More blatant charter school propaganda

The hype around the charter school, Harlem Village Academies, has been extraordinary.

The school has been featured on NBC Nightly News and many other media venues. The CEO, Deborah Kenny, spouts all the usual cliches: the school's success is based on running it “like a business”, the school supports “great teaching” and has a “culture of accountability.” She also calls Bloomberg a “godsend” for education. One thing is for sure, Kenny is paid like a corporate executive, according to the the blog Schools Matters.

Be sure to check out the hugely deceptive video below from an Oct. 15 segment of the MSNBC show, Morning Joe. Joe Scarborough begins by showing headlines from that morning's NY Times about NY State's lack of progress on the math NAEP exams, also called the Nation's report card, which called into question the validity of the sharp increases of NY students on the state math exams.

But then Joe goes on to say “However, but its not all bad news: for example 100% of the eighth graders at NYC’s Harlem Village Academies are proficient in their math skills."

At the same time, a graphic is displayed with the name of the charter school, stating that 100% of its students scored proficient in math, compared to 34% in the nation. At the top of the blackboard the words “the Nation’s Report Card” are featured, implying that both sets of results are from NAEP.

Yet the 100% figure for this charter school were from the NY state exams – which the NAEP results had just revealed to be hugely inflated! And the 34% is the national average for proficiency on the NAEPs – whose results are far more reliable and whose standards are much higher.

Whether this deception was promulgated by Kenny or was just sloppy reporting on the part of MSNBC, who knows. But at no time did Deborah Kenny try to correct the misimpression created by Joe Scarborough’s remarks or the visual displayed on the screen. I guess she earned her 420K salary that day.

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.