Special Education Update at Panel for Educational Policy

On Monday we finally had the session on Special Education canceled last month in favor of Jim Liebman’s tedious defense of the ARIS database system.

Several members of the Citywide Council on Special Education (CCSE) were present – John Englert, Patricia Connelly, Ellen McHugh. Apologies to anyone I missed. Linda Wernikoff oversees special education initiatives at DOE. Click here for the Powerpoint she delivered (pdf format).

She also provided copies of a new manual of special education standard operating procedures. I noted that the opening pages explain how more than 18 different entities are involved in special education and parents often are frustrated in their attempts to get the services required by their child’s IEP. I asked Ms. Wernikoff who exactly was accountable when services were not provided. She pointed to the principals and explained the DOE’s effort to devolve authority to them. I explained the difficulty in holding principals accountable when the District superintendents have been turned into Senior Achievement Facilitators and sent all over the city to show principals how to look at reports. The Citywide Council on Special Educaiton has proposed creating a senior-level executive to oversee special education reporting directly to the Chancellor. When I raised this proposal with Chancellor Klein, he replied that he didn’t see it as necessary.

My colleague from Queens, Dmytro Fedkowskyj, asked an important question on special education placements. He had heard that parents were being told they had to accept the first placement option offered by DOE. Linda Wernikoff assured Dmytro that there had been no change in policy and that DOE would still work with parents to find an appropriate placement.

Many people offered highly critical testimony during the public comment section of the agenda. John Englert, president of CCSE, explained how the rosy view offered by DOE contrasted sharply with State Comptroller DiNapoli's audit findings showing thousands of children do not receive the services they require. Jesse Mojica of the Bronx Borough President's office cited results of his survey indicating only 6% of calls placed to DOE requesting assisstance with special education issues were resolved.

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.

Gifted and Talented Policy at October Panel for Educational Policy Meeting

This month's PEP meeting was held on Staten Island. A special thanks to the D31 CEC who provided a warm welcome. Here are the highlights from my perspective as the Manhattan representative on the Panel:

Proposed Gifted and Talented Policy

The new G&T admissions policy was presented but not discussed. Highlights:

• Request for testing forms available starting December 3rd
• There will be two tests used to determine each child's score: the Bracken School Readiness Assessment (BSRA) and the Otis Lennon School Abilities Test (OLSAT). The OLSAT will count for 75% of the score and the BSRA for 25%.
• There will be strict cutoff for the combined score. A child must fall in the 95% percentile nationally to be considered gifted.
• All children at or above the cutoff score will be guaranteed a seat in a G&T program. Children not passing the cutoff will not be eligible for G&T programs.
• The three citywide programs (NEST, TAG and Anderson) will have an additional onsite assessment.

Beyond these changes scheduled to take effect starting in December, the DOE is proposing for next year to test all Kindergarten students with the Bracken School Readiness Assessment (BSRA).

See the G&T proposal document (pdf) for more information including the proposed timeline.

Already I have heard many complaints from parents about the proposal, especially the following:

• The standardized tests being used are correlated with socioeconomic status and may be heavily influenced by child's preparation in the home. It's not clear that the proposal brings us any closer the the stated goal of a more equitable system. See more on this viewpoint here.
• Notifications of acceptance are given too late for parents who are also considering private or parochial school options. This late notification retards parental choice, supposedly one of the key elements of the Chancellor's reform program.
• The implication of the plan is that some districts have too many G&T seats and these may need to be curtailed. While it is important to add capacity where it is needed, there is no good argument to close programs that are working. Based on last year's OLSAT results, DOE should have a sense of impact on each program but don't seem to be discussing it with principals.
  

DOE will take comments for a month, take them into consideration and release the final plan. Members of the public can submit comments through November 25 via e-mail (to giftedandtalented@schools.nyc.gov), phone (call (212) 374-5219) or at a public hearing:

Manhattan: Monday, November 5, Fashion Industries HS (225 W 24th St.)
Staten Island: Tuesday, November 6, PS 58 (77 Marsh Ave.)
Queens: Thursday, November 8, John Adams HS (101-01 Rockaway Blvd.)
Bronx: Thursday, November 15, Evander Childs HS (800 E. Gun Hill Rd.)
Brooklyn: Monday, November 19, Brooklyn Technical HS (29 Fort Greene Pl.)

Speaker sign up is at 6:00 and hearings start at 6:30

School New York City Educational Construction Fund (ECF)

The ECF provides long term leases on city land to developers who then build both a commercial project and a school. It's a way for the city to get school capacity without capital funds.

Jamie Smarr presented the two current projects of the ECF, 1765 First Avenue (future site of East Side Middle School) and 250 East 57th Street (PS 59 and High School for Art & Design).

While the idea behind the ECF is fine, there just have not been enough projects to make a dent in the capacity needs of school system. The ECF has been in existence since 1967 and has built 18,000 seats, or roughly 450 a year. Against 1.1 million kids, that's not much. But even these seats are not necessarily incremental. For example, the 1765 First Avenue project is replacing a school that was closed earlier. I asked Jamie what was stopping us from doing more projects and he pointed to the need for developers to cooperate. I asked if he got support from the Mayor and Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff in reaching out to developers. He said he had the cooperation of the Chancellor.

Chancellor's Regulation A-655 (School Leadership Teams)

Martine Guerrier presented the proposed changes to the SLT regulations. Many parent leaders have expressed the concern that the changes to the regulations would weaken SLTs by giving the principal more influence than the current regulations allow, especially by placing the SLT task of creating the schools Comprehensive Educational Plan (CEP) behind the principal's responsibility to define the budget. For more information on this point, see testimony at the City Council hearings from myself, Jim Devor and Joan McKeever Thomas (here).

Martine and I had some back and forth on these issues. She said the final A-655 regulations are not yet ready.

Public Comment

There were many speakers at the Staten Island session who complained about poor treatment of special ed students - lost IEPs, poorly trained teachers, lack of programs and a tendency on the part of school staff to criminalize the behavior of special ed kids. There were several speakers who had accounts of police being called to deal with misbehaving students including one disturbing story of a very young girl who was threatened with arrest and handcuffing.

Peter Calendrella, 1st VP of the District 31 CEC made an impassioned plea for DOE to find ways to allow students to carry phones to and from school. Mr. Calendrella, who was formerly an Assistant District Attorney working with the Special Victims Unit, pointed to two recent cases where Staten Island students could not call police when they witnessed a crime in the immediate vicinity of their school.

Controversy Over Bloomberg Survey For Public School Parents Continues

Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum has sent a letter to Chancellor Joel Klein, asking him to reverse the decision to exclude special education parents from the parent survey. The widely-publicized survey was sent to all parents except those with children in District 75, the city-wide district comprised of schools dedicated to children with special needs. Here is an excerpt from Gotbaum's letter:

I urge you to rethink the decision to exclude parents of students with disabilities from the parent survey.

Furthermore, the justification for this exclusion, that District 75 students are "too unusual," attributed to school officials in recent published reports, is invalid and offensive. Parents of students in District 75 would be more than happy to participate in this survey and again in a survey specific to them next year.

Not only is the DOE excluding the parents of District 75 students from the survey, the DOE is also muffling the voices of all students with disabilities and their families.

The letter also points out the many other problems with special education under this administration: lengthy delays in referrals and providing necessary services resulting from the elimination of relevant staff in the district offices, hiring attorneys to contest parents in expensive and lengthy hearings , overstuffing classes so they exceed the size mandated by state law, and excluding special needs students from the new small schools for the first two years of their existence.

Click here to see the full text of the letter and here for our earlier post about the controversy over the parent survey.

DoE: No Surveys For District 75 Parents

District 75 is a city-wide district comprised of schools serving children with moderate to severe challenges. Despite spending millions of dollars to survey parents, teachers and students, the DoE has made a shameful decision to exclude parents in D75 from the parent survey. The Daily News covers the story here.

In their defense, senior DoE officials claimed parents were unhappy with the absence of questions addressing special education on the survey. But that was the common complaint of parents who participated in the survey design process; questions on the issues most important to parents were either stripped from the survey or jumbled together in a single question, a methodologically unsound research approach.

The survey eventually sent out was so bland and general, it's hard to understand why the DoE couldn't make the minimal effort to be inclusive.

The News quotes John Englert, President of the Citywide Council on Special Education: "We're part of the New York City public school system, and I would think that if you're going to survey the parents, you'd want to include parents of children with disabilities."

This link provides more information on District 75. Click here for an earlier post on the parent survey including news of Mayor Bloomberg's attack on parents critical of the survey.

Chancellor Flees Staten Island Parent Meeting

According to press and eyewitness accounts, Chancellor Klein apparently "bolted" from a meeting with angry Staten Island parents. Here's the story in the Staten Island Advance.

A parent on the scene sent this report:

The Advance got the tone right but I want to add that parents (and teachers) at the forum were great—respectful and thoughtful but very angry.

Among the most salient points addressed were: 1) Class size, especially in Middle Schools continues to be insanely high; 2) Special Ed problems abound, including students who are getting exams not appropriate to their IEPs; 3) There are significant concerns about the implications of the new funding proposal both with respect to schools with senior teachers being penalized and funding being tied directly to students; 4) There are too many assessments, tests, and exams. Both teachers and students told Klein that needs to focus more on teaching and learning and less on constantly gathering data and information.

In an update to an earlier story, NYC Comptroller Bill Thompson added his voice to chorus of those criticizing the Mayor's record on education. Quoted in this NY Post article, Thompson suggests the State's graduation is the accurate one. See our post on this issue from earlier this week.

Update: Borough President Molinaro sent a letter to the SI Advance criticizing the conduct of those at the meeting. Parents responded with a slew of letters. Here's an excerpt from one:

Mr. Molinaro says he is ashamed by what took place. I am ashamed that I did not see Mr. Molinaro present at such an important forum. I am ashamed that Chancellor Joel Klein dodged, evaded, and dismissed the pressing questions and concerns of teachers and parents. …What occurred at this forum was an outcry from the people who are not being heard or served by these politicians.

If anyone has a link to BP Molinaro's letter, please send it in.