Any issue with today's math exams?

Today was the first day of the NY Common Core state math exams in grades 3-8.  Please note below any observations about these exams, or the reactions of students taking them.

Were they lengthy, confusing and or stressful, or were they grade appropriate with reasonably straightforward questions?  Were there any errors in the booklets or instructions? 

Comments welcome from teachers, parents and students, anonymously or not! 

So was the testing experience for kids so much better this year? The answer must be no.

Clearly there were many problems with this year's NY state ELA exams.  My three blog posts have received about 150 comments so far, and over 40,000 page views.  I urge you to take a look here, here, and here. Many teachers, administrators and parents wrote about their concerns with these exams elsewhere, pointing out faults that had plagued previous versions of the Pearson NYS ELA exams.

These included overly long, dense and grade-inappropriate reading passages with numerous typos, abstruse vocabulary and confusing questions; many of which teachers themselves said they couldn't discern the right answers.   On the third grade exam, for example, an excerpt from a book called “Eating the plate” was actually fifth grade level and sixth to eighth grade interest level.  There were many reading passages with Lexile levels two or three grades above the grades of students being asked to comprehend and respond to these texts.

"In 6th grade there was a poem from the 17th century that the teachers in our building read in COLLEGE. 11th grade level.”

On the eighth grade exam, one reading passage featured obscure words like "crag" and "fastnesses".  As one teacher wrote, "What are fastnesses?...I asked eight of my fellow colleagues to define this word.  1 of 8 knew the answer.  Unless you a geology major, how is this word a part of our everyday language, let alone the reading capacity of an average 8th grader? And our ESL students?"

I even asked my husband, a professor in the Geosciences department; he didn't know what "fastnesses" meant either.    

There were several passages that included commercial product placements as in years past, this time featuring the helmet manufacturer Riddell, Skittles candy, Stonyfield yogurt, and Doritos.  (Riddell is being sued by a thousand NFL players for deceptive claims that their helmets protected against concussions.)
  
One notable reading passage described herding sheep from the perspective of the dog, without making that clear in the text.  Another section asked what the phrase "impossibly improbable" meant, within the context of an article promoting the efficacy of the controversial weed-killer called Round Up.  The article didn't mention that the herbicide has been called a "probable carcinogen" by the World Health Organization, and banned in several countries.  (In this case, however, the author used its chemical name glysophate, and not its more well-known commercial name.)  There were even  upsetting passages about kids who had lost parents through death or separation.

One teacher disclosed that a passage on the exam had been in Pearson i-ready test prep reading material that she had assigned to her class a few weeks before.

Two new problems emerged.  One was the omission from many of the test booklets of blank pages that were supposed to be used by students to plan their essays, or the titles of the pages were left out.  Instructions to deal with these problems came from the state only after many children were in the midst of writing their essays or after they had completed the exams.  In these cases, teachers pointed out, this represented an unfair disadvantage to their students, who were forced to either use the limited space at the front of the booklet to plan their essays or didn't plan them at all.

But perhaps the most heartbreaking was an unforeseen but brutal consequence of the untimed nature of these exams, the major innovation made by Commissioner Elia that was supposed to reduce the stress levels of kids.  Instead, many students labored for many hours, taking three to five hours per day to complete them, and sometimes more.  Here's one comment from Facebook:

"This afternoon I saw one of my former students still working on her ELA test at 2:45 PM.  Her face was pained and she looked exhausted.  She had worked on her test until dismissal time for the first two days of testing as well. 18 hours.  She's 9."

This is a travesty; no child should be subjected to such a punishing regime. It also appears to violate the NY law passed in 2014 that limits state testing time to one percent of total instructional time.

In any case, it appears that the parents who chose to opt their children out of the exams were wise to have done so.  All in all, the number of opt outs seem to have held steady from last year's 240,000, or even perhaps increased, with even higher rates of test refusals in Rockland County, NYC, and Long Island, which surpassed its record rates last year, with more than 97,000 students opting out, or about 50% of eligible kids compared to about 47% last year.

And all this, despite the efforts to suppress the movement from Commissioner Elia , Chancellor Farina, as well as six-figure ad buys  from Gates-funded Astroturf groups like High Achievement NY, all with the message that the tests would be so much "better" this year.

It goes without saying that even more parents should consider opting their kids out of next week's math exams.  Instructions from NYSAPE including a sample letter to give to  your principal is here; here’s one from Change the Stakes.  

3rd day of ELA testing; please add yr comments! And "impossibly improbable" reading passage found!

Thanks to eagle-eyed Fred Smith, we have now found the passage in which the phrase "impossibly improbable" used, in yesterday's 6th grade ELA exam.  In a piece called "Weed Wars: Farmers fight unwanted plants among crops" published in 2011, the article describes how weeds are developing resistance to a chemical called glyphosate, and how new strategies will have to be found to kill weeds.

In its context (see highlighted below), the phrase seems to mean impossible, because it is then contrasted with the fact that  over time, it is indeed possible for weeds to build in resistance to the weedkiller called glyphosate, but it is certainly a tricky question and who knows how exactly it was phrased? Fred gives it "half a Pineapple"; what do you think?

Aside from the fact that there are plenty of ways for food to be grown organically without the negative impact of chemical weedkillers and genetically engineered crops, a position that that the article appears to ignore. Glyphosate, also called "Round Up", is made by Monsanto and is banned in many countries for its potentially damaging effects on human health.

An excerpt follows below.  If anyone knows what which particular questions followed, and if the passage was changed in any way, please put this in the comment section below.  Also please offer any observations you have on the 3rd day of ELA testing. thanks!

Weed wars: farmers fight unwanted plants among crop

When Stanley Culpepper was a kid, he spent hours pulling weeds on his family’s farm. “We pulled and pulled and pulled,” he says.

Culpepper started weeding when he was only about 5 or 6 years old. As a teenager, he chopped big weeds down with a hatchet.

Culpepper loved working on the farm, but he didn’t like weeding. He became a scientist to figure out easier ways for farmers to control weeds. “I decided there’s got to be a better way than pulling weeds all your life,” says Culpepper, now a weed scientist at the University of Georgia in Tifton.

A lot has changed since Culpepper was a kid. About 15 years ago, many more farmers started using a chemical called glyphosate to kill weeds. It worked so well that many farmers thought their problems were solved. But recently, some weeds have become resistant to glyphosate, meaning it’s harder for the chemical to kill the unwanted plants.

Resistant weeds are a big problem. Some can grow 10 feet tall! Scientists have discovered that weeds use all kinds of tricks to fight glyphosate. If the problem gets worse, farmers might not be able to grow as many crops, or they will have to spend more money controlling weeds. Then food could become more expensive.

...In the 1990s, something big happened: Scientists made crops that couldn’t be killed by glyphosate. They changed the plants’ DNA, the genetic instructions that tell cells which molecules to make. If farmers planted these glyphosate-resistant crops, they could spray the herbicide all over the field anytime and kill weeds without harming crops.

“It became very simple,” says Steve Duke, a plant scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Oxford, Miss. “Just spray once or twice, kill everything [but your crops].”

Farmers loved those glyphosate-resistant crops. They started planting more and more of them and using more and more glyphosate.

Winning the lottery

Some people thought glyphosate would work forever. But the weeds were evolving. That means their DNA was changing.

Once in a while, changes to a weed’s DNA would allow that weed to survive the glyphosate. The chances of changes like this were very, very small. But when farmers used glyphosate year after year on millions of hectares of crops, “what seems almost impossibly improbable becomes more probable,” Duke says.

Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University in Ames, compares the process to a lottery. If one person buys a lottery ticket, his or her chances of winning are tiny. But when millions of people play, chances are good that at least one person will pick the winning combination of numbers. As weeds were sprayed with glyphosate every year, it was like billions of plants were buying lottery tickets over and over, trying to “win” resistance to glyphosate. Eventually, some weeds were going to hit the jackpot.

It didn’t take long for that to happen. In 1996, Australian scientists found a weed called rigid ryegrass that couldn’t be killed with normal levels of glyphosate. In 2001, a researcher in the United States reported another resistant weed, called horseweed. Now at least 21 weed species have evolved glyphosate resistance.....If farmers can’t control weeds and insects, they can’t grow as much food. And if they grow less food, food prices could go up.

ELA exam 2nd day: major snafu - what should now happen? Leave your comments below!

The notice below was sent by NYSED this morning at about 9 AM, after many students had already started taking the ELA exams and some had already completed them.

As the teacher quoted below said, @QuestaristhenewPearson. What is wrong with these testing companies, and where is their accountability?

 Please leave your comments below about what you think should happen with these exams,  and if you have any other observations about day 2.

From a teacher:  For Day 2, the 3rd and 5th grade books were both missing the planning pages for the extended response. We're allowed to hand out scrap paper, but this contradicts the directions as written, so very confusing. The testing coordinator also received an email AFTER administration had begun, letting us know that there wasn't enough space given for 5th graders to write their essay and that we could give out lined paper and staple it into the books. Since Questar is handling this year's printing, this doesn't bode well for the future, no? #questaristhenewpearson

From a MS principal: The problem in middle schools is that the blank pages are after the lined pages and kids know (are trained) not turn ahead in the book. It is a production mistake that was only noticed after the early completers were already done. Many students will plan on the lined page and then either raise their hands or write on the blank pages. If kids see no prompt to write, they aren't going to ask for paper.

The message was sent at 9:09 AM from SED and I saw [it] at 9:30 ...when most students are done and have turned in their books.... Even if an administrator is on their email all day (which they aren't) it is too late to walk around on tests that started at 8:00 to interrupt testing rooms to correct the mistake.

Please post your comments & observations about the ELA exams here!

Today is the first day of the NY State ELA exams in grades 3-8.  As in past years, I am reaching out to students, parents, and teachers to let us know if there are confusing or ambiguous questions, overly long reading passages or passages with commercial product placements or vocabulary that is anachronistic and/or not age-appropriate.  Please note if there are any other issues that concern you or make the exams flawed or problematic.

This year the exams are also untimed.  How long did it take your child or students to complete the questions?

It was nearly four years ago, on April 18 when I first learned from a comment on our blog about the absurd Pineapple passage on the 2012 ELA exam.

 After I did a little research and blogged about this passage the next day, the story of the race between a Hare and a Pineapple with no sleeves quickly blew up into a national scandal.  To this day, the Pineapple has endured as emblematic of the lack of accountability on the part of the test-makers and policymakers, who insist on using these exams to rate schools, students and teachers.


Please also note below if you have info about the opt-out rates at your schools.  Already we have received reports of high rates in some Rochester-area districts and at PS 261 in Brooklyn.

thanks Leonie

So many reasons to #optout: Let’s keep it going until our kids get the schools they really deserve!

It’s that time of year again: Students throughout NY State will be subjected to the burdensome, stressful, overly long, confusing and poorly constructed state exams.The ELA exams will be held from Tuesday, April 5 to Thursday, April 7, and the math exams from Wednesday, April 13 – Friday, April 15.  (Schedule here.)

Johanna Garcia, parent leader in Upper Manhattan

There were stories in today's New York Daily News and Politico New York about the dynamite NYC Opt Out press conference yesterday at City Hall, in which parent leaders demanded that DOE inform parents throughout the city that they have the right to opt out of the upcoming exams.

There is a dearth of information in many schools about this, particularly in immigrant and Latino neighborhoods, as Johanna Garcia of District 6 Presidents Council pointed out at the press conference – despite the fact the state tests are especially inappropriate for English Language Learners and provide no useful information about their skills or progress. 

Other parent leaders in schools with predominantly students of color spoke of principals who had misinformed them, saying that their kids could be held back if they opted out -- even though there is a state law barring this.  The disparity in information provided across the city is in itself a civil rights violation, parents maintained,  reflecting and perpetuating separate and unequal conditions in our schools.

Last year, I appeared on a news show with Angelica Infante-Green, then NY Associate Commissioner of the Office of Bilingual Education, now the Deputy Commissioner.   Ms. Infante-Green agreed that the state tests provide NO useful diagnostic information for ELLs, and that then-Commissioner John King had asked for a waiver from the US Department of Education so that ELLs would not have to take the state test for two years.  The waiver  was denied.

Yes, this is the same John King who is now US Secretary of Education.  Ms. Infante-Green said the state really believed that ELLs should be excused from taking the test for three years, but they hadn't asked for that as they had thought they couldn't get such a waiver.

The test is also particularly abusive to kids with special needs.  At the press conference, Brooke  Parker spoke about how at a private meeting of District 14 parents with Chancellor Farina, she had asked the Chancellor if her dyslexic daughter, a struggling reader, should take the test, and the Chancellor said no. 

Here's an account of a similar private meeting with parents in District 15, in which the Chancellor said that parents of children with special needs and immigrants should opt their children out.  But why tell this to parents in private meetings, without making this information public throughout the city?

Last year,  only 6.9 percent of NYC students with disabilities and 4.4 percent of ELLs “passed” or were deemed proficient on the ELA exams.

Council Member Helen Rosenthal also spoke about the resolution she sponsored that was unanimously approved by the City Council last year, calling for the right of parents to opt their children out of state testing to be included in the DOE Parent Bill of Rights and  sent to every NYC public school parent each year.

Although in Schoolbook, it was suggested that there is a risk of losing federal funds in schools with high opt-out rates, this has never happened.  As Jeanette Deutermann of Long Island Opt out pointed out at the press conference, there are many schools and districts throughout the state that haven’t made the 95% participation rate for three years and have not suffered any loss of funds.  Budget cuts because of high opt out numbers are even more unlikely to occur this year, as it would cause a firestorm and are openly opposed by the Governor, the Commissioner, and  the new  Chancellor of the Board of Regents Dr. Betty Rosa.

More than anything, opting out of the state exams is the most effective tool parents have to protest and disrupt the push to defund, dismantle and privatize our public schools – and turn them into test prep factories where children are treated as data points rather than human beings.

The huge 20 percent opt out rates in NY State last year led directly to the Governor changing his position on linking teacher evaluation to test scores, and also helped lead to the selection of Betty Rosa as the new Regents  Chancellor. 

The selection of Dr. Rosa, an experienced Bronx educator with years as a teacher, a principal and a Superintendent, to replace Merryl (“Push kids into the deep end of the pool”) Tisch would never have happened without the huge opt-out movement in NY over the last two years. 

In fact, in her very first press conference Dr. Rosa said that if she still had kids in the public schools, she would opt them opt.  See yesterday's  Juan Gonzalez column for more on this: "This grass-roots civil disobedience stunned the politicians and data-obsessed bureaucrats who have dictated public education policy for more than a decade.Ever since then, the bureaucrats have been scrambling to win back the confidence of fed-up parents."

  

Here are even more reasons to opt out of testing this year:

•  Pearson, the company known for writing the ridiculous Pineapple passage and many other confusing and badly designed questions, is still writing the exams this year.

• The number of test questions has not been significantly shortened. See the chart to the right.

• While the exams will be untimed, this may mean your child could be subjected to even more hours of pointless stress.       

• ·         In NYC and many other districts, teachers are pulled out of their classrooms for up to three days to score these exams.  The fewer students take the tests, the fewer days they will lose their teachers.  Last year, in some Long Island districts, Jeanette Deutermann told me, teachers only were pulled out for scoring for one day instead of three – because so many students had opted out. 

• ·         There is also the critical issue of privacy.  Nearly two years after the state law passed requiring the appointment of a chief privacy officer and a Parent Bill of privacy rights to be created with public input, neither of these events has happened – despite the fact that the legal deadline for both was July 2014.  And as we recently found out, the State Education Department decided in 2013 to place all the personally identifiable student data it holds, including their test scores, into the State archives potentially forever – a decision which, despite protests, it still has not revoked. 

Here’s a nifty quiz you can take yourself about the exams.  Here is a sample letter you can send to  your principal from NYSAPE; here’s one from Change the Stakes.   

 Here are more detailed explanations by testing expert Fred Smith, Jessica McNair of Opt out Central NY, and NYC teacher Katie Lapham about exactly what has and what hasn’t changed ,and why the current testing regime produces unreliable results and is bad for kids. 

This Saturday, at the office of Senator Bill Perkins at 10 AM, there's a meeting to provide parents with more information on this issue.  Address: Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building 163 West 125th Street, Conference Room B.

See the video below from NYS Allies for Public Education and another from filmmaker Michael Elliot, with simple instructions on how to opt out.

Let’s keep the opt-out movement going until our kids get the schools they really deserve!

HOW TO OPT OUT OF THE NY STATE TESTS from Shoot4Education on Vimeo.

Please join NPE in Raleigh to be inspired and learn so much!

In a few weeks, the Network for Public Education will hold our annual conference in Raleigh NC on
April 16-17. Among the keynote speakers will be Diane Ravitch, Rev. William Barber and author Bob Herbert, Jesse Hagopian, Karran Harper Royal and Dr. Phil Lanoue of Clarke County GA and National Superintendent of the Year.

I will be leading a workshop with the co-chair of our Parent Coalition for Student Privacy Rachael Stickland on the fight for student privacy post-inBloom, and another on "Personalized Learning", contrasting the research and reality of class size reduction vs. online instruction.  Joining me will be teacher/blogger extraordinaire Peter Greene and attorney and columnist Wendy Lecker.

Here is the full schedule of events; click the right hand arrow for Sat. and Sunday and this page to register and get info on how to reserve your hotel room etc. 

I am on the board of NPE, and I'm proud to say it has become the leading national organization of parents, teachers and advocates fighting the forces that undermine our public schools, including high-stakes testing, budget cuts and privatization. Each year the opportunity to meet with like-minded allies and share strategies and information is tremendously helpful and even inspirational.  This year promises to be our best yet.  Please join us if you can!

One week only! See the new film about the Gulen chain of charter schools -- the nation's largest

Tomorrow the documentary "Killing Ed" opens at the Cinema Village on E. 12 St., and will run for only a week.  See the trailer below.  It's about the largest chain of US charter schools, led by a politically influential Turkish Imam living in Pennsylvania named Fethullah Gulan.

This  school year, 155 Gulen charter schools operate in 26 states and the District of Columbia under different names, including New York. The chain is also under investigation by the FBI for various alleged abuses.

This Friday, the filmmaker and Sharon Higgins, a Gulan expert who is interviewed in the film and blogs at Charter School Scandals, will be at the 7 PM show to answer questions afterwards.  Buy your tickets here. 

Trailer for KILLING ED from Visual Truth Projects on Vimeo.

Too many retroactive DOE sole-source contracts and other problems with proposals to be voted on tonight

Patrick Sullivan and Leonie Haimson of the Citizens Contracts Oversight Committee provided the following comments to the members of the Panel for Educational Policy about the list of proposed DOE contracts to be voted on tonight.  If you want to join our committee, please email us at info@classsizematters.org

Retroactive sole-source contracts 

For the contracts to be voted upon March 23 at the PEP, fully half of the proposed contracts (17 of 35) are retroactive -- with some starting as early as last May; which prompts the question what the point of a vote is, if it is held months after the money has been paid and the services delivered. Sole source retroactive contracts for this month include:

Item 6 (page 20) Bard College. Inexplicable why this is retroactive. The relationship with Bard has been in place for years.

Item 7 (page 23) Measure Excellence

Item 11 (page 33) Teachers College professional development for conferences

Item 12 (page 36) Teachers College professional development for writing instruction

Item 13 (page 39) Silicon Valley Mathematics Initiative: consulting to develop tests to measure teachers for performance reviews.

Insufficient information on consulting project to rate teachers with student tests

Item 13 (page 39) Silicon Valley Mathematics Initiative is a consulting engagement to develop tests to measure teachers for performance reviews. This work is controversial in light of 1) the thorough discrediting of value-added measurement models by the academic community and 2) action to eliminate state tests in rating teachers.  The contract should be presented with more information including the RFP and statement of work.  It should be presented for approval before it's done, not after.

Contracts presented for approval without any prior information

There are eight Head Start or pre-K contracts that have no information: Items 15, 16, 17, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. One (item 16 on page 46) is for "lead teacher incentives". That sounds like something that would require a discussion.  DOE continues to present contracts for approval with no names or amounts reported despite the promise of DOE to reveal this information at least a month ahead of the votes.

Lack of any assessment of quality of services delivered

DOE spends vast amounts of money on professional development -- $70 million has been approved since October of 2105 -- without any assessment of the efficacy of this spending.   This month the requested funding is another $500,000.

For numerous textbook and online program contracts, there are no comparative evaluations of quality or market research as to why these particular vendors were chosen; with less analysis offered than in the detailed description of why a particular vendor for snow tire chains was selected.

Rationale for Bard College funding is unclear

The proposal to pay Bard College nearly a million dollars for additional services to the two Bard High schools, which are both highly selective schools with comparatively few high-needs students, does not appear to be aligned with their Fair Student Funding system.

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Lies, waste and fraud: join our webinar tomorrow night on how to uncover the truth about corporate ed reform

Are you interested in how bloggers like Dora Taylor, Jonathan Pelto and I uncover lies,  corruption, waste and fraud involved in corporate education reform?

We'll be sharing investigative tips, techniques, strategies and some of the big stories that resulted, during a free and LIVE webinar this Thursday March 24 at 8 pm Eastern.

Please register for the NPE Action event: Education Bloggers Uncover the Truth
by clicking here:  https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/regist…/5317616837033682434

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about how to join the webinar.  thanks!  Leonie

Yesterday's capital plan hearings: school overcrowding bad and getting worse

I co-authored a Gotham Gazette article published yesterday on the need for more school seats and reforms to the school planning process yesterday with Javier Valdez of Make the Road NY.  See also the story on NY1 on the hearings. 

Yesterday, in a crowded Committee hearing room at City Hall, the City Council Education Committee held hearings on the five-year capital plan.

Among those testifying were Eduardo Hernandez, President of Community Education Council in District 8 in the Bronx, Shino Tanikawa, President of Community Education Council 2 in downtown Manhattan, Midtown and Upper East side and co-chair of the DOE Blue Book Working group; Fe Florimon, President of CEC 6 in Upper Manhattan and chair of Community Board 12 Youth and Education Committee; Maria Roca of Friends of Sunset Park in Brooklyn,; Luke Henry, a member of CEC 1 on the Lower East Side and co-chair of the Youth and Education committee of Community Board 3; Mary Winfield, East Harlem parent activist; MC Sweeney, member of Community Education Council in D28 in Queens; and Bertha Asitimbay, a parent leader at PS 19 in Corona and a member of Make the Road NY. 

All spoke eloquently about impact of overcrowding in their neighborhood public schools and a broken school planning process that needs critical reforms or else the problem will worsen with the thousands of new housing units resulting from the Mayor's rezoning proposals. Below is my testimony and that of Marie Winfield.

Deputy Chancellor Elizabeth Rose led off by saying that the DOE needs estimate of 83,000 seats was based on updated enrollment projects and a new Blue Book formula.  Despite the fact that there are more than 550,000 students crammed into overcrowded schools according to the DOE's own figures, she continued the implausible line started during the Bloomberg administration that there was merely "pocket overcrowding."

Chair Dromm asked why for the second year in a row the capital plan was months late. This plan released in January was supposed to be released in November; last May's plan was supposed to be released in February.   Rose responded that the latest delay was caused by the need to incorporate the Blue Book task force recommendations (which were actually proposed in December 2014, and new Blue Book report was released in October.)

 Dromm asked if its true that they never use eminent domain to site a school unless the property had recently been on the market; SCA President Lorraine Grillo confirmed that this was true.  She also said that she would welcome a committee or taskforce to look in depth at the problems with school siting.  Dromm asked why the city rejected the Blue Book Working group recommendations to align the school capacity formula with smaller classes; Grillo said that this was still a "work in progress."

CM Margaret Chin asked why they were now building "gymnatoriums" -- combined gyms and auditoriums rather than separate spaces for each.  Grillo said it was matter of space and only happened in Elementary schools where the auditorium is not needed often.  Chin also asked what reforms are needed to see that schools are built along with housing, especially since the Mayor's new housing plan is accelerating the creation of new residential units through rezoning.  She added, whether they would support "impact fees" on developers  with funds available for infrastructure including schools. Rose said there were areas with new housing with underutilized capacity (really?) as for impact fees, that was a state matter.  Would the SCA help us, asked Chin?  Grillo said we won't comment on this.

CM Rosenthal asked what changes in the procurement process have been made since the inflated $1.1 billion contract to Computer Specialists that was later rejected by the city and rebid at a savings of over $600 million.  Rose deferred to Ray Orlando of the DOE budget office.  Rosenthal said she had spoken to Orlando and hadn't gotten any answers.

CM Brad Lander thanked the DOE for the extra schools they've built in his district and the new seats D15 is receiving (they added 1648 seats, but are only funding 50% of their own estimate of need), and then asked about air-conditioners and bathrooms. Rose said air conditioning is not eligible for capital funding, which must come from the "school community" (meaning PTA funds?).  Rose said that there will be a public forum on the spending of the Smart Schools Bond act on March 31.

CM Menchaca asked whether they were budgeting enough for the higher prices of real estate; and need team to focus on creative methods to acquire sites, such as land swaps. Grillo said they'd never rejected a site because it was too expensive in an area of real need. (really?).

CM Levine praised dual-language programs; asked if they are more expensive?  Dromm reminded him that this was a capital hearing, and to hold that question for the expense hearing next week.  He said he was "excited" about the new Blue Book, but asked how a school without a library or gym could be identified as under-utilized, even though these spaces had turned into classrooms because of overcrowding.  Grillo said she could sit down with him to explain this.

CM Dromm asked whether the target class sizes in the Blue Book formula in grades 4-12 are larger than the average class sizes in these grades.  Rose said that was true.  Why did they reject the recommendation to align the formula to smaller classes? Grillo: the BB Working Group is "still in progress" and nothing is off the table.

CM Reynoso spoke passionately about the lack of gyms in so many schools, including PS 18, a school with a small cafeteria that is combined with a gym and a lobby, with columns in the middle.  The principal's office is in a closet. Rose says we would like to solve the problem of lack of gyms throughout the city.

CM Treygar  pointed out the thousands of unmet seats in his district; charter co-locations which made the situation worse; and temporary boilers three years after Sandy wrecked the original ones.

Dromm asked how projects are identified for the $490 million  allocated under the category of Class Size Reduction.  Grillo said there was a committee that meets regularly to identify these projects. (Then why after two years have only three projects been identified  -- when there are 350,000 kids crammed into classes of 30 or more?)

He followed up by asking how many dollars were going to be spent for these three projects now finally identified.  Grillo said they didn't know because they hadn't started designing the projects yet.  (Why after two years have only three projects been identified and none in process in this category -- when there are 350,000 kids crammed into classes of 30 or more?)

Rose added that $72 million is being spent on new partitioning due to placing of School-based health centers for the Community Schools initiative.


There is more at the video link  to the hearings- though the video only starts working at 58 minute in;  I speak at 2.23 in, and my written testimony is below as is Marie Winfield's.  Please check it out for the eloquent testimony of our parent leaders.

Testimony on Capital Plan 3.8.16

Testimony of Marie Winfield, E. Harlem activist:

WinfieldM Testimony Prelim Budget DOE Capital Plan 3.8.2016

Our comments on the new Procurement Process and DOE Contracts to be voted on tomorrow night

Here are the comments of our new Citizens Contract Oversight Committee about the new DOE procurement procedures and the contracts to be voted on tomorrow, Wed., Feb. 23 at the Panel for Educational Policy meeting.  The meeting will be held at 6:00 P.M. at the High School of Fashion Industries on 225 West 24th Street; the agenda is here.

As you can see, we had several reservations about the proposed procurement process and the contracts.  If you'd like to join our Oversight Committee and provide your input, please email us at info@classsizematters.org ; thanks! 

Citizens Contract Oversight Committee comments on procurement and contracts to be voted on Feb. 24, 2016

Send an Email Now to Mayor and Speaker to Address School Overcrowding

Please send an email to the Mayor and the City Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito, urging them to expand the plan and create a Commission to speed the accuracy and efficiency of school planning and siting.

The DOE released its updated capital plan at the end of January. They have now identified an overall need of approximately 83,000 seats citywide – closer to our estimate of more than 100,000 seats and far more than their previous estimate of 49,000 in May.

They also plan to build an additional 44,348 K12 seats compared to 32,629 previously, at an additional cost of nearly $1 billion. All of this is good news.

However, the DOE is planning to fund only about 59% of their own estimate for necessary seats, compared to 66% previously. The number of school seats with sites identified and in in the process of design are only 15% of their estimate of need, compared to 22.7% previously. (Click on charts to enlarge.)

The need for seats will grow even larger as will school overcrowding if the City Council approves the Mayor’s new rezoning proposals to allow for thousands of new housing units to be built throughout the city.

We are urging the city to fund 83,000 seats – which would cost an additional $130 million according to the IBO. But even if these seats were fully funded, the DOE doesn’t appear to have the capacity to site and build schools efficiently enough. There are overcrowded communities for which funding has existed in the capital plan for over a decade without a single school being sited or built in their neighborhoods.

That’s why we also need a Commission or Task Force to improve the whole process of school siting and planning – to make sure that schools are built along with housing and not decades afterward.

Please send an email to the Mayor and the City Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito, urging them to expand the plan and create a Commission to speed the accuracy and efficiency of school planning and siting.More details concerning the changes in the capital plan are here; we also have charts showing how many seats are being funded in each school district compared to the actual need-- and how few seats are actually sited and in process of being actually designed.

I was recently quoted in a Gotham Gazette where I said the crisis of school overcrowding is unacceptable in the richest city in the richest country in the world. Here are some recent newsclips about school overcrowding in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens. Don’t you think it’s time to do something about this? Please send an email now!

If you would like to see the overcrowding data for your district, and how many seats are planned for your district compared to the need, please let us know. We are speaking on the capital plan at CEC 30 on Feb. 22 and CEC 6 on Feb. 29. We can also come speak to your Community Education Council or Community Board on this issue. We also have a sample resolution for your CEC to consider.

The growing storm around Success Academy

On Friday morning, the NY Times ran a story and posted the video above, a minute and 16 seconds of a teacher berating a first grade child at the Cobble Hill Success charter school in Brooklyn, ripping up her page of math work, and sending her to sit on the “calm down” chair.  This video has gone viral, with an apparently greater impact than all the news articles, complaints, and lawsuits filed against Success charters in the past few years.  

There have been so many documented instances of students unfairly treated and pushed out of Success charter schools that it is difficult to know where to start.   One of the first parents to tell her story of how her special needs son was pushed out of a Success charter school in Kindergarten within a few weeks of the beginning of the school year was Karen Sprowal, in a Michael Winerip column in  the NY Times in July 2011 – nearly five years ago.  We followed up with Karen’s own account on our blog here.

Over the years, Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News has repeatedly chronicled the many documented instances of young children repeatedly suspended and ejected from Success Charters.  For the first time, the NY Times started critically covering the school last spring, describing their high-pressured test prep tactics and severe disciplinary practices for the purpose of achieving high scores on the state exams.

This fall, PBS ran a segment about the suspensions of young children at the Success Academy Charter Schools. You can see the segment here.  Fatima Geidi spoke about the way the school had repeatedly suspended her first grade son for minor infractions, and refused to provide him with the special education services he was entitled to.  While the reporter, John Merrow, attested to the fact that many other parents and teachers confirmed these system-wide practices, they told him they were afraid to appear on camera. 

Eva Moskowitz subsequently retaliated against Fatima and her son, by posting a falsified record of his disciplinary infractions, and sharing it with the media.  Fatima filed a FERPA complaint to the federal government, pointing out how this violated his federal privacy rights.  Months later, this falsified list of infractions was taken down from the Success website. 

Shortly after the PBS program ran, the NY Times published  an October 29 article on the “Got to Go list,” composed by the principal at the Fort Greene Success charter school targeting certain students, and explaining that their parents had to be persuaded to take them out of the school.

After that, a petition to the US Department of Education was posted online by Alliance for Quality Education and Color of Change, asking for a federal investigation and that the US Department of Education withhold any more federal funds from the school until the investigation was complete.  The petition pointed out that the US Department of Education had given Success Academy charters more than $37 million dollars since 2010, and nearly three million dollars in 2015 alone.  The petition received over 35,000 signatures.

On December 10, 2015, four parents whose children were on the “Got to Go list” at the Fort Greene Success Academy filed a 27-page lawsuit in federal court, seeking $2 million in damages. On January 4, the NY Times reported that the principal of that school had taken a “personal leave of absence” (though it was later revealed that he is now teaching at another Success charter school in Harlem.)

On January 18, the NY Post wrote that SUNY Charter Institute, the main authorizer of Success charters, was finally launching its own investigation into the practices of these schools.  In a longer story published January 20, Schoolbook revealed that the SUNY Charter Institute had sent a letter five days before to the board chairman of Success Academy, noting “allegations of improper use of student discipline practices to encourage students to dis-enroll, especially at the Fort Greene school.”

On the same date, January 20, a class action complaint to the Office of Civil Rights of the US Department of Education was brought by thirteen parents on behalf of their children with disabilities at eight different Success Academy charter schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Bronx.  The complaint highlighted “systemic policies” that violated these students’ federal rights, including harassing and publicly shaming them, refusing to provide them with appropriate services, calling 911 to take them to the hospital when they allegedly misbehaved, and repeatedly suspending them without reporting these actions as suspensions, and without providing them with due process or alternative instruction as required by law.

This class action complaint was joined by City Council Education Danny Dromm and Letitia James, the New York City Public Advocate. You can read the full complaint here.  More recently, another lawsuit was filed by NY Lawyers for Public Interest on behalf of a parent of a former Kindergarten student with disabilities at Fort Greene Success Academy charter school, who was successfully pushed out of the school.  

Yet none of these documented news accounts or lawsuits has had the same impact on the public consciousness as this minute and sixteen second video.  Is it the power of video in the digital age?  The ability to see with your own eyes and viscerally experience the abusive treatment that these young children were forced to suffer through, week after week, year after year?  Whatever the reason, let’s hope that this brings a wider public awareness not only about the practices of this particular chain of charters, but about all the “no excuses” charters that may produce better test scores, but at a very large human cost.