Sign a letter now and let the State know how you feel!

The city released their class size reduction proposal last week. Despite calling it a five year plan, as the state requires, it is anything but.

Accordingly, the Mayor and the Department of Education ignored the pleas of parents from all parts of the city -- including the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island, and Queens -- who begged them them to revise this flimsy proposal and instead submit a real plan that will lead to measurable progress in class size. Instead, a small group of schools will receive "targeted" class size coaching -- without an actual commitment that any school will actually reduce class size to appropriate levels.

This week the Mayor traveled to St. Louis, and in a speech to the Urban League said that elected officials who respond to parents' legitimate concerns to have their children provided with the same sort of class sizes and attention that Bloomberg's own daughters received are merely offering "cheap platitudes and slogans instead of real solutions."

Please sign on this letter to Commissioner Mills of the NY State Education Dept., urging him to reject the city's proposal, and make the DOE offer a real solution to our class size crisis. Just send your name, school and/or other organizational affiliation to leonie@att.net with a copy to Ann Kjellberg at kjellzer@pipeline.com by Aug. 6 -- the day before the state deadline for comment.

Then please resend the message -- with any edits or details about your child's situation that you'd like -- directly to SED at emscsom@mail.nysed.gov, signed with your name and full address, with a copy to your state legislators, as it's important for them to weigh in as well. For their emails, just plug your address and zip here.

Then forward this message to every parent you know who cares about the future of education in this city.

Klein and Aide to Provide Yuks for Next Woody Allen Film

July 25, 2007 (GBN News): Filmmaker Woody Allen announced today that he is hiring Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and Department of Education Spokesperson Dina Paul Parks as consultants for his next movie. Mr. Allen, on the set of his as yet unnamed film, was said to have realized that many moviegoers feel that his films are “not as funny as they used to be”. But when he heard some of the recent statements coming out of the DOE, he was reminded of some of his earlier movies and felt that, with these people as comedy consultants, perhaps he could “capture some of the old magic”.

Mr. Allen felt that the DOE plan to provide outside lockers for cell phones, and to make the lockers transparent so that students could not store drugs or weapons in them, was a “stroke of comedic genius”. He said it reminded him of the scene in “Bananas” where the South American dictator decrees that people change their underwear every day, but that they must wear their underwear on the outside so it can be monitored.

Mr. Allen was also said to be tickled by a statement made by Ms. Parks, the DOE spokeswoman, about a City Council bill prohibiting the DOE from interfering with parents’ right to send their children to school with cell phones for use going to and from school. Ms. Parks was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “The mayor has never said you can’t bring phones to and from school — you just can’t walk into the buildings with them. So I’m really at a loss to see what the legislation adds.” Mr. Allen will be relying on Ms. Parks, as well as Mr. Klein, to come up with similar outlandish statements for the movie.

Mr. Allen has characteristically refused to divulge any details about the new film. However, a source close to Mr. Allen revealed that the film would be a remake of “Bananas”, set in New York, and would feature Mr. Allen as a bumbling character who manages to attain dictatorial control over the city schools. The source said that Mr. Allen felt it would be the “challenge of his career” to portray a more bumbling set of characters than the ones currently running the Department.

Bloomberg Record on Education Attacked by Manhattan Institute Scholar

Last month we highlighted a long article critical of the Bloomberg record on education that ran in the progressive magazine The Nation. This month, City Journal, the journal of the right-leaning Manhattan Institute published an essay by scholar Sol Stern, also highly critical of Michael Bloomberg's record.

What was refreshing in Stern's article was the discussion of "accountability". Public school parents have come to realize that the mayor and chancellor use this word to simply mean more tests for our kids. But what of the accountability of the mayor to answer to the public?

Stirring public unease is the realization that what Bloomberg really meant by accountability was one election, one time. If you didn’t like the way that mayoral control was working under Bloomberg, you could vote for Democrat Freddy Ferrer in the 2005 mayoral election (Bloomberg’s last, because of term limits). But what could you do after that election? Bloomberg’s suggestion: “Boo me at parades.”

The arrogance of that response demonstrates how little Bloomberg really seems to care about accountability. In fact, his Department of Education routinely undermines accountability with a public-relations juggernaut that deflects legitimate criticism of his education policies, dominates the mainstream press, uses the schools as campaign props, and, most ominously, distorts student test-score data. Without transparency, real accountability doesn’t exist.

The article goes on to point out specifically how Chancellor Joel Klein's bloated public relations staff spins test score results. In this passage picking up on arguments made by Diane Ravitch in posts on our blog and the Huffington Post, Stern points out how the Bloomberg administration has deliberately embellished its own record by appropriating test score increases stemming from earlier reforms:

Consider: Bloomberg took office on January 1, 2002, but he didn’t win control of the schools until June 12 of that year. Klein wasn’t appointed until August, and then he spent the rest of the year studying the system and appointing task forces to advise the administration on how to restructure the schools. By the time the chancellor finished studying, students were taking the 2003 fourth-grade reading test. The system was, in effect, operating on autopilot during the year that the students recorded the healthy 5.9 percentage-point improvement.

At the time, Klein knew that he couldn’t convincingly claim credit for the 2003 test scores, and he didn’t even hold a press conference to celebrate them. Four years later, the fourth-grade reading scores have inched up by another 7 percentage points, only half the average yearly increase achieved under the tenures of Chancellors Levy and Rudy Crew. But to avoid that invidious comparison, the mayor and the chancellor simply take the 2003 result and add it to their own column.

While the story may not get covered in the mainstream daily press, this City Journal article, like the earlier one in The Nation, reveal how much of what constitutes news about education in New York City is merely the narrative scripted by the administration's press office. An office that Stern claims has 29 people (DOE says no, only 14). Either way, that's enough people to staff an elementary school, which would certainly be a better use of our tax dollars.

Panel for Educational Policy Votes on DoE's Contract for Excellence

New York City's Panel for Educational Policy met Monday night and reviewed the DoE's plan for the Contract for Excellence. The contract is the formal plan required to by state law to be filed with the state education department (SED) in order for NYC to receive additional funding due to the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit.

From my perspective as the panel representative of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, the DoE proposal is deeply flawed and is essentially a repackaging of what they had always intended to do. Testimony I gave on behalf of the Borough President last week is here and you can see what others said here. During Monday's meeting, I focused my questions on the specific areas where the plan violates either the law creating the contracts or the SED regulations specifying the content of the contracts.

First, the law requires the class size reduction plan to be focused on "overcrowded and low performing" schools. The DoE plan uses their Fair Student Funding formula to allocate funds. This approach considers neither overcrowding nor school performance. Second, there is no alignment of the capital plan with the money being given to schools to reduce class size. In many cases principals are getting more money but don't have space to add classes. Despite the fact that this alignment is required under the state regulations, DoE has been quite clear in saying there is no construction funding to reduce class sizes below the limits of the contract with the teachers union. Third, the DoE proposal directs large sums of money for testing, assessments and coaching school staff on interpreting tests. This spending is not an allowed use of state funds under the regulations.

While a vote was not scheduled and the Law Department insisted one was not required, I made a motion to hold a vote. As the oversight board for the city's school system, we have the responsibility under state law for reviewing and approving major policy decisions. Chancellor Klein allowed the vote, with the plan getting approved. I voted against it, the Queens representative, Michael Flowers abstained and everyone else-- the mayor's appointees and representatives of the Bronx and Staten Island approved it.

If you have a minute, watch this video of the proceedings filmed by District 1 parent Noel Bush. It is certainly a disappointing performance given the importance of the topic, the final resolution of a fourteen year fight for the funding city kids are owed under the constitution.

On a Serious Note: A GBN News Cautionary Tale

(Ed. Note): Recent news reports of an al-Qaeda resurgence are a chilling reminder of the realities we face as parents in New York City. We are reminded of how powerless we feel against forces that we cannot control, and of the difficulties we face in protecting our children. How ironic, then, that some of the forces we cannot control turn out to be our own Mayor and schools Chancellor, whose school cell phone ban not only rejects the wishes of the vast majority of parents and educators, but puts our children’s safety at risk in this age of terrorism. GBN usually tries to do humorous news parodies, but the following look ahead is deadly serious, and unfortunately all too plausible. Our apologies for the graphic and disturbing nature of this piece. But if only the Mayor and Chancellor, or someone close to them, would read this, maybe seeing these possibilities laid out in black and white would shake them up just a bit. Maybe they would even consider changing this ill-advised and dangerous policy. But then again, why should they? It’s not their children who are at risk.

A winter day, early 2008 (GBN News): Three days after the worst terror attack since 9/11, this time in the dead of winter, there is increasing concern about the fate of a number of missing New York City public school students. Despite the near total shutdown of the city’s transportation system in the first two days after the attack, most people seem to have been able to find their way back to their homes or to other shelters. Many made use of their cell phones to help direct them away from danger, coordinate assistance, and to reassure loved ones of their safety. However, some city students, denied the right to possess cell phones by a strict Department of Education policy, have not been heard from since the blast.

Several distraught parents, unable to get any information from the police, have contacted news organizations. One high school parent, whose daughter travels to school by subway between Manhattan and the Bronx, said that her daughter’s cell phone had been confiscated the day before the attack in a random scan. The parents had considered keeping her home from school until they were sure the metal detectors were gone, but were afraid that she would miss important test preparation with the high stakes tests coming up. The parent said that her daughter, a ninth grader, is unfamiliar with the city streets and, without transit running and with no way to call her parents, probably got lost wandering around in the sub freezing temperatures.

The parent of an eighth grader said that his daughter had actually managed to reach an out of town “contact person” after waiting two hours for one of the few working pay phones, but was unable to leave a call back number since the pay phone was constantly busy. The contact person was finally able to relay the girl’s location to the parents, but when they finally got to the pay phone location hours later, the daughter was gone, and has not been heard from since.

A few of the missing students were from a Manhattan high school a short distance from the terrorist blast. This school was one of those designated for experimental “outside lockers” where children could lock their phones up before coming into school. However, the school grounds were evacuated in such haste, and the smoke was so thick, that students did not have time to retrieve their phones as they fled in all directions. A parent of one of those children said that he was afraid his son might have wandered further into the danger zone. Had his son been able to call, the father said, he could perhaps have directed him safely out of the area.

One child who did eventually make it home told a horrifying story. She had been taken in by ostensibly “Good Samaritans” who offered her a refuge from the cold weather, but they proceeded to steal her money and threatened her life if she told anyone. The child then wandered the streets in a daze until she happened upon a police officer.

The police confirmed that they are getting a number of missing children reports, but they have been too overwhelmed with securing the city to appropriately follow up. A senior Police Department official, in apparent contradiction to the Mayor’s policy, acknowledged that had the city’s schoolchildren been able to carry cell phones, many more would have gotten safely home, and much anguish would have been avoided. Moreover, he said the 911 system, already overloaded in the hours after the attack, was further burdened by parents attempting to find their children. In retrospect, he admitted that children, as our most vulnerable citizens, should have had at least the same essential safety tools as adults.

Besides the missing, there have been a number of other serious situations involving school children. One Brooklyn High school had a near riot and school security agents were overwhelmed when hundreds of students fought over the school’s only two pay phones. And some parents whose children finally did make it home reported that their children were traumatized and frost bitten, and some are afraid to go back to school on their own. Others heard from hospitals that their children were being treated for exposure, having spent hours outside trying to find their way home, many walking miles in the cold.

Mayor Bloomberg, at a City Hall news conference, dismissed the parents’ concerns and insisted that the missing children “probably just stopped off for pizza somewhere”. The Mayor added, “We’re not changing our cell phone policy, schools are for learning, thank you very much, next question.”

DOE Plays Key Role in Latest Potter Book

Friday, July 13, 2007 (GBN News): Given the intense interest in the upcoming Harry Potter book, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”, GBN News has been able to secure an advance copy, making us the only news organization known to obtain one thus far. The following is a brief rundown of the plot, which surprisingly, revolves around characters familiar to New York City parents. However, readers who do not wish to know any details of the new book before reading it themselves are hereby warned not to read any further.

As Potter fans know, the previous book, “Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince”, saw Harry watching in horror as Professor Snape kills the Headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Wizardry and Witchcraft, Albus Dumbledore. In the new book we learn that in a secret plot engineered by the evil wizard, Lord Voldemort, the New York City Department of Education had taken over Hogwarts months before Dumbledore’s killing. It turns out that Snape was simply carrying out the DOE policy of removing “underperforming headmasters”, after the Hogwarts students showed “insufficient progress” on their “OWL” exams.

Much of the book revolves around the DOE reorganization of Hogwarts after Dumbledore’s departure, and the attempts by Harry, the other students, and the staff to cope with the massive changes. Class sizes rise, and the school’s young wizards and witches spend most of their waking hours in test prep. The DOE bans owls, thereby cutting off any student communication with their parents in an emergency. Worst of all, the entire Quidditch season has to be cancelled because the Quidditch pitch is leased to a consortium of private schools of wizardry and witchcraft, and the Hogwarts students are no longer allowed to use it for their matches. And even if they had a field, there is a shortage of brooms due to transportation cuts by the DOE consultants Alvarez and Marsal.

In the book’s climactic scene, a visit to Hogwarts by Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein so traumatizes the students and staff that they beg for mercy, saying that anything would be better than this, even Voldemort. Harry and his friends finally make a deal with Voldemort: they will not challenge his primacy in the Wizarding world in return for his promise to keep Bloomberg and Klein away from Hogwarts. It is a hard lesson in “the lesser of evils”, and somewhat telling that the students choose Voldemort over Bloomberg and Klein. While the rumors that Harry dies in this book may not be literally true, his interest in education and his thirst for knowledge die a painful death at the hands of the DOE.

Parents, teachers, students and elected officials criticize DoE's contract for excellence, class size reduction proposal

Many parents, teachers, and elected officials spoke out this week at public hearings on the Bloomberg administration's "Contract for Excellence." A submission of this Contract, including a class size reduction plan, is required by the state in order to receive additional state funding due to the settlement of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity Lawsuit.

Comments were limited to two minutes. We've collected some prepared statements below:

Assembly Member Cathy Nolan, Chair of the NY State Assembly Education Committee here.

Council Member Robert Jackson, Chair of the NYC Council Education and the original CFE plaintiff here.

Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters and a public school parent here.

John Elfrank-Dana, Teacher and UFT Chapter Leader, Murray Bergtraum High School here.

Seth Pearce, New York Student Union here.

Patrick Sullivan, Manhattan member of the Panel for Educational Policy here.

Ann Kjellberg, parent at PS 41 in District 2 here.

Noreen Connell, Educational Priorities Panel, here

UPDATE:

Read the testimony of teachers, parents and other concerned citizens at the borough hearings -- very compelling! in pdf form: Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island.

UFT President Randi Weingarten, here

Jo Anne Simon, President-elect, New York Branch - International Dyslexia Association here

Concerns on NYC's Contract for Excellence

Department of Education leaders held a hearing Wednesday night to collect public comment on their proposed Contract for Excellence. As the Manhattan member of the Panel for Educational Policy, I presented the following testimony on behalf of Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer:

I understand that the success of our school system has been and continues to be the top priority of the Mayor and Chancellor. While I share in the excitement about the pending arrival of this vital new state funding, I have serious concerns about the current Contract for Excellence.

First, I would like to discuss the serious flaws in this process. In order to account for the Campaign for Equity (CFE) lawsuit funds issued by the state, the New York City Department of Education (DOE) must submit a Contract for Excellence plan. Holding hearings in the middle of school summer break, with little outreach, one week before the plan is submitted to the State Education Department is not sufficient time to digest and respond to the public's concerns. I urge the Department of Education to seriously address the issues brought before them today and act to amend the plan before its submission.

In addition, this plan should come before the Panel on Educational Policy (PEP) for a vote. The PEP is specifically charged with the responsibility to "consider and approve any other standards, policies, objectives, and regulations as specifically authorized or required by state or federal law or regulation (NYS Education Law § 2590-g (1)(b))." As the Contract for Excellence plan submission has been mandated by state law, it is required to come before the PEP for approval. It is imperative the PEP functions properly as a part of the Department of Education government structure.

Outside of this poor process, there are serious issues regarding the Fair Student Funding formula and class size reduction as laid out in the plan. One true weakness of the plan is its reliance on an unproven funding mechanism. The Contracts for Excellence were supposed to focus on students with the greatest educational need. An original finding of the CFE judgment was that the city's schools were deficient in class size, retention of teachers and instrumentalities of learning. While Fair Student Funding will place new money as well as decision-making authority into some schools, it does nothing for about half of the city's schools. In Manhattan Districts 4 (East Harlem) and 5 (Central Harlem) the proportion is actually much higher -- 2 of 3 schools are considered "unfairly over-funded" by DOE. For these students, the DOE offers simply "accountability" - more testing - yet no substantive educational programs. Fair Student Funding is a new and unproven approach to budgeting. Its effects are still unclear and poorly understood. Reliance on it for allocating the new state money is inappropriate. There must be a more tangible dividend from Campaign for Fiscal Equity for all our schools.

In place of tangible benefits, the DOE offers "accountability initiatives" such as the McGraw Hill contract for interim tests, new staff positions called Senior Achievement Facilitators, Data Inquiry Teams and the like. Excessive standardized testing, supercomputers and bureaucratic staff positions will not help teachers provide differentiated instruction as DOE claims. Our teachers need smaller classes to better focus on the needs of each student.

The law requires class size reduction to specifically target "low performing and overcrowded schools." In drafting the law, the state legislature reflected common sense - resolve overcrowding by focusing on the weakest schools first. The DoE's allocation formula, Fair Student Funding (FSF), considers neither overcrowding nor poor performance in determining the allocation of funds to schools. While the state has identified 382 city schools in need of improvement or restructuring, 47% of the identified schools will not receive new funding under the FSF and therefore will have no class size reduction plan.

Most important, the plan offers no alignment of physical capacity or capital budget for new seats with the class size reduction plan. Principals may be given more funds under FSF but in most cases will not have space to add classes. DOE has provided a document purporting to show alignment of the capital budget with class size reduction but there is nothing more than "placeholders" of number of seats plugged in at the district level and no investment to reduce class size beyond the third grade.

The absence of a coherent plan demonstrates a lack of willingness to be held accountable for overcrowding. No one wants the mayor and chancellor to fail in their efforts to improve our schools. However, if they continue their refusal to plan for and spend new state funding as intended, the state must hold them accountable.

The city's class size reduction proposal; smaller by 1/3 of a child?

Yesterday, DOE released its state-mandated proposal for class size reduction.

For news clips about their proposal, and our reaction, see articles in today’s NY Times, the NY Sun, the Daily News, and the SI Advance. For the proposal and all the documentation, check out the DOE website here.

As you may remember, the new state law requires the city to submit a five year class size reduction plan for all grades, as part of its “contracts for excellence”. This was a massive battle that we won, with your help, this spring. Yet there is nothing in the documents that DOE released yesterday that even resembles a five year plan.

There are no goals, no benchmarks, no time tables, no specific budgetary allocations, and no provision of space that would ensure that significantly smaller classes in any grade would ever become a reality.

Even as a one year plan, the proposal falls far short of adequate. What the DOE has simply done is aggregate the choices of those principals who have said that they intend to hire extra teachers with their “fair student funding” allocations, out of a menu of five different options. Whether this will ever lead to smaller classes is anyone’s guess.

In the initial years, the state law requires that the city’s efforts to reduce class size should be focused first on low-performing and overcrowded schools. Yet our analysis shows that 47% of all city schools on the state failing list will receive no FSF funds at all – and thus the principals of these schools were provided with no real option to reduce class size. (For more on this, click here.)

Most of the other low-performing high schools in the city are severely overcrowded, without sufficient space to reduce class size. In fact, DOE’s own figures show that more than half of failing schools with very large class sizes (in the top quartile) are currently at 100% utilization or more.

Accordingly, the state law not only requires a five year class size reduction plan for smaller classes in all grades, but also that the city’s capital plan for schools be aligned with their class size plan, so that in future years, there will be sufficient space for smaller classes in all schools. Yet the city’s capital plan only provides enough space for smaller classes in K-3, and assumes maximum class sizes in all other grades.

The DOE has not reported how many additional general education classes will be formed with the FSF allocations; thus it is difficult to predict whether their plan will even lead to smaller classes anywhere. They have said that they “project” smaller classes as a result, of about .3-.8 students per class on average – yes, that’s 1/3 to 4/5 of a student. (see above photo for a visualization)

Yet this amount is so minimal, and the class size data that DOE reports is so error-prone that this will be difficult to even track.

Moreover, enrollment is still falling i by about 1.5% per year. Thus, much of this decline would occur in any case, without any concerted effort to reduce class size, which we see no evidence of in this case.

There are many other problems with their “contracts”. For example, DOE claims that their $40 million accountability initiative should be paid for under the contracts, including $17 million for the interim assessments, even though this falls under none of the categories set out in the regulations. They also claim that the assessments, in which students will be tested an additional five times in English and math starting next year, will create more instructional time rather than subtract from it.

So what can we do?

1. Robert Jackson, original CFE plaintiff and chair of the City Council Education committee is holding a press conference on Sunday, to express his views about whether this proposal is an adequate solution to the problem of class size in our schools, the issues he raised in the CFE case, and whether it complies with the state law. Please come and bring your kids! Encourage your elected representatives to attend as well. Signs are welcome, as would be any visual that shows how paltry a mere one third of a child reduction in class size really is. (What portion of your child would you leave out? An arm, a leg – god forbid, a head?)

WHO: Education Chair Robert Jackson, Class Size Matters, Educational Priorities Panel (EPP), Parent to Parent, Alliance for Quality Education (AQE), and other education advocates and elected officials; parents are invited!

WHERE: City Hall Steps

WHEN: Sunday, July 8, 2007

TIME: 11:30 am

2. All parents, teachers and others who care about the future of education in this city really should come and testify at the borough hearings next week; the meeting times and places are below. Transcripts will be taken of your remarks and sent to the State Education Commissioner to read when he is considering whether the city’s proposal (let’s not call it a plan) is acceptable.

3. Take a look at the talking points posted here: The DOE is very clever, in trying to package this as a real class size reduction plan, though as I said to the press, it is more of game of 52 pick up. Throw the cards in the air and see where they land. From all indications we have from past experience, we would get no real improvements if it goes forward.

___

Hearings Monday- Thursday of next week in all five boroughs. Come no later than 5:30 PM to sign up to speak; speaking time will be limited to two minutes.

Bronx
Monday, July 9, 2007
6:00 p.m.
Bronx School for Law, Government and Justice
244 East 163rd Street
Bronx, NY 10451

Brooklyn
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
6:00 p.m.
Brooklyn H.S. for the Arts
345 Dean Street
Brooklyn, NY 11217

Manhattan
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
6:00 p.m.
Millennium High School
75 Broad Street
New York, NY 10004

Staten Island
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
6:00 p.m.
Michael J. Petrides H.S.
715 Ocean Terrace,
Staten Island, NY 10301

Queens
Thursday, July 12, 2007
6:00 p.m.
Thomas A. Edison Career & Technical Education H.S.
165-65 84th Avenue
Jamaica, NY 11432

Written comments regarding the Contracts for Excellence will be accepted through July 14, 2007 at: contractsforexcellence@schools.nyc.gov

The Plot Sickens

July 3, 2007 (GBN News): While a decision has reportedly been tabled until fall, the controversy over the selection of a Principal at an East Harlem high school may not be over, and suspicions abound over what has been going on behind the scenes. As reported in the Daily News, one of the two finalists for the Principal position at the Manhattan Center for Mathematics and Science was Jolanta Rohloff, the former Principal of Lafayette High School in Brooklyn and a DOE Leadership Academy graduate. The News reported that the C-30 selection committee at the Manhattan school had not been told details of her stormy tenure at Lafayette, details which included frequent battles with teachers and students, questionable grading practices, and “withholding textbooks from students for weeks to minimize the loss of funds from unreturned books”. Many committee members and other parents had complained that they were kept in the dark about Ms. Rohloff, but after the News story was published, the C-30 committee learned from the Superintendent that the search will be resumed in September after one of the two finalists “accepted another position” and the other “did not clear the reference check”.

The superintendent did not reveal which of the candidates was which, but GBN News has learned that the other finalist for the position had been Emomali Rakhmon, currently chief of school security for the DOE and formerly the President of Tajikistan. Mr. Rakhmon, according to GBN News sources, had been encouraged by Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to apply for the Principal position when he heard that Mr. Rakhmon, like Ms. Rohloff, was a “leadership academy” graduate. However, the resume Mr. Rakhmon submitted to the C-30 committee failed to even mention his stormy tenure as Tajik strongman, where he ruled with an iron fist, banned cell phones and automobiles from universities and decreed that citizens drop the Slavic “ov” from the end of their names. The sanitized resume mentioned only his “high administrative positions” in both Tajikistan and New York, and emphasized his “leadership qualities” and his ability to bring order and discipline to schools in both places.

When reached for comment, Mr. Rakhmon confirmed that he had indeed been the other finalist for the position. He stressed that the Leadership Academy he attended in Tajikistan was, as he put it, “better than Klein’s”. “I know it’s better,” he told GBN News, “because I ran it myself.” He went on to say, “I was top graduate. I got all ‘fours’. Not easy to do in Tajikistan, harder than your ELA.” However, GBN news has learned that Mr. Rakhmon was not just the “top graduate”, he was the only one, and rumors in Tajikistan were that the other academy students had all dropped out after they “did not clear reference checks” or “accepted other positions”.

While Mr. Rakhmon denied any responsibility for the sudden change in the selection process, he is known to be close to Mr. Klein, and committee members voiced suspicion that Mr. Rakhmon could still be in the running for the position. A committee member, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that, “If we really had to choose between them, I suppose the guy is better than Rohloff, but next time we’ll learn a lesson from this, and we’ll be sure to read the NY City Parent Blog at http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/ to get the real story before we accept the choice they give us.

Small schools success?

See articles from the NY Times and NY Post about the Gates-funded small schools boasting of much higher graduation rates than the larger schools that they replaced. A few points omitted or glossed over in these articles:

First of all, these comparisons assume that the students who attended both sets of schools were similar. Yet the independent evaluation done by Policy Studies Associates (in pdf) revealed that the students who were admitted to the small schools in all respects were much more likely to succeed. (This study was suppressed by New Visions until a copy was leaked by a critic to the NY Times in 2005.)

Not only were there far fewer English language learners and special education students among them, two groups with the worst graduation rates in the city, but on average, their students also had higher test scores, higher grades, better attendance, and were far less likely to have been held back than students at the large host schools. For example, only 10% of the students at the small schools scored below basic in their 8th grade ELA exams, compared with 35% at their host schools -- with a similar disparity in math. Moreover, 97% had been promoted in the prior year, compared with only 59% of the students at the host schools.

They had better attendance records in middle school (91% compared to 81%), and were less likely to have been suspended. Only 6% of Bronx NCHS students had IEPs, compared with 25% at the comparison schools; and none of the students at the small schools had the most serious disabilities. Indeed, teachers at the new small schools praised their principals for "recruiting more high-performing students."

The new small schools also had significantly more resources, more space, and much smaller classes than the large schools that they replaced. While class sizes at the larger high schools averaged 30 students or more, class sizes at most of the new small schools were between 13 and 20 students, as the first year PSA evaluation (in pdf) noted.

Students observed that their smaller classes were their most valuable aspect: “they liked the small class sizes, the willingness of teachers to provide extra help…” One student said, “I like the close thing with teachers and that you can discuss your problems with them.” According to another, “I like that it’s small, and we each get attention. There’s not one person who doesn’t get attention from our teachers. And they treat us all the same. In a normal high school, they don’t talk to you when you have a problem. They don’t care.”

I don’t think that it should be any surprise that if you take higher-performing students and give them smaller classes, they will be more likely to graduate on time than lower-achieving students with much larger classes.

Another important point to note that as the small schools take up more space, and exclude so many special ed, ELL, and low-performing students, large schools throughout the city have become even more overcrowded with "at risk" students, undermining their chance of success. Many affected high schools have since been put on the state failing list, including Murray Bergtraum, Washington Irving, Norman Thomas, Jane Adams, etc. etc.

The question is if this is equitable and sustainable, with so many of our large schools destabilized. Sadly, the administration has no strategy to improve these high schools, rather than close them down, exclude the neediest students, and cause more overcrowding and failure elsewhere.

As more than two thirds of our HS students continue to attend large schools, there needs to be some plan in place to increase the capacity of these schools so they can provide their students with some of the same sort of opportunities, including smaller classes.

Unfortunately, no such plan exists.

For more on these issues, see the recent Class Size Matters testimony to the City Council.

Also, Tilden HS teachers fight for their school’s survival. Though the school has one of the few bilingual programs for Haitian students, and a good record of graduating ELL students, the administration is determined to shut it down. Yet it is these very students who will be likely be excluded from the small schools taking Tilden’s place.

Even some of the older generation of small schools face the same fate --- being closed down prematurely so that the administration can establish yet another generation of small schools in its place: see the statement from teachers at the New School for Arts and Sciences, a small high school in the Bronx, that has improved results for its population of about 40% ELL and special ed students.

This just in: see Diane Ravitch's take on the media's unthinking acceptance of the administration's small school spin in Ed Week.

NYC Charter Schools Plagued by Management Woes

The NY Times ran a front page story on a charter school whose wealthy benefactors purged the board of trustees of parents and teachers. According the account, parents at the Beginning With Children School were unhappy:

The move caused an uproar among parents and teachers who said they would be left with no formal say at the school. “My voice is going to be lost,” said Shakema Daise, the mother of a first grader.

The couple that funds the school, Joseph and Carol Reich, demanded the resignations under threat of withdrawing their support for the school. Parents charged that the Reichs were focused excessively on test prep, a charge that has become all too familiar.

Also revealed in the Times story by David Herszenhorn was that the flagship charter school of the Bloomberg Administration, the Ross Global Academy housed in DoE headquarters at the Tweed courthouse, is now on its fourth principal in less than a year. A long New York Magazine story on the Ross School included this disconcerting passage:

By this past November, both the principal and the president at Mrs. Ross’s charter school had quietly vanished. In February, another principal went up in a puff of smoke after just a couple of weeks bobbing around the premises. The “ ‘chaos’ of a school evolving around its students helps them become poised for a world of constant change” is a tenet of Mrs. Ross’s philosophy.

Those kids need a stable environment for learning, not chaos.

Charters have been attractive to some parents, mostly because they are allowed to cap their class sizes, a luxury generally not available to traditional public schools and because they provide the types of enrichment programs cut from public schools. But with a growing record of management problems, like this disaster in the Bronx, people are beginning to realize that charters are not the panacea their supporters make them out to be.

Cheney to Take Over DOE In Secret Deal With Mayor

June 28, 2007 (GBN News): Concerned that Mayoral control of the NY City school system may not be renewed, Mayor Bloomberg has, according to GBN News sources, made a secret deal with Vice President Dick Cheney to put the Department of Education under the authority of the Vice President’s office. The Mayor reportedly offered the deal after learning that the Vice President is apparently able to operate without any accountability whatsoever. Mr. Cheney has claimed that as President of the Senate he is not part of the Executive branch and thus not answerable to its agencies, but yet he has also asserted “executive privilege” to avoid oversight by Congress. While Mayor Bloomberg has claimed a similar sort of freedom of action regarding the schools - he says he is not accountable to the City Council because it is the State that gave him control over the DOE, yet he is not accountable to the State because the DOE is a City agency - he fears that he could lose this legal loophole if Mayoral control sunsets automatically as the law provides.

While the deal would cede titular authority for the DOE to Mr. Cheney, the Vice President would refer operational control back to the Mayor and Chancellor. In return, Mr. Bloomberg would agree that, should he be elected President, he would protect the secrecy of all of Mr. Cheney’s Vice Presidential documents. The sources also told GBN News that the Mayor’s plan is to name current Schools Chancellor Joel Klein as his running mate. This way, if Mr. Bloomberg is elected, Mr. Klein, as Vice President, would continue to run the NY City school system whether or not Mayoral control is renewed. In fact, with the power that he would have, Mr. Klein as Vice President could potentially take over every school system in the country, “reform” them all, and be accountable to no one.

Some analysts think that this purported “plan” is just a ploy to scare critics into renewing Mayoral control, and that the Mayor has no intention of running for President. Others say that Mr. Bloomberg’s real motive is to have Mr. Cheney declare cell phones to be a “tool of terrorists” and use the Patriot Act to enforce the DOE ban on them in schools. Still, should the plan, if true, come to pass, it would consolidate Mr. Bloomberg’s control of the City schools for years to come.

Our independent parent survey; check it out!

Today, we released our independent NYC parent survey online.

It was launched by some of us who volunteered to be part of the DOE focus groups, but were sorely disappointed when so many of the critical issues we brought up were omitted from their official survey.

We then put together our own parent focus group, and enlisted the help of another public school parent who volunteered her time and experience as a professional survey designer to help write the questions in a fair and objective fashion.

The issues addressed in our survey include class size, testing, our schools' strengths and weaknesses, and the leadership and direction of the school system as a whole – none of which were covered in the official DOE survey. It's sponsored by Class Size Matters, with assistance from the National Center for Schools and Communities at Fordham University. A polling company is also administering it by telephone, to ensure the statistical reliability of the responses.

I hope everyone will take just a few minutes to fill it out, now that your memories are still fresh about the year that just ended. Parents who have done so already have said the experience was fun and very fulfilling.

We hope that the results will help the Mayor and Chancellor better understand what areas may still need to be addressed in order to improve our schools and the system as a whole. I encourage all of you to please complete the survey, and then send the link to every other parent that you know!

Here is a press release about our survey; here is a NY1 story about it.

GBN’s Annual “Predict Next Year’s Education News” Contest!

It’s the end of another school year, and time for the GBN News “Predict Next Year’s Education News” contest, an annual GBN tradition since 2007. What will be the top education news stories of the 2007-2008 school year? Answer the multiple choice “assessment” questions below. The reader or readers who come closest to what actually occurs in the coming year will receive a prize (or “incentive” as it’s known around the DOE). Note: There are no hot links; you’re on your own for this one.

1. The number of complete reorganizations of the NY City Department of Education during the 2007-2008 school year will be:
a. 0
b. 1
c. 2
d. One each month, based on aggregate interim test scores and ARIS computer data.

(Note: If your answer was “a”, don’t even bother with the rest of the questions. You obviously don’t know the DOE well enough to win anything)

2. The next high-salaried DOE “officer” position to be created will be called the:
a. Chief Accountability Officer
b. Chief Assessment Officer
c. Chief Cash Incentive Officer
d. Chief Cell Phone Confiscation Officer

3. The DOE will demonstrate its commitment to lowering class size by:
a. Paying students $5 to stay outside in the hall
b. Counting custodians, aides and cafeteria workers as teachers to lower student to teacher ratios
c. Squeezing the same number of students into smaller classrooms, then declaring, “the size of classes has been reduced”
d. All of the above

4. In a secret, no-bid deal, NY City will:
a. Give a consortium of private schools a 30 year lease on all NY City school buildings; however, the private schools will generously allow public school children to use the buildings on weekends and evenings after 9 PM
b. Sell the DOE to the Gates Foundation
c. Buy the military’s Guantanamo Bay prison facility, to detain school cell phone violators and troublesome Principals
d. Sell off all “failing schools” to Donald Trump for conversion to condos

5. The next DOE “celebrity” PR spot will feature:
a. I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby saying, “Our schools’ success is no secret.”
b. G. Gordon Liddy saying, “If you had anyone else but Alvarez and Marsal plundering your schools, it would be nothing but a third rate burglary.”
c. Pete Rose saying, “The New York City Schools: Success you can bet on.”
d. Barry Bonds saying, “Chancellor Klein has done such a great job, you’d think the whole school system was on steroids.”
e. OJ Simpson, pitching a new partnership between the School Transportation Department and Hertz, saying, “Don’t let the school bus cuts leave your children behind. Rent a bus from Hertz, and you’ll get them to school with time to kill.”

6. In an effort to increase parent involvement in their children’s education, Chief Family Engagement Officer Martine Guerrier will announce:
a. A city-wide bake sale
b. Cash incentives for attending PTA and PA meetings will be doubled for those who attend but keep their mouths shut
c. Parents will take the interim assessments alongside their children. The motto will be, “The family that tests together, has success together.”
d. An outing for public school families at Randall’s Island. The announcement will be rescinded when she is reminded that most of the island is set aside for the exclusive use of private schools
e. All of the above

7. Mayor Bloomberg will announce that:
a. He is forming a third party, and will run for President on the “Eccentric Billionaires” line with Thurston Howell III as his running mate; analysts will say that Mr. Bloomberg feels he has more control over a fictional running mate such as the former “Gilligan’s Island” co-star
b. He will forego a run for President, fearing that if Betsy Gotbaum becomes Mayor, she will derail all of his education reforms by allowing cell phones in schools
c. He has determined that no law prohibits him from being both Mayor and President, so if elected President, he will moonlight until his Mayoral term runs out, thus keeping his promise to serve out his term
d. He has made a deal to buy the White House from President Bush for $2.5 billion, thus giving him the advantage of incumbency. After the election, it will emerge that the deal included full pardons for Mr. Bush and Vice President Cheney.

8. President Bush, in a major educational policy address, will announce that:
a. The No Child Left Behind act should be renewed, because, “If our children is left behind, the terrorists win.”
b. Joel Klein is doing “A heckuva job.”
c. He has finally finished reading, “My Pet Goat”, this time “without any silly interruptions.”
d. In a characteristic “faith based” initiative, he has ordered Education Secretary Margaret Spellings to bolster the chances of NCLB renewal by praying for better test scores
e. All of the above

9. A court will rule that:
a. Mayor Bloomberg’s ‘cash incentive” program is in violation of Federal and local anti-bribery statutes
b. The new “outside locker” plan to “take crime out of the schools and put it back on the street where it belongs” puts students and their property at risk and must be terminated
c. The DOE, with its present organizational structure, falls under Federal “anti-racketeering” statutes
d. Mayor Bloomberg’s “Congestion Pricing” plan applies to schoolchildren as well as autos. The court will order the Mayor’s EZ Pass charged for every child over mandated class size limits.

10. The ARIS supercomputer will:
a. Supercede classroom teachers and determine the educational objectives and lesson plans for every class, based on data gathered from interim testing
b. Take control of the physical plant and environment in every school building in the city, rendering custodians obsolete and breaking their union
c. Compete with the Chancellor for control of the DOE, and in April 2008 will refuse to open the Tweed Courthouse doors, thus stranding the Chancellor outside
d. Play and win 153,968,007,363 simultaneous games of solitaire
e. All of the above

Responses are due no later than the first day of school in September, 2007. Answers can be submitted via the “comments” section below. No partial credit will be given. The decision of the GBN News judges is final. If, by the first day of school, the CEO of GBN News has been given a $150,000 a year PR job with the DOE, this contest will be void.

How "fair student funding" fails our failing schools

Here's an excerpt from a letter to Chancellor Klein from John Elfrank-Dana, teacher and chapter leader at the Murry Bergtraum High School in lower Manhattan:

I was in "shock and awe" at our last school budget meeting. We are held harmless for over $200,000.00 and are expecting increased austerity for the next two years - all of this in a post-CFE world? It's hard to believe that we are not feeling any of the trickle-down from the CFE money. We need smaller class sizes for our freshman and advisories as a fifth (not sixth) class. Mr. Klein, we want to succeed and demand a chance to do so. ....Can you explain where our share of the CFE money is going, and when we will feel it at the school level?

Murry Bergtraum is a severely overcrowded high school that has been on the state failing list for several years. In fact, it is in its second year of "restructuring"-- with the possibility of closing in the near future if results don't improve. Class sizes range from 28 to 30.4 students-- far higher than the rest of the state, where high schools average twenty students per class.

Yet according to the "fair student funding" reform that DOE claimed would drive more dollars to our neediest schools, Bergtraum's budget would have been cut by $282,365 next year if the proposal had been fully enacted. Because of the negotiated agreement to "hold harmless" all schools, it will receive a big fat zero through this formula for the next two years instead.

Compare this to Stuyvesant high school, with the highest graduation rate and the top performing students in the city, due to receive an increase of $68,929 next year through its FSF allocation.

In fact, 47% of all the failing schools in NYC would have received cuts averaging $322,000 if the proposal had been implemented as originally designed -- and will get no extra funding through the formula for the next two years. The other 53% failing schools will get an average of only $81,676, enough to pay for one extra teacher at most.

For example, in District 4 in East Harlem, only one of nine failing schools will receive any dollars through FSF. In District 5 in Central Harlem, only two of eight failing schools will. In District 7 in the Bronx, only six out of 20 failing schools will receive FSF, and in two of these, the amounts are too small to hire even one extra teacher. In Brooklyn, there is not a single failing school in District 13 with enough funds through FSF to hire a new teacher. District 21 in Brooklyn has only two out of 11 failing schools that will receive new FSF funds. In Queens, only two out of 10 failing schools in District 28 and only one school out of seven in District 29 will receive enough funds through FSF to hire any additional teachers. And the list goes on.

What makes this particularly disturbing is that so far, the FSF allocation is the only way in which DOE has announced it will distribute any of the extra funds resulting from the settlement of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit to schools, a case which was more than 13 years in the courts and was finally settled by the State Legislature this spring.

Councilmember Robert Jackson (see photo to the right) was the original plaintiff in this lawsuit -- in which the state's highest court concluded that class sizes were too large in NYC schools to provide our students with their constitutional right to an adequate education.

The so-called "fair student funding" allocation is also the only way in which so far Chancellor Klein has publicly revealed that he will attempt to comply with the new state law requiring class size reduction -- by simply aggregating the individual choices of principals who choose to use their FSF funds to hire extra teachers to reduce class size. The city is supposed to submit a five year class size reduction plan on July 1 -- with the first year focused on low-performing, overcrowded schools -- a description that fits Murry Bergtraum to a T.

From all the evidence so far, the administration's class size reduction plan -- as well as the FSF formula itself--is a fraud.

For more on how the city's FSF plan fails our failing schools, see this memo here.

For how it fails to be an actual class size reduction plan, see the Class Size Matters letter to the Regents and the State Education Department.

Paying for test scores: Anti-social, bone-headed perversity?

Check out the scathing critique in the Huffington Post by Diane Ravitch, contributor to this blog, of the Mayor's proposal to pay students for getting library cards and good test scores, as well as their parents each time they show up for parent-teacher conferences. An excerpt:

It demeans the poor parents who do meet their children's teachers; who do have library cards; who do care desperately about their children's schooling. And it insults the kids who are trying their best but having trouble because New York City has the most overcrowded classrooms in the state of New York.... The pay-for-behavior plan is anti-democratic, anti-civic, anti-intellectual, and anti-social.

There have also been negative columns in the New York Post from the Manhattan Institute's Nicole Gelinas here (called "Mayor Mike's Poverty Perversity") and from Andrea Peyser here, who writes that it is the " the most insulting, bone-headed plan ever cooked up. "

We now have an unusual consensus of the Huffington and NY Posts, which rarely agree on anything, that this proposal is morally repugnant. Too bad our Mayor doesn't appear to have the same scruples.

Public School Parents and Community Activists Sue Bloomberg Administration Over Randall's Island Fields Controversy

Mayor Bloomberg has won accolades for his plan of sustainable growth, PlaNYC 2030, which he calls "our plan for a greener, greater New York". While his intents are laudable, his actual record on city parks has shown that some people get more green than others.

His plan for 171 acres on Randall's Island will double the number of playing fields. Unfortunately, he intends to grant exclusive access to 66% of these fields during after-school hours to an elite group of twenty private schools for the next twenty years. The Franchise and Concession Review Committee approved this controversial no-bid contract in February with the sole dissenting voice from Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.

Last week, public school parents represented by the District 4 (East Harlem) PTA Presidents Council and the Citywide Council for High Schools, the elected and legally mandated representatives of high school parents, joined East Harlem community activists Marina Ortiz and Matthew Washington to sue the Bloomberg Administration.

The NY Times quoted Eugenia Simmons-Taylor, president of the Parent and Teacher Association of the Young Women's Leadership School:

“The Parks Department never met with the parent associations of District 4 in East Harlem to discuss their plans. Our PTA presidents voted unanimously to be part of this lawsuit because it’s wrong to deprive public school children of these fields, in their own district, for the next twenty years. Also, I faithfully follow the Chancellor’s regulations and Robert’s rules of order as a PTA president. The Parks Department should have to abide by the law, like everyone else.”

In response, the Bloomberg Administration claims the review process was adequate. The Times quotes Law Department spokesperson Connie Pankratz:

“A full and fair public hearing appropriately addressed citizens’ concerns prior to the approval. While we have not seen the lawsuit, we intend to vigorously defend the decision to approve the sports complex, as it was entirely lawful and in the city’s best interests.”

When was this hearing? Febuary 13th. When was the deal approved? February 14th. Not so much time to address "citizens concerns". Private school headmasters testified they had been working with the Parks Department for over a year. Some citizens apparently get more attention from the mayor than others.

The City Charter says concessions considered "major" need to go through an extensive land use process including review by the local community board, borough president and the New York City Council. To be considered "major" the contract must cover use of more than .7 acres. With this concession involving 171 acres, the mayor's attempt to avoid review by forcing the deal through various loopholes has been particularly brazen.

Public school parents and community activists are represented by Norman Siegel, the noted civil rights attorney and Alan Klinger of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, LLP.

See additional news of the lawsuit in the NY Times here and Metro here . Our earlier post on the topic has more in-depth coverage here.

For the latest, including text of the legal documents, check East Harlem Preservation's website.

GBN News Exclusive Interview With Chancellor Klein

June 22,2007 (GBN News): In a rare, exclusive interview today with GBN News, NY City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein discussed a wide range of educational issues. Excerpts from the interview follow:

GBN: Chancellor Klein, thank you for speaking with us today. I understand that you have another new initiative to announce.

JK: Yes, I’m sure that our parents and schoolchildren will be as excited as I am about this. The Department of Education will now be partnering with the New York City Police Department and IBM to use our ARIS computer system to replicate, for the DOE, the Compstat system that the police use to track crime. This system will track educational progress and students’ behavior right down to the classroom level, and will help us hold those in charge accountable.

GBN: How will it work?

JK: As you know, ARIS can track every aspect of our students’ school day, from test scores to bathroom visits. All ARIS information will be fed on an ongoing basis into a central database, which will be constantly analyzed. If we see a problem in a particular school, we can respond on an immediate basis and take care of the problem before it gets out of hand. For example, suppose a class bombs out on an interim assessment. We will have a response team on call to go immediately to the school and take over the situation.

GBN: “Take over” in what way?

JK: First, we need to secure the school. That means a mobile scanning team to rid the school of dangerous weapons like cell phones. “Safety First” is our motto, and we want to make sure that no kid jeopardizes our response team by, say, throwing a cell phone at them. And don’t think it hasn’t happened. Anyhow, then we arrest the Principal, and our mobile administrators assume temporary control of the school.

GBN: Why arrest the principal?

JK: The school is the principal’s responsibility. Obviously, if they’re part of the problem, then they can’t be part of the solution.

GBN: What else will the team do?

JK: Next, we bring in a Brink’s truck and flood the school with money. Nothing motivates like giving people money. We immediately double the incentive awards: $10 to take a test, $100 to ace it. That sort of thing. Then, it’s intensive test prep 24/7, for a week.

GBN: What then?

JK: Then, if things still don’t improve, it’s obviously a “failing school” and we take away their funding. Nothing motivates like not giving people money.

GBN: There has been a lot of criticism over what some have termed “heavy handed” security practices since Emomali Rakhmon, the former dictator of Tajikistan, took over as school security chief.

JK: Actually, “Rocky” is a great guy once you get to know him. Turns out we have a lot in common. He’s a little intense, but as “Rocky” likes to say, “better to be feared than liked”. And he really did rid the university system in Tajikistan of cell phones.

GBN: But what about the reported detainment of cell phone violators here in the city schools, at a place they call, “Little Gitmo”?

JK: Oh, “Rocky” was just kidding about that. But don’t think we’re not serious about the cell phone thing. And we just heard that the real Gitmo is up for sale, so we’re putting in a “no bid” to the Bush Administration to buy it. There are 313 principals who will be needing a place to stay soon. They thought they could bribe the Mayor and me by paying us to rescind the DOE reorganization. Imagine, thinking that paying people will change their behavior!

GBN: Speaking of “no bid”, there has been criticism, too, about the massive bus cutbacks made by those “no bid” consultants, Alvarez and Marsal. A kid recently was seriously injured, hit by a commuter bus while crossing an intersection that, if his bus route had not been cut by Alvarez and Marsal, he never would have had to cross.

JK: That’s not a fair question. Ask me something nicer. We now have a new DOE incentive policy for the press, you know. You can get $200 if you ask about the math test scores going up.

GBN: Do you really think I’d sell out for $200? I won’t accept anything less than a full time PR job at the DOE. $150,000 a year, final offer!

JK: I’ll have “Rocky” get back to you.


Editor’s note and disclaimer: The preceding interview is, of course, fictional. The idea that the Chancellor would ever speak to GBN news, at least without an incentive, is ludicrous. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely intentional and within the realm of parody. Should the Chancellor feel that anything written above is offensive or reflects badly on him, GBN News will not only apologize, but will deny under oath that we ever wrote it. For a price.

"School's out"; great examination of the Bloomberg education record

Lynnell Hancock has written a terrific piece for the Nation laying out the way in which this administration has autocratically ignored the views of parents and other stakeholders in our public schools, leading to the failures of the small schools initiative, the bus route fiasco, the obsession with testing, the lack of financial accountability and more.

It is the most comprehensive look yet at Bloomberg's education record. The article is called "School's Out"; but it's only available to subscribers. It was also radically shortened for publication.

Thankfully, Lynnell has sent us the original unedited version -- which we've posted here. It is well worth reading.

An excerpt:

Another parent shut out from the meeting that night had waited outside the Hostos Annex for a chance to ask the exiting chancellor a question. The mother emigrated from Mexico more than a dozen years earlier. She had come so her kids could get a decent education. "But there are 32 kids in my son's classroom," said Esperanza Vasquez. She never got a chance to ask Klein about the overcrowding. He left the Bronx that evening in a hurry, without giving an email address.

PRINCIPALS OFFER BLOOMBERG AND KLEIN CASH REWARDS

June 21, 2007 (Gadfly News) In a surprising twist in the city’s increasingly tense struggle over the direction of its schools, a coalition of 313 New York City public school principals have banded together to offer Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein a schedule of cash payments if the two agree to rescind recent changes instituted by the Department of Education.

“We had no choice,” said a principal of a Brooklyn elementary school who asked to remain anonymous, as did all the principals interviewed. “The changes they were making were radical and extreme, but more than that, they were wrong-headed. It seemed as if they were deliberately designed to destabilize our schools.”

Another principal, who heads up an elementary school in the Bronx, seconded the sentiment. “I hate to do this, offer an award schedule,” she said. “As all of us who got our degrees in education know, doling out rewards to people can seriously undermine their intrinsic motivation to do something. It sends the message that the thing itself is not worth doing, not rewarding in and of itself. But we can only assume from the actions of the mayor and the chancellor that they have no intrinsic motivation to do the right thing by the schools. We’ve come to the conclusion that money is the only thing they understand.”

Students at this principal’s school did not seem as concerned about the direction of the schools as she was. When asked their opinions about some of the changes recently instituted by the DOE – the increase in testing dates, the proposal to pay students for passing scores – all of the students approached refused to answer unless they were compensated. “What’s it worth to you?” asked one student. “Show me the money,” demanded another.

A third principal in the coalition, this one heading up a Manhattan middle school, seemed near exhaustion when interviewed for this article. “I feel as if I’ve been on a reality survival show all year,” he said. “Every week the DOE has thrown a new ‘challenge’ at us, and now that it’s the end of the year we’ll have to look around and see which schools are still standing.”

When apprised of this principal’s comment, Chancellor Klein brightened. “A survival show?” he said. “Great idea! Who says we don’t listen to our professional educators? I’m going to have my people investigate the possibility ASAP!” He peeled a bill out of the wad in his wallet. “The last principal standing will win a grand!” he said. Then, “Can somebody run this ten spot over to the principal who came up with the idea, as a little incentive along the way?”

The principals representing the coalition, masked in order to conceal their identities and protect their jobs, gathered yesterday afternoon outside of Tweed, where the DOE is housed. In the opening remarks, the spokesprincipal apologized for the low dollar amounts of their rewards. “We realize that these amounts might not be ‘motivating’ to a billionaire,” she said, “but they were all we could raise in our bake sale.” The group then announced the schedule of rewards as they had structured them. The schedule included:

• Repealing the assessment tests: $100
• Reinstatement of the district structure: $500
• Revoking mayoral control of schools: Priceless

Cash Rewards Cause Chaos in City Schools

June 20, 2007 (GBN News): The rollout of New York City’s new educational cash incentive plan was marred by several incidents yesterday. The plan, designed to motivate children and parents through cash rewards, pays specific dollar amounts for taking and passing tests, obtaining library cards, and other educationally beneficial behaviors. However, the first day was not without its glitches.

At MS 322 in Brooklyn, a sixth grade class took matters into their own hands and demanded to be tested in order to earn reward money. According to several witnesses, the class began chanting, “We want a test” so loudly that it could be heard all over the school. Other classes then took up the cry, and the Principal was forced to direct the entire teaching staff to immediately administer interim exams to all classes. Other schools ran out of cash, unprepared for the high level of motivation shown by their students, and teachers had to reach into their own pockets to provide the rewards to keep order.

By afternoon, so many people were applying for library cards that long lines formed outside many public library branches, and the libraries quickly ran out of new cards. To make matters worse, a number of parents were miffed upon learning that they were not eligible for the $50 reward because they already had library cards. At one library in Queens, in a scene reminiscent of a 1960’s draft protest, dozens of parents stood outside and burned their library cards so they could apply for new ones and earn their $50. Chancellor Joel Klein responded in a statement that these were all “growing pains”, and that he was pleased at the positive overall response to the plan.

Mr. Klein also announced a major change in student report cards for next year. Eschewing the traditional letter grades, the new report cards will simply indicate the dollar amounts earned for each class. “We’re trying to focus children on real-world measures of success," he said, "and what better measure of success than money earned? Look at the Mayor and myself.” And responding to criticism that the new incentive program will lead to more disparity between economically advantaged and disadvantaged students if children who score well are not poor, the Chancellor reassured parents that since benefits will be subject to the income tax, the less advantaged students will keep a greater percentage of their earnings. Furthermore, he said, to simplify tax filing, report cards will be printed straight onto W2 forms.