Archives for category: New York City
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Eva Moskowitz Cancels Pre-K Program with City Rather than Accept Regulation

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2016 //
14

Eva Moskowitz agreed to open a pre-K program on behalf of the City of New York. But she refused to sign the contract that other charter schools (and all public schools and facilities) agreed to sign. Eva said that the city was not her boss, even though the money for the program came from the city.

She refused to back down. She refused to sign the contract. She canceled the pre-K program, for the fall, which enrolled about 70 children at a cost to the city of about $700,000.

Success Academy Charter Schools Cancels Pre-K
After months of fighting with City Hall about a prekindergarten contract, Success Academy Charter Schools said Wednesday it was canceling its pre-K program for the fall.

For nearly a year the charter’s founder, Eva Moskowitz, has refused to sign a contract that New York City requires of providers who participate in its public pre-K program. She says it aims to exert too much control over her curriculum, daily schedule and field trips.

City officials have said that every other pre-K provider, including charter schools, signed the same basic contract, and doing so was a clear condition of joining the initiative. Expanding public preschool has been a key part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s agenda.

Ms. Moskowitz has said the charter oversight body at the State University of New York is the proper authority over her network. State Education Commissioner MaryEllen Elia ruled in the city’s favor in February, saying pre-K is a state-funded grant program, rather than part of the K-12 levels overseen by SUNY.

Ms. Moskowitz appealed to the state Supreme Court earlier this year, but said Wednesday that the court’s decision would come too late to open doors in August, and families of admitted children must scramble to find alternatives.

“It is unbelievably sad to tell parents and teachers that the courts won’t rescue our pre-K program from the mayor’s war on Success in time to open next year,” she said in a news release.

“The state upheld our important standards to ensure all programs are high quality,” Department of Education spokeswoman Devora Kaye said.

Success Academy started a prekindergarten program for 72 children in four classrooms last August, and planned to expand slightly for the next school year. A spokesman said about 3,000 children entered an admissions lottery for about 100 seats for the coming year.

Ms. Moskowitz and Mr. de Blasio have clashed repeatedly over the city’s obligation to provide space for charters and other issues. She said she hopes for a court victory so she can reopen prekindergarten classes in August 2017.

A spokesman said she is still seeking $720,000 reimbursement from the city for the current school year.

Categories Early Childhood Education, Harlem Success Academy, New York City

Arthur Goldstein: How Can I Get Away from Michael Bloomberg?

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2016 //
15

Arthur Goldstein has taught in the New York City public schools for more than 30 years. His blog is NYC Educator. He has been a frequent critic of the disruption and turmoil of the past fifteen years in the schools.

 

Michael Bloomberg is everywhere I look. A few weeks ago I went to see NYS Regents Chancellor Betty Rosa at George Washington Campus, nee George Washington High School. “Campus” means it’s been broken up into four smaller schools. If your test scores weren’t high enough for Mayor Mike, you got broken up. If they were good, like in my school, you got filled to 300% capacity.

 

 

Two miles south of my school is the Jamaica Campus, a building that looks exactly like the George Washington Campus. It used to be Jamaica High School, and it had, for my money, the smartest and best UFT chapter leader in New York City, James Eterno. It had a long history, and photos in the halls of the doughboys who’d attended, of the bowtie clad principal on the David Susskind Show, and a million things in between. Michael Bloomberg closed it based on false stats. James sent the corrected stats to then-Chancellor Joel Klein, and as far as I know, they’ve never even been disputed.

 

 

Michael Bloomberg renamed the Board of Education the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP). He controlled the majority of votes on the PEP, and when a couple of his appointees disagreed with him, he simply replaced them. Despite Patrick Sullivan’s persistent voice of sanity, they approved every school closing, every new school, every charter that Michael Bloomberg wanted. Mayoral Control is very much favored by prominent reformies like Bill Gates because it sidesteps all that messy, time-consuming democracy stuff.

 

 

Bill de Blasio wants mayoral control too, though I have no idea why. At first I was glad to see mayoral control in the hands of someone who appeared not to be insane, but I was quickly disappointed. Once de Blasio decided not to approve a few Moskowitz Academies, Andrew Cuomo moved to change the law. Now de Blasio had to pay Eva’s rent even if he doesn’t want her school. It was like the spirit of Michael Bloomberg had taken over Andrew Cuomo, who took to calling himself a “student lobbyist.” (Curiously, he hasn’t bothered lobbying for the billions of dollars the state owes NYC from the CFE lawsuit.)

 

 

Every time I look at the car I bought in May 2014 I think about Michael Bloomberg. By 2009, just about every union but teachers got an 8% raise. After a few years it adds up. In fact, by that time that raise would have more than paid for that car. But Mayor Mike passed it off to Bill de Blasio, who isn’t paying until 2020. The Mazda dealer was a nice guy, but would not agree to wait that long.

 

 

Many of Michael Bloomberg’s friends and cronies still sit at Tweed. Even Chancellor Carmen Fariña once worked for him. In fact, her predecessor, Dennis Walcott, was an alumni of my school. Our principal named our college office for him and now I feel like I have to wash my whole body with Brillo pad every time I set foot in there.

 

 

Mayor Bloomberg, with what was in effect mayoral dictatorship, used our city as a laboratory for reforminess, and used our children as guinea pigs. He gave no-bid contracts to all his pals, and if they left young children outside waiting hours for buses freezing days, well, too bad for them. He spent 95 million dollars on a computer system no one used. He boasted of being a regular guy, taking the subway to work, but had two SUVs pick him up at his townhouse because he didn’t like the stop closest to it.

 

 

But where we really feel his presence is in the tests. They are everywhere, and they mean everything. And though much of the state is rebelling against them, NYC lags far behind. Why? Because Michael Bloomberg set up a system, and this system has everything to do with Michael Bloomberg and nothing to do with community.

 

 

In Michael Bloomberg’s NYC, if you want to send your kid to a particular middle school, it may use test grades as criteria for admission. So if you opt your kid out of a test, too bad for you, and too bad for your kid. The city turns the wheel of fortune, and wherever your kid lands, that’s it.

 

 

This is in stark contrast to the rest of the state. Where I live, in Freeport NY, my kid goes to the same middle school no matter what grade she gets and whether or not she takes the test. We have a community, and we have a community school. Not only that, but we, the community, elect our school board and have genuine input into how it is run.

 

 

Michael Bloomberg wanted what he wanted, and he had all that money, so he was entitled to it. Old-fashioned democracy wasn’t efficient enough for him. Better that he should make all decisions, and if the voters twice voiced their preference for term limits, he’d change the law and buy himself another term anyway.

 

 

Thank God his polling must have revealed all his money couldn’t buy the presidency. Only one question remains.

 

 

What on earth do we have to do to exorcise his reformy ghost from New York City once and for all?

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, New York City, Testing

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
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