New York State’s new Commissioner of Education MaryEllen Elia says she will put together a team to fix the state’s 144 lowest-performing schools and give them one year to improve. If they don’t, she will hand them over to independent managers or make them charter schools.
This is magical thinking at its best. On Long Island and probably everywhere else in the state, the struggling schools are racially segregated and have high proportions of poverty.
Can they be “turned around” by a member of Elia’s crack team? Where is Beverly Hall when we need her?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Colonialism rears its ugly head once again.
Sure does. I was born and bred in Hawai’i and colonialism is well and alive even today. It’s SIC.
What exactly does “improve” mean? Does this mean 1 percentage point? Two? Three?
Hey now, asking those kind of questions can only get you into trouble!
If a child is three to four levels below grade level, and a teacher sacrifices and works hard, bringing that child up maybe two grade levels, the student still is not in the range a VAM test will measure. The student and teacher are branded failures, even after success. An entire school could battle to overcome poverty, crime, family life, yet people like Elia cannot see past a few numbers on a spreadsheet, or more likely $$$$ speaks louder. If you are able, get the heck out of teaching while you can. If you are a student going into teaching, change majors. America hates its teachers.
EdisonLearning, a for profit organization, has taken over six failing schools in Indiana. From what I’ve read, getting better results from poverty areas doesn’t work nearly as well as their sales department promised.
As all teachers know, poverty is destructive and changing to a charter or using a voucher doesn’t help these kids who are suffering from their home environment.
What will it take to ‘turn around’ politicians who have all the answers on ‘education reform’?
“What will it take to ‘turn around’ politicians who have all the answers on ‘education reform’?” We need to quit voting for politicians in ANY political party that support privatizing public education, dismiss the value of professionalism in education and take away the parental right of a public school in which they have a real voice in its governance.
And that parental right is enshrined in every state constitution.
History repeats. At least ten years ago, Edison took over some Philadelphia schools and failed miserably. They hired newbie teachers at half the cost and there were multiple lawsuits…one I remember in particular was for locking a special needs student in a closet (don’t think that was part of the IEP!).
Elia’s War Plan, divide and conquer, undermine capacity, force failure, seize and hand over to the private sector. Starting with schools in poor districts to lull middle-class families into detached security, unless we refuse to be lulled and fight this ugly plan tooth and nail, the next phase of the private war on public schools.
On Long Island one of the struggling schools was taken over by the state; it’s still struggling. Also Nassau County had to have independent fiscal management put in place; they’re still having financial problems and corruption. so obviously the state isn’t qualified to fix things.
Obviously the plan is to turn all of the schools into charter schools. This is
how they will achieve that goal. It is all about getting the money into the hands
of private groups. This has nothing to do with fixing anything or improving anything.
It is all about money.
It’s a very diffuse method of tackling a complex problem.
What is your “it” in “it’s”??
“New York State’s new Commissioner of Education MaryEllen Elia says she will put together a team to fix the state’s 144 lowest-performing schools and give them one year to improve. If they don’t, she will hand them over to independent managers or make them charter schools.
This is magical thinking at its best. On Long Island and probably everywhere else in the state, the struggling schools are racially segregated and have high proportions of poverty.”
Thanks, as I wasn’t sure to what you were referring. And I concur!
I can understand that the state wants the struggling districts to improve. School improvement requires a lot more work than test and punishment From what I know school improvement is an evolutionary rather than revolutionary process. One year is unrealistic.
Selling schools off to charters with no assurances that anything will be better is naive. I don’t think the state should be in the “business” of selling off schools. It is their responsibility to educate the future voters of New York. It seems as if it is a coward’s path to give up on a segment of your population. If the schools get turned over to charters and those students are mostly poor and minority, you are allowing the state to create separate and unequal schools. Why should students in Scarsdale or Great Neck be entitled to authentic public schools with democratic input with genuine certified teachers per NYS law, but poor black children get to be guinea pigs for some yet unnamed grand experiment.? They will call is public education, but it is a lie! it is not a public school if it does not have to play by the same set of rules. It is a school created from smoke and mirrors for the purpose of allowing corporations to profit from poor minority students. How this is not a violation of civil rights I don’t understand!
retired teacher, I think you hit the nail on the head. One of the founding tenets of neoliberalism is to sell of public services and spaces to private owners because the so-called “free market forces” will do a far better job more cheaply and efficiently. No matte that reality has proven this theory false over and over and over. They cling to it like leaches.
Will the state be taking over East Ramapo School District? Why does East Ramapo get a “monitor” who can do very little, but failing schools in big cities where the many unwanted children can be pushed out to other public schools get “charter schools”?
Two questions (both of which, of course, we all know the answer to):
1. What exactly does “improvement” mean? If a school implements an innovative program that gets kids excited about coming to school and their attendance shoots up but test scores do not, is that considered “improvement’?
2. Since we all know that God Himself couldn’t improve these schools enough for Elia’s satisfaction and we all know they are going to be taken over, is the same expectation in place for the independent manager/charter school? Do they too have only one year to make “improvements”?
Improvement: fire teachers, bring in subs and temps, hire a great PR firm.
Apparently Elia isn’t capable of learning anything other than whatever her reformist handlers want her to say/do/know.
She is fully aware that Florida, her former home, tried this takeover plan in a big way and failed utterly.
Three years ago the state DOE declared the “100 Worst Schools” based solely upon reading scores on that year’s F-CAT tests, which had the cut scores raised much higher than the year before. This was the birth of a Jeb Bush/ALEC plan to take over the “worst performing” schools and turn them into charters managed by private companies. At least that was the threat communicated to my faculty by the Differentiated Accountability Team from the state DOE at our first meeting. Improve or be taken over!
Obviously the cut scores were raised in order to implement the “Differentiated Accountability” program that swooped in shortly after this declaration. My school was one of those schools. There were several other schools in my district. We were near the top of the list; 3 of our schools were in the “bottom 10” and were almost completely taken over by the DA Team.
The DA teams were like Spanish Inquisitors or Gestapo officers, coming into schools unannounced, doing numerous quick and pointless walkthroughs that, of course, found that no one was doing anything right anywhere at any time.
They produced rooms full of “data walls” and directions on how to “fix” things that were reminiscent of cartoon depictions of mad scientists working out complex formulae on several blackboards. We were told these must remain visible all year and be frequently revisited and always followed.
This was all made possible by Race to the Top funding and the DA was a fix required by the law for “failing” schools.
After 6 months of constant harassment, crying teachers, angry and frightened children, exasperated parents, and being told every day how poorly we were all teaching, I developed panic attacks and had to seek counseling.
One colleague at a bottom 10 school had a heart attack and died after a particularly high-pressure walk-through where over a dozen evil-looking DA goons stood in the back of her classroom furiously writing down all the bad things they saw and then met with her in a courtroom-like setting where they proceeded to tear apart everything she did. Several people quit their jobs mid-year. Others retired much earlier than they had intended.
The DA Team actually told us that they were ordered by the FLDOE to not smile, not be friendly, and not to point out or emphasize any of the GOOD things they saw out of fear that it would take the focus off of “continuous improvement”, that elusive goal that is never reached and that can never be good enough for anybody’s purpose.
The following year the FLDOE declared the bottom 300 schools instead of 100 schools, based upon FCAT reading scores, which, again, had a higher cut score than previous years. The DA Teams were expanded, again with RTTT funding, but they were unable to maintain the level of teacher and school harassment from the year before.
Employees of the DA Teams started quitting THEIR jobs due to the stress and overload. The head of our assigned team actually took a job in our district. Walkthroughs were the first thing to disappear. The twice-monthly meetings were replaced by once-quarterly meetings. The whole program began to fall apart.
This year, the 3rd year of the DA program in Florida, the DA Teams are minuscule compared to the beginning of the program, due to having spent all the RTTT money and the state legislature and governor not being willing to replace the money to pay for them.
They held a statewide conference with the school leaders over the summer and said that they would not be visiting our school at all this year and they would only be going into the “worst” schools to “help with improvement” this year.
No “improvement” took place. The FCAT went the way of the dodo bird and this past year it was replaced by the AIR tests from Utah. The state legislature, in a rare fit of sensibility, passes a law preventing the FLDOE from releasing the scores or using them to grade schools or students until they could produce independent research that proves the tests are valid and fair measures.
That hasn’t happened as of this month and we have not been given any indication when the test scores from last year will be released. Our VAM scores were determined by district assessments instead of state tests.
Elia’s heavy-handed threats are a waste of time, money, and effort that will not produce any kind of “improvement”. It simply doesn’t work and she knows that. I guess she is desperate and wants to please her reformist masters by parroting back the tripe they want to hear and that they believe in so wholeheartedly despite the lack of evidence of success anywhere.
Insanity.
I believe this will be her downfall in NY state. I hope so, anyway.
And we already have the answer how that will work out. Once the for-profit crowd takes over those 144 schools, almost half of the kids will be forced out one way or another until their education comes from the street-to-prison pipeline, and not a classroom. That’s what happened and is still happening in New Orleans.
It’s perfect really. Declare public schools a failure, institute charters, vouchers, etc, when THEY fail, look the other way, declare charter information proprietary and keep taking the money from their lobbyists. The legislator is responsible for nothing but hot air (no new taxes). I’m from OH and that’s how it works. Apparently, people get elected to get rich and put the blame for poverty on teachers. I haven’t voted for these horse’s pattooties since I was able to vote but the rest of the state is convinced the Republican brand is the superior one. Drives me nuts.
Is your union or, retirement system (If its STRS), doing anything to organize voting against Republicans?
When will we realize that outsiders cannot fix schools. Schools need to be “fixed” from within. Good compassionate collaborative leadership is what it is all about. We did it in Miami-Dade with out School-Based Management/Shared-Decision Making initiative. Sharing a powerful vision and building a caring team will do it.
What will happen in the smaller cities that have schools on the list like Poughkeepsie? Their only high school is on the list, when it is given to a charter there will be no other public school option for parents. Or what about the smaller school districts that have 2 or 3 elementary schools on the list. When those children are counseled out they will go to the remaining public schools that could then end up on the list in the near future. Soon these small city school districts will have no public school options left.
Don’t worry, I’m sure there will always be a “public option” in NY State. The charters need a place to dump the kids they decide are too difficult or expensive to educate because of course, test scores are the measure of a student and those who can’t score high need to feel “misery” until they leave. If there isn’t an underfunded public school nearby to take the students who “voluntarily” (after feeling a bit of that misery) leave a top performing well-funded charter school, how can a charter school brag about its “improvement’? And justify moving even more resources from the underfunded public school to the charter school so they have plenty of money to trumpet their scores, advertise to the parents whose children “fit”, and promote the general political aims of their leaders and the billionaires who sit on their boards.
Obviously charters don’t want to take over failing school districts unless there is a place they can dump the students they don’t want. Or maybe they can just model themselves after New Orleans, and instead of dumping those kids to underfunded public schools, just make it so difficult for them to attend ANY charter school that they just – well – cease to exist.
Chris is Florida said it well with all valid data. It didn’t work with Gates money backing her here and it won’t work anywhere else. It’s flawed for a reason…top down without inviting educators and not addressing the REAL problem: poverty.
I remember a few years ago on the News Hour they did what was to be an ongoing piece about a principal from a successful suburban school who took over a failing inner city school (I think in Virginia). The News Hour was going to follow him around as he turned the school around and made it as successful as the suburban school he “transferred” from. By Thanksgiving he would not allow the News Hour into the school and he was gone within two years. When he went in he faced resistance from the faculty because they did not believe he was accepting of the culture of the community and he would not work with teachers, but insisted on telling teachers what will work.
I believe teaching involves teachers relating to students, accepting and working with them where they are at. And also recognizing the dynamics of each individual classroom. I think insanity in education often revolves around doing the same thing over and over expecting the same result. Doing the same thing, I think, rarely produces the same result. What was done in the past, whether it worked or not, needs to be adapted and modified to the specific needs, abilities, and personality of the current class. What did not work with one set of students often does with another and what works with one set of students often does not work with another. Behind most education reform I have seen is the belief that by doing the same, in their view successful, thing over and over will always produce the same result. Sometimes it does, so they can point to their successes, but as often as not, maybe more often than not, it does not work.
It reminds me of a superintendent we once had who would go around and talk to teachers in all the buildings to get their feed back on what he wanted to do. At the end of the day he could quote all kinds of teachers who were behind what he wanted to do, but at the same time he totally ignored an awful lot of teachers who had problems with what he wanted to do. He was not interested in collaborating on solutions, just with gathering enough favorable comments to show the schools and the school committee that he had teacher support for what he was trying to do (and to silence those that disagreed by saying he has the teachers’ support). Real leadership involves bringing disparate views together and attempting to find something that resembles consensus. We (and by “we” I mean “we the people” in general, not we the people here at this website) claim to be a democracy, but we have discovered that tyranny works best when trying to get our programs through our “democratic” institutions.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
And the hits just keep coming. How do you get control over the commissioner appointing/removal process? Is it unethical to ask?
What I hate most is that a school is given only a year to improve. That is NEVER possible! Unless you are going to provide released time for teachers, it would take a year to make a plan! Then you have to try things out, and have time to modify things that don’t work. And meanwhile, there have to be doctors, psychologists and social workers working with the children and their families… Without ALL of this, no change will be lasting. Marcia
Even if these so-called low performing schools in NY show improvement in one year, it will never be enough for Elia, because NCLB, RTTT and the Common Core Crap mandate 100% of children must be college and career ready—something that no country on the planet has ever achieved in recorded history, even Finland and Communist China where more than half of China’s children never attend an academic high school and even fewer go to college.
And it is obvious that New York State’s new Commissioner of Education Mary Ellen Elia is wedded to the Common Core Crap. To get rid of her, the parents will have to run her out of New York through the state’s sewer systems that hopefully all flow into the Atlantic after the toxic waste is cleansed from the water. But then Elia would never make it to the Atlantic because she is toxic waste.
I strongly argue that there is no such thing as a low-performing school—unless they are corporate Charters and they are much worse—but there are children who need a lot of support to overcome being low performing children with low literacy skills for whatever reason.
If a child doesn’t enjoy reading and has low literacy skills, it wasn’t a teachers fault.
If a child won’t do the classwork, it isn’t a teachers fault.
If a child doesn’t do the homework at home outside of school hours, it isn’t the teachers fault.
If a child doesn’t read books, it isn’t the teachers fault.
Under this type of plan, no one in authority cares what teachers think so release time is unnecessary. Teachers are seen as a nuisance, and as low level workers to be managed. The appointed DOE people will tell the schools what they have to do, and will make visits and bully “non-compliant” faculty who may (rightfully) complain that the prescribed curriculum and instructional methods are inferior. The plan does not include any social services, as students who need help will be pushed out of school entirely to doctor up the stats. That is how it worked in Florida, and I guess Elia thinks it is a perfectly good model. Appalling.
Exactly. My district did not receive any ‘extra’ money for the ‘improvement’ plans we were required to follow. The district had to pick up the cost of the extra 30 minutes a day teachers were made to work, the cost of materials for the ‘approved’ canned/scripted programs, and any extra personnel required.
That’s why the program disintegrated over a period of 3 years. There is no money and no appetite in the state capital for sending more our way. It’s all gone to charters and private school vouchers.
The woman is an ignoramus or extremely cynical, or like most so-called education reformers, both: either she doesn’t realize that education is a gradual process (even the debased form of “McEducation” that uses scores on invalid tests as a proxy for learning) and that one year is not nearly enough to turn things around in a school. Or else she does know, and doesn’t care, since she was hired to do the bidding of her Overclass patrons.
That course of action seems more than short sighted, it’s stupid. Making a school a charter does not guarantee that it will improve. How about we pick a charter and a public school who are equally yoked, socio data, test scores, student makeup and give both a year to improve. An equally ridiculous quest. Plz New York, get a manager who knows what they are doing.
The recently published medical research about the effects of poverty on the brain, in JAMA Pediatrics, by Seth Pollak and Barbara Wolfe, makes Elia look like an a__.