There have been several forums for mayoral candidates in New York City. At the latest one, convened by charter supporters, Anthony Weiner and Christine Quinn pledged to continue giving free public space to charters. This was a practice initiated by the Bloomberg administration. John Liu said he would end the practice, a stand that showed his willingness to displease the audience. Liu’s position conforms to state law. Other candidates ducked the forums, thus not alienating either the teachers’ union or the charter lobby. Less than 10% of the city’s children attend charters.
Archives for category: New York City
A teacher sent this commentary about what’s happening in her city of Syracuse, New York.
She writes:
“As part of the teacher evaluation in Syracuse, our lovely union negotiated a student survey which would count as 6% of our evaluation. It’s called the Tripod survey, but I don’t know what that means. I’ve attached the directions we were given, which includes the questions for grades K-2. They have 40 questions, and when you get to 6-8, there are over 100.
While there are questions about the classroom, there are also questions about home life. How that pertains to my classroom, I don’t know. And, there are more “personal” questions the higher the grade level. I suspect that some of this information will find its way to the information cloud in the sky.
There will be name labels on each survey, which will be removed prior to collecting the completed survey. However, if it is anything like the surveys we’ve had to give to students in the past, their school ID # is still on the pages. Otherwise, why bother with name labels which will be removed? Why not just hand out surveys like you do the NY tests? I am uncomfortable with the whole thing, and really ticked off at the union which approved, sight unseen, what was going to be done.
Although my kids, all 4 of them, went to public schools in Syracuse, I fear for the future of the kids there now. Do we have any chance at all of putting a stop to what is going on? Money really is the root of all evil.”
Arthur Goldstein is at his satirical best as he paints a darkly outrageous vision of the future, after the testing and privatization movement has finally achieved all its goals.
All the teachers have been fired (except for the Gates-funded “Educators for Excellence”), charter operators have taken over the New York City school system,, and Walmart happily trains all the students who couldn’t pass those rigorous new tests. And the new mayor eliminates term limits and elections.
Last year, a terrific documentary was produced about the extraordinary chess team at I.S. 318 in Brooklyn. The film is called “Brooklyn Castle.” Its producer and one of the star players were on the Jon Stewart “Daily Show,” and the chess program was also featured in Paul Tough’s book “How Children Succeed.”
The chess program at this inner-city middle school is phenomenal. Most of the players are black and Hispanic. They work very hard, and their team has won more chess championships than any other school in the nation. The teachers are fantastic. If you see the film, you will be reminded about why public education is a treasure in America.
The strange thing about the film is that it starts off as a somewhat conventional tale about poor kids who overcome the odds and succeed, but midway through the film, it turns into a struggle for survival as the kids and teachers learn that the city cut their budget. Somehow, the students sell enough candy bars and dream up enough gimmicks to pay heir way to the next championship, and life goes on. But at the end of “Brooklyn Castle,” you understand how precarious this project is. There is no funding from Bill Gates or Eli Broad or the Walton Family for one of the most inspiring stories in American education today.
Well, it has happened again. Mayor Bloomberg cut the budget, and there is no money for after school programs like the chess team at I.S. 318. Unless the kids can raise $20,000, the famous chess team is dead.
About a month ago, Eva Moskowitz held a fundraiser for her Success Academy charter school chain and raised $7 million in one night.
Wouldn’t you think that just one of those hedge fund managers would adopt the chess program at I.S. 318?
This just in:
Hope you can join us and spread the word!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thursday, June 6th, 2013
NYC public school children will sign John Hancocks to their own “Declaration of Education” on Chancellor’s Day
City Hall Park gathering injects a positive message into the standardized testing debate, favors giving administrators room to create learning communities and giving teachers time to do what they do best: teach!
MANHATTAN—Parents, New York City public schoolchildren and community members will gather in City Hall Park on Thursday, June 6th at 10:00 am for a Chancellor’s Day event that will feature music, giant puppets and a participatory social studies lesson inspired by the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.
“We’re coming together in support of our amazing public school teams,” said Jody Drezner Alperin, one of the event’s organizers. “The high-stakes testing culture handcuffs our teachers and administrators and keeps them from doing what they do best. We want to see the tests return to being just one valid measure of success among many.”
Vicky Finney Crouch, another event organizer, said “This isn’t about opting out, it’s about redressing the balance. We don’t send our kids to school to just take tests and do endless test prep; we send our kids to school to learn. We don’t want our schools turned into test-taking factories; we want them to be nurturing communities of learning again.”
At the gathering, as part of an interactive lesson, kids will offer suggestions for what they believe are the fundamental ingredients every school should have, and their ideas will be inscribed on an enormous scroll, the “Declaration of Education”. Candidates for mayor and City Council have been invited to attend.
The scroll, which the kids will sign, will be delivered later to New York State Education Commissioner John King. Copies will go to Mayor Mike Bloomberg, NYC Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, NY State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, NYC City Councilmembers, city members of the NY State Legislature, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew, Council of School Supervisors and Administrators President Ernest Logan, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.
“We’re helping New York City Public School children share their strong and important voices with the powers that be,” said Drezner Alperin. Added Finney Crouch, “This will remind decision-makers how fantastic kids can be when they’re encouraged to think for themselves. And it will show them that when kids are actively engaged, real learning happens – the kind of learning can’t happen during test prep and isn’t valued by standardized tests.”
Media Contacts: Jody Drezner Alperin: 917.902.0944. jd.alperin@gmail.com
Vicky Finney Crouch: 917.608.4321. vickyfinney@mac.com
Robin Epstein: 917.658.8803. robinepsteindesign@gmail.com
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Gary Rubinstein, who teaches mathematics, analyzed Commissioner John King’s plan to evaluate NYC teachers, which he imposed in the absence of an agreement between New York City and the United Federation of Teachers. Gary went a step further and read the law that King based his plan on. Gary concludes that King misread the law and that his plan is fundamentally flawed.
Step back a minute and ask yourself how many other professions are evaluated based on legislative mandates. Even in public sector jobs, like firefighters and police, nurses and social workers, do legislatures dictate how they should be evaluated on the job and by what criteria rpthey should be rated?
Public school activist Leonie Haimson notes in her post about New York’s new educator evaluation plan that the plan includes this proviso:
“Teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall.”
Haimson writes: “This means despite the claim that there are multiple measures, one year’s worth of unreliable and inherently volatile test scores will trump all.”
The state scores are supposed to be 20% of a teacher’s evaluation, plus another 20% of local measures. But a teacher who is rated ineffective on the 40% “must be rated ineffective overall.”
Ergo, 40% = 100%.
*the original post said 20% = 100%, but teacher/blogger Arthur Goldstein pointed out to me that the test portion was 40%, not 20%.
Testing is moving from onerous to ridiculous.
In response to the new teacher evaluation agreement, where every teacher must be evaluated in part by student test scores, the city education department is moving rapidly to develop new tests for every teacher, including teachers of physical education, music, arts, and even kindergarten through second grade.
At this point, one must ask whether city education officials have lost all sense of education values or whether they are trying to make public school so dreadful that parents flee to charters and private schools.
Naturally the agreement was praised by a spokesperson for the rightwing National Council for Teacher Quality, which has a faith-based devotion to standardized testing.
Someday this testing madness will collapse of its own weight, as one foolishness is piled onto another and then another and then another.
And those who created this regime will go down in history as opportunistic, anti-intellectual, or worse.
This reader echoes a frequent complaint expressed by parents in New York City. Mayor Bloomberg’s choice program gives choice to schools, not students. Sometimes one wonders if he is literally aiming to drive middle-class parents out of the school system and into charters, which will rescue their children from schools that the Tweed gang neglected.
The reader explains her frustration:
“There is No School Choice – Disenfranchising Children and Parents in District 15
School choice is a hallmark of the Department of Education under the Bloomberg/Tweed regime in New York City. But last week with the arrival of middle school placement letters in District 15, Brooklyn, it was made painfully clear to everyone, the choice is not ours, but theirs. My son, along with other boys from our high achieving elementary school was placed in a school that nobody chose. He was placed in a school where only 24% of the students read at grade level, in DOE parlance, a failing school. It is also a school without a rich curriculum of art and music. It is a school that has been forced to share space with other schools including the most recent encroachment of the Eva Moskowitz’s Success Charter Chain. Other students from across the district met the same fate. Boys from one successful elementary school were placed in a middle school where 17% of the children read at grade level and whose mission is to serve at risk children – exactly not the child now being sent there. Does this sound like choice by anyone’s definition?
What does the newly appointed 27-year-old Chief Operating Officer of the DOE do to earn his $202,000 salary? Are we to believe this is all the result of incompetence on the part of Tweed or is it something worse – deliberate mismanagement? One would think that they were intent on driving away families. Indeed, some families of means have already jumped ship. There are plenty of private schools if you have the money.
There is a huge disparity between schools in the district. Some are more desirable than others for good reason – some have a comprehensive curriculum of art, music, dance; others offer little in the way of arts. Some have reputations of being safe, others for violence and bullying. These are not the schools where parents want to send their children. To be clear – I believe that all children deserve to go to safe schools where there is a comprehensive arts program. And I would hope that no child in any school would be bullied or intimidated, but sadly we know that is not the case.
Children who come from crime-ridden neighborhoods and from families that suffer under the stresses of poverty, racism and discrimination, tend to need extra support, a fact that Tweed has yet to comprehend. They have yet to figure out that all this sorting and stacking of children has not improved schools, that we should not relegate low achieving students to one school and high achieving ones to another. Undoubtedly it would be better to have a mix of students with varying skills in a well-funded school with a comprehensive curriculum and a supported staff. This would go a long way towards bringing up those precious test scores. But perhaps it is a deeper problem. Are there too many children living in poverty? Too many children feeling the impact of discrimination and racism? Too many problems that the Tweed is ill-equipped to deal with and therefore chooses to ignore?
The dearth of successful schools for all children is a failure of leadership, vision and planning on the part of the men and women who run the New York City Department of Education. However, in this age of accountability, I suppose all the blame lies with the one man who has had twelve years to right all that was wrong with the system, Michael Bloomberg.
No achievement gap has been closed. No high level of proficiency for all students has been reached. How can it be that 12 years into Bloomberg’s reform agenda we still have schools in which a mere 20% of students can read at grade level? And now we know the Bloomberg administration doesn’t know how to count. In one popular middle school 1,300 students applied for 320 seats, at another smaller school, 1,000 applied for 180 seats. Clearly we need more middle school seats in the district. This situation did not develop overnight. Bloomberg and his minions at Tweed had years to develop new schools or to expand existing successful elementary schools. And no, the two new charter schools in the district are not the answer.
Parents have been left out of this process as they are left out of all decisions Tweed makes on behalf of our children. They unilaterally decided to forgo matching students with suitable placements without bothering to consult the parents. We do not even know how this arduous process for ten-year olds works. It began way back in October with middle school fairs, open houses and tours that many of us took time off from work to attend. Neighborhood middle schools no longer exist; students must apply to district schools. The application process for these choice middle schools also involves interviews and tests. Focus on fourth and fifth grade report cards is intense. Scores of 3 or 4 on the Pearson standardized tests is a pre-requisite for one of the selective schools. We fill out an application and list schools in order of preference. And then we wait months for results. This year some students got their first choice, some got their second or third and some got none of their choices. No rhyme or reason, and certainly no explanation. This should be a transparent process.
Our public school system has been mangled under the reign of Bloomberg leaving behind many children from all neighborhoods across district 15, and the rest of the city. Children and their families who did everything they are supposed to do and were kept in line with the promise of gaining entry to a “good” school were left behind. And the children who attend those “failing” schools were left behind. We need to organize and make Tweed accountable to us. But how does that happen? Walcott puts in appearances from time to time for photo ops, Polakow-Suransky attends town hall meetings and forums when forced to, but how does a parent actually get to speak to someone in charge at Tweed? I would like them to explain to me how schools under their leadership are improving the education of my child, or anyone’s child.
Leonie Haimson is Néw York City’s one-person Truth Squad.
While Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott was telling anyone who would listen about the stellar education record of the Bloomberg years, Haimson marshaled data to demonstrate that New York City made less academic progress on the federal tests than any city other than Cleveland.
She lacerated the administration for its indifference to class size, now at its highest point in 14 years.
And she shocked her Bronx audience by explaining that the city was releasing confidential student data without parental consent to inBloom, to be mined by vendors.
Haimson is the leader of Class Size Matters and a co-founder of Parents Across America. She is also a director of the Network for Public Education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 