Please fill out our brief survey on class size and budget cuts now!

Welcome back to a new school year.

I hope your children had a good first day of school.

I have posted a VERY BRIEF survey for you to fill out about class sizes and or other effects of budget cuts at your schools.  

Whether you are a parent, teacher, administrator or student, please fill out this survey and forward it to others; it will take only 5 minutes or less.  Your name and participation will remain completely confidential unless you choose otherwise, but we need this info badly to see how much and where class sizes have increased this year.

 Meanwhile, the mayor’s ratings have slipped sharply, with only 34% approving of his handling of our schools, and 52% disapproving, according to a new NYT poll .  The Mayor discounted the poll, saying “In the end, polls don’t matter — it’s what mayors do.”

The top concern of parents in this new poll is class size and overcrowding, just as it is in the DOE’s own surveys.  Yet Walcott in an interview discounted the importance of increasing class sizes, saying he expected an average rise of only 1.5 students per class, which he claimed would have little impact on our schools. 

Yet this ignores the fact that our class sizes are already above optimal levels, have increased sharply for the last three years in a row, and the research shows that every single student added to a class diminishes learning for the whole. 

Walcott also seems unaware or unconcerned with how in individual schools, class size is a discontinuous phenomenon, and likely to increase much more than 1.5 students each time a teaching position is eliminated.  This year we believe about 5,000 teaching positions have been lost through attrition, retirement and excessing, while enrollment continues to grow.   DOE  also plans to lay off over 700 school aides this year; see video from our press conference yesterday.

Instead of helping our kids succeed, Walcott said his top priority this year would be improving public relations and getting his staff on TV.

Above are the UFT contractual caps in each grades, compared to the goals in the city’s C4E plan.

As school begins: resources for families with children with disabilities from Parent to Parent

Helpful information from Ellen McHugh of Parent to Parent NY State:

As school begins ………New lunch boxes, new clothes, back packs, bus schedules and drivers and new classrooms. These are all part of the start of a school year. For families who have a child with disabilities or special health care needs, fears and concerns seem to multiply as the `first day' comes closer.

Below are some resources provided by Parent to Parent of NYS that may be a help to families as they prepare for another year of special education services and school bus transportation.

Transportation: 

As of July 1, 2009, NYS School Bus transporters are mandated under PJ's Law to train staff in disability awareness. The State Education Dept has provided the training curriculum for School Bus Driver Instructors (SBDIs). The need for the law comes after the horrific abuse of then 7 year-old PJ, a student who exhibited some behaviors on his bus that both the driver and monitor 'enjoyed' and encouraged. The law is intended to prevent abuse. A link to the PJ's Law training slides with notes.  

Special Education Law

Families should be acquainted with the Regulations related to Special Education Law in NY State.  Also: Special Education in Plain Language created and provided by the Special Education Task Force of NYS.

What Am I Looking For? Observing a Child, Looking At a School

Observing a Child: Some Questions To Ask Yourself :  As parents we can see/observe many things about our children that can help us when professionals ask us questions about a child's development. Here are some questions you might ask yourself about your child's growth and development.

Happy Labor Day? Not for school aides, or our kids

Happy Labor Day and welcome back to a new school year.  I hope you had a good summer and rest.  Unfortunately, the DOE has not been honoring those who work in our schools.  Instead, they are planning to lay-off nearly 800 school aides and other school-based personnel; people who help our kids every day.

The day before school begins, on Wednesday, at 4 PM in front of Tweed, we are co-sponsoring a protest against the proposed lay-offs; for more on these layoffs, see Juan Gonzalez’ column here.

This year, we also expect to return to a much diminished teaching force; with more than 3000 or more teaching positions lost and/or teachers excessed, While enrollment is still increasing, this is likely lead to the highest class sizes in eleven years  in many grades.  (See how the DOE received an “F”  in the city’s performance reports, largely because of rising class sizes.) 

Meanwhile, DOE keeps adding hundreds of positions in an unprecedented expansion of the mid-level and central bureaucracy, spending tens of  millions of dollars for highly paid educrats called “achievement coaches” , “teacher effectiveness consultants”, “talent managers” and the like, none of whom will ever directly  help a single child.  They also plan to spend more than $36 million for new local assessments,  $12 million for new teacher evaluation systems, $10 million to expand the central “innovation office” and “innovation managers,” and millions more to expand online learning -- even as school budgets are cut for the fifth year in a row.  (For more details on all this new spending, see the DOE document here.)

One of the new achievement coaches was just appointed to that post after the Special Investigator found that as principal, she had  passed 30 students who had failed their courses; this is more evidence of DOE’s deep-rooted pathology, like the way they rewarded Verizon with a $120 million contract after the company was found complicit in fraud.

The entire way this department is  run is the antithesis of Children First – instead it should be renamed Educrats First. 

Please join us in protest against the layoffs and the systematic way DOE is disinvesting in schools and the classrooms -- and further bloating the bureaucracy:

Who:   Parents, teachers, labor and community leaders including Class Size Matters, NYC Parents Union, Local 372-DC 37, UFT, CEP, GEM, the Mothers' Agenda New York, NYCORE, Teachers Unite, ICE, NY Charter Parents Association and OurSchoolsNYC.org

When:  Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 4 PM

What:  Protest & Rally Against egregious School Staff Layoffs

Where:  New York City Department of Education, 52 Chambers Street

Bring your kids! They’re the ones being deprived of a quality education; they might as well get an education in politics and protest, if nothing else.

And on Thursday, please try to count the other students in your children’s classrooms, or ask your children do that for themselves, and report back to me what the situation is at leonie@att.net.

The top NYC public high schools in terms of college-readiness and SAT scores

Here is a file of NYC high schools ranked as to the percentage of their students in 2010 who graduated “college-ready,” which is estimated by the state education department as scoring at least 75 on the Regents exam in English and 80 on Math – called the "aspirational performance measure," or APM.  Here is a file ranked by their students' 2010 SAT scores.  UPDATE: here are files with 2011 SAT scores and AP scores.

Students scoring lower than this on the APM, according to the state, are likely to need remediation in college.  The spreadsheet also disaggregates this percentage by ELL and special education status, gender and ethnicity.

Lots of caveats before you interpret the APM or SAT list as a reliable ranking of the quality of NYC high schools:

• To a large degree, these results are determined by the selectivity of the schools' admissions process – not the quality of the school itself.  In other words, schools with the highest percentages of college-ready graduates tend to be those that admit the highest-achieving 8^th graders in the first place.  (See this recent paper, for example, that suggests that attending a highly selective high school like Stuyvesant or Bronx Science does not appear to increase SAT scores, college enrollment or college graduation rates.)

• Schools with fewer than 20 students in any cohort are listed an “s” for suppressed.

• Some NYC high schools are alternative/portfolio schools and do not take the math Regents; so they are omitted from the APM list.

•  Regents scores are not in themselves wholly reliable indicators since schools grade these exams themselves;  now that the city has announced that they will use the college-ready percentage in their accountability system, this measurement will be even less reliable in the future.

• These figures do not take into account the high dropout and/or discharge rate at many high schools; thus, one way a high school might be able to elevate its score is by pushing many low-achieving students out.

• In any case, test scores in isolation are never a reliable gauge of achievement or actual learning.   

Still, I think it’s interesting and worthwhile for parents to have access to this information.  The statistics overall are lamentably low.  Statewide, only about 37% of students graduate from high school college-ready; in the city, the figure is even lower at  21.4%.

Here is an article about the low college-readiness percentages of some NYC high schools with high graduation rates; here is a link to the NYSED explanation of these scores.  See this NY Post article that ranks the top 50 HS in NYC by using several academic measures.  Here is the DOE webpage with AP results as well.

The 40% solution? NYT editors parrot the Billionaire Boys Club and ignore the research

Today, in an editorial, the NY Times inveighs against the recent court decision that held that the new teacher evaluation system should be based 20 percent rather than 40 percent on state test scores, as mandated by a law passed by the Legislature.  

Somehow NY Times editors are under the delusion that teacher evaluation system based 40 percent on  state test scores, which themselves have been absurdly manipulated over the last several years, would be a more “rigorous” system.  They even appear to agree that if any teacher  did poorly on the that one portion of the system for one year only, he or she would deserve the lowest of ratings – as the Commissioner King would prescribe – in a perversion of the entire notion of multiple measures.

It is sad that none of the research showing the fallibility and potentially destructive effects of such a simplistic rating system has managed to penetrate into their heads.  Thus the Times shows itself as averse to research and expert opinion on the subject as the Wall Street Journal and the Daily News – and as firmly under the sway  of the oligarchy of ignorant billionaires and hedge fund operators who are now making education policy in this nation.

As Marc Epstein  put it, “If the issue is education reform, put Governor Chris Christie in a room with Governor Andrew Cuomo; Joel Klein, the education reformer and lifelong Democrat; Secretary of Education Arne Duncan; and the editorial boards of the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Post and New York Times, and you'd think you're at a family reunion straight out of "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet."

For a far more reasonable analysis of this eminently fair court decision, that merely ratified the notion that the Regents and the State Education Department should respect  the legal framework informed by their own advisory task force and negotiated by themselves, the legislature and the unions, see Mike Petrilli of the conservative Fordham Institute in NY Regents: Stop the madness!
 
Too bad the editorial board of the NY Times continues to show itself as averse to the expert consensus as embodied in this letter from the National Academy of Sciences on “Race to the Top”, that warned against a reductionist and ultimately unreliable teacher evaluation based heavily on standardized test scores,  as well as this letter from renowned academics, protesting Commissioner King’s unilateral decision to ignore the law.

The NY Times editors should recall their principled stance they took when the Bush administration allowed the influence of politics and big money to overwhelm research, science, and good sense.  Instead, on the issue of education policy,  they seem headed in the same ignorant and profoundly damaging direction.

One small win for humankind: Comptroller rejected $27 M no bid Wireless contract

One small but significant victory:  public outrage has managed to stop the state contract with Wireless Generation, owned by Rupert Murdoch and run by Joel Klein.   

As reported in today's Daily News, State Comptroller Di Napoli rejected the egregious $27 million contract that the NY State Education Department  wanted to award the company, to build a statewide data system modeled after the highly deficient city system known as ARIS.  

We were the first to post a petition to Di Napoli, the Regents, and the feds, after the Daily News broke the story, and many other petitions and letters to the Comptroller followed.

For some of the reasons this contract should have been rejected see here.

If you would like to thank Comptroller Di Napoli, you can send an email to: contactus@osc.state.ny.us

Keep safe everyone on the East Coast, from Hurricane Irene, but savor this win for accountability and for someone who dared to say NO to educrats , apparently intent on wasting taxpayer money and reward their friends and cronies with no-bid contracts. These wins have been few and far between in recent years.

A court decision on the teacher data reports that will hurt our kids

It is unfortunate that the day after a court decision held that NY teachers should be evaluated by use of multiple assessments, with student scores on state standardized tests only one minor factor, today, the appellate court said that the DOE could release the teacher data reports to the public, based only on these same test scores. 

Most testing experts agree that these reports are highly unreliable and reductionist, and they will unfairly tarnish the reputation of many excellent teachers:

1.     The state tests were never designed for such a purpose – and are technically unable to make year to year judgments on “progress” or value added. 

2.    Many studies have shown the extreme volatility of these measures, and how the results differ even from one sort of test to another.  See Juan Gonzalez’s column on how DOE consultants themselves believe these reports are highly unreliable; here are links to the original documents revealing this, obtained through a  FOIL.

3.    As John Ewing, former executive director of the American Mathematical Society, recently concluded, ”if we drive away the best teachers by using a flawed process, are we really putting our students first?  Mike Winerip reported on a top-notch NYC teacher who was denied  tenure in just this manner.

If NYC goes ahead and releases this data it would likely be the first school district in the country to do so willingly and enthusiastically; when the LA Times generated its own value-added data for Los Angeles teachers, the paper was widely criticized.  Chris Cerf, former deputy Chancellor and now acting State Superintendent of NJ schools, was originally in charge of creating the teacher data reports; he promised that they would never be used for teacher evaluations and that the DOE would fight against any effort to disclose them publicly. In a 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 the school community."

Chancellor Walcott should think twice before releasing this data, if he cares about real accountability, the morale of teachers,  and the potential damage to our kids.

Here are some of the recent studies from experts on the unreliability of this evaluation method:

Sean P. Corcoran, Can Teachers be Evaluated by Their Students’ Test Scores? Should they Be? The Use of Value-Added Measures of Teacher Effectiveness in Policy and Practice. As  the author concluded from his analysis, “The promise that value-added systems can provide a precise, meaningful, and comprehensive picture is much overblown… .Teachers, policy-makers and school leaders should not be seduced by the elegant simplicity of value-added measures. Given their limitations, policy-makers should consider whether their minimal benefits outweigh their cost.”  

Economic Policy Institute, “Problems with the Use of Student Test Scoresto Evaluate Teachers.” 2010.

National Research Council, Henry Braun, Naomi Chudowsky, and Judith Koenig, eds., GettingValue Out of Value-Added: Report of a Workshop, 2010: “Value- added methods involve complex statistical models applied to test data of varying quality. Accordingly, there are many technical challenges to ascertaining the degree to which the output of these models provides the desired estimates.”  

John Ewing, former executive director of the American Mathematical Society, current president of Math for America;  MathematicalIntimidation: Driven by the Data; “Why must we use value-added even with its imperfections? Aside from making the unsupported claim (in the very last sentence) that “it predicts more about what students will learn…than any other source of information”, the only apparent reason for its superiority is that value-added is based on data. Here is mathematical intimidation in its purest form—in this case, in the hands of economists, sociologists, and education policy experts…And if we drive away the best teachers by using a flawed process, are we really putting our students first?"

Sean P. Corcoran, Jennifer L. Jennings, Andrew A. Beveridge, Teacher effectiveness on high- and low-stakes tests; April 10, 2011. " To summarize, were teachers to be rewarded for their classroom's performance on the state test or alternatively, sanctioned for low performance many of these teachers would have demonstrated quite different results on a low-stakes test of the same subject.  Importantly, these differences need not be due to real differences in long-run skill acquisition…

That is, teachers deemed top performers on the high-stakes test are quite frequently average or even low performers on the low-stakes test. Only in a minority of cases are teachers consistently high or low performers across all metrics… Our results… highlight the need for additional research on the impact that high-stakes accountability has on the validity of inferences about teacher quality. "

And they say the 1950's were boring!

Check this photo from the May 8, 1950 edition of Life magazine: students "rioting" in the streets for better salaries for their teachers, after their teachers refused to take on extra duties like chaperoning proms after being denied raises.

Their teachers, paid salaries of from $2500 to $5,325, had been asking $600 raises, but were offered only $150-$200 instead: 

25,000 students held "mass rallies all over NY which had the police department jumping.  Carring banners on which their pro-teacher sentiments were scrawled in lipstick, they held up subway trains, wrecked automobiles, dared police to break them up and were prevented only by hasty police action from forcing their way into the office of Mayor O'Dwyer, who had refused to discuss higher salaries.  School officials declared the riots were staged by 'subversive elements'."

According to the caption on the photo at right, "Milling rowdies overturn car parked near city hall and mount it to shout their insults at the police and Mayor O'Dwyer.  Attempts to storm the mayor's office were thwarted by flying wedges of patient policemen."

And this was before there were cell phones, Facebook and twitter.  Just think!

Karen Sprowal talks about class size at last night's PEP and Verizon vote followed by audience yelling "Shame!"

Karen Sprowal,whose son, Matthew, was kicked out of Harlem Success charter school in Kindergarten, speaks for Class Size Matters about the devastating school budget cuts and the harsh effect on class size at last night's Panel for Educational Policy meeting.

Below this video is another of the audience shouting "Shame" after the Panel vote to approve the $120 million contract with Verizon.

Last night's PEP meeting on Verizon contract and its "Norma Rae" moment

Last night's meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy meeting was exhilarating, stirring, and depressing all at once.   Over a thousand parents, teachers, and striking Verizon workers showed up for the pre-meeting rally, and hundreds more filled the auditorium afterwards at Murry Bergtraum HS, chanting, booing Walcott and the DOE, and speaking up passionately for the need for more caring education priorities, and against the $120 million Verizon contract, which will steal even more resources from our children and the company's workers.

This contract had at least  five strikes against it, each of which would have convinced any individual with a conscience to oppose it, but was nevertheless rubber-stamped by the mayoral appointees (known collectively as the Panel of Eight Puppets, though the chair, Tino Hernandez, was absent), with  four borough reps all voting no.  

This, at a time when our school budgets are being slashed to the bone for the fifth year in a row, and while spending on testing, technology, consultants, bureaucrats, and private contracts like this one are ballooning into the billions.  The resulting cuts are forcing principals to raise class sizes to thirty (even in grades 2 & 3) teach classes themselves, and patrol the halls, as today's  Times article makes clear.

Here is some media coverage of the meeting from the Times, Daily News, Post, NY1.  None of it really captures the intensity of the evening, though the NY1 video comes closest.

Two unmentioned yet electric moments: Patrick Sullivan, Manhattan rep to the PEP and blogger here, revealing  that the Verizon contract actually releases the company from any legal obligation to fulfill their duties in case of a strike(!).  Also,  Dmytro Fedkowskyj, Queens rep, who, in response to DOE counsel Michael Best droning on how Verizon has agreed to pay back any profits they inappropriately received through the fraudulent scheme masterminded by Ross Lanham,  pointed out that the letter the company executives sent yesterday to the PEP contradicts this, as it claimed that they did nothing wrong.  Dmytro called this "insulting," and Walcott admitted that he did not "appreciate" the letter. (!!)

See below, for a "Norma Rae" moment, as Amy Muldoon, a passionate Verizon striker and mom, calls out the DOE for their contempt for workers, kids, and NYC taxpayers, while holding her baby in her arms.

Things are getting hot! Update on rally and letters from Verizon and CM Cabreras

Things are heating up.  Speakers at tomorrow's rally will include  elected officials,  labor leaders, and parent and teacher activists.  Be there or be square!

What: Rally and Protest 

Where: Murry Bergtraum HS, 411 Pearl Street, Manhattan (4/5/6 or N/R to City Hall / Brooklyn Bridge)

When: Wed. August 17, 2011 at 5 PM 

Why?  Verizon is shortchanging their own workers and stealing from schoolchildren!   Say no to more giveaways to private contractors and more wasted spending on technology while our class sizes are increasing! Tell the PEP to vote down the Verizon contract with the DOE!

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Verizon has sent a letter to members of the Panel for Educational Policy, claiming the company was not involved or implicated in any fraud.  

And yet the Special Investigator in his report clearly said that " SCI has determined that Lanham stole millions of dollars in public funds and defrauded the DOE. IBM and Verizon, by their silence, facilitated this fraud. ....Verizon concealed from the DOE and law enforcement that they got millions of dollars in contracts through Lanham only after agreeing to hire CCS as a subcontractor.....It is the recommendation of this office that the DOE recover all the money paid to IBM and Verizon for the Lanham consultants. It is further recommended that the DOE bring in outside auditors to determine any additional cost to the DOE and the Federal government engendered by Verizon’s use of CCS as a subcontractor on work that Verizon could have done at a lower cost."
 

But up to this point, Verizon has failed to pay any of this money back.  Here is what  Patrick Sullivan, Manhattan member of the PEP, has to say about this matter: 

 "Verizon has sent the PEP members a letter asking us to approve the contract.  It blames CWA for the campaign against the contract.  It attempts to completely misrepresent the SCI [Special Commissioner of Investigation] report which clearly states Verizon concealed billing information and knew of inappropriate arrangements.   Rather than CWA, it was SCI who asked that all funds be recovered from Verizon and that external auditors be brought in to examine Verizon's books." 

Also, please check out what Council Member Cabreras, chair of the NYC Council Technology Committee, wrote in his own letter to Chancellor Walcott, asking him to postpone the vote until he can hold hearings about Verizon's involvement in the scandal. 

For more on this and related issues, see Five Reasons to Say No! to the Verizon contract, and Patrick's recent post. 

Contracts Update for August PEP Meeting: Verizon & EPOs

Below is an update sent to Manhattan Community Education Councils this morning:

To: CEC1, CEC2, CEC3, CEC4, CEC5, CEC6:

Dear Parents,

I have received many emails with inquiries or concerns about the contracts agenda for the Panel for Educational Policy meeting on Wednesday the 17th. I'd like to update everyone on my understanding of these issues based on my discussions with DOE:

First, one comment on process. When the PEP was first granted approval authority over contracts we established a committee to review the contracts in detail. The Contracts Committee met publicly to question DOE staff and discuss contract specifics. Recently, the chairs of the Contracts Committee, mayoral appointees selected by the PEP chair, have refused to hold the public meeting. The Committee has not met at all under Chancellor Walcott. The DOE has also begun asking for PEP approval before contracts are drafted. In effect, rather than ask for approval of a contract, we are asked for blanket pre-approval of a potential contract based upon an outline of what's envisioned. This reduction in transparency has hampered the PEP's ability to assess the contracts and carry out our responsibilities under state law.

Verizon Contract

The DOE has explained that rather than conduct a procurement for a provider of fixed line and data telecom services, they've decided to piggyback on an existing city contract with Verizon. My concerns with this approach are two-fold:

First, there has been no resolution of the over-billing issue stemming from the alleged fraud perpetrated by a DOE consultant. The Special Commissioner for Investigation's report explained that Verizon, through it's silence facilitated the fraud. Verizon has agreed to return any inappropriate profit but has not yet done so. I don't believe we should enter into a new agreement with Verizon until they resolve this issue to our satisfaction. The sums involved are considerable, especially compared to the significant budget cuts to the classroom.

Second, Verizon and the unionized workforce of the landlines divisions that would deliver services to our classrooms are engaged in a protracted labor dispute. I have concerns about whether Verizon can actually provide the services we need given this dispute. I am skeptical that with limited staff to maintain landlines and data services that our schools would get appropriate priority compared to Verizon's commercial customers. A failure of telecom services would present a considerable risk not only to the smooth functioning of our schools but a safety risk to our children.

Given these issues, I have asked DOE to defer consideration of this contract and instead initiate an procurement exercise to identify the best provider of the needed services in the present circumstances.

EPO Contracts

The Chancellor has announced his intention to outsource management of a limited number of schools to Educational Partnership Organizations. The Chancellor has this ability under Ed Law 211-e. That law requires the relationship with an outside entity to be strictly delineated in a contract. DOE procurement staff have asked the PEP to vote on these contracts without actually seeing them. Citing a lack of time, they have told us no contacts will be available before Wednesday's vote. This excuse is not acceptable. The DOE needs to draft the contracts, come to terms with the EPOs and then provide them to the PEP for approval. I will not allow our children and staff to be placed under the leadership of outside management without the DOE and their partners demonstrating absolute adherence to the terms of the law.


Borough President Stringer's office and I will continue to engage the DOE on these issues and I hope to have a more encouraging update in the near future.

Patrick J. Sullivan
Manhattan Member,
Panel for Educational Policy / NYC Board of Education

Five reasons to say NO! to the DOE's $120 million contract with Verizon

UPDATE: Since posting this on Friday, new sponsors/supporters of this protest include the Communications Workers of America (CWA), BNYEE, CPE-CEP, New York Communities for Change, ICE, S.E.E.D.S, The MANY,  TJC and the UFT.  Be there or be square!

On Wednesday, August 17, the Department of Education's Panel for Education Policy will vote on a $120 million two year contract with telecom giant Verizon to wire our schools.   There are at least five good reasons to oppose this contract ( see below.)

Join us at the PEP meeting near City Hall to protest this immoral and possibly illegal contract.  At the same time the PEP will be voting on a spending plan that will cut our school budgets - for the third year in a row - and lead to sharply larger classes.
Whether you can join us or not, please  send the message below to the members of the PEP:

What: Picket and Protest 

Where: Murry Bergtraum HS, 411 Pearl Street, Manhattan (4/5/6 or N/R to City Hall / Brooklyn Bridge)

When: Wed. August 17, 2011 at 5 PM

Why?  Verizon is shortchanging their own workers and stealing from schoolchildren!   Say no to more giveaways to private contractors and more wasted spending on technology while our class sizes are increasing! Tell the PEP to vote down the Verizon contract with the DOE!

Take a stand against the increasing section of our education budget given to private contractors and online for-profit vendors, like Rupert Murdoch's Wireless Generation. 

Sponsored by: Class Size Matters, Grassroots Education Movement, New York Charter Parents Association, NYCORE, NYC Parents Union, Teachers Unite (list in formation)  

And please send the following email to the PEP:

Dear PEP member:

Please vote no on the $120 million contract with Verizon. Here are five good reasons:  

1.  45,000 Verizon workers are currently on strike, as management has demanded a long list of concessions, including cutting their health benefits, pensions, and sick time – givebacks amounting to $20,000 per worker. Meanwhile, the company has $100 billion in revenue, net profits of $6 billion, and Verizon Wireless just paid its parent company a $10 billion dividend. The top five company executives have been paid more than a quarter of a billion dollars over the last four years.  Why should the city be contracting with such a greedy and unethical company?

2.      Verizon is implicated in the recent scandal in which the Special Commissioner of Investigation found that a consultant named Ross Lanham in charge of school internet wiring stole $3.6 million dollars through a false billing scheme, and that Verizon profited from and  “facilitated this fraud.” Though DOE admits that “Verizon is in discussion with the DOE regarding repaying of the overcharges,” the company has not yet agreed to pay back any of this money, and the case has been referred to the US attorney’s office for possible prosecution.   Why should DOE reward Verizon by paying the company more millions?

3.       In the same document in which the DOE outlines the contract, there are twenty other instances listed of suspicious or illegal behavior on the part of Verizon, triggering numerous investigations.

4.      All NYC public schools are already wired for the internet; but according to the DOE, this new round of wiring is for high-speed internet and hi-definition video  to facilitate the expansion of online learning and computerized testing.  This is occurring at the same time as budgets are being cut to the bone, schools are losing valuable programs, and class sizes are rising to the highest level in over a decade.  A quarter of our elementary schools are so overcrowded they had waiting lists for Kindergarten.  It is outrageous that in the midst of this budget crisis, the DOE should be spending $120 million for unnecessary technological upgrades when children do not have seats in their neighborhood schools.

5.   Finally, this contract with Verizon began on January 1, 2011, and DOE is only now asking for the PEP  to approve it “retroactively.”  But there is no allowance for retroactive contracts in state law, unless the chancellor finds that due to an emergency, it is necessary for “the preservation of student health, safety or general welfare” and provides a written justification.  This was never done.  Thus this contract with Verizon is likely illegal on the face of it.  

I hope you will vote your conscience, and reject this outrageous contract, 

(name)

Send this message to: llbryant@inwoodhouse.com; jchan@dbpartnership.org; pepofqueens@yahoo.com; FFoster@schools.nyc.gov; thernandez@samvill.org; patk.j.sullivan@gmail.com; okotieuro@yahoo.com; JKay3@schools.nyc.gov; EMarti@schools.nyc.gov; Dperuggia@schools.nyc.gov; majorm766@gmail.com; gittepeng@yahoo.com; Lnieves01@gmail.com

 

PBS: Are these schools really "drop-out" factories? And what would help?

An intelligent, probing video below from last night's PBS' News Hour of several NYC high school struggling to survive.  Schools examined include Flushing HS, International HS at Prospect Heights, and Robeson HS, which DOE is phasing out.  Full transcript here.  Excerpt:

ROSIE FRASCELLA (teacher): Computers and spending a billion dollars on technology and infrastructure is not going to stop kids from dropping out. Human beings stop kids from dropping out, calling their parents, having that human conversation, that interaction.

SIOBHAN SEN: Fazya couldn't agree more. She thinks having an adult who listens would help kids in school.

FAZYA BACCHUS (student at Flushing HS, where most class sizes average 30-34 ) : And when I talk to somebody, it helps me. I feel better, and I go to my classes. I do what I have to do.

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

Video: how US economic and political trends have led to plutocracy and larger classes

In two and half minutes, Robert Reich tells the truth re the US economy since 1980.  The size of our economy doubled; but wages stayed flat.  All profits went to the wealthiest; and the top percent now have 40 percent of the wealth.

Which gives them too much political power,  influencing our politicians to lower their their tax rates, leading to deficits and budget cuts and yes, higher class sizes (not to mention more charter schools...)

A must see.

Our daily newpapers: four different takes on NYC test scores

•   The Wall Street Journal says charter schools’ scores – especially those of Eva Moskowitz’s schools -- are so stellar that they should stop opponents in their tracks.

Of course!  Privatization is the goal.

• The Post says the test scores, though nothing stellar,  should be commended.

Let’s keep boosting Bloomberg, half-heartedly, even though we don’t really believe anything he says.

• The Daily News says there were only “miniscule gains”  and show that the city’s teachers are at fault and need to be "weeded" out.

Let’s keep attacking the UFT and teachers, whatever happens!

• The NY Times? No editorial.

Let’s ignore our public schools as much as possible since really, who cares?

For my take on the results, see yesterday's post .