Bloomberg booed at today's Triangle Shirtwaist ceremony

See video below of today's ceremony commemorating the 100th anniversary of the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in Greenwich village. It was the deadliest industrial disaster in the city's history, in which more than a hundred seamstresses, most of them very young, died from the fire or jumped to their deaths when the exits were blocked. The disaster led to legislation requiring improved safety standards and working conditions.

The Mayor, by proposing the layoffs of thousands of teachers, most of them women, and the elimination of all seniority protections, is increasingly recognized as the enemy of labor rights and was appropriately booed. Meanwhile, his approval rating has fallen to its lowest level in eight years.

Highs and lows of Thursday's education forum in Washington Heights

On Thursday night, an education forum was hosted by NY State Senator Espaillat. Here is an account of the proceedings from Tory Frye, parent at PS/IS 187:

Noah Gotbaum [ President of the Community Education Council in District 3] was brilliant at last night's education forum in Washington Heights; the crowd completely lit up at his remarks, which were rays of light in an otherwise dark and dismal evening.

From a parent's perspective, here were the low lights:

• The suggestion by Chancellor Merryl Tisch, head of the NY State Board of Regents, that the state can foster a focus on the arts and music in city schools by making schools accountable/creating standards around them and (I think this is where she was going) testing kids on those subjects too (Wow, kids can learn to hate music and art too!).

• Senator Espaillat claiming that he had not received any calls from constituents supporting the millionaire's tax (I guess his office forgot to mark down my calls from the past few weeks and days, and e-mails too.).

• Santi Taveras, Deputy Chancellor of the NYC Department of Education, who was unable to explain the DOE decision not to site a progressive public school (modeled on Central Park East) with a school in D6 that had space available, while instead choosing to co-locate a charter there (and then shot darts at me with his eyes when I corrected him!)
  

• Michael Mulgrew, head of the United Federation of Teachers, who said that policy issues were not what he wanted to talk about last night, and that he'd rather focus on teaching practice in the classroom (Really? That's what you want to talk about tonight? Because as a parent I am a little worried about my son's school losing five more teachers next year...and that's on top of the seven we lost the year before).

...And of course all the glad handing, self-congratulatory blabber that was emitted each time any elected official entered the event. The way they like to congratulate themselves, you would think they've all done a mighty fine job on education policy.

On the bright side of this busy week, our school, PS/IS 187, staged a rousing and dramatic protest this morning, complete with the Grim Reaper and Council Member Jackson. We vowed to go after any elected official who does not get behind us parents on this!

-- Tory Frye (D6 parent)

Bringing the War Home

March 23, 2011 (GBN News): Responding to criticism that he is neglecting his domestic agenda in favor of foreign intervention, President Obama today ordered a massive cruise missile attack on public schools. The assault was said to be aimed at taking out teachers’ union defenses by surgical strikes on the classrooms of the most senior teachers.

Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters in his daily briefing that the attacks are not aimed at the schools per se. “The President’s goal”, he said, “is simply to protect ‘great teachers’ by eliminating the sanctuaries of the ‘defenders of the status quo’.”

Education Secretary Arne Duncan was said to be the main driving force behind the President’s bold action. He reportedly argued persuasively to the President that, “To bring about real education reform, Bill Gates can make better use of the missiles than Bob Gates."

In an exclusive interview with GBN News, Mr. Duncan gave his assurance that no teachers would be physically harmed. “The strikes are being carried out a night, when schools are closed,” he said. “The teachers will simply come in the next morning and find they do not have a classroom. They’ll be forced to go home and find another career.”

The Secretary also pointed out that every effort was being made to avoid collateral damage. “Those cruise missiles are extremely accurate,” he insisted. “In no case has there been any damage to co-located charter schools.”

Send a message about school overcrowding and the $5 billion cut from the school capital plan!

In the press of other news, like rampant budget cuts, school closings, rising class sizes, and harmful co-locations, we have failed to focus on one of the most important issues that will determine the quality of education in NYC schools for years to come: the five year capital plan.

On Wednesday, the Panel for Educational Policy will vote on this plan, which compared to DOE’s previous proposal issued in November, cuts the funding for new capacity over five years by almost $6 billion.

Spending is slashed for new seats from $8.8 billion to $2.9 billion, and the number of new seats is cut by 30,000, or 67% . At the same time the DOE wants to spend $1 billion on new technology, including $542 million next year alone – so that they can the spread of online learning to 300-400 schools over the next few years.

This an extraordinarily large amount to be spending in any one year, especially given the city’s (and the DOE’s) dreadful record with technology projects.

It is also more than twice as much as the $259 million that the DOE plans to spend on building new schools next year. If this plan is approved, there will be very few new seats over the next few years, with only 609 new seats projected for Sept. 2013—the smallest increase in more than ten years, just as our school-age population is rapidly expanding.

This is a recipe for disaster.

The November DOE proposal, which called for 50,000 new seats, was the first under this administration to admit the reality of increased enrollment citywide, resulting in widespread wait lists for Kindergarten and class sizes growing at an unprecedented rates. Though we have been warning of increasing enrollment for several years, the DOE’s official projections wrongly claimed that this would not occur until 2016 at the earliest, although it already started in most districts three years ago, and occurred citywide in 2009.

At the same time, the DOE plans to accelerate online learning, called the Izone, expanding it to 300-400 schools over the next few years, without any independent evaluation of the pilot program that currently exists.

As a recent report warned, the rapid spread of this sort of experimental, expensive program is happening nowhere else in the country:

“NYC school district leaders are taking risks with the iZone, implementing new models, committing deeply to a defined set of principles that challenge core assumptions about what a school should look like, and moving to scale very quickly. How and when they will know if they got the big bet right is a question district leaders will have to ask so that students are not subjected for too long to programs and schools that don’t work. … At some point, the district may get pushback from parents about the idea of having their children participate in unproven programs and may need to consider catch-up academic plans if certain programs are not effective.”

In truth, this plan represents a large scale experiment on our children, with no research to back it up. Already, hundreds of schools have found that the $80 million ARIS was a costly mistake, and are using a far more inexpensive and useful model called Datacation developed by a science teacher in the Bronx, as NY1 has reported.

But the half billion dollars that the DOE plans to spend next year on expanding the Izone will make the $80 million ARIS looks like chickenfeed.

For more on the radical cuts in new seats and the concomitant increase in spending on technology, see my comments on the capital plan in Gotham Gazette.

Click on the chart to the right for the number of seats that will be cut in every borough and in most districts, ranging from 39% in Manhattan, 54% in Queens, 60% in Staten Island, 72% in Brooklyn, to 78% in the Bronx, compared to the November plan.

Five districts will have all their new seats cut – including D3, D8, D14, D26 and D29. [CORRECTION: D3 does not have its 480 seats cut; I have corrected the chart to the right.]

Because the DOE has never published a needs assessment for any district, we cannot know if these cuts are fairly apportioned; all we know is that is this plan is approved, children in these communities will be sitting in overcrowded schools for years to come.

The mayor blames the Governor for proposing a cap on capital reimbursement; and it is true that Cuomo is partly responsible. But the mayor and the DOE are ultimately accountable, because of their refusal at any time during their administration to provide accurate utilization (Blue book) figures, reliable enrollment projections, or a transparent needs assessment of how many seats are actually required to eliminate overcrowding.

Instead, they have consistently hidden the truth and minimized the problem, and continued to pursue damaging policies that have made overcrowding worse, such as charter school co-locations.

To add insult to injury, at the same time the DOE plans to rapidly spread risky virtual learning to hundreds of schools over the next three years, they are refusing to replace the leaky PCB-lights in our schools in anything less than ten years, risking our children’s health and safety.

Please send the mayor, the chancellor, the PEP members and the borough presidents a message now, on the need to expand new seats in the capital plan and freeze spending on technology!

A sample email is below, along with relevant contact information, and room to plug in your own borough and/or district cuts, if you like. But PLEASE do it today. Then come Wednesday to Brooklyn Tech PEP meeting and make your voices heard.

SAMPLE EMAIL:

To the Mayor, Chancellor Black and members of the PEP:

mbloomberg@cityhall.nyc.gov; Cpblack@schools.nyc.gov; patk.j.sullivan@gmail.com; sipeprep@aol.com; majorm766@gmail.com; okotieuro@yahoo.com; pepofqueens@yahoo.com; llbryant@inwoodhouse.com; robert.reffkin@gs.com; tomas.morales@csi.cuny.edu; FFoster@schools.nyc.gov; jchan@dbpartnership.org; gittepeng@yahoo.com; lnieves@yearup.org; thernandez@samvill.org;

CC: BPs and education staff:

bp@manhattanbp.org; emcgill@manhattanbp.org; askmarty@brooklynbp.nyc.gov; cscissura@brooklynbp.nyc.gov; margkelley@aol.com; info@queensbp.org; rdarche@queensbp.org; webmail@bronxbp.nyc.gov; jmojica@bronxbp.nyc.gov; dmarciuliano@statenislandusa.com

Dear Mayor Bloomberg, Chancellor Black and members of the PEP:

The proposed five-year DOE capital plan will cut $5 billion from new capacity, and nearly 30,000 new seats from the version of the plan just released in November. Given existing overcrowding, the rapid increases in enrollment and class size throughout the city, as well as Kindergarten wait lists at many schools, these cuts are simply unacceptable. [My borough of X will be cut by y seats; and my district by Z seats].

At the same time, the DOE is proposing to spend nearly a billion dollars to expand virtual learning to hundreds of new schools, with more than half a billion dollars to be spent on technology next year alone. This is a recipe for disaster, given the city’s record in overspending and waste on technology projects, as well as the fact that the Izone is a risky experiment without any independent research to back it up.

Though the Mayor and DOE blame the Governor for capping the reimbursement for school construction, they are ultimately responsible for this fiasco, for refusing to report accurate overcrowding figures, reliable enrollment projections and/or a realistic, transparent needs assessment of new capacity for our schools at any time during this administration.

As a parent, I ask that you to reject this inadequate plan, which disregards the rights of our children to be provided with a quality education in uncrowded schools with reasonable class sizes. You should also immediately freeze the billion dollars to be spent on technology until an independent analysis of the Izone pilot can be released to the public, and parents and experts can thoughtfully evaluate its results.

Otherwise, you will be risking a huge waste of money on a large-scale experiment on our children, without our consent.

I also urge you to restore the full amount ($5 billion) to school construction and new capacity, and to eliminate all PCB-laden lights from schools over a much more rapid time frame than ten years. If you really care about NYC children, you will agree. In exchange, I promise to work with you to persuade the Governor and the Legislature to raise the cap on school construction.

Thanks,

[Name, school, district]

Why is Cathie Black so unpopular, and why is the DOE scrambling for evidence of parent support?

Today's NY Post features a column about Cathie Black's abysmal approval ratings of only 17%; more on the Quinnipiac poll results, including the fact that only 28% of NYC public school parents now approve of Bloomberg, while 61% disapprove of him here.

As to Ms. Black, I think it’s interesting to analyze why her approval ratings are so low.

Nothing she has said or done is objectively worse than Joel Klein, and in a few cases, she seems to have pulled back from some of the most controversial choices that he likely would have made: reversing the closing of PS 114, and deciding to put the KED charter in Tweed for just one year and then give it back to the community for their exploding number of Kindergarten students. In contrast, Klein seemed to relish putting his thumb in the eyes of parents and local electeds.

Moreover, in my view, Cathie Black's public persona is not nearly as objectionable as his was. Truly, she was unqualified for the job, but so was Joel Klein, in every way imaginable. He was a non-educator and a non-manager, and had zero people skills besides .

My speculation is that she is even more unpopular than Klein results from a few developments:

Klein’s approval ratings were always the lowest of any NYC public figure, but for many years, he and Bloomberg coasted on two things: school budgets that were generally increasing each year (though much of the increase was spent on the wrong programs) and rising state test scores (which activists knew were a fraud but managed to assuage most parents that their kids were doing well.)

Then the mayor starting cutting budgets for schools, and last summer, the test score bubble burst. Suddenly, Bloomberg and Klein had nothing to fall back on. Terrible relationships with parents and the community, rising class sizes and overcrowding, policies based on high-stakes testing, school closings and charter co-locations – all of which most public school parents despise, with good reason. And the DOE finally lost all credibility with even those people who don’t spend their time paying attention to what’s really going on.

This is why the DOE is so desperately scrambling for support in the parent community, and, as it was recently revealed, resorted to trying to get parent coordinators to persuade "Happy Harrys" to show up at PEP meetings, rather than the furious parents that normally appear at these shouting fests. They also asked PCs to get parents to sign a petition, supporting their controversial proposal to end teacher seniority protections. Even if parent coordinators tried to gather parent support, they will find it nearly impossible to do so.

Cathie Black, fairly or not, is reaping the results of nine years of wrong-headed education policies, as well as open contempt for the views and priorities of parents. Unless she makes a determined effort to change these policies , I don’t know how she -- or Bloomberg -- can possibly recoup.

What do you think about the reasons for her low approval rating -- as well as Bloomberg's? Please leave a comment below.

Sign a petition to Cuomo and the Regents now about teacher evaluation!

In response to Mayor Bloomberg's pressure to eliminate seniority protections for teachers , Gov. Cuomo has introduced legislation to impose a new teacher evaluation system next year.

It is good that he has resisted the mayor's pressure, since study after study shows that teaching experience matters in terms of student outcomes, and installing an alternative system of layoffs based largely on arbitrary ratings would undermine the professionalism of the teaching force and the quality of instruction in NYC schools.

Yet the legislation that the Governor has proposed that would rush into effect a new teacher evaluation system next year would do more harm than good., as many experts, including the National Academy of Sciences and the Economic Policy Institute, have warned of the potentially damaging consequences of implementing test-based teacher evaluation systems.

This danger was also revealed in a recent New York Times column that showed how an excellent NYC teacher is likely to be denied tenure and leave teaching altogether – a major loss to her school and its students – because of the unreliability of the test-based system. Thus, any new teacher evaluation system must encompass multiple sources of evidence, including peer and principal input, parent and student surveys, and alternative assessments that include student work.

Moreover, the Regents Task Force on Teacher and Principal Evaluation is almost exclusively composed of teachers and administrators, and does not appear to have a single public school parent on it. Nor does it include any experts on statistics and testing.

Please sign our letter, co-sponsored by Class Size Matters and Time out From Testing, urging the Gov., the Regents, Commissioner Steiner and the Legislature, with a copy to Michael Mulgrew of the UFT, to delay implementing any new teacher evaluation system until we can be sure that it is thoughtfully devised and carefully piloted, with numerous safeguards to ensure that excellent teachers are not mistakenly denied tenure or other job protections.

We also ask that parents be appointed to the taskforce, along with independent experts on testing and statistics who are not under contract to either SED or DOE.

After signing, please forward to your friends and post to your Facebook page.

thanks!

Diane Ravitch asks: do we live in an age of stupidity or insanity?

On Saturday, at an event sponsored by the Chicago's Teacher Union, Diane Ravitch asked, do we live in an age of insanity or stupidity? Vote to the right!

To a crowd of over 500, including mostly teachers and interim Schools CEO Terry Mazany, Diane criticized the multibillion-dollar testing industry, charters, Teach for America, and turnaround management organizations.

Catalyst magazine described it this way:

In a speech that painted a dismal picture of the intensifying attacks against teachers in many states around the country but was also a call for teachers to remain united and engaged, Ravitch relayed an alarming account of recent and proposed measures to downsize teaching staffs and increase class sizes.

“I’ve wondered, given all the talk of school reform and seeing how it’s playing out in the media and legislature, do we live in an age of national insanity or is it an age of national stupidity.....All across the country, we have governors and legislatures and philanthropists telling us we must reform our schools at the same time they’re cutting the education budget and refusing to raise taxes on the people who have money..”

Please vote on the sidebar to the right: insanity or stupidity? You can also answer undecided or don't know. You be the judge! And then leave a comment explaining your vote below.

Chris Cerf: there you go again

This morning featured an extended story in the Star Ledger examining Chris Cerf, and his record as Deputy chancellor of NYC schools. Cerf has been appointed to be acting New Jersey Commissioner of Education by Gov. Christie, and is intent on implementing many of the same divisive policies that have been tried and failed in New York City, including charter school co-locations and expansion, and teacher merit pay linked to unreliable test scores.

He is also now embroiled in the same sort of conflict of interest charges and allegations of dishonesty that marred his time in NYC. As Bob Braun of the Star Ledger has written,

“Newark residents want reform but they also want a say — all parents do. When decisions about their children are made behind closed doors by billionaires who believe they know what’s best for them, they have a right to be concerned. They also have a right to rely on the law.”

As a result, a prominent NJ State Senator, Ron Rice, says he will block Cerf’s nomination:

"Acting Commissioner Cerf prevaricates. He doesn’t tell all truths…He may be here now, but he can’t stay forever, and he will not be permanent at this point. The governor will have to find someone else."

In today’s article, Cerf said, “while he has found the negative publicity bruising and "profoundly unfair," he has no plans to step down, describing his motivation to reform education as something "spiritual."

Despite this “spiritual” calling, he used the occasion of this article to viciously attack Tim Johnson, NYC public school parent and former head of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council [CPAC].

“In an e-mail, [Cerf] called him [Johnson] a "pathetic, two-bit player" and a "stooge" for the United Federation of Teachers.”

Anyone who knows Tim realizes he is fiercely independent, and that Cerf’s attack is ludicrous.

In 2007, Tim had the nerve to question Cerf about whether he still held Edison stock– something that Tim apparently was the only person in NYC with the temerity to do.

I have held off blogging about Cerf, but I am now impelled to clarify the deep flaws in his record as a DOE administrator.

A little background: Cerf was originally employed by Edison Schools, a for-profit charter management chain, between May 1997 until April 2005, rising to be the President and COO of the company. Though in many cases they used pressure tactics to charge districts more than average per pupil funding for their services, Edison utterly failed to make a profit or to create effective schools.

The company was eventually saved from bankruptcy when it was taken private in 2003, in a buyout by a private company called Liberty Partners, a deal facilitated by Jeb Bush, who as Governor of Florida, invested billions of the state teacher’s pension fund in the company at the same time.

Cerf officially resigned from Edison’s board of directors in October 2006, though he had already apparently been acting for several months as a consultant to DOE, which had substantial contracts with Edison for their supplemental tutoring services amounting to more than $9.6 million in the 2005-6 school year. (Such obvious conflicts of interest never seemed to bother Joel Klein, which is worrisome, especially given that Klein is now heading Rupert Murdoch’s online learning ventures at the same time that the DOE is intent on spending millions on expanding these programs .)

Cerf was hired by Klein as Deputy Chancellor in Dec. 2006. In February 2007, I was in the room when he was asked by Tim at a CPAC meeting whether he owned Edison stocks. Cerf vociferously denied he did, without revealing that he had just divested himself that morning, after learning that he would be asked this question. Here is the account as reported in the NY Times:

Asked by Tim Johnson, the group’s chairman, to describe his financial interest in Edison Schools, he replied, “I’d be delighted to do that,” adding: “I have no financial interest in Edison of any kind. Zero.”

When Mr. Johnson persisted, asking, “Can we ask when you divested yourself of Edison stock?” Mr. Cerf said he would be “delighted” to give Mr. Johnson a copy of financial disclosure forms he said he was required to file as a public employee. “That will answer all of your questions, and that’s what I’m prepared to say today,” he added.

These stocks were at the time more or less worthless, because of the company’s poor financial performance, though they could be potentially worth from $1.1 million to $6.7 million, according to filings Edison had made with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Over the next few days, I along with several others asked the Special Investigator for Schools, Richard Condon, to investigate the legality of Cerf having held onto these stocks. Though Condon’s report was completed in August 2007, it was not publicly released until I FOILed more than a year later, in December of 2008. When I saw what it included, I immediately gave it to Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News; someone else leaked it to the NY Times at the same time.

Though it was heavily redacted, the report revealed that Cerf had violated city conflict-of-interest laws by soliciting a $60,000 contribution for the Darrow Foundation, on whose board he sat, from Edison officials at the same time that he divested himself of their stock:

"At 7:37 am, prior to the scheduled CPAC meeting, Cerf sent an email to [redacted] of Edison, stating, "Per this email, I irrevocably release you and any interests with which you are associated from any and all obligations arising under the document executed on or about the date of my departure." As with his earlier messages to the Liberty and Edison executives, Cerf asked [redacted] to consider a contribution to the Darrow Foundation."

Cerf later took back the request for a donation when asked about it by the Special Investigator’s office. After investigators questioned him about its propriety, Cerf sent an e-mail to the Edison executives saying: "I have now concluded that it would be the better course not to proceed with the contribution."

Subsequently, the NYC Conflict of Interest Board sent him a confidential letter, admonishing him for using his city position to benefit the charity:

"It appears that you were aware that Edison schools was likely to come before the DOE and/or to be affected by your official actions on behalf of DOE," the letter stated. The board recommended no further disciplinary action but reminded Cerf that such violations "can result in civil fines of up to $10,000 ... and other penalties."

The Special Investigator also found that Cerf had relinquished an ongoing ten-year consulting contract with another Edison-connected firm only at the same time as he gave up the stocks, a contract that could have been worth $2.5 million.

Though Cerf claimed that the contract was not "operational" since he never signed it, the question remains why the word "Accepted" was written over his name on the document, and why he felt compelled to hurriedly renounce the agreement in the same email exchange in which he divested himself of Edison stock.

The Special Investigator’s report also pointed out there were mistakes and omissions in Cerf's official financial disclosure forms that appeared to relate to ongoing class action lawsuits against Edison. These forms he was subsequently allowed to amend, though such omissions can also result in termination of employment and criminal prosecution.

See Juan Gonzalez' column about these matters, as well as the NY Times story here. Here is the FOILED report,  GothamSchools here  shows a redacted page, and describes the report as “the investigation into a top school official that you will never read“ because so many pages were crossed out.

All this differs considerably from Cerf’s own account of the SCI investigation at the time:

“There is nothing here other than an investigation that exonerated me. The only real story here is that I was put through a rather tortuous experience.”

What did Cerf learn from this experience? Evidently very little, considering how he has been entangled in a similar controversy, involving misstatements concerning a secret, leaked report from his consulting company, which advised the takeover and charter conversion of many Newark public schools.

Cerf’s time in NYC featured other controversies. In October 2007, it was revealed that he had assigned an employee of the DOE press office to tape Diane Ravitch at public events, and was keeping a dossier on her. After failing to interest any reporter to write about her alleged contradictions, he got Kathryn Wilde head of the NYC Partnership to publish an NY Post oped attacking her.

Later, when asked by Patrick Sullivan of the Panel for Education Policy about this “Soviet-era approach to stifling dissent,” Cerf responded that it was totally “appropriate” to spend public funds taping Diane, and to prepare a document tracking her positions.

Nevertheless, the conservative National Review described Cerf’s smear tactics this way: “Welcome to Moscow or Berlin circa 1935.”

Kenneth Bernstein of the liberal Daily Kos wrote,

“There is something seriously wrong with people unwilling to hear criticism. Actions to suppress criticism imply to me an insecurity or worse a recognition that the positions being criticized cannot truly be defended...”

Again, Cerf was not discouraged by the widespread criticism of his Nixonian-like tactics. In July 2008, it was revealed that he had assigned several members of his still growing press office to monitor other potential critics, by subscribing to our NYC education list serv, in a effort called the “Truth Squad.”

And that is not all. As a DOE consultant, Cerf devised a cockamamie plan to reorganize the NYC system, and give private companies the responsibility to offer support services for schools, replacing the district superintendents, whose role had been specifically retained in state governance law.

At that time, Joel Klein claimed that he could not legally exclude for-profit companies like Edison from bidding for the work – a claim that after considerable protests, he renounced, though non-profits were still allowed by Klein to support schools, in so-called “Partnership support organizations,” run by private groups like New Visions etc.

Cerf also devised a new bizarre management structure, in which district superintendents were appointed “Senior Achievement facilitators” and required to spend 90% of their time on the road, coaching schools outside their districts on how to analyze and improve test scores.

This proposal even more clearly violated two consent decrees, in which DOE had promised to retain the customary support and supervisory role of district superintendents, after state legislators sued them for breaking the law. (See Patrick Sullivan’s questioning of Cerf on this issue as well at a December 2007 PEP meeting).

What else? Cerf consistently failed to investigate principals who were accused of tampering with test scores. When yet another such scandal broke, Cerf, who by that time was working for the Bloomberg campaign, said this:

"We cannot comment on any aspects of this, but we certainly do not condone the kinds of things that are alleged. But at the same time, we believe that accountability for student outcomes is a central driver of positive reform and we believe it is critical to hold everybody in the system accountable for student results.”

The implicit message to principals: lie, cheat or steal, it hardly matters as long as test scores go up.

Cerf also claimed that the reason that class size had increased sharply in NYC schools under his watch, despite a state law mandating their reduction, was that principals did not regard this reform as important. Yet in a citywide survey of over 500 principals, co-sponsored by the NY City Council, 87% of principals responded that they were unable to provide a quality education because of excessive class sizes.

Cerf was in charge of commissioning the teacher data reports, and promised that these reports would not be used for teacher evaluations and that the DOE would fight against any effort to disclose them publicly.

In an October 1, 2008 letter to Randi Weingarten, Cerf wrote, “It is the DOE’s firm position and expectation that Teacher Data reports will not and should not be disclosed or shared outside of the school community.”

Both promises have been broken, with the DOE basing tenure on these highly flawed reports, as recounted in a recent Michael Winerip column in the New York Times, and pushing for the release of these reports in the press.

Clearly, the man cannot be trusted; and Cerf’s persistent proclivity towards prevarication, political smear campaigns, and the privatization of public schools shows that he is not fit run New Jersey’s education system.

(photo above, thanks to Newark Star-Ledger.)