Fred LeBrun is rapidly emerging as the most astute education writer in New York State. He writes for the Albany Times-Union so there is a good chance that the Governor’s staff and the legislative staff read what he writes. I hope so.
In this article, he skewers Cuomo’s plan to put struggling schools into “receivership.” That’ll fix them. Millions will be burned while the state ignores the root causes of low-performance in school: poverty. It seems that all the schools on the Governor’s list are in poor communities. Black and brown children will be Cuomo’s playthings, as teachers and principals and other staff are fired and new ones brought in, who will also be fired.
It is painful to read. You know that millions of dollars will be spent on consultants, and by the time the money is all gone, there will be more schools to hand over to Cuomo’s hedge fund buddies to turn into low-performing charters.
LeBrun writes:
While New York public education struggles to resolve an idiotic dependence on standardized tests, waiting in the wings is another poorly-thought-out plan threatening more harm than benefit: school receivership.
So far you haven’t heard a great deal about it because the dramatic consequences are a year off, but you will. And, unlike the statewide disgust over Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s testing obsession that affects every school district and has gotten a lot of press, the threat of receivership at the moment hangs over only 144 “struggling” schools — not districts — all of them among the state’s poorest. Of these, 20 are labeled by the state Education Department as “persistently struggling” because of the length of time they’ve been “struggling” and need to turn themselves around in just a year, or else. The rest have two years.
In the Capital Region, only Albany’s William S. Hackett Middle School is on the persistent list, but if a handful of schools in Albany, Troy, Schenectady and Amsterdam, including Albany High School, don’t show appropriate progress, they will join Hackett next year.
What happens now for schools like Hackett is as complicated as directions to Atlantis, and about as reliable.
Albany school Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard becomes the acting school receiver, with broad powers, for the next year. A required community engagement team composed of the principal, staff, teachers, parents and even students from Hackett will forward recommendations for improvements to the superintendent, who will use them to help create her intervention plan to turn the school around. The plan is due at State Ed for approval by the end of this month. Over the next year, the community team will look over her shoulder as the intervention plan unfolds.
In the meantime, the school receiver can do pretty much what she wants (with approval from State Ed): change the curriculum, replace teachers and administrators, increase salaries, reallocate the budget, expand the school day or year, turn Hackett into a community school, even convert to a charter school. Although there’s enormous rigmarole attached to much of it, including going charter. Remember, the receiver in this case remains the superintendent for the rest of the district, so she is answerable for any wild and crazy ideas to the voters through the school board.
Anyway, to help start the process, Vanden Wyngaard can apply for a grant from a $75 million pot set up by the state, although she’ll have plenty of competition from other “persistently struggling” school receivers in Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Yonkers, New York City and elsewhere. She has a year to do her turnaround. Or the hammer falls and we are off to Neverland.
Then the state would appoint an independent receiver who is answerable only to State Ed. At which time the process of community involvement, an intervention plan, and the rest are repeated, only now change is apt to be far more radical, with wholesale staff firings. An independent receiver can be a person from an approved list that doesn’t yet exist, or an institution or charter school. Although charter schools upstate have been mostly a bust, as Albany well knows. Middle school charters in Albany could not save themselves, let alone others.
So. If you’re getting the idea that this receivership idea seems like a plan designed to fail and thus prepare the way for school privatizers to make a bundle, move over.
For one thing, the state has yet to give school receivers a clear idea of what would constitute appropriate progress to avoid an independent receiver. Presumably, we’ll know by the end of the month when intervention plans have to be approved. What is expected and how reasonable it is will answer a great deal.
Because just a year to show any marked improvement on any front for a school like Hackett, no matter how thoughtfully considered, broadly accepted by the community, or earnestly pursued, is absurd. Real change needs time for all stakeholders to become invested. Teachers at Hackett today are still complaining that attendance and discipline as major problems, just as it was when I substituted there, oh, a half century ago. These are, after all, manifestations of the poverty and despair underlying most of Hackett’s problems; they don’t go away. They are the community’s problems, not just Hackett’s.
And for any turnaround plan to stand a chance of success, it will need tons of money and sustained financing for years. Curiously, while the law creating school receiverships is rich in the detail of who can be fired and not rehired, on punitive measures, and what extraordinary powers a receiver may exercise, it does not specify who will pay for an independent receiver.
Keeping in mind, always, that the state has an abysmal record in meeting its education commitments. At the moment, the state owes New York City more than $2 billion in aid; Albany more than $37 million; Schenectady nearly $60 million.
So there you have it. A boondoggle in the making. Cuomo forced us to accept a mandate of an independent receiver for certain schools labeled struggling by his cohorts at State Ed, but so far there isn’t a hint of state money to pay for it. Can you imagine what that burden will do for school budgets like Albany’s?
Oh, and it gets better. Amusingly, the concept of “struggling” public schools is defined by the educational establishment as the bottom 5 percent of all state schools based on a host of criteria. Which means no matter how much struggling schools improve, there will always be 5 percent at the bottom who potentially need a receiver.
What a surprise.
flebrun@timesunion.com • 518-454-5453
Fundamental features of self-styled “education reform”:
1), There will always be a bottom something percent, so those schools will be turned over to rheephormers, to be privatized more or less quickly.
2), Demand rapid increase in mystically defined quality (outputs) without ponying up the necessary resources (inputs) to make it happen aka expect to procure world class luxury results at the 99¢ Rheephorm Store in the Education Gimmicks aisle. Also known as providing Lakeside School results without Lakeside School support and assets.
3), Circumvent any reasonable objections to unrealistic and punitive goals by making the process of garnering $tudent $ucce$$ for a few adults at the expense of the vast majority of students and parents and communities a done deal—democracy, who needs it?
This story has played out before. I hope the writer looks into the NOLA “miracle.” That’s the future of education that he’s looking at.
I thank the owner of this blog for this posting.
😎
If the powers that be believe the solution to saving impoverished schools is a flexible charter school model- then why has very little of what works for charter schools made it into the public education model?
Marissa, not sure, but I expect that some of the no-excuses discipline would be against state laws and regs
Please provide a definition of “what works for charter schools” that does not involve any mention of higher test scores.
What we know that works for charters: cherry pick the best students, and counsel out or expel the nonconformists. It also helps to have a high rate of attrition and a no back filling policy for students that leave.
MJM, “What works for charter schools” may involve high attrition rates (as for North Star Academy, Newark, NJ). Jersey Jazzman blog has articles re charter schools that have statistical base. Or charter schools accepting only certain grade levels.
Considering that 20-37% (depending which article read) charters perform better than traditional public schools, that’s still at best 4/10 shoot of the dice.
Perhaps because what “works” for charter schools is restricting who can attend them to docile students who don’t bring down their test score numbers, unlike public schools, which must accept all comers.
I am a parent of a student at one of the state’s 20 “persistently struggling schools” LeBrun mentions in the article. We learned at a meeting earlier this week that because the school has met the state’s goals on many of the metrics used to evaluate these schools entering the receivership game, the school cannot choose those metrics to be evaluated on at the end of the year. Almost all of the metrics that are left to be chosen to be evaluated on are related to the state testing. It is all a game of trying to figure out which population subgroups will be most likely to meet the metrics when the tests are given months from now And you just keep your fingers crossed that you pick the right subgroups. (This is helping the kids how?)
It also appears that the school population as a whole has to have 95% participation in state testing to meet metrics. Is there any district in the state that did that last year? I think our school was about 80% participation last year. This is something that the school has very little control over. (To the administration’s credit, they do not strong arm families to take the test.) How can a school be evaluated on this?
Ideas of what we can do about this? The school’s plan is due Sept 30, so there’s not much we can do to change the procedure prior to plan submission. (We received the metrics from SED earlier this week, so there wasn’t much lead time.) How can we fight this even after our plan is submitted?
I am quite scared about what might happen to the school next year. No one seems to know what the possibilities even are or what rights the school and the parents have.
“It also appears that the school population as a whole has to have 95% participation in state testing to meet metrics. Is there any district in the state that did that last year?”
Yes. About 99% of the 425,000 or so children in grades 3-8 in New York City were duped, coerced, and/or intimidated and sat for their state tests last year.
Thanks, Tim. I don’t think any schools in our region did this, which makes meeting the metric seem impossible to me, even if I thought it was a metric worth aiming for. (I don’t.)
I’m so glad someone at the Times Union is getting it right. When the TU “editorial board” writes about education it sounds like reformer ventriloquism.
If the bottom 5% of public schools are always failing and are turned over to corporate Charters, then in 20 years there will be no more public schools.
I think that’s their plan!
Reblogged this on CNY Teacher and commented:
Another great article by Fred LeBrun.
“While New York public education struggles to resolve an idiotic dependence on standardized tests, waiting in the wings is another poorly-thought-out plan threatening more harm than benefit: school receivership”
Whenever a standard is set, there will always be schools at the bottom. Raising the bar doesn’t change that. The problem with the receivership plan is that no matter what a struggling school does, as long as it’s fate is tied to test scores which are designed to fail over 50% of students, and those “passing” must achieve minimum progress for the school to be considered successful, there is no hope for turning it around in a year or two (especially without needed funding). Even if this year’s 5% improve, next year there will be another 5%…and another…and another…
This whole this is just fundamentally wrong.