My comments at last night's PEP meeting in opposition to the co-location of a Success charter in a D22 high school building

Update 12.22.22:  At last night's Panel for Educational Policy meeting, Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg insisted that there will be enough space in the building for Origins HS to lower class size to mandated levels even after this co-location of a Success elementary charter school in the building; while providing no evidence to back up his claim. The proposal passed 10-5, with all the mayoral appointees voting to approve the co-location, joined by the Staten Island borough appointee.  I was the last to speak after countless others -- after the DOE had left me off the list.

My name is Leonie Haimson, the Executive Director of Class Size Matters, and I’m here to speak against the co-location of Success Academy in Building K495, and in fact all the co-locations of Success charters that have been proposed for Queens, Brooklyn and Bronx. 

As many parents and teachers have pointed out during the public hearings, there is no mention in either the Educational Impact Statement or the Building Utilization Plan for this co-location or indeed any of these co-locations of the need to lower class size, according to the bill signed into law by the Governor in September.  Meanwhile, somewhere between 56%-80% of the 69 classes at Origins High School do not comply with the class size caps in the new law.     

In addition, more than 80% of District 22 high school classes in D 22 did not make the class size cap of 25.  This means that many more classrooms will be needed at Origins HS and in the district as a whole to achieve the smaller classes mandated by the law.  Yet the Instructional Footprint on which the EIS and BUP bases their estimation of space explicitly assumes current class sizes will continue into the indefinite future.  

In addition, neither this EIS nor any of the others actually describe any of the Educational impacts that these co-locations  will cause; in some cases, the loss to students of a science lab, the loss of intervention and support spaces for students with disabilities, or the loss of access to the gym,  or the cafeteria at reasonable times. 

·       In fact, no educational impacts are described in any of these documents, only an abstract accounting of how many rooms each school should get, according to an arbitrary formula that doesn’t allow for either smaller classes or require any of the other elements of a quality education.

Chancellor Banks, I was encouraged by your interview with Marcia Kramer on Sunday, where you appeared to embrace the opportunity to lower class size, and said you want "to ensure that our kids have a great school experience," and you realized that this would require the building of “dozens of new schools.” 

Then why are you proposing these co-locations that will take away necessary space, and why has the DOE cut the capital plan for new capacity by over $1.6 billion dollars and over 11,000 seats since you took office?

Instead, we need a real plan to ensure that all schools and all students will have the benefit of smaller classes in the time frame specified in the law;  rather than any more co-locations that will deprive NYC public school students of their long -awaited opportunity to be provided with their right, according to the state’s highest court, to a sound basic education.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today.

The best and worst education events of 2014

It’s been a very eventful year for those of us who advocate for better schools – across the country, but especially here in New York.  Below I focus on some of the best and worst education developments from the perspective of someone who believes that the  corporate reform agenda of privatization, high-stakes testing, data collection and online learning ignores research, disrespects parents’ priorities about the kind of education they want for their kids, and treats children not as the complex, many faceted individuals they are, but as interchangeable widgets to be assessed, ranked and controlled.

Best of 2014

    1.  InBloom closed its doors.  

I     I started  blogging about this $100 million datapalooza project of the Gates Foundation in August 2011, when it was still called the Shared Learning Collaborative. Though neither the Gates Foundation nor NY state were willing to “share” much information about their plans with parents, the more I learned the more distressed I became at the huge risks to student privacy and   security this project represented.  With the help of Diane Ravitch’s blog, and Stephanie Simon, then a reporter at Reuters and now at Politico, parent activists throughout the nation whose children's most sensitive data was to be shared with inBloom and had been told nothing about this were alerted.  Their protests in turn persuaded every state participating to pull out, one by one. (Here’s a  timeline of events.) Here in New York, the battle was fiercest – and it took a law passed by the Legislature at the end of March to block Commissioner King from disclosing the highly sensitive information of the entire state’s public school population to inBloom, and via inBloom with three data dashboard companies. 

New York was the last of the corporation’s customers to pull out, and the company closed its doors in April.  Yet as a result of the inBloom controversy, parents were made aware of the way schools, districts and states were already sharing personal student data with a wide variety of contractors, vendors and other third parties, with little or no oversight.  In a way, the arrogance of the Gates Foundation and their refusal to listen to our concerns did us a favor by helping to kickstart  a national debate on student privacy that has not yet abated.  

credit: Politico

    After inBloom’s demise, we joined with many of the activists who had fought inBloom in their own states to form a new national organization called the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, to provide information to parents on the rights they still have to protect their children’s privacy– many of which are being ignored by schools and districts, as well as what questions they should be asking their schools and vendors.  We are also dedicated towards closing the loopholes in the federal law known as FERPA.  Our website is at www.studentprivacymatters.org, our FB page is here, our twitter handle is @parents4privacy, and we encourage you to take a look and join us.

3.    

  2. A national revolt against the defective Common Core standards and the expansion of high-stakes testing erupted, with 60,000 students opting out of state exams in NY last spring alone.  Because of fierce public pushback, many Governors have begun to question their support for the flawed standards and several have withdrawn from the multi-state testing consortia,  designed to collect and share personal data in much the same way that inBloom intended.  This grassroots rebellion has been led by advocates from the right and the left, but mostly by parents who have no particular political affiliation at all -- but are alarmed at how their children are being stressed and their education undermined by excessive test prep, deficient curricula and flawed exams.  National polls also show rapidly growing opposition to the Common Core and high stakes testing – which along with data collection and online learning are the centerpieces of the Gates-funded corporate-backed agenda.

3. NY Education Commissioner John King resigned.  

As I observed at the time, King is the most

unpopular commissioner in the history of NY State and showed little or no respect for parents, teachers or student privacy.  King’s departure capped a year in which many other controversial corporate reformers announced their departure, including NJ Commissioner Chris Cerf, Oklahoma’s education chief Janet Barresi (who lost re-election), Idaho’s Tom Luna,  Tennessee Commissioner Kevin Huffman and Los Angeles Superintendent John Deasy. Starting January 1, there will be more than twice as many “emeritus” former education state heads as members of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change (nine) than current office holders (four.) In addition, Michelle Rhee announced she was quitting as CEO of StudentsFirst, the organization she started in 2010; at the same time, her organization was forced to radically retrench and close chapters around the country.  Similarly, Teach for America eliminated its NY office and revealed it is finding it more difficult to recruit candidates, because of the controversies around its role in school reform.

credit: Rob Tornoe

4. Even corporate reformers admitted that the growing charter sector is a vampire with little accountability, draining resources and the higher-achieving students from our public schools.  One  report after another was released, showing massive charter corruption and mismanagement.   Macke Raymond, the head of the pro-privatization research group CREDO that is funded by the Walton Family Foundation, admitted that market-based competition in the form of charters does not lead to improvements in the public schools: “I’ve studied competitive markets for much of my career. That’s my academic focus for my work. And (education) is the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work.” 

Kaya Henderson, Michelle Rhee’s chosen successor as DC Chancellor, said about charter schools, “Either we want neighborhood schools or we want cannibalism, but you can’t have both.”  Cami Anderson,  the Superintendent who designed the disastrous “One Newark” plan to close neighborhood public schools and open charters in their stead, explained why  test scores have dropped during her administration: “We’re losing the higher-performing students to charters, and the needs [in district schools] have gotten larger….[there are public schools] where there are 35 percent of students with special needs…I’m not saying they are out there intentionally skimming, but all of these things are leading to a higher concentration of the neediest kids in fewer [public] schools.”

5. New organizations have sprung up and others have grown stronger in opposition to the corporate reform

status quo agenda – including Network for Public Education (founded by Diane Ravitch and on whose board I sit) which had our first national conference last spring and will have our next one in Chicago April 25 – 26  (proposals for workshops accepted now.)  Other groups advocating for progressive and evidence-based school reforms include the fearless Badass Teachers Association, Save our Schools, United Opt out, Parents Across America , and our state coalition, NY State Allies for Public Education.   All these groups are working together – with authentic grassroots support as opposed to the astroturf organizations bankrolled by billionaires -- to counter the corporate attempt to dismantle public education and instead to strengthen our public schools, by means of evidence-based reforms.

Worst of 2014

1.   

   1. In NY, the hegemony of the hedge funders continues unabated.  They provided millions in donations to Governor Cuomo, who won re-election, though the election was closer than had been anticipated and his vote total was the lowest for Governor in at least forty years.   The hedge-fund pro-charter lobby was also the biggest contributors to the State Senate elections, and their money helped  elect a majority of GOP members.  Though these billionaires’ main issue is pushing for the further expansion of charter schools and the hostile takeover of public education, the words “charter schools” were never mentioned in the ads they ran, as their candidates campaigned in swing districts where charters are a vehemently opposed.  These privateers also persuaded our Governor to push through a new law as part of the state budget that undermines mayoral control – which they supported when Bloomberg was in office but not when NYC voters elected a mayor who did not support the push towards privatization and favoring charters over public schools.  The new law requires the city to provide free space to any new or expanded charter school going forward – which will further overcrowd our exceedingly overcrowded schools or force city taxpayers to spend millions leasing them private space.   

2.   2. The new administration of Bill de Blasio did little to oppose this new law, and

his appointed Chancellor just approved the co-location of 12 new charter schools in existing school buildings, which will further deprive NYC students of their right to be provided with a well-rounded education with reasonable class sizes.  Despite numerous promises when he ran for Mayor, neither de Blasio nor Chancellor Farina have shown any interest in reducing class size, the number one priority of NYC parents.  The union contract they negotiated eliminated the only chance for struggling students to be taught in small groups, and did not address class size – despite the fact that union contractual limits in NYC schools have not been lowered in forty years. The administration also ignored a letter signed by 73 professors of education and psychology, urging the reduction in class sizes lest the benefits of their initiatives for expanded preK, community schools and special education inclusion be undermined.   Every time the need to reduce class size was brought up in town hall meetings – as it was by parents at least six times – the Chancellor dismissed their concerns.

      3. The de Blasio administration and Chancellor Farina also showed little interest in tackling the worsening crisis of school overcrowding -- made worse by the new charter law.  There are many communities in NYC that have waited for a decade for a new public school in their neighborhood, and thousands of city students continue to sit in trailers, on waiting lists for Kindergarten, and in overcrowded public schools with huge class sizes. Yet the  capital plan for school construction the city introduced in February and re-submitted last month with only minor changes would build less than one third of the additional seats needed to alleviate existing overcrowding and address future enrollment growth.  This is yet another area in which the administration has made no improvement from the last one – despite our report, Space Crunch, and another from the NYC Comptroller showing a crisis in school overcrowding that is steadily getting worse.   And the DOE officials continue to put out fake data, under counting the number of high school students sitting in trailers by many thousands.

4.    4. The Vergara decision in California and a copycat lawsuit in New York grabbed the media’s attention and sucked up all the oxygen in the room, focusing on the red herring of eliminating teacher tenure as the solution to struggling schools, rather than proven reforms like class size reduction, which could help lower the high levels of teacher attrition in these schools.  Campbell Brown stepped into the spotlight, replacing Michelle Rhee as the media spokesperson for the “blame teachers first” crowd.  Time magazine with an incendiary cover jumped on the bandwagon – though the story inside was not nearly as bad – and together, these high-profile cases managed to divert attention from the issues that really matter.

credit: Data Quality Campaign

5.    The barrage of technobabble and digital learning bilge continued unabated – despite ANY evidence that it works to help kids learn.  Even the US Department of Education – which despite being a huge booster of technology, asking superintendents to sign a “future ready” pledge that they will devote funds to online learning,  found in its meta-analysis that for grades K-12 , policymakers “lack scientific evidence of [its] effectiveness.” 

Credit: Lindamarie @Linda1746

Each online program or gizmo is hyped as magically effective by the ed tech scam artists-- until research unmasks it as fatally flawed.  First DreamBox and Rocketship charters' version of blended learning were praised to the skies, until both were shown   to be mirages. The Year of the MOOC is followed by the reality of huge MOOC drop-out rates.  Despite the Amplify fiasco in North Carolina and the continuing Ipad scandal in LA (which contributed to John Deasy's departure, see above), kids continue to be hooked up to devices with data-mining software of doubtful value - with no attention paid to the fact that this is entirely antithetical to the critical thinking and creativity that corp reformers are supposed to support.  The trend towards massive amounts of personal data collection, data tracking and data sharing continues –- as encouraged by the US Department of Education and the Gates Foundation  -- with no proven benefits, but huge risks to privacy (check out the long string of hacking disasters this year  too numerous to recount).  Though amassing all this data is repeatedly plugged as "empowering teachers"  by the likes of Joel Klein of Amplify and Gates-funded organizations such as the Data Quality Campaign, teachers themselves say they are overwhelmed by all useless data, as in this eloquent post by teacher Susan DuFresne:

 

The corporate reformers have sucked the life out of teaching and learning. The real purpose of education is lost in a blizzard of data – numbers entered onto a rubric to become bits of data – trillions of 0’s and 1’s about each child are flying at high speed, tracked and collecting in data banks like so many feet of snow to be mined for corporate profits – icy cold they create systems of punishment as dangerous crevices – an abyss of corporate created failure – a place devoid of all humanity for children and teachers to try to traverse.

Of course, the real motivation  of these edupreneurs is to further inflate the  eight billion dollar ed tech market -  which continues to expand every year, taking resources away from schools and the kids who need authentic learning the most in the form of human feedback from their teachers in small classes, but are denied their right so that companies can make profits off imposing an inhumane system of mechanized depersonalized learning instead.

Our Co-Location Moratorium Letter to the Chancellor

On Nov. 18, along with many parent leaders and other advocates, we sent the letter below to the Chancellor, urging a moratorium on any more co-locations until all NYC children could be ensured of their constitutional right to a sound basic education, including smaller classes.  WNYC reported on our letter here.

It was reported yesterday that the DOE has turned down three new charters asking for co-located space, one in District 6 in Upper Manhattan, correctly stating there is no room in their schools, and the other two in Brooklyn, and is negotiating with them on leasing private space. 

Under the new state law, NYC has to provide free space for all new and expanding charters going forward, or pay them up to $2600 per student for leased space. After NYC reaches $40M in total rental costs, state will pick up 60%.

Under the existing charter cap, NYC already has 197 charters, 31 more have been approved to open over the next two years,  and 28 remain under the cap.

Governor Cuomo & Regents Chancellor Tisch favor expanding cap & will likely push for this in Legislature this year. We will be drafting a resolution, urging the Legislature to oppose any lifting of the charter cap, and asking the state to cover entire cost of charter rent in NYC.  Email us at info@classsizematters.org if you’d like a copy.

Co-Location Moratorium Letter_FINAL 11 14 14

The Mayor's speech at Riverside Church today; "we will not accept the neighborhood school that fails them"

Mayor de Blasio spoke today at Riverside Church about the need for systemic education reform, including expanding preK, afterschool programs, retaining teachers, and involving parents; and his refusal to pit children against each other as currently happens with charter co-locations.

It was a very good speech -- despite the fact that it did not mention the critical need for smaller classes.  Below the video is an excerpt, in which he addresses the bitter fight over charter school co-locations.  Meanwhile, the charter lobby has funded non-stop ads, paid for with $3.6 million, attacking him for his decision not to allow Eva Moskowitz's Success Academy to push PS 194 to 134% capacity and displace special needs kids from P 811 in Harlem.

“The answer is not to save a few of our children only.  The answer is not to find an escape route that some can follow and others can’t. The answer is to fix the entire system.  (sustained applause)… so we have to approach systemic change. …Poverty, hunger, the lack of affordable housing…  But even within the education system itself we aren’t approaching root causes and the systemic changes we need to.  We have to work from the assumption that we will save every child, that we will reach every child, that no system is working unless every child has opportunity. And we need to be able to say that despite the good efforts of many the school system is still broken in many ways…We need to work on solutions for the whole and the original notion of the charter movement was to innovate, to create laboratories …to bring to the entire school system. …The idea is not to create separation, the kind of competition that works for some and leaves some out…For 6% of our children in the charters, they are our children; we need them to succeed.  For 94% of the children in the traditional public schools they are our children, we need them to succeed.

The notion that some children may be “lucky” enough to escape from the traditional public schools in their neighborhood speaks volumes, because so many parents feel that right now…I want that parent to know that we will not accept the neighborhood  school that fails them …Our mission is to create a city in which regardless of zip code, your neighborhood public school is a great option for your child.  (sustained applause.)

There has been failure, we should not sweep it under the rug….It’s all of us in public life that haven’t measured up… well I say to you today that in my mayoralty… It is my responsible to fix the problem, and I won’t choose between the children of this city any more that any parent would choose between the children in their family.  I will reach out to all the children in the city, in traditional public schools, in charters schools, in religious schools… they all deserve a solution.  

We made some decisions in the last weeks striving for fairness, but …I didn’t measure up in explaining this to the people of this city.  We want want children to have good options, but not displacing or harming other children in the schools to which they may go.  We will make sure that 194 children [in Success Academy] have a good home this year, but we will not do this at the expense of our special education children.  That is a false choice has been set up as part of a broken system and a broken dialogue; and it's time to ending that kind of dysfunction … So we’ll protect the children who need our help while not pitting one against another."

My appearance on co-locations and Brian Jones on charters on MSNBC last night.

My appearance on The Ed Show last night, with Michael Eric Dyson, talking about how all the 36 co-locations will hurt NYC public school children.  Below that is Brian Jones' appearance on Chris Hayes show later that evening.

Letitia James: a new national star in educational justice takes the stage

There were many great speeches last night at the Panel for Education Policy, protesting the awful
long list of co-locations that will damage our schools and hurt NYC children, pushed through by a lame duck administration to give away maximum space to   their cronies among the charter school operators. Council Members Chin, Fidler, Recchia and Greenfield were all eloquent, incisive and compelling, as were the parents, teachers and students of Murry Bergtraum HS, Seth Low, and Roy Mann, and so many others. 

There was one electrifying moment in which CM Letitia James, our future Public Advocate, spoke against charter co-locations, showing how these proposals would create "separate and unequal" conditions that were ruled unconstitutional in Brown Vs. Board of Education.  In case you are wondering about her comments that they shouldn't dare delete their emails, see this DNA info article about how the DOE is considering erasing all its communications before Bloomberg leaves office; James has tried to forestall this by FOILing them.

But watch this awe-inspiring speech below in which Leticia James, in which I predict a new national star for educational justice is born.

The MOST nonsensical co-locations of all

Joel Klein and others at DOE repeatedly accused parents of only protesting  charter co-locations, and not the numerous others that DOE has pushed forward in recent years, that involve new public schools inserted into the buildings of existing public schools. 

Certainly among the 40 or so co-locations that the DOE is planning  that will only take place after Bloomberg leaves office, the most controversial are the numerous charter schools that take more space each year from public schools   -- including many with deplorable records in serving our most at-risk kids.  (See, for example Success Academy charter – which DOE is giving more space so it can extend its tentacles in every borough of the city , despite numerous examples of  illegal disciplinary and suspension practices).    

The Panel for Education Policy has already rubber-stamped 25 school siting proposals and there are another 29   proposals  that will be voted on next month.   And while charter schools co-locations are contested, they are not the only co-locations that parents and community members bitterly oppose.  Perhaps the most absurd and nonsensical of all the proposals put forward by DOE are their plans to put new zoned public schools inside the buildings of existing public schools – composed of the same grade levels – for no apparent reason except to deprive the existing school of students and resources.  These proposals also represent an incredible waste of money and space in a system starved for both.

See the comments of Laura Timoney, parent activist and CEC member in Staten Island, who deplores the plan to site another zoned middle school inside of IS 2 – a struggling middle school, which according to DOE statistics has class sizes of 30 and above, and that was severely damaged in Hurricane Sandy.  But instead of using existing space to lower class size to help the school improve, the DOE is intent on taking away classroom space to insert another school.  Here are Laura’s comments:

We are circulating a petition at Change.org on behalf of the parents at IS 2.  The NYC DoE proposed a co-location of another middle school inside an existing middle school.  Parents are opposed to this idea and want smaller classes at the school.  

The DoE says it is doing this to improve performance and give parent's choice.  Smaller class size is what we want.  Listen to the parents and do that.  We know that smaller class size improves academic outcomes. There is reliable data that proves this effective.  Co-location - there is no data that is does anything positive.  Please stand with the parents, the community and the students and sign, comment and share the petition with your network.

Hearings will be held Oct. 2 at the school, with a vote of the PEP on October 15.

Another instance of a community fighting back is in Queens in District 28, in which DOE is proposing to put a new elementary school inside PS 40; with a vote of the PEP on October 30. PS 40 is a school with 90% children on free or reduced price lunch, according to the EIS, which also indicates that the co-location will push the school to 102% utilization,.  According to the DOE’s class size reports, there were Kindergarten classes at PS 40as large as 28 last year; 2^nd and 3^rd grade classes of 30 and 31, and a 5^th grade class of 35, the last which violates the union contract. This is unconscionable. 

Yet rather than support the school by providing the resources it needs to reduce class size, DOE plans to take away 15 full-size classrooms to give them to the new school. There is also yet another proposal to co-locate a new middle school in an existing middle school, Count Basie JHS 72, also in District 28, which already shares its building with a District 75 program.  Vera Daniels, CEC 28 member writes:

There will be a CEC meeting on Thursday, September 19, 2013 @ 6pm to discuss these proposals, at District 28 offices, located at 90-27 Sutphin Blvd, Jamaica NY 11435 (Room 241).

There are major concerns that these co-location/utilization proposals are rushed and aggressive with limited public and community awareness. Changes such as these demand adequate, purposeful, and meaningful planning in order to maximize their potential benefit to its stakeholders and the community. 

It is no secret how devastated these districts have become, particularly within the Southern Queens communities.  It stands to reason that DOE should focus on seeking and sustaining appropriate and transformative strategies that will address the current crisis (i.e., undeserved, overpopulated, and under-educated) that exist within these district schools.     

How do these changes help further the education of students, enrich the districts, and empower a community?  These co-locations will compound current challenges and introduce even newer ones…The community must be aware of the implementation of these rushed changes to co-locate New Schools within already “devastated” School Districts, and contribute their opinion – because it matters.

Truly it does. Let’s hope that even if the PEP rubberstamps these absurd and damaging proposals, our next mayor has the good sense and courage to undo them.