Archives for category: Bill de Blasio
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New York Legislature Frees Charter Schools of Regulations and Oversight

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2016 //
55

In late night negotiations, rushing to finish the legislative session, the New York Legislature reached a package deal to extend mayoral control by only one year. Part of the package creates a parallel system for charter schools, which can switch authorizers and choose one (either the State University of New York or the Board of Regents) that will give them freedom from any regulations and standards that apply to public schools. In other words, there will be one set of rules for public schools, and no rules for charter schools. This will be the first time in New York state’s history that the Legislature has officially established a publicly-funded dual school system: One sector is subject to democratic control, the other is not. One must accept (or take responsibility for) all students, the other is free to accept and reject whichever students it wants.

A one-year extension, with few or no caveats, had seemed all but cemented when lawmakers went to bed on Thursday evening. But the morning found Mr. Flanagan pushing for the funding transparency requirement, followed by the charter-school provision in the afternoon. It would effectively create a parallel system of charter schools within the city, allowing “high-performing charter schools in good standing” to switch to join the State University of New York umbrella or the Board of Regents of the State Educational Department.

Not since the era preceding the Brown decision of 1954 has a state legislature so brazenly established a two-tier system of K-12 schools.

The leader of the State Senate, John Flanagan, has made no secret of his contempt for Mayor Bill de Blasio. De Blasio helped to raise money for Democrats running for the State Senate; had they won, the State Senate would be controlled by Democrats, not Republicans. Governor Cuomo has stabbed the mayor in the back repeatedly, because he doesn’t like to share the stage with any other prominent Democrat in the state. So, the mayor had a losing hand when he asked for a three-year extension of mayoral control.

When Mike Bloomberg asked for a six-year extension in 2009, the Legislature granted it. The State Senate loved Mayor Bloomberg, because he often contributed to individual Republicans running for re-election (three years later, in 2012, the Mayor gave $1 million to the Republican campaign fund for the state senate). When Mayor Bloomberg asked for a renewal of his unlimited power over the schools in 2009, he boasted of the dramatic increase in test scores that were a direct result of his control. However, a year later, the New York Board of Regents commissioned an independent study, which concluded that the New York State Education Department had lowered the passing mark every year and test scores across the state were inflated. When they were adjusted after this revelation, the dramatic gains disappeared. NAEP scores never confirmed the boasts by Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein about “historic gains.”

If anyone remembers what all these political maneuvers over control have to do with educating one million children, please remind me.

Categories Bill de Blasio, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, New York, New York City

Leonie Haimson Holds the de Blasio Administration Accountable for Reckless Spending

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2016 //
2

Leonie Haimson is the watchdog of New York City public education. She is the founder of Class Size Matters (I am a member of her six-person board), which operates on a shoestring. She is unpaid, yet she is tireless in her determination to police the awarding of contracts, as well as the administration’s attention to class size. She also is deeply involved in protecting student privacy. She and Rachel Strickland in Colorado brought down Bill Gates’ effort to data-mine American students, a project called inBloom, to which he contributed $100 million. In the face of parent criticism, inBloom folded.

 

Leonie reads every contract that the New York City Department approves. She did the same during the Bloomberg years, when she was also the mayor’s most persistent critic.

 

Here is her scathing report on the failure of the administration to perform due diligence before it awards contracts, in this case, for special education services, for Amazon, and for new technology. Once again, as under Bloomberg, the city’s Panel on Educational Policy (actually know in the law as the New York City Board of Education) mutely acquiesces and approves whatever the administration asks for, without debate or discussion.

 

This is a good reason to oppose mayoral control, state control, and any other undermining of democracy.

Categories Accountability, Bill de Blasio, Education Industry, New York City, Technology

Leonie Haimson on De Blasio Board: Closing Schools, Co-Locating Charters, Ignoring Protests

By dianeravitch
April 25, 2016 //
9

Opponents of corporate reform has high hopes when Bill de Blasio was elected, but their hopes are rapidly dimming. The de Blasio administration tried to slow down (not stop) the growth of Success Academy, and ran into a billionaire buzz saw. The hedge funders spent millions on a scurrilous TV campaign, falsely claiming that de Blasio administration was snuffing out the dreams of poor children of color (who had not yet been selected to enroll in the charters that might not open). The reality was that Eva Moskowitz’s chain was pushing a program for children with profound disabilities out of their dedicated space to make way for a new charter. Andrew Cuomo received big donations from the charter industry, and Eva won everything she wanted in the legislature, including free rent and the right to expand as much as she wanted. Since then, de Blasio has capitulated abjectly to the charter crowd.

 

Here is Leonie Haimson’s report on the latest meeting of the city’s board of education, now called the Panel on Education Policy, which is controlled by the Mayor.

 

Please be sure to watch the video at the end, made by the students of Meyer Levin School of the Performing Arts. The students are protesting the co-location of a charter in their school. The charter will take away the third floor of their building, which is their performance rooms.

Categories Arts Education, Bill de Blasio, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Injustice

Meet Billionaire Paul Tudor Jones

By dianeravitch
March 20, 2016 //
44

Paul Tudor Jones is a hedge fund billionaire who enjoys a lavish life style, with multiple homes, jets, and yachts. He has cultivated his image as a philanthropist who cares deeply about the poor and needy. But his political activities assure Republican control of the New York State Senate, which refuses to raise taxes in the 1%. He is a major supporter of charter schools and of a group of wealthy backers of “Families for Excellent Schools,” which financed a multi-million dollar campaign to defeat Mayor Bill de Blasio’s effort to rein in charter schools.

 

He gives political contributions to Democrats (such as Corey Booker and Debbie Wasserman Schultz) and Republicans (such as Eric Cantor).

 

Know your billionaires.

Categories Bill de Blasio, Billionaires, Boston Consulting Group, Education Reform

Exemplary Program for Homeless Students May Fall Victim to Low Test Scores

By dianeravitch
February 19, 2016 //
13

Do you want a definition of educational insanity? It is not just the old chestnut about doing the same thing over and over again, after seeing that it fails every time. It is taking a holistic program intended to support the social, emotional, mental, and physical needs of homeless children and judging its success or failure by standardized test scores. This is madness!

 

Yet as Marilena Marchetti explains in this article, that is exactly what is happening in New York City. The city has a huge population of homeless families and children. Mayor Bill de Blasio created a “community schools” initiative to help these children with the multiple supports that they need. Marilena teaches in one of these schools.

 

She writes:

 

 

I work as an occupational therapist in Bronx District 10 where the highest number of homeless students are enrolled. A cornerstone of the Initiative is that school sites become resource hubs for vulnerable families, thereby making access to social services and programs easier. The program adopts a “whole child” approach that sees schools as places where social-emotional, mental and physical health are valued as much as academics. Quality and accountability to performance measures are emphasized to reassure families, communities and donors that success matters. Without a doubt, it is a tremendous step in the right direction.

 

High expectations have taken hold, flowing from the desperate circumstances of so many school communities alongside the financial investments and political clout associated with the program. Despite the many positives, I fear the Community Schools Initiative is operating with an internal contradiction that may doom it to fail if it is not corrected. The major problem is this: All the wonderful programming and promises of the Community Schools Initiative could be taken away if, after three years’ time, standardized test scores are not raised. Interestingly, nowhere in the 43-page Community Schools Strategic Plan are the terms “standardized test” or “high stakes test” used, as those phrases have been rightfully maligned by the Opt Out movement. No matter the semantics, the writing is on the wall. The plan talks about “tiered interventions that impact large numbers of students and families,” “aligned program supports and services that promote student proficiency in Common Core standards,” “processes for on-going review of student data” and “established performance improvement metrics and processes,” all of which are references to testing and its repercussions.

 

Later in the document, the following is stated:

 

“Within the Community Schools Initiative, on-going data collection will inform practice, track progress, and connect data with targeted outcomes [emphasis added]. Data collection will include both qualitative and quantitative data, both of which will allow City government leadership and researchers the opportunity to track Community Schools’ outcomes (pp. 29).”

 

It isn’t necessary to say directly what teachers, families and students in Community Schools can read between the lines: You must pass or you will perish. Just like adding one drop of red dye to a glass of water turns the entire liquid red, so goes the entire school culture when standardized testing is applied and laden with grave possible consequences. Tying test scores to funding streams and to the possibility that a school would be protected from being shut down reinforces the fear, anxiety and sense of instability that is meant to be alleviated for our children living on the brink. Must the issue of survival for them always remain an open question? Imagine struggling to improve teaching and learning under this pretext.

 

Chalk it up to the forcefulness of the Opt Out movement that high-stakes testing has finally been dialed down, albeit only slightly. Thanks to the many parents, teachers and students who spoke up, we can no longer deny that high stakes testing leads to a narrowing of the curriculum and all manner of stress for our young people. It undermines children’s interest in learning and teachers’ ability to engage them. When standardized-test results play even the tiniest part in determining if a Community School be allowed to stay open and continue receiving financial support for special services and programming, it sabotages the goal to boost academic achievement for students who need it most.

 

Using standardized test scores to judge a program serving homeless children is like judging fish by their ability to fly or judging horses by their ability to read or judging all children by their ability to run a mile in four minutes.

Categories Accountability, Bill de Blasio, Common Core, New York City, Standardized Testing

The Great “Credit Recovery” Scandal and Its Roots in Accountability

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2015 //
22

Over the past few days, the New York Post (owned by Rupert Murdoch, who hates public schools and loves charter schools) has been flogging a scandal. The Post published a story by a young woman who said she got a high school diploma from a New York City public high school when she should have been failed. She hated school, she skipped classes, she should never have been allowed to graduate. Then the Post “discovered” that many students were graduating by taking “credit recovery” online classes, where they could make up for a failed course in a few weeks. In other words, the soaring graduation rates of which the Bloomberg administration boasted, are fake.

But the Post didn’t want to blame Bloomberg, whom they regularly hailed for expanding charters and cracking down on the public schools. They wanted to blame Mayor Bill de Blasio, whom they frequently ridicule as a hapless fool, and his schools chancellor, Carmen Farina.

Here is the sordid story, told by Perdidostreetschool blogger. The story is told by Harris Lirtzman, former Director of Risk Management for the New York City Retirement Systems in the NYC Comptroller’s Office from 1996-2002 and former Deputy State Comptroller for Administration from 2003-2007. Lirtzman was an untenured teacher in the Bronx from 2009-2012 and was pressured to pass unqualified students to boost the high school graduation rate to at least 70%. That was the target.

Credit recovery became widely accepted during the Bloomberg era as a way to raise graduation rates. The New York Post applauded Bloomberg’s reforms, especially charter schools, but they ignored the use of credit recovery to inflate the graduation rate. Many critics–such as Leonie Haimson–complained about credit recovery, but they were ignored by the Department of Education and the media. In 2011, she testified about credit recovery and other means of playing with data to make the graduation rate go higher. The New York Post didn’t report her testimony or show any subsequent interest in credit recovery. What the Post–or the New York Times– should do now is an in-depth investigation of credit recovery. When is it valid, when is it not? How many students rely on simple online courses to make up for semester-long or year-long courses that they failed? Which firms are profiting by supplying this quick fix? Some might justify credit recovery by saying that it is better for the student to have a high school diploma that was obtained through credit recovery than to be a dropout. If so, let’s have that discussion.

Categories Bill de Blasio, Bloomberg, Michael, Farina, Carmen, New York City, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes

New York Times: How Privatizers In NY Reversed the Results of Last Election

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2015 //
41

The New York Times has a fascinating article today about how a handful of very wealthy people invested in Andrew Cuomo and the Republican majority in the State Senate to gain control of public schools in Néw York City and state. The article says they want to continue former Mayor Bloomberg’s policies of closing public schools and replacing them with charter schools and tying teacher evaluations to test scores.

The leader of this effort, the story says, is former chancellor Joel Klein, who now works for rightwing media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Unmentioned is the undemocratic nature of this purchase of public policy. There was a mayoral election. Bill de Blasio won handily, after making clear his opposition to Bloomberg’s education policies. So, the reformers lost at the polls but used their money to nullify the voters’ choice.

Categories Bill de Blasio, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New York, New York City, StudentsFirst

De Blasio Blasts Cuomo, At Last

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2015 //
44

For two years, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has shredded Mayor Bill de Blasio’s legislative agenda and imposed his own wishes on the city. De Blasio tried to rein in the free-wheeling charter sector, and Cuomo responded by expanding it and forcing the city to give free public space to charters or pay their rent in private space. This year, de Blasio sought permanent extension of mayoral control. He ended up with only one year.

 

Until today, de Blasio has faithfully supported Cuomo, despite the rebuffs and slights. He helped Cuomo get the nomination of the Working Families Party, which threatened to endorse Zephyr Teachout. He gave the premier nominating speech for Cuomo at the State Democratic convention, showing progressive support for a governor who has governed as a conservative.

 

Today, de Blasio finally let loose on Cuomo.

 

 

“Mayor Bill de Blasio, in candid and searing words rarely employed by elected officials of his stature, accused Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Tuesday of stymieing New York City’s legislative goals out of personal pettiness, “game-playing” and a desire for “revenge.”

 

“In an extraordinary interview, Mr. de Blasio, appearing to unburden himself of months’ worth of frustrations, said that Mr. Cuomo — who, like the mayor, is a Democrat — “did not act in the interests” of New Yorkers by blocking measures like reforming rent laws and allowing a long-term extension of the mayor’s ability to control the city’s public schools.

 

“I started a year and a half ago with a hope of a very strong partnership,” Mr. de Blasio said of the governor, whom he has known for two decades. “I have been disappointed at every turn. And these last couple of examples really are beyond the pale…..

 

“I’m not going to be surprised if these statements lead to some attempts at revenge,” Mr. de Blasio said, his voice even. “And we’ll just call them right out. Because we are just not going to play that way.”

 

Teachers know how vindictive and petty Cuomo can be. He fancies himself qualified to dictate how teachers should be evaluated, a subject about which he is totally uninformed.

Categories Bill de Blasio, Cuomo, Andrew, New York, New York City

Cuomo Releases List of State’s Failing Schools

By dianeravitch
February 28, 2015 //
19

Governor Andrew Cuomo released a report which identified 178 “failing schools,” with more than half in Néw York City. His report was an implicit–if unintended–critique of mayoral control, since the schools in Néw York City have been under mayoral control since 2002.

Cuomo wants the state to take control of the schools he named and turn them over to private management organizations.

“The report aims to bolster Cuomo’s argument that the state should be allowed to seize control of the schools and hand them over to outside organizations. Cuomo’s takeover plan would allow “receivers” to restructure the low-ranked schools, overhaul their curriculums, and override labor agreements in order to fire “underperforming” teachers and administrators.

For another perspective, read Bruce Baker as he rips apart “Angry Andy’s” list of “failing schools,” most of which have been shortchanged by the state.

Baker writes:

“NY Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office has released a report in which it identifies what it refers to in bold type on the cover as “Failing Schools.”
Report here: https://www.governor.ny.gov/sites/governor.ny.gov/files/atoms/files/NYSFailingSchoolsReport.pdf

“Presumably, these are the very schools on which Angy Andy would like to impose death penalties – or so he has opined in the past.

“The report identifies 17 districts in particular that are home to failing schools. The point of the report is to assert that the incompetent bureaucrats, high paid administrators and lazy teachers in these schools simply aren’t getting the job done and must be punished/relieved of their duties. Angry Andy has repeatedly vociferously asserted that he and his less rabid predecessors have poured obscene sums of funding into these districts for decades. Thus – it’s their fault – certainly not his, for why they stink!”

“I have addressed over and over again on this blog the plight of high need, specifically small city school districts under Governor Cuomo.

“On how New York State crafted a low-ball estimate of what districts needed to achieve adequate outcomes and then still completely failed to fund it.
On how New York State maintains one of the least equitable state school finance systems in the nation.

“On how New York State’s systemic, persistent underfunding of high need districts has led to significant increases of numbers of children attending school with excessively large class sizes.

“On how New York State officials crafted a completely bogus, racially and economically disparate school classification scheme in order to justify intervening in the very schools they have most deprived over time.

“I have also written reports on New York State’s underfunding of the school finance formula – a formula adopted to comply with prior court order in CFE v. State.

“Statewide Policy Brief with NYC Supplement: BBaker.NYPolicyBrief_NYC
50 Biggest Funding Gaps Supplement: 50 Biggest Aid Gaps 2013-14_15_FINAL

“Among my reports is one in which I identified the 50 districts with the biggest state aid shortfalls with respect to what the state itself says these districts require for providing a sound basic (constitutional standard) education. Districts across NY state have funding gaps for a variety of reasons, but I have shown in the past that it is generally districts with greater needs – high poverty concentrations & more children with limited English language proficiency, as well as more minority children – which tend to have larger funding gaps.

“I have also pointed out very recently on this blog that some high need upstate cities in NY have had persistently inequitable/inadequate funding for decades……

“Personally, even I was shocked to see the relationship between my 50 most underfunded districts list and Angry Andy’s 17 districts that suck.
NY State has over 650 school districts, many of which may be showing relatively low test scores for a variety of reasons, including & especially due to serving high concentrations of needy students.”

Categories Bill de Blasio, Bloomberg, Michael, Cuomo, Andrew, New York City

NY Charter Advocacy Group Opens in Boston

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2015 //
11

A well-funded charter advocacy group, deceptively named “Families for Excellent Schools,” has opened in Boston.

It claims that it supports all excellent schools, whether charter or public, but the record says this group is a cheerleader for charters and against public schools. As the story in the Boston Globe says, FES spent something like $6 million (earlier coverage had numbers like $3.6 million or $4 million but eventually reporters settled on $5-6 million) to stop Mayor Bill de Blasio from reigning in charter expansion. Due to FES’ efforts, Governor Cuomo and the legislature required Néw York City to provide all charters free public space or to pay their private rent.

What kind of families can raise $4-6 million in a matter of days to bash the mayor and promote charters? The family of billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones and the Walton family, just your typical American families.

Categories Bill de Blasio, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, New York
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