Our battle is not over! Sign our new petition to Steiner

Send a new message to Commissioner Steiner to reject Cathie Black's nomination --even if there's an educator as number two.

In what has been called a stinging rebuke to the mayor, the members of an advisory panel appointed by Commissioner Steiner voted today against granting a waiver to magazine executive Cathie Black to become NYC Schools Chancellor. They listened to the voices of parents, educators, and the majority of New Yorkers, who believe that she has none of the qualifications needed to lead the nation's largest school system. Yet our battle is not over.

Yet Commissioner Steiner has suggested that he may still grant a waiver for Ms. Black if the Mayor agrees to appoint an educator in the number two position. This is simply unacceptable. We need a seasoned educator at the helm, with a record of achievement in running and improving public schools.

That's why we're asking you to sign our new petition, which automatically sends a message to Commissioner Steiner, urging him to reject Cathie Black as Chancellor, and asking him to tell the Mayor to appoint a seasoned educator instead.

Please forward this link to all your friends and colleagues, post it on your Facebook page, and keep fighting for our kids! And then have a great Thanksgiving.

Shutting out parents, and how it must stop!

Education Week just published an article I co-authored with Julie Woestehoff of Chicago’s PURE called Shutting Out Parents: Obama's Disappointing Blueprint for Reform, about how the US Department of Education has completely excluded parents and our ideas from their education agenda, including the need for smaller classes and more parental involvement.

The only instance in which parent involvement in decisionmaking is mentioned in Duncan’s entire blueprint for ESEA is to require that the parents of Native American children be included in the design of programs at the school level. (!!)

Though the U.S. Department of Education calls many of their proposals “innovation,” we see them as representing large-scale experiments on our children—experiments lacking a foundation in research and implemented without informed parental consent—something that would never be allowed in fields such as medicine.

It is a shortened version of a letter we sent last month to the President and Congress, signed by parent leaders across America.

Please send your own message to DC policymakers, by signing our NEW petition to Obama and Congress, Put the Parent Voice Back in Public Education, if you agree.

Vote No! to raising the cap on charter schools

A new bill was introduced in the State Senate on Friday, April 30, which would more than double the number of charter schools, without allowing audits by the State Comptroller, without giving any voice to parents on controversial co-locations, and without barring profit-making enterprises from making money off our kids. This is an open invitation to abuse and fraud and to the further overcrowding of our public school system.

Without more rigorous protections of the rights of all parents, students, and taxpayers, financial corruption and abuse of power will continue to flourish, and the education of our NYC children will suffer grievously as a result.

Please sign our petition now, urging the state legislature to Vote No on bill number S7678. The website will automatically send a message to your legislators, and allows you to make any additional points about the numerous inadequacies of this bill, the full text of which is posted here.

Many parents have reported getting calls over the weekend from representatives of the charter school industry, asking to connect you to legislators so you can express your support for the bill, and saying that if it passed, this would allow NY State to get $700 million in extra federal education funds.

Please be aware that if NY State did get this federal funding, which is not guaranteed, the state would have to use it for specific purposes outlined in the grant, many of them quite questionable, and that it could not be used to plug holes in the education budget, either to prevent increases in class size or the loss of valuable programs.

Please sign our petition now! And if you have a moment, also call your legislators today or tomorrow to doubly make your voices heard. Their contact info is available when you plug in your address here.

Put the Public Back in Public Education: sign our petition now!

Mayoral control (or what some would call mayoral dictatorship) will either sunset, be renewed or amended in June.

If you believe in accountability and checks and balances...

If you believe in democracy....

If you believe that parents should have a real voice in how our children are educated....

If you believe in billionaire bullies not having autocratic power over our schools....

If you believe that the key to improving the quality of education lies in improving classroom conditions and reducing class size rather than spending more time on testing and test prep....

Then please sign our petition, Put the Public Back in Public Education Now!

sign our new petition! and hearings on the capital plan

We have a new petition online that asks the Mayor to come up with a better capital plan – urging him to build enough schools so that overcrowding can be eliminated and class sizes can be reduced, to plan for growth, and to provide incentives to developers to build schools along with residential and office space.

The petition grows out of the recent reports from the Manhattan borough president and City Comptroller, the work we’ve done on the Manhattan task force on school overcrowding, as well as the impending crisis caused by development that is facing so many neighborhoods throughout the city.

Please sign the petition and be sure to include your address and phone no. Be assured that this info won’t show up for anyone online to see, but it’s important information that elected officials like to have when we send them copies of the petition.

There will be City Council hearings at City Hall on the capital plan next week, Wed. May 21 – with testimony from the DOE starting at 10:30 AM, and from the public beginning at 3:30 PM. Please come if you can and share the story of your school and neighborhood. Just write a few paragraphs about whether you think the richest city in the world is treating its public schoolchildren right by jamming them like so many sardines .

If you can’t make it, leave comments on the petition, and we'll try to include as many of them as possible in our testimony.

Sign our petition against the new school grades and for smaller classes today!

Class Size Matters has a new online petition, asking that the school grading system be terminated, and all the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on the DOE’s ill-conceived overemphasis on standardized testing and test scores be redirected towards reducing class size and expanding the capital plan.

Our online petition is posted here. Please go sign it now! We’d like as many signatures as possible by the City Council hearings on the new school grades, scheduled for Dec. 10.

(If you’d like more info on why the grading system is unfair, arbitrary and will hurt rather than help our schools, check out my Daily news oped, Why Parents and teachers should reject the new school grading system, posted here (as a word doc) or on the News website here. Also: Ten reasons to distrust the new accountability system and "Negative learning" and statistical malpractice at the Panel on Educational Policy for more.)

North Carolina, a state that over ten years ago pioneered the move towards more testing, is about to reverse course. See N. Carolina begins to turn away from testing.

“We're testing more but we're not seeing the results," said Sam Houston, the commission's chairman. "We're not seeing graduation rates increasing. We're not seeing remediation rates decreasing. Somewhere along the way testing isn't aligning with excellence."

Here in NYC, rather than be satisfied with all the existing state tests, and the new interim assessments now being given five to six times each year, the administration want to start adding new standardized tests in science and perhaps other subjects next year, as well as yet additional tests for grades K-2.

Rather than go down that same road that North Carolina is now rejecting, Tweed needs to be woken up from its delusion that more testing means more learning, as quickly as possible, before things get even worse.

Please sign our petition today! The full text is below.

We are vehemently opposed to the new DOE school grading system. These grades are unfair, simplistic and arbitrary, are based on statistically unreliable measures, and will hurt rather than help our schools.

By awarding each school a grade from A to F, the progress report trivializes the complexity of teaching, and will drive schools towards even more test prep and less learning, as well as further deprive our children of art, music, and physical education.

We demand that the energy, focus, personnel and millions of dollars that have been spent on devising this system, as well as the entire data collection system known as ARIS, interim assessments, financial incentives for high test scores, and “data inquiry teams” in the name of “differentiated instruction” be instead invested in reducing class size and expanding the capital plan, so that all NYC children can be provided with smaller classes and an equitable and adequate chance to learn.

Send a Message to The Mayor and Chancellor!

Let the Mayor and Chancellor know how you feel. Tell them to stop the constant restructuring. Add your signature and comments to the Class Size Matters / Put the Public Back in Public Education Coalition petition. Here are the key points:

Enough is enough! Listen to parents. These are our demands:

• Provide smaller classes and a better capital plan to eliminate overcrowding.

• Restore arts funding and reduce testing.

• Include real input from parents and other stakeholders at the school level and system-wide before important decisions are made.

• Invest more resources in our children and the classroom, and waste less on expensive bureaucrats, consultants and no-bid contracts at Tweed.

• Stop the privatization and outsourcing of critical education services.

• Finally, no budget cuts to any school. Every one of our public schools is under-funded. With more than $1 billion in additional education spending and record city surpluses, there is no reason for any school to have its funding cut next year.

Click here to read the full text and sign the petition. It only takes a few seconds. And don't forget to forward to a friend.