A good article in today’s New York Daily News by Michael Brick, who recalls going to an integrated public school in Austin, Texas.
Brick compares his own experience in Austin with New York City’s complete abandonment of integration today.
An interesting reflection on where we are heading as a society.
The author of the article “Is Literature Necessary?” writes a comment:
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Many people assume that value-added assessment started with Race to the Top.
Value-added assessment or value-added modeling means judging teachers by how much students scores went up.
Actually, it started in the 1980s, when William Sanders, an agricultural statistician in Tennessee, claimed that it was possible to measure student growth the way he was accustomed to measure the growth of plants, with the teacher as the independent variable.
In Dallas, at about the same time, a group of school district statisticians developed their own model to measure teacher effectiveness.
You would think that by now Tennessee and Dallas would be leading the nation, having figured out this stuff that the Obama administration has imposed on the nation. But they are not.
New York City started experimenting with a value-added model not long after Bloomberg took control. Marc Epstein, then a teacher at Jamaica High School, figured out that what the city was doing was shifting responsibility for learning from the student to the teacher. It seemed benign at the time. Now we can see this idea sweeping the nation, demoralizing teachers and turning schooling into a data-driven environment where learning becomes a numbers game. Anyone can play.
Marc, who holds a Ph.D. in Japanese naval history, is now a member of the large group of teachers in New York City called ATR (absent teacher reserve). His school was closed, through no fault of his own or any other faculty member. So with his long experience and deep knowledge of history, he floats from school to school. He is too expensive. A school can hire two young teachers in place of his salary. New York City’s Department of Education would prefer to keep teachers like him as ATR–collecting a salary without a real assignment–because…sorry, I can’t recall the reason. Maybe they hope he will go away, along with the hundreds or thousands of other teachers that have been displaced by a policy of closing schools and allowing new schools to maximize their budget by excluding veteran teachers.
This New York City teacher has been beaten down and out by ten years of reform that ended in more segregation and demoralizing actions by those at the top.
My advice to you: Don’t leave. There will be a new mayor. Maybe it will be someone who recognizes the damage of the past decade of endless and pointless reform and bragging. Stay and fight for the kids. Don’t let them push you out. Your students need you!
| After 10 years of teaching in NYC public schools, I’m quitting because I’ve become discouraged and can no longer deal with the upheavals that the so-called “reforms” bring to the everyday task of teaching. I’ve literally shed blood, sweat, and tears during these years of teaching at a school where the majority of the students live below the poverty line. Poverty Is the problem! NYC schools are segregated. How shameful that this is the case in this great city, and how unfair to students, teachers, and administrators. |
This is what school reform looks like in New York City after ten years of mayoral control.
In nearly 200 of the city’s 1,500 schools, at least 90 percent of the students are below the poverty line.
Four out of five of these schools have disproportionate concentrations of students who are limited English proficient or special education.
Only 31 percent of the students in these high-needs schools passed the state reading test, as compared to 47 percent citywide.
Only 45 percent of the students in these high-needs schools passed the state math tests, compared to 60 percent citywide.
Chancellor Dennis Walcott responded: “I know schools that have a variety of percentages of students, through over-the-counter or special ed or English language learners, who are knocking the socks off the ball.”
According to the NY1 story, the chancellor is referring to 21 of the high-needs schools that beat the odds. That’s 6 percent.
Next time you hear someone from the New York City Department of Education boasting about the “miracle” of mayoral control, think about these children.
Next time they tell you that “poverty is not destiny,” ask them about these schools and what the DOE did to change the odds.
After ten years of mayoral control, who will be held accountable for the system’s inability or unwillingness to meet the needs of these students?
A reader sent this analysis of the city’s data:
A recent story in NY1 examined New York City schools where 90% of the students are below the poverty line. NYC School Chancellor, Dennis Walcott, was quoted as saying that there are schools “who are knocking the socks off the ball.”
We took a careful look at the 2010-11 New York City data on elementary and middle schools and identified 153 schools where 90+% of students were eligible for free lunch. Of those schools only 3 were in the top half of the city in Math and English as calculated by the New York City progress report. PS 134 and PS 130 in Brooklyn and PS 002 in Manhattan were in the top half of students scoring at or above grade level in Math and English. In other words less than 2% of high poverty schools beat the city average and, unfortunately, not by much. In English for example the highest school was at the 65th percentile.
| School | ELA % Level 3 or 4 City Percent of Range |
| PS 134 | 64.4% |
| PS 002 | 52.1% |
| PS 130 | 51.6% |
Digging deeper we noticed that all of these 3 schools have higher levels of student movement out of the school (ranging from 20-12% of the student population) than most elementary schools. This raises questions about how the high scores are generated. Additionally, one is not making AYP for English Language Learners.
New York City’s own data shows that schools with high concentrations of poor students are not knocking the socks off of any balls. Perhaps the Chancellor should stop spending time inventing new idioms (one knocks the cover off of balls and socks off of people, although one can sock a ball over the fence) and should start paying attention to his own data. Making up numbers and success stories will not improve schools for kids. Figuring out the supports and services that would help high poverty schools might.
Anyone?
Leonie Haimson is a leading parent activist in New York City and a co-founder of Parents Across America, which keeps tabs on the depredations of the corporate reformers.
Here is Leonie’s take on l’affaire Campbell Brown. One would think that Michelle Rhee and her organization StudentsFirst would be wary of getting too deep in the weeds with the issue of sexual misconduct. Yet they seem to want to exploit it to the full in a fact-free fashion.
The text of Leonie’s commentary follows, in full:
Campbell Brown was the first witness chosen to testify at the Cuomo Commission hearings last week, all about how the UFT protects sex abusers. She repeated the same claims in the WSJ a few days later.
Bloomberg & Students1st NY (which essentially works for him, under the direction of Micah Lasher) are pushing a bill in the legislature, S.7497, that would allow him to fire any teacher accused of abuse, no matter what the arbitrator decided.
Meanwhile, it has been revealed that Brown’s husband Dan Senor, a senior Romney advisor, is also on the board of Students1st. There is more on this here and here – including about how Rhee’s own husband, Kevin Johnson has been accused of sexually molesting a minor under his supervision.
Here is the Students1st NY email blast sent out today:
We need your help, right now, to speak out against sexual misconduct in our school — and against sexism in the education debate.
On Monday, Emmy Award-winning journalist Campbell Brown — who previously served as White House Correspondent for NBC and as an anchor for CNN — wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about how New York law, supported by the teacher’s union, keeps sexual predators in the classroom.
Last night, the union responded — by attacking Campbell’s husband (who, among other things, serves on our Board).
National teachers union president Randi Weingarten took to Twitter and started republishing comments about Campbell’s “hubby” and his political views — as if Campbell’s accomplishments and perspective on this issue didn’t count. This morning, many of Ms. Weingarten’s colleagues have pursued the same line of attack.
Will you help us send a message that sexual misconduct has no place in our schools, and that sexism has no place in this debate?
Click here to speak out on Twitter. Tell Ms. Weingarten that she should focus more on protecting kids and less on sexist spin. Please use #protectourkids.
Of course, the union is looking for anything to distract from the issue at hand: that the union fights tooth-and-nail against giving school districts the authority to terminate anyone who engages in sexual misconduct.
Hopefully, if enough people speak out, we can convince the teachers union to put down the poison pen (and keyboard) and join us in trying to do something about this issue.
Click here to make your voice heard. Urge the union to put students first.
Chandra M. Hayslett
Director of Communications
StudentsFirstNY
http://twitter.com/StudentsFirstNY
In the political arena, all eyes are on the Presidential race.
But in New York City, candidates for Mayor are lining up supporters. The election is 2013, when Mayor Bloomberg’s rocky third term ends.
It appears that the favorite of the charter school hedge fund crowd is Christine Quinn, City Council speaker. Quinn, a close ally of Mayor Bloomberg, seems likeliest to keep his policies intact. To say that parents do not like his school-closing policy would be an understatement. The brute fact is that there is a lot of money on the privatization side of the agenda.
The question is whether any of the candidates will stand up for public education and block the insertion of charters into public schools that are already overcrowded.
The New York City Department of Education decided a few years ago that Jamaica High School, with its grand building and long history, deserved to die. Its test scores were too low. There was no point in trying to figure out why or to offer help. And so the DOE announced that Jamaica was a failing school. Parents began to withdraw their children or to select other high schools. Enrollment fell. Many faculty, remembering better times, held on. The city was determined to close the school and replace it with small high schools and charters. It is very desirable space in the borough of Queens.
A state report was recently released that documents how a school is swiftly put to death. First, declare it to be a failing schools. Then take away the programs that attract and develop good students. In time, no one will be left who cares about what once was the school, because the school that everyone once knew is dead, even if a few classes remain.
With the heart cut out of the school, it is comforting to learn from the state report that the school continues to “use data to drive and improve instructional outcomes.”
This is the key section in the state report:
· The following findings are based on information ascertained from various stakeholders including parents, teachers, students, administrators as well as school and district documents:
o No honors or advance placement classes are offered to students o The school no longer offers calculus, chemistry or physics
o Only three electives are offered to students: Law, Accounting and
Latin American Literature. Prior to the implementation of the phase out model, elective courses offered to students were: African American Literature, Film, Geography, Forensics, Sociology, Psychology, Computer classes (Word, Excel, visual basic, PowerPoint) and Creative Writing
o Offtrack classes, which were offered to students not meeting Regents requirements, are no longer available
o Students are not able to complete specialty programs: Business, Computer Science, Engineering and Finance Institutes, or Art Institutes
o Students are not offered SAT prep courses
o Two teachers, who are not certified in special education, are
teaching students with disabilities.
· The school uses data to drive and improve instructional outcomes.
A comment by Long Island principal Carol Burris, who has written for this blog:
MY AP worked there. They started bringing over the counter registration kids into the schools, including those recently released from incarceration and still wearing restraining leg chains on their ankles.
The city and the teachers’ union went to court to battle over the city’s plan to “turnaround” 24 schools by firing thousands of teachers.
The judge listened to the arguments, retired to her chambers, and returned seven minutes later to say that she was sustaining the arbitrator’s decision. The city may not lay off the teachers. It violates their contract.
This battle involves more than 3,000 teachers and 30,000 students. No one is sure how the schools will be staffed when schools opens in a few weeks. No one knows which teachers have found other jobs and which will return.
The schools, having been labeled as “failures,” have suffered enormous blows to their reputation in the community. If past experience is any guide, parents will be reluctant to enroll their children in a school that has been targeted for closure and that is now on life support for another year.
Just keep saying to yourself, that is reform, this is not reform, this is reform, this is not reform.
Or just call it chaos.
Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, and Michael Mulgrew, president of the UFT (New York City local of AFT), have some good advice for Mayor Bloomberg: Help schools that struggle, don’t close them.
Interesting that this opinion piece appears, no doubt by coincidence, in the New York Daily News on the same day that a news story reports the failure of Bloomberg’s closing schools strategy. According to the news story, Bloomberg’s new schools did worse on the state reading tests than the “old” schools that he hasn’t closed yet.
Weingarten and Mulgrrew call the Mayor’s attention to the Chancellor’s District created by Rudy Crew when he ran the school system. He created a non-contiguous district of the city’s lowest performing schools and then saturated them with support and resources. Some (though not all) of the schools showed impressive progress.
Will the Mayor take the suggestion from Weingarten and Mulgrew? Hmm. It would mean turning his back on ten years of school closings. It would mean admitting error. 140 schools closed and replaced by schools that mostly did no better. It would mean that the Federal Government’s turnaround (close schools and fire teachers) strategy is wrong.
The data don’t support more of the same. Is the Mayor listening? Is Arne Duncan listening?
Diane Ravitch's blog 