their much-derided NYC interim assessments as “formative” --the tests that DOE paid millions for and later rejected. See this Princeton Review presentation:

“Interim Assessment with Instructional Impact: How to use the formative, low-stakes testing system to support teaching and learning in New York City. …. We have a 20+ year history of using formative testing to support teaching and learning.

The subsequently renamed “periodic assessments” that the Accountability office under James Liebman contracted out to McGraw-Hill at $22 million annually, also known as “Acuity,” are commonly characterized as “formative” by Liebman et. al. See this recent pdf document from the DOE Accountability office:

Periodic Assessments support schools by providing …. formative, instructionally valuable feedback to support differentiation of instruction, determination of professional development needs, and selection of instructional resources.”

See the long list of periodic assessments now required in all NYC public schools in the chart above.

The EdWeek article quotes James Popham, professor emeritus at UCLA and former President of the American Educational Research Association: “When test companies sell things and call them formative...these vendors are being disingenuous—we used to call it lying.”

Unfortunately, they appear to be lying to a very eager clientele at the DOE.