Archives for category: Cuomo, Andrew
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Public Schools Across NY See State School Aid Decline Due to Cuomo Budget

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2014 //
19

I can’t find a link for this story, but I have the newspaper in front of me.

(Thanks to a reader, here is the link:

http://www.newsday.com/long-island/education/84-of-li-school-districts-to-get-less-aid-than-6-years-ago-under-cuomo-budget-plan-1.6973979)

It is dated February 7, 2014, Newsday (published on Long Island, New York), and it is the front-page headline:

“School Aid Slide: 84% of LI Districts to get less from state than 6 years ago.”

“Guv’s aides cite declining enrollment”

Inside, the story says that 68% of districts across the state will get less state aid under Cuomo’s formula in 2014-15 than they received in 2008-09.

That includes 78% of the districts in the Lower and mid-Hudson Valley, and 100% of New York City districts.

The governor’s staff attributed the lower funding to enrollment declines.

School leaders noted the increases in employee pay health insurance, pensions, heating expenses and said: “I can go from 25 students in a classroom to 19 students, and I still need a teacher in that classroom.”

The governor’s budget calls for a rise of 3.8% and includes $100 million for full-day pre-kindergarten, targeted to low-income students.

Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio of New York City have been at odds because de Blasio wants a dedicated tax on residents of New York City who earn over $500,000 a year to pay for pre-kindergarten rather than go hat in hand every year to Albany.

In addition, the governor will ask voters to approve a $2 billion bond issue for new technology.

One local school leader said:

“How are you going to have kids in full-day prekindergarten, and then have them come back to kindergartens that are half-day?”

Some districts may have to cut back to half-day sessions to save money.

Cuomo earlier imposed a 2% tax cap across the state, which districts cannot increase without a vote by 60% of voters.

Cuomo says he is the “students’ lobbyist.”

He views increases in aid as money for bloated administrative salaries and for greedy labor unions.

Categories Budget Cuts, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Cuomo, Andrew

Andrew Cuomo Names Panel to Study Common Core Implementation

By dianeravitch
February 7, 2014 //
75

Leonie Haimson, leader of New York City’s Class Size Matters, reports that Governor Andrew Cuomo has named a panel to study the implementation of the Common Core standards in the state. The panel, she says, is stacked with supporters of Common Core.

 

She writes:

 

No early childhood experts, elementary or special ed teachers on commission, which is unfortunate because these are the people whose critiques have been most sharp.

Litow chair already wrote an oped in favor http://bit.ly/1ea69ge 

Russo is one of the few Superintendents in entire state on record in favor http://bit.ly/1ea6wHP 

He was booed by parents & teachers at a Common Core forum http://bit.ly/1ea6wHP  and says CC curriculum “one of best things I’ve seen in education in 31, 32 yrs”

Dan Weisberg head of TNTP has received $23M from Gates Foundation including $7M in last yr alone http://bit.ly/1bDFNH8 

Gates has spent >$170M on the Common Core and will not go down lightly   http://wapo.st/1bDHggw

 

 

Cuomo names Common Core panel as rollout remains under fire

by Philissa Cramer on February 7, 2014

More in Albany ReportMORE IN ALBANY REPORT

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has named the members of a panel that he has asked to advise him about the way the state is implementing the Common Core standards.

The 11 panel members include state legislators, educators from New York City and upstate, an upstate parent, business leaders, and advocates. Linda Darling-Hammond, the Stanford University education professor who advised President Barack Obama on education, is also on the panel.

Cuomo announced in his budget address in January that he would convene the panel, after remaining silent for months amid growing concerns about the state’s rollout of the new standards. Parents and educators from across the state have said schools did not get enough time or support to adjust to the standards before being held accountable for having students meet them.

The panel’s work gained new significance this week when legislators — including the two on the panel — called for the state to untie Common Core test scores from teacher evaluations for at least two years. Darling-Hammond has supported Common Core testing but criticized using test scores to measure individual teachers.

“It would be premature to consider any moratorium before the panel is allowed to do its work,” Cuomo said in response.

The panel will deliver recommendations before the end of the legislative session this spring, according to Cuomo’s office.

The full list of panel members is below:

  • Stanley S. Litow, Vice President, IBM Corporate Citizenship and Corporate Affairs & President, IBM International Foundation (Chair)
  • Senator John Flanagan, Senate Education Committee Chair (Senate appointee)
  • Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, Assembly Education Committee Chair (Assembly appointee)
  • Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education, Stanford University Graduate School of Education
  • Todd Hathaway, Teacher, East Aurora High School (Erie County)
  • Alice Jackson-Jolley, Parent (Westchester County)
  • Anne Kress, President, Monroe Community College
  • Nick Lawrence, Teacher, East Bronx Academy for the Future (NYC)
  • Delia Pompa, Senior Vice President of Programs, National Council of La Raza
  • Charles Russo, Superintendent, East Moriches UFSD (Long Island)
  • Dan Weisberg, EVP & General Counsel, The New Teacher Project

Lawrence, the UFT lead teacher at his school, wrote last year about his experience with New York City’s teacher evaluation rules for Chalkbeat’s First Person section.

 
Categories Common Core, Cuomo, Andrew, New York

Errol Louis Gets It: Merit Pay Is Useless

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2014 //
20

Errol Louis is one sharp journalist. He is a newscaster for NY1, the city’s local all-news TV station. I have benn interviewed by him a few times and have always been impressed by his insight.

In this article, he explains how dumb merit pay is.

He notes that Governor Cuomo has proposed a $20,000 bonus for the state’s “highly effective” teachers. He didn’t say how he would pay for it. Maybe he would increase class size, lay off teachers, eliminate the arts.

Maybe no one told him that 50% of the state’s teachers were rated “highly effective.” That’s millions and millions of dollars.

Louis quotes Roland Fryer of Harvard, an economist who reviewed New York City’s failed merit pay plan.

Fryer says:

“I find no evidence that teacher incentives increase student performance, attendance or graduation, nor do I find any evidence that the incentives change student or teacher behavior,” Fryer wrote. “If anything, teacher incentives may decrease student achievement, especially in larger schools.”

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/education-reform-merit-article-1.1581217#ixzz2qikqOSoR

Categories Cuomo, Andrew, Merit pay

How Embarrassing for Rhode Island!

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2013 //
11

According to the Providence Journal, Rhode Island won plaudits from the National Council on Teacher Quality. The newspaper, which is notorious for its inattention to background, describes NCTQ as a “nonprofit, nonpartisan research and policy group.”

This is not accurate. As I have described on this blog in detail, NCTQ was created in 2000 by the rightwing Thomas B. Fordham Foundation at a time when I was a member of the board. It was created specifically to harass teacher-education institutions and to advance an agenda in which untrained teachers could win certification by passing a test.

As I explained in this post, NCTQ floundered about, seeking a strategy and was rescued in 2001 when George W. Bush’s secretary of education Rod Paige gave NCTQ an unrestricted grant of $5 million to keep it alive. The teacher test it created, called the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, eventually was turned over to another company that sells online certification for only $1995.00. Is that a high-quality way to prepare teachers for the nation’s children?

The board of NCTQ is dominated by corporate reformers. It may have members from both parties, but it is certainly NOT non-partisan. It is hostile to teacher education and infatuated with the idea that test scores are both the measure and the outcome of education.

Mercedes Schneider analyzed the board and the political agenda of NCTQ at great length on her blog; her posts have been widely reposted.

Its recent, widely heralded report on the nation’s schools of education–which found all but four to be inadequate–was based on a review of their reading lists and syllabi, not on actual visits to the campuses. This was supposed to show the power of “Big Data,” that is, making judgments without any personal interactions, but it really demonstrated that the NCTQ review was a hit job on teacher education. I always have been a tough critic of teacher education, but I also believe that you can’t grade an institution without ever setting foot in its buildings or interviewing its professors and students.

The Providence Journal should have done a few minutes of research on the Internet before lauding the findings of the NCTQ report on Rhode Island. What they have done here is journalism by press release. That’s not journalism. That’s lazy.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Cuomo, Andrew, Education Reform, National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), Teacher Evaluations, Teachers

Peter Goodman: Will Cuomo’s “Death penalty for Schools” Derail His Ambitions?

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2013 //
11

Governor Andrew Cuomo has an unfortunate habit of spouting off about education, a subject where he is woefully uninformed.

When New York won a Race to the Top grant, the original proposal called for a 20% cap on test scores as part of teachers’ evaluations. Cuomo insisted, after the deal was struck, that it had to be 40%. If he knew anything about research on teaching, he would have said 20% was too high.

Last week, he said that low-scoring schools should have a death penalty, again parading his ignorance. He meant replacing democratic governance with state takeover or mayoral control or chartering. All are failed remedies.

Peter Goodman here predicts that Cuomo’s ill-informed policies could derail his presidential ambitions.

New York State has done a miserable job running the Roosevelt school district.

Voters in NYC are sick of mayoral control.

Cuomo needs better advisors. His lines are stale.

Categories Cuomo, Andrew

Bruce Baker: Hold Cuomo Accountable for School Failure

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2013 //
10

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called for the “death penalty” for failing schools recently, setting off a war of words between those who believe in closing struggling schools and those who want to kill them and fire the staff.

Bruce Baker takes a different view. Here he demonstrates that Néw York has a funding system that is unfair to the schools with the neediest students.

Instead of vilifying teachers and principals and pretending to advocate for the children and families, Cuomo should look at where the money goes. It is not going to the kids who need it most.

Baker writes:

“Put simply, what the New York public should NOT tolerate, is a Governor and Legislature who refuse to provide sufficient resources to high need schools and then turn around and blame the schools and communities for their own failures. (all the while, protecting billions of dollars in separate aid programs that drive funds to wealth districts).”

Categories Closing schools, Cuomo, Andrew, Democrats for Education Reform, New York

What Is a “Failing School”?

By dianeravitch
September 3, 2013 //
28

NOTE: I cross-posted this piece on Huffington Post. Be sure to leave comments there too.

Two years ago, Kevin Kosar, a former graduate student of mine, conducted an Internet search for the term “failing school.” What he discovered was fascinating. Until the 1990s, the term was virtually unknown. About the mid-1990s, the term began appearing with greater frequency. With the passage of No Child Left Behind, the use of the expression exploded and became a commonplace.

Kosar did not speculate on the reasons. But I venture to say that the rise of the accountability movement created the idea of “failing schools.”

“Accountability” was taken to mean that if students have low test scores, someone must be blamed. Since Bush’s NCLB, it became conventional to blame the school. With President Obama’s Race to the Top, blame shifted to teachers. The solution to “failing schools,” according to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, is to fire the staff and close the school.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently took this idea to an extreme by saying that he wanted a “death penalty” for “failing schools.” His believes that when schools have persistently low test scores, they should lose democratic control.

They should be taken over by the state, given to private charter corporations, or put under mayoral control. In fact, none of these ideas has been successful.

Low-performing school districts in New Jersey have been under state control for more than 20 years without turning them into high-performing districts. Mayoral control in Cleveland and Chicago has been a flop. And private charters typically do no better than public schools, except when they exclude low-scoring students.

Undoubtedly there are some schools where the leadership is rotten and corrupt. In such cases, the responsibility lies with the district superintendent to review the staff and programs, and make significant changes as needed

But these days, any school with low test scores is called a “failing school,” without any inquiry into the circumstances of the school.

Instead of closing the school or privatizing it, the responsible officials should act to improve the school. they should ask:

What proportion of the students are new immigrants and need help learning English? What proportion entered the school far behind their grade level? What proportion have disabilities and need more time to learn? What resources are available to the school? An in-depth analysis is likely to reveal that most “failing schools” are not failing schools, but are schools that enroll high proportions of students who need extra help, extra tutoring, smaller classes, social workers, guidance counselors, psychologists, and a variety of other interventions.

Firing the staff does not turn around a low-performing school. Nor does handing it over to a charter chain. Nor does mayoral control. Most of the time, what we call a “failing school” is a school that lacks the personnel and resources to meet the needs of its students.

Closing schools does not make them better. Nor does closing schools help students. It’s way past time to stop blaming the people who work in troubled schools and start helping them by providing the tools they need and the support their students need.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Closing schools, Cuomo, Andrew, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top

Is New York Paying Too Much for Education?

By dianeravitch
August 31, 2013 //
17

Governor Cuomo likes to complain that New York spends too much for education. That was one of his reasons for wanting a “death penalty” for schools with low test scores.

Instead of doing anything to help them improve, like expanding Pre-K or reducing class sizes, he wants to “kill” those schools by eliminating democratic control of education–that is, by state takeover, mayoral control, or privatization. None of these three measures will help the kids. They just wipe out local control. Where is the logic?

Makes no sense, but that’s his story and he is sticking to it.

This reader has a different take on the Governor’s use of data:

 

Governor Cuomo complains that New York spends more per child than any other state.

He advocates data driven instruction.

Here are two pieces of data that our esteemed governor should consider before he “executes” failing schools and fires teachers based on unproven standardized tests.

Average cost per year to educate a child in New York State – $18,618.

Average cost per year to incarcerate a prisoner in New York State – $60,000.

http://schoolsofthought.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/21/which-places-spent-most-per-student-on-education/

http://shnny.org/research/the-price-of-prisons-what-incarceration-costs-taxpayers/

 

Categories Class size, Cuomo, Andrew, New York

Cuomo Wants “Death Penalty” for “Failing Schools”

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2013 //
86

New York Governor Cuomo wants a “death penalty” for “failing schools,”

He was referring to the public schools of Buffalo, which is one of the state’s poorest districts. He threatened state takeover, mayoral control, or charters.

None of his remedies has ever succeeded. But they will extinguish democracy. Democracy is not the cause of low achievement. If Cuomo ignores poverty and segregation, he will be spinning wheels. Prediction: he will ignore both.

More districts than Buffalo face the death penalty:

” Robert M. Bennett, a member of the state Board of Regents representing Western New York, as well as chancellor emeritus, said he thinks it’s likely that the officials in Albany will discuss “a limited state takeover for certain districts” during the next session of the Legislature. He also cited the possibility of mayoral control for some districts as well as charter takeovers.

“He pointed to Buffalo, Rochester and three districts on Long Island as being in particular need of dramatic change.

“The frustration level is extremely high about what should be done with a school that is persistently failing. It’s a very serious thing when you have so many schools that are on the state’s watch list,” he said. “It’s the right thing to debate how to turn schools around.”

Categories Cuomo, Andrew, Education Industry, New York

Governor Cuomo, Please Read This

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2013 //
3

Governor Andrew Cuomo likes to say that the problems in New York are not about money, because the state spends enough already.

Governor, please read this analysis by Bruce Baker.

Despite years of promises, New York State has one of the most inequitable school finance systems in the nation.

We may be spending enough, but the funding is highly inequitable.

And the state’s neediest children have the least funding and the largest class size.

These disparities are inexcusable.

Categories Cuomo, Andrew, New York, New York City
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