Archives for category: New York
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How to Rip Off Children with Disabilities and Taxpayers Too

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2012 //
4

The New York Times reveals today some of the findings of an ongoing audit of New York State’s privatized program to provide special education services for prekindergarten children Thomas P, DiNapoli, the Comptroller of the state of New York, has found evidence of massive fraud. New York’s preschool special education program is a $2 billion system that relies mostly on private contractors, many of them for-profit operators. New York spends more to provide these services than any other state in the nation.

Here are key excerpts:

“The owners of a Bronx company that employs teachers for disabled toddlers used thousands of dollars in government funds to fix up a weekend getaway in the Poconos, state auditors found. A Brooklyn company in the same program, which provides treatment for prekindergarten special education students, billed taxpayers for his wife’s $150,000 salary as his assistant director when she was a full-time professor at the City University of New York, the auditors said.”

“And the owners of an upstate company improperly diverted more than $800,000 to pay, among other things, rent and interest to themselves and the full-time salary of an executive who lived in South Carolina and seldom worked.”

A valuable story to read and ponder as our nation’s policymakers are pushing more and more districts and states to privatize the management and control of their public schools.

Diane

Categories New York, Privatization, Special Education

How Charter Schools Get a Bad Reputation

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2012 //
37

The best investigative reporter in New York City–and possibly in the nation–is Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News.

Gonzalez writes about politics and occasionally writes about the politics of education. He has written some of the biggest scoops about the inner workings of the New York City Department of Education. He won the George Polk Award in journalism for reporting about the Citytime fraud, a giant high-tech scam in which a contractor ripped off the city for years and eventually agreed to repay almost $500 million.

This morning he revealed that Eva Moskowitz is seeking a big increase in her management fees from the state because she claims to be running a deficit. Today, he writes, the State University of New York is likely to approve “a huge 50% increase in the per-pupil management fee of one of the city’s wealthiest, biggest-spending and most controversial charter school operators.”

Gonzalez writes that “The Success Network, in fact, is a fund-raising colossus, having received $28 million from dozens of foundations and wealthy investors the past six years, and millions more in state and federal grants.” It has reported huge surpluses to the IRS, currently $23.5 million.

Last year, it spent more than $3 million on marketing and recruitment to drum up applicants for its much-ballyooed lotteries. The more applicants for every seat, the more Success Academy looks “successful.” It is a marketing tool in which people and their children are used to get more charters for Success Academy.

Whenever there is a public hearing about closing schools, hundreds of Success Academy children and parents are bused in–all wearing identical T-shirts–to insist on closing more public schools so that Success Academy can take their space and open more charter schools. Why would charter students demand more charters? They are already enrolled in one and they can only attend one school. They are used. You can imagine the opprobrium that would be heaped on a public school principal if he or she hired a bus to take children to public hearings to demand more space or more funding. The principal would be called out, rightly, for using the children and would be fired.

Today Success Academy will appeal for more public funding. It gets whatever it wants from city and state officials (Eva’s charter PAC–called Great Public Schools– made a $50,000 contribution to Governor Cuomo’s campaign).

This is how charters get a bad reputation.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, New York, NYC

Debating Cuomo Plan for Teacher Ratings

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2012 //
22

Governor Andrew Cuomo has come up with a compromise on the issue of releasing teacher data rankings. He wants only parents to see the rankings and data reports for their children’s teachers, but to make public the data for individual classes and schools. This is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t go far enough.

It doesn’t satisfy the tabloids, who want every teacher’s name and ranking to be published online and in print. Like Mayor Bloomberg, they believe that the rankings are an accurate reflection of teacher quality and should be freely displayed, perhaps on “wanted” posters in the post-office.

It doesn’t satisfy me either because I know based on research and experience that the rankings are inaccurate, unstable and will sully the reputation of good teachers. How are parents helped by seeing inaccurate ratings? How are teachers helped to improve, as Bill Gates pointed out in an article in the New York Times earlier this year, if their job evaluations are showed to anyone other than their supervisors?

The rankings, derived from the rise or fall of student test scores, are demonstrably inaccurate. When New York City released its teacher data reports in January and they were published in the media with the names and rankings of teachers, it warned the public to take them with more than a grain of salt because the margin of errors in both reading and math were so large–35 points in reading and 53 points in math. That means that a teacher of math who was labeled a 50 (on a 100 point scale) might actually be at the 15th percentile or the 85th percentile. In reading, the margin of error was so large as to make the numbers utterly meaningless. Statistical analyses showed that there was no correlation between the scores that a teacher “produced” from year to year, and that a teacher who taught both subjects got different grades. All that data, all those rankings were so flawed as to be pointless other than to provide fodder for the tabloids to attack teachers.

Why aren’t the tabloids howling for the release of the evaluations of police officers and firefighters? Why are their evaluations shielded (by law) from public view? Shouldn’t the public have a right to know about their performance?

What about the job evaluations of the top officials at the New York City Department of Education? When will their job evaluations be released? They are public employees and they are paid six figures. What value do they add? How many schools have they improved? What are they doing to strengthen public education? How can the public hold them accountable? Here’s one suggestion: Every time a public school closes, the top officials should lose points on their evaluation because a school closing represents a failure of leadership.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, New York, Teacher Evaluations

How Are Police and Teachers Alike These Days?

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2012 //
16

Read this article, which documents how data-driven policing has caused police to report statistics wrongly, classify crimes as more or less serious depending on the quota needed to fill, and has created constructs of “productivity” that warp the goals of policing.

What is the primary goal of policing? To keep our communities safe and crime-free. What is the primary goal of education? To assure that the younger generation is prepared in mind, character and body to assume the responsibilities of citizenship in our society. But what are the goals of education in a data-driven environment? To raise test scores, by whatever means necessary. This is akin to setting a quota for felony arrests for police or directing them that the crime statistics must go down.

Here we see a restatement of Campbell’s Law. When the stakes are high, people will not only forget the goals of their activity but the measure itself becomes corrupted. Thus, the data that are generated–whether by police or teachers–become meaningless because of the pressure applied to get them. In effect, we are paying people bonuses to generate good news that is not true. The good news is not true, the data are not trustworthy, the measures are no longer useful, and we are not achieving the purposes of policing or teaching. It’s what you might call a lose-lose.

But it does have certain benefits. It creates new industries for those who love counting and measuring and reporting. It creates new work for the consultants who will tell you how to reach your targets. It provides a rationale for endless workshops and professional development and study groups, all of which divert even more time from the original goals. It creates new work for the experts who will opine about better ways to reach the targets. And it gives bragging rights to the politicians who think they accomplished something.

Categories Accountability, Campbell's Law, Education Reform, New York, Teacher Evaluations

Vouchers in New York State?

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2012 //
12

Legislation was introduced on June 15 proposing to repeal the Blaine Amendment in the New York State constitution.

Enacted by many states in the nineteenth century, the Blaine amendment prohibits the allocation of public money to religious schools.

The proposed legislation would clear the way for vouchers for religious schools.

This is an opportune time for the repeal effort by supporters of religious schools. The proliferation of charter schools has dimmed the bright line that separates public and private schools. Many charter schools are private schools that operate with public funds. They are not open to all. They are free to write their own rules and to kick out kids who don’t live by their rules. They operate with minimal oversight. Most have wealthy directors, usually hedge fund managers, who supply extra funds. Most have a smaller proportion of students with disabilities and English-language learners than their nearby public school. And they claim to be better because they are not regular public schools. Also, there are places like Wisconsin, Indiana, and Louisiana, as well as D.C., that already send public funds to religious schools.

Now that it is hard to know what is a public school and what is a private school, it becomes harder still to explain why it’s okay to send public funds to thousands of privately managed charters but not to religious schools, or why some states may directly fund religious schools and others don’t. And that’s why voucher legislation becomes feasible in these times.

Since the change in the state constitution in New York requires a popular vote, this is no slam-dunk. There may still be voters who remember what they were taught in school about separation of church and state.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, New York, Vouchers

When Policymakers Are Clueless

By dianeravitch
June 7, 2012 //
7

Over the past decade of mayor control in New York City, the newly established Department of Education has had a free hand to do whatever it wanted with the city’s 1.1 million students, free of any concern about the reaction of parents, teachers, principals, or the public.

One reform after another has rolled out of City Hall, after Mayor Bloomberg or Chancellor Klein or someone else got a new idea or had a conversation at a dinner party. Sometimes these ideas are announced with great fanfare, and almost always they are announced as the solution to some problem, trumpets blaring, success preceding implementation.

The state scores went up and up, evidence of the New York City “miracle,” until 2010, when the New York State Education Department acknowledged that the state scores were a hoax. Someone at the SED had decided to help raise test scores by lowering the passing mark, and had done the same year after year, creating the illusion of progress. This was enough to enable New York to win Race to the Top funding, enough to help Mayor Bloomberg win a third term in 2009, and enough to get mayoral control extended in 2009 by the Legislature for another six years , all because of those amazing but phony test scores.

When the test score mirage dissolved, we learned that graduation rates had gone up into the low 60%, but there were no press conferences to talk about the persistently high remediation rates for entering college students, nor about their low persistence or graduation rates in postsecondary education.

A new blog by Peter Goodman, a veteran observer of the New York education scene, reveals a new round of thick-headed decisions:

City and state policymakers are now applying what they think is a sure cure for low academic performance: They will raise the bar, make the courses harder, more demanding. High schools will be incentivized to offer more college-level courses to students who are three or four grade levels behind in reading and/or math. This is supposed to incentivize students who can’t read or do math to take advanced placement courses, to work harder and to get higher test scores.

Here is the theory: If you raise standards, students will get higher scores.

What exactly is the logic here? If a student can’t jump over a four-foot bar, how exactly does it help if you raise the bar to six feet?

Goodman sensibly asks: What is the evidence that taking a “college level” course for which a student is not prepared will increase college readiness?

Other changes now about to be imposed involved the placement of special education students, not decided on a case-by-case basis by experienced professionals, but by fiat.

And Goodman sensibly suggests: Policy should be based on peer-reviewed research and years of experience in teaching and leadership positions within an urban school system.

But that is no longer the way things work these days.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, New York, Testing

NY State Ed Dept: Lie to Students

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2012 //
16

As you may know, there has been growing parent dissatisfaction about the amount of testing that their children are subjected to.

initially, the tests and test prep increased because officials wanted to measure student growth on tests.

Then, the testing increased because officials want to measure teacher quality.

From the vantage of parents, the school day and year are increasingly devoted to testing, not teaching.

Just weeks ago, students sat for the annual spring testing. Now, in New York state, there will be testing in June, but this time it will be a field test, part of the testing company’s trials of its test items.

When parents got wind that there would be more tests in June, and that the tests were for the benefit of Pearson, several parent groups began organizing boycotts. After all, neither the school nor the teachers would be penalized if students didn’t take the field tests, so it is an opportune time to opt out and make a statement.

Last week, the New York State Education Department sent out a memo instructing teachers that they must not tell students that the June tests are field tests. They must pretend that it is a real test.

Parents were aghast that the State Education Department would tell teachers to lie to students.

I’m beginning to sense a trend. Once the public understands that all this testing is counter-productive, that it steals time from instruction, that it has become an end and not a means, the game will change. The bureaucrats are hunkering down. But once the tide turns, there will be no going back.

Diane

Categories New York, Pearson, Testing

The Worst 8th Grade Math Teacher in NYC?

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2012 //
5

Aaron Pallas is one of the most insightful commentators on education in the nation. He teaches at Teachers College and if I were a student there, I would want to study with him. Not only is he smart, he is fearless. His regular columns in the Hechinger Report are “must” reading. His latest is about a teacher who was identified by New York City’s “teacher data reports” as the absolutely worst eighth grade teacher of math in the city. (http://eyeoned.org/content/the-worst-eighth-grade-math-teacher-in-new-york-city_326/).

Pallas shows how her rating has nothing to do with her performance as a teacher. She teaches gifted students and was a victim of her own success. Her students did so well last year that they did not meet the scores that the city’s computers predicted for them this year. But every one of them took and passed the state’s Regents exams.

The teacher, Carolyn Abbott, makes the interesting point in the article that the tests are high-stakes for the teacher, but not for the students. These students are so far advanced beyond the expectations of the state tests that the tests are almost a joke for them. But not for her. She is leaving teaching and going to work on a doctorate and then probably into college teaching.

Pallas writes, quoting Abbott: “I love to teach,” she says. And she loves mathematics. Ultimately, she decided, the mathematics was more important than the teaching, although she envisions teaching mathematics at the college level in the future. “It’s too hard to be a teacher in New York City,” she says. “Everything is stacked against you. You can’t just measure what teachers do and slap a number on it.”

When will the authorities in New York City and Albany and Washington, D.C., and in state education departments across the nation recognize that they have created a monstrous, counterproductive and utterly harmful means of evaluating teachers? Are they wise enough to recognize the errors of their ways?

Diane

Categories New York, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

Anti-Testing Movement Gains Momentum

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2012 //
7

The movement to slow down or stop or reverse high-stakes testing is moving forward at a rapid pace. This past week, the Houston Independent School Board endorsed a resolution opposing the overuse and misuse of standardized tests (http://blog.chron.com/k12zone/2012/05/hisd-joins-anti-testing-movement/). The resolution has now been endorsed by about 450 school boards in Texas, representing nearly half the state’s students.

The Texas resolution picked up steam after Robert Scott, the state commissioner of education, blasted the misuse of tests earlier this year. He said that testing had grown into the “be-all, end-all” of education and had become “the heart of the vampire.”(http://goo.gl/Az246)

Scott stepped down recently but it turns out that he spoke for vast numbers of Texans who are sick and tired of the tests that now control education and children’s lives.

Parents in Florida are now on board the anti-testing train, as are parents in New York.(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303505504577406603829668714.html?mod=WSJ_hp)

New parent organizations opposed to high-stakes testing seem to be forming in many cities and states.

I recently posed a question on Twitter that is relevant to this development. I asked, what happens in your district if children vomit while taking the test? I got many answers from teachers about the policy in their district. In some, the test must be placed in a plastic baggie and preserved. In others, the child must immediately retake the test. There were all sorts of variations on what to do when test anxiety causes a child to lose his or her breakfast.

Test anxiety is only part of the problem. Pineapplegate opened a national discussion about the quality of the tests and why they  are used to decide the fate of children and their teachers.

Diane

Categories Florida, New York, Parent Groups, Testing

Scarsdale Superintendent Blasts Cuomo Plan

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2012 //
0

Governor Andrew Cuomo once boasted that he was the lobbyist for the children of New York state. One of his signal claims is the new evaluation system for educators.

Many educators think it is a very bad system because it relies heavily on standardized test scores. More than 1/3 of the principals of New York state signed a protest against the system and continue to fight it. They have said, repeatedly, that reliance on test scores for evaluations will harm their teachers and their students. Governor Cuomo doesn’t listen.

Now a new article was just published in Newsday by Mike McGill, the superintendent of the Scarsdale public schools, one of the best in the state. McGill asks why it is necessary to rank and rate teachers on a 100-point scale. As an experienced educator, he knows the downside of this measurement obsession.

Here is the article, with which I agree.

Diane

McGill: Rating won’t help teachers or kids

Published: May 11, 2012 12:40 PM
By MICHAEL MCGILL

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Photo credit: Illustration by Christopher Serra |

The State Education Department has mandated a new evaluation scheme for New York‘s teachers. In what Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo describes as a “groundbreaking” move, everyone now will be rated on a 100-point scale that relies heavily on classroom observations and students’ test scores.

What could be wrong with that?

Pretend you want to evaluate 150 people in your organization. You have three objectives. Assure a high level of effectiveness. Constantly improve everyone’s performance. Screen out anyone whose efforts aren’t acceptable.

You want to base your evaluation plan on several principles. You know that performance improves when people collaborate and when they get good coaching. Good coaches take information from multiple sources and use it to give considered feedback. Their charges get ample opportunity to practice under supervision. Evaluators also need standards and strong evidence to hold employees accountable.

Most of the people in your organization want to succeed. A few are truly exceptional. A larger number have mixed strengths and weaknesses. A smaller group is less competent. Everyone works independently much of the time. You don’t have the resources — enough supervisors or time, for example — to give everyone the continuous, thorough feedback needed to change complex behavior intentionally. So you focus your energies.

Some of your people are relatively new. They need more support and mentoring. You get several supervisors to collaborate in observing these newcomers and in working to bring them along. You’re less interested in comparing them than in whether each is becoming fully proficient — and then getting even better .

Some people are more expert. You check in on them less often to be sure they’re meeting core standards, cooperatively plan for their development, and offer them opportunities to hone their skills and absorb emerging knowledge about their field. Again, you’re less interested in how they might rank and more in their staying vibrant and continuing to grow.

You know from your periodic checks and from informal feedback that some folks aren’t measuring up. Supervisors either collaborate to help them upgrade their performance or develop extensive evidence for their dismissal.

That’s effective evaluation in a rational world. Not in the world of Albany. Albany wants to rank people relative to one another.

But why?

If the point is to help them improve, they need insightful advice and good coaching, not numerical rankings. If it’s to screen out less competent teachers, the only relevant yardstick is whether performance is up to standard. Who cares whether Ms. Jones is number 34, 35 or 36 out of 150?

The state’s rationale is that the metrics will drive people to compete for better scores. But what’s the point when the numbers lack meaning? Everyone knows that standardized tests aren’t good measures of who’s a good teacher, for example. Few, if any, researchers believe they can be used to make fine distinctions among practitioners, as the state plan tries to do.

Regardless, quantification is the name of today’s game. Student test results or classroom observations determine at least 71 points of a teacher’s score. The local schools control the remaining 29 points, but they have to be divided up in some set way: so many for planning, so many for taking part in professional activities, and so on.

This numbers game already drives teachers to spend increasing time prepping their kids for exams at the expense of other learning, and to play the system so they can amass points strategically. It’ll discourage collaboration, as well. As one veteran recently said, “Why should I do anything that could help someone else get a higher score than I do?”

Meanwhile, no rigid scoring formula will anticipate all possible situations. Let’s say Ms. Smith’s special needs kids are constantly the brunt of her dark sarcasms when nobody’s watching. That’s unacceptable. Whatever her strengths, credible student and parent feedback should lead supervisors to judge her performance inadequate. In Albany‘s 100-point world, however, she may well pile up enough points to be “proficient.” All she has to do is deliver a coherent lesson in front of an observer, produce decent test scores and strategically get a few more points here and there.

In short, the supposed strengths of this one-size-fits-all approach are really weaknesses. The “objective” numbers don’t judge people accurately. One state-wide evaluation framework doesn’t make sense for every school, and this one restricts the human judgment that’s essential to effective evaluation.

This is teacher appreciation week. In place of well-meaning sentiment, New York State should appreciate its teachers meaningfully. Rather than impose its uniform evaluation template on everyone, it should enable districts to develop their own plans and their capacity to evaluate effectively. A real service to teachers would be to help them understand whether teaching is the right career for them and, if it is, how to do an even better job of developing the determination, initiative, and thinking skills standardized tests can’t measure.

Michael McGill, superintendent of the Scarsdale Public Schools, is participating in a panel about the misperceptions and realities of the state’s teacher evaluation system on Saturday, May 12, at Bank Street College in Manhattan.

Categories Cuomo, Andrew, New York, Testing
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