Guess which schools in Connecticut have the highest suspension rate for children in kindergarten?
Archives for the year of: 2013
This year the city of New York will pick a new Mayor, after 12 years of Michael Bloomberg.
There were only supposed to be 8 years of Bloomberg, as the voters of New York City had twice endorsed term limits of only 2 terms. But Bloomberg decided he wanted a third term, refused to call for a referendum, and got his faithful friend City Council President Christine Quinn to twist a few arms, promise that the members of the City Council would also get a third term, and voila!, our mayor had the chance to drop another $100 million into winning a third term.
For some reason, he thinks that his legacy will be his education “reforms,” but the voters don’t agree. The last Quinnipiac poll showed that only 22% of voters want his autocratic style of governing the schools to continue. The rest want some form of shared governance, where other elected officials have a voice in choosing the city’s school board, and the school board treats parents and the public with a modicum of respect.
Despite the constant trumpeting of the Bloomberg PR machine, voters understand that the city school system has not improved and that it is highly inequitable. Leonie Haimson and I wrote an article in The Nation recently describing the elitist tone and consequences of the Mayor and his policies. The proportion of black and Hispanic students admitted to the city’s exam schools (Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, etc.) has dropped precipitously during the Bloomberg years. The numbers are in the linked article. Brooklyn Tech, for example, which had an enrollment about 23% black and Hispanic, now has only 10%. The admission of black and Hispanic children to the city’s coveted gifted and talented programs has plummeted since the Bloomberg administration decided that it would be determined only by a single test score, even for the youngest children. The city’s state test scores, once the mayor’s greatest boast, collapsed in 2010 when the state education department admitted that it had made the tests too predictable and lowered the passing score each year. The Bloomberg administration boasts about the rising graduation rate, but never pairs it with the fact that some 80% of the graduates who enter community college require remediation in basic skills. The mayor boasts about reducing the black-white and Hispanic-white achievement gaps, but the federal tests (NAEP) show the gaps unchanged over the past decade.
And so the mayoral election is underway, and the Democratic candidates have loudly criticized the mayor’s policies. I moderated a parent forum at PS 29 in Cobble Hill (every Democratic candidate showed up except Christine Quinn, who was attending a fundraiser, and none of the Republican candidates accepted the invitation). The entire event was videotaped and it is here on the website of Parent Voices New York.
The questions I asked were written by parents. They wanted to know (I am paraphrasing, you can watch and see the original):
1) what will you do to reduce class size to not more than 20 children in the early grades (class size in New York City is the highest in 14 years)?
2) what will you do to end high-stakes testing?
3) will you end Bloomberg’s policy of assigning letter grades to schools, which no one understands and which are highly misleading?
4) what will you do to make the governance system more democratic, so that parents have a voice?
5) will you end Bloomberg’s policy of closing schools based on low test scores?
Every candidate–Bill Thompson, Sal Albanese, Bill DiBlasio, John Liu–disagreed with the Bloomberg administration’s policies.
All promised to dismantle the heavy-handed reforms of the past dozen years. All agreed that schools should be helped, not closed; that class sizes, especially in the early grades, should be reduced; that the school-grading policy should be abandoned; and all promised a more democratic and more open form of governance when the mayoral control law expires in 2015.
The Bloomberg administration won’t let the critics go unanswered. They have nothing left to boast about, so they fall back on weary platitudes about “we can’t go back to the bad old days.” The mayor sent out Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott to defend the Mayor’s sterling record. Walcott is the third non-educator appointed by Bloomberg to be chancellor. He was preceded by litigator Joel Klein and publisher Cathie Black. The mayor thinks that educators don’t know anything about education.
Dennis Walcott was once a civil rights leader. He was head of the New York Urban League before he went to work for Bloomberg as deputy mayor, largely as an ambassador to the black community. I don’t envy him. He has to defend an administration that has privatized the public schools across large swaths of black and Hispanic neighborhoods. He has to defend an administration that has made testing its major strategy. He has to defend an administration that cares not a whit that only 9 black students were admitted to Stuyvesant High School this year, in an entering class of 1,000. He has to defend an administration that has whitened the enrollment of gifted programs by making admission dependent on a single test score. He has to defend an administration that oversaw the gutting of arts in the schools.
The mayor called his program “Children First” when he announced it on Martin Luther King Jr. Day back in 2003. We now know that the children who come first are the ones whose parents are knowledgeable enough and have time enough to navigate a complex system of choices and testing. We know which children don’t come first.
Poor Dennis.
In this article, a Massachusetts blogger points out that it is time to do something about those unionized police and firefighters who have failed to stamp out crime and fires.
It is time to unleash innovation and turnaround the police precincts where crime is highest: close them down and allow the cops to reapply for their jobs.
America could be a perfectly crime-free, safe nation if only we turned public safety over to bankers and lawyers and entrepreneurs.
The initiative–which is known as No Citizen Left Behind–requires the investment of billions of dollars for data collection, data analysis, turnaround specialists, and retraining of the current workforce.
Unfortunately this is so close to the insane reality of federal education policy that it is easy to think that it is real, not satire.
The run-off for Los Angeles school board is Tuesday May 21.
As Howard Blume’s excellent overview in the Los Angeles Times shows, Monica Ratliff is clearly the better candidate. She is an experienced teacher who understands the needs of children and the schools.
She has raised $42,000.
Her opponent has great political contacts. He worked for Mayor Villaraigosa. His qualifications to sit on the city school board are nil, although it is true that he was once a student.
He has raised, with the help of the Mayor, more than $3 million.
Will money decide the election?
The choice is clear.
If you live in their district, please take the time to vote for Monica.
Tennessee charters have learned the secret to high test scores: push out low-performing students right before testing time.
That way, the charter keeps the money, and the public school gets the low score.
This is not a closely guarded secret, but it usually fools the media and the politicians.
Here is one journalist–Dennis Ferrier at WSMV–who was not fooled:
“When it comes to the net loss of students this year, charter schools are the top eight losers of students.
“In fact, the only schools that have net losses of 10 to 33 percent are charter schools.”
The KIPP school in Nashville has an attrition rate of 18%.
One of Governor Jindal’s “reforms” is called Course Choice. This is supposed to allow public school students to sign up with private vendors, using public school dollars extracted from their local school. Most of the vendors are online operators.
Course choice and vouchers were the centerpiece of Jindal’s plan to privatize public education, by funding these choices from the state’s Minimum Foundation budget. Unfortunately for the governor and his State Superintendent John White, the state’s highest court said that it was unconstitutional to spend the money dedicated to public schools on vouchers and Course Choice. The court decided by a vote of 6-1, which in the eyes of most people is decisive.
One of the state’s investigative bloggers discovered that some 1,100 students had enrolled— without their knowledge— in an online course offered by a Texas corporation.
How could this happen? Why were Louisiana dollars shipped to a Texas company when the students and their parents didn’t know they had signed up? How did the corporation get their contact information?
Will the legislature provide alternate funding for vouchers and Course Choice?
Will there be a legislative investigation of this curious “choice”?
An interesting detail. The state department of education is in a frenzy trying to identify the leaker of salacious details about their prized programs.
Uri Tresiman of the Dana Center at the University of Texas spoke to the annual NCTM conference about the true needs of American education.
This is an important speech in which he shows how shallow current reforms are and how deeply poverty affects children’s performance in school.
I intend to post this speech twice this week. It is that powerful.
I may post it more than twice.
It meant a lot to me because Dr. Treisman agreed with what I have been saying. We will not narrow the achievement gaps unless we act to reduce poverty. He does not say–nor do I–that schools don’t matter. We agree that schools and teachers matter very much. But so does poverty.
A few days ago, I wrote that if we halved the child poverty rate–now a scandalous 23%–then achievement would score. A faithful reader and blogger who works for a conservative think tank wrote offline to disagree with me. He said that we don’t know how to reduce child poverty, and he doubted that it would matter much even if we did. He countered that if we increased the number of charter schools, then achievement would soar.
I challenge him to watch Dr. Treisman’s speech. Pay particular attention to his evidence about the effects of charter schools.
Dr. Mercedes Schneider decided to review Dr. Steve Perry’s dissertation.
Dr. Perry, until recently, was CNN’s education expert.
She was not impressed.
Now this is an interesting idea that needs to be deconstructed. Mayor Bloomberg, reputedly worth $20 Billion, suggests that some young people should skip college and be a plumber.
On one hand, that’s good advice for young people who are not interested in going to college. Many, even some who should go to college, can’t afford to go because the cost is so prohibitive. In recent years, the states have shifted the costs to students and made college unaffordable for students unless they are willing to take on heavy debt.
On the other hand, if Mayor Bloomberg really believes this, he should not have gutted so many of Néw York City’s fine vocational programs.
If the mayor is serious, he might look into the German apprenticeship system, which seems to work well. Germany has taken care not to outsource its manufacturing base (as our corporations did), and it has far fewer college graduates than we do.
This writer teaches in Pennsylvania. He wants to know when he will have time to teach again. He says about some 40 days of the school year are now devoted to testing. His students plead with him to know when will they have a “regular” day again? When will they have a day when he is teaching and they are learning?
When will our legislators figure out that testing is not teaching? That test scores do not go up because of taking more tests? That children don’t learn more when they get more testing and less instruction?
