Parent of autistic child on how bill requiring tracking on school buses could be improved

The below testimony on school busing was submitted to the City Council by an Inwood parent with an autistic daughter who prefers to remain anonymous for the purpose of preserving her child’s privacy.  she is commenting on Int 1099-2018, a bill to be discussed today at Council hearings requiring tracking devices on all NYC school buses.

Dear Members of the NYC Council,

I submit the following testimony to be included in the official record of the NYC City Council re Int 1099-2018:

Thank you for taking the time to read my testimony. My name is [removed].  I am a parent of a elementary school-aged child with an IEP in District 6 in the Inwood neighborhood of Upper Manhattan. I have intentionally left her name and diagnosis out of my testimony to protect her privacy. Please help guard her privacy by referring to me and my testimony by my middle name, Nicole.

Busing my child to school has been a challenge. Chancellor’s regulations allow one-way bus times of
90 minutes for in borough and 180 minutes for out-of-borough transportation. Given a 6 hour school day, this means that a child may spend 40% of his or her school day actually in transit on a bus. It is thus a vital part of a students learning experience.

The proposed ‘school bus tracking app’ could be very beneficial to many students and their parents if implemented conscientiously.

It is my personal experience that the $40 ($75) initial investment in Verizon’s LG Gizmo Pal 1 (now 2) plus $5 monthly charge have enabled my child to have the benefit of this proposed legislation. It uses both GPS and cell-phone tracking to allow me to check my child’s progress to and from school. This tool has kept my mind at ease those days when her in borough route has stretched into 100 minutes or longer — no crash, just late. It has flagged the days when the bus got her late to school, and she missed out on vital learning time. It has illustrated poorly planned, inefficient routes. It is a tool that should be available to all parents.

I hope this legislation will provide an opportunity to improve school transportation for all students.

I think that the current draft needs to improve in the following ways:

(1) GPS is too narrow of a definition for a bus tracking device. The technology for this type of tracking device can be challenging in a dense metropolitan area such as New York City. I suggest requiring the tracking device to have at least 2-fold technology: 1:GPS as well as 2:GSM/CDMA (cellular phone triangulation). Moreover, the legislation should be written in such a way as it ‘grows’ with the technological standards for tracking.

(2) It is not clear who the owner of the cellular phones referenced in Int1099-2018. The mandate should clarify that these are owned by NYC DoE, and the hardware used / software installed should be highly regulated.

(3) The protocol for use of cellular phones / radios by bus drivers should be clarified.  Is it permissible to use these while driving? Only while stopped? Are these intended for the bus matron instead?

(4) There is no explicit treatment for how the data gathered by these tracking devices will be protected from unintentional distribution (hacking) or regulated/prohibited for intentional distribution (3rd party data sharing by NYC DoE, OPT, busing companies). Will students’ privacy be protected?

(5) I suggest that the following be added to the top for context and to emphasize the importance of school busing to students getting a free and appropriate public education: “Transportation is a related service for special education students as defined by the Federal IDEA 2004 law — 34 CFR §300.34(c)(16)”

(6) There is no protocol for how the data will be used to improve student transportation: *Will too-long (out of IEP compliance) routes be flagged automatically?

*Will ‘lemon’ buses (those with chronic break-downs) be flagged automatically? 

*Will drivers be penalized for speeding?

*Will drivers be penalized for waiting an extra minute when a child has trouble transitioning onto the bus?

*Will the efficacy of the route be assessed and poorly designed routes flagged for improvement?

*Will adjustments be automated for predictable traffic conditions (i.e., garbage pickup times on narrow streets)?

*Will there be an automated process to give students ‘make up’ time when the bus is late getting the student to school?

*Will special education students continue to be segregated from non-special education students during transportation? (Will they be allowed to integrate with supports?) Or will there continue to be dual, segregated routes?

I do hope that you can incorporate some of these suggestions into the current draft. I also note that, if transportation is required to adhere to the IEP guidelines wrt limited time transportation that NYC DoE may be compelled to operate schools in more wide-spread locations. I think that this change would also benefit many students.

Thank you.

The five year capital plan: hi definition video but no seats for our kids

Nearly half a million children currently attend overcrowded schools, one quarter of all elementary schools have waiting lists for Kindergarten, and due to residential development, the DOE admits that they will need at least 58,000 more seats over the next five years.  

 

The state pays for half of all funds spent on new school construction.  And yet DOE intends to build only 28,000 new seats, and Deputy Chancellor Grimm announced that they NEVER intend to replace the trailers that are already years past their lifetime and are rotting away.  

 

But they do intend to spend a billion dollars on high speed internet and high definition video! 

 

For more on this, check out  these charts, and the NY1.

My statement to Cathie Black last night

See video below of last night at the Panel for Educational Policy, my statement to the new Chancellor Cathie Black.

To address the need to reduce overcrowding and class size, she should immediately call a halt to all co-locations and school closings, which only lead to conflict, bitterness and more overcrowding. Each new school sharing space with an existing school sacrifices about 10% of precious classroom space to create administrative and cluster rooms.

And she should immediately re-allocate the $1 billion to be spent on new technology next year in the capital plan to building and leasing more schools. These are not "Sophie's choices" -- these are choices that would benefit all our kids.



For more on the $1 billion extra the DOE wants to spend on new technology, see today's NY Post. Typically, the city wants to blame this on the state and the feds mandating online assessments. This doesn't fly; nowhere else in the country are they spending these kind of dollars for this purpose. Instead, the real reason is they want to expand online learning and further degrade the opportunity for our children to receive instruction from a real live teacher.

Another excuse by the DOE and another way in which they are evading their own accountability for the massive waste that will result.

Response to Mike Petrilli on technology and class size

Mike Petrilli, via Diane Ravitch, responded to my earlier comments on his post on moving beyond the debate on "teacher quality" this way:

I appreciate the feedback on my article, and am glad it resonates with many of you in NYC. As promised at the end of my piece, I'll flesh out my ideas for making average teachers into effective teachers in a future column. But yes, I think that technology-someday at least-will have the potential to help do exactly that. (Programs like K12.com- where I used to work- are already making average Moms and Dads into effective teachers.) So will a strong core curriculum. But I'm very skeptical about reducing class size as a viable solution. Of course it's popular with teachers (which is all the Public Agenda data can show), but the most rigorous studies demonstrate that class size has to be reduced dramatically in order to make a difference, and even then there's only strong evidence that it matters in the early elementary grades. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been reducing class size across the board for decades, which only makes the teacher quality challenge greater.

My boss, Checker Finn, once estimated that if the teacher ranks had grown proportionately with the student population since the 1950s, rather than at three times the rate, we could afford to pay the average teacher $100,000. Instead we've opted, as a country, to hire lots more teachers at lower salaries. Maybe that wasn't the best choice.

My response is as follows:

Michael: Urban high-needs school districts with large numbers of minority students still have far larger class sizes on average than the average middle-class or wealthy suburban school district, and of course any of the elite private schools. See the belwo chart from ETS, for example, in a report called "Parsing the Achievement Gap."

And while there has been a big change in the teacher/student ratio, much of that has gone to intervention specialists, pull out teachers, push-in teachers, etc. but not nearly enough to lower class size.

If we're serious about improving achievement and narrowing the achievement gap we need to prove it by creating the same opportunities that people with means demand for their own kids -- especially as the research shows that it is poor minority kids who benefit from smaller classes the most. Otherwise, there is a strong whiff of hypocrisy about the whole debate.

The Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the US Dept. of Education, concluded that class size reduction as one of only four, evidence-based educational reforms that have been proven to increase student achievement through rigorous, randomized experiments -- the "gold standard" of research. More technology is not included among them.

This combined with the fact that actual practitioners in the field, including teachers and principals, overwhelming respond that class size reduction would be the most effective way to improve the quality of teaching, makes it hard to understand why there continues to be so much intellectual effort expended in combating any attempts to achieve this.

I liked what you started to move towards in your comments on teacher quality -- and I loved your recent column on the importance of extra-curricular activities in educating students and expanding their leadership skills. (For more data to back up your argument there, see two Mathematica reports, "Expanding Beyond Academics: Who Benefits and How?" and "Valuing Student Competencies: Which Ones Predict Postsecondary Educational Attainment and Earnings, and for Whom?" both coincidentally co-authored by my brother.)

But if we really want to make teachers more effective, we should start listening to what they say will work best, rather than imagining that somehow we know better.

Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters