Los Angeles: ground zero in the fight over class size and corporate reform

The Los Angeles school board has a new president, Dr. Richard Vladovic, and a new member, Monica Ratliff, a working fifth grade teacher, who won her seat despite being hugely outspent more than 10-1 by the corporate reform crowd, including $1 million from NYC Mayor Bloomberg.  (UPDATE: counting independent expenditures, it was more like 42-1; see comment below.)

Vladovic was elected president by 5-2. The two votes against him came from outgoing president Monica Garcia and her ally Tamar Galatzan.

LA Superintendent John Deasy

The Los Angeles school district also has, for the first time in years, an increase in funding from the state, and has decided to spend a large portion to reverse the increase in class sizes that has driven class sizes in many classrooms to 30 to 40 students or more.

Here is a video of the June 18 school board meeting, showing Los Angeles parents, many of them Mexican-American, pleading with the school board to pass the resolution that had been introduced in support of reducing class size.  It is well worth watching in its entirety.  

At the behest of some LA parents and activist Robert Skeels, I wrote a short research brief supporting the resolution that is posted here.

The class size reduction resolution was approved by the board 5-2.  The two votes against it came, again, from Monica Garcia and Tamar Galatzan. The board  postponed a vote on a competing resolution, introduced by Galatzan and supported by Superintendent John Deasy, that would have given schools more “flexibility” in spending these funds.

Deasy had already pushed through a program to give iPads to all LA students, and expand digital learning to teach the common core, all favorite experiments of the corporate reform crowd and especially the Gates Foundation.

Deasy was appointed straight from the Gates Foundation, which  remains the nation’s most powerful opponent of reducing class size, despite the voluminous evidence for its efficacy in boosting learning and narrowing the achievement gap. 

After the vote of the school board in favor of reducing class size, Deasy said he would ignore their wishes and would implement Galatzan’s resolution:

 “The Board voted down the directive to have me come and do it,” said Deasy, referring to Galatzan’s local spending resolution: “…we’re doing it anyway. If they had voted to prevent me from doing it… well they didn’t think of that.”

He said his spending plan will somehow combine both resolutions, including the one supporting class size reduction, which he derisively described as a “directive to hire every human being on the West Coast.”   

The LA principals and teachers unions subsequently sent a letter of protest to the board about Deasy’s intention to defy their decision.

Below is a video clip of the most dramatic part of the board’s debate over class size, as Steve Zimmer, the new vice-president, also a former school teacher, explains the hypocrisy of those who opposed this resolution by showing how many LA charters boast about their smaller classes.  (Deasy is proud of the fact that LA is now the largest charter authorizer in the United States.)

Here is a description/explanation from a LA insider, originally posted on Diane Ravitch’s blog:

With mounting irritation, Zimmer starts shouting—quoting and throwing the paper printouts from the charters websites wildly over his shoulder (where the charters’ websites’ main page touts and specifically cites their exact student-to-teacher ratios.)

This was breathtaking. You can’t see this because of the camera angle, but Board Member Galatzan was visibly angry at this point. A little subtext here.

Both Galatzan and Monica Garcia have strongly backed the private charters in general—and the ones mentioned by Zimmer in particular, while at the same time, lambasting teachers in the traditional public schools and those teachers’ union, UTLA for doing a lousy job, and “obstructing reform” and being “defenders of a failed status quo,” and on and on… (In the process, Galatzan and Garcia are parroting the talking points of the “reform” organizations who pumped millions into their campaigns… but that’s another story).

In 2009, Galatzan and Garcia also voted to raise class size in the traditional public schools—and saying nothing about the ratios at their beloved charter schools. While the state budget was a contributing factor to the vote, Galatzan and Garcia also cited in part the following reasons for raising the class size in the traditional public schools:

1) “Lowering class size is just about teachers unions wanting more members and more dues, and more power… with no proof that it helps kids.”

2) “Lowering class size is about advancing adult interests at the expense of children’s interests.”

3) “Lowering class size is just so teachers, who have it easy enough already, will have it even easier, with less work required from less students.”

Zimmer makes brief reference to these objection ”to those who think that (lowering) class size is solely about jobs.. ”

For Galatzan and Garcia, they take a seemingly contradictory (hypocritical?) stance on this, as again, they bend over backwards supporting and praising the charter schools whose success is in part due to their low class size—the low class size the charters tout on their websites.

Anyway, back to the video.

Galatzan starts picking up the papers that Zimmer flings indiscriminately over his head and slapping them down angrily on the counter, and says to him, “Are you gonna clean this up?”

Not flinching a bit, Zimmer continues his laser-like focus, not even looking sideways at Galatzan as he snaps, “I’ll clean it up!” as if to say, “Don’t butt in… I’m on a roll here.”

Again… a breathtaking performance.

It is especially breathtaking for those of us here in NYC, whose children continue to suffer from rising class sizes because of mayoral control and a lack of democracy, with a school board whose decisions are in lock step with their master, Michael Bloomberg.

New York Times editors sadly return to cheerleading Bloomberg's status quo

Today the NY Times editors returned to their status quo ante position when it comes to the city’s public schools, and sternly warned the mayoral candidates to stick to the dreadful Bloomberg dysfunctional and autocratic policies of school closings and privatization.

Much of the editorial, entitled “A New Education Mayor,” reads like it was written by City Hall PR machine, without any reference to reality: “He swept away a byzantine bureaucracy that had defeated his predecessors and created clear lines of authority.”

Nothing could be more byzantine – and without any clear lines of authority -- than the inexplicable networks that have replaced the district structure.

“Mr. Bloomberg’s policy of closing large, failing schools and replacing them with smaller schools is unpopular with teachers, many of whom have to find jobs elsewhere in the system. And some adults have emotional ties to a school, however terrible it has become.”

This is totally dismissive of the terrible impact school closures have on communities and the children in these schools. 

The editorial is similarly dense about the damaging impact of charter co-locations:

“In a few extreme cases, critics say, the regular school students are treated like second-class citizens in a building that once belonged to them.”

A few extreme cases, critics say? The loss of classrooms, art rooms, access to library and gym – and the inequitable conditions that result -- are all too common among co-located schools.

This editorial is a huge contrast with the far more accurate May 19 editorial that clearly recognized the failure of the Bloomberg policies and criticized administration figures who complained that some of the mayoral candidates wanted to take a different tack, called “Education, Vision and the Mayor’s Race.”

Here’s what that earlier editorial said about school closures, less than two months ago:

“Yes, Mr. Bloomberg has shown disdain for consultation, as in his rush to close underperforming schools without the full and meaningful involvement of affected communities. The system needs to strengthen neighborhoods’ connection to schools and reconnect with parents who feel shut out.”

And here’s what it said about the awful co-locations:

“And while charter schools can be a path to excellence, they can also cause problems. Shoehorning them into existing school buildings over local objections can alienate parents and reinforce among students a harmful sense of being separate and unequal.”

But my favorite sentence in the earlier editorial was this:

“But after 12 years, this mayor’s ideas are due for a counterargument. The critiques the candidates are offering hardly shock the conscience, and their complaints about the Bloomberg administration can be heard from teachers and parents in any school in the city.”

Exactly.  The fact that the New York Times editorial board, which had consistently ignored the protests and discontent of parents and the evident damage that Bloomberg had done to our schools, and had now appeared to awaken from its somnolence and emerge from its insulated fortress, made me hope that the situation had improved.  I speculated that perhaps there was now a Times editorial writer who actually knew a NYC public school parent, or even had a child in a city public school herself.

No such luck. Inadvertently or not, this earlier editorial has now been omitted from the list of Times education opinion pieces here.

What explains this schizophrenia? Was Brent Staples, the Times education “expert” and reliable Bloomberg ally, on vacation when the May editorial was written? Will we see any more trenchant education critiques from the Times before the election?  Sadly, this prospect now seems unlikely.

July 4th: fighting to preserve the right to privacy

Happy July 4^th everyone.  Today we all remember how important it is to preserve our right to privacy, our right to protect ourselves and our families against unreasonable search and seizure, and our ability to keep our children's most confidential and sensitive information secure and protected from being handed off to for-profit vendors and corporations.

These rights seem more imperiled than ever before  when our government, at the national and state levels, seem to feel they have the right to spy on ordinary citizens and to do whatever they like with our children's data.  In the debate over whether the state should provide this information to inBloom Inc., and via inBloom, to a plethora of for-profit vendors, Tom Dunn of the New York State Education Department told the Village Voice that "when parents register a child for school" they "give up" any right to determine what is done with his or her data.  Really?

A young computer scientist named Edward Snowden has shown us the extent to which the federal government is engaged in spying on citizens and the rest of the world, and for revealing this reality, he cannot find safe haven.

Not long ago, another young computer scientist named Bill Gates made a fortune, is now lionized around the world, and has amassed incredible power.  He is now intent on transforming our public education system into a marketplace of competing schools and outsourcing instruction to machines and an array of software products, which is called "personalized" learning but it is really depersonalized learning.

To this end, he is amassing all the data he can from the nation's vulnerable children, and offering it up to vendors,  because information is power and one can never have enough.  But our children are not commodities, and their privacy and security is invaluable. 

As usual, Diane Ravitch said it best:

July 4 is a day when we celebrate our independence, our freedom, and our liberties, guaranteed by our great Constitution and Bill of Rights.

It is also a good day to ponder the continuing growth of the national security state. This state demands the power to watch our every move. It says that it keeps us safe by having the ability to read our emails and monitor our phone calls. It sets up hidden cameras on the street to watch us.

Similarly, in schools, confidential data about our children and grandchildren are being amassed on a huge database that will be stored somewhere in the “cloud,” and managed by amazon.com. The database is being assembled, thanks to $100 million from Bill Gates and the Carnegie Corporation, by Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation. Don’t you feel safer already, knowing that every detail about your offspring is aggregated somewhere so that corporations can develop new products and sell stuff to the schools? Who might hack the data? Who might use it and misuse it? We don’t know. Will it happen? Of course....

Here’s a video from Fox Business:  Schools Putting Student Privacy at Risk?  

CNN story on inBloom and important update: NYS districts must choose dashboards populated with inBloom data by fall

UPDATE: the CNN segment about inBloom has been moved to 6:45 PM tonight, Saturday instead.

A CNN story about inBloom Inc. was posted this morning and will be aired at 3 PM tomorrow, Saturday June 29.  I have also posted it below; please check it out.  It contains an interview with Karen Sprowal, NYC parent activist, a short excerpt from our Brooklyn town hall meeting, and comments from the CEO of inBloom Inc., Iwan Streichenberger.    

This morning, the article accompanying the CNN video had a major error.  It quoted Streichenberger as saying that “the school districts themselves are the only ones with access to the data -- schools are forbidden from sharing the information, and third parties can't tap in.”

Actually, the whole point of inBloom Inc. is to gather as much personal student data as possible and share it with 3^rd party vendors without parental consent – to help them develop and market their products.  But this error, as well as similar ones in the media, reveal how purposely obscure and confusing inBloom, the NY State Education Department and the DOE have been about their intent.  I was recently was forwarded an email from a Newsday editor, saying that she could not confirm that this data would be shared with any vendors, and that she believed that this was only a “rumor”.

After we contacted her, the CNN producer corrected the error and now the article says that “School districts control the data, though they may share that information with third-parties if they choose. (See correction below).”

Still, the CNN piece doesn’t discuss the inherent insecurity of storing this massive amount of highly sensitive data on a cloud, and doesn’t mention that the whole purpose of inBloom is to commercialize the data, so it can be shared it with as many vendors as possible.  It doesn't cite inBloom's statement that it "cannot guarantee the security of the information stored...or that the information will not be intercepted when it is being transmitted."  It also ends with an interview with Karen Sprowal, edited in such a way to appear that she would be okay with inBloom if only they had involved parents more in the discussion.

Actually, Karen responded that she was willing to consider that online learning tools could be helpful in some instances, but that the district and state must involve parents in the process. She, like most parents, remains strongly opposed to inBloom and to sharing any personally identifiable student data without parental consent.  Anyway, take a look at the CNN video and the article and leave comments on the site, where there is already a lively debate on these issues.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Three companies, (DataCation from ConnectEDU, myTrack from eScholar, and Schoolnet from Pearson) have signed contracts with NY State to create data dashboards that will receive personalized student data straight from inBloom cloud.  The state is requiring that any district that received funding through “Race to the Top” must sign up with one of these companies in the fall.  They are also encouraging all districts and charter schools in the state to sign up with one of these companies, as well as contract with additional for-profit vendors that will offer “interoperable” software programs and receive data from inBloom.

Even the privacy of students in non-RTTT districts is at risk, since the state has indicated that they are uploading personally identifiable data for every public school and charter school student onto the inBloom cloud – whether their district intends to contract with any vendors or not. In fact, the entire NYS student data system is now apparently in the hands of inBloom Inc., now outsourced and privatized, with a governing board made up almost entirely of the Gates Foundation and its grantees, giving them incalculable power but no responsibility in case of breaches. 

In this NYSED memo, dated yesterday, a schedule of meetings in August around the state about these data dashboards for school officials is included; I suggest that parents and others concerned about privacy find out where these meetings are being held from their school boards or superintendent, ask lots of questions and express their concerns – since the state has refused to meet with parents or listen to them up to this point. 

  
More articles about inBloom have appeared in the last few days.  One is about two New York bills that were approved by the Assembly to protect student privacy, but failed to pass the Senate in the last weeks of the Legislature. Also see this article about a bill introduced in Massachusetts to restrict the sharing of this highly sensitive information. 
Please send a message to your Senator and school board, expressing your concern with their lack of action, and asking what they will do to protect your child's privacy from being violated or abused.

UPDATE: No performance evaluations for any Chancellor or top administrator at Tweed since Bloomberg took office

Correction!  Lisa Fleisher FOILed for the DOE performance evaluations BEFORE I did.  Apologies to her.  I had wrongly assumed otherwise.
UPDATE: Lisa Fleisher of the Wall Street Journal FOILed for the job evaluations of the top leadership at Tweed shortly after I did – but smartly, she asked for all the evaluations back to 2001, when Bloomberg took office. 

Guess what?  There are none.  She also shows how this is sharp departure from pre-Bloomberg days and the way things are done in other school districts.  Walcott explains the disparity from the strict accountability demanded of teachers:

"They're in front of the classroom and teaching our children, and we need to have a sense of how well they're doing," he said. "With us, we're not teaching children directly, we're setting policy. And I don't think it's hypocritical at all."

That really makes a lot of sense.  

Klein claims that instead of evaluations, he fired any of his aides who weren’t doing the job.  And those were who again?  

This latest revelation is perfect coda to the Bloomberg era, when accountability at the top was promised New Yorkers, but instead we got mismanagement, corrupt and wasteful contracts, privatization, and damaging policies that were abhorrent to parents and educators alike.