What teacher surveys say about merit pay vs. class size

An editorial in Saturday's NY Times argues, as others have, that the new merit pay proposal to be implemented in 200 low-performing schools “represents a good first step toward the goal of attracting teachers to the most challenging schools — and keeping them there.”

The argument that the chance of a $3,000 bonus will draw teachers to low-performing schools is dubious. There is at least an equal chance that through no fault of their own, such a school will get a failing grade on the new progress report, be further stigmatized – and eventually closed. Why wouldn’t teachers be responsible for a school’s low grade?

First of all, the new reward system as well as each school's grade will be based largely on one year's test scores alone -- highly unreliable, statistically speaking. Moreover, many factors out of any individual teacher's control, such as class size and overcrowding, will not be considered in the assessment of his or her performance -- or a school's grade, for that matter.

In North Carolina, educators were polled from throughout the state to find out what would be the most effective measure to attract teachers to work in low-performing schools. The number one response was lowering class size, with 83.7% of teachers and 83.1% of administrators replying that this way, far outstripping any other proposal, including providing salary enhancements --which came out at number five.

A just-released Public Agenda survey found that 76% of teachers say that reducing class size would be a "very effective" method to improve teacher quality, compared to fewer than one in six who believed that tying salary increases to their students' performance would be. (You can click on the chart to enlarge it.)

If the administration were really serious about enticing teachers to work in our most challenging schools, and keeping them there longer, it would immediately cap class sizes at reasonable levels. As the Times editorial points out, this would be a better way to improve student achievement in these schools as well:

"At the same time, school officials would need to make bigger changes — like cutting class sizes and improving support services — if they want to make real headway in improving student performance."

DOE Answers Critics, Details New Merit Pay Plan

October 18, 2007 (GBN News): Yesterday’s announcement by the NY City Department of Education of a new merit pay plan for teachers has raised a number of questions. For one, critics have asserted that basing bonuses almost entirely on test scores is not an appropriate way of compensating teachers. However, a source at the DOE has given GBN News more details of the new plan, which are said to address such concerns.

According to the source, schools participating in the merit pay plan will receive bonuses based largely on the school’s test scores, but each school will have a choice of one of the following three options to divide up the money:

• Bonus money would be paid to individual teachers based on the time their classes spend on test prep rather than on the actual scores. Under this system, teachers who spend all day on test prep, for example, will receive more money than those who waste their students’ time with unrelated activities such as art, music, and social studies.

• Bonuses would be spread among all the school’s teachers. If a school chooses this option, the school’s bonus money will come in a large piñata. The piñata will be placed in the center of the gym (for schools that have no gym, a large closet may be used). During assembly period, teachers will break open the piñata and each will keep all he or she can scoop up.

• Bonus money would be used for the school as a whole. A committee consisting of the Principal, a designee appointed by the Principal, and two UFT members will travel to Atlantic City and try to double the award. Of course, they could lose the money entirely, but this option is consistent with the way the Mayor and Chancellor have gambled with the city children’s education for the past six years.

R.I.P., NYC Public School System, 10/17/07

Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have announced two new arrangements with the teachers’ union (UFT) that, combined with their policy initiatives in recent years, will be recalled in future years as the last nail in the coffin of the NYC public school system. In the end, it appears that Randi Weingarten, President of the UFT, has finally succumbed to the Dark Side rather than preserve any sense of the City schools as a truly educational enterprise.

The first of these new programs is the City’s agreement with the UFT to pay merit bonuses to teachers in low-performing schools that make the greatest gains in student test scores. Now not only can principals and students receive cash rewards for high scores, but teachers will share the wealth as well, beginning next year at the $20 million mark.

Anyone who is able to recall the criminal consequences of Sears Auto Shops paying their mechanics incentive bonuses in the early 1990s based on the charges they generated from customers can foresee what’s coming. Those Sears mechanics did only what was natural – they “discovered” thousands of unneeded repairs and generated tens of millions of dollars in fraudulent repairs. Incentives drive behavior, and badly designed incentives often drive single-minded bad behavior that creates unintended consequences.

In this instance with the DOE and the UFT, only the naïve can fail to see the consequences – more test prep, more test prep, and more test prep – and an institutionalized encouragement to cheat. Not to mention that this system of rewards will be unfair to those teachers who are left working in overcrowded schools with class sizes of thirty or more compared to their colleagues lucky enough to teach in smaller classes. Nor that one year’s test scores are statistically unreliable indicators of student learning.

Within a decade, our public school teachers will be mostly test prep functionaries, our schools subsidiaries of Kaplan or Princeton Review, and the kids won’t be any better off. Our school system is looking more and more like that of mainland China every day, where success in standardized testing determines a school’s reputation and ranking, a principal’s standing, a teacher’s rating, and a student’s future at every stage of education. Of course, as anyone who has taught in China or worked with Chinese college graduates knows, these students are robbed early in life of their creativity, insight, inquisitiveness, or interest in learning. And no wonder: their entire knowledge base has been developed for one purpose and one purpose only – success on standardized tests.

The second announcement, another handout from the Mayor to the UFT, will allow teachers to retire five years earlier with full pension benefits. Combined with the increased emphasis on standardized testing and a new budgetary system (ironically called “fair student funding”) that dissuades principals from retaining higher-paid, more experienced teachers, the handwriting on the wall is clear. Ten years from now, the NYC public school teaching population will consist even more of young and inexperienced teachers.

Even more important, as a former teacher, I recognize the implications for the classroom. Anyone who sees teaching as fun, challenging, and an opportunity to motivate and experiment, anyone who teaches as a vocation to inspire students with understanding and enthusiasm, anyone who teaches to see kids’ eyes light up with new knowledge and appreciation for the world around them – what would you do except give up and look elsewhere for the kind of teaching you want to do? Our schools’ best teachers will leave the profession or migrate elsewhere, to private schools or the suburbs, where originality and joy in their professional calling will still have a chance to thrive.

Any notion that NYC public schools can be a haven for creative learning experiences has been shattered by these announcements. Sadly, the only parents who will keep their children in this system are likely to be those who lack the financial means to escape. Randi Weingarten’s agreement to these initiatives is a stunning betrayal of public school children and their parents for the sake of more money in her members’ pockets. Future generations will survey NYC’s gutted public school system and recall October 17, 2007 as a day of infamy in the history of the UFT – and this city.


UPDATE: Check out this excellent September 2005 Boston Globe article on merit pay for teachers uncovered by Leonie Haimson. Curious how the Boston Globe can understand the problem while the Daily News and the New York Post are busy fawning over the Emperor's new clothes and the NY Times considers it beneath themselves to comment.

The Tyranny of Numbers – The DOE in the Mayor’s Management Report

The recently released Mayor’s Management Report (MMR) demonstrates once again Chancellor Klein's belief that only what can be measured matters. The DOE merited five of the MMR’s mind-numbing 216 pages, filling them with multiple tables of presumably revealing information that are in fact utterly devoid of content or explanation. Apparently, charts of numbers are believed to speak for themselves, but the real effect is to preempt thoughtful analysis of whatever resides behind those reams of statistics.

As an example, consider the sole chart on the first page of the DOE section, a bar chart showing Special Education and Total Enrollment in NYC public schools from FY2003 through FY2007 as summarized in the table below.

Fiscal Special Total
Year Education Enrollment
2003 169,700 1,091,700
2004 171,800 1,086,900
2005 177,100 1,075,300
2006 180,900 1,055,900
2007 182,700 1,042,100

Here are a few of the head-spinning array of questions raised (and left unaddressed) by the MMR, drawn from just this one chart.

-- According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, New York City’s population increased by 2.45% from July 1, 2000 to July 1, 2006, yet the MMR’s reported school enrollment shows a five-year loss of nearly 50,000 students, a decline of 4.5%. Furthermore, the New York Times reported in a story on March 23, 2007 that the number of children under five years old in Manhattan alone had increased 32% since 2000. How to explain this inconsistency? Are more and more parents abandoning the City’s public school system, as these numbers might well suggest?

-- The DOE’s own Statistical Summaries of enrollment show steady but even worse declines in every longitudinal cohort from 2002/2003 through 2006/2007 at every grade level 1-8 and 9-12. General education enrollment in Grade 1 alone has declined 13.1% from 80,278 in 2001/2002 to 69,763 in 2006/2007, while the 100,947 enrolled freshmen in 2003/2004 became 47,559 enrolled seniors in 2006/2007, a drop of 52.9%. How does the MMR help citizens understand these contradictory indicators to the City’s growing population (not to mention a retention rate into Grade 12 of 47% that makes a mockery of the MMR’s claim of a 59.7% four-year high school graduation rate)?

-- Information elsewhere in the MMR suggests that 66.9% of the City’s high school students attend schools whose enrollments are already over capacity. Given that the City Planning Department conducts its own futures planning around an estimated population increase of 500,000 by 2020 and almost 1,000,000 by 2030, can the DOE expect really expect enrollment not to increase (they actually expect it drop by 0.2% from 2000 to 203o!)?

-- At the same time total enrollment has dropped by 4.5%, the MMR shows special education enrollment increasing by 7.7%. What’s behind this counterintuitive surge in the special education numbers?

-- Similarly, and contradictory to the DOE’s online Statistical Summaries, the MMR shows an astonishing 17.5% of total student enrollment receiving special education services. Why is this percentage so alarmingly high, and growing to boot?

The rest of the MMR consists of meaningless numbers (640,000 lunches served, 1,353,000 phone calls taken by parent coordinators) interspersed with startling but unexplained figures, such as a drop of 10.6% last year in parents attending parent/teacher conferences, an extraordinary one-year increase of eight percentage points in Grade 3 to 8 pass rates on standardized math tests in 2006/2007, and a decline of 12.3 percentage points in Regents science exam pass rates in 2005/2006 (the last reported year on the MMR).

When the negatives are ignored and the positives are reported without explanation or supporting analysis, it is difficult to take the DOE section of the MMR as anything other than more public relations puffery disguised by the deceptive tyranny of numbers.

Smaller classes lead to big savings in health care -- and almost two more years of life

This month's American Journal of Public Health contains an article showing that smaller classes could be the best investment society can make -- not just in terms of improving education, but also in terms of health.

Project Star, the premier experimental study in the history of educational research, revealed that students who spent several years in smaller classes in the early grades had higher test scores, better grades, were less likely to be held back and graduated from high school at a much higher rates. Now, Peter Muennig of the Columbia University School of Public Health and Stephen Woolf of Virginia Commonwealth University use this data to estimate the gain in earnings, lower welfare payments, and reduced rates of crime and mortality for these students when they reach adulthood. They project that each low-income child who attended smaller classes is likely to benefit from almost two more years of life; and society would gain almost $200,000 in reduced medical costs and additional tax revenue.

According to Dr. Sydney Spiesel writing in Slate magazine, the findings of these researchers

"suggest that investment in reducing elementary school classes is better, in cost-benefit terms, than money spent on antibiotics, or hospital buildings, or even vaccines (long thought to be one of the most cost-effective interventions for health care). Perhaps I would do better for my patients if I gave up pediatrics and became a member of my local school board."

Does DOE have plans to cut services for visually and hearing impaired children?

This entry was written by a parent familiar with the concerns of visually impaired students and their families:

NYC Public School Parents has learned that the Department of Education has floated a plan to eliminate the Educational Vision Services (EVS) and Hearing Education Services (HES) offices in District 75, which oversees special education programs in our schools. Currently, 1,000 children with visual impairments and 3,000 children with hearing impairments are being served by the these offices. Last week, the head of Educational Vision Services was informed by District 75 and the Chancellor's Office that EVS would be closing and that the principals of schools would take over the supervision of the special instructors for these children. When parents started protesting, the reorganization was temporarily put on hold, but not cancelled.

Such a dismantling would likely have a devastating impact on the students in the system with visual and hearing impairments. Children who are blind or visually impaired need all kinds of special services that others don’t —for example, to learn braille, to be provided with books in braille or large print, and to learn travel skills, like walking with a cane. Many of these children are fully functioning intellectually, but need these services to be able to learn. They need special equipment as well. Regular special ed teachers don't teach these skills, teachers who specialize in working with visually impaired students do. Similarly, hearing impaired students need teachers who can teach sign language, as well as interpreters and other special services. This latest "reorganization" has the potential to completely disrupt those services.

Principals of individual schools are not equipped to supervise or support these specialized staff. In fact, these teachers usually work with students at several schools. The offices threatened with closure have the expertise to ensure that students with these disabilities get the help they need and that their teachers (and schools) receive the support and oversight necessary to make sure they do. If the responsibility to provide these very specialized services are dumped on the principals' shoulders, along with all their other new duties, how can they possibly be expected to manage?

Since the DOE's plans for special education have not been fully disclosed, it's difficult to guess what kind of structure they might have in mind once EVS and HES were closed, and what other current supports might also be slated for elimination. Only one thing is for sure: As usual, no one actually working with these students was consulted about these changes, least of all their parents.

Parents of visually and hearing impaired students are up in arms and plan to attend the meeting of the Citywide Council on Special Education tomorrow night, Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 6:30pm at Tweed to demand some answers. Stay tuned.

New York City DOE -- 2017

Chancellor Joel Klein, now in his 15th year at the helm of New York City’s public schools, announced today that secondary school rolls had reached their tenth consecutive all-time high while graduation rates slipped yet again for the tenth year in a row. He also noted that the average age of the City’s high school students had increased to 18.6 years.

“It’s definitely a paradox,” Mr. Klein remarked in describing these unusual trends. “We’ve never seen more students taking Regents and Advanced Placement exams, yet our student population seems to be getting older and older.”

A student interviewed outside A.P. Randolph High School offered an explanation. “Heck, everybody I know wants to stay in school as long as possible now. Me? I cleared $14 grand last year doin’ nothin’ but sittin’ in a classroom. They paid me for showin’ up, for bringin my pencils and notebooks, for bringin’ a calculator, for takin’ some stupid tests, for draggin’ my mom in to see my teachers, for not gettin’ suspended, for only usin’ the bathroom once a day, for eatin’ a salad and drinkin’ milk once a week, and I don’t even remember what else.”

A female student at Evander Childs concurred. “Why should I graduate when I can make good money here in high school? I can sit here in a classroom, or I can flip burgers at MickeyD’s. That’s a no-brainer! And if I went to college? Forget it! You actually have to pay them! Can you believe that ****?” That student reported she was 19 and was planning to attend at least one more year of high school so she could save enough money for a Microsoft Virtual Reality Xbox 3000 and an Apple iImplant(G12 Powerbook version).

In answer to a question posed during his press conference today, Chancellor Klein conceded that annual spending by the City’s privately-funded Scholars for Dollars program had topped the one billion dollar mark. He also admitted that in order to raise more money to pay students for attending school, the DOE is exploring the possibility of selling the naming rights to each City school building. “Monster.com Middle School. Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?” commented the Chancellor. “Maybe once Mayor Trump completes her tenure, we’ll have to add an Ivanka High School of Fashion Design as well.”

High School Class Sizes – One School’s Story

As a consequence of a mistaken UFT press release and local newspaper reports back in mid-September claiming that my son’s school, Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics (MCSM), had 101 class size contract violations (35 or more students assigned to a class), I had reason as President of the PTA to inquire as to the facts. I was invited to review the school’s class master in detail and did so. While there were indeed very few classes of 35, all of which have since been remedied, I was deeply disturbed by what I saw two weeks into the school year, through no fault of the school administration or its teachers.

The daily reality at MCSM is one of crushing class sizes and teacher workloads. Consider a profile of just the core general education academic classes for Regents Math, English, Science, and Social Studies.

Number of Regents subject classes – 145
Number of classes with 35 students – 3
Number of classes with 34 students – 69
Number of classes with 33 students – 38
Percent of classes with 33 or more students – 75.9%
Average class size, Regents subjects – 32. 75

Add in the rest of the non-AP academic classes, such as Pre-Calculus, Multimedia I, computer programming, Introduction to Psychology, Environmental Studies, foreign languages, and so on, and the picture is no better.

Number of non-AP academic classes – 205
Number of classes with 35 students – 5
Number of classes with 34 students – 93
Number of classes with 33 students – 51
Percent of classes with 33 or more students – 72.2%
Average class size, non-AP academics – 32.38

This situation exists in a school that, according to the DOE’s Fair Student Funding formula, stands to lose $426,000 from its budget in 2009!

While the Mayor and Chancellor fumble every day over multiple jargon-laden programs styled as school reforms – increased standardized testing, elimination of social promotion, dissolution of community school boards, regionalization and deregionalization of the organizational structure, creation of empowerment zones, quality reviews, accountability, school report cards, new school funding schemes, computerized student progress tracking via ARIS, paying students to attend school and pass tests – 1,540 high performing students (over 97% children of color) are shoehorned into classrooms while their teachers are burdened with intolerable workloads from as many as five classes with 33 or 34 each, up to 165 – 170 students.

It is a credit to the collective abilities and efforts of students, faculty, and Administration at MCSM that the school manages to succeed in daily attendance (93 – 95%), Regents pass rates (70 – 95% over 65), and graduation rates (85+%) despite these adverse conditions. Nevertheless, I am certain from my own experience as a former NYC high school teacher that these 1,540 students are being deprived of the rich educational experience they deserve because of overwhelming class sizes and teacher workloads.

This situation is intolerable and only getting worse. How can the Mayor and Chancellor repeatedly strike out in so many different and sometimes radical directions without aggressively exploring this single most obvious and effective approach to improving student performance and learning? Is it not about time they gave class size reduction the same degree of attention and priority they have given to standardized testing, bureaucratic reorganizing, quality reviews, and school report cards? What is the value of Mayoral control if the Mayor makes no effort to address one of the public school system’s most pressing issues?

CPAC’s Influence On The Rise?

October 14, 2007 (GBN News): In an astonishing turnabout, the NY City Department of Education has finally begun utilizing suggestions from the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Committee (CPAC). By law, CPAC is supposed to advise the Chancellor on educational issues, but the committee’s input has long been ignored by Chancellor Joel Klein. As recently as last April, a turf conflict had even resulted in a number of CPAC members being held hostage by the DOE. But at last Thursday’s meeting, it became clear that things had changed dramatically.

At that meeting, during a discussion on the cell phone ban, a CPAC member asked Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott when the Administration was going to ban paper and pens, given that today’s disruptive text messaging is only a higher tech version of yesterday’s note passing. The Deputy Mayor, who has traditionally been dismissive of parent concerns and ideas, immediately embraced this suggestion. “I see you parents have finally come around to our way of thinking”, Mr. Walcott said. “You’re absolutely right. Children can use pens and paper to cheat, disrupt class, and even arrange gang fights. I’ll speak to the Chancellor about this tonight and I’m sure we can have a ban in place ASAP.”

It is unclear just how this ban will be enforced, since metal scanners are unable to detect paper and pens. How children will manage to take the many standardized tests and assessments that they are subjected to also remains to be seen. Still, this could prove to be one of the more radical changes of Joel Klein’s tenure as Chancellor, and will have a profound impact on the school environment.

In a related story, the DOE is expected to announce as soon as this week a long-awaited, exclusive no-bid $18,000,000 contract with GBN News to take over the Department’s Public Relations. It is unclear what will become of the 29 PR consultants already working for the DOE.

The truth behind the new small schools

Andrew Wolf has a good column in the Sun about the deceptive ads from the Fund for Public Schools, called "Evander Childs Turnaround". The statistics clearly show that the students who were recruited for the new Gates-funded small schools now housed in the Evander building were much higher achieving before they ever enrolled in these new schools than those who had previously attended the school, undermining the administration's claim that it was its reforms that improved graduation rates.

The NY Times last spring ran both a credulous article and an editorial that read like press releases about the rise in graduation rates in these schools, without mentioning this salient fact. An excerpt from Wolf’s column:

The Fund for New York City Public Schools, a charitable group run by the Chancellor that once raised money to buy things to enhance the education of our public school children, is now spending millions on television commercials to convince the public that the programs are working. One of these commercials, highlighting "progress" at Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, has drawn particular attention on the growing network of blogs that critique the conditions in city schools.

Wolf credits the statistical findings that the students enrolled in these new schools started out way aheadto a recent Eduwonkette column and one posted last spring on the UFT blog by Leo Casey . Both were terrific pieces of work, and it’s great that this issue is finally receiving the attention it deserves, but it is long overdue.

Almost two years earlier, I pointed out some of these same facts to the Panel on Educational Policy and the United Parents Associations, in a summary posted here. Much of it was based on a report by Policy Studies Associates completed in March 2005, but suppressed for many months by New Visions before it was finally leaked to the NY Times eight months later. The authors of the PSA report based their analysis on background student data received directly from DOE. Too bad the reporters – and editors – of the Times seem to have conveniently forgotten its findings.

The PSA report examined not just those new schools placed in Evander but throughout the Bronx, those Gates-funded New Visions schools grandly called the New Century High Schools. It described how the creation of these schools had led to worse conditions and more overcrowding for those students left behind in the large schools who shared their facilities, and/or those who had been diverted to other already overcrowded schools nearby. And it pointed out how these excluded students were far needier academically than those who had been recruited for the new small schools:

Here is an excerpt from my summary:

“By gaining access to student records, the [PSA] analysis substantiates what DOE officials have long denied – that these schools recruit students with better scores, attendance, and overall records than the population from which they are drawn. See for example the recent [Sept. 2005] NYC Partnership report -- which misleadingly compares NCHS students to the average student citywide.

As the Policy Studies report points out, "These citywide comparisons are of only limited usefulness, since [this] initiative is intended to improve education opportunities and outcomes for students who might otherwise attend some of the city's most troubled high schools." Thus their evaluation properly compares the earlier records of students at the new small schools to those attending neighboring or host comprehensive high schools.

The students at the small schools had eighth grade math and reading scores significantly higher than their peers in the comparison schools; and 97% of them had been promoted in the prior year, compared with only 59% of the students at the comparison schools. They had better attendance records (91% compared to 81%), and were less likely to have been suspended. They were much less likely to need special education services. Only six percent of Bronx NCHS students had IEPs, compared with 25% at the comparison schools; and none of the NCHS special education students had the most serious disabilities. Indeed, teachers at the new small schools praised their principals for "recruiting more high-performing students".

I also pointed out that these schools did appear to be doing a better job keeping their students engaged – something ignored by the recent exposes – but not because of the size of the schools, as New Visions and the Gates foundation claim, but primarily because of their smaller classes:

While the students attending small schools maintained their previously good attendance, even the subset of students who previously had good attendance who enrolled at the larger high schools experienced a 10% drop in attendance in 9th grade. And while 6% of NCHS students transferred schools, and 10% were discharged from the system entirely, the transfer rate among incoming students at the larger schools was 14% and the discharge rate was 20% -- showing that more than a third of these students departed from the larger schools each year. …

Why were the new small schools more successful at keeping their students engaged? Students reported that their teachers were able to know them well, give them individualized instruction and help, and provide lots of attention in and out of class. As one pointed out, "the teachers I have had at other schools never knew me."

While class sizes at the larger high schools average 30 students or more, class sizes at most of the new small schools were between 13 and 20 students, as pointed out by the first year evaluation. The fact that these schools provided much smaller classes was noted by students themselves in surveys as their most valuable quality. As a result, “Teachers listen to you and get your opinion.” “In a normal high school, they don’t talk to you when you have a problem. They don’t care.” Another student said, “Slipping through the cracks? Not at this school!” Indeed, without smaller classes it's hard to see how these schools could succeed in their mission at all. …

If you take higher achieving students, and give them smaller classes, it should be no surprise to anyone that they will do far better and graduate in larger numbers than the lower-achieving students left behind in classes of 30 or more, attending overcrowded schools on double and triple shifts.

In the New Visions interim report there is a timeline in which by 2010, "innovative educational methods from NYC's small high schools" are supposed to "improve teaching and learning at the city's traditional high schools." This is critical, since even if its ambitious goal is achieved of 200 new smaller schools, fully two thirds of NYC students will continue to attend larger high schools.

As the smaller classes in the small schools appear to be their most successful elements, without a plan to eventually reduce class size and provide more individualized help to all high school students, it is difficult to see how this will ever occur.

As one parent recently asked, where did all those students who once attended Evander go? I wish I knew. Probably into the great ranks of the desaparecidos -- those thousands of poor souls who each year, magically disappear from the system, without being counted as dropouts.

My more recent City Council testimony from last November is here, with more about how the new small schools not only excluded our neediest students, but also provided them with much smaller classes -- and how the administration has no plan to deal with the increasing inequities of the system it has created.

See also our earlier post about the Fund for Public School's deceptive ads that claim class sizes have been reduced in our schools -- and how this organization, which was founded to provide more resources and programs for students in our turned into a PR arm for the Mayor's political image.

Bloomberg Announces City Beef Ban

October 13, 2007 (GBN News): Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that effective November 1, all sales of beef will be banned in New York City. In a statement to reporters at City Hall, the Mayor said that the beef ban will be put in place so that, as he put it, “Those pesky parents won’t be needing to call their kids all day on cell phones to ask if they want beef or fish for dinner.”

Despite recent incidents in Cleveland and at St. John’s, where cell phones proved to be a major boon to students’ safety, the Mayor has insisted that parents only need them to contact their children about the dinner menu. With beef banned from supermarket shelves, Mr. Bloomberg said, parents would have no choice but to serve fish every night, and “they can once and for all stop sending their kids to school with cell phones.”

The question was raised as to whether the Mayor has the authority to unilaterally ban beef sales, or whether this would require a City Council vote. But Mr. Bloomberg countered that since this is an education related issue, the state Legislature has given him full control to make the decision on his own.

The Mayor also said that the ban on beef will have the additional benefit of improving the health of New Yorkers. He pointed out that under his administration the city has already banned trans fats, and said that the beef ban is a logical next step to promote healthier eating.

A reporter pointed out that parents say they want their children to have cell phones for their own safety, especially given the recently reported incidents of gun violence. The Mayor responded, “More people die each year from high cholesterol than from school shootings. Let them eat fish!”

Analysts said that the beef ban may put the Mayor at odds with President Bush, normally an ally with respect to education policy. The President is from Texas, a major cattle producing state, and he is likely to oppose the ban on the grounds that it will hurt his state’s economy. The Mayor said that he will not yield to political pressure, however. “I will do what it takes to uphold the ban,” he declared, “if I have to stand there and block the supermarket doors myself.”

The Mayor’s announcement came hours after he was released from Bellevue Hospital, where he had been admitted for psychiatric evaluation. GBN News has learned exclusively that Mr. Bloomberg was seen roaming the streets late last night, accosting passersby and demanding to confiscate their cell phones. The results of the evaluation have not been released.

Should cell phones be allowed in schools?

On WCBS news yesterday, Maria Dapontes-Daughterty, the President of the Presidents Council in D30 Queens and I were interviewed by Marcia Kramer about how recent shooting incidents at the Success Tech HS in Cleveland and St. John’s University in Queens underlined the need for our children to be able to carry their cell phones in school.

WCBS ran the anguished recording of a Cleveland mom, calling the police after her son had contacted her by cell phone, while hiding from the gunman in a closet at school. This was juxtaposed with a clip of Bloomberg, scoffing that parents only want to contact their kids " to find out whether they want beef or fish for dinner."

The story also makes the point that the lockers outside would not help if there was an attack within a NYC public school. It's a powerful bit of news -- check out the full transcript and the video here: Should cell phones be allowed in NYC schools?

Randi comes out

In what was an open secret but never publicly disclosed before, Randi Weingarten, the President of the United Federation of Teachers, talks about being gay in this week’s issue of Gay City News. Congrats to Randi for doing this.

She also mentions the UFT's support for the City Council's passage of anti-bullying legislation that Mayor Bloomberg has refused to implement.

See: “Randi Weingarten Discusses Her Life as a Lesbian Labor Leader”.

Update: more on this disclosure, from the Daily News and NY Post.

Rikers to House New DOE “Prison Academy”

October 12, 2007 (GBN News): Spurred by the increasing number of arrests of students and school personnel, the NY City Department of Education will be partnering with the Corrections Department to create a new, small high school within the Rikers Island prison facility. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein told GBN News that school security officers have lately been arresting much “higher achieving” student offenders – a result, he said, of new “performance incentives” which reward officers for arresting students with higher test scores. This, he said, coupled with the recent arrests of well-respected school administrators, will make for a “quality school environment” within Rikers.

The Chancellor went on to say that he expected the new school to have a high graduation rate due to its small size and the quality of its leadership. Its success, he said, “will prove once and for all that our small school policy works.” Mr. Klein also mentioned that students will have an added incentive. “They won’t be released from Rikers until they graduate”, said the Chancellor. And as for incentives for the teachers and administrators, Mr. Klein warned, “It’s either Rikers or the rubber room. They can take their pick.”

Critics said that if the graduation rate is high, it will only be due to the highly selective admissions process. Still, some feel that at least the environment will be less “prison-like” than many of the current city high schools.

Is there adequate public review for charter schools? Letter from Marge Kolb

Here is a letter to the New York State Board of Regents from Marge Kolb, a parent leader in Queens. It points out that while state law requires a public review process by members of the community before the applications of charter schools are approved, in NYC this occurring without sufficient notice and information being disclosed to parents.

At the September Community Education Council meeting in D24 (Queens) the prospective Principal and AP for La Cima, a proposed charter school, made a public presentation. I am a former member of that CEC and the current D24 designee to CPAC. I was at the La Cima presentation and I have the following comments:

• I believe there is a requirement under state law that prospective charter schools seek public opinion. If that was what was trying to be accomplished at the September CEC meeting, I must point out that there was not adequate notice given to the "public." The CEC agenda only listed an item under the District Superintendent's monthly report which said "presentation regarding charter schools by DOE officials." It did NOT say that it was a public hearing or request for public input regarding a new charter school proposed for Jackson Heights or Corona.

Consequently, affected parties from those neighborhoods were not put on notice. For this reason, I believe this charter school must be heard from again at a future CEC meeting. (In fact, I met some PTA members from a Corona school, PS 19, a week after the CEC meeting and they told me that their parent coordinator had told them it wasn't necessary for them to attend CEC meetings!)

• I object to this charter school being placed in any current or future DOE facility in D24. If the school organizers are able to find their own space, so be it, but inasmuch as D24 is one of the most overcrowded districts in NYC, especially in the Corona area, any use of public school space for a charter school - which can cap class size and overall enrollment and accept students from outside the school zone (and indeed, outside the district) would only serve to increase overcrowding in other area schools. The new school which will open in September 2008 in Corona is already going to be at- or over-capacity accepting students from the two nearby schools (PS 19 and PS 16).

• I didn't think the idea of the La Cima school was particularly unique. The speakers said it would be a dual-language school which celebrates Hispanic culture and seeks to involve parents. PS 19 in Corona already has a dual language program and I believe one of the DOE's core values is to involve parents. Furthermore, I defy anyone to identify a school in D24 which does not "celebrate diversity."

Finally, on a note about dual-language programs, I looked into the question of whether my zoned school, PS 229, could have a dual-language program and was told by the District Superintendent that Central places a cap on the number of such programs that any given district can have. Why would you deny such programs to public schools and then sponsor a Charter School just because it plans such a program?

Thank you for your consideration of the above.

Marge Kolb, Woodside, NY

For more on this issue, see our recent posting on charter schools.

Who controls our schools:principals or the police?

We asked Sally Lee of Teachers Unite to contribute this entry to our blog:

The arrest of the student and principal at East Side Community High School set the stage for yesterday’s City Council hearings on school safety and NYCLU news conference. The focus of the hearings was the complete confusion over who has authority in public schools—principals or school security agents.

When Kathleen Grimm, the DOE Deputy Chancellor, claimed that principals have the power to remove metal detectors from their schools, there was audible surprise. Even the President of the Principals’ Union, Ernie Logan, stated that he had never heard that before.

In the afternoon, the union representing the security agents held their own press conference an hour before the NYCLU’s conference yesterday, and pushed the idea that these agents are victimized and assaulted by students.

The press coverage focused on the DOE and NYPD claim that once a student performs a criminal act, it is under the jurisdiction of the police. This begs the question: How often are school security agents escalating non-criminal incidents into violent conflicts?

Again, the enlightening news came from inside the hearings, where students gave a clear picture of regular harassment. One boy talked about a school security agent forcing him to stop eating lunch so that he could take him directly to the dean’s office, while cursing at him, all because of a completely false accusation—which made him miss half of his next class. One girl spoke of being forced to skip a class while sitting in a “holding room” which is where students are made to stay when even one minute late.

The NYCLU reports that the NYPD has assigned more than 5,000 school safety agents and at least 200 armed police officers to the city’s public schools. This massive presence would make the NYPD’s school safety division the fifth largest police force in the country—larger than Washington DC, Detroit, Boston or Las Vegas. And yet, there is no effective mechanism to hold school safety agents accountable for misconduct.

At yesterday’s news conference, youth from the Urban Youth Collaborative; Lepore Felice, the principal of Urban Assembly School for Careers in Sports; Jamaal Bowman, the dean of a small school inside Martin Luther King Jr. High School; and I discussed the importance of investing in proactive solutions to keep our schools safe including: small class sizes; rich after-school programs; peer mediation initiatives and increased support services.

Critics will say that cops are needed in schools to keep students in line in these violent times. Bowman, quoted on WNYC this morning, highlighted the fact that police are heavily stationed in schools with almost 100% Black and Latino students. Race and income is the main factor contributing to the hostile use of policing in our schools, but the NYPD and Department of Education will never own up to that scandal.

Teachers Unite for Student Safety is an initiative of Teachers Unite advocating for supportive services in schools rather than the use of aggressive policing strategies. For more on the hearings, see the NY Times blog.

UPDATE: See the excellent article in City Limits. Excerpt:

“A primary finding of the hearing was that the 1998 MOU [Memorandum of Understanding] that assigned responsibility for school safety to the NYPD expired in 2002 and has not been renewed. Furthermore, a joint committee called for by the MOU to "ensure the effectiveness of school safety" and prepare annual evaluations of the school safety program was never convened. The only outside oversight of the school security program, according to DOE and NYPD, is conducted by Mayor Bloomberg."

Fifty new charter schools; where will they go?

See article from today’s NY Sun profiling the new head of the charter school office at DOE, Michael Duffy.

Duffy comes from Boston. As he says about NYC, “Having the support of the mayor and the schools in New York City…will be a relief.”

It’s clear from this piece that Bloomberg and Klein are among the very few officials in charge of running public school systems anywhere in the country who support the expansion of charter schools in their districts – since most superintendents believe that these schools draw resources and sometimes space from existing public schools.

To the contrary, the Mayor and the Chancellor pushed hard to allow the cap on charters in NYC to be raised so that they could create 50 more of these schools. Already, $60 million for charter schools has been subtracted from the state funds supposed to improve our traditional public schools in NYC, as a result of the settlement of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit.

Moreover, charter schools have significant advantages that most public schools do not have --especially the ability to cap enrollment at whatever level that is desired to keep class sizes small, which is appealing to parents, but tends to create more disparities in the opportunities provided children who attend these schools compared to those in the rest of the system.

As to where all these new charter schools will go:

“Mr. Duffy said solutions he is mulling include securing longterm building leases for charter schools rather than making full purchases; renovating existing buildings, and delaying many charter schools' start dates until just before Mr. Bloomberg's term ends, September 2009, so that they have time to secure buildings. "All of the easy options for charter schools to locate in city space have been taken," he said. "We're going to have to get more creative about the locations for these schools."

Another challenge is a new requirement that charter schools hold a community hearing before opening. In the past, community members have greeted charter schools with skepticism.”

Yet the new requirement that founders of charter schools must actually present their plans to parents at Community Education Council meetings does not require that the locations of their schools be disclosed, whether they have secured financing for buildings, or whether, as many parents fear, DOE still harbors secret plans to jam them into existing already overcrowded school buildings, as was the practice in the past.

The location of any new charter school should be required as part of the application process – and reported to the public and to the Regents, before the application is approved. Without this information, it will be impossible to gauge the school's likely impact on existing schools.

The untimely life and death of the City Hall Academy

The life and death of the City Hall Academy, as so poignantly told by the NY Times, is emblematic of the story of this administration. Here is an excerpt from the original press release which announced the program's beginning:

“The opening of City Hall Academy demonstrates our commitment to excellence, achievement, and innovation in the public school system,” Mayor Bloomberg said. “City Hall Academy will provide New York City children and their teachers a unique opportunity to study and participate in the cultural and historical fabric of the City."

The idea of bringing 3rd and 4th grade students into the DOE headquarters for two weeks to learn about the city's history through an interdisciplinary approach was a good one; for one thing, it allowed students to actually experience the spectacularly beautiful environment of the Tweed building, and not restrict that opportunity to the highly paid bureaucrats at DOE. One teacher on the NYC education list serv recounted how "Some of the students actually cried when their time was up."

The Mayor's interest in providing this sort of enriched learning experience was quickly supplanted by subsequent priorities --most prominently his 3rd grade retention policy – in which children would now be held back on the basis of their scores, and succeeding on the standardized tests became all-important.

Then, the school was supplanted by the administration's craze for more and more charter schools -- and the need to find space for them. The first of these was the Ross Global Academy, the charter school founded by Bloomberg’s fellow billionaire, Courtney Sales Ross, who one would think could have afforded to buy any building she wanted to house her school.

When the administration's attempt to place this school into the building of the NEST school on the Lower East Side was blocked by Speaker Silver, the Ross charter school was placed in Tweed, and the City Hall Academy was moved uptown to Harlem.

In their unrelenting drive to base all educational decisions on high stakes tests, and to recklessly expand the number of charter schools without requiring that they find their own space outside the already overcrowded infrastructure of our traditional public schools, the effects of the administration's policies on the overall educational experience and opportunities of our public schoolchildren have been ignored.

Just as the City Hall Academy’s first home in Tweed was given over to the Ross Charter; its second home, in Harlem, was taken over by yet another charter school. For some reason, the online version of the article is missing the last paragraph of the story in the printed version:

“The building that most recently house the academy is not closed. It is home to the Harlem Link Charter School. When a young man answered the phone there recently, he was not surprised to learn the caller was looking for the academy. He said nonchalantly: “Year they’re not here anymore. This is us now.”

Mayor Defends DOE Blackwater Security Contract

October 6, 2007 (GBN News): Mayor Michael Bloomberg today defended the no-bid contract given to Blackwater USA by the Department of Education to take over school security from the city Police Department. The Mayor said that the move was made in response to issues raised over the Police Department’s handling of school security by critics such as the NY Civil Liberties Union and NY Times columnist Bob Herbert. Nearly 2700 complaints have been received by the Police regarding school safety agents in the last five years, but the Mayor noted the success of other private companies such as Alvarez and Marsal in improving the efficiency of the school system, and said that he expected similar results from Blackwater.

Mr. Bloomberg said that President Bush himself had recommended Blackwater to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein during a meeting last week. The President was said to have told Mr. Klein that if Blackwater could take over the Iraq war so successfully from the US military, it could do the same thing for the NY City Police Department in the war against cell phones. Mr. Bloomberg told GBN News that while Blackwater security forces will not be encouraged to actually fire on students, their track record in Iraq will “certainly make those little buggers think twice before trying to bring their cell phones into school.”

In a related story, President Bush asserted yesterday that “This government does not torture people.” He went on to say that torture is a function he believes should be left to the private sector.

Those million dollar ads: are they true?

Probably you’ve seen one the many ads that are running on TV, radio and bus shelters – touting the great improvements in our public schools and telling us to “Keep the Progress going.” In one of these ads, a teacher claims, proudly, “our classes are smaller.” (See the ads here.)

Is this true? We can look at recent data from the IBO to determine the validity of this claim.

If you look at the citywide averages, class sizes appear to be shrinking by less than 1% per year. To be exact, average class sizes are declining by about .3%, (that’s point 3%, not 3%) in K-3 and in grades 4-8 by about .8% (point 8%) each year. This, despite the fact that enrollment is dropping much more rapidly – by 1.5% annually in K-3, and 3.1% in grades 4-8^th.

Which means that the administration has made absolutely no effort to keep classes small, but to the contrary is subtracting hundreds of classes -- and teachers -- each year. (You can click on the graph on the right to enlarge it.)

If we had class size goals similar to those that the state of Florida has achieved for nearly every school in the state, of 18 kids per class in grades K-3 and 22 kids in 4-8^th grades, it would take over 40 years to reach these goals in the early grades, and 19 years for 4-8^th grades. Unless of course, enrollment trends change over the next 40 years, which is quite possible.

Moreover, in more than half of districts, class sizes are actually increasing -- either in K-3, 4-8 or both.

The Fund for Public Schools is financing these deceptive ads – once a legitimate charity, established to provide extra services and resources to our kids in the public schools – but now is pursuing a nakedly political campaign to burnish Bloomberg's image and ensure that Mayoral control is kept intact. Their PR campaign is called “Keep it going” and it asks for donations, in part, by saying that contributions will offer families tools and resources to support their children's education."

But when you search for these tools and resources, all they appear to be providing is no-cost website advice, reused from other organizations, like a list of back-to-school supplies, including those all important No. 2 pencils. If we had ten million dollars, we could put on ads refuting DOE’s claims; unfortunately all we parents have is this blog.

The answer to the question, what ever happened to Robert Gordon?

I know you've all been dying to know.

Gordon, a former attorney and would-be educational reformer, spent a few months working at Tweed and doing a quick “hit job” on our schools by designing the fundamentally unfair “fair student funding” system. This system would have cut the budgets of half of our failing schools by over $400,000 if fully implemented– and still won’t give them a dime to improve conditions, whether that be reducing class size or doing anything else.

Now he’s back at the Center for American Progress – the supposedly liberal DC think tank which is led by lawyer John Podesta and where they have lots more lawyers who know nothing about education but are full of ideas about how to make poor urban schools even worse than they are. Interestingly, they never would conceive of the same solutions for the schools where their own kids go to school.

There's a new article by Robert Gordon in Slate on how to fix NCLB -- though he sees little to change. Here Gordon actually argues that improving our schools, is merely a matter of educators setting "clear and high expectations" for themselves and their students.” And we know what that means -- lots more testing, little learning.

He’s wrong on Texas by the way – studies show that the state's emphasis on high stakes testing did nothing to raise its students' test scores on the NAEP. Actually, the actual rise in achievement and the narrowing of the achievement gap came years before, when the state actually improved learning conditions by reducing class size in grades K-4 -- a reform proposed by a commission led by none other than Ross Perot.

Military to Recruit Rubber Room Teachers, ATR’s

October 3, 2007 (GBN News): The New York City Department of Education is embroiled in another military recruiting controversy today, this time over the solicitation of ATR’s and teachers assigned to “Rubber Rooms”. ATR’s are experienced teachers who have been excessed from their previous position. No longer given priority for another teaching post, they must substitute teach while trying to find a position on their own in what is termed an “Open Market” system. Teachers in Rubber Rooms have been removed from their classrooms after being accused of various and often unspecified forms of malfeasance. The recruitment of these teachers appears to be a marriage of convenience between the DOE, which would like to unburden itself of teachers that it considers a “problem”, and the military, which has had increasing difficulty filling its ranks during an unpopular war.

GBN news has learned that the upsurge in teacher recruiting by the military arose out of a meeting between Chancellor Joel Klein and President Bush during UN week. The Chancellor, according to GBN News sources, approached the President with an offer to allow military recruiters into reassignment centers, and to provide them with lists of ATR's. The President, reportedly impressed with Mr. Klein’s “patriotism”, even consented to raise the maximum enlistment age, in order to accommodate some of the more senior teachers who, the Chancellor is said to feel, are holding back his school reforms.

When reached for comment, Chancellor Klein told GBN News that the new recruiting policy should be “really popular with the teachers”, since it will “greatly expand their range of options under the Open Market system”. He also expressed the hope that being in the military will “straighten out those misfits” in the rubber rooms. The Chancellor even left open the possibility that, after completion of their military service, the teachers could be hired back as school security officers whereby they could “prove themselves useful by confiscating cell phones.”

In a related story, President Bush announced a new health insurance plan designed to maintain health coverage for people who are excessed from their jobs. The plan would place all such former employees under the U.S. Armed Forces health plan, and would cover them at no cost to the employee. There would, however, be a work requirement similar to that for people on Public Assistance. Work assignments will be provided through a contract with Blackwater USA, and may require relocation.

Nolan and Gioia on toxic schools

See today's oped in the Daily News by Assembly member Cathy Nolan and City Council member Eric Gioia, responding to Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott piece last week --- in which Walcott defended the indefensible -- the opposition of this administration to requiring environmental and community review of toxic sites for leased schools. This is how the Nolan/Gioia oped starts:

“Deputy Mayor Walcott's "Be Our Guest" piece last week is a disingenuous public relations ploy to protect mayoral power and avoid accountability at the expense of the health of New York City's schoolchildren and teachers.”

The bill in the Legislature sponsored by Nolan would provide the most necessary basic rights of disclosure and City Council review for the SCA’s plans to lease buildings on contaminated sites:

“As a check and balance on mayoral control, communities must be given notice of plans to lease toxic sites for schools and the Council must be given the opportunity to vote on the appropriateness of a site.”

The administration’s dishonesty on this issue and their lack of concern about the health of our children matches their dishonesty on class size. For more info on this issue, see our previous posting here, about the contaminated Information Technology HS in Long Island City, and the New York Lawyers for Public Interest website here.