Intel Science Talent Search – NYC Schools’ Collapse Continues, and the Silence at the Times, Daily News, and NY Post Is Deafening

On January 14, the Intel Science Talent Search, indisputably our country’s premier science project competition, announced its 300 semifinalists for 2008/2009. First, for the good news: NYC public high school garnered 24 of those coveted spots, including ten students from Stuyvesant High School, nine from Bronx High School of Science, two from Brooklyn Tech, and one each from Townsend Harris, Edward R. Murrow, and Forest Hills High School. Three students from private high schools also captured Semifinalist spots. Well-deserved congratulations to all 27 students and their respective teachers and mentors.

Now for the bad news. Once again, as has been the case every year since 2003 when Chancellor Joel Klein effectively began his “save the public schools” regime, the numbers for NYC are abysmal by the standards of the six years immediately preceding Mr. Klein and mayoral control. The six-year average number of NYC public school Intel Semifinalists from 1997-2002 was 45.83 students; for the six years from 2003-2008, just 24.33, a drop of 46.9%. If we look at just the last five years, from 2004-2008 (considering that Intel participants in 2003 had already started their projects before the Klein-inspired ravaging of our high schools), our “Education Mayor’s” policies have resulted in a five-year average of just 21.8 Semifinalists, a decline of 51.1% from the average of the preceding seven years.

The numbers are down everywhere you look. Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, and Staten Island Tech in the last six years are each substantially below their prior six-year averages. Combined, their Semifinalist numbers are off by 34.9% in 2003-2008 compared to 1997-2002, and by 39.2% if only the period 2004-2008 is included in Chancellor Klein’s database of shame.

Even more shameful is the impact Klein/Bloomberg have had on the balance of the city’s high schools, those not classified as science high schools. From 1997-2002, an average of 5.67 different schools per year chalked up an average of 18.2 Intel Semifinalists. From 2003-2008, an average of 3.3 different schools have claimed just 6.3 Semifinalists, a horrendous (and truly tragic) drop of 65.1% in the number of such award winners that constitutes nothing less than the virtual abandonment of high-level science research work outside of Stuyvesant and Bronx Science (the drop is 69.9% if 2003 is shifted into the pre-Klein column). In the last three years, non-science high schools have claimed 16,7%, 15.0%, and now just 12.5% of the City’s public high school Intel Semifinalist pool; in no year before that, back at least to 1997, was their share ever less than 25%.

One might think that all this bad news might be worthy of note in our local press, but one would apparently be thinking wrong. The NY Times barely bothered to write anything about Intel beyond a generic release (in its Business section, from a press release obtained over Business Wire!) that failed even to mention NYC schools or students, the Daily News took a complete pass on the Intel announcement, and the NY Post offered a miniscule article under the too-cute (and misleadingly feel good) title "Kids Are All Bright" that simply cited the NYC total number of Semifinalists (incorrectly stating 26 instead of 27) and the numbers from Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, as if those numbers standing alone, independent of their downward trend, were nevertheless some sort of DOE triumph. One year ago, a reporter at the Times actually expressed interest in a posting on this blog site about the “de-Klein” in the City’s Intel numbers, but no story resulted. This year, Intel Semifinalists in NYC were apparently not even worthy of mention in our “newspaper of record.”

Lest anyone think that the NYC Intel “de-Klein” is reflective of a Statewide phenomenon, think again. The six-year average number of Intel Semifinalists in NYS went from 155.8 (1997-2002) to 133.5 (2003-2008), a drop of 22.3 that almost exactly matches the 21.5 average Intel Semifinalist drop in NYC public high schools across those same two time periods.

How is it that a 50% decline in the number of Intel Semifinalists in NYC public schools, corresponding precisely to the effective impact years of the Bloomberg/Klein DOE, does not attract both news reporting and alarm? Where are our missing media on this story? Lacking another “happy news” press releases emanating from the DOE P.R. machine, did they simply fail to notice? Or is another DOE performance failure simply too hot to touch in this decision year for mayoral control? Whatever the case, it seems that our local MSM (mainstream media) have once again failed to inform the NYC public as to what mayoral control (and NCLB) has really meant to their schools.

Assembly hearings on school governance; please RSVP now!

The Assembly Education committee will hold hearings on School Governance and the future of Mayoral control, beginning in Queens on Thursday, January 29, 2009. More information is here; the full schedule is below.

The hearings in each borough will begin at 10 AM, but if working parents reserve a slot after 5 PM, by phone or email, you can be sure that you can speak at that time – but you must reserve the slot in advance. It is important that as many parents as possible come, but if you cannot attend, you can email your testimony as well.

To reserve a speaking slot, just email storellicastron@assembly.state.ny.us; or call (518) 455-4881. Included in the official notice is a description of some legislators' concerns:

As the law is set to sunset on June 30th of this year, the Assembly Committee on Education is interested in hearing about the impact of mayoral control on the City's school system and how modifications to the law could address concerns and improve the current governance structure. For example, questions have been raised regarding the development and execution of a five-year capital plan that still leaves many schools overcrowded and New York City with some of the largest class sizes in the state. There has also been persistent concern about the lack of access to information by parents and the community. Mayoral control has also had an impact on many other areas over which it has authority, such as student achievement. Therefore, the Committee anticipates hearing testimony regarding the effect the change in governance has had on this area, including the delivery of educational services to English language learners and students with disabilities, as well as on the other areas that have been affected by mayoral control of the New York City schools.

QUEENS
Thursday, January 29, 2009
10:00 a.m.
Queens Borough Hall
Meeting Room 213
120-55 Queens Boulevard
Kew Gardens, NY

STATEN ISLAND
Thursday, February 12, 2009
10:30 a.m.
College of Staten Island Center for the Arts
Williamson Theater
2800 Victory Boulevard, Building 1P

MANHATTAN

Friday, February 6, 2009
10:00 a.m.
Assembly Hearing
250 Broadway, Room 1923
19th Floor

BRONX
Friday, March 13, 2009
10:00 a.m.
Lehman College
Lovinger Theatre
First Floor Speech and Theater Building
250 Bedford Park Boulevard West

BROOKLYN

Friday, March 20, 2009
10:00 a.m.
New York City Technical College
Klitgord Auditorium
285 Jay Street

This Land is Your Land

A moment to take pause and appreciate the history we are living through.

Here is the video from Sunday’s inaugural concert of Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen, performing the song that, in my opinion, should be our national anthem – “This Land is Your Land”.

The song was written by Woody Guthrie in 1940, towards the end of the Great Depression. The version on this occasion contained all its verses, including those rarely sung. They are below.

"In the squares of the city - By the shadow of the steeple
By the relief office - I saw my people
As they stood there hungry, I stood there wonderin
If this land's still made for you and me."

"There was a big high wall there - that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted - it said private property;
But on the other side - it didn't say nothing;
That side was made for you and me."

"Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking - that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me."

Let’s cross our fingers and hope that we all take strength from these ideas of self-empowerment, and that this historic moment marks a major positive transformation for our country -- and for our public schools.

Advice for Duncan in the WaPost: parents need not apply

Check out Diane Ravitch’s succinct advice to Arne Duncan, the soon-to-be Secretary of Education, in yesterday’s Washington Post, recommending that he scrap NCLB. Here is an excerpt:

“The law's remedies don't work. The law's sanctions don't work. The goal of 100 percent proficiency by 2014 is ludicrous; no nation or state has ever reached it. Achievement gains have been meager. Test scores improved more on federal tests in the five years preceding NCLB than in the years since it was implemented. What Washington does best is write checks, collect honest information, and call attention to problems. “

On the other hand, Margaret Spellings, current Secretary of Education and a big supporter of NCLB, writes Duncan:

“Congratulations. I don't want to hurt you, but I think you're a great choice. You're the right guy at the right time. I look forward to working with you and know you to be compatible, tough-minded and someone who does what's right on behalf of kids. You'll need those characteristics as secretary.”

Check out either of the above pages for links to advice from The Critic, The Early Education Advocate, The University Chancellor, The Student, The Teacher, The Astronomer, The Bioethicist, The School Superintendent, The Author, and The Thinker (as the Post describes them.)

Unfortunately, no one mentions the importance of class size. But then they also didn’t bother to ask any parent.

Even though on the very same day, Jay Mathews of the Post had a column, saying that sometimes, parents actually have good ideas when it comes to our children’s schools.

Clearly we are swimming against the tide.

If you'd like to know what some real-life parents from NYC and Chicago would recommend, check out the Common-sense reforms for our schools, from Class Size Matters and Parents United for Responsible Education.

Check out SED contract list and other agency spending info

Check out the new website, www.openbooknewyork.com, where you can search spending information on state and local agencies. This includes broad categories of NYC DOE expenditures, but more interestingly, specific State Education contracts.

One of the largest SED contracts is listed as $20,518,160 for McGraw Hill/CTB to “DEVELOP GRADE 3-8 ASSESSMENTS IN MATHEMATICS” from 2004 -2011.

Another $17.8 million is again for CTB McGraw Hill, to “DEVELOP GRADE 3-8 ASSESSMENTS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS” over the same period. Wonder why math exams are more expensive than the ELA?'

Lots of charter school grants as well, including a $175,000 “planning” grant last June to the Ross Charter School.

Many of member items listed as well, though the list doesn’t identify which legislators were the sponsors. Check it out, and please share anything interesting you find in the comments section.

More cuts to the classroom , despite Tweed's claims

In today's Daily News, it is revealed that schools will be forced to pull teachers out of their classrooms for up to three days next month to score the state exams.

This will even affect students in grades, like Kindergarten, who do not have to take these tests. Why?

"[Some principals] said they were reluctant to pull teachers in older grades out of the classrooms so close to the state math exams, which are given in March."

In the past, DOE hired teachers to score these standardized tests during the February break. Now, schools will have to pay substitutes to take their place.

Yet in a budget presentation to the PEP, DOE officials falsely described the revision in the “scoring of state assessments in Math and ELA” as a major part of its “$40 million cut to Central and Field.”

In another budget document circulated by Tweed, this change was listed as having “No Impact to Schools.”

Instead, this represents yet another major budget cut to our schools. Not to mention its damaging effects on the classroom.

More testing, less learning. And more evidence of how the DOE’s claims to be making major cuts to administration cannot be trusted.

New study on charter schools in Boston

"Informing the Debate," is a new study that finds that charter schools in Boston are more effective in raising student achievement than traditional Boston public schools. The methodology used is well-accepted: comparing the achievement levels of the students who "win" the lottery and are able attend a charter school compared to those who "lose" and remain in regular public schools.

As Eduwonkette points out, only one quarter of Boston charter schools were analyzed -- oversubscribed schools with a waiting list, so the results of these schools may not be typical.

Nevertheless, this looks to me a good study, though it doesn't begin to analyze why these particular charter schools are more successful in raising student achievement. There are two possibilities that come to mind, and both may be true.

1- Class Size -- an examination of the descriptions of a random selection of the charter schools included in the study, either from reports by the Massachusetts state education dept. or self-reported by the school itself, shows that classes tend to be much smaller in these schools than in the regular BPS system, and in some schools, as small as 15 (as in the Boston Collegiate Charter School). In most, classes are about 18-22 students; while the regular BPS system has class sizes ranging from 25-28. In fact, many of the charter schools studied openly proclaim that their small classes are critical to their success. In general, it is easier for charter schools to reduce class size because they are able to cap enrollment, unlike traditional public schools.

2- Peer effects. Though the study finds that the randomly selected students who attend charter schools do better than those who remained in the BPS system, it also states that "Charter Schools ... serve a smaller proportion of special education students, free- and reduced-price lunch students, and English learners than do the traditional BPS schools. In addition, high school Charter students tend to come in with substantially better math and ELA performance on the MCAS..."

So to the degree that the "winners" of the lottery would tend to surrounded by higher performing and more advantaged students, this in itself could boost their achievement levels.

Tom Kane , one of the authors of this study, has been quoted as saying that "The next step is to identify what's working in charter schools that can be transferred back into the traditional public schools to improve student achievement." Let's hope they manage to achieve this. I am aware of few such studies that have honestly attempted to do this in the past.

Bloomberg Curtailment of Parent Role Ruled Illegal By Albany

A year ago, Queens public school parent Marie Pollicino refused to accept Mike Bloomberg's attempt to marginalize public school parents. She filed a formal complaint with the state education commissioner to reverse the Chancellor's changes in regulation A-655 specifying the role of school leadership teams (SLTs). Her action was joined by Queens parent Melvyn Meer, the District 26 Community District Education Council and the UFT.

This week, State Education Commissioner Richard Mills ruled that the Bloomberg administration's attempt to revise Regulation A-655, shifting all decision making power on SLTs to principals was a violation of state education law. The law grants school-based management teams specific powers and duties:

Develop an annual school comprehensive educational plan that is aligned with the school based budget. Such plans shall be submitted to the district superintendent and be made available for public inspection.... (Ed Law 2590 - h(15) (b-1))

In his decision Mills says "The A-655, as revised, strips the SLT of this basic, statutorily mandated authority". The state ordered the city to revise the regulation.

Commissioner Mills also ruled that the method by which the Bloomberg Administration changed the policy was unlawful. State law requires the changes to be developed by the superintendent of each community school district in conjunction with committees "composed of administrators, teachers and parents". The current changes were developed without this input.

A copy of the legal decision can be found here.

For background on the case, see this earlier Daily News article and update here. Gotham Schools has the story here.

Oddly, the NY Post didn't have news coverage but that didn't stop the editorial board from braying about the decision. The Post apparently could not pass on the opportunity to simultaneously take a swipe at two favorite targets: public school parents and Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver.

Another day, another reorganization; meanwhile more ARIS delays.

All the previous reorganizations (how many have their been? four? Five? Who can count them?) have caused nothing but chaos, confusion, and a massive waste of money. Each of them was supposed to cut the bureaucracy.

Yet somehow, the headcount (and salaries) at Tweed continue to grow, year after year.

Now, there’s yet another reorganization on the way .... but when Elizabeth Green reported this story about the latest reorganization (oh, I meant “reshuffling”) in the morning, she filed again in the afternoon, after Eric Nadelstern, the new "Chief School Officer" called back, to try to reorganize the spin on the reorganization.

If Nadelstern and all the other bumblers at Tweed really believe their own PR about giving principals the choice so they can be the CEO’s of their own buildings, they should privatize Tweed, set it up as a consulting company, and see if any of these CEOs would bother to hire them. I doubt they would – even those zombies trained at the Leadership Academy.

I was at a CPAC meeting this morning, and guess when Santi Taveras said that the vaunted $80 million supercomputer ARIS and its data would be accessible to parents? Not until May. How many months has this been delayed?

Here is an excerpt from the Oct. 24 NY Times:

James S. Liebman, the Education Department’s chief accountability officer, said on Thursday that the project was “proceeding in an appropriate manner” and “in the way we anticipated.” He said that parents would begin gaining access to the system in December, and noted that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, in his State of the City speech in January, said that ARIS would be online by the fall, not September specifically.

Well, no way you can redefine May as in the fall. Except perhaps in Australia, which perhaps is the last place in the world that Joel Klein is still popular.

About the only reorganization led by Tweed that would really improve the situation is if they reorganized themselves out of existence.

Closing the Achievement Gap - -DoE discussion Series

DoE is hosting a discussion series titled “Closing the Achievement Gap Series” with various prominent educators and policy makers. The last night’s session, Ensuring Equality for All of Our Student, was a “conversation with Chancellor Joel Klein and Reverend Al Sharpton” moderated by Dominic Carter of NY1.

Howard Dodson, Chief of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Cutlure, the event sponsor, made a passionate plea for an urgent action calling the current educational state of affairs the direst of all crises.

Asked what the biggest contributing factor to the achievement gap was, Klein’s answer was to empower and engage families. Yep. You read that right. Empower and engage families. Evidently, he has not noticed the hundreds of parents who have been sacrificing their precious time to make their voices heard, only to have their efforts entirely ignored.

He went on to list two more factors: the low expectations placed on disadvantaged students and unequal allocation of resources, both financial and human. Sharpton’s replies (which came before Klein’s) were pretty similar – special interests , underlying inequalities, and lack of familial involvement.

On the latter two points, Sharpton went on to say we needed to change the “culture of kids” by involving the community beyond the school. There is too much glorifying of “being nothing” and too much defeatist attitude. He talked about his college experience where an African American man told him if he could write and read, then he was trying to be a white man. But the only way to change that is by involving everyone – not just teachers, administrators, parents, but kids themselves and the community at large. He further suggested parental involvement should be tailored to each community.

Klein offered his thoughts on how to close the achievement gap. He proposed longer school days and school year. He wants schools to start at an earlier age. He suggested bringing in the community. He wants to offer families more choices. He talked about how choice will lead to competition which will improve the system. Especially now with the funding tied to students, he believes that schools that can attract more students will excel but the competition will also drive low performing schools to do better. He also mentioned the word, accountability, several times and said that Mayoral control provides accountability because the Mayor can be voted out.

It was painfully clear that Klein has never spent a day in a classroom. While I am not opposed to longer school days or school year, I cannot in good conscience ask even the most veteran teacher to teach until 5PM or well into July (not to mention do both) with so many students in a cramped classroom with so few resources and so many constraints. If Klein had any first-hand experience with a real classroom, he may have thought twice about making this suggestion.

It is ironic that some schools in District 2 had to eliminate pre-K classes to accommodate ever increasing kindergarten enrollment, while he preaches the importance of early childhood education.

As for his comments on bringing in community, judging from the way he has treated parents willing to work with the DoE on various issues, I can only presume he means businesses and consultants when he says bring in the community. He has certainly brought in many consultants to do the job that used to be done by DoE employees. And, remember Caroline Kennedy who was hired to specifically to reach out to and bring in resources from the private sector (i.e., businesses)?

Klein also firmly believes that running the system on a business model of competition will improve our schools. He talked about giving families choice several times during the night, even while Sharpton cautioned that limitation and narrowness of choices will make the system too competitive. Klein does not seem to understand that when you have a competition, someone always loses. Why not base our system on collaboration? Collaborate with stakeholders – parents, guardians, community based organizations, education experts, policy makers. Foster collaboration among schools and replicate successes. Competition is inherently the wrong model for education where we want to lift everyone up.

Naturally of all the times he mentioned accountability, he was not talking about himself or the Mayor. True, the Mayor can be voted out, but the election happens only every four years and there are many voters who do not vote based on the Mayor’s performance on education. I wondered why the Chancellor couldn’t be elected or booted out every two years. After all, Chancellor can do whatever he wants so long as the Mayor approves it, but he can blame the Mayor if anything goes wrong. That’s not accountability.

As an example of how his strategy has worked, Klein mentioned how an all-African-American boys school in Bedford Stuyvesant was able to have 100% of its students reading at grade level. Marcia Lyles, his own Deputy in Division of Teaching and Learning, later set the record straight by saying that the school is a charter school – hardly a good example of how his policy works.

The cluelessness of Klein became apparent when an audience member made a plea to re-evaluate our pedagogical model and foster creative learning. She very eloquently explained how children learn best in a creative environment. His response was that first and foremost children needed to know how to read and write. He missed the whole point of her comment. Dodson, Sharpton and most of the audience understood what she was asking for (to be fair there seemed to be many educators in the audience, including a NYS regent), yet, Klein, the man in charge of educating our children, was clueless as to the significance of her comment.

Some education experts have said that the Chancellor need not be an educator. Perhaps that is true. However, I expect the Chancellor to at least understand how children learn and what it is like to teach in our schools. So, I left the lecture hall feeling we had a longer way to go to close the achievement gap than I thought.

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.

Post and News Editors Attack Shelly Silver Over Mayoral Control

The owners of the Daily News and NY Post, Mort Zuckerman and Rupert Murdoch respectively, are staunch supporters of Mike Bloomberg's reign here in NYC. So when State Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver commented on potential changes in the school governance law, it was no surprise that the papers clobbered him in their Saturday editorials. In a move clearly coordinated out of City Hall, the editors of the Daily News and Post make the same points on the same day.

The Post suggests that behind Silver's concern for public school parents looms some grave danger:

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, for example, told this newspaper in September that he favors mayoral control with "tweaks" to focus on helping "the parent who has a problem ... as it relates to their child." He said this week that he envisions changes to enhance parental input.

While his aides declined to elaborate on what he has in mind, his remarks are fraught with danger.

More fear mongering in the Daily News version:

But . . . what does Silver want?

That's the tricky part: His answer - he wants more input for parents, he told The Post's Carl Campanile this week - sounds a lot like the rhetoric of those seeking to gut mayoral control entirely.

And Silver, as usual, is short on details.

The News goes on to express concern over proposals to establish fixed length terms for the Panel for Educational Policy (Board of Ed) members. Mayor Bloomberg has previously fired members who threatened to disagree with him. Clearly the idea of making the PEP more than a rubber stamp has stoked serious fear in the administration.

Unfortunately, the sagacious editors of the Daily News couldn't figure out how to spell "predictable" in their editorial, spelling it "predicable" instead. If the mayor's friends will lecture us on how our schools should be managed while they privately school their kids, they ought to learn to spell, or at least how to find the spell-check button.

Despite the bad editing, the message certainly comes through. The Post and News have previously attacked pols who called for more school construction and an end to excessive standardized testing. We will hear more as the mayoral control law comes up for renewal this year. It's clear the Post and News are sharpening their knives for those who stand up for public school parents.

How the same practices that led to the economic crisis are being implemented in our schools

Today’s New York Times has two articles relevant to the education policy debate in NYC – but they aren’t about schools. Instead, they deal with the sudden collapse of the financial system and its causes.

Joe Nocera has a riveting analysis in the Magazine section called Risk Mismanagement --about how Wall St. financiers failed to see the crash coming, because of their over-reliance on a single mathematical formula called VaR (for Value at Risk), that was supposed to accurately quantify the risk of financial losses:. “VaR’s great appeal is that it expresses risk as a single number, a dollar figure, no less.”

But the formula, in all its simplicity, was severely flawed, and investors placed undue confidence in it. As a result, they failed to respond in time to the catastrophe that was upon them. Aside from being overly simplistic, the formula was based upon only a few years worth of data – which in a bubble, are unable to predict possible future declines.

… because it is a very short-term measure, [VaR] assumes that tomorrow will be more or less like today. Even what’s called “historical VaR” — a variation of standard VaR that measures potential portfolio risk a year or two out, only uses the previous few years as its benchmark. As the risk consultant Marc Groz puts it, “The years 2005-2006,” which were the culmination of the housing bubble, “aren’t a very good universe for predicting what happened in 2007-2008.”

According to the article, another major flaw is that VaR was relatively easy to manipulate:

… VaR could be gamed. That is what happened when banks began reporting their VaRs. To motivate managers, the banks began to compensate them not just for making big profits but also for making profits with low risks. That sounds good in principle, but managers began to manipulate the VaR by loading up on … “asymmetric risk positions.” These are products or contracts that, in general, generate small gains and very rarely have losses. But when they do have losses, they are huge.

Ironically, it turns out that one of the best ways to minimize risk, at least in the way the formula was written, was to load up on credit-default swaps; And we know how that turned out.

In an op-ed entitled The End of the Financial World as We know it, Michael Lewis and David Einhorn discuss other reasons for the crash. They cite a litany of problems, including deregulation, in which the SEC essentially ceded all controls concerning the amount of leveraging and/or debt that companies could accumulate. These companies also focused almost exclusively solely on short-term gains, at the expense of a more rational long-term investment strategy, based on how their employees were rewarded.

Lewis and Einhorn are particularly good at explaining the many “wacky incentives” that led to poor decision-making– the faulty compensation structures that led to the bubble, and the way in which the ratings agencies like Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s were led to give high marks to corporations that were hugely overleveraged like MBIA –though it had “only $7.2 billion in equity against an astounding $26.2 billion in debt.” Why?

These oligopolies, which are actually sanctioned by the S.E.C., didn’t merely do their jobs badly. They didn’t simply miss a few calls here and there. In pursuit of their own short-term earnings, they did exactly the opposite of what they were meant to do: rather than expose financial risk they systematically disguised it.

In short, Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s gave triple-A ratings to companies that are now regarded as nearly worthless, because their own financial success was dependent upon the very companies whose instruments they were supposed to objectively assess. As Lewis and Einhorn point out, this was true of the SEC as well.

… the S.E.C. itself is plagued by similarly wacky incentives. .. anything the S.E.C. does to roil the markets, or reduce the share price of any given company, also roils the careers of the people who run the S.E.C. Thus it seldom penalizes serious corporate and management malfeasance — out of some misguided notion that to do so would cause stock prices to fall, shareholders to suffer and confidence to be undermined. Preserving confidence, even when that confidence is false, has been near the top of the S.E.C.’s agenda.

So what does this have to do with the NYC public schools?

All these same elements are central to the policies being pursued by the DOE:

• A system of deregulation, with principals let loose (or as the DOE likes to put it, “empowered”), to spend money and run schools as they like, with very little supervision or support, as long as they achieve continual gains in test scores.

• A “wacky” incentive system that provides merit pay to principals, teachers and students, all based on one-year gains in standardized test scores.

• An overly simplistic and inherently unreliable formula devised to give letter grades to schools -- again, based predominantly on the one year’s gains or losses in scores. DOE has vehemently refused to develop a more complex and accurate assessment that would be based on more than one year’s data, and/or would include more measures of a quality education, like class size and/or the level of arts education being provided.

• Like the manipulation of VaR by investment bankers, more and more “gaming” of the system has occurred, as our public schools become increasingly focused on driving up test scores to the exclusion of all else – through an overwhelming amount of test prep, resorting to more cheating, and/or excluding or discharging low-achieving students – all of which practices have been ignored or denied by DOE.

• Just as the SEC mistakenly believed that its primary goal was to bolster stockholder confidence in the financial system by ignoring negative consequences of current practices, the DOE acts as though it is its mission to spin the data to make it appear that its own flawed policies and objectives have been uniformly successful.

Thus, Tweed educrats and their PR machine continually ignore, minimize, or misstate all evidence of the contrary – including flat NAEP scores, rising class sizes, worsening overcrowding in many schools, increasing discharge rates – and even violations of the law.

It is ironic that just as our society has lost confidence in the flawed ideology and practices that led to the current financial catastrophe, including the notion that deregulation and unleashed competition would lead to all boats rising, and that simplistic formulas could be devised that would minimize any risks to investors and the economy as a whole, the political establishment seems to be intent on implementing eerily similar policies in our schools.

What will the inevitable crash look like in this case? Will we even be able to witness its full dimensions? Or will the cost in terms of students’ lives go unreported? Please post your predictions in the comments area.