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Arthur Goldstein: How School Choice Blocks Opting Out in New York City

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2016 //
14

Experienced educator Arthur Goldstein recently visited the George Washington Campus in Manhatttan. It used to be the George Washington High School and had some famous graduates, but those days are gone. Now it is the G.W. Campus, containing multiple small schools, all schools of choice.

 

All high schools are now schools of choice, and there are hundreds of them. The student ranks 12 schools in order of his choice, and the school decides which students it wants. The middle schools are also schools of choice. You are not likely to get into your school of choice unless you can show your test scores.

 
The effect, of course, was to downplay any notion of community schools (thus downplaying any notion of community, valued by neither Gates nor Bloomberg). Parents now had “choice.” They could go to the Academy of Basket Weaving, the Academy of Coffee Drinking, or the Academy of Doing Really Good Stuff. Of course by the time they got there the principals who envisioned basket weaving, coffee drinking, or doing good stuff were often gone, and it was Just Another School, or more likely Just Another Floor of a School, as there were those three other schools to contend with. (Unless of course Moskowitz got in, in which case it was A Renovated Space Better Than Your Space.)

 

Last night I learned that middle schools in NYC also are Schools of Choice. I don’t know exactly why I learned this last night, because my friend Paul Rubin told me this months ago. I think I need to hear things more than once before they register with me, though. Anyway last night I heard from someone who told me that one of the schools her daughter might attend required test scores as a prerequisite. So if her family had decided to send their kid there, opt-out may not have been a good option.

 

I live in a little town in Long Island. My daughter went to our middle school, as did every public school student in our town. We are a community, and our community’s kids go to our community’s schools. If I opt my kid out, she goes to that school. If she scores high, low, or anywhere in between, she goes to that school.

 

Goldstein realized that the choice policy is an effective deterrent against opting out of tests. If you opt out, you won’t get into your school of choice. You might rank 12 schools, and get into your last choice, or end up with no school assignment and get sent wherever there is an opening, which might be an hour or more from your home, with a theme that has no interest for you.

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Education Reform, New York City, Opt Out, School Choice

Arthur Goldstein: The Negative Consequences of Cracking Down on Discipline

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2016 //
13

Arthur Goldstein is a 32-year veteran of the New York City public s hools. He teaches ESL classes in a large, comprehensive high school, one of the few that was not broken into small schools by the Bloomberg administrations.

In this article, he explains why he opposes the city’s new discipline policies. Teachers are not allowed to suspend students no matter what they have done without permission from central. That permission, he expects, will never come.

Goldstein explains that in his 32 years of teaching, he has only once suspended a student. But he needs to know that this last-resort tool is available to him. He hopes he will never use it, but he believes his authority is undermined when this last resort is removed.

Categories Discipline and Suspensions, New York City

Leonie Haimson Holds the de Blasio Administration Accountable for Reckless Spending

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2016 //
2

Leonie Haimson is the watchdog of New York City public education. She is the founder of Class Size Matters (I am a member of her six-person board), which operates on a shoestring. She is unpaid, yet she is tireless in her determination to police the awarding of contracts, as well as the administration’s attention to class size. She also is deeply involved in protecting student privacy. She and Rachel Strickland in Colorado brought down Bill Gates’ effort to data-mine American students, a project called inBloom, to which he contributed $100 million. In the face of parent criticism, inBloom folded.

 

Leonie reads every contract that the New York City Department approves. She did the same during the Bloomberg years, when she was also the mayor’s most persistent critic.

 

Here is her scathing report on the failure of the administration to perform due diligence before it awards contracts, in this case, for special education services, for Amazon, and for new technology. Once again, as under Bloomberg, the city’s Panel on Educational Policy (actually know in the law as the New York City Board of Education) mutely acquiesces and approves whatever the administration asks for, without debate or discussion.

 

This is a good reason to oppose mayoral control, state control, and any other undermining of democracy.

Categories Accountability, Bill de Blasio, Education Industry, New York City, Technology

Gary Rubinstein: How Did Success Academy Students Perform on New York Regents’ Exams?

By dianeravitch
April 23, 2016 //
16

Gary Rubinstein has been tracking the progress of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain. They get very high test scores. They have small percentages of students with disabilities (only the mildest disabilities allowed) and students who are English language learners. They have high attrition rates. They have high suspension rates, even for children of 5 and 6. But the hedge fund managers love the schools because results are all that matter, not how they are obtained.

 

So Gary decided to find out how SA’s high school students performed on the state Regents exams.

 

That turned out to be a challenging quest.

 

Gary writes:

 

Reformers are all about ‘outcomes’ and that’s why they love Success Academy charter schools. Year after year Success Academy students outperform the rest of the state on the 3-8 ELA and math tests.

 

For sure if there was a hospital out there that was claiming to have the ability to cure Cancer or something like that, there would be all kinds of independent investigations and different tests to see if their claims were for real. But when it comes to education, we don’t see this so much.

 

The oldest Success Academy students are now in 10th grade. They have had two different cohorts of 8th graders take the specialized high school test for admission into one of the 8 specialized New York City high schools. Amazingly, none of those students made it into any of the specialized schools. That is pretty unusual that a group of students does so well on one standardized test but does so poorly on another. Aside from knowing that none of their 8th graders made the cut score on that test, there are no other details about their specific scores.

 

But there are other tests those students have taken, namely the New York State Regents exams. Most advanced students take the Algebra I test in 8th grade and then various Regents in 9th grade, maybe Geometry and also a few others like Living Environment, Earth Science, and Global History.

 

I had not heard about how they fared on the Regents exams for the past two years so I went over to the revamped New York State data site. I went to the page for the school, Success Academy Harlem I, but could not locate the Regent scores. I did take notice of their enrollment by grade, however.

 

The first Success Academy cohort began as kindergarteners in 2006-2007 ago with 83 kindergarteners and 73 first graders. That group of 73 first graders had been whittled down to 26 ninth graders last year and who knows how many of those 26 are now tenth graders this year. So they have lost about 2/3 of them so far so we’d expect the Success survivors to be pretty strong academically.

 

So how did the SA students fare on the Regents exams?

 

I won’t give you the answer. To learn more about Gary’s search for the SA high school students’ performance on the New York Regents exams, read his post.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, New York, New York City, Privatization, Testing

Mayor DeBlasio Capitulates to Charter Industry

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2016 //
28

Mayor Bill de Blasio campaigned against the charter industry and against school closings. But when he tried to slow (not stop) their invasions of public schools, the billionaires pinned his ears back with a big TV campaign and with Cuomo’s help. It all came down to this: not what was best for 1 million students, but what was best for the charter business.

 

And now:

 

PRESS RELEASE

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 20, 2016

 

CONTACTS:
Jane Maisel (917) 678­-1913

 

Contact after 3 pm:
Jim Donahue
(917) 318-8762 donohuenyc@gmail.com
or
Jim Shoaf jimshoaf@me.com

PRESS CONFERENCE
100 Hester Street, NYC
Wednesday, April 20, 5:15 pm

Mayor de Blasio’s “RENEWAL”
means public school “REMOVAL”

 
New York City– Bronx high school, Foreign Language Academy for Global Studies (FLAGS), may be closed by a vote of the Panel for Educational Policy, held this evening, Wednesday, April 20th, despite the fact that it was classified by NYS as a Receivership School and by the NYC DOE as a Renewal School and was supposed to have time and support renew itself. Its space will be given to a charter school, as the DOE has recommended, with the full cooperation of the current UFT leadership.

 

At 5:15 p.m., families and teachers will hold a press conference before the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) votes. They will decry this betrayal and explain how school closures perpetuate systemic segregation and racism, while serving the private interests of charter school profiteers.

 

According to Aixa Rodriguez, NYC DOE teacher, notice of FLAGS’ possible closure was, “like a poison. We began hemorrhaging students. The stigma of the label is what made our enrollment fall, and then our low enrollment was used as a reason to close us.”

 

“The DOE loves to break up schools into small schools, but their love isn’t sustained once there is a choice between a small school and a charter. It looks as if the small school movement is nothing more than a method for picking off public schools, one by one, as their buildings are demanded by charter schools. And the schools that are being closed are in communities with the fewest economic resources.” observed Jane Maisel, member of Change the Stakes.

 

Rodriguez describes a cascade of problems set off by the threat of closure: teachers looking for other jobs, the school improvement grant only distributed in February which was the same month the proposal to close FLAGS was delivered, while students were not informed of the closure with enough time to participate in the first round of the high school application process.

“Were the new toilets a gift for the new tenants, Academic Leadership Charter? They were never meant for us.”

 

At the April 5 meeting, the school community was already so resigned that not a single parent, teacher or student spoke. Senior Deputy Chancellor Dorita Gibson told the audience that it is never easy to make the decision to close a school, and that it really is not possible to run a good high school with only 100 students. This was the same argument used with the recent closure of three other schools, and was supported by the UFT’s current president, Michael Mulgrew.

 

Yet over the past year, the school staff’s multiple suggestions for attracting new students were all rejected by the principal. When a CEC 7 member suggested that the DOE should keep its commitment to the students by reviving rather than closing the school, building on the strength of the mostly multilingual student body, her ideas were dismissed. Apparently occupying space that has been requested by a charter school is tantamount to a death sentence for a school. Teachers and parents do not accept the DOE’s chilling logic. Parents and teachers ask the PEP members to make an independent judgement on this trend of sacrificing schools, but we will be surprised if the members of the PEP are willing to resist giving their rubber stamp approval to the DOE’s decision.

 

Jim Donohue teaches English at Renewal School JHS 145 in the Bronx. His school fought to prevent a charter co-location during high stakes standardized testing season last year. According to Donohue, “Success Academy came into our school last year and pointed out the classrooms they wanted. The DOE welcomed them with open arms and told us to get packing. We have been scattered across 4 floors of the building, and Success Academy has beautifully renovated the 19 classrooms that they staked a claim to. This is defined as RENEWAL.”

 

Tonight the PEP will also vote on the expansion of Success Academy Charter School Bed-Stuy 1 at the site of Foundations Academy, a Renewal School that will cease to exist after this year. The correlation between the Receivership and Renewal program and the sites where charters are opening and expanding is undeniable. Concerned teachers and parents wish to make this hypocrisy clear to members of the PEP. Closing Renewal Schools and allowing charter schools to take over their space undermines the restoration Mayor de Blasio promised and institutes a climate of fear and demoralization. Advocates demand a moratorium on public school closures, demand that city officials join NYC citizens in fighting the law that requires the DOE to pay for charter school space, and that all public schools be meaningfully respected and given a genuine chance to thrive.

###

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Education Reform, New York City

Gary Rubinstein: The P-Tech Disaster

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2016 //
35

P-Tech is one of the most celebrated schools in recent years. President Obama hailed it in one of his 2013 State of the Union speech. He and Arne Duncan visited the school and repeatedly praised it as “proof of what can be accomplished” if we have the courage and will to do it. P-Tech was created as a partnership between the New York City Department of Education, IBM, and the City University of New York. I don’t take pleasure in reporting that their praise was premature. I would like to see P-Tech succeed. But it is very annoying when the President and the Secretary of Education go out on a limb to hail success before a school has ever graduated a single student.

 

Gary Rubinstein reports that P-Tech has been a huge disappointment despite (or perhaps because) of the overpraise it received.

 

In an earlier post, he says, he noted that only 2% of the students at P-Tech passed the Geometry and Algebra II Regents’ exams. Defenders explained that the pass rate was so low because students in sophomore and junior years were taking the tests for practice.

 

Now, he writes:

 

I recently followed up on my P-Tech research and found that New York State has revamped their data page extensively. Now all the data including the number of test takers is all available with a very user friendly interface. The P-Tech state data page can be found here.

 

I’m focusing on Algebra II since P-Tech is an engineering school where students attend for six years to earn a high school degree and an associates degree and a job offer from IBM. Since Algebra II is taken by advanced 10th graders I figure that P-Tech should be able to get a good percent of their students to eventually pass this test.

 

The first thing I checked was their 2014 scores last year again. They had 128 students take that test, which went against their claim that they made all their freshmen and sophomores take the test. If that were the case, it should have been about 300 test takers. In 2014 only two students passed that test with a score over 65 and four other students got between a 55 and a 65. Pretty brutal — but not as bad as how they did a year later.

 

In the most recent Regents administered last June, P-Tech decided to only allow the students who were most likely to pass the test, knowing that making too many unprepared students take the test would affect their passing percent. So last year only 41 students took the Algebra II Regents. Of those 41 students exactly one student passed and one other scored between 55 and 65. That’s it. The 39 other students all failed with scores under a 55.

 

Rubinstein notes that P-Tech, having received so much hype and praise, is now spreading across the country. Some 40 more P-Techs are in the pipeline in other states and in New York City.

 

Shouldn’t school officials wait for experiments to prove themselves before they replicate them?

 

 

 

 

 

Categories New York City, Obama, STEM

Rapper Joins with Steve Perry to Open Charter School in Harlem

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2016 //
21

This should be an April Fools’ Day joke, but it is not.

 

Rapper Sean (Puff Daddy) Combs is sponsoring a charter school in Harlem that will be run by the notorious Dr. Steve Perry of Hartford, Connecticut.

 

Perry bills himself as “America’s Most Trusted Educator.” His magnet school in Hartford was known for its harsh discipline. Perry became known for his contempt for teachers and unions. He once publicly referred to union teachers as “roaches.”

 

Perry has an intense lecturing schedule, including a few dates next fall after his charter school opens.

 

As Jonathan Pelto writes, Perry had quite a reputation in Hartford and beyond:

 

“Perry gained national notoriety for his school’s harsh disciplinary policies that included the use of the “Table of Shame” to punish children who received demerits and for his ugly public comments about unions, teachers and anyone who opposed his empire building efforts.

 

 

“As a 2013 Wait, What? post entitled, Hey Steve Perry – Tell us about Capital Prep’s “Table of Shame,” explained:

 

“Located in the cafeteria of the Capital Preparatory Magnet School at 1304 Main Street in Hartford, Connecticut is the “Table of Shame.”

 

“As part of Capital Prep Principal Steve Perry’s “zero-tolerance” policies even the slightest “violations,” such as wearing the wrong colored belt, will result in punishments designed to humiliate and demean students.

 

“For example, it is not uncommon for Capital Prep students to be forced to stand in the cafeteria to eat as punishment for violating the school uniform policy or some equally unimportant “violation.”

 

“And now, more than a half a dozen former and present parents, students and teachers report that Perry and his fellow Capital Prep administrators regularly require children, even the youngest students in the building, to sit at the cafeteria’s “Table of Shame.”

 

And yes… it is actually referred to as the “Table of Shame.”

 

Along with the charges of abusive disciplinary practices and questionable financial activities – According to federal and state documents, Steve Perry registered his private charter school management company at the address of the Hartford public school at which he worked – Perry’s unwillingness to provide federally required educational services to children with special needs led to a sweeping investigation and follow-up action.

 

As a Hartford school administrator, Perry was also unwilling or unable to recruit and retain students who were English Language Learners despite more than 50 percent of Hartford’s students being Latino.

 

Where Perry goes, controversy follows.

 

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Connecticut, Discipline, Education Reform, New York City

NYC Public Advocate Letitia James Advises Parents that They Have a Right to Opt Out of the Tests

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2016 //
1

New York City’s second-highest ranking official is the Public Advocate. Our Public Advocate is Letitia James, known to her constituents as Tish James. She is a lawyer and a fighter for equity.

 

For consistently supporting parents and public schools, I add her to the honor roll of this blog.

 

She released the following advisory to parents and the public:

 

 

Friends,

 

Next week, children across our state will be asked to take the New York State English Language Arts exam and the following week they will be asked to take the New York State Math exam.

 

There has been a lot of confusion about whether these tests are required. I want to remind you that, as parents, you have the right to opt your child out of this exam with no consequences to you, your child, or your child’s school.

 

If you do choose to make this decision, you must write a letter to your child’s principal. More information on how to opt out is available here.

 

The decision whether to opt out or not is a personal one for each family. As your Public Advocate, I want to ensure that parents know their rights. And that we continue working together to build a school system that offers a holistic education, including arts and physical education, and equips our children for success.

 

If you have questions or concerns, I urge you to contact my office at 212-669-7250 or gethelp@pubadvocate.nyc.gov.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Letitia James
New York City Public Advocate

Categories Honor Roll, New York City, Opt Out, Parents, Standardized Testing

New York City: Teachers Warned Not to Speak About Opting Out

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2016 //
71

While the state of New York is scrambling to respond to the outraged parents who opted out of state tests last year, New York City is threatening teachers who dare to speak about opting out.

 

Last spring, 20% of the state’s eligible students opted out (about a quarter million students), but the numbers were much lower in New York City. Some attribute this to the fear of losing funding. Whatever the reason, less than 2% of students in New York City refused the tests.

 

The city wants to keep the numbers low.

 

According to the New York Times:

 

At a forum in December, Anita Skop, the superintendent of District 15 in Brooklyn, which had the highest rate of test refusals in the city last year, said that for an educator to encourage opting out was a political act and that public employees were barred from using their positions to make political statements.
On March 7, the teachers at Public School 234 in TriBeCa, where only two students opted out last year, emailed the school’s parents a broadside against the tests. The email said the exams hurt “every single class of students across the school” because of the resources they consumed.

 

But 10 days later, when dozens of parents showed up for a PTA meeting where they expected to hear more about the tests, the teachers were nowhere to be seen. The school’s principal explained that “it didn’t feel safe” for them to speak, adding that their union had informed them that their email could be considered insubordination. The principal, Lisa Ripperger, introduced an official from the Education Department who was there to “help oversee our meeting.”

 

Several principals said they had been told by either the schools chancellor, Carmen Fariña, or their superintendents that they and their teachers should not encourage opting out. There were no specific consequences mentioned, but the warnings were enough to deter some educators.

 

Devora Kaye, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said that teachers were free to express themselves on matters of public concern as private citizens, but not as representatives of the department, and that if they crossed that line they could be disciplined. Asked what the disciplinary measures might be, Ms. Kaye said they were determined case by case.

 

“I don’t think that the teachers’ putting themselves in the middle of it is a good idea,” Ms. Fariña said in an interview.

 

 

Categories Farina, Carmen, New York City, Opt Out, Parents

George Joseph: Why Are Reports of Violence Increasing Faster at NYC Charter Schools Than Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
March 12, 2016 //
23

In an article in The Nation, George Joseph notes a curious phenomenon: the reports of violent and disruptive behavior are increasing at double the rate in charter schools in New York City, as compared to public schools.

 

The irony is that this is happening at the same time that the billionaire-backed Families for Excellent Schools has unleashed a social media campaign aimed at discrediting Mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to reduce harsh discipline in the public schools. Joseph’s article includes several tweets from FES, calling attention to disorder in the public schools. He surmises that FES–a major backer of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter chain–is trying to divert attention from the embarrassing video of a SA teacher humiliating a child.

 

Joseph interviews a retired professional who observed both types of schools in a building co-located with a charter:

 

Brenda Shufelt, a recently retired librarian who served public school and Success Academy Charter School students at a colocated school library in Harlem, said that as charter schools rapidly expand, they may be taking in more high-needs kids, many of whom cannot conform to one-size-fits-all disciplinary approaches.

 

“In my experience, what would often happen is that charter school students would be so rigidly controlled that the kids would periodically blow up,” says Shufelt. “At PS 30, some of our kids would have meltdowns, usually because of problems at home, but I never saw kids melt down in the way they did in charter schools. They were just so despairing, feeling like they could not do this. I was told by two custodians, they had never had so much vomit to clean up from kindergarten and elementary classes.”

Categories Charter Schools, Discipline, New York City
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