Class Size Matters
Please distribute to all parents!
Parents and elected officials are holding a press conference Tuesday May 6 at Tweed to speak out against the new state law that gives any new and/or expanding charter free space either in our public school buildings or in private space paid for by the city .
Meanwhile, many thousands of NYC public school students are sitting in vastly overcrowded schools, subjected to excessive class sizes, in trailers or on waiting lists for their zoned schools, with an underfunded capital plan. This is one of the worst charter giveaways ever passed into law, and will create even more inequitable conditions in our city going forward.
Eva Moskowitz charter chain, Success Academy, raised more than $7.5 million in one night, from Jeb Bush and her Wall St. buddies, while claiming she could not afford to rent her own space. Instead, the DOE is being forced to rent three parochial schools for her, and pay for renovations to suit her specifications. Here is yet another shameless ruse in which Success Academy is planning to make big sums off the stock trades of their billionaire supporters.
Clearly the charter lobby wants to drain as much resources and space from the public schools in order to destabilize and further overcrowd the system, or else they would pay for space themselves.
A flyer for our press conference is posted here: http://tinyurl.com/qy3mlaf
Please invite your City Council reps and other elected officials to attend as well.
Hearings follow the press conference at 10 AM at City Hall on the lack of charter accountability, including their egregious practice of suspending and pushing out large numbers of high need students.
Meanwhile, comedian Louis CK’s tweets have made a huge splash on the Common Core math materials given his children as test prep; see Rebecca Mead in the New Yorker, and the tweets themselves. Cynthia Wachtell bewailed the lack of poetry on the Common Core curriculum and exams. Rebecca, Cynthia and Louis are all public school parents, and welcome voices in this debate. Take a look and join the discussion!
We just heard today’s 3rd grade math exam was awful. What did you hear from your kids?
Thanks,
Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
212-674-7320
Well…thank you Leonie Haimson!
Can someone start a petition for New Yorkers who will not vote for Cuomo due to his public school/educational policies and post it here to circulate here and on facebook? I would but am not quite tech savvy enough. Cuomo only seems to understand that language. Pity.
Is it known who Cuomo’s opponent will be yet? My guess is it will be some kind of raving Tea Partier, so the common line will be that you have to vote of Cuomo as the “lesser of the two evils” because you don’t want some Sarah Palin clone in office, do you?
“The other guy is worse” is a tired strategy:
http://www.ctnewsjunkie.com/archives/entry/the_other_guy_is_worse_is_a_tired_strategy/
de Blasio was on Charlie Rose and stated that charters need accountability. He should keep putting the pressure on and tell the public about the truth about charters-tell all of the stories of the shams. Keep hitting hard.
Yes, the third grade math assessment made my student sob today . It was so sad to see this hard working student who was doing the best she could unable to answer a single question correctly and know it. Saying “do your best” didn’t cut it. I found it heart breaking .
Success Academy has the money to give every student a laptop, every classroom a Smart board, every one of their schools a faculty room with state of the art copy machines, printers, refrigerators, and to renovate their own hallways and bathrooms. They do not need NYC DOE to pay for renovations . On the contrary, they should be paying to provide the schools in which they co-locate all the same amenities which their teachers and students get.
I proctored the 3rd grade math exam all three days. The first two days were multiple choice questions. There were a few tough questions but no surprises. The third day of the test consisted of short response questions. Each of the problems was set up in a way that required the children to do two or more steps, or calculations, to arrive at the final answer. A couple of the problems were very wordy and would be difficult for any but the strongest readers to follow through to a successful conclusion.
Asking an 8 year old about the difficulty of the test probably won’t give any adult an understanding of the difficulty level. Many of the children who do poorly on these kinds of test questions will say that the test was easy because they don’t understand what the questions are requiring of them. They merely pull numbers from the story problem and add or subtract them. To them that seems easy. The top performing students, (20%) of your typical third grade classroom, probably did a decent job.