GBN News Commentary: Satire or Reality? Response to a GBN News Reader

By Gary Babad

I feel that a recent blog comment by a reader named Jonathan, questioning a GBN News article, warrants a response in this space. Jonathan expressed confusion as to whether the story (“From Cash to Crash”) was satire or reality. I sympathize, Jonathan, since I often have the same confusion when I read the things that Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein say and do. I suppose the simplest way to clear up the confusion is to say that when I do parody, I write it in a GBN News article, but when Bloomberg and Klein do parody, they call it “reorganization” and then actually implement it!

Seriously, though, Jonathan, these parodies we do on the blog are, I think, the only way we can stay sane in the face of these fanatics who have hijacked the city school system and turned it into a massive “mad scientist” experiment on our children, carried out in secret, with no real oversight. They reorganize, then reorganize again like a reality show version of “Groundhog Day”. They jeopardize our children’s health and safety with a mid-year bus cutback that leaves kids waiting out on the street in the middle of winter, and with their metal detector/confiscation policy that equates cell phones with knives and guns. In light of this, is it that much of a stretch to imagine Rumsfeld in charge of school transportation or Rakhmon as school safety chief? It might even be an improvement!

But I fear it will get worse before it gets better. The reality is, the Tweed folks have failed, but like Bush in Iraq, they either don’t know it yet, or they are trying to spin it long enough to attempt to salvage their own reputations before they leave office. Six years into their experimenting, test scores are not rising significantly, parents and children are confused by perpetual reorganizations, and there is a growing backlash against a testing regime that goes far beyond the No Child Left Behind mandates. The DOE openly flaunts the law, ignoring State mandates to lower class size. And because they have taken such a cavalier attitude towards any criticism or input, they have alienated both voters and politicians enough to jeopardize the very Mayoral control that they have used to bring about their ill-advised “reforms”.

People with their backs against the wall and reputations to preserve can be awfully dangerous, and I fear that there will be even more of their bizarre machinations to come. So now that we are facing even more of the same, it will need to be countered in multiple ways: through legislative lobbying, public education, legal action, and yes, satire, because the barb can sometimes be as effective as the sword.

There are certain twisted realities I just cannot accept. To give just one example, the fact that a major factor in choosing what high schools my child will apply to will need to be the schools’ informal policy on cell phones and whether they have metal scanners. Because I will not have my child traveling around the city without something that many of the city’s own police officers have recommended as an essential safety tool. What an irrelevant thing to have to base a school application decision on! They’re messing with our kids’ safety and interfering with rational educational decision making, and we cannot allow that.

So, Jonathan, all I can tell you is that you’re not alone in your confusion. I hope you will continue to read the blog. And to guide you, keep in mind that the intentional parodies are under the GBN News and Gadfly News titles. The other articles are pieces of serious news and commentary that you can trust as independent voices of reason and sanity. And the unintentional parodies will doubtless continue being issued in the name of Bloomberg and Klein.

Gary Babad is creator, owner, CEO, and crack reporter for GBN News. With this commentary, he has probably blown any remaining chance at that $150,000 a year PR job at the DOE.

Salaries at Tweed continue to grow

There’s an article in the NY Post today, showing a big jump in the number of city employees making $150,000 or more in 2006:

The increase was led by the Department of Education, which saw its number of $150,000 earners more than double in 2006, to 229 from 97. Among these high-pay employees at DOE were new hires James Liebman, formerly a lawyer for the NAACP [actually a Columbia law professor], who earned $188,304 as the head of DOE's accountability office, and Santiago Taveras, a longtime DOE employee who earned $155,174 working with Liebman on school reviews.

Here’s a quote from me: "We've heard about many restructurings, but after each one it seems the number of high-paid executives down at Tweed [school headquarters] has mushroomed. I haven't seen any money redirected into schools."

It’s true that through all the various reorganizations, the only constant is that the number of high-priced employees at Tweed – and exorbitantly paid consultants – continues to grow. At the same time, we’ve seen little or no improvements in terms of added resources to the classroom or reduced class size.

As of 2005, six DOE employees were making as much or more than any Deputy Mayor, and twenty were making more than Police Commissioner Kelly. And of course, there are the seven Alvarez and Marsal consultants, each receiving more than $1 million – plus expenses.

In the NY Post article, Tweed claims that "DOE in 2006 cut $230 million from its administrative budget and redirected it toward the schools. We're getting an exceptional return on taxpayer dollars.”

Each year, it seems, the DOE makes this same assertion; with little or no evidence to back it up.

In 2004, the DOE claimed to have cut $200 million from administration and transferred it to schools, yet no one, including the City Comptroller and the Independent Budget Office, could confirm this.

Here are the conclusions of the IBO: “….changes to DOE’s internal budget structure make it difficult to fully assess whether the department has attained the savings it claimed….It is even more difficult to determine whether the savings were shifted to the classroom as claimed by the Chancellor and the Mayor."

In February of 2005, the City Comptroller released a letter challenging the validity of these cuts, and reporting that instead, the head count at Tweed had increased, and that our schools had suffered a net loss of over 2,000 teachers in two years, with no improvement in the teacher-student ratio.

Comptroller Thompson added that “DOE fiscal reporting practices have become markedly less transparent since the Department's restructuring. …DOE has misapplied certain units of appropriation to report expenditures, commencing with FY 2004, in a way that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to track its use of public funds."

An analysis by the Educational Priorities Panel found that rather than reducing the bureaucracy, DOE had made huge cuts to special education services, and that the percentage of spending devoted to instruction had steadily declined.

The Post article shows that the between 2005-6, the number of DOE top executives making more than $150,000 more than doubled, compared to an increase of only 4% in high-salaried employees at the Police Department. And guess what? Next year, spending for Tweed staff is projected to grow another 12%.

I predict that the increases will be even larger – with all the new positions at the Accountability office, including at least twenty new “Senior Achievement Facilitators” to analyze the huge amount of test score data spewed by ARIS, each of whom will make $139,304 - $158,602.

DOE still mum about cash for kids who ace their "no-stakes" assessments

In his Daily News column on Thursday, Juan Gonzalez broke the story about the proposal to give cash awards to students in the empowerment schools who ace the new interim assessments. (Here is an earlier blog entry about these $30 million assessments to be given four to five times a year.)

More than a week ago, we posted a letter to principals from Roland Fryer, the 30 year old Harvard professor leading the project.

Students will be paid five to ten dollars for taking these tests -- and 25 to 50 dollars if they score a perfect score. Every empowerment school that buys into the project will also be awarded a $5,000 cash "gift."

This proposal severely undermines the official DOE claim that these are “no-stakes tests” See this headline on the Tweed press release from June 1 for example: "Customizable, No-Stakes Assessments to Give Teachers, Principals, and Parents Timely Feedback on Student Progress"

Or this, from the DOE website: "These assessments are solely tools for teaching and learning. There are no stakes attached to the results for schools, principals, teachers or students."

The new project was inspired by the Mayor’s poverty initiative. Bloomberg established a commission on eradicating poverty, and then ignored most of their recommendations and instead announced he would implement experiments to pay parents and students cash if they attend school regularly and get good results.

Of course, if the kids who score well are not poor, they will presumably get receive these awards anyway – so this proposal might even enhance economic disparities among students at the school level.

In the NY Times today, Ernest Logan, the president of the principals’ union, said that “We are troubled by additional pressure being placed on children to achieve perfection,” he said. “What really matters in education is continued student progress, not perfect test scores.”

Apparently, the project has not been formally approved by DOE, despite the fact that the Fryer has already held sessions with principals and signed up a number of schools. Eric Nadelstern, head of the empowerment zone, endorses the project, according to the NY Times:

“He has my enthusiastic support,” Mr. Nadelstern said in an email to principals.“I encourage you to give the program serious consideration.”

Bloomberg also likes the proposal: "If we aren't looking at everything, shame on us,” he said at a news conference yesterday, “I hope there are people thinking about how we would implement that and every other idea." (Unfortunately, they still aren’t thinking seriously about how to reduce class size – despite a new state law that requires them to do so.)

According to NY1, late Friday DOE issued a statement: "Performance-based incentives are one element in a range of strategies we are considering. We are still at a preliminary stage in considering how to implement such a program."

Does this reluctance to endorse the project signal a split within the administration?

Check the negative commentary from New York magazine, in a piece entitled "Mike Bloomberg wants to bribe your kids," the blog Ed in the Apple, and a column criticizing a similar program of cash incentives in Florida here:

“Gov. Charlie Crist was correct when, as the state's education commissioner, he said that the prospect of cash rewards for students who score well on FCAT made him “a little queasy.”

We spend loads of time and effort telling kids what's right about learning, that education is something inherently good and valuable. By using cash as an incentive for students to do well on state tests, schools act hypocritically, and they may even be undermining their core missions.”

From Cash to Crash

June 8,2007 (GBN News): A Brooklyn middle school student today became the first recipient of a new cash incentive program of the NY City Department of Education. But in what can only be described as a surreal scene, his triumph suddenly took an ugly turn.

The day began routinely enough. In an assembly at MS 322, attended by both Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein, seventh grader Josh Bigham was awarded $50 for scoring a perfect grade on a recent interim assessment. The cash awards are designed to provide an incentive for students to improve their test scores, and Josh’s achievement appeared to demonstrate the program’s effectiveness. “Up till now,” Josh said with a beaming Mayor and Chancellor looking on, “I couldn’t pass a test no matter how hard I tried. But when they told us about the $50, all of a sudden it was a snap. Like I just couldn’t get a wrong answer if I tried!”

But it was when Josh was asked what he intended to do with the money that things started to go downhill for the young man. No sooner had he replied that he intended to use the money to buy a new cell phone, three imposing looking men in dark suits suddenly barged in and spirited him out of the room. The apparent abduction occurred so fast that no one in the room was able to get a good look at the men, but they appeared to be talking in some sort of Slavic language. The other children in the room shrieked in panic, but oddly, Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein looked on impassively, seemingly unperturbed by the bizarre turn of events.

It was not until later in the day that GBN News learned what had actually occurred. A source deep inside the DOE confirmed that the three men were part of a “Quick Response Unit” loyal to School Security Chief Emomali Rakhmon. Mr. Rakhmon, until recently the President of Tajikistan, has begun a severe crackdown on cell phones at the Mayor’s request. The former Tajik strongman is said to have secretly instituted a rule banning so much as the mention of cell phones on school property, and Josh unwittingly became the first victim of the new regulation. The DOE source also confirmed that Josh will be held indefinitely at “Little Gitmo”, a youth detention facility for cell phone violators created as one of Mr. Rakhmon’s school security reforms.

Civil Rights attorney Norman Siegel, speaking on behalf of Mr. Bigham’s parents, challenged the legality of both the new cell phone regulations and the detention facility as “excessive” and “draconian”. However, the mayor suggested that the parents were overreacting. “So he got detention”, the Mayor said to reporters. “Detention has always been a part of school. The kid should stop whining and suck it up.” It was unclear if Josh will be able to keep the $50.

Update: Manhattan Assembly Election Focuses on Mayoral Control, "Accountability"

Here is a quick update on yesterday's post about the Manhattan election where the question of mayoral control was being debated as a top campaign issue.

Despite endorsements from the New York Times and New York Sun, and strong support from Michael Bloomberg, Republican Greg Camp was handily defeated by Democrat Micah Kellner. Political pundits were predicting a much closer race than the 64% - 36% landslide. But we were more skeptical. In the Observer's informal contest to predict the outcome, we called it accurately at 65%. It's simple: overcrowded schools = angry parents = motivated voters.

With new CFE money, matching funds for construction and new state regulations requiring a class size reduction plan for the city, the time for excuses has run out. Parents want a real solution to schools crowding. Mr. Kellner deserves credit for wanting to take a closer look at mayoral control and the true meaning of "accountability". Politicians who simply ally themselves with the Bloomberg record on schools will go the way of Mr. Camp.

Update: Those looking for more information on Assemblyman Kellner should check his page on the Assembly web site.

Rakhmon Named School Security Chief

June 6, 2007 (GBN News): Tajikistan President Emomali Rakhmon, whose reported appointment as NY City Schools Chancellor turned out to be an April Fools’ joke, will be coming to New York after all. Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that the Tajik strongman is being named to head up a newly reconstituted office of school security. Though the original report was a hoax, the Mayor learned that Mr. Rakhmon does indeed have a strict policy banning cell phones in schools, and has been able to effectively enforce it through his dictatorial powers.

The Mayor, with Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and Mr. Rakhmon at his side, discussed the new appointment at a City Hall news conference. Calling cell phones “The single biggest security threat to our children”, Mr. Bloomberg cited figures showing that cell phones have constituted a vast majority of the weapons seized in random scanning. “Yes", said the Mayor, "sometimes we find a knife or a gun, and of course we’ll continue to confiscate those too, but clearly, statistics prove that cell phones are by far the biggest problem.”

Mr. Bloomberg praised the “new ideas” that Mr. Rakhmon brings with him to beef up school security. An elite force, recruited from Mr. Rakhmon’s personal security detail in Tajikistan, will serve as an independent “quick response unit”, and can be at a school for a security sweep minutes after any reported cell phone violation. The new security chief vehemently denied that violators will be held in a detention facility that DOE staffers are already dubbing, “Little Gitmo”. Mr. Rakhmon, speaking through an interpreter, said, “There is nothing ‘little’ about it. Our detention facility is just as big as the real Gitmo, maybe even bigger.”

In what some observers feel may be a conflict of interest, the Mayor is reportedly also hiring Mr. Rakhmon privately as a political consultant. Impressed that The Tajik President won his office in an election that the New York Times said was “widely dismissed as a farce”, Mr. Bloomberg apparently feels that Mr. Rakhmon’s assistance could be crucial to a potential campaign for the White House. The Mayor was said to have told a close aide, “With Rakhmon on my side, I can certainly beat Guiliani. This guy’s even better than Bernie Kerik.”

Mayor: anti-harassment measure "illegal" and "silly"

On Monday, City Council members and advocates blamed the Department of Education of "turning a blind eye" to discrimination and bullying in our schools.

On May 25, a 15 year old Sikh student was attacked in the bathroom of Newtown High School in Queens by another student, and had his hair cut off. Apparently, he had complained to staff of similar harassment five times before but nothing had been done. A DOE spokeswoman said no record of the student's complaints could be found.

Councilmembers John Liu, Robert Jackson, and David Weprin held a press conference to protest the fact that the anti-harassment legislation passed by the City Council in 2004 known as the Dignity for all Schools Act, or DASA, has never been enforced . The legislation not only prohibits bullying, but also requires DOE to follow certain procedures to track and report all such incidents.

When the City Council first passed the law, Mayor Bloomberg called it "silly" and vetoed it. He said that it was up to teachers and principals to judge "when the horseplay gets out of hand."

"Having a law to do it doesn't make any sense. You cannot force the teachers or the principals to follow some script. They are professionals, and you have to leave it up to them to do it."

After the Council overrode his veto, Tweed officials refused to attend hearings on the issue, insisted that they would not comply with the law and declared the measure “illegal,” claiming that their authority over our schools can only be overridden by the state.

Meanwhile, according to a recent report, more than three-quarters of male Sikh students in Queens say they have been teased or harassed in city schools. "The Department of Education is as guilty as these boys in that bathroom for what happened," said Councilman Liu at the press conference.

For more on this latest incident, see NY1 clip and the AM NY article here.

Manhattan Assembly Election Focuses on Mayoral Control, "Accountability"

The special election being held today on Manhattan's Upper East Side has become the first political contest to raise mayoral control of the schools as a central campaign issue. In the race to succeed Pete Grannis, Republican Greg Camp has attacked Democrat Micah Kellner for suggesting that mayoral control needs to be reconsidered. Mayoral control will automatically expire in 2009. Kellner proposed that control of the schools should continue to be vested in the city but that the City Council have a greater role.

In an open letter, Camp complained that Kellner's proposal, by increasing the oversight role of the council, would undermine the mayor's "accountability" for the school system. See report from The Observer here including text of the letter.

The question of accountability is especially critical in the 65th Assembly District where overcrowded schools are struggling to cope with increased enrollments fed by rampant over-development. In the district's elementary schools, 4th and 5th grades consistently have 30 or more children in each class. PS 290 now has 30 in second and third grade as well, and actually ranks worst of all elementary schools citywide for 2nd grade class size.

Faced with this overcrowding, the mayor's administration refuses to be held accountable for providing students with suitable space for learning. Chancellor Joel Klein told parents at the May 23rd Community School District 2 meeting he couldn't find space for schools in Manhattan. It seems the mayor's much-heralded plan for the future growth of the city, Plan NYC 2030, deliberately excluded any planning for the public school capacity needed to accommodate population growth. So Klein asked the audience to send him suggestions on good locations for schools.

There is, of course, much talk of "accountability" emanating from the Department of Education. But Tweed's definition of accountability is simply more testing. The Office of Accountability announced last week that all children starting in 3rd grade will have five additional tests on top of existing high stakes tests in math and English. Click here for more on that kind of "accountability".

UPDATE: The Camp campaign responds to our inquiry: No, Mr. Camp's children "are not public school students".

UPDATE 2: See new post with election results

Mike Dreams Up Phone Switch

June 4, 2007 (GBN News): In a sudden and dramatic reversal of policy, NY City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has reportedly directed Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to mandate that city school children be required to carry cell phones on their trips to and from school. According to an anonymous source at the Department of Education, a no-bid contract has already been signed with Nextel to provide phones to all children who travel on their own before or after school.

The shift in policy caught even the Chancellor by surprise, and the DOE PR department scrambled to find a plausible explanation for the abrupt policy revision. Forgetting that Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, not the Chancellor, is next in line to succeed the Mayor, Mr. Klein even started preparing to take over the Mayor's responsibilities, remarking to aides that the Mayor “must have lost his marbles”, and “will probably end up in Bellevue”.

The Mayor’s office is not commenting publicly on the astounding change in course. However, a City Hall source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told GBN News that the Mayor had a dream last night that “really spooked him”. In a 2 AM phone call, an obviously panicked Mayor told a top aide about his dream in which a child, after her cell phone had been confiscated that morning in a random scan, was attacked by a sexual predator who had stalked her on the way home. As the aide attempted to calm the Mayor, Mr. Bloomberg said, “Wait, I haven’t even gotten to the bad part yet.” The Mayor went on to say that in the dream, the child’s parents sued not only the city but the Mayor personally by showing that if not for the school cell phone ban, the child could have averted the attack by calling for help when she first saw the stalker. The dream ended with the Mayor, left penniless by the lawsuit, pacing incessantly back and forth through metal detectors, his mind ravaged by auditory hallucinations of ringing cell phones.

The Mayor reportedly was so rattled by the dream, and so worried that the threat to children’s safety could jeopardize his fortune and his position, that he insisted the Chancellor change his policy immediately. The source said Mr. Bloomberg told the Chancellor, “We have to protect the children at all costs. We don’t want any lawsuits - I mean losses”.

Mayor Bloomberg is said to be considering various options as to how to enforce the new mandatory cell phone possession rule. So far he seems to be favoring a system by which random scanning will be set up around the city, especially near bus and subway stops. Any child who fails to set off the portable metal detectors will be brought to the local precinct and will forcibly be given a cell phone.

Police Raid Middle School To Enforce Bloomberg Cell Phone Prohibition

In Thursday's raid of Booker T. Washington Junior High School, police captured 400+ cell phones. See the NY1 stories here and here and the NY Times blog, Empire Zone. Parents were outraged at the tactics employed. Here is one account from the NY1 story:

"I saw a long line of students over here; I saw a number of police officers herding the children over there; and then they had a rope set to steer traffic so they were going up the stairs single file,” said parent Mark Stolar.

While the random scanning raids, carried out by a special branch of the NYPD, have been continuous in the public schools since the mayor implemented his ban, most don't get the type of coverage this one did. Earlier this year we reprinted a NY Civil Liberties Union account of strong arm tactics employed in a Bronx school.

The rough justice meted out to our children under the mayor's orders contrasts sharply with how the issue is addressed in the types of private schools the mayor's own children attended. A story in the NY Sun about smart phone use in Manhattan private schools included this account:

With his new BlackBerry, a junior at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side, Matthew Ressler, said he plans to keep track of his homework assignments, exam dates, basketball practices, and volunteer activities. "I think it will keep me better organized, and I won't have as many missed appointments," Matthew, 17, said of the device, a recent birthday gift from his mother. "It's really like you're organizing a professional career."

Click here for the full article, including the latest on what models are most popular and how one school supports downloads of the school calendar especially formatted for personal digital assistants.

Our demands are a bit more modest. All public school parent want is for our children to use their phones before and after school -- on their long commutes to/from school, activities and work. Is it so important for the mayor and chancellor to deny families this freedom? The reality is that the vast wealth of the men who control the public school system blinds them to the needs of ordinary people.

Diane Ravitch: Another Look at the 2007 ELA scores

Jonathan posted a good question in his comment. He said that he was more interested in the year-to-year changes of the same cohort (value-added), rather than comparisons of the fourth grade to the fourth grade.

This is not difficult to do, and the annual testing of students in grades 3-8, which started in 2006 in response to the requirements of NCLB, makes it feasible to compare the performance of the same cohort of students as they advance through the grades.

*In grade 4, 56.0% met the state standards in 2007 (levels 3 & 4); a year earlier, 61.5% of the same cohort met the standards, a drop of 5.5 points.
*In grade 5, 56.1% met the standards; a year earlier, 58.9% of the same group met them, a drop of 2.8 points.
*In grade 6, 49.7% met the standards; a year earlier 56.7% of this group met them, a drop of 7 points.
*In grade 7, 45.5% met the standards, compared to 48.6% who met them in 2006, a drop of 3.1 points.
*In grade 8, 41.8% met the standards in 2007, compared to 44.2% of the same group in 2006, a drop of 2.4 points

The data also permit us to look at the eighth grade cohort longitudinally. The group of students who are now in eighth grade were in fourth grade in 2003. In 2007, 41.8% of this group met the standards; in 2003, when these children were fourth graders, 52.5% met the state standards, a drop of 10.8 points.

Considering the score changes from the perspective of "value-added," the steady decline in test scores is even more alarming than the comparison of grade-to-grade, because there are no gains at all.

These year-to-year comparisons for the same grades suggest that progress has been sluggish at best. After five years of mayoral control and four years of the Children First "reforms," test scores decline steadily for each cohort.

Now the Chancellor promises to add new tests, with the expectation that more testing means more learning. This is not good news. Testing is not a substitute for a sound curriculum and effective instruction.

Diane Ravitch

Bob Herbert: "Cruel madness" in our schools

Bob Herbert has a column in today’s New York Times about the overwhelming and often abusive presence of police in the NYC public schools – based on the devastating NYCLU/ACLU report called "Criminalizing the Classroom" that we excerpted on our blog here.

I have posted Bob's column here, for those who do not subscribe to the NY Times. It ends this way:

“There is no excuse whatever for this systematic mistreatment of New York City students. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is in charge of the school system, and he and Commissioner Ray Kelly run the Police Department. Parents across the city should demand that they step in and bring this cruel madness to an end.”

Unfortunately, when this report came out back in March, not a single major NYC newspaper covered it. Bob used to write regularly about our public schools – including several columns on the problem of class size in NYC schools-- which continues unabated. Let’s hope he’s back on the beat.

If you'd like to send a message to the Mayor and/or Chancellor, the NYCLU has a sample letter here.

Diane Ravitch: ELA scores no cause for celebration

The recent release of English Language Arts scores for grades 3-8 by the New York State Education Department was treated as a cause for celebration by the New York City Department of Education. Chancellor Joel Klein said that the scores showed that "the system is clearly moving forward."

Actually, the news was not all that positive. None of it was terrible, but the scores were mainly flat or declining. Overall, in grades 3-8, 50.8% met the state standards. This represented an increase of one-tenth of 1% over the scores in 2006, when 50.7% met the standards.

*In grade 3, the scores dropped by 5 points, from 61.5% in 2006 to 56.4% in 2007.

*In grade 4, they dropped nearly 3 points, from 58.9% in 2006 to 56.0% in 2007.

*In grade 5, they dropped by .6, about half a point, from 56.7% in 2006 to 56.1% in 2007.

*In grade 6, they increased by 1 point, from 48.6% in 2006 to 49.7% in 2007.

*In grade 7, they increased by a tad more than a point, from 44.2% in 2006 to 45.5%.

*In grade 8, they increased by 5.2 points, from 36.6% in 2006 to 41.8% in 2007.

The big news, according to the Department of Education spinmeisters, was not that scores in grades 3-7 were either declining or flat, but that scores in eighth grade were up significantly. They downplayed the curious fact that eighth grade scores were up across the state by 7.7 points, from 49.3% to 57%.

Nassau County eighth grade scores jumped from 69.8% to 77.4%, nearly eight points. Suffolk County saw a gain in this grade of 9.3 points, from 61.1% to 70.4%. In the troubled Roosevelt, Long Island, district, under state control for the past five years, eighth grade scores leapt by an astonishing 22 points.

Gains of this consistency in district after district suggest to testing experts that the test for the eighth grade was decidedly easier than in years past.

The grade that is most interesting to contemplate in the latest test results is fourth grade, because the state has reported fourth grade scores continuously since 1999. (In grades other than four and eight, scores are available only for 2006 and 2007.) Furthermore, these are children who started school under the current regime of mayoral control.

This is the grade that is the true testing ground of mayoral control. Recall that the Children First agenda was first implemented in the schools in September 2003. When Children First began, 52.5% of the fourth graders met state standards. As of the latest ELA scores, 56% met state standards.

Thus, after four years of Children First, reading scores in the fourth grade are up by a total of 3.5 points. In the five years before the initiation of the Bloomberg-Klein regime, reading scores in fourth grade increased from 32.7% to 52.5%, an increase of 19.8 points.

This may explain why the Chancellor and Mayor have reorganized the schools yet again, why they are continually in search of new assessment tools, and why they are planning to offer cash and pizzas for higher test scores. In four years under their control, the schools have not shown dramatic achievement. In fact, their record does not match what was accomplished in the previous four years under Chancellor Rudy Crew and Chancellor Harold O. Levy.

Unfortunately, achievement has actually stalled under the current regime.

Diane Ravitch

For more on the ELA results, see this NY Sun oped by Fred Smith. He points out that while Tweed is attributing the relatively flat results to greater numbers of ELL students included this year, in 2005 they glossed over the fact that a large part of that year's gains were due to fewer ELL students being tested, as well as large numbers of low-scoring Hispanic and black 3rd graders who had been held back.

(Also see the SED website for the recent test results, as well as this pdf file from DOE, including some extremely confusing charts.)

CHANCELLOR KLEIN URGED TO ENTER REHAB FOR OBSESSIVE REORGANIZATION DISORDER

May 31, 2007 (Gadfly News): According to an anonymous source at the NYC Department of Education, a group of Tweed staffers today requested a meeting with Chancellor Joel I. Klein at which they suggested that he get help for two behaviors they consider to be obsessive – adding testing dates for NYC students and overhauling the structure of the school system. “We kind of had an intervention,” reported the source. “There were ten of us in on it. We sort of told him Joel that we needed to meet with him about something else entirely – the low response rate on the parent surveys – so he was all keen to talk to us. Then we just closed the door and laid it on the line.”

According to the source, the group of ten had been planning the intervention for the past few months. “There was an elephant in the living room, that our chancellor has a problem,” said the source. “But no one was acknowledging it in any way.” The source reported that he himself had started attending a 12-step support group on his lunch hour, “because Joel’s behavior was affecting me – not to mention our city’s students and schools.” The first time the staffer attended a meeting, he saw co-workers there. “It was an Al-Anon meeting, so I figured they were there for alcoholic spouses or something," he said. "But then one of them started to share about his ‘boss,’ and I broke down crying. Finally, someone was confirming, ‘Yes, there is a problem here. The guy just can’t stop.’”

Before the group confronted the chancellor, they made a list of behaviors they thought demonstrated the problem. “There were warning signs all along,” said the staffer. “Like the 37 and a half minutes. The year he instituted that, it was in February, the middle of the school year. That was crazy, and we told him so at the time. All the schools, all the families, already had their schedules set. But then he did the same thing again this year, changing all the bus routes around – in winter! We want to show Joel that there’s a pattern to his behavior, that it’s become irrational.”

The list the group presented to the chancellor was extensive, according to the source. “We just went through and documented everything. On such and such a date, you reorganized the districts into regions. On such and such a date, you then dismantled the regions. And with the tests, too. We documented every single time he had added a new test.”

Asked how Chancellor Klein reacted to the intervention, the source sighed. “Not well,” he said. “He started screaming, totally wildly, that this would affect our grade. Someone put in an emergency call to the mayor because we thought he would help us. But when Mike arrived, he sided with Joel. He might as well have just said, ‘What elephant? Where?’” The source reported that Mayor Bloomberg accused the group of ten of being unduly influenced “by a small group of naysayers, that segment of the city that is always resistant to change.”

Though the intervention did not turn out as planned, the source reported that he has hope. “The guy has got to hit his bottom soon,” he said. "I mean, doesn't he?" The interview ended when the source excused himself to attend another Al-Anon meeting. “My chancellor has become unmanageable,” he said. “But I have to remind myself: I didn’t cause it, I can’t control it, and I can’t cure it.”

Chancellor threatens principals for poor survey response

Word is the response rate on the parent survey is so low that DOE will extend the deadline once again. They are now openly threatening principals that if they don't get parents to return them in greater numbers this may count against their schools in their grades, which in turn could put their jobs at risk. In turn, principals are begging parents to fill in their surveys and send them back.

Here’s part of a desperate email that went out to parents at one school today:

“Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has informed all principals that the surveys "are so vital that I have instructed the Office of Accountability to count low response rates in a school's Progress Reports".

Tweed puts together a lousy survey, they have almost no communication skills, they do little outreach except a terrible ad, they have alienated parents for six years and continue to ignore our views about the changes we'd like made in our schools – so now they will punish our principals for a low response rate?

Where's the accountability? When are the Chancellor and his inner circle going to recognize that it's not adult to blame everyone else for their own mistakes?

I bet if they had asked about issues that parents care about -- class size , testing, and the quality of leadership at the top, while offering just a hint of evidence that they actually care about what we think, rather than simply engaging in yet another empty exercise in PR, a lot more of us would have bothered to complete the surveys and send them back.

Big Joel is Watching

May 31, 2007 (GBN News): The NY City Department of Education announced today what Chancellor Joel Klein called a “revolutionary new testing program”. Saying that the previous program, “Perpetual Testing”, was a “vestige of the past”, the Chancellor touted the new plan, which is to be termed, “Total Testing”. The program will make use of a new IBM supercomputer called ARIS II. Mr. Klein said that ARIS II is so powerful that it beat the original ARIS a thousand straight times in both chess and backgammon. Calling ARIS a “dinosaur” which has “long been in need of replacement”, the Chancellor said that the DOE has been working day and night with IBM to develop the new computer, for which the Department will pay $180,000,000.

Chancellor Klein criticized the old “Perpetual Testing” program, which had not yet been implemented, saying that its scope was limited to the school day. While “Perpetual Testing” would have tested virtually every aspect of the school day, with “Total Testing”, students will carry a computer chip, linked to ARIS II, which will constantly monitor their progress both in and out of school. This way, the Chancellor said, even homework can be evaluated as it is done, and teachers can sit in the comfort of their own homes in the evening and monitor their students’ progress in “real time”.

Critics immediately branded the “Total Testing” program “Totalitarian Testing”, but Mr. Klein dismissed the criticism as coming from “the usual defenders of the status quo”. He also ridiculed rumors that the computer chips will be implanted in children’s heads. Saying that the DOE would never do anything that intrusive, the Chancellor said that children will instead wear the chips on hospital type bracelets, which will be cut off upon graduation.

In a related story, after nearly 120 years in the game business, Parker Brothers had to close its doors today after its entire game development staff was institutionalized due to the stress of keeping the game “Children First: A Game of Irony” up to date. The game, based on the NY City school system, has been wildly popular, but the changes at the DOE were just too much for the developers to keep up with. Upon hearing of their fate, IBM immediately offered jobs to the entire Parker Brothers staff to work on the development of its “next generation” computer, ARIS III, which is slated to be ready for use by the DOE by the beginning of summer school. The DOE Public Relations department is rumored to already be preparing the Chancellor’s statement blasting the “outdated” ARIS II computer and its associated “Total Testing” program.

more testing=more learning, according to the Chancellor

As our blog discussed more than a week ago, DOE announced that McGraw Hill will provide the new periodic assessments -- the same company that came up with the infamous Brownie the Cow.

According to the DOE, schools must give five assessments per year in grades 3-8 and four in High School in ELA and Math. More subjects will come later.

These tests will cost $80 million over five years and are separate from the state tests that are already required in grades 3-8. This, plus the cost of the ARIS supercomputer (another $80 million) could have paid for a whole lot of smaller classes. According to the New York Times,

“…few major cities administer standardized tests as frequently as five times a year, several education experts said, and the move instantly drew criticism from the array of groups that have mobilized against the growing reliance on standardized tests that has accompanied the No Child Left Behind law.

“It’s certainly more than any other city than I know of,” said Monty Neill, an executive director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing in Boston, which is skeptical of standardized testing. “We’ve reduced schooling to preparing for bubble tests.”

Randi Weingarten, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said in an interview that many teachers say they already spend at least one day a week preparing for standardized tests. “Our issue is, how much teaching time is this eating up?” she said. “You’re spending a lot of time doing test prep and doing paperwork associated with test prep instead of teaching.”

What’s the justification?

“I don’t think it means more pressure,” Mr. Klein said. “I think it means more learning.”

When did more testing become more learning? In the jargon of the Accountability office, more test results supposedly allows for more “differentiated” instruction “ which will lead to more learning.

Yet the smaller classes that would really make individualized instruction more possible are not considered. Instead, DOE has omitted the crucial step of improving classroom conditions – because mandating more testing will somehow substitute for everything else.

Apparently DOE could find only one principal in support of the new assessments: Elmer Myers, of PS/MS 194 in the Bronx. He is quoted in both the Daily News and NY1.

"This gives much more specificity from what I've seen for far, than what we've had in the past,” said Elmer Myers, a Bronx school principal. “We'll be able to take that information, sit down as a professional development team, and design ways we can improve instruction in a classroom."

According to Insideschools, Meyers is a new principal this year. The school’s report card shows that 14% of the students at PS/IS 89 are black, 64% Hispanic, 17% Asian, and 93% are eligible for free lunch.

According to the DOE, class sizes at the school range from 24.6 students in Kindergarten to 31.7 students per class in 4th grade. Sixth to eighth grade classes range from 27.4 to 29.8 students, with each middle school teacher usually responsible for five classes.

That means every middle school teacher has about 150 students, with charts to be analyzed for each class in different eye-glazing, color-coded categories five times a year. (See p.19 of this pdf file for an example of a class of only 17 students.)

Then, the revealed weaknesses of each of these 150 students will somehow addressed – that is, if the results are meaningful at all, which they won’t be, according to many testing experts and the record of the previous version from Princeton Review. And, of course, this will also depends on there being sufficient time in class to do so, along with all that test-taking.

Good luck to Mr. Myers, his teachers and most of all, the students at this school.

(For more information on the periodic assessments, see the DOE website here.)

The real priorities of this administration are now clear

from Dorothy Giglio, long-time parent leader and President of Region 6, High School Presidents Council:

I have just received my 3rd or 4th robo call about turning in the parent survey. I lost count. If they put that much effort into advising principals that their School Leadership Team has to have consensus, or that Parent Associations have to be part of the school budget decisions, then maybe the system would be working without parents constantly on the offensive. I would even be pleased if they sent out that many notices to attend parent-teacher conferences.

Well we know where the priorities are. Between the $ 80 million dollars going to the interim assessments, and another $80 million for the supercomputer ARIS, with top level salaries totaling in the millions, and who knows what other wasteful contracts there are, we can now see where the Campaign for Fiscal Equity money will go. We fought so hard and yet I predicted that if the state did not put rules on the use of these funds this would happen -- and sadly once again I was correct.

Instead, the money could put toward more Art, Music, Drama, Science (not just test prep but real learning) ; a really solid enrichment program (as we had in my district until the regions took over) which includes off site visits to museums, with classroom instruction before and after.

This type of enrichment could have been expanded to more children. Also, the creation of some programs for those kids that will never be able to get a Regents diploma and have no desire to go to college -- so they can use the talents they do have and get a diploma, instead of becoming a drop out statistic (or non-statistic with all the manipulation of the data.) They could get some form of job training that can afford them real opportunities in life thus building a real future for them.

I will say, however, on behalf of lower class size, I have had three sons go through the system. The youngest is a junior in high school; the other two have graduated college and in every, every instance when they were lucky enough to have a class of 25 or less, especially in Junior High school or high school, they did extraordinarily better than when their classes were 30 or more.

Even in college, my older ones have said that they did so much better in college because they had classes of 10. Teachers can get to know their students, their strengths and weaknesses. Students can build a rapport with the teacher. More than any other single change, lowering the class sizes, notwithstanding a good teacher, a mediocre teacher, a new teacher, a seasoned teacher, would raise the level of education for each child.

"Revolutionary" changes to alternative schools?

In a move called "revolutionary", Tweed announced the closing of two types of alternative schools. The first are the "P-Schools," schools for pregnant girls established in the 1960's. Eliminating these schools, which had been criticized for years as being unnecessarily stigmatizing and not providing the credits needed to graduate, was far from "revolutionary" -- instead it was long overdue.

In 2000, a NYCLU letter complained that pregnant girls were often illegally forced to transfer to these schools, which offered a substandard education. In 2003, Comptroller Thompson released a report revealing that only a small fraction of teenage mothers and pregnant girls in NYC received the necessary services to help them remain in school -- including child care.

Beth Fertig of WNYC did an expose of the pregnancy schools in 2004 -- and still nothing was done to improve or eliminate them. Even now, as pointed out by the NYCLU, there is little in the DOE press release about the closing of these schools about what will be offered in their place:

"The plan to close the 'pregnancy schools' must be accompanied by an aggressive strategy to change the culture hostile to pregnant and parenting students -- and a comprehensive plan to build active support systems that will help them stay in or return to regular schools. "

The other type of alternative schools to be phased out are the "New Beginning" centers, where high school students with a history of minor behavior problems or uneven attendance were often transferred. Of course, all of these programs were a godsend to high schools that wanted to get off their rolls any students considered marginal or troublesome.

Unnoticed in any of the articles reporting their elimination was that these centers were first established with great fanfare only four years before. Here is an excerpt from a 2003 press release from the Mayor's office:

The New Beginnings Centers enable the Department of Education to remove these students from the classrooms that they disrupt so that other students may learn there. Once removed, the students are placed in classrooms under the close supervision of an instructor using a specially-designed standards-based curriculum that allows students to earn credits towards Regents exams. Students are also provided with integrated guidance and supportive services.

A 2004 New York Times article featured an interview with Chancellor Klein, bragging about this particular reform:

Mr. Klein...praised the New Beginnings centers, 16 mini-schools for disruptive (but not extremely violent) high school students. The high schools that send students to the centers say they are also pleased with the program. As a result, four more centers are being created this spring. But some New Beginnings staff members say the program, like much else about the overhauled school system, is still getting its footing. Some sites have been sent students they are unprepared to handle, like violent or special education students.

Only this administration would claim "revolutionary" credit for getting rid of a failed program that had been created under its leadership, as well as schools for pregnant girls which lasted far longer than could be justified.

Still remaining, unfortunately, are the SOS suspension centers that the DOE has placed in the basements of community or drug treatment clinics, which provide little in the way of either education and/or counseling. The continued existence of the SOS schools continues to be a major scandal waiting to be told.

(For more on the dreadful legacy of the Pregnancy schools, see the 2006 NYCLU testimony to the Citywide Council on High Schools here.)

Controversy Over Bloomberg Survey For Public School Parents Continues

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

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

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

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

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

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