This is a wonderful dinner that honors outstanding defenders of public education and benefits Class Size Matters, which fights for reduced class sizes, student privacy, parent voice, and adequate funding for public schools.
The event is tomorrow night in New York City.
Meet Leonie Haimson (and me).
Leonie Haimson is a true school reformer, unlike the hedge funders, tycoons, and entrepreneurs who have falsely claimed that title. She is a dedicated education activist who has led the fight over many years for fully funded public schools and student privacy.
In this video, she talks with veteran journalist Bob Herbert about the mistakes of those in power who rely on standardized testing as the sole definition of success, about segregation, about the damage wrought by charter schools, and about the changes that will benefit all students.
Leonie Haimson is executive director and founder of Class Size Matters. In addition to advocating for reduced class size, Leonie is a nationally recognized defender of student privacy and has won notable battles against data mining. She is also the most effective education activist in the city of New York. I am a member of her board.
I hope you will join us on June 19 for the annual dinner to benefit Class Size Matters.
Please reserve your seat now for our Annual Skinny Award dinner on Tuesday June 19. We will be honoring four tremendous individuals who have given us the “real skinny” on NYC public schools:
Council Member Danny Dromm, Chair of the Finance Committee & former Education Chair
Norm Scott, retired teacher and
blogger/videographer extraordinaire
Fred Smith, testing expert and critic
And a surprise honoree who will be announced at the event!
Join us on June 19, 2018 at 6 PM at Casa La Femme, 140 Charles St. in Greenwich Village, for a delicious three course meal with a glass of wine and great company!
This is always one of the most joyous events of the year, where we celebrate our victories and gain strength for the challenges to come. Buy your tickets today.
Even if you can’t make it, please consider making a contribution at the above link in honor of these terrific awardees, and to support our work going forward.
Hope to see you at the Skinnies, and thanks! Leonie
Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
212-529-3539
Make a tax-deductible contribution to Class Size Matters now!
Nancy Bailey writes about the one proven reform that will schools safer: smaller class size
Smaller classes is REAL personalized learning, and it guarantees that no student will be anonymous.
Smaller Class Sizes and REAL Personalized Learning are Needed for Safer Schools
“High school teachers in this country face class rosters of 30-40 students per class. This means that within the course of a day teachers face approximately 200 students! With so many students it’s difficult to get to know everyone.
“Teachers who strike for better wages and working conditions always ask for a reduction in class size.
“Education reformers have rejected class size reduction. Jeb Bush spoke against it when Florida voted for lowering class size when he was governor, although he is a huge proponent of online “personalized” learning.
“Bill Gates has also been against lowering class size.
“Teachers cannot control what happens in a student’s home, but they can work with students to make school a warm environment, where students learn that they have someone they can always turn to who will help them. This is best done with smaller class sizes of 20 or less.
“Even if all classes are not reduced, students should have access to at least one period a day where teachers and students can get to know one another.”
That choking sound you hear is me writing the headline for this post.
Just when you thought the charter advocates could not sink any lower in seeking rationalizations for privatization, they go lower yet again.
Writing for the National Education Policy Center, Julian Vasquez Heilig critiqued a University of Arkansas study that purports to show that charter schools are more productive and profoppduce a higher return on investment than public schools. The study under review is called “Bigger Bang, Fewer Bucks.”
What would you care about when comparing two sectors, one of which is staffed by professional educators, the other staffed mainly by TFA temps? Would you care about test scores? Parent satisfaction? Teacher turnover? Student projects? Graduation rates? College acceptance rates? Would you consider how the creation of a second sector affects the health and vitality of the first sector? Would you Permit the Second sector to cripple the first sector?
How about return on investment?
This is a mode of thinking with which I am not compatible. I’m reminded of reading I did in the 1990s, when I learned about efficiency experts who studied the curriculum. I was writing a book called “Left Back,” published in 2000. These scientific curriculum experts worked out a way to compare the cost and value of different subjects. They concluded that Latin was not worth teaching because the unit cost was too high. They would understand this new Arkansas study.
Heilig writes the abstract of his critique:
“A report released by the University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform contends that charter schools produce more achievement per dollar invested, as compared to public schools. This newest report is focused on city-level analyses in eight US cities (Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, New York City, San Antonio, and Washington D.C.) and uses cost effectiveness and Return on Investment (ROI) ratios. It concludes that charter schools deliver a weighted average of an additional 4.34 NAEP reading points and 4.73 NAEP math points per $1000 invested. The report also argues that that charter schools offer an advantage of $1.77 in lifetime earnings for each dollar invested, representing a ROI benefit of 38%. However, there are a variety of methodological choices made by the authors that threaten the validity of the results. For example, the report uses revenues rather than actual expenditures – despite well-established critiques of this approach. The report also fails to account for the non-comparability of the student populations in charter and comparison public schools. Three other problems also undercut the report’s claims. First, even though the think tank’s earlier productivity report included a caveat saying that causal claims would not be appropriate, the new report omits that caution. Second, the report’s lack of specificity plagues the accuracy and validity of its calculations; e.g., using state-level data in city-level analyses and completely excluding race and gender. Finally, the authors again fail to reconcile their report with the extensive literature of contrary findings.“
Mercedes Schneider takes apart Bill Gates and his monumental hypocrisy and arrogance.
She documents his predilection for experimenting on other people’s children, as he did with the Commin Core, and his penchant for carelessly destroying other people’s lives, as he did with the ineffective teacher evaluations.
She notes that he recently announced an initiative to fix poverty, but is not investing much money, as compared to the billions he wasted on education forays.
Bill Gates has funded studies to belittle class size reduction, though in his own schooling and in that of his children, small classes were crucial.
He has given advice lately, sharing advice about how to raise children. He says you should love them unconditionally and pay no mind to their grades or test scores. Nice for his children, whose elite schools would never follow Gates’ education ideas. But what about the teachers who got fired because their students didn’t try or their parents didn’t care?
And last, to really see how out of touch he is, read about the “modest” bequests he plans to leave them.
Leonie Haimson is a model of an activist who drives city and officials crazy, as well as the billionaires who think they can drive policy with their money. She has two passions: reducing class size and student privacy. She created two groups to fight for her causes: class Size Matters and Student Privacy Matters. Leonie and her allies (the Parent Coalition for Studebt Privacy) killed inBloom, the data mining program of students that Gates and Carnegie funded with $100 Million. (Full disclosure: I am a member of her board [Class Size Matters] and she is a member of the board of the Network for Public Education.) With meager resources, Leonie writes, testifies, organizes, blogs, and is a force to be reckoned with.
See the lawsuit here.
“Advocates and city parents have filed a lawsuit calling on state Education Department officials and city schools Chancellor Richard Carranza to reduce class sizes in the public schools.
“The suit filed in Albany State Supreme Court Thursday was brought by advocates with Class Size Matters, the Alliance for Quality Education and nine parents from all five New York City boroughs.
“It claims the state and city Education officials have ignored a 2007 law called the Contract for Excellence that required the city to lower class sizes.
“Class Size Matters founder Leonie Haimson said the city has instead increased class sizes, with nearly one-third of all students in classes of 30 or more children.
“It is unconscionable that the state and the city have flouted the law and are subjecting over 290,000 students to overcrowded classes of 30 students or more,” said Haimson, citing a Class Size Matters analysis of city Education Department data.”
Duane Swacker is a retired teacher in Missouri. He shares his wisdom here.
“Anyone who has taught for a decent length of time, oh minimum 5-10 years understands this process and more likely than not has done something very similar. And it does mean taking the time to listen to the student on a one on one basis (somehow making time to do so without it being so intrusive as to turn off said student).
“One student, whom I still see in the local small town bar every couple of months, a certified heavy equipment operator, struggled with my class-Spanish as a freshman. His mom and I did all kinds of things to try to get him interested. I know, because he told me, that the reason he did any work at all was because I took the time to talk with him about. . . outdoors, fishing, hunting. See he was and still is a country boy through and through and I (who has a lot of country boy in me) enjoyed talking to him about his adventures out in the woods and on the farm.
“Every year I had the students prepare authentic type dishes from different Spanish speaking countries (no, not tacos, burritos and that stuff, food really good recipes). I let the students pick the recipes, with my approval. This student picked out a recipe for a braised saffron rabbit dish from Spain. I asked if he had the half dozen rabbits in the freezer and he said, “nah, I’ll go out and get em this weekend.” And he did and with his mom’s help (I supplied the saffron as it is more expensive than gold) they prepared the dish. And it was exquisite.
“He came back for level 2 after having gone from a low D in first semester and did a lot better in attempting to learn that second year.
“No doubt that the very basic human connection is one of the most important in the teaching and learning process and why smaller class sizes are the real, and perhaps only, reform that we really need.”
The General Assembly in North Carolina has devoted its efforts since 2010 to destroying the public education system and undermining the teaching profession. The Tea Party took control of the legislature in 2010 and proceeded to enact as many unjust laws as fast as they could while gerrymandering election districts to retain control. A Democrat won the governorship by a narrow margin in 2026, but the Far-right legislature has frustrated him repeatedly and stripped him of power and appointments to the greatest extent possible.
High school teacher Stuart Egan has chronicled the war against public schools and teachers on his Blog, Caffeinated Rage. In this post, Egan describes the current state of that war.
In this post, he writes about the new state superintendent, whose only previous experience was two years of TFA, and who now acts as a lackey for the Tea Party. (Curious how many TFA alums end up aiding governors who want to destroy public schools.) The legislators passed a class size reduction mandate without funding it. Reducing class size is a very good thing, but without funding, it means cuts in every area and elimination of courses and electives. It means chaos by design.
State superintendent Mark Johnson is avid for “personalized learning” (aka depersonalized learning).
Egan explains the hoax of personalized learning, and he calls out Johnson for his failure to provide leadership:
“Time, resources, classroom space, and opportunities to give each student personalized instruction are not items being afforded to North Carolina’s public school teachers. In fact, as state superintendent, Mark Johnson has never really advocated for those things in schools. Actually, he has passively allowed for the class size mandate to proceed without a fight, has never fought against the massive cuts to the Department of Public Instruction, and devotes more time hiring only loyalists and spending taxpayer money to fight against the state board.”
There will be a rally in Raleigh on January 6 in opposition to #ClassSizeChaos. If you are in the state, be there.
Here are some sound, sensible wishes for students by Nancy Bailey.
101 of them. Each one five words or less.
Imagine a world where children went to school eagerly, happily, ready to learn.
Start with this:
Provide children plenty of recess.
Pay attention to child development.
Cherish play for children.
Encourage teens to socialize.
Lower class sizes.
Bring back the arts.
Provide all students art instruction.
Give students credentialed art teachers.
Let children dance.
Sing-along with students.
Teach students to play instruments.
Display student art in schools.
Bring back school plays.
Showcase student writing.
End high-stakes testing.
Teach better civics.
Bring back Home Economics.
Help teens balance a checkbook.
Teach students self-care.
Provide school nurses.
Help students learn money management.
Provide 12th grade career information.
Develop good career-technical education.
Give students with disabilities services.
Make IEPs relevant and personal.
Address dyslexia.
Show students how to adapt.
Help students find alternatives.
Find student strengths.
Provide teachers special education preparation.
Value parents in educational decisions.
Quit pushing school choice.
Stop throwing money at charters.
That’s only 1/3 of Nancy’s wishes.
Read the rest and add your own.
Diane Ravitch's blog 