The New York City Department of Education is treating students who boycott state tests as failures and requiring them to go to summer school if they hope to be promoted. Even if their teacher recommends them for promotion, they will be punished. There are consequences for those who defy the DOE.
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Joel Klein lambasted the Democratic candidates in the race to succeed Mayor Bloomberg for their criticism of his policies.
Klein defended the policy of giving free public space to charters, even though many of the charters have billionaires on their boards. He also defended his record of closing schools with low test scores even though many of the replacement schools exclude low-scoring students.
He didn’t mention the fact that he resigned shortly after the collapse of city test score boasts in 2010, or that he was replaced by hapless publisher Carhie Black, or that the achievement gap remained unchanged during his eight years as chancellor, or that only 22% of voters want more of the same failed policies.
This is an alarming account of the frenzied efforts by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Department of Education to cement his “legacy” of opening privately managed charter schools while abandoning the public schools for which he is responsible.
The high school named for the famed Socialist Norman Thomas will be closed and set aside as space for privately managed charters. This is a way of spitting on the memory of a crusader for the public sector, that is, if anyone at the New York City Department of Education ever heard of Norman Thomas.
The new charter high schools will not accept any transfer students; after all, they are not public schools, so why should they comply with the same rules as real public schools?
The article by Gail Robinson of City Limits says that the charter school community of hedge fund managers and equity investors is worried about what will happen after Bloomberg leaves office. There is always the risk that someone might be elected who doesn’t want to privatize public education.
“Until then, Bloomberg is doing what he can. When the new school year starts, the city will open 24 new charter schools, for a total of 183, with spending on the publicly funded, privately run schools set to top $1 billion. And the city Department of Education (DOE) continues to allocate space in public school buildings to many charter schools, which use the rooms rent free.
But the department is also looking beyond Bloomberg’s term, carving out rooms in district buildings for schools that will not open until fall 2014. One, PAVE II, got space in a Bushwick middle school building even though the state has not yet approved its existence. And DOE also has set aside space for a charter that was supposed to open in August 2011; the plan now is for it to finally begun admitting students in September 2014.”
PAVE Academy was started by a billionaire who prefers free space in public buildings, rather than buying or leasing space. Who can blame him? Why not take free public space if the mayor wants you to have it?
Bloomberg himself plans to open four new charter schools, in partnership with billionaire George Soros.
We can only hope and pray for a mayor who takes seriously his responsibility to improve the public education system, which enrolls more than one million children. The needs of those children have been treated as a measurement issue for a dozen years; the public schools have gotten no support, only threats of closure, as the mayor blithely pursues a free-market system, with favor and preference for schools that he does not control, the privately managed schools that enroll 6 percent of the city’s children. Who will care for the other 94%?
The first thing a new mayor should do is clean out the top layers of administrative personnel, those who have abetted the privatization of public education in the City of New York. Shame on them.
The New York Daily News found another of those “miracle” schools that, on examination, isn’t.
Gary Rubinstein is a master debunker of miracle schools, and his antennae went up when he read about a charter school in the South Bronx where almost every student graduates. The Daily News wrote: “Of the 66 12th graders at Hyde Leadership Charter School, 62 graduated — a 95% rate that crushes the citywide average of 64.7%.”
Time for mathematics. Gary knew that the citywide rate was the “cohort rate,” the percentage who made it through high school to graduation. The 95% rate represents those who made it to 12th grade and graduated.
When the data were made comparable, the graduation rate at the “miracle school” was lower than the citywide average.
As Gary concludes, the Daily News could really use a fact-checker.
An earlier post reported on the Lisa Fleisher story about the complete lack of any accountability for top school officials in New York City. At the same time that the Department of Education was creating elaborate metrics to evaluate teachers, principals, and schools, no one at headquarters was evaluated. As Fleisher showed, there had been regular evaluations until Bloomberg became mayor. Then, nothing.
Jersey Jazzman takes the issue of accountability further to inquire who was held accountable by Chancellor Joel Klein when things went wrong. The answer: no one.
After reviewing a few of many fiascoes (he overlooked the Alvarez & Marsal contract for $15.8 million to rearrange bus schedules that left thousands of children stranded on the coldest day of the year), he concludes:
“The truth is that Joel Klein’s tenure as the Chancellor was rife with incompetence and unaccountability. He was happy to point the finger at teachers whenever possible, play the blame game with the union, and throw junior staffers under the bus when needed.
“But Klein never held his senior staff – or himself – accountable for anything. In many ways, he is the personification of the corporate reform movement: a movement that refuses to take responsibility for its own many failings.”
Lisa Fleisher of the Wall Street Journal reminds us what investigative reporting looks like.
In New York City, we nearly forgot, especially since Michael Winerip of the New York Times was taken off the education beat.
Fleisher filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find out whether top officials at the New York City Department of Education receive job evaluations. As we know, the Bloomberg DOE evaluates everyone in its reach.
Except those at the top of the DOE.
“Top administrators at the city’s Department of Education haven’t been subject to formal evaluations during the Bloomberg administration, a break from past practice and an unusual occurrence among school districts across the U.S.
“The disclosure follows the culmination of a yearslong battle by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to implement tougher teacher and principal evaluations in the district.
“Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who has been on the job since April 2011, said formal job reviews weren’t necessary because he informally evaluated his staff daily, and he was evaluated daily by the mayor. Teachers, he said, were in a different position.
“They’re in front of the classroom and teaching our children, and we need to have a sense of how well they’re doing,” he said. “With us, we’re not teaching children directly, we’re setting policy. And I don’t think it’s hypocritical at all.”
As Leona Helmsley once famously said, “Only the little people pay taxes.” Apparently, under Bloomberg, only the little people get job evaluations.
The following officials are exempt:
“In a response dated June 11, the department’s public-records officer said no evaluations had been created since at least 2001 for the following positions: chancellor, chief of staff, chief academic officer, senior deputy chancellor, chief schools officer, chief operating officer, chief financial officer, deputy chancellor and general counsel. Mr. Bloomberg has appointed three permanent chancellors.”
Rudy Crew, former chancellor of the New York City public schools, former superintendent of the Miami Dade schools, currently chief education officer of the state of Oregon, will return to New York City to assume the presidency of Medger Evers College in Brooklyn, which is part of the City University of New York system.
Leonie Haimson filed a Freedom of Information Act request for fairly simple information: she asked for the accountability reports on the top officials at the NYC Department of Education. The bad news: there are none. No one at the top is held accountable. Their performance doesn’t matter. It is not measured. They have no growth scores..
This is a story about a private contractor who figured out how to make big money: open a center to diagnose and treat preschoolers with disabilities.
The state of New York pays for everything, and no one pays much attention to the quality of the services. The state pays for your beautiful new building and even your Mercedes.
So what if you misdiagnose children? Who will know? Then you order yourself to provide very expensive services, which you don’t really provide.
“Some children whose first language was Chinese languished in classes taught in Spanish or Korean. Others who were supposed to receive individual tutoring were thrown into groups of four or more children, all with different types of disabilities.” Some children didn’t have any disabilities but the state was billed for them too.
So what if your revenues grew over a decade from $725,000 a year to $17 million?
That’s business.
The Bloomberg administration loves small schools. Conversely, it hates large schools, especially large high schools. The city used to have dozens of large high schools, some of which had a storied history. Now few remain. One that was slated to close last year was Long Island City High School, but it was saved by a court order.
So the Department of Education is killing it by the usual means, by diverting students to other schools. As enrollment falls, so does funding. We previously saw this process at historic Jamaica High School, where the city starved it of students and funding until programs died and nothing was left but bare bones of what was once the pride of the community.
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