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Leonie Haimson: How States Can Inspire One Another to Fight for Successful Policies

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2025 //
3

Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters in New York City, is a tireless advocate for reform policies that work. She has spent years collecting research about the benefits of class size reduction and prodding legislators to take action.

She wrote recently about the cross-pollination between New York State and Michigan, where state school board leaders used her research to advocate for lower class sizes.

She wrote:

On April 5 and 6, the Network for Public Education, on whose board I sit, held its annual conference in Columbus, Ohio.  More than 400 parents, teachers, advocates, school board members, and other elected officials gathered to learn from each other’s work and be re-energized for the challenges of protecting our public schools from the ravages of budget cuts, right-wing censorship, and privatization.  

It was a great weekend to reconnect with old friends, meet new ones, hear from eloquent education leaders, and participate in eye-opening workshops.  I led a workshop on the risks of using AI in the classroom, along with Cassie Creswell of Illinois Families for Public Schools, and retired teacher/blogger extraordinaire, Peter Greene. You can take a look at our collective power point presentation here.

At one point, Diane Ravitch, the chair and founder of NPE,introduced each of the board members from the floor.  When she told me to stand, I asked her to inform the attendees about the law we helped pass for class size reduction in NYC.  She responded, you tell it –and so I briefly recounted how smaller class sizes are supposed to be phased in over the next three yearsin our schools, hoping this might lend encouragement to others in the room to advocate for similar measures in their own states and districts.

Perhaps the personal high point for me was the thrill of meeting Tim Walz, on his birthday no less,  who said to me that indeed class size does matter.  Here are videos  with excerpts from some of the other terrific speeches at the conference. 

Then, just four days ago, Prof. Julian Heilig Vasquez, another NPE board member, texted me a link to this news story from the Detroit News:

State Board of Education calls for smaller class sizes after Detroit News investigation

Lansing — Michigan’s State Board of Education approved a resolution Tuesday calling for limits on class sizes to be put in place by the 2030-31 school year, including a cap of 20 students per class for kindergarten through third grade.

The proposal, if enacted by state lawmakers, would represent a sea change for Michigan schools as leaders look to boost struggling literacy rates. Across the state, elementary school classes featuring more than 20 students have been widespread.

Mitchell Robinson, a Democratic member of the State Board of Education, authored the resolution and said action on class sizes was “overdue.”

“Smaller class sizes are going to be a better learning situation for kids and a better teaching situation for teachers,” said Robinson of Okemos, a former music teacher.

A months-long Detroit News investigation published in April found 206 elementary classes — ranging from kindergarten through fifth grade — across 49 schools over the 2023-24 and 2024-25 years that had at least 30 students in them. Among them was a kindergarten class at Bennett Elementary, where the Detroit Public Schools Community District said 30 students were enrolled.

Less than a month after The News’ probe, the Democratic-led State Board of Education, which advises state policymakers on education standards, voted 6-1 on Tuesday in favor of Robinson’s resolution. The resolution said lawmakers should provide funding in the next state budget for school districts with high rates of poverty to lower their student-to-teacher ratios in kindergarten through third-grade classrooms.

By the 2030-31 school year, the resolution said, limits should be instituted to cap class sizes at 20 students per class in kindergarten through third grade, at 23 students per class in fourth grade through eighth grade, and at 25 students per class in high school.

“Many studies show that class size reduction leads to better student outcomes in every way that can be measured, including better grades and test scores, fewer behavior problems, greater likelihood to graduate from high school on time and subsequently enroll in college,” the resolution said.

The resolution added that the Legislature should increase funding to ensure schools are “able to lower class sizes to the mandated levels.”

In an interview, Pamela Pugh, the president of the state board, labeled the resolution an “urgent call” for action. Pugh said the board hasn’t made a similar request in the decade she’s served on the panel.

…Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have called for action on class sizes after the reporting from The News and as Michigan’s reading scores have fallen behind other states.

During her State of the State address in February, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said just 24% of Michigan fourth graders were able to read proficiently. Michigan invests more per student than most states but achieves “bottom 10 results,” the governor said.

Asked, in April, if she thought having 30 students in a kindergarten class was appropriate, Whitmer, a Democrat, said, “No. Of course, I don’t.”

“I think the science would tell us that we’ve got to bring down class sizes,” Whitmer said in April.

On Wednesday, state Sen. Darrin Camilleri, D-Trenton, said he was open to a conversation about timelines for implementing class size limits and about how schools could achieve the proposed standards with staffing and physical space.

He noted the Senate Democrats’ budget proposal for next year features nearly $500 million that could be used by school districts to lower class sizes. “I think it’s going to be a culture change,” Camilleri said.

As I read the story, I was delighted, of course; and noticed that the class size caps cited in the resolution were identical to those required to be phased in for NYC schools.  I also noted language in the resolution that echoed the words in some of our research summaries. 

I reached out to Diane to ask her if she knew whether Mitchell Robinson had attended the NPE conference, and she confirmed that indeed he had.  I then emailed him to ask if our New Yorklaw had played any role in his decision to introduce the resolution, and he immediately responded,

“Leonie, your work in NYC was the direct model and inspiration for this resolution! I was in your session in Columbus, and went home motivated to put together the resolution, using the figures from your bill and the research base on the website.”

He cautioned me that the proposal still has to be enacted into law, and that it would be “an uphill battle,” as Republicans hadretaken the state House. 

Then he added: “But that doesn’t mean we sit on our hands for another 2 years—we need to stay on offense and advance good ideas whenever we can.”

I wholeheartedly agree.  This resolution and what may hopefully follow for Michigan students reveals just how importantgatherings like the NPE conference are to enable the exchangeof ideas and positive examples of what’s occurring elsewhere.  This sort of interaction can be vital to our collective struggle,not just to defend our public schools from the attempts of Trump et.al. to undermine them, but also to push for the sort of positive changes that will allow all our kids to receive the high qualityeducation they deserve.

 

Categories Class size, Class Size Matters Org, Education Reform, Michigan, New York, New York City, Research

New York: Judge Rules that NYC Should Not Pay Inflated Rent of Charter School

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2025 //
1

Back in the first flush of charter schools, when they promised miracles, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared that he was the champion of charter schools. They enrolled only about 5% of the state’s students, but he was courting their Wall Street backers. He persuaded the state legislature to give charters whatever they wanted. One of their victories was to win a pledge that the public schools would either give them space or pay their rent.

This victory has been costly to the city. One charter chain owns a building, charges itself an exorbitant rent, and the city pays the bill.

Here’s a victory for the city, reported by Michael Elsen-Rooney in Chalkbeat:

In a legal dispute between the New York City and state education departments over a charter school rent reimbursement, an Albany Supreme Court judge sided with the city last week. 

The fight centered on a state law requiring the city to provide charter schools space or reimburse them for the cost of rent. The city Education Department sued the state over its interpretation of the law after it approved a reimbursement request from Hellenic Classical Charter Schools.

The school rented property on Staten Island then turned over the lease to a group affiliated with the school. That affiliated group then sub-leased the property back to the school at three times its original price, allowing the school to seek more reimbursement from the city. The extra costs were meant to subsidize the construction of a new building for the charter school on the same plot of land, according to court documents.

The city refused to pay the higher rate, which it later called “artificially inflated.” Hellenic appealed to state Education Commissioner Betty Rosa, who ruled in favor of the charter network. Rosa argued that while Hellenic’s arrangement was “concerning,” asking the city to subsidize new construction was “merely an exaggerated example of the goal of the rental assistance program: the public financing of New York City charter schools.”

But in a decision issued last week in a city lawsuit over Rosa’s order, Judge Julian Schreibman disagreed with Rosa’s reading of the law, annulling her decision and directing her to reconsider the case. The law specifies that the city only has to reimburse charters for “the actual rental cost,” which means it can reject requests that don’t go toward that purpose, Schreibman said.

Categories Accountability, Funding, New York, New York City

Another NY Prosecutor Refuses to Drop Case against Mayor Adams and Resigns

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2025 //
21

Yes, Virginia, there are men and women of integrity who defend the rule of law. Yesterday, it was Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern district of New York. She resigned rather than drop the case against NYC Mayor Eric Adams. Her devotion to the rule of law was greater than her allegiance to Trump, who appointed her only a month ago. Her resignation was followed by several resignations in the Public Integrity Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

The New York Daily News today reported another principled resignation by a federal prosecutor.

One of the lead prosecutors handling the sweeping public corruption case against Mayor Adams resigned on Friday — in a searing letter to President Trump’s Department of Justice saying he wouldn’t be the “fool” who files a motion to dismiss the case based on support for the administration’s immigration objectives and not the law.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten, a highly regarded prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and decorated U.S. Army veteran who served in Iraq, in his resignation letter to Trump’s acting No. 2 at the DOJ Emil Bove, said he was “entirely in agreement” with the former acting U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon, who resigned Thursday.

Sassoon said she could not sign off on the request to drop the charges against Adams that stemmed from what’s effectively a “quid pro quo” between the mayor and the president that included the DOJ dropping the charges in exchange for Adams getting in line with the president’s immigration policies in the nation’s largest sanctuary city.

In the letter, which was first reported by The New York Times, Scotten — who has clerked for Supreme Court Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh — said some may view Bove’s “mistake” in light of their negative views of the Trump administration, which he said he did not share.

“I can even understand how a Chief Executive whose background is in business and politics might see the contemplated dismissal-with-leverage as a good, if distasteful, deal. But any assistant U.S. attorney would know that our laws and traditions do not allow using the prosecutorial power to influence other citizens, much less elected officials, in this way,” Scotten wrote.

“If no lawyer within earshot of the President is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me…

Scotten’s blistering resignation letter came the morning after what many have already dubbed the “Thursday night massacre” at the DOJ, echoing President Nixon’s infamous 1973 DOJ purge. 

He marks the seventh DOJ staffer to resign after Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, managing the daily functioning of the federal government’s law enforcement arm in an interim capacity, ordered the dismissal of the bombshell case against Adams set to go on trial in April.

Following the mass resignations, Reuters reported Friday that Bove had threatened to fire every member of the DOJ’s public integrity section — where the case was transferred following Sassoon’s resignation — unless someone volunteered to file the dismissal motion in Manhattan federal court, where Judge Dale Ho must approve it. According to the report, Bove gave them an hour to decide, and one ultimately stepped up.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Courage, Democracy, Fraud, Justice, New York City, Trump

NYC: Top Federal Prosecutors Quit to Protest Trump Demand to Drop Charges Against Mayor Adams

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2025 //
8

Facing multiple criminal charges for corrupt activities, Mayor Eric Adams flew to Mar-A-Lago to discuss his problems with Trump. Adams agreed not to impede ICE roundups. Trump ordered the federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York to drop the charges and not to investigate Adams any more. This office–the SDNY– has a sterling reputation for its independence from politics.

The top prosecutors resigned, rather than follow Trump’s order. Among the resignations was that of Danielle Sassoon, whom Trump had appointed as the acting U.S. Attorney on January 21, the day after his inauguration. Sassoon is a 38-year-old conservative Republican, a member of the Federalist Society. She clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia. Her devotion to the law was stronger than her loyalty to Trump, so she tendered her resignation.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

NEW YORK—The Justice Department’s order to dismiss charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams triggered a series of resignations Thursday and ignited a feud between top Trump appointees and career prosecutors.

The departures started with Danielle Sassoon, a longtime federal prosecutor who refused to comply with the demand to drop the Adams case. President Trump had elevated Sassoon to be the acting Manhattan U.S. attorney after he took office. 

Others followed suit, including Kevin Driscoll, the senior-most career official in the Justice Department’s criminal division, and John Keller, head of the department’s public-integrity section. They left when it became clear they would be ordered to dismiss the case after Sassoon refused, people familiar with the matter said. Three other supervisors in the Justice Department’s public-integrity unit also resigned Thursday, one of the people said.

Sassoon wrote in a letter Wednesday to Emil Bove, the acting No. 2 official at the Justice Department: “Because the law does not support a dismissal, and because I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged, I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations.”

Bove shot back in a letter Thursday saying he had stripped the Adams case from the New York office and criticizing her for disobeying orders. He said he was putting two main Adams prosecutors on leave and opening an investigation into their conduct—and Sassoon’s.

“Under your leadership, the office has demonstrated itself to be incapable of fairly and impartially reviewing the circumstances of this prosecution,” Bove wrote.

“The Justice Department will not tolerate the insubordination and apparent misconduct reflected in the approach that you and your office have taken in this matter,” he wrote. Both letters were viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Sassoon is a profile in courage.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Justice, New York City, Politics, Trump

Great News for NYC Retirees!

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2024 //
8

For years, the City of New York has tried to force its public service retirees to give up their Medicare and move to a private Medicare Advantage plan. Many retirees understood that MA means privatization. Any serious medical needs required prior approval by the insurance company; it also meant that the insurance company could decline to pay. Retirees were furious, but it seemed hopeless, especially when a few powerful unions, including the United Federation of teachers, supported the city’s plan.

Marianne Pizzitola, who retired as an Emergency Medical Technician for the Fire Department, organized resistance to the plan. She found other retirees who were opposed to giving up Medicare and educated others about the downside of making the change. Marianne created an organization called the NYC Organization of Retired Public Service Workers.

The organization lobbied elected officials, litigated, and kept up the pressure.

Today, they won! They stood up the government of the City of New York, against overwhelming odds. And they won!

Brad Lander, the Comptroller of the City of New York sent out this letter this evening:

Dear New Yorkers,

Massive news for New York City retirees: Today the New York Court of Appeals rejected shifting retirees to a Medicare Advantage plan.

Today’s ruling is the final win for the 250,000 some retirees fighting to keep the health care they worked for and were promised! Seniors will continue to have access to all providers who accept Medicare, a victory for our public sector retirees.

The City’s Medicare Advantage plan would have constrained our retirees to a smaller network with more restrictive requirements on care. Many public servants entered the municipal workforce with the promise of middle-class wages, pensions, and a retirement plan. The shift to anything less than that full promise was a hard pill to swallow.

When the Medicare Advantage contract was submitted to my office last year, we declined to register it, knowing that litigation raised doubts about the City’s authority to enter into the contract. As a matter of public policy, beyond the scope of our office’s specific Charter responsibility for contract registration, I was seriously concerned about the privatization of Medicare plans, overbilling by insurance companies, and barriers to care under Medicare Advantage.

It is vital that all our seniors—and all New Yorkers—get quality health coverage as a basic human right. At the same time, given the growing costs of health care for both retirees and active employees, we cannot ignore that there are real cost questions facing the City when it comes to health care.

Thanks,

Brad 

Categories Health, New York City, Resistance, Unions

John Thompson: Steve Brill’s Destructive Attacks on Teachers Did Real Damage

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2024 //
8

Retired Oklahoma City teacher John Thompson wrote in The Oklahoman about the early days of the teacher-bashing movement. At its center he found a journalist-entrepreneur named Steve Brill, who wrote a slashing attack on teachers, tenure, and teacher unions in The New Yorker. Even in Oklahoma, Brill’s article was big news, because it identified the scapegoat that legislators wanted: teachers. Brill subsequently wrote a book celebrating charter schools, called Class Warfare. In that book, he falsely claimed that I had been bribed by teachers’ unions to become pro-union and pro-public school. So, as you might imagine, he is not a friend of mine.

John Thompson wrote:

In 2010, I attended an Oklahoma legislative committee meeting where most lawmakers were reading a New Yorker article, Steve Brill’s “The Rubber Room.”  It was full of attacks on teachers. Legislators found his narrative persuasive, and it contributed to the passage of the most destructive education bill I ever witnessed.

I then reached out to Brill, trying to share the social and cognitive science that explained why he was using invalid and unreliable data in support of a blame game that would undermine teaching and learning.

So, I was curious about what he now believes. After all, the subtitle for a recent interview with him was:

New York repealed measures that made it easier to fire ineffective teachers. The veteran journalist wonders if they ever mattered.

But, Brill, a non-educator, still sticks with an anti-teacher ideology, propagated by “astro-turf think tanks” that rejected the scientific method when trying to use venture capitalism procedures for transforming traditional public schools. Even after those reward-and-punish policies demonstrably failed, Brill says, “in public education, I think there’s a pretty good argument that the people abusing and undermining the system are actually the teachers.” 

“The Rubber Room” presented little evidence that teachers were to blame. His sources focused on “the twentieth of one percent of all New York City teachers” who had been removed from the classroom, but not fired. He believed the PR from corporate reformers like The New Teacher Project (TNTP) and the New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein who thought “tenure is ridiculous.” 

Although value-added models (VAMs) were the foundation for holding teachers accountable for test score growth, Brill only used the term “value-added” once, and he didn’t bother to address that statistical model’s flawed methodology for evaluating individual teachers. (Some of those models even held teachers accountable for outcomes of students they never met!)

Brill merely wrote that the “value-added scores” was “a phrase that sends chills down the spine of most teachers’ union officials.”

Brill didn’t understand why it was impossible to recruit top teachers to highest-poverty schools using evaluation metrics that were biased against inner city teachers. Neither did he understand why these data-driven evaluations would prioritize “jukin the stats” and drill-and-kill instruction that would undermine holistic and meaningful teaching and learning. Brill certainly didn’t understand that teachers and unions also fought against VAMs in order to protect their students from teach-to-the-test malpractice which they would incentivize.

Brill was also dismissive of peer review, which the teachers union supported, and which was a constructive and efficient method of removing ineffective teachers from the classroom. (In my experience, union leaders invested a great deal of political capital in removing ineffective teachers; it was administrators that would lose their nerve and not exit those teachers.)  

Brill drew upon the anti-union TNTP, which spread inaccurate information on the Toledo Plan, where districts and unions worked together to efficiently remove ineffective teachers. The TNTP claimed that the Toledo peer review program only removed .7% of probationary teachers over a five-year period.  In fact, 12.9% of teachers in the plan were removed from the classroom in 2009. The percentages of 2008 probationary teachers removed from the classroom in Syracuse (9.7%), Rochester (7%), Montgomery County (10.5%), and Minneapolis (37%) were far greater than outcomes that VAMs produced.

And that brings us to today’s attacks on education. After a history of failure, corporate reformers have moved away from teacher evaluation systems that rely on test score growth, even though they still tend to blame teachers and unions. But state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters now represents today’s version of disempowering teachers.

Walters pushed for and succeeded in getting the Oklahoma State Board of Education to revoke the license of Norman High School’s Summer Boismier, who “covered her bookshelves with red paper, [with] the words ‘books the state doesn’t want you to read,’ and a QR code to the Brooklyn Public Library, which offers any student free access to banned books.” 

She has asked an Oklahoma County judge to review and reverse the revocation order, saying it was unlawful, frivilous and without a legitimate cause.

Also, Edmond’s Regan Killackey is fighting against Walters’ effort to revoke his teaching license for a photo showing him playing with his kids at a Halloween supply store in September 2019. His daughter was wearing a mask of Donald Trump and his son held up a plastic sword, and Killackey had a grimaced look on his face.

If teachers lose their due process rights, who will be able to resist Walters’ civics curriculum committee which includes the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts, a key sponsor of Project 2025?

Categories Failure, Inequity, Injustice, New York City, Teachers

Leonie Haimson: Mayoral Control of Schools Has Failed in NYC

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2024 //
2

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, writes about the latest developments in New York City. Mayor Eric Adams was indicted on multiple charges of corruption. His top aides resigned, including his schools chancellor David Banks. Adams says he is innocent and won’t resign. Leonie worries about what will happen to the city’s public schools, which are controlled by the mayor. Some of us–Leonie and I–long for the end of mayoral control and a revival of an independent Board of Education. Checks and balances are a very important part of democratic government. Under mayoral control, there is more cronyism than accountability.

She writes:

Mayor indicted, Chancellor resigning, and the Panel for Educational Policy eliminates its Contract Committee; so much for Mayoral control!! 

Mayor Eric Adams talks to the press outside Gracie Mansion, the official residence of the mayor of New York City, on September 26, 2024, after he was indicted on federal criminal charges

Mayor Adams has now been indicted on  five federal charges of bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations.  Chancellor Banks is resigning as of Dec. 31, 2024, to be replaced by Melissa Aviles-Ramos, current Deputy Chancellor for Family Engagement. This follows the announced resignations of other top officials, including the Police Commissioner and Commissioner of Health, in the last two weeks.

We should recall the false narratives promoted by those including Governor Hochul who insisted on extending unchecked Mayoral control for two more years last April, with no strings attached: that any other system invited corruption, instability, and inefficiency. The Mayor himself insisted on renaming Mayoral control “Mayoral Accountability”, and Chancellor Banks threatened to resign if the governance system was altered in any significant way. And look at what has happened since. 

The only minor tweak the Legislature made to Mayoral control was that the Chair of the Panel for Educational Policy chair would be appointed by the Mayor from among three nominees put forward by leaders of the Legislature and Board of Regents. And yet it turns out that the new Chair will be exactly the same man who already held that seat as a Mayoral appointee, Greg Faulkner. The only difference is that now the Mayor will get an extra PEP appointee, to further cement his control over controversial educational policies, as well as questionable contracts and spending.

The Chancellor himself was reported having privately met with the CEO of 21stCentEd in October of 2022, and  subsequently greenlit a major contract with this company that had hired his brother, Terrence Banks, as a lobbyist. According to the Daily News,  21stCentEd has since received more than $1.4 million in business from the Department of Education for providing a variety of services. In cases where a family member is involved, the city requires that a Conflict of Interest waiver be obtained.  And yet Banks never applied for one. Both Chancellor Banks and Terence Banks have had their homes raided and their telephones seized by federal investigators.

Terence Banks also apparently lobbied for a Florida-based tech firm called Saferwatch which markets “panic button” apps to be used to alert authorities in case of school emergencies such as fires or active shooters.  The NYPD signed a contract with Saferwatch which was piloted in several schools  last year.

We have seen tremendous privacy problems with Teenspace, an online mental health program for NYC students 13 and up, relentlessly promoted by the Mayor and the Chancellor, after the Department of Health signed a $26 million dollar with the parent company Talkspace last year. And yet as we have discovered, Teenspace collects, shares and uses personal student data for marketing and commercial purposes with multiple social media “partners” that would be illegal if the contract was with the DOE rather than the Department of Health.  When a NYC student visits the Teenspace website on their phone, their personally identifiable information is collected by 34 cookies, and shared with 15 ad trackers, as well as Facebook, Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft among other companies. The company has also been sued in Californiafor sharing personal data with TikTok, including  the mental health data of minors. One should not be surprised to learn that lobbying firm for Talkspace is Oaktree Solutions, the firm owned by Frank Carone,  a close associate and a former chief of staff to the Mayor who was with him last night when Adams was huddling with his attorneys after learning of his federal indictments. 

Shortly after he was elected, Mayor Adams own partner,  Tracey Collins, who already worked at DOE,  was promoted and named the “senior adviser to the deputy chancellor of school leadership,” and received a 23% boost to her salary to $221,597 a year.  Shortly thereafter, Sharon Adams, the wife of the Mayor’s brother Bernard Adams, was hired by DOE, at a salary of $150,000-a-year .

The whirlwind of scandals and investigations surrounding the Mayor and his top appointees, including the Chancellor, should give rise to a new call for more accountability, oversight and checks and balances at DOE, but I fear that no lessons will be learned by those in power, because their interests lie in maintaining one-person rule, and ignoring the voices of parents and teachers.  Indeed, there have been many cases of large-scale corruption at the DOE under previous administrations. 

Eric Goldstein was hired in 2004 during Bloomberg/Klein years as a deputy overseeing food, transportation and high school sports, and promoted to chief executive in 2007. Goldstein was just recently sentenced to two years in prison, for a corrupt scheme he was involved in 2015-2016, during the De Blasio administration, by receiving bribes in exchange for turning a blind eye to tainted food served to public school kids — including chicken tenders laden with plastic, bones and metal, causing choking. 

There is also the recently revealed, shocking case of DOE staffers in the Queens office who took their own kids on trips to Disneyland and other trips by using federal funds meant to provide educational experiences for homeless children.  For some reason, the DOE failed to ask for restitution for the money stolen; and neither the DOE nor the Special Investigator for Schools  reported the alleged fraud, forgery and misuse of federal funds to any authorities for possible prosecution.  To make things even more bizarre, the SCI held off posting its findings report, dated January 2023, for nearly two years after it was completed, and when they did so, they posted it quietly without any press release or notification, perhaps in hopes it would be ignored by the media focused instead on the allegations and investigations surrounding the Mayor.  I have since reported these alleged crimes to the Inspector General’s office of the US Department of Education, and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

There have been many more multi-million dollar DOE corruption scandals under Mayoral control over the last 20 years, a selection of which I summarized in my testimony to the State Education Department and my presentation last year to the NYC Bar Association, both posted here.

And yet despite all these allegations of cronyism and worse, the first thing that the newly reconstituted Panel for Education Policy did in its first meeting of the new school year on September 25 is to eliminate its Contracts Committee by amending their  Bylaws  as depicted below. 

Image

This committee, whose meetings have been livestreamed and recorded, has provided the only public airing of discussion and questioning of DOE officials by PEP members of the rationale behind  hundreds of millions of dollars of questionable DOE contracts before the final Panel vote.  The approval to ditch the committee was 13-6, with one abstention.   As usual, every Mayoral appointee plus the new, supposedly “independent” Chair voted in lockstep to eliminate the Contracts Committee and its monthly public meetings.  So much for so-called Mayoral accountability!

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Failure, New York City

A Message to Trump from His Base: Words Matter

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2024 //
5

Staten Island is one of the five boroughs of New York City. It is the only borough that consistently votes Republican. Trump is, not surprisingly, popular in Staten Island.

Brian Laline, the editor of The Staten Island Advance, wrote the following editorial:

Hi Neighbor,

There’s talk of investigations, subpoenas and Florida officials charging the suspected gunman with attempted murder in the aftermath of the second assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump.

As there should be.

There is something seriously wrong when, in this climate of intense political divide, someone with an AK 47 can hide for 12 hours in the bushes on the perimeter of a golf course owned and used by a combative presidential candidate, without being spotted.

Twelve hours!

This after another madman lurked the perimeter of an outdoor Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, eventually firing an AR-15 at the former president, grazing his ear.


Another quarter-inch and the man would have been dead.

After the latest attempt at Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach, a sheriff told reporters that “when somebody gets into the shrubbery, they’re pretty much out of sight.”

That, neighbors, is a ridiculous statement. Maybe I watch too many cop shows, but they have these things called “thermal drones,” sheriff. They find people.  Even in shrubbery.

When a mayor or governor visits the Advance offices for an editorial board meeting, a security detail arrives hours earlier and sweeps the building, wanting to know what room the official will be in, how the official will get to that room, which chair the official will be seated, and the names of every person who will be in the room.

But then the sheriff told the real story . . .

“At this level that he [Trump] is at right now, he’s not the sitting president…” 

In other words, the near assassination in Butler didn’t make much of a difference in the level of the protection Donald Trump received.

You can bet that will change. As it should, because the level of divisive rhetoric is only increasing – despite pleas that everyone calm down.

And frankly, as much as this will inflame neighbors who make up Donald Trump’s base, the former president, his VP pick, his campaign people and his supporters are not helping to calm the roiling political waters.

Donald Trump cannot play nice to save his life – literally.

True, he called for unity after the Butler assassination attempt, positing on social media, “it is more important than ever that we stand United.”

That didn’t last long, following up at a rally with this . . .

“They say something happened to me when I got shot . . . I became nice.  When you’re dealing with these people . . .  they’re very dangerous people  . . . you can’t be too nice . . . I’m not going to be nice.”

What “dangerous people” he was referring to was never made clear.

The former president, his VP pick and his cable news mouthpieces blame Kamala Harris and Joe Biden for the latest attempt on his life.

“Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out,” Trump told Fox News.

Democrats have “taken politics in our Country to a whole new level of Hatred, Abuse, and Distrust,” he wrote in another social media post.

Dems, for their part, say that Donald J. Trump is a “threat to democracy,” which the Trump camp takes umbrage. I guess constantly ranting that he lost an election because Democrats fixed it, and thousands of supporters taking siege of the Capitol Building to overthrow said election is not a threat to democracy.

To paraphrase Billy Joel, Mr. Trump, Democrats didn’t start this fire.

Who insisted Barack Obama was not born in the United States? Who threatens to jail political foes? Who, to this day, says Democrats “stole” the 2020 election?  Who continually calls Kamala Harris a communist? Comrade Kamala? A radical left Marxist? A woman who will cause a Great Depression?  “She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist.”

Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump and his sidekick Vance ought to get on the same page. They seem to differ on who calls whom a fascist.

“Look, we can disagree with one another, we can debate one another,” Vance told a crowd in Georgia just the other day, “but we cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a fascist . . .”

We can’t? But your running mate just called Harris . . . oh never mind.

There’s an old saying that Donald Trump just doesn’t get:

Words matter.

Let’s take the absurd claim he made during the recent debate.

“. . . They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” he told millions watching. It has become a national joke. 

Guess what? It’s not funny.

Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, and by extension, everyone in Springfield, have become a target. Bomb threats are constant.  Schools have been evacuated or closed. Hospitals have closed. College campuses have been shut down. Festivals have been cancelled.

All because of threats against Haitians.  All because of absurd claims by Trump and Vance.  And to make it even worse, Vance admits he makes up stories to get attention.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN.

Political violence has been part of the American experiment since the beginning. Think the American Revolution and Civil War. Lincoln didn’t survive his visit to Ford’s Theatre. JFK lost his life in Dallas.  Bobby Kennedy was killed in L.A. and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King assassinated in Memphis. Presidents Garfield and McKinley were murdered. Ronald Reagan was shot while in office, while Teddy Roosevelt was shot after he left office. Alabama Gov. George Wallace was shot and paralyzed while he campaigned for office. 

There have been many others, the latest being Mr. Trump.

Will these heinous acts ever be eliminated in our country? I think you’ll agree it’s doubtful.

But do we have to make the possibility even worse?

Brian

Categories Accountability, Elections, Fascism, Harris, Kamala, New York City, Politics, Trump, Vance, J.D.

NYC Schools Chancellor: Immigrants Are a “Godsend”

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2024 //
8

In an interview with the New York Times. NYC Schools Chancellor spoke up for immigrants and the public schools. It was refreshing to see his refusal to fall into the traps set by naysayers who badmouth the schools.

Troy Closson interviewed Mr. Banks:

As the school year opens for an American education system facing multiple crises, one education leader is staking out a curious stance. He is sublimely optimistic.

Public schools in the United States lost more than one million students between 2019 and 2022. The deluge of cash relief distributed during the coronavirus pandemic is drying up. And in a politically polarized era, fresh fights over what students learn in class are continuing to emerge.

But David C. Banks, the New York City schools chancellor, whose national profile rose this spring after his unyielding testimony at a House hearing on antisemitism in schools, argues in a recent interview that the state of urban education is not so bad.

All the woes of urban school districts can be found in New York, a diverse city that is contending with a major influx of homeless migrants. But in a departure from Mayor Eric Adams’s warnings that the migrant crisis is upending city life, Mr. Banks described the arrival of immigrant children as a boon.

As many states retreat from the teaching of race and identity in schools amid rising controversies, the chancellor doubled down on the value of those lessons in New York.

And he said that the rise of artificial intelligence did not represent an alarming threat of chatbot-enabled cheating, but a chance to transform education for the better.

As half of American adults say the education system is heading in the wrong direction, Mr. Banks argued that the “No. 1 thing” his administration had achieved was starting to rebuild faith in public schools.

The interviewer’s question are printed in bold.

New York City has enrolled nearly 40,000 new migrant children since July 2022. Are schools feeling the strain?

For some of the schools, the migrants coming here has been a godsend because we’ve lost so many other kids. Some schools were being threatened with whether we’re going to be able to keep the doors open. 

I push back on a lot of the kind of negative politics that people talk about with migrants. This is a city of immigrants. I mean, that’s the uniqueness of New York. 

We never make it easy for immigrants who are coming. But they find their way. And the same thing is going to happen here.

Many schools spent the earliest stages of the migrant crisis meeting basic needs. Now what do teachers and principals tell you is their biggest challenge in supporting new arrivals?

We’ve got over 5,000 teachers who are either bilingual or English-as-a-new-language teachers who are doing everything that they can possibly do. We need more. 

If you want to see New York City schools at their best, look at how these teachers have responded to the migrant crisis. It’s incredible. They’ve partnered kids with other kids who are serving as buddies for them. They’ve got mentors from older grades.

So I don’t hear a major cry from schools.

This administration has championed expanding popular programs to win back families, and celebrated last year’s enrollment uptick. But New York City has 186,000 fewer children and teenagers today than it did in 2020, and birthrates are on the decline. What does that mean for the future of the school system?

New York City is a very expensive place to live in. But we didn’t go from one million to 100,000. We still have over 900,000 kids and families.

Some of these things are happening beyond anything that I can do. There was a huge migration of Black folks back to the South. It’s more affordable for them to be in a place like South Carolina. Nothing I can do about that.

A big part of my job is to make the case for why we think the public schools would be a great place for you and your family. For years, the Department of Education used to play defense on media, the narrative. And I think we’re doing a better job with getting that word out.

GOOD JOB, CHANCELLOR BANKS!

Categories Bigotry, Education Reform, Funding, Immigration, New York City, Supporting public schools

NYC High School Senior, Child of Immigrants, Accepted at 28 Colleges

By dianeravitch
July 27, 2024 //
13

Malena Galletto, the daughter of immigrants from Argentina, was accepted at 28 colleges, including all eight Ivy League colleges. Malena attended the Bronx High School of Science, one of the city’s most selective high schools, where she had a 97% average. Malena is the first in her family to attend college.

Malena has decided to go to Harvard.

When you hear Donald Trump rant about immigrants, accuse them of horrible criminal behavior, think of Malena.

It is 7 p.m. on March 28th, 2024. Malena Galletto ’24 sat in her dad’s car on their way to a family friend’s house for a long weekend. In the back seat, Galletto sat with her laptop opened to the eight college portals that released their decisions. Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and University of Pennsylvania. 

Having received an encouraging letter from Columbia a few weeks prior, Galletto opened the Columbia decision first. She rejoiced at her first acceptance of the day. She then opened Dartmouth, followed by Brown and Cornell, and eventually Harvard, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton. By the end of the night, Malena had gotten into all eight ivies.  

In total, Galletto applied to 28 colleges in the United States, hopeful that she would get into at least one of them. She was accepted to all 28 universities that she applied to. Galletto is an Argentinian-American who grew up in Washington Heights, and she embraces her Latin culture. Growing up, she was strongly immersed in the Tango community. 

Galletto: “My mom loves dancing. I spent so much time watching her and her friends Tango, that dancing is just a part of me. I think that I probably learned to Tango before I learned to walk.” 

Galletto’s culture is one of the most important things for her. Galletto believes that preserving Argentinian culture through celebrating the traditional dance of Tango is crucial for keeping it alive and thriving. Growing up in Washington Heights in Manhattan, Galletto had a first hand account of how the pandemic negatively impacted the Tango community. Due to social distancing, cultural activities and showcases were canceled, giving a devastating blow to the whole community.  

Galletto: “Despite these challenges, over the past couple of years, we have been focused on ensuring that Argentinian cultural heritage remains active. Efforts to keep the community engaged have been paramount, as we are continuing to find innovative ways to connect and celebrate our traditions, despite the restrictions. This includes everything from increasing our outreach to hosting virtual concerts. As I was preparing for college applications, this commitment to cultural preservation was a significant part of my application, since it is such a big part of who I am and my story.”

Throughout her fight for preserving her culture and maintaining her passions for education, Galletto recognizes her mom as her biggest cheerleader and motivation. 

Despite being the valedictorian of her high school, Galletto’s mother did not get the opportunity to attend college. 

Galletto: “My mom was the valedictorian of her high school, and she has always emphasized the importance of education. She believes that education opens up a world of opportunities, and she has always pushed me to prioritize my education. This has been crucial for me, as I have been looking to strike the perfect balance for maintaining my grades and also to continue fighting for what I believe in.”

Galletto: “Being first-generation and of low-income, navigating the complexities of college was daunting. I did not have the generational wisdom passed down by parents who attended college, so not understanding the process felt a little like stumbling in the dark. However, the process was made a lot less challenging thanks to the generosity of the Bronx Science Foundation. Their abundance of resources helped me decipher the intricacies of the applications, financial aid, and campus life. For someone like me, the first person in my family to attend college, those resources were not just helpful — they were transformative. They empowered me to chase my dreams despite the odds stacked against me.”

Categories Democracy, Higher Education, Immigration, New York City, Students
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