Archives for category: Bloomberg, Michael
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The Failure of Bloomberg’s New Schools Strategy

By dianeravitch
July 22, 2012 //
14

The New York Daily News (owned by billionaire Mort Zuckerman, who also owns U.S. News & World Report) often runs editorials applauding the “reforms” of the Bloomberg administration. Its editorials are anti-union, anti-teacher, and consistently supportive of the policy of closing schools that have low test scores.

But the New York Daily News has excellent reporters who don’t follow the editorial line. They just report the news. And the story today is stunning.

The headline summarizes the story: “Bloomberg’s New Schools Have Failed Thousands of City Students: Did More Poorly on State Reading Tests than Older Schools with Similar Poverty Rates.”

This analysis shows the abject failure of the policy that has been the centerpiece of the Bloomberg reforms for the past decade.

Closing schools and replacing them with new schools is also the centerpiece of the Obama-Duncan “turnaround” strategy.

Here is an excerpt from the news story. Note that the grandmother of a student in Brooklyn makes more sense than the six-figure bureaucrats who run the New York City Department of Education. Tanya King of Brooklyn for Chancellor!

…When The News examined 2012 state reading test scores for 154 public elementary and middle schools that have opened since Mayor Bloomberg took office, nearly 60% had passing rates that were lower than older schools with similar poverty rates.

The new schools also showed poor results in the city’s letter-grade rating system, which uses a complicated formula to compare schools with those that have similar demographics.

Of 133 new elementary and middle schools that got letter grades last year, 15% received D’s and F’s — far more than the city average, where just 10% of schools got the rock-bottom grades.

“It’s crazy,” said Tanya King, who helped wage a losing battle to save Brooklyn’s Academy of Business and Community Development, where her grandson was a student.

The school opened in 2005, then closed in 2012.

Instead of closing struggling schools and replacing them with something else that doesn’t work, King says, the city should help with extra resources to save the existing schools.

“You have the same children in the school,” she said. “What’s going to be the difference? Put in the services that are going to make the school better.”

Her grandson Donnovan Hicks, 11, will be transferred next fall for the seventh-grade into another Bloomberg-created school, Brooklyn’s Peace Academy, where just 13% passed the state reading exams this spring.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bloomberg-new-schools-failed-thousands-city-students-article-1.1119406#ixzz21M3o9hBP

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, NYC, Obama

Study Says Teacher Churn Hurts Student Achievement

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2012 //
9

This study by a group of prominent researchers will not be news to teachers and principals, but should be a revelation to the U.S. Department of Education, to Secretary Arne Duncan and to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Here is the summary.

It says that teacher turnover harms student test scores in both mathematics and reading. It says that it harms academic performance most among poor and black students. It says that high rates of teacher churn affect both the students who lose their teachers and even those who didn’t. The researchers are cautious about why this is so, but they think it may have to do with the continual disruption of the school’s community and culture. It is hard to have collegiality and a cohesive staff when staff members come and go in large numbers.

Good schools don’t have high attrition among teachers and principals. Good schools are schools that professionals feel part of and want to sustain and improve. Churn is not good for schools. And now we know it is not good for children either.

So every time you hear Secretary Duncan laud the “turnaround” model, remember that he is lauding a bad idea. Remember he is saying that the mere act of tossing out the principal and half the staff constitutes “reform.” There may be instances where a school is so bad and so incompetent and so corrupt that a start over is necessary, but those instances are rare. Typically a school with low scores is struggling to meet the needs of children who are poor and don’t speak English; it needs help, not churn-by-design.

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Race to the Top, Teachers and Teaching

Real Life in a “Turnaround” School

By dianeravitch
July 13, 2012 //
4

Mayor Bloomberg and Secretary Duncan like to describe the firing of teachers and the closing of schools as a wonderful reform strategy.

Something magical is supposed to happen because of clearing out half or all of the staff and starting over with a new team, or half a new team.

The public knows nothing about the details, reads that “reform” is happening, and is satisfied to know that someone is doing something even if they don’t know what it is.

There is an implicit assumption that the teachers who got fired must be “bad” teachers because they work in a “failing” school.

Change the teachers, goes the story, and the school won’t be a failing school anymore, It will be a “turnaround” school.

If only it were that easy.

Here is a comment by a teacher who worked or works in a turnaround school in New York City. I don’t know which verb tense to use because he was fired, then he was reinstated by the ruling of an arbitrator, and now Mayor Bloomberg is litigating to reverse the arbitrator’s decision. So, for the moment, he has a job. But only for the moment. If nothing else, his account gives the lie to the claim that those who were fired deserved to be fired and that getting rid of them would “help the school” and “save the students.”

I work in one of those 24 turnaround schools in NYC and was appalled at the hiring process. The majority of the teachers who were NOT hired back were indeed effective and amazing teachers. They were “culled” from the herd because they were senior teachers and made too much money. Among the teachers who were not hired back were the bilingual science teacher whose Regents passing rate was the highest of all the science teachers. She is amazing, but her sin was being in the system too long. Honestly, teachers were stunned when they were not hired back.Ironically, some of the teachers who were hired back were among the weakest on our staff. Nobody really understood the hiring process or how these decisions were made. Yes, we knew there was a rubric and yes, the UFT sat on these committees, but let’s be honest–none of this addresses the real issues in many of these students’ lives. They are sent to the high school with deficient skills and other social problems.And “Harold,”,none of this, please be clear, was about helping kids. It was about hiring the least expensive workers. Kids be damned. Morale at my school was so low to begin with. Nobody even knows if they are back or not, nobody knows if the old principal is in or not and nobody even knows what the school’s name is.This is chaos. This is destruction. This is immoral. This is DANGEROUS!

 
Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Education Reform, NYC, Race to the Top

Ten Years of “Reform” and Still So Much Failure

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2012 //
6

The New York Daily News has an editorial this morning complaining about an arbitrator’s decision to stop Mayor Michael Bloomberg from closing 24 schools.

As usual, the editorial lambastes the teachers’ union, which is supposedly the font of all evil in education. The editorial writer forgets that the city Department of Education agreed to enter into binding arbitration. Having lost the decision, the city and the newspaper forget the plain meaning of the word “binding.”

The crucial issue: No question is raised about why so many schools continue to “fail” after a full decade of “reform” in New York City.

How many years must it take before the failure stops? Twenty? Thirty? Forty?

The Daily News editorial writers will never hold the mayor accountable for improving the schools, over which he has had total control for ten years. He has a puppet board, which routinely approves whatever the mayor wants. Never in ten years has the board said no to any decision of his. He negotiates with no one.

They will never call him out for the charade of closing schools and opening new schools that exclude the students with the lowest scores. Those children will be shunted to other schools that will eventually be closed. And the new schools will also be in line to be closed too.

This is not reform. It is a shell game. Guess who is under the shell? Children with disabilities. Children who can’t read or speak English. Children who are homeless. Children who are failing.

Should I mention that Mort Zuckerman, the owner of the Daily News and U.S. News & World Report, served on the Broad Foundation Center for the Management of School Systems? I will mention that the Daily News has some of the best, most independent reporters and columnists of any newspaper in the city.

For some reason, the newspaper editorialists like to talk accountability but never mention that accountability starts at the top.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Education Reform, NYC

The Only Egg in NYC’s Basket Is Broken

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2012 //
18

After ten years of mayoral control of its public schools, New York City has only one strategy to “reform” the schools: Closing existing schools and replacing them with many new small schools.

You would think that after ten years with one person in charge, holding the unlimited power to do whatever he wants, the schools would now all be successful–that is, if he actually had a good idea about how to improve the schools.

But no, the game of closing schools continues, meaning that every year a new group of schools will be single out for a shutdown. As readers of this blog know, the New York City Department of Education (i.e., Mayor Bloomberg) decided to shut down 33 schools this year. When powerful politicians in Queens complained loudly, the closing list dropped from 33 to 24. When the city realized that it could scoop up about $40 million in federal funds by calling the schools “turnarounds,” rather than just closing them outright, the 24 became “turnaround” schools, in which at least half the staff was fired.

But an independent arbitrator ruled that the “turnaround” plan violated the teachers’ union contract, so everyone who was just fired got reinstated, unless they decided to take whatever job they had lined up in the meanwhile. At last writing, Mayor Bloomberg was steamed that he lost “binding” arbitration and announced his intention to sue to overturn the arbitrator’s ruling, which apparently is only “binding” if it goes the way the Mayor wanted it to go.

So here is an additional twist to this story.

The city’s dependence on closing schools and opening schools relies heavily on one study, which said that the city’s small high schools had a higher graduation rate. The brilliant Gary Rubinstein decided to take a closer look at this study and found it to be flawed. How sad that so many lives of students, teachers and administrators have been disrupted, how many careers ruined, how many communities fragmented, based on a theory that lacks evidence.

How sad too that this path of destruction and ruin is considered “reform.” No, not reform. Destruction, chaos, upheaval. And not in the best interests of students.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Education Reform, NYC

Bloomberg’s Defeat..For Now

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2012 //
10

Mayor Bloomberg is intent on closing as many public schools as he can before he leaves office at the end of 2013 (his third term). He has already closed about 150 schools, maybe more, of the 1,100 or 1,200 that he started with. He has added hundreds of new schools. I’ve lost count. Maybe he has too.

The mayor loves privately managed charter schools, competition, and choice. He has done his best to promote those ideas over the past ten years. There was a time when the mayor and his public relations team sold the idea of a “New York City miracle,” but those claims blew up in 2010 when the state acknowledged that it had manipulated the passing score for years. When scores across the state were recalibrated, the “miracle” about which Bloomberg and Joel Klein had boasted for years evaporated. Now, the big boast is about climbing graduation rates, but since 80% of the city’s graduates require remediation in the city’s community colleges, those claims too must be taken with a large helping of salt.

By now it is clear that the mayor’s central “reform” strategy is to close schools, fire the entire staff, and open new schools, either small schools in the same building with new names or charter schools. Many schools that were the heart of their local community have been killed during the time in which the mayor has ruled the schools with an iron hand. Most of the closed schools had low test scores, and he assumed it was because they were bad schools, but they enrolled disproportionately large numbers of poor students, students with special needs, and English language learners. As large high schools closed, the new schools tried to avoid enrolling the same students, to burnish their own scores.

Last week, at a press conference called to announce that 1,100 professors across New York state had signed a petition opposing high-stakes testing, Pedro Noguera of New York University (who recently resigned as chair of the State University of New York’s charter school authorizing board) denounced the mayor’s school closing strategy as a “shell game” that harmed the city’s most vulnerable students. In a blistering critique, he said that our public officials literally have no idea what they are doing and  cling to failed policies rather than listen to their constituents.

Last Friday, an independent arbitrator ruled against the mayor’s plan to do a “turnaround” at 24 public schools. Originally, the mayor planned to close 33 schools outright, but some powerful politicians stayed the executioner’s hand and got him to reduce it to 24. The mayor doesn’t listen when thousands of parents and students show up at public hearings, but he does listen when the head of the State Assembly’s education committee complains.

The mayor’s usual strategy is to just close the school outright, but he wanted to get millions of federal dollars available for the “turnaround” so he proposed to fire at least half the staff instead of everyone. The United Federation of Teachers sued to block the closings, on grounds that it violated their contract. The arbitrator agreed with the union.

The city will appeal. The mayor is defending the children, of course. Stay tuned.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Education Reform, NYC

Mayor Bloomberg Is Angry

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2012 //
9

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City and Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York state had a disagreement.

The mayor wanted the power to publish the names and evaluations of all teachers in the city, as happened earlier this year when the New York City Department of Education released the single-number ratings of 18,000 teachers, based solely on test scores. The mayor says the public has a right to know the job ratings of every teacher. The teachers’ union (among others) objected because the ratings are highly flawed and inaccurate; and it humiliates teachers to have their ratings made public. Others objected to the public release because the job evaluations of police, firefighters and corrections officers are shielded by state law; why single out teachers and open their ratings to the public? Even Bill Gates wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times opposing public release last winter, a day before the ratings went public, on the ground that they are useful only as part of a discussion between teachers and their supervisors about how to improve. Public release turns them into a tool for humiliating people, not a means of helping them become better at their work.

The governor argued that the parents have a right to know the ratings of their child’s teachers, but that the ratings should not be made public.

The state legislature overwhelmingly passed a law reflecting the governor’s view. The ratings will not be published but parents have a right to know the ratings of their child’s teacher.

Mayor Bloomberg became very angry that the Legislature sided with the governor and rejected his view. So he said on a weekly talk show that the city would contact every one of the city’s parents or guardians of 1.1 million children and make their ratings known. Many people saw this response as the reaction of a petulant billionaire who can’t stand to lose. Be that as it may, the New York City Department of Education now has the burden of enacting a policy or program to do as the mayor directs because New York City has mayoral control and the department must carry out the mayor’s wishes, no matter how odd they may seem and no matter if they violate the spirit of the law that was just passed.

GothamSchools published an account of how the Department of Education intends to carry out the mayor’s wishes. It appears that every principal will be required to contact every parent to inform them of their right to know, but it is not clear how or if this information will be released. Maybe it won’t be, as that would clearly be illegal.

Based on this article, it appears that the mayor thinks that parents are consumers who should be able to go teacher-shopping. If they don’t like Mr. Smith’s rating, they should be able to transfer their child into Ms. Jones’s class because she has a higher rating. The problem here is obvious and I wonder if this occurred to the mayor. Unlike a business, where consumers may decide to shift their patronage, a teacher can accommodate a limited number of children. If a school has 500 students, and Ms. Jones has the highest rating in the building, her classroom can still enroll only a certain number of students, between 25 and 34, depending on the grade. What happens if the parents of 200 students or all 500 students want to be in her class? It doesn’t work, and it makes no sense.

Furthermore, given what we already know are the huge margins of error built into the ratings, Ms. Jones may not be the best teacher at all. The consumers may be misinformed.

Mayor Bloomberg has a faith in the value of the standardized test scores that shows how little he knows about measurement. The scores measure student performance, not teacher quality. When used to assess teacher quality, the rankings produced are inaccurate, unreliable and unstable. A teacher who appears to be effective one year may not be effective the next year. And the more that schools use test scores to rate teachers, the more they incentivize behaviors that actually undermine good education.

As it happens, I just read a blog by a teacher in Los Angeles who announced that he had changed his mind about using test scores to evaluate teachers. He concluded that they are misleading, that they needlessly demoralize almost all teachers, and that they aren’t good for students or for education.

I agree with him.

Diane

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Cuomo, Andrew, Education Reform, Teacher Evaluations

Is This a Conflict of Interest?

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2012 //
12

Last spring, Louisiana held a crucial election that determined who would control the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Governor Bobby Jindal–the uber-conservative education reformer with a plan to replace public education with vouchers and charters–wanted to take control.

He rallied his friends and allies to win the decisive seat on the board, which was held by a local attorney, Louella Givens. Jindal’s candidate was Kira Orange Jones, the director of TFA in New Orleans.

According to Education Week, Orange Jones collected nearly $500,000 for her campaign.  She raised large sums of money from the business community and from out-of-state donors, including Mayor Bloomberg, who sent a last-minute contribution of $100,000. Orange Jones also received campaign funds from Democrats for Education Reform, the pro-charter Wall Street hedge-fund managers organization.

Educators rallied to support Givens, but she raised only $9,000. In a runoff, Orange Jones won.

Now questions have been raised about the propriety of having a member of the state board who works for an organization that receives contracts from the State Department of Education. Orange Jones says there is no conflict because TFA gets its contracts from the state education department, not the state board.

The potential for conflict of interest goes well beyond the contracts that are written specifically for TFA. Every time the state board of education approves charter schools, it is implicitly expanding the number of jobs available for members of TFA. Every expansion of charters across Louisiana will benefit TFA teachers and alums who run charters.

Don’t expect Governor Jindal to launch an investigation. The question in Louisiana is whether there is anyone independent of the Jindal machine (or TFA–the state superintendent is a TFA alum).

Diane

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Democrats for Education Reform, Education Reform, Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana, Teach for America TFA

What Do Graduation Rates Mean?

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2012 //
11

Everyone talks about high school graduation rates, but no one-including me–has any idea what they mean and what they really are.

We operate from the assumption that 100% of students “should” graduate from high school and excoriate the schools when the numbers are anything less. The assumption–which is wrong–is that we used to have high graduation rates but now we don’t. This is simply wrong. Over the course of the 20th century, graduation rates started from a very low point–less than 10% of young Americans finished high school at the beginning of the 20th century–and the rate rose steadily until it reached 50% in 1940. By 1970, it was 70%, and since then it has inched up.

Today, it is difficult to know what the graduation rate is because there are so many different ways of counting. If you count only those who graduate in four years, then it is about 75%. If you include those who graduate in August, after four years, it goes up. If you add those who took five or six years, it goes up more. If you add those who received a GED or some other alternate degree, it is up to 90%. (Aficionados of the issue can have fun poring over the latest federal data here).

These days, politicians play with the graduation rate to make themselves look successful (never mind the students). They lament the “crisis” in dropouts when they enter office, then crow at every uptick once they are in office to demonstrate “their” success.

Unfortunately, the pressure to raise the numbers typically overwhelms the standards required for attaining a high school diploma. When teachers and principals are sternly warned that their school will close unless they raise their graduation rate, they usually manage to raise their graduation rate without regard to standards. The usual gambit these days is called “credit recovery,” a phenomenon that was unheard of twenty years ago.

Credit recovery means simply that students can earn credits for courses they failed by completing an assignment or attending a course for a few days or weeks or re-taking the course online. As I wrote this week in Education Week, online credit recovery is typically a sham, a cheap and easy way of getting a diploma that was not earned. Students sit down in front of a computer, watch videos, then take a test that consists of multiple-choice questions, true-false questions, and machine-graded written answers. If they miss a question, they answer again until they get it right. Students can”recover” their lost credits in a matters of days, even hours. I wrote about online credit recovery as academic fraud in my EdWeek blog this week. Students realize quickly that if they fail, it doesn’t matter because they can get the credits in a few days with minimal effort. In this way, the diploma becomes meaningless, and students are cheated while the grown-ups fool themselves into thinking that they succeeded in raising the rates.

In this way, Campbell’s Law applies. When the pressure is raised high to reach a goal, the measures of the goal become corrupted.

The same number may be used either to bemoan a lack of progress or to claim victory. For example, the recent “Blueprint” created by a business strategy group for the school district of Philadelphia lamented that “only” 61% of its students attained a high school diploma in four years. At the same time, Mayor Bloomberg in New York City was delighted to report that the graduation rate was up to 65.5%, a figure that included summer school plus a heaping of credit recovery. The state of New York, which did not include summer graduates, put the actual figure at 61%, no different from the rate in Philadelphia. The state says that only 21% of students are “college-ready,” and the City University of New York–where most of the city’s graduates enroll–reports that nearly 80% require remediation.

So what is the real high school graduation rate? I don’t know.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Campbell's Law, Education Reform, NYC, On-Line Education, Philadelphia

Newsflash: Bloomberg Backs Down on Social Promotion

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2012 //
4

The Bloomberg administration in New York City made national headlines in March 2004 when the Mayor unilaterally decided to end social promotion. He told the city’s “Panel on Educational Policy” (the successor to the once-powerful Board of Education which Bloomberg turned into a toothless group) that students should not be promoted if they scored at the lowest level on the state tests. Bloomberg controlled the eight votes on the 13-member panel, and he told his appointees to approve his new policy. Two of them expressed doubts, suggesting that more thought was needed before implementing this change, more attention to what supports the students needed. The Mayor fired them on the day of the vote, and arranged the firing of a third member of the panel appointed by another elected official. The night of the panel’s meeting was tumultuous, as protesters shouted and objected. That evening was memorialized among activists as “the Monday Night Massacre.”

Mayor Bloomberg defended his decision: “Mayoral control means mayoral control, thank you very much. They are my representatives, and they are going to vote for things that I believe in.” Never again did a mayoral appointee ever disagree with the mayor’s orders. The Panel on Education Policy officially became a rubber stamp for the Mayor, and the “chancellor” no more than his mouthpiece.

In the first year of the policy’s implementation, nearly 12, 000 kids were flunked. As time went on, implementation of the policy was spotty. High school teachers still complained about students reading at a fourth grade level. And, the remediation rate at the City University of New York remained stubbornly high as the students schooled on Bloomberg’s watch arrived. Currently, about half of all those who enter CUNY require remediation. Most tellingly, 80% of the city’s high school graduates who enter community college require remediation in reading, writing, or mathematics. So, no one believed that “no social promotion” was a reality.

All that is context to a stunning decision that appeared in the press two days ago: The mayor is changing his hard line on social promotion. He has decided that principals may now have flexibility to decide whether to hold back students a third time and whether to hold back students who are already two years older than their classmates. There is even talk of added resources for the schools with large numbers of overage students.

Bear in mind that the mayor has now been sole proprietor of the New York City public schools since June 2002. And that “no social promotion” was one of the hallmarks of his reign. And that the New York City Department of Education has issued press release after press release boasting of its unheralded triumphs. And that the Mayor is known for never acknowledging an error. And that the publicity campaign for the “historic” achievements of the New York City public schools under his leadership was in high gear throughout the past decade, winning stories in every major news outlet. And that the collapse of the city’s claims about test scores in the summer of 2010 (after the state admitted that all the state scores were vastly inflated) popped the city’s bubble. And that Mayor Bloomberg to this day has never acknowledged that the “miracle” was a mirage. And that New York City has been a model for the national “reform” movement because of the city’s undemocratic governance structure for education, its alleged achievements, and its unbridled enthusiasm for choice. Reformers especially like the Mayor’s total control of the policymaking machinery, which make it easy to ignore parent and community protests, like the one that occurred at the Monday Night Massacre. Democracy has a nasty habit of getting in the way of “reform.”

Thus, the Mayor’s decision to modify the “no social promotion” policy is huge. Granted, it is a small step, but nonetheless this may mark the first time that the city (i.e., the Mayor) has admitted, however obliquely, a problem of his own creation. That is  historic.

Diane

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, NYC
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