Comments on DOE Questionable Contracts and Fair Student Funding formula

Leonie Haimson and Patrick Sullivan of the Citizens Contracts Oversight Committee provided the following comments to the members of the Panel for Educational Policy about the proposed contracts to be voted on April 20, 2016. If you want to join our Overight committee, please email us at info@classsizematters.org. If you would like to send in your own comments, please do so tonight by the public comment deadline at 6:00 pm.

To: CGFarina@schools.nyc.gov, Budget@schools.nyc.gov, panel@schools.nyc.gov, fbaptiste@schools.nyc.gov , ecleveland@schools.nyc.gov,  vleung@schools.nyc.gov, lpodvesker@schools.nyc.gov   lzingmond@schools.nyc.gov, ICarmignani@schools.nyc.gov, ddillingham@schools.nyc.gov , kpaynehanks@schools.nyc.gov, mzorrillaaristy@schools.nyc.gov, bshuldiner@schools.nyc.gov, GLinnen@schools.nyc.gov

April 19, 2016

Dear Chancellor Farina and members of the Panel for Education Policy:

On behalf of Class Size Matters, the Citizens Contract Oversight Committee, and the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, we have the following concerns about the proposed contracts and the Fair Student Funding formula to be voted on tomorrow night, April 20, 2016:

The Amazon contract

DOE proposes to pay $30 Million to Amazon over three years to provide digital textbooks and tradebooks. The ultimate plan, according to the RA, is to provide 29%-42% of all content online by Year 5 at a cost of up to $64.5 million.

·         Yet there is no cost/benefit analysis in the RA discussion of the proposed contract, including the huge cost of having to purchase tablets or laptops for all the students who will access their assigned readings through digital devices.  The contract also implies that some students will use “a school-provided device or a personal device to access their profile and content,” Yet latter which cannot be relied upon given the fact that many families cannot afford to supply a suitable e-reader for their children to use at home.

·         The RA also proposes that students will “request content for independent reading” via Amazon, which implies that the DOE will be steering students’ personal purchases to this provider, which will allow Amazon to further expand their market share.  Yet many authors and publishers have protested the way in which Amazon uses their dominance of the market to engage in  illegal monopolistic practices, which goes unmentioned in the RA.

·         The DOE omits any discussion of the growing research showing that reading comprehension and retention are significantly reduced with the use of digital devices compared to actual books.  Here's just one of several recent studies on this critical issue.

·         Finally there are the privacy concerns, which are insufficiently addressed in the RA:

“Despite this technology’s capacity for track and reporting student progress, students’ personal identifiable information will be safeguarded in this system, as Amazon will use a DOE-provided proxy with encrypted information and limited student information.”

It is unclear what “limited student information” is going to be included, but in any case, many parents are not just worried about potential breaches, but about teachers and administrators tracking students at school and at home, and what will be done with their personal data.

For more on some of the concerns with the Amazon contract, as yet unexplored by DOE, see today’s Wall Street Journal.

Contracts with Special Education providers

The DOE proposes to award contracts to pay seven special education vendors who have engaged in fraud in the past or who have failed to pay Workman’s compensation and thus are barred from public work contracts.  We strongly believe that any company that has engaged in fraud or failed to properly follow the law should be barred from future DOE contracts for at least five (5) years.

We are also concerned that the DOE admits that “background checks have not been completed for all vendors…Should noteworthy information become known to the DOE after the Panel meeting, it will be reported to the Panel.” 

No contract should be approved without a background check, and there is no point in reporting it to Panel members once negative information is found.  

The fact that the DOE would even consider proposing contracts for companies to provide services to special needs students, a highly vulnerable population, without conducting any background checks, only reaffirms our conviction that there is insufficient care and due diligence maintained by DOE officials to minimize risk to children, fraud and waste. 

More evidence of the insufficient care shown by DOE is shown below in the section below headed “Reimbursing the Fund for Public Schools for PreK vendors found “non-responsible”.

An article about these highly questionable special education contracts was published in yesterday’s Daily News here

Whole School Reform

DOE seeks funding for a vendor, Southern Regional Education Board, who has provided these services in the past and whose expertise with NYC schools has been previously questioned.  It is regrettable that the new proposed contract is presented without any accounting for how the vendor has performed in the past.

Pre-K providers

DOE continues the unacceptable practice of proposing to award many pre-K contracts without providing any information in advance on the vendors or their backgrounds and history (see items #3-5 on pages 49- 51 and #24-25 on pages 109-110,)  This again is risky and irresponsible.

Professional development contracts

We are concerned about the proliferation of professional development contracts.  This month there are seven PD contracts, items #7-11, #16 and #19, at a total cost of $14,697,447 or $8,050,447 annually.  Including these, there have been a total 36 PD contracts since October 2015, costing over $27 million annually, or $98 million over the course of these contracts. 

Nearly half of these contracts are proposed to provide training aligned to the Common Core standards, even though the State Education Department is now planning to revamp the standards. 

Retroactive contracts

DOE also continues its unacceptable practice of asking the PEP to approve retroactive contracts after the funds have already been presumably spent.  This month, there are nine proposed retroactive contracts: items #2, 16-20, 26-28.

Reimbursing Fund for Public Schools the City of New York for PreK vendors found “non-responsible”  [Update: wrote the wrong Fund here}

Serious concerns are prompted in the information found in the Addenda (page 132).  Many pre-K providers were approved by the PEP in July 2014, despite the fact that their background checks were not complete.

Three providers were subsequently found to have engaged in fraud or other illegal behavior, including B’Above Worldwide Institute, FootSteps Child Care Inc., and West Harlem Community Organization Inc.

Church Avenue Day Care did not file NYC corporate taxes for 2010-2014.  While this transgression would normally disqualify a vendor (categorize them as "non-responsible"), the DOE decided to pay the firm anyway with private funds raised by the Fund for the Public Schools City of New York.  The documents now make clear the firm hasn't corrected the issue.  But the DOE wants now to reimburse the Fund for Public Schools for its payments to this vendor.

The DOE also proposes to reimburse the Fund for Public Schools the City of NY for it payments to another preK vendor, Footsteps Childcare Inc. despite the fact that earlier audits from the NYS Comptroller had found this vendor had engaged in “systematic abuse of child care grants awarded by the NYS Office of Children and Family Services, including evidence that funds…had been misappropriated to defraud the State.”

A third vendor, B’Above Worldwide Institute, exhibited unspecified “performance and contract compliance issues” during the 2014-2015 school year.  Despite the fact that the vendor was offered the “opportunity to show cause why it should not be found non-responsible,” B’Above failed to do so.  Now the DOE wants to pay back the Fund for Public Schools the City of NY for the “bridge loan” that the Fund had provided the vendor.

Panel members should oppose these reimbursements.  Moreover, the DOE's practices of using a private fundraising entity to fund questionable vendors, presumably because they had been barred from receiving city funds, should immediately cease.

These examples provide more evidence of unacceptably sloppy and risky contracting practices on the part of DOE, and why no contract should be approved by the PEP for vendors whose background checks have not been completed.

Fair student funding

While in FY 2008, schools were provided with 100% on average of their Fair Student funding, this year the average is only at 89% and if the mayor’s proposed budget is adopted, next year this figure will rise to only 91% — reflecting a 9 percent cut to our schools since 2007.  Moreover, the Mayor’s proposed budget does not project any increase in Fair student funding in the out years.

In many cases, the overall use of the Fair student Funding formula has forced class sizes upwards, or forced principals to choose between retaining their experienced teachers or keeping class sizes at acceptable levels.  

In addition, as Class Size Matters discussed in testimony before the City Council last month, the specific formula being proposed is unsupported by logic or research.

·         The smallest amount of funding is allocated to students in grades K-5, where the investment in smaller classes has huge pay-offs in terms of increased student achievement. 

·         More funding on the level of 8 percent is allocated for students in grades 6-8, an additional 3 percent for high school students, and 40-50 percent additional funding for remedial services as a student falls behind, starting in 4^th grade. 

·         Yet as many studies indicate, remediation is  far less effective than prevention,  which  ensures that students do not fall behind in the first place, especially in the form of smaller classes in Kindergarten through 3^rd grade.

·         The FSF weights are far greater for special needs students if they are assigned to inclusion classes starting in Kindergarten, (with a weight of 2.09) and in grades 1-12 (with a weight of 1.74), though the class sizes in these ICT classes are generally far too large to provide students with the individual attention they need.

·         The failure of DOE’s inclusion program, caused in large part by the excessive class sizes of ICT classes, is something we hear constantly from parents of special needs students. 

·         This is further evidenced by the fact that since the fall of 2012, there have been sharp increases in the numbers of students recommended for special education services, as well as the number of students attending non-public schools at city expense, according to the Mayor’s Management report.

·         Total special education enrollment in grades K12 has increased by 25 percent in four years since the inclusion initiative began in earnest in 2012, at a huge expense to the city.  The increase in the number of students identified as having special needs is yet another indication of the hidden cost of rising class sizes, especially as class size reduction has been shown to significantly reduce the number of students identified as requiring special services.

Yours sincerely,

Leonie Haimson, Executive Director, Class Size Matters and co-chair, Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

Patrick Sullivan on behalf of the Citizens Contract Oversight Committee

Any issue with today's math exams?

Today was the first day of the NY Common Core state math exams in grades 3-8.  Please note below any observations about these exams, or the reactions of students taking them.

Were they lengthy, confusing and or stressful, or were they grade appropriate with reasonably straightforward questions?  Were there any errors in the booklets or instructions? 

Comments welcome from teachers, parents and students, anonymously or not! 

So was the testing experience for kids so much better this year? The answer must be no.

Clearly there were many problems with this year's NY state ELA exams.  My three blog posts have received about 150 comments so far, and over 40,000 page views.  I urge you to take a look here, here, and here. Many teachers, administrators and parents wrote about their concerns with these exams elsewhere, pointing out faults that had plagued previous versions of the Pearson NYS ELA exams.

These included overly long, dense and grade-inappropriate reading passages with numerous typos, abstruse vocabulary and confusing questions; many of which teachers themselves said they couldn't discern the right answers.   On the third grade exam, for example, an excerpt from a book called “Eating the plate” was actually fifth grade level and sixth to eighth grade interest level.  There were many reading passages with Lexile levels two or three grades above the grades of students being asked to comprehend and respond to these texts.

"In 6th grade there was a poem from the 17th century that the teachers in our building read in COLLEGE. 11th grade level.”

On the eighth grade exam, one reading passage featured obscure words like "crag" and "fastnesses".  As one teacher wrote, "What are fastnesses?...I asked eight of my fellow colleagues to define this word.  1 of 8 knew the answer.  Unless you a geology major, how is this word a part of our everyday language, let alone the reading capacity of an average 8th grader? And our ESL students?"

I even asked my husband, a professor in the Geosciences department; he didn't know what "fastnesses" meant either.    

There were several passages that included commercial product placements as in years past, this time featuring the helmet manufacturer Riddell, Skittles candy, Stonyfield yogurt, and Doritos.  (Riddell is being sued by a thousand NFL players for deceptive claims that their helmets protected against concussions.)
  
One notable reading passage described herding sheep from the perspective of the dog, without making that clear in the text.  Another section asked what the phrase "impossibly improbable" meant, within the context of an article promoting the efficacy of the controversial weed-killer called Round Up.  The article didn't mention that the herbicide has been called a "probable carcinogen" by the World Health Organization, and banned in several countries.  (In this case, however, the author used its chemical name glysophate, and not its more well-known commercial name.)  There were even  upsetting passages about kids who had lost parents through death or separation.

One teacher disclosed that a passage on the exam had been in Pearson i-ready test prep reading material that she had assigned to her class a few weeks before.

Two new problems emerged.  One was the omission from many of the test booklets of blank pages that were supposed to be used by students to plan their essays, or the titles of the pages were left out.  Instructions to deal with these problems came from the state only after many children were in the midst of writing their essays or after they had completed the exams.  In these cases, teachers pointed out, this represented an unfair disadvantage to their students, who were forced to either use the limited space at the front of the booklet to plan their essays or didn't plan them at all.

But perhaps the most heartbreaking was an unforeseen but brutal consequence of the untimed nature of these exams, the major innovation made by Commissioner Elia that was supposed to reduce the stress levels of kids.  Instead, many students labored for many hours, taking three to five hours per day to complete them, and sometimes more.  Here's one comment from Facebook:

"This afternoon I saw one of my former students still working on her ELA test at 2:45 PM.  Her face was pained and she looked exhausted.  She had worked on her test until dismissal time for the first two days of testing as well. 18 hours.  She's 9."

This is a travesty; no child should be subjected to such a punishing regime. It also appears to violate the NY law passed in 2014 that limits state testing time to one percent of total instructional time.

In any case, it appears that the parents who chose to opt their children out of the exams were wise to have done so.  All in all, the number of opt outs seem to have held steady from last year's 240,000, or even perhaps increased, with even higher rates of test refusals in Rockland County, NYC, and Long Island, which surpassed its record rates last year, with more than 97,000 students opting out, or about 50% of eligible kids compared to about 47% last year.

And all this, despite the efforts to suppress the movement from Commissioner Elia , Chancellor Farina, as well as six-figure ad buys  from Gates-funded Astroturf groups like High Achievement NY, all with the message that the tests would be so much "better" this year.

It goes without saying that even more parents should consider opting their kids out of next week's math exams.  Instructions from NYSAPE including a sample letter to give to  your principal is here; here’s one from Change the Stakes.  

3rd day of ELA testing; please add yr comments! And "impossibly improbable" reading passage found!

Thanks to eagle-eyed Fred Smith, we have now found the passage in which the phrase "impossibly improbable" used, in yesterday's 6th grade ELA exam.  In a piece called "Weed Wars: Farmers fight unwanted plants among crops" published in 2011, the article describes how weeds are developing resistance to a chemical called glyphosate, and how new strategies will have to be found to kill weeds.

In its context (see highlighted below), the phrase seems to mean impossible, because it is then contrasted with the fact that  over time, it is indeed possible for weeds to build in resistance to the weedkiller called glyphosate, but it is certainly a tricky question and who knows how exactly it was phrased? Fred gives it "half a Pineapple"; what do you think?

Aside from the fact that there are plenty of ways for food to be grown organically without the negative impact of chemical weedkillers and genetically engineered crops, a position that that the article appears to ignore. Glyphosate, also called "Round Up", is made by Monsanto and is banned in many countries for its potentially damaging effects on human health.

An excerpt follows below.  If anyone knows what which particular questions followed, and if the passage was changed in any way, please put this in the comment section below.  Also please offer any observations you have on the 3rd day of ELA testing. thanks!

Weed wars: farmers fight unwanted plants among crop

When Stanley Culpepper was a kid, he spent hours pulling weeds on his family’s farm. “We pulled and pulled and pulled,” he says.

Culpepper started weeding when he was only about 5 or 6 years old. As a teenager, he chopped big weeds down with a hatchet.

Culpepper loved working on the farm, but he didn’t like weeding. He became a scientist to figure out easier ways for farmers to control weeds. “I decided there’s got to be a better way than pulling weeds all your life,” says Culpepper, now a weed scientist at the University of Georgia in Tifton.

A lot has changed since Culpepper was a kid. About 15 years ago, many more farmers started using a chemical called glyphosate to kill weeds. It worked so well that many farmers thought their problems were solved. But recently, some weeds have become resistant to glyphosate, meaning it’s harder for the chemical to kill the unwanted plants.

Resistant weeds are a big problem. Some can grow 10 feet tall! Scientists have discovered that weeds use all kinds of tricks to fight glyphosate. If the problem gets worse, farmers might not be able to grow as many crops, or they will have to spend more money controlling weeds. Then food could become more expensive.

...In the 1990s, something big happened: Scientists made crops that couldn’t be killed by glyphosate. They changed the plants’ DNA, the genetic instructions that tell cells which molecules to make. If farmers planted these glyphosate-resistant crops, they could spray the herbicide all over the field anytime and kill weeds without harming crops.

“It became very simple,” says Steve Duke, a plant scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Oxford, Miss. “Just spray once or twice, kill everything [but your crops].”

Farmers loved those glyphosate-resistant crops. They started planting more and more of them and using more and more glyphosate.

Winning the lottery

Some people thought glyphosate would work forever. But the weeds were evolving. That means their DNA was changing.

Once in a while, changes to a weed’s DNA would allow that weed to survive the glyphosate. The chances of changes like this were very, very small. But when farmers used glyphosate year after year on millions of hectares of crops, “what seems almost impossibly improbable becomes more probable,” Duke says.

Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University in Ames, compares the process to a lottery. If one person buys a lottery ticket, his or her chances of winning are tiny. But when millions of people play, chances are good that at least one person will pick the winning combination of numbers. As weeds were sprayed with glyphosate every year, it was like billions of plants were buying lottery tickets over and over, trying to “win” resistance to glyphosate. Eventually, some weeds were going to hit the jackpot.

It didn’t take long for that to happen. In 1996, Australian scientists found a weed called rigid ryegrass that couldn’t be killed with normal levels of glyphosate. In 2001, a researcher in the United States reported another resistant weed, called horseweed. Now at least 21 weed species have evolved glyphosate resistance.....If farmers can’t control weeds and insects, they can’t grow as much food. And if they grow less food, food prices could go up.

ELA exam 2nd day: major snafu - what should now happen? Leave your comments below!

The notice below was sent by NYSED this morning at about 9 AM, after many students had already started taking the ELA exams and some had already completed them.

As the teacher quoted below said, @QuestaristhenewPearson. What is wrong with these testing companies, and where is their accountability?

 Please leave your comments below about what you think should happen with these exams,  and if you have any other observations about day 2.

From a teacher:  For Day 2, the 3rd and 5th grade books were both missing the planning pages for the extended response. We're allowed to hand out scrap paper, but this contradicts the directions as written, so very confusing. The testing coordinator also received an email AFTER administration had begun, letting us know that there wasn't enough space given for 5th graders to write their essay and that we could give out lined paper and staple it into the books. Since Questar is handling this year's printing, this doesn't bode well for the future, no? #questaristhenewpearson

From a MS principal: The problem in middle schools is that the blank pages are after the lined pages and kids know (are trained) not turn ahead in the book. It is a production mistake that was only noticed after the early completers were already done. Many students will plan on the lined page and then either raise their hands or write on the blank pages. If kids see no prompt to write, they aren't going to ask for paper.

The message was sent at 9:09 AM from SED and I saw [it] at 9:30 ...when most students are done and have turned in their books.... Even if an administrator is on their email all day (which they aren't) it is too late to walk around on tests that started at 8:00 to interrupt testing rooms to correct the mistake.

Please post your comments & observations about the ELA exams here!

Today is the first day of the NY State ELA exams in grades 3-8.  As in past years, I am reaching out to students, parents, and teachers to let us know if there are confusing or ambiguous questions, overly long reading passages or passages with commercial product placements or vocabulary that is anachronistic and/or not age-appropriate.  Please note if there are any other issues that concern you or make the exams flawed or problematic.

This year the exams are also untimed.  How long did it take your child or students to complete the questions?

It was nearly four years ago, on April 18 when I first learned from a comment on our blog about the absurd Pineapple passage on the 2012 ELA exam.

 After I did a little research and blogged about this passage the next day, the story of the race between a Hare and a Pineapple with no sleeves quickly blew up into a national scandal.  To this day, the Pineapple has endured as emblematic of the lack of accountability on the part of the test-makers and policymakers, who insist on using these exams to rate schools, students and teachers.


Please also note below if you have info about the opt-out rates at your schools.  Already we have received reports of high rates in some Rochester-area districts and at PS 261 in Brooklyn.

thanks Leonie

So many reasons to #optout: Let’s keep it going until our kids get the schools they really deserve!

It’s that time of year again: Students throughout NY State will be subjected to the burdensome, stressful, overly long, confusing and poorly constructed state exams.The ELA exams will be held from Tuesday, April 5 to Thursday, April 7, and the math exams from Wednesday, April 13 – Friday, April 15.  (Schedule here.)

Johanna Garcia, parent leader in Upper Manhattan

There were stories in today's New York Daily News and Politico New York about the dynamite NYC Opt Out press conference yesterday at City Hall, in which parent leaders demanded that DOE inform parents throughout the city that they have the right to opt out of the upcoming exams.

There is a dearth of information in many schools about this, particularly in immigrant and Latino neighborhoods, as Johanna Garcia of District 6 Presidents Council pointed out at the press conference – despite the fact the state tests are especially inappropriate for English Language Learners and provide no useful information about their skills or progress. 

Other parent leaders in schools with predominantly students of color spoke of principals who had misinformed them, saying that their kids could be held back if they opted out -- even though there is a state law barring this.  The disparity in information provided across the city is in itself a civil rights violation, parents maintained,  reflecting and perpetuating separate and unequal conditions in our schools.

Last year, I appeared on a news show with Angelica Infante-Green, then NY Associate Commissioner of the Office of Bilingual Education, now the Deputy Commissioner.   Ms. Infante-Green agreed that the state tests provide NO useful diagnostic information for ELLs, and that then-Commissioner John King had asked for a waiver from the US Department of Education so that ELLs would not have to take the state test for two years.  The waiver  was denied.

Yes, this is the same John King who is now US Secretary of Education.  Ms. Infante-Green said the state really believed that ELLs should be excused from taking the test for three years, but they hadn't asked for that as they had thought they couldn't get such a waiver.

The test is also particularly abusive to kids with special needs.  At the press conference, Brooke  Parker spoke about how at a private meeting of District 14 parents with Chancellor Farina, she had asked the Chancellor if her dyslexic daughter, a struggling reader, should take the test, and the Chancellor said no. 

Here's an account of a similar private meeting with parents in District 15, in which the Chancellor said that parents of children with special needs and immigrants should opt their children out.  But why tell this to parents in private meetings, without making this information public throughout the city?

Last year,  only 6.9 percent of NYC students with disabilities and 4.4 percent of ELLs “passed” or were deemed proficient on the ELA exams.

Council Member Helen Rosenthal also spoke about the resolution she sponsored that was unanimously approved by the City Council last year, calling for the right of parents to opt their children out of state testing to be included in the DOE Parent Bill of Rights and  sent to every NYC public school parent each year.

Although in Schoolbook, it was suggested that there is a risk of losing federal funds in schools with high opt-out rates, this has never happened.  As Jeanette Deutermann of Long Island Opt out pointed out at the press conference, there are many schools and districts throughout the state that haven’t made the 95% participation rate for three years and have not suffered any loss of funds.  Budget cuts because of high opt out numbers are even more unlikely to occur this year, as it would cause a firestorm and are openly opposed by the Governor, the Commissioner, and  the new  Chancellor of the Board of Regents Dr. Betty Rosa.

More than anything, opting out of the state exams is the most effective tool parents have to protest and disrupt the push to defund, dismantle and privatize our public schools – and turn them into test prep factories where children are treated as data points rather than human beings.

The huge 20 percent opt out rates in NY State last year led directly to the Governor changing his position on linking teacher evaluation to test scores, and also helped lead to the selection of Betty Rosa as the new Regents  Chancellor. 

The selection of Dr. Rosa, an experienced Bronx educator with years as a teacher, a principal and a Superintendent, to replace Merryl (“Push kids into the deep end of the pool”) Tisch would never have happened without the huge opt-out movement in NY over the last two years. 

In fact, in her very first press conference Dr. Rosa said that if she still had kids in the public schools, she would opt them opt.  See yesterday's  Juan Gonzalez column for more on this: "This grass-roots civil disobedience stunned the politicians and data-obsessed bureaucrats who have dictated public education policy for more than a decade.Ever since then, the bureaucrats have been scrambling to win back the confidence of fed-up parents."

  

Here are even more reasons to opt out of testing this year:

•  Pearson, the company known for writing the ridiculous Pineapple passage and many other confusing and badly designed questions, is still writing the exams this year.

• The number of test questions has not been significantly shortened. See the chart to the right.

• While the exams will be untimed, this may mean your child could be subjected to even more hours of pointless stress.       

• ·         In NYC and many other districts, teachers are pulled out of their classrooms for up to three days to score these exams.  The fewer students take the tests, the fewer days they will lose their teachers.  Last year, in some Long Island districts, Jeanette Deutermann told me, teachers only were pulled out for scoring for one day instead of three – because so many students had opted out. 

• ·         There is also the critical issue of privacy.  Nearly two years after the state law passed requiring the appointment of a chief privacy officer and a Parent Bill of privacy rights to be created with public input, neither of these events has happened – despite the fact that the legal deadline for both was July 2014.  And as we recently found out, the State Education Department decided in 2013 to place all the personally identifiable student data it holds, including their test scores, into the State archives potentially forever – a decision which, despite protests, it still has not revoked. 

Here’s a nifty quiz you can take yourself about the exams.  Here is a sample letter you can send to  your principal from NYSAPE; here’s one from Change the Stakes.   

 Here are more detailed explanations by testing expert Fred Smith, Jessica McNair of Opt out Central NY, and NYC teacher Katie Lapham about exactly what has and what hasn’t changed ,and why the current testing regime produces unreliable results and is bad for kids. 

This Saturday, at the office of Senator Bill Perkins at 10 AM, there's a meeting to provide parents with more information on this issue.  Address: Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building 163 West 125th Street, Conference Room B.

See the video below from NYS Allies for Public Education and another from filmmaker Michael Elliot, with simple instructions on how to opt out.

Let’s keep the opt-out movement going until our kids get the schools they really deserve!

HOW TO OPT OUT OF THE NY STATE TESTS from Shoot4Education on Vimeo.

Please join NPE in Raleigh to be inspired and learn so much!

In a few weeks, the Network for Public Education will hold our annual conference in Raleigh NC on
April 16-17. Among the keynote speakers will be Diane Ravitch, Rev. William Barber and author Bob Herbert, Jesse Hagopian, Karran Harper Royal and Dr. Phil Lanoue of Clarke County GA and National Superintendent of the Year.

I will be leading a workshop with the co-chair of our Parent Coalition for Student Privacy Rachael Stickland on the fight for student privacy post-inBloom, and another on "Personalized Learning", contrasting the research and reality of class size reduction vs. online instruction.  Joining me will be teacher/blogger extraordinaire Peter Greene and attorney and columnist Wendy Lecker.

Here is the full schedule of events; click the right hand arrow for Sat. and Sunday and this page to register and get info on how to reserve your hotel room etc. 

I am on the board of NPE, and I'm proud to say it has become the leading national organization of parents, teachers and advocates fighting the forces that undermine our public schools, including high-stakes testing, budget cuts and privatization. Each year the opportunity to meet with like-minded allies and share strategies and information is tremendously helpful and even inspirational.  This year promises to be our best yet.  Please join us if you can!

One week only! See the new film about the Gulen chain of charter schools -- the nation's largest

Tomorrow the documentary "Killing Ed" opens at the Cinema Village on E. 12 St., and will run for only a week.  See the trailer below.  It's about the largest chain of US charter schools, led by a politically influential Turkish Imam living in Pennsylvania named Fethullah Gulan.

This  school year, 155 Gulen charter schools operate in 26 states and the District of Columbia under different names, including New York. The chain is also under investigation by the FBI for various alleged abuses.

This Friday, the filmmaker and Sharon Higgins, a Gulan expert who is interviewed in the film and blogs at Charter School Scandals, will be at the 7 PM show to answer questions afterwards.  Buy your tickets here. 

Trailer for KILLING ED from Visual Truth Projects on Vimeo.

Too many retroactive DOE sole-source contracts and other problems with proposals to be voted on tonight

Patrick Sullivan and Leonie Haimson of the Citizens Contracts Oversight Committee provided the following comments to the members of the Panel for Educational Policy about the list of proposed DOE contracts to be voted on tonight.  If you want to join our committee, please email us at info@classsizematters.org

Retroactive sole-source contracts 

For the contracts to be voted upon March 23 at the PEP, fully half of the proposed contracts (17 of 35) are retroactive -- with some starting as early as last May; which prompts the question what the point of a vote is, if it is held months after the money has been paid and the services delivered. Sole source retroactive contracts for this month include:

Item 6 (page 20) Bard College. Inexplicable why this is retroactive. The relationship with Bard has been in place for years.

Item 7 (page 23) Measure Excellence

Item 11 (page 33) Teachers College professional development for conferences

Item 12 (page 36) Teachers College professional development for writing instruction

Item 13 (page 39) Silicon Valley Mathematics Initiative: consulting to develop tests to measure teachers for performance reviews.

Insufficient information on consulting project to rate teachers with student tests

Item 13 (page 39) Silicon Valley Mathematics Initiative is a consulting engagement to develop tests to measure teachers for performance reviews. This work is controversial in light of 1) the thorough discrediting of value-added measurement models by the academic community and 2) action to eliminate state tests in rating teachers.  The contract should be presented with more information including the RFP and statement of work.  It should be presented for approval before it's done, not after.

Contracts presented for approval without any prior information

There are eight Head Start or pre-K contracts that have no information: Items 15, 16, 17, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. One (item 16 on page 46) is for "lead teacher incentives". That sounds like something that would require a discussion.  DOE continues to present contracts for approval with no names or amounts reported despite the promise of DOE to reveal this information at least a month ahead of the votes.

Lack of any assessment of quality of services delivered

DOE spends vast amounts of money on professional development -- $70 million has been approved since October of 2105 -- without any assessment of the efficacy of this spending.   This month the requested funding is another $500,000.

For numerous textbook and online program contracts, there are no comparative evaluations of quality or market research as to why these particular vendors were chosen; with less analysis offered than in the detailed description of why a particular vendor for snow tire chains was selected.

Rationale for Bard College funding is unclear

The proposal to pay Bard College nearly a million dollars for additional services to the two Bard High schools, which are both highly selective schools with comparatively few high-needs students, does not appear to be aligned with their Fair Student Funding system.

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Lies, waste and fraud: join our webinar tomorrow night on how to uncover the truth about corporate ed reform

Are you interested in how bloggers like Dora Taylor, Jonathan Pelto and I uncover lies,  corruption, waste and fraud involved in corporate education reform?

We'll be sharing investigative tips, techniques, strategies and some of the big stories that resulted, during a free and LIVE webinar this Thursday March 24 at 8 pm Eastern.

Please register for the NPE Action event: Education Bloggers Uncover the Truth
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Yesterday's capital plan hearings: school overcrowding bad and getting worse

I co-authored a Gotham Gazette article published yesterday on the need for more school seats and reforms to the school planning process yesterday with Javier Valdez of Make the Road NY.  See also the story on NY1 on the hearings. 

Yesterday, in a crowded Committee hearing room at City Hall, the City Council Education Committee held hearings on the five-year capital plan.

Among those testifying were Eduardo Hernandez, President of Community Education Council in District 8 in the Bronx, Shino Tanikawa, President of Community Education Council 2 in downtown Manhattan, Midtown and Upper East side and co-chair of the DOE Blue Book Working group; Fe Florimon, President of CEC 6 in Upper Manhattan and chair of Community Board 12 Youth and Education Committee; Maria Roca of Friends of Sunset Park in Brooklyn,; Luke Henry, a member of CEC 1 on the Lower East Side and co-chair of the Youth and Education committee of Community Board 3; Mary Winfield, East Harlem parent activist; MC Sweeney, member of Community Education Council in D28 in Queens; and Bertha Asitimbay, a parent leader at PS 19 in Corona and a member of Make the Road NY. 

All spoke eloquently about impact of overcrowding in their neighborhood public schools and a broken school planning process that needs critical reforms or else the problem will worsen with the thousands of new housing units resulting from the Mayor's rezoning proposals. Below is my testimony and that of Marie Winfield.

Deputy Chancellor Elizabeth Rose led off by saying that the DOE needs estimate of 83,000 seats was based on updated enrollment projects and a new Blue Book formula.  Despite the fact that there are more than 550,000 students crammed into overcrowded schools according to the DOE's own figures, she continued the implausible line started during the Bloomberg administration that there was merely "pocket overcrowding."

Chair Dromm asked why for the second year in a row the capital plan was months late. This plan released in January was supposed to be released in November; last May's plan was supposed to be released in February.   Rose responded that the latest delay was caused by the need to incorporate the Blue Book task force recommendations (which were actually proposed in December 2014, and new Blue Book report was released in October.)

 Dromm asked if its true that they never use eminent domain to site a school unless the property had recently been on the market; SCA President Lorraine Grillo confirmed that this was true.  She also said that she would welcome a committee or taskforce to look in depth at the problems with school siting.  Dromm asked why the city rejected the Blue Book Working group recommendations to align the school capacity formula with smaller classes; Grillo said that this was still a "work in progress."

CM Margaret Chin asked why they were now building "gymnatoriums" -- combined gyms and auditoriums rather than separate spaces for each.  Grillo said it was matter of space and only happened in Elementary schools where the auditorium is not needed often.  Chin also asked what reforms are needed to see that schools are built along with housing, especially since the Mayor's new housing plan is accelerating the creation of new residential units through rezoning.  She added, whether they would support "impact fees" on developers  with funds available for infrastructure including schools. Rose said there were areas with new housing with underutilized capacity (really?) as for impact fees, that was a state matter.  Would the SCA help us, asked Chin?  Grillo said we won't comment on this.

CM Rosenthal asked what changes in the procurement process have been made since the inflated $1.1 billion contract to Computer Specialists that was later rejected by the city and rebid at a savings of over $600 million.  Rose deferred to Ray Orlando of the DOE budget office.  Rosenthal said she had spoken to Orlando and hadn't gotten any answers.

CM Brad Lander thanked the DOE for the extra schools they've built in his district and the new seats D15 is receiving (they added 1648 seats, but are only funding 50% of their own estimate of need), and then asked about air-conditioners and bathrooms. Rose said air conditioning is not eligible for capital funding, which must come from the "school community" (meaning PTA funds?).  Rose said that there will be a public forum on the spending of the Smart Schools Bond act on March 31.

CM Menchaca asked whether they were budgeting enough for the higher prices of real estate; and need team to focus on creative methods to acquire sites, such as land swaps. Grillo said they'd never rejected a site because it was too expensive in an area of real need. (really?).

CM Levine praised dual-language programs; asked if they are more expensive?  Dromm reminded him that this was a capital hearing, and to hold that question for the expense hearing next week.  He said he was "excited" about the new Blue Book, but asked how a school without a library or gym could be identified as under-utilized, even though these spaces had turned into classrooms because of overcrowding.  Grillo said she could sit down with him to explain this.

CM Dromm asked whether the target class sizes in the Blue Book formula in grades 4-12 are larger than the average class sizes in these grades.  Rose said that was true.  Why did they reject the recommendation to align the formula to smaller classes? Grillo: the BB Working Group is "still in progress" and nothing is off the table.

CM Reynoso spoke passionately about the lack of gyms in so many schools, including PS 18, a school with a small cafeteria that is combined with a gym and a lobby, with columns in the middle.  The principal's office is in a closet. Rose says we would like to solve the problem of lack of gyms throughout the city.

CM Treygar  pointed out the thousands of unmet seats in his district; charter co-locations which made the situation worse; and temporary boilers three years after Sandy wrecked the original ones.

Dromm asked how projects are identified for the $490 million  allocated under the category of Class Size Reduction.  Grillo said there was a committee that meets regularly to identify these projects. (Then why after two years have only three projects been identified  -- when there are 350,000 kids crammed into classes of 30 or more?)

He followed up by asking how many dollars were going to be spent for these three projects now finally identified.  Grillo said they didn't know because they hadn't started designing the projects yet.  (Why after two years have only three projects been identified and none in process in this category -- when there are 350,000 kids crammed into classes of 30 or more?)

Rose added that $72 million is being spent on new partitioning due to placing of School-based health centers for the Community Schools initiative.


There is more at the video link  to the hearings- though the video only starts working at 58 minute in;  I speak at 2.23 in, and my written testimony is below as is Marie Winfield's.  Please check it out for the eloquent testimony of our parent leaders.

Testimony on Capital Plan 3.8.16

Testimony of Marie Winfield, E. Harlem activist:

WinfieldM Testimony Prelim Budget DOE Capital Plan 3.8.2016